Lee Packham

Last week, Green Man Gaming was launched and the world of digital distribution changed forever. I’m not just saying that because I’m one of the founders, I’m saying that because it really has done this.

There was a lot of people that doubted that it could be done from a technical point of view – and even why would publishers put games on the service? There was also a lot of SecuROM hating. In fact, I’ll briefly cover that now:

GMG doesn’t actually use any of the restrictive options of SecuROM bar one. The license reactivation of ‘x’ days. The value of x changes game to game depending on a number of different factors but all it really means is that the game just has to connect to the internet every few days. This is not the kind of constant internet connection that a certain publisher has been doing recently – but more the Spotify approach. That is, you can happy use the game offline – you just have to connect every now and again.

No Spyware is installed, nothing is actively hidden and tools are available from Sony DADC to remove any traces. I hate restrictive DRM, but since implementing SecuROM for Green Man Gaming, I can happily say that it got a bad name for reasons beyond Sony’s control. I’ve had no problems using it in VMWare/Parallels and in normal versions of Windows too. There’s been no tickets raised by customers on this topic either, which is great. Must be doing something right!

Yesterday (while my blog was offline due to a silly WordPress Plugin that shall remain nameless), GameHounds posted this week’s Podcast and it has nearly 9 minutes of discussion about Green Man Gaming.

I have included it below:

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In other news, Green Man Gaming’s usage of the Qt library hit the Nokia Qt blog yesterday as well.

Didn’t get a chance to post yesterday as I was swamped working on some alterations to the DRM systems for Green Man Gaming. The story about GMG hit Rock Paper Shotgun yesterday and it was rather interesting:

Details are comically thin on the ground (the official site’s just a cheapo holding page, but VG247 has rounded up some pertinent quotes from CEO)

I’m wondering what an expensive holding page looks like? It’ll be changing in a few days anyway – so maybe it’ll look a little less cheap then. The pertinent quotes referenced are from the COO not CEO. Quite a big difference!

The rest of the post goes into guessing around commercials and the like. Which I guess has to be expected when the details are “comically thin on the ground”. If one basis of business on what some of the posts around the web have been guessing, then yes it’d be absurd! Apparently there’s no way a publisher would be interested in working with Green Man Gaming… the press release covers this already with the “400 titles for launch” so that’s pretty much put to bed already isn’t it?

Naturally the comments continue – the editor at Game Spy noted this:

Green Man Gaming is one company I’ll be keeping tabs on. If this takes off, it might be the start of something huge. Three letters keep popping into my head — D.R.M.

Yep, DRM. As noted earlier it’s something, along with Code Security that gets a lot of attention at Green Man Gaming. It’s worth making sure that we distinct the two there. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is just checks to make sure a piece of media is being used in the way it’s intended. Code Security is then used to protect it. The consumer world wraps this up in just DRM.

The DRM we’re employing is designed to be secure and lightweight and not intrude on the poor customer’s PC. I personally hate all the Sony hell that was created with their music DRM system. I’ll be happy to go into that in more detail another time if there’s a demand to know more.

So the news about Green Man Gaming hit the press yesterday and over the last 24 hours or so it’s managed to get around all the main sites. I’ve been reading through the comments and posts and felt the need to debunk some things where editors have added their own, wrong, spin to things:

On Geek.com it actually goes as far as:

This is interesting, but still not very good for consumers. Basically, what’s happening is you’ll never be able to buy a pre-owned game through Green Man Gaming: you just tell them you never want to play a game again, they give you some credit you can use for other purchases, and then that credit is used to pay royalties to the developers of the next game you buy.

Where in the press release did it say that? In fact MCV get it right, saying:

The firm will then re-sell that game code to another customer for a ‘pre-owned’ price

An interesting comment on kokatu brings up some interesting points:

Setting these systems up is not cheap.

Malloc is right, it certainly isn’t cheap. I can only speak from a technical point of view (being the CTO ‘n all), but the most significant expenditure has come from the tech. side of the business. We’ve hired some quite top notch developers to work on this and they’re storming through the last bits of the system.

It kind of reeks of something that would sound great to people who don’t really know a lot about how this stuff actually would work and figure they’ll just hammer out the logistics when they get there.

I’ll put this one to bed right now! Everyone at Green Man Gaming has a long background in the gaming industry. In fact, the full list of people involved is on Linked In – go check out the Green Man Gaming Profile on there.

By far the funniest has to be on Shacknews:

That placeholder construction image looks surprisingly sexual.

Yes… he appears to have a rather large err… we’ll leave that there.

I’ll keep reading up and probably grab some more snippets of info in the next few days – early comments appear to be good overall.