I take a few weeks out of my schedule every year to travel the country and give talks on responsible gaming. A lot of it is educating gamers about stuff like sportsmanship, keeping teams balanced, avoiding homophobic slurs, and how to interact online with putative girls. But an important recent theme has been responsible multiplayer gaming.
For a long time, LAN gamers have gotten a free ride to a free lunch. Recently, THQ opened the window, leaned out, and shouted "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore!" But they did it silently by releasing an expansion pack for Company of Heroes that forces all those freeloading gamers with local area networks to pony up and pay-to-play.
You see, THQ used to be the poster boy for cheapskate LANners shirking their responsibility. Games like Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes could be installed and run on multiple computers at once, and a single CD key was all that was needed to run multiplayer games over a local area network. But the Opposing Fronts expansion to Company of Heroes changes all that. Want to play a LAN game of Opposing Fronts? Well, you can't. Until your buddy -- the thieving cheapskate! -- buys his own copy.
Maybe this doesn't seem like a big deal to you. Or maybe you're in denial. Maybe you think THQ owes you and your buddies a game of Company of Heroes without each of you having to cough up a mere forty bucks each. At this point, a bit of history is in order.
The oldest multiplayer game known to man is Roshambo, which was published in Ancient Asia sometime around 8000 BC or so. In that game, each player needed his own hand. Early attempts at piracy (i.e. two people playing with only one copy of the game) were thwarted by the fact that one player would have to tell the guy with the game whether he was going to throw rock, paper or scissors. Since it's a turn-based game, that guy would then plan his move accordingly. Roshambo simply didn't work with a single copy.
Then came games like chess and Battleship. These games allowed multiple people to play even though they only bought a single copy. The publishers of chess, for instance, could have sold the white and black pieces separately. But they instead neglected a potential revenue stream for reasons unknown to us today.
Another example is Cards, which were invented in the Old Timey West. Imagine the additional revenue for the publishers of Cards if they had adopted Wizards of the Coast's model. They could have sold starter decks for each suit, released over an extended schedule. Then they could have sold booster packs with a king, queen, jack, or ace. Instead, where are the publishers of Cards these days? No one knows. I rest my case.
This was the scene when computer games arrived. Everyone was playing multiplayer games with a single copy. The business model was in shambles. Back then, Hollywood was making more money than gaming. It was a sad state of affairs and it took someone like Valve to make it better.
But Valve took its sweet time. For a while, you could play games like Counter-Strike and Half-Life deathmatch on a LAN without everyone having to buy your own copy. But once Steam arrived, Valve put a stop to that. Now, if a bunch of your friends -- no-pay freeloaders, all of them! -- come over to play Counter-Strike: Source on your LAN, each of them has to pony up with his or her own copy.
