Jake DeSantis, the executive Vice Prsident of AIG’s financial product unit has put his resignation letter online.  It’s worth reading.

View: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/opinion/25desantis.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

I was somewhat disgusted with Bush having deficits but compared to Obama, Bush was a piker.

http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2009/03/rising_tide_of_1.html

I’d feel really bad about putting on our debt on the next generation except that it was young voters that were amongst Obama’s most enthusiastic voters.

I cringe when someone tries to say their DRM isn’t DRM.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with DRM. The problem thus far with it is that the R part of it (rights) is often ignored. A proper acronym for DRM thus far should be DrM . The rights in DRM were supposed to be between both developers and users.

So for months, since the Gamers Bill of Rights was launched we’ve been working on a technology that would provide the kind of protection publishers want and would accept but at the same time would give gamers a lot of the things they’ve been asking for.

The solution we’ve come up with and integrated into Impulse Reactor is called Game Object Obfuscation (GOO). When a developer runs GOO on their EXE, it encapsulates it and Impulse Reactor into a single encrypted EXE. When the user runs the program for the first time, they enter in their email address and serial #. It’s about as easy as logging into a forum except you only have to do this once.

Because the game is tied to a person instead of hardware, they can install on their other machines without being hassled. Also, because it’s all self-contained it makes possible 3 key things:

1. Universal Activation.  If I buy a copy of a game from Steam or Direct2Drive or Impulse that is also available on one of the other platforms, I should be able to re-download it form any of the services that it’s available on.  That way, if the place I buy from folds, I can still re-download my game from someone else.  A Goo’d game makes this possible.

2. Used copies. One thing that holds digital distribution back is that a gamer who buys a game digitally can be made to feel like they’re renting it because the licenses are non-transferable. Publishers, however, really don’t like reselling games (I hate the way it’s currently done).  But with Goo, now the game developer and the user can both benefit and let gamers resell their copy to someone else. That’s because the Goo’d EXE is encrypted and the user can voluntarily disable their access from it thus making it transferrable. 

To demonstrate the business advantages of this, we plan to use this feature of Goo ourselves on Elemental– it lowers the risk of buying a game and thus can increase sales.

3. Untethered gaming. Because Goo is all self-contained, there’s no third party client floating around. A developer can use this on their game and have it available at retail or other digital distributors.

What’s nice about GOO is that a developer simply runs it on their program. They don’t have to mess with source code or anything. It takes care of it all for them. Legitimate customers end up with something that’s incredibly benign, publishers end up something that protects their rights, and both get something that opens the door to resolving some of the remaining challenges with digital distribution.

Internal beta of Impulse Phase 3 client. UI graphics are not finalized yet. Faster, cleaner, more streamlined view.  More major publishers scheduled to come on board in the month of April.

At the Game Developer’s Conference. This is a view from my hotel window.

I’ve been on Celexa for about a year and a half.  Celexa is ostensibly prescribed for depression.  In my case, I have used Celexa to deal with my aggressiveness.  That is, I tend to lack the “flight” part of the flight or flight instinct even when it would make sense to do so.  Celexa doesn’t fix that as much as greatlyincrease the threshold of when the fight or fight instinct comes into play which is useful when running a company.

The effects have made others happy but I’m not sold on whether it’s been a good thing for me personally or not.  For one thing, I’m a lot less social than I used to be. And by a lot less social I mean I rarely visit friends or family anymore. Whatever spark that exists that makes us want to be connected to other people is subdued by Celexa. 

Those around me, however, are thankful I’m on it. I’m apparently a lot nicer now.  But the cost is that I don’t like people nearly as much as I used to.   It’s probably been good professionally for me.  In the old days, I would endlessly debate people online. Now,I don’t care as much. But it also makes me a lot less ambitious.

So do I recommend it? Yea, I guess I do.  In the bigger scheme of things, I’m probably a lot better for people to be around. But I also think I’ll probably be a lot less social, but thanks to Celexa, I’m not really bothered by that.

Now for those of you who know me, none of this will come as a shock.  For Elemental, one of our chief goals is to make a game where the community can keep it going forever and ever.

That means automating as much as possible in game from our standpoint. We want people to mod and mod and mod the game. For instance, if someone wanted to make Carcassonne (I think that’s what it’s called) I want people to be able to do that with Elemental.

What people don’t understand about Elemental is that it’s really the first 3D gaming engine to be made specifically for strategy games in years. This is a big deal because there are some huge differences between a game that’s designed to be played 1st person and one that is designed to be viewed third person in terms of what features the engine is optimized for.

I’d like to see the Elemental engine be able to be used in lots of interesting ways.

The game industry has its share of myths.

1. Units sold is usually meaningless. I turned down an offer to sell a million units of Demigod because they would have been sold at less than $1 per unit.  So if you see someone talking about units sold, take it for a grain of salt (incidentally, every copy of Sins of a Solar Empire is a full blown copy).
2. What gets talked about by the media has little to do with how successful the title is. You’d think the world was dominated by first person shooters. Ask Walmart or Best Buy what they think of first person shooters.  Strategy games sell better but tend to be treated as second-class citizens to first person shooters.
3. Piracy is a joke. Freaking out about piracy is what executives who don’t actually play games do. Piracy is real. Lots of people play pirated games. But the % of them who would have purchased the game is nil. Some genres attract pirates more than others (See first person shooter item above). 

I’m doing a session on what’s involved in making independent PC games that are both fun to make and profitable to produce.

Here' are the details for those of you who plan to attend the Game Developer’s Conference:

Stardock On The PC Hardcore Scene As Indie
Speaker: Brad Wardell (President/CEO, Stardock)
Date/Time: Monday (March 23, 2009)   4:15pm — 5:00pm
Location (room): Room 131, North Hall
Track: Independent Games Summit
Format: 45-minute Lecture
Experience Level: All

Session Description
Stardock's Brad Wardell is the founder of an independent game developer and publisher with such titles as GALACTIC CIVILIZATIONS II, SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE, DEMIGOD, and ELEMENTAL. Through its choice of game projects combined with its digital distribution platform, Impulse, Stardock has been able to tap into the core PC game player, a group that has been often ignored in recent years, with the ability to create games they want and deliver those games to them. Wardell will discuss the strategy Stardock uses to design such games as well as how they deliver these games to the target audience through both retail and digital channels.

If you know someone who is going who might be interested, tweet this.   Hope to see you there.

 
Doing a gazillion things at once.

I have not loved a computer upgrade like the upgrade to 64-bit/12 gigs RAM/Core I7 since I got a Pentium with OS/2 years ago.

One of the things that I’ve been thankful for is the blessing of good health. And by good health, I don’t mean a life free of disease or injury but I mean a life free from getting colds, flus, etc.  I never get sick.

As I’m getting a bit older, I once in awhile will have a day where I get say a migraine or am sore from working out in the yard and my productivity drops to nil. That sort of thing would have a devastating impact on trying to succeed if it was common.