Musing: Game On!

Check out the cover story of the March issue of WIRED. You can read it online for free... which is interesting, isn't it? They just give away the intellectual property... for free! Another good example of this is in my last post, where you can click on a link and read a big NYT Sunday Times Magazine piece... for FREE!! They used to make you pay to read the opinion pages, but now they let you access all of the newspaper's content at no charge (except the daily crosswords... unfortunately for me, you still have to pay a subscription to get those).

Anyway, it's a pretty interesting article (I'm talking about the WIRED piece again). The gist is that, in any business that takes place online, the price of everything trends toward $0.00. Take the price of digital storage as a for instance. It used to be that you had to pay for an email account (like the original version of AOL). Soon, they started giving them away with the price of your internet access. Then, free email accounts popped up all over the place, like Yahoo! and GMail... free, but you still had to pay if you wanted increased email storage. Now, not only can you get unlimited email storage from both of those companies, Google even gives you a free virtual portable hard drive. (It's called GSpace. Check it out--it plugs right into your browser. Sexy!) This is all possible because the price of digital storage has declined so much that, spread over the cost of all of a website's users, it becomes negligible. So you get it for... say it with me...

FREE!... right?

Wrong. You just don't pay any money for it. Instead, you pay with your time and your attention. Google may be subtle, but it rakes in untold billions from the ad revenue it generates. Today's digital business model is structured so that you don't pay for the content and services you use, advertisers pay for it for you in order to get their ads in front of you. That's not the only way to make money, of course. There's also the business model in which you give a product away, but make users pay if they want a better or deeper version of the content. A good example of this is the sweet music player and file manager I use for my sweet music collection. It's called Media Monkey. It's awesome! I love it! So I upgraded my free download version of it to Media Monkey Pro, which cost me around $20. In this model, 99% of the people using a product get it for free, and the company who makes it is happy to give it away. Because there's that last 1%, like me, who choose to pay cash money for it, and that 1% pays for the rest. That business model has nothing to do with the Google/Yahoo! model except for one important similarity: FREEEEE!!!!

Which brings me to one of my favorite pastimes (NERD ALERT!!): video games. There's a company called WildTangent that makes a new application called Orb. Basically, using Orb, you can stream and play games on your computer for free. The tab will be picked up by advertisers who will show you their ads in unobtrusive ways during loading screens. Or you can pay money to skip the ads entirely. Here's a quote from the company's founder, Alex St. John (I read this in PC Gamer... DOUBLE NERD ALERT!):

"Every consumer PC shipping this year--including the laptops--will have superior graphics capabilities to the Wii, and most will match or exceed an Xbox 360. That'll be 36 million consumer PCs--more than all consoles sold in the United States combined--going into people's living rooms in one year, and they'll be connected to the Internet with superior media capabilities. And every one of them will have a nice, big, high-res screen."

"Welcome back, Professor. Let's play... Global Thermonuclear War."

Which means that, if you're reading this, you already have a high-powered gaming machine, and now you can get your games for free. Is this the future of gaming? I think it's the future of ALL digital entertainment. The music industry got burned when it tried to stop piracy, and it sure looks like the film industry didn't learn from their mistake--acquiring video content still, for the most part, means buying a DVD with the latest anti-piracy protections embedded into it... or going to a website like Project Free TV and downloading free versions of the same content that have been uploaded by pirates immediately after they got done bypassing the latest anti-piracy protections. In WebTangent's model, consumers get what they want at the price they want (free!), and game developers get their product out to as many consumers as possible. And of course, they don't lose their profits to piracy, because what's the point of pirating something if the producers are already giving it away?