As someone who’s a gamer that happens to work at a publisher/developer of games, I thought I’d weigh in on “The Gamer’s Bill of Rights.” Is it reasonable? Are the “rights” adequate? Would this even make a difference in the PC gaming market?

Well, let’s examine this…

For the most part, it’s a reasonable set of expectations, though I’m not sure how likely it is that it’ll gain widespread industry acceptance. As Stardock CEO Brad Wardell said himself, a lot of bigger publishers might just go, “What’s a Stardock?” though I hope I’m wrong; we all know that non-WoW PC gaming is on the decline and we need to band together as an industry to create any sort of large-scale change.
 
Developers themselves are likely all going to be in favor of the initiative – I don’t know a lot of devs who don’t consider themselves to be gamers, and any gamer will, of course, want these guidelines to be followed in all cases. But when it comes to the business side of things, it’s currently really difficult to make a case for publishers to seriously commit to PC gaming, and especially to PC gaming without copy protection.
 
As for the individual rights themselves, I think that in an ideal world, all of the rights are great. They also happen to conveniently fit with Stardock’s business model, though some of them don’t necessarily apply in all cases. Stardock has the benefit of being its own publisher, so the idea of giving a refund for games that don’t work on a player’s system (as the Bill suggests) is fine; most developers would need a publisher’s buy-in for this, and more importantly, retailer buy-in. In a world where anyone can return a game if it doesn’t work – and where copy protection isn’t implemented – piracy becomes much easier.
 
There are some things that I’d change with the Bill. I would actually re-word the rule that “Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game's release” to something more along the lines of, “If it suits the game design and business model, they should expect meaningful updates.” If, in fact, companies are sticking to the rule of releasing a game in its finished state, then by all accounts companies shouldn’t have to release any updates at all.
 
If there was any additional “right” that must be added, it should be an 11th rule that gamers have to abide by. And that is, “If most of these criteria are met by the developer and publisher, then the gamer shall not obtain illegal copies of games.” Yes, difficult to enforce and a bit utopian, but that’s really the root of this issue. Many of the rules Stardock and the list’s co-creator Gas Powered Games have outlined are excuses used by pirates to explain their actions; with those addressed, piracy should theoretically be nil. Except for… you know… thieves and whatnot.

If the Bill were to be adopted by game companies, it might impact the market, but the issues addressed are just part of the problem with PC gaming. I know that there are a number of initiatives in the works that are intended to make PC gaming easier, but we still have the issue of hardware costs, a huge variety of graphics cards and processors, tons of different configurations, etc. that just make it all too complicated for the casual gamer. We should have a much larger base of PC gamers than console players, given the number of PCs out there, but most people just can’t be bothered to screw around with hardware to get the best gaming experience. Speaking from my own experience, I used to have no problem tinkering around in autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make a game work, but I just don’t have the patience to figure out why a game won’t work nowadays. I spent over $700 on a new video card and processor last year and my gaming PC is already starting to show its age. It’s just getting too difficult to get the best experience out of PC games, and that, to me, is the main issue that needs to be addressed.

My company, CD Projekt, will support the Bill. We actually support most of these things already; we’re very much committed to giving gamers the best possible service and experience. We were quite happy with the release of The Witcher originally, but due to fan (and media) feedback, we’ve spent almost a year fixing any issues, implementing “meaningful updates” and more in The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. We still didn’t think that was enough, so we added in a bunch of other stuff (soundtracks, a game guide, etc.) and were happy to see that our publishers were also supportive of the idea. And still we thought that gamers might be a bit ticked off, so we’re giving it all out for free to people who already bought the game. The problems we had at release – The Witcher was CD Projekt RED’s first title, I should remind you – taught us a lesson and our future titles will be as good as we can possibly make them. But as with Stardock, we have the luxury of also being a publisher and thus having another source of income, and not every developer is in that position. It’s up to publishers to give their developers time to make the projects as good as they can be.
 
As a further example of how we’re already supporting these things, I’ll mention another project of ours, GOG.com (“Good Old Games”). One of the key fundamentals of GOG.com is a gamer-friendly approach; that includes giving players very cheap and very good games without copy protection of any sort. They can download games as many times as they want and install them on as many PCs as they want. Not treating gamers like criminals, though, relies on gamers not being criminals! If the games get pirated anyway, then this whole argument goes out the window. That being said, it’s been awesome to see the response from media, players and even publishers – we’re very confident that gamers are honest people and are ready for this sort of approach to customer service.