Recently we discussed Blizzard’s announcement that they are saddling Diablo III with terrible DRM, which they say isn’t DRM, but which everyone knows is DRM. I mentioned that there was much to be said about the contemporaneous announcements of a real-money auction house and a ban on modding. Well, the time for that is now.

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You may have heard that there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle recently in response to some news about Diablo III. I’ll walk you through it - but first, we need to talk about Ubisoft.

On July 28, Ubisoft reported that they consider their constant connection DRM scheme to be a “success.” This despite the uproar and backlash caused by the scheme, the fact that it was immediately cracked, the clear demonstration of the system’s flaws when denial of service attacks locked out paying customers and left pirates unaffected, and Ubisoft’s eventual scaling back of the DRM to a once-per-run validation. Their reasoning?

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Like the pre-order metagame and the trophy/achievement metagame, demos are part of the less-evolved fringes of game design. Which is odd considering how long we’ve had demos in one form or another. Shareware has been around since at least the eighties. But not every developer made use of it, and only now with the latest console generation has heightened internet access resulted in widespread freely-available demos for consoles. We are still figuring out how to design games, but we are even more in the dark about how to design demos.

In fact, it’s not even entirely clear that we should design demos. Research on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games suggests developers are better off not making demos at all, and should just make trailers instead. It’s not clear, however - there are many confounding variables here.

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Pre-ordering a video game is, on the face of it, a pretty dumb thing to do most of the time. You’re agreeing, before you can possibly know if the game is any good, to buy it for the most it will ever cost - and most video games depreciate pretty quickly. Before pre-order bonuses, the only real tack game-sellers could take to try to convince you to do this was to point out that it would guarantee you’d get a copy on launch day, even if the game sold out completely - but that almost never actually happens.

For the other parties in the transaction, however, it’s a great deal. It ensures a certain minimum number of sales, and allows demand to be gauged and thus indicates how large production runs should be. And if there are enough pre-orders, this fact can be used in the game’s marketing and drive sales up even higher. So it’s not too surprising that incentives would start appearing to make pre-ordering more appealing for consumers.

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