Legality of magazine game bundles?

[Maes]

As some of you may have noticed, from time to time I mention how awesome full games get bundled "for free" with Greek computer magazines. This is normal practice here, and magazines with bundles only cost minimally more than magazines without (and often there's no price difference, and no option to buy a bundleless magazine).

Latest examples from this year:

PC Master magazine, August 2011 issue bundles full "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl" patched to v1.0006, with a fully functional (and presumably legal CD key). You really have to search through the fine print to even find who's making this offer possible. Price of full magazine + bundled DVD (which contains a lot of other goodies as well): Eur 6.80.

PC Master magazine, September 2011 issue bundles World Of Goo, and if I go back and make a complete list you'll find classics such as Warcraft II Battle.NET, Warlords Battlecry II, Soldier of Fortune, Unreal Tournament, Grim Fandango etc. (strangely, no id games).

Just for kicks, I checked out how much it would cost to get those through Steam (aka no physical support, DRM issues etc.): STALKER would be 9.99 Eur (so that's more expensive from the magazine!) and world of Goo would tick at Eur 8.99 (STILL more than the bundle).

Warcraft II Battle.NET on Amazon would cost anything from $18 used to $75.

Factor in the fact that getting a credit card is not for everybody (so only the elite/pampered/spoiled brats can even use a service such as Steam) while I can literally walk down my street and get awesome games with their DVD, case, and sometimes even printed manual for under $10, no questions asked, no DRM, no tracking, no bullshit.

I mean, isn't that somehow unfair competition? How could Digital Distribution (TM) even compete in such an environment? Is it as easy to get such quality magazine bundles in other countries or is it just a Greek phenomenon?

[Gez]

I've gotten plenty of games in my neck of the woods through magazines too, so it's not just in Greece. That said, I haven't checked for such magazines recently. The last time I got a game this way was a few years ago already.

Phenomenons I've noticed about the games that benefit from this treatment:
- Often tied to some promotional campaign. E.g. I got Monkey Island 1 & 2 (with CD soundtrack for the first) in a magazine that, if my recollection is correct, also previewed or reviewed Monkey Island 4. Likewise I got a Morrowind this way (though I already had the game anyway) about at the time the Oblivion expansion set was released.
- Other times, it's old games meant to boost the magazine's sales. Often with "two/three-in-one" offers or the likes (a few games on a CD, whose only common point is that they're all so very old). I liken this to GOG without the Internet. I got Space Quest 6 this way, and I completely forgot what the other two games were. Heh.
- The last category include the games that weren't very successful. I suspect the game's publisher is trying to get back some more money from a deal with the magazine in this way. For example, I got Beyond Good & Evil, Shadowman and Rebel Moon Rising.



How does Steam and other digital distributors compete? Simple. They're worldwide. World of Goo in a Greek magazine will be accessible only in Greece; and even there only by people who actually go to newspaper shops. With the Internet, this kind of people has dramatically shrunk. It's also time-limited; such magazines will stay at most about one month, maybe a couple weeks more, in the kiosks. After that, they're returned to the publisher to free some room for newer magazines.

[Maes]

Gez said:

- Often tied to some promotional campaign. E.g. I got Monkey Island 1 & 2 (with CD soundtrack for the first) in a magazine that, if my recollection is correct, also previewed or reviewed Monkey Island 4.

Yes, sometimes they throw these as Tie-ins (in one magazine they even had ALL Might & Magic games prior to 6 I think, because the latest and greatest was being reviewed).

Gez said:

How does Steam and other digital distributors compete? Simple. They're worldwide.

Right, but the figures I mentioned simply make them nonviable in a market such as the Greek one (which, I gotta admit, is nor attractive nor important in terms of potential revenue).

Gez said:

World of Goo in a Greek magazine will be accessible only in Greece; and even there only by people who actually go to newspaper shops. With the Internet, this kind of people has dramatically shrunk.

Whether the Internet has killed off paper is debatable, at best. I'd say they kind of complement each other, and unless you're living in some sort of futuristic bubble-dome city, there's still a hefty market for printed newspapers and magazines. You could say that the bundles are exactly a way for magazines to stay afloat...but this kind of bundling was commonplace even 10 years ago. OTOH, in countries such as e.g. Italy, "full game" bundles do exist but are subject to a price premium and are in a totally different league.

Gez said:

It's also time-limited; such magazines will stay at most about one month, maybe a couple weeks more, in the kiosks. After that, they're returned to the publisher to free some room for newer magazines.

Actually, they do that only for daily and weekly newspapers: monthly magazines often get a +/- 1 month overlap between issues, and some kiosks (those large enough anyway) even carry as many old issues they have left, and there are some shops specialized in just the bundles of older magazines. Different market/economical realities, I suppose.

[CODOR]

I bought a PC Gamer in 2000 or 2001 that had full versions of a bunch of late-1980s, early-1990s games. (Including one of the King's Quest games, the original Duke Nukum, a version of one of the Monkey Island games and a few others.)

I think it also had the Daikatana demo on it. I suppose that's the price one pays to get all that free stuff...

[Bucket]

Nope. The last time I ever saw a full version of a game come out with a magazine is when I had to type out the code for it myself.

[Blastfrog]

For some reason I misread the thread title as "Legality of marijuana bundles?".

[Gez]

Sodaholic said:

For some reason I misread the thread title as "Legality of marijuana bundles?".

And you insist you're not a pothead... :p

[Maes]

Sodaholic said:

For some reason I misread the thread title as "Legality of marijuana bundles?".

Heh you'd wish. Then again I had a WTF moment when I saw they were legally (?) selling poppers and some weird herb mixes at Camden Locks, London."Air freshener" my ass.

[boris]

It's been common practice in germany for several years now. Mostly older games, though. I never doubted their legality, the idea of bundling an illegal copy of a game with a magazine is utterly ridiculous, at least in germany.

[DoomUK]

Yeah. Why would you put your business at risk by giving away illegal shit with your magazine?

Free (legal) giveaways are just a buying incentive.

[Maes]

DoomUK said:

Yeah. Why would you put your business at risk by giving away illegal shit with your magazine?

Free (legal) giveaways are just a buying incentive.

They have regularly given away emulators and ROMs for that matter. And in the case of Warcraft II Battle.net they directly competed with a national retailer who still bad it at full price.

[printz]

An issue of a games magazine I used to buy (until the new games started to suck) did deliver me a copy of the Doom 3 Trent Reznor sound pack, whose giveaway pretty much qualifies as banworthy offence on this forum (read the Doom 3 FAQ and obey).

Too bad I'm not very interested in game quantity, so all this over-cheap game promotion does nothing for me.

[Xeros612]

Sodaholic said:

For some reason I misread the thread title as "Legality of marijuana bundles?".

You have a one-track mind and/or need glasses.

[Maes]

OK, a semi-ethical question.

Let's say that I warezed game X at some point in time, and the very next day I buy a magazine bundling game X with a CD key and everything. Am I suddenly legal and can treat the warez as backup? What if I reverse the order (bundle first, then download warez for whatever convenience).

What if e.g. PC Master bundled Doom: the Collector's Edition in their next issue? Would that count as owning the game legitimately/in full/no questions asked? (with the pricing assumptions made in the first post, which mean that the authors get very little or no money at all, at least in MY particular market).

[Gez]

Maes said:

OK, a semi-ethical question.

Let's say that I warezed game X at some point in time, and the very next day I buy a magazine bundling game X with a CD key and everything. Am I suddenly legal and can treat the warez as backup? What if I reverse the order (bundle first, then download warez for whatever convenience).

The warez isn't made legal by owning the game separately. Exact same as if you had bought it in its original retail packaging.

Maes said:

What if e.g. PC Master bundled Doom: the Collector's Edition in their next issue? Would that count as owning the game legitimately/in full/no questions asked?

Well, duh. Of course. That's the point of these bundles. You get the game at a discount. Why should it be different from getting the game with any other sort of discount?

Like, if you buy* a game on Steam during one of their infamous 75%-off sales, you still get the exact same as if you had paid the full price.

Except with a magazine bundle, you get a cheap and lousy packaging instead of the pretty box you'd have gotten with retail. So I guess on that front it's not entirely the same.

(* Yeah, I know you don't actually buy the games on Steam. You only buy access to them.)

[GreyGhost]

Bucket said:

Nope. The last time I ever saw a full version of a game come out with a magazine is when I had to type out the code for it myself.

I remember those, and the inevitable debugging session after going cross-eyed from squinting at poor quality printouts.

I also remember when ELSPA (now UKIE) banned Amiga magazines from bundling full games, they were worried about the potential impact on retail sales if the then thriving magazine publishers started licensing first release games for their bundles. These days I'd say it's just an opportunity for game publishers to make some easy money from titles that are out of publication.

[Aliotroph?]

I've never seen a magazine do full versions unless it was something ancient or something free. Pretty sure I got They Hunger from a PC Gamer.

Game magazines hold no interest for me whatsoever. I can read things about games that are just as good or better for free online. Then I can rant about them on some forums and have even more fun! Paper is bulky, clumsy, and you can't adjust the font.

For the purposes of lawyers, legal backup copies have to be made from your own legal copy. This even applies to Canadians, who can do things like legally copy their CDs and give the copies to their friends; the copy has to be from an original. Interestingly, the proposed new copyright law they've been trying to pass for years would allow us to download anything we want as long as it doesn't involve us breaking DRM. Totally ass-backwards!

[Maes]

Gez said:

Except with a magazine bundle, you get a cheap and lousy packaging instead of the pretty box you'd have gotten with retail. So I guess on that front it's not entirely the same.

That's an ironic thing to say, considering how most "game packaging" nowadays consists of a DVD jewel case with a disk inside, and as for the manual, it's either online or -if you are lucky- on a PDF file. AKA, the exact same way I got most of my bundles (let alone that often those bundles are BETTER in this respect than the retail product, as they come with the latest patches and even some utilities/mods already on-disk).

Anyway, from the quite fractionary responses here I take that this form of bundling, involving full, relatively recent games at conditions quite competitive with actual retail and even DRM is an exclusively Greek phenomenon, and that elsewhere even if you get bundles, they won't be near as good. And before you think that I got some bargain binned, localized unsupported version of said game, think again: we usually get World, US or Europe releases.

[Belial]

A couple of years ago I got Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics from a daily newspaper's weekend edition. Next week it was Gothic 2 and Spellforce.

This month's edition of one of our gaming mags has Mass Effect Extended Edition. Last month it had King's Bounty: Armored Princess.

The first Stalker is about as old as ME so it isn't anything special.

[Maes]

Well, Poland is probably closer to Greece for what regards this particular market. I take that Steam ain't particularly hot stuff (pardon the lame pun) over there, either?

[Belial]

No idea, never used it.

Other games bundled this year:

Gothic 3
Arma 2
Resident Evil 5
Sam & Max
Torchlight
Call of Juarez 2
Braid + Thief Trilogy
Tomb Raider Anniversary + Devil May Cry 3
Resident Evil 4

~$5 each.

[Maes]

The funny thing is that I have a couple of shelves stocked with once-great games but I only really played a handful. Then again, sometimes these bundles have led me to buy the real thing e.g. Warlords Battlecry II was a free bundle, and I was all over III when it came out.

Of course, when they challenge actual retailers, I guess it's a sort of grey area.

[finnw]

DoomUK said:

Why would you put your business at risk by giving away illegal shit with your magazine?

Not intentionally, but a UK magazine (I forget which) put MAME on their cover CD sometime in the late 90s together with a bunch of ROMs, wrongly assuming that they were abandonware.

[Maes]

finnw said:

Not intentionally, but a UK magazine (I forget which) put MAME on their cover CD sometime in the late 90s together with a bunch of ROMs, wrongly assuming that they were abandonware.

I still have PC Master's "Emulation Festival" DVD with ROMs for the -then current- MAME 0.63, Amiga, NES, SMS, GG, Genesis, SNES, etc. etc. ;-) And that was in 2003, while another magazine even more recently released a 6-DVD MameFX pack ;-)

How many billions of $$$$ would that be worth in lawsuits? ;-)

[Sharessa]

I remember back in the day PC Gamer used to give away some good games. That doesn't seem to happen any more, though. The gaming companies probably see countries like Greece as niche markets where their stuff doesn't sell well, so they probably let the magazines there give away their games for a licensing fee, because it's more than they'd make there otherwise..

[Maes]

*shrug* I guess it's one of those things that can only be answered by an "insider" with extensive knowledge and connections in a given industry/marketplace, and even then the answer would probably be a mouthful, so no thanks. Although Danarcy's answer sounds pretty close to what might be such an expert's explanation.