Why Do Studios Still Treat Reviewers As Potential Pirates?
Monday, 6th June 2011, 16:42

Page 1 Page 2 I had a few titles for this article, including The Ludicrous Over-Protectiveness of Studios, Who Does Warner Think They Are?, and even Why I Need To Start My Own PR Company. In the end you can see what I went with, and I'll show you that consumers aren't the only group of people large companies treat as pirates.

Having played with computers since 1981, I'm well used to annoying copy protection which gets in the way of a (not always) good game. I've lived through word look-ups in the black ink on red background hard to read manual fiascos, strange match-up wheels, lens based decoding gadgets you held up to the TV, and an almost endless stream of PC titles that would install to the HDD but still insist on having the original disk in the drive.

All of this whilst anyone with a pirated copy suffered none of it. These days more than half of the games I buy are from the likes of Steam, or for my iPhone or a console, so things don't seem too bad on that front. Perhaps if I bought anything from Ubisoft I might think differently, but so far nothing they make interests me.

But as a legitimate DVD buyer, I suffer endless copyright messages and enforced trailers before a menu trying to sell me more stuff, all of this whilst a pirate gets to visit the movie straight away. And I'm the one paying the studios money, how come the ones that aren't are the ones getting what they want? Blu-ray doesn't seem anywhere near as bad in this respect, with a lot of titles jumping straight to the menu or even the movie itself,

However the more things change, the more they stay the same. As any reviewer will tell you, some studios go to insane lengths to protect their content, treating even those that review their products and can potentially encourage many more sales, as someone who would copy and slam it on the Internet, a move that would harm the industry and ultimately the reviewer themselves.


Studio Restrictions
Many times in the past, and it was nearly always the same studios that did this, Fox being one of the worst, we'd be sent what is known in the trade as a Check Disk. But for quite a few major titles, Fox and co would demand we return it within a few days for security reasons, because some idiot executive or manager somewhere thought doing this would protect it from being sent to the Internet. It never occurred to them that a dodgy reviewer could easily copy it within an hour and return the disk, and they'd be none the wiser. I guess that level of knowledge was beyond whoever made the decision.

Another thing they'd do is limit the number of copies sent out to a very small pool and try to keep track of them, which again would have no effect other than to annoy reviewers who couldn't get hold of one or would only see it after the release date. Other studios would send a special copy out with just the movie (often not even in the same format the final disk would be released as) and a constantly appearing Property Of message over the image, or a constant Time-code somewhere on the screen.

Now someone who writes reviews in 36pt text and is happy to review a major blockbuster courtesy of a VHS tape on a hotel room TV might find that acceptable, but we certainly don't. Our team are rather obsessed with movies, we've all spent a stupid amount of money on large TVs or projectors, and surround sound systems, we didn't do all this just to have our enjoyment spoilt by large burnt in subtitles telling us who it belongs to.

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Posted by Robert John Shepherd