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Free-to-play is an awful model, thrust upon gamers because the publishers have decided it must be so

Free-to-play exists because the developers that have nailed it with a good game are making money hand over first, and everyone else wants to do that too.

Nobody really likes free-to-play. I don't know anyone for whom it is their first choice of gaming platform.

Allow me to introduce myself - I'm someone that likes free-to-play!

I've been playing Dota 2 a lot in the last 6-8 months. It is as often frustrating as hell, but it's great fun having a good game with friends.

It is a free-to-play game; they make revenue selling in-game content like clothes and effects for characters. I am totally, completely uninterested in this, but I am by far the unusual one - most of the people I've played have dropped at least the cost of a normal AAA game buying stuff, and I know a few people who have spent over $100 - no doubt there are even more.

There's the occasional in your face thing trying to get you to buy something - usually just an item expiring notice or something - but they are few and far between. I am easily able to ignore it.

I often spend hours a day playing this and cannot believe they're giving something this awesome away for free. Maybe I'll buy something some day - some of the in-game content looks really visually impressive and it gives your character a unique flavour - I can see why people like doing it, although it seems like playing dress up with virtual dolls.

Some games are more obnoxious about it - I play a bit of Tapped Out, the Simpsons game. It is much more in your face trying to get you to buy stuff. I love the game because I love the Simpsons, but it's just idle pleasure for me and I have no plans to drop money in it either.

(plug: I did a review of Dota 2 which outlines the game for noobs. I encourage people to play it because it's F2P done right, it's extremely well engineered and well featured - and it's great fun.)

I'm still waiting for my ouya to ship and I was a kickstarter backer. Apprently they missed the DELIVERY estimate of march 28. They also only shipped about 250 units to hand picked high profile people for review while everyone else gets the shaft. They've had my money for a long time now, other people have ouya, where's mine?

You ... should probably just stop using Kickstarter. If you get upset when people miss deadlines, if you get upset when a fledgling company tries to build press, if you are not interested purely in helping something that otherwise wouldn't happen happen then do not use Kickstarter. Do yourself and the people trying to use Kickstarter and Kickstarter a favor and stop using it!

They have horrible communication and leave everyone in the dark unless they donate thousands of dollars. We started their company and they can't even email us back when we send an inquiry as to what is going on with our units. Horrible company. Horrible PR.

They're a small company, you want them to spend money on a call center or the device?

Horrible console because it REQUIRES a credit card to use.

That's not quite true, it sounds like it requires a credit card to download video games ...

just bad. very disapointed. It'll be an emulator box for me, that's about it.

So it's "just bad" and you're very disappointed despite never having used one or held one in your hands? They tried something bold and they succeeded. You should be happy about that. You don't understand what Kickstarter is and I hope this experience teaches you a valuable lesson -- stay off Kickstarter, it's not a goddamn store.

Blizzard sent us through a response to this story:

Bashiokâ(TM)s response on Twitter was intended as a confirmation that weâ(TM)re actively exploring the possibility of developing a console version of Diablo III, as weâ(TM)ve mentioned in the past. This is not a confirmation that Diablo III is coming to any console platform. Our focus right now is on finishing the PC/Mac version of Diablo III and making sure itâ(TM)s a worthwhile successor to the Diablo series.

Except this has been proven wrong in 'blind' (ie no FPS showing) tests:

http://whisper.ausgamers.com/wiki/index.php/How_many_FPS_human_eye_can_see

You are the one who is full of bullshit. Repeatedly. Stop repeating this tired crap, and actually go and LEARN SOMETHING.

Steam's prices are the same in every country

They certainly aren't the same in Australia. See http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3047097 for details...

Here's the response I got to my follow-up questions: http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3094648

Here's the response I got to my follow-up questions: http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3094648

I'd love to have the sort of bug where it actually was one price for everyone, but Gabe might need a reality check on that one - Australians (and presumably some other countries) are still getting skinned alive on video game prices - even on Steam.

We've started putting together a pricing comparison page for users and have a preview online, but in Australia we get to pay almost $50 more in some cases for games.

In Valve's defence, it isn't their fault - regionalised pricing is set by the jerk publishers. But lots of Aussie gamers are sick of it and we're spending more and more time and effort buying overseas where we can - but then we run the risk of falling afoul of the various mechanisms in place to specifically stop us doing that. (I've heard of at least one Aussie who bought a game after VPNing to the US to get the good price, then Valve took it away from him - not sure how true that story is.)

Reading the rest of the comments, it seems this is more a statement of fact than mere "European arrogance" - most people have commented on the weird attitude US has towards sex in mainstream media. I'll admit it certainly was my first thought as well; I just came back from a conference in the US and as always was amazed by the amount of violence on television, combined with the fact that anything remotely sexual in movies (like boobs) were cut out, along with almost ANY swearing at all.

Given that the US is probably the biggest single market for video games this is completely unsurprising to the rest of us. I hardly think its arrogance to point that out, but if you are going to persist you'll have to paint me with the same brush as an Australian.

As an aside, here in Australia sex + violence in video games is almost a sure-fire way to have your game refused classification (meaning it can't be sold) - it's why GTA3 was RC when it came out - because you could kill prostitutes after having sex with them.

Yep, transcripts are great - I always prefer reading because I can absorb information so much faster than video. Generally, any video I want to watch now I try to download locally and play back in VLC at 1.2-1.5x faster - highly recommended.

But I understand why they don't do transcripts - because it takes a lot of effort. We do transcripts for all videos that we produce on our website (blatant example plug) and doing it properly takes a surprising amount of effort. It's really easy to make mistakes, it's really time consuming to type it all up, etc. I believe there's some software which purports to automatically generate transcriptions - I haven't used it, but have seen the results - terribad.

We've tried various options - like having juniors do it or volunteers - but usually the only way we can consistently get good quality transcriptions is to have them done by the person who actually did the video.

Next step is actually doing it as closed captioning but that's another whole area of effort!

Only if the pirates that bought the game because of DRM compensate the consumers who didn't buy it because of DRM and the free games Ubisoft had to offer because of DRM problems.

1. ...
2. If you want your tickrate changes to have any noticeable benefit you must change a few other server variables as well as change the Windows Kernel Timer Resolution (pingboosting)
3. To change the Windows Kernel Timer Resolution (pingboost a server) all you need to do is run Windows Media Player. It does not need a file open, it just has be running in the background, if you do not do this, your servers fps will be limited to around 64 frames a second.
4. ...

I ran into that little gem while researching TF2 server optimizations and saw this as a solution to be able to use tickrate over 66 on Windows while scrolling through the wiki. Although I am personally using Linux for my TF2 server. :)
http://whisper.ausgamers.com/wiki/index.php/Tickrate

Reminds me of the time when I recall hearing about some games' servers actually requiring a full 3D graphics card in the box in order to run even though the game server program didn't render anything, just ran in a command prompt window.

I just scanned the article but this looks like a misleading subject.. basically only one ISP is doing this (although it's the biggest), and the others have been threatened with legal action (just like what is happening here in Australia, with one of our ISPs targeted by the media industry and currently getting sued (disclosure: our site) for not taking action against file sharers).

So, this is basically ISPs caving to legal threats - which I guess either means they're complete pussies, or they have deals with the ISPs to provide content themselves (ie, sell music to their subscriber base) so its in their financial interests to comply, or they've actually crunched the numbers with their lawyers and Irish law doesn't look so good for ISPs.

If that latter is true, THEN I would believe reduced revenues might be likely - or if this ISP is just the biggest because it has a monopoly on infrastructure or whatever. If it's not though, users should just vote with their feet and jump ship on this ISP and go to one that is not going to tell them what they can and can't do with their Internet connections.

Free LAN Games

Wolfenstein Enemy Territory [Download]

Cube

AssaultCube

Sauerbraten (Cube2)

Urban Terror

Nexuiz

Open Arena

More First-person shooters here

Driving Speed2

Red Alert1

Command and Conquer NOD ISO GDI ISO

Singleplayer:

Super Mario War

I wrote a massive reply to this but Slashdot ate it.

The short version is, I know exactly how many users they have and I can extrapolate the requirements. Our site (http://www.ausgamers.com) has spent the last 9 years mirroring gaming content for Australians - working with Blizzard to spread the load for War3 and Starcraft patches).

We'd happily help do this for WoW, and we know there's many other sites that would do it internationally to absorb the bandwidth load.

I recently wrote an article on this issue which you can find here which explains some of the difficulties Australians face; Americans should probably gear up to face them as well if/when your major ISPs start enforcing monthly limits.

Obviously noone wants to pay the bandwidth costs for this, but you're acting like Blizzard should get some sort of free pass. It's their game, the responsibility is on them to make sure their customers can get patches, and they've passed the distribution buck onto the customers.

We have been doing this for ages for certain high-demand games file that we mirror. While offering torrents for some of our download mirrors is only mildly useful (as we're in Australia we're trying to keep bandwidth on-shore to cut down international traffic, and BT doesn't really help this), it is extremely helpful for the VAST amount of users that appear to either have massively crazy Internet problems or are simply unable to drive a HTTP based downloader and resume downloads.

When a large number of users are having problems downloading or resuming a particular file, I simply create a torrent for them and give them some vague instructions about how to resume it and then generally I never hear from them again. They're happy because they don't have to download a 4gb game client again from scratch, they don't have to worry about resuming/corrupt downloads, and because its a torrent it probably feels like they're getting something for free that they shouldn't be.

http://www.ausgamers.com/files/details/html/30227

The official site is up now too, with screenshots and movies.

(blatant plug: mirrors of the movies available here (Australian mirror))

Finally, someone in the broadcasting business is catching on.. There ARE a lot of people viewing video online, they WILL continue, and if you can figure out a legitimate advertising and revenue model, you can capitalise on online video content in a big way.

Ever since watching "PiracyIsGood.mov", a recording of a presentation given at (I assume) a University campus, I have been very keen to have either a broadcasting company or even the advertising department of a major company latch on to the concepts presented in this movie, and release a TV series in online form with watermark advertising (as outlined in the video).

The basic concept is.. Coke/Walmart/GM or whoever currently pays thousands of dollars for a 5-10 second advert during a TV episode, which a lot of viewers simply ignore. With this new method, the company would purchase an entire series of episodes, place their watermark in the corner of the video and distribute it online. It would be impossible to remove the (admittedly fairly unobtrusive) water from the video, and certainly not worth the effort, so the company would have, perhaps, 24 episodes, 22 mins each = 528 minutes of you watching a video with their advertising in the corner.

You win (free episodes), they win (this could work out cheaper than paying for 30 seconds of advertising during the airing of these 24 episodes, plus you get 528 minutes of advertising, not 12, and it's unobstrusive so no-one is going to get frustrated at your annoying gimmick advert), and the only people who lose are the broadcasting company who was too stupid to capitalise on this idea in the first place.

Maybe this is all too idealistic, and I'm sure there are other things that need to come into consideration, but I am VERY keen to see this happen sometime. Season 5 of Futurama with a coca-cola symbol in the corner works for me.. In fact, I'll drink a bottle of coke each time I watch an episode :)

P.S. you can get the video at http://ausgamers.com/files/details/html/17504

find something to do with direct3d then :)
http://www.ausgamers.com/files/details/html/18206

Expect the same release time, with no demo, ever, for linux.

Linux Doom3 had a demo.

And, in the case of Doom3, waiting 3 months was a clever marketing decision. If a demo had been out before commericial release, many customers would've been off by knowing that 80% of the game was spent squinting at blackness.

We're still trying to get an adult games rating out here in convict-land. Australian Adult Gamers was the fore-front of an organised effort but it looks like the site has gone and I cannot find a replacement

The escape buffer doesn't go into the input video, only letter and symbol keys. Plus, anybody who isn't smart enough to rename the intro videos so they autoskip, or login by double clicking the account name deserves having to write out their password.

A helicopter mapped key will only affect other helicopter keys... if it won't let you map anything, it's because there is something ON THAT PAGE that is mapped the same thing. I find Bf2's system much better than Half Life 2's, where it just unmaps your other key, and suddenly you can't jump.

The server list is interruptible with the new hotfix.

When you click the pre selected radio command, IT DOESN'T FIRE YOUR GUN! As long as you are holding down the Battle Commo Rose Button, your gun is on safety.

I never had the zero-ping problem, and, for those that did, it was patched in the hotfix.

Battlefield 2 is the greatest game to ever be made, and I doubt that will change until Battlefield 3 is released.

[MoD] E. Grey

Hey, Ausgamers are great for stuff like this. Get it here

http://www.legaltorrents.com/
http://www.xandros.com/products/home/desktopoc/dsk _oc_download.html
http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/bittorrent/ download.html
http://www.ferrago.com/
http://syd2.ausgamers.com:6969/
http://www.filerush.com/
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/faq/blizzarddo wnloader.html
http://www.slackware.com/torrents/

Who is the one living in the bubble here? Personally, I love being able to download popular files quickly. I guess you'd prefer to pay fileplanet for the privilege, hmm?

and where's my phonecall

looks like everyone is happy again www.ausgamers.com The recent reaction to the upcoming Call of Duty demo has caught us here at Activision by surprise. We're appreciative and excited about of the high level of enthusiasm the game has received throughout the gaming community. Due to the tremendous demand for the demo - we are answering the call by not only making the demo freely available to all gamers at the same time, but early - This Friday Night - just in time for the long weekend.

Smith: Hello Neo. Welcome back. We missed you...

Neo: shut up... just shut up. You had me from "hello."

passonate violin music.

Trinity: You know, when we first came to this place it was so different.

http://www.ausgamers.com/files/download/html/6569

Go get it!

I paid the US$20 (AU$33) and thought i would mirror the files for the masses.

http://mirror.ausgamers.com/solaris9/

If sun want me to take it down, they can contact me at mirror at ausgamers dot com.

--Trent

FileFront
Nvidia
3D Gamers
Beyond Unreal
The Shack
HomeLan Fed
Aus Gamers
File Planet
Faster Files
Blue's News
Gigex
FragLand
GameSpot.

And the fastest mirror that I've tried yet was Nvidia's, though you have to download six split files and run a script to recombine them.

Well as your in the UK it might not be all that useful for you. But down here in Australia all LAN Parties worth going to are listed on the AusGamers registration system calendar. And watch out for this 1000 player lan (Big Day In) in Melbourne early next year.

Well as your in the UK it might not be all that useful for you. But down here in Australia all LAN Parties worth going to are listed on the AusGamers registration system calendar. And watch out for this 1000 player lan (Big Day In) in Melbourne early next year.

asdf to the

http://130.237.161.56/NWN_Tools_BETA.EXE

AusGamers
(Sydney Australia)

Well, not many users of linux that i've seen have been aware of how well WineX works with games these days, maybe someone should research and post what games do/dont work with WineX (or interview someone from transgaming.com?).

Make it easily available for anyone to find information on, i attend many australian LANs and i am the only linux gamer that attends any of them in my state.

Really? The first demo or the second demo dont really exist then?

Really? The first demo or the second demo dont really exist then?