Slashdot Mirror

First, you do crowdfunding and maybe even some crowdsourcing. At some point, you may want to do some early access. Put as much or as little DRM as you want, but it shouldn't be illegal to crack it. Spyro 3 had notable DRM. [1][2] Get your game on GamersGate, GOG, and/or Steam. Steam has some early access features, and puts reviews right on the software's store page. Also, there are many websites that resell Steam keys. There are software bundle sites for when sales are lagging. Not that popular, but product placement, like a racing game having actual ads on billboard can happen. Then there are the free-to-play, pay to unlock shiny objects, MMOs. Skylanders and amiibo and Disney Infinity show another way to earn money. When trademarks actually involve a confusion of source the confusion of source should be prosecuted, but putting a large swish that looks like Nike's logo as a decoration on a shirt should not be prosecuted, but on a tag that is designed to prove source should. I was reviewing my philosophy of key generators, but if you go to the company's website, like Steam or Playstation Network to redeem a key, that should be prosecutable as you are misrepresenting your situation to those sites. Now that may sound like EULA's but you are usually presented with a EULA after you already bought the software, and there is some room to argue that the person who clicks on accept might be liable, but the people he enabled to use a copy of it without seeing the EULA didn't agree to it, so are not liable. Now that can be gotten around by cracking the installer too, but that means that there's more time to sell your product without the pressure of unauthorized copies.

http://gamersgate.com/ is another good alternative to GOG and Direct2Drive. The nice thing is that they're having a *massive* summer sale right now :) Like GOG, it's re-download all you want.

It can be bought from gamersgate: http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-PATH/pathologic Myself; I gave up. Couldn't stand playing it after a while. Now, over a year later I'm giving it another try. There's few games that can change one's view of gaming as a medium, Pathologic is one of them. Spend a few hours in it, and it will be remembered. Few games leave such a lasting impression.

What happens when steam goes bust?

On a side note, for digital download service I'd recommend Gamer's Gate simply because most of the games (especially the Paradox Interactive ones) do not have DRM.

Yes, you do have a valid account, but any game you download can be copied to any other computers locally and backed up and installed without checking the servers. Yes, you do have to register to download patches, but its their bandwidth and they pay that bill.

No cd, no server check, no hassle, and if they go bust one day you'll still have your games as long as you keep good backups.

Steam being bloated? Steam takes up under a hundred meg of the 12 gig of steam games I have installed.

Uh huh. Did you miss the 5GB of .gcf's it keeps hanging around, basically duplicating every file in every game you purchase off it? That, and the app itself takes a good 30 seconds to start, when it's not forcing yet another mandatory update on you.

Steam's overhead here is on the order of 25GB, not 100MB, and it doesn't even put that overhead to good use by providing me the capacity of move installed games to other drives or roll back patches.

On the other hand my entire Impulse install is 19MB, the games I've bought from it are on two other drives, I can archive them, reinstall them, roll back patches, or choose not to install patches without losing a notification that there is in fact a patch, and I don't need to wait for Impulse to start to run any of the games I've bought; they're pretty much just unmodified retail copies without DRM.

GamersGate similarly ships at least *some* unmodified, DRM free games. I'm not sure how far that extends, but Sword of the Stars' publishers gave them a limited exclusive for their latest expansion because they were so fast at distributing new patches, and the users seem to love them.

Have a louder cry about the DRM. I'm sure you'd love games costing several million dollars to develop shoved up on FTP with an honesty box, but someone with any brainpower whatsoever would realise that its fucking retarded.

Its what Paradox Interactive does with Gamer's Gate with their own games (3rd party titles I'm not so sure).

You could say the actual download process is DRM because you do have to install the Gamer's Gate Client to download the game, but once you have downloaded any of Pdox's games you can copy to any machine anywhere without any DRM.

They are a niche company, but frankly their fans (like myself) are hard core and I'll have to admit that I've given them more money for their games last year than any other gaming company I can think of.

Of course they do something kind of unique that kind of encourages honesty. For each game your purchase you can an icon of the community forums (they run them personally) and its like a badge of honor and you get direct communication with the developers.

They may not be making huge money like EA but they are quite successful in what they do and have a "rabid" community following their games.

GamersGate is a good service. Has some exclusives and hard to find games. Just picked up King's Bounty. The Legend and will be picking up the 2nd Sword of the Stars expansion soon.

http://www.gamersgate.com/

DRM doesn't seems to be a big deal,
"How many times can I download and/or install my games?
Any game bought on GamersGate is yours to download and install as many times you like. Some games are protected with an activation limit but that limit is easily reset with an email to support@gamersgate.com"

You should be able to find EU III here:
http://www.gamersgate.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&category_id=11&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=95&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=14