Slashdot Mirror
More Info on Phantom Game Console
MImeKillEr writes "Newsforge is reporting that the Phantom Game Console
discussed on Slashdot is really a DRM-protected PC, sans floppy or CD running Windows XP. It uses a proprietary encryption method to protect the data on its harddrive, and the only thing that differentiates this 'game console' from a standard, Windows-running PC is that it has no way to get data on or off of it except through a dedicated connection to Infinium Labs' own servers." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
When you pick up a pen in your own home, does the pen have a chain on it to remind you not to walk away with it? Maybe the refrigerator pen would, but a vast majority of pens in your home will not come with a chain because you don't want them.
That's what these DRMs remind me of. They're *supposed* to be a gentle reminder for you to not break the law yet allow fair use. The idea that you can circumvent a DRM and get in trouble is ludicrous, to me.
It's like my pen analogy. If you went to the store to buy a pen and *all* of the pens had chains on them, you'd have to buy a pen with a chain on it. Would you have to use the chain? Could you remove the chain? You certainly could remove the chain from your own pen.
I don't understand how fair use got so screwed up like this. Hey, shouldn't this article be on yro.slashdot.org?
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
It'd be great to get away from physical media--anything that does away with pointless jobs is good. Copyright, of course is bad. Overall a step forward.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
So it's like an Xbox (Really a PC)but you have to download all yours games...
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
Yet.
sulli
RTFJ.
I have trouble believing that any game companies are going to pony up development costs and then not release an identical product for normal PCs. At which point, why buy the console?
Seems like they came up with the product by drawing up a list of things it won't do. Well, add another item to that list: it won't sell.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
I predict only phantom sales for this ... thing.
What with Media PCs picking up acceptance, I wouldn't be surprised to see a game/network/PVR combo soon.
This is just the next step from the Xbox, and I cannot imagine having NO control over something in my own home. The Xbox is bad enough, so I say no thanks to the phantom.
Karma: Can there be a void?
.. -. - . .-. .-. --- -...
that it has no way to get data on or off of it except through a dedicated connection to Infinium Labs' own servers...
So when I get that nice "We had a problem, send email to Microsoft to report the error" dialog there's a good chance they won't receive it? How will they ever know what happened? ;-)
This sig is offered AS-IS, with no warranty express or implied. Risk of using this sig rests entirely with the user.
I give it 3 weeks before it's completly cracked and reverse engineered. Thanks, Infinium Labs', for giving me (and dozens of other nerds) something to do this semester!
Roberts told me it will probably take somewhere between 750,000 and one million subscribers to start turning a profit, based on $9.95 per month. This doesn't look good to me. Seems they feel that they'll have to have something like $88,000,000 to $100,000,000 per year to break even? That's JUST TO BREAK EVEN!?! This certainly smells like a bad ".com" bussiness plan to me. Is it buying all the licences for the games? Someone help me understand why he has to have that sort of cash flow, just to break even. After all, you can build rather large networks and even support them for a heck of a lot less than that. His console is pretty much a PC, not exactly huge costs there. Besides, the purchaser is paying his share. So, is the lion share going to pay for content? If he has to have that sort of cash flow to pay for content, that surely sounds like he isn't brokering very good deals to support his business model.
Bethanie: Whore...
Fan Whore
Maybe in high-end gaming establishments - arcades, etc. But then, why use a PC-like platform?
I could see this working something line the NTN game consoles that are in bars, where everyone across multiple locations can compete all at once. Still, setting up completely dedicated connections without using public networks makes this a huge undertaking and probably not worth the cost.
And if it did use public networks - well who would want this, why not just buy a PC?
When was the last time you checked? Been away for a while?
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
The only real plus I can see would be DirectX. That said, Linux has OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, Allego, SVGAlib, and anything else you want. I would expect the company would make a DevKit anyway that had their OWN video/audio/network APIs. So I ask again, why Windows?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Schnapple
What's the point?
If development for it is exactly the same as the PC, why develop games for this console?
PCs number in the hundreds of millions. Nobody in their right minds would develop a game exclusively for it - maybe a port after a PC release, but this will never be a primary platform.
The XBox is similar, although noteably different in one respect - Microsoft is a huge games publisher and owns quite a few development houses as well.
I predict a quick, merciless death due to the following reasons:
1) Lack of good, exclusive content results in lackluster hardware sales, which results in lack of good content...
2) There is another company trying the same approach. That company controls DirectX. Does anyone really think Microsoft will sit still while some upstart to beats down the XBox? Expect Microsoft to hit back. Their weapon of choice would be DirectX.
3) Lack of differentiation from PC, if most games are available on PC as well. XBox suffers in this regard also, although Microsoft has done an admirable job of making content exclusive. It remains to be seen how long they are willing to throw away money to support XBox; we all know that Halo would have made much more money had the PC version been released by now also.
But already, there's no way in H-E-double-hockey-sticks I'm going to use this.
First, I'm somebody who likes to play the games. No problem there. I even like to play the PC games (FPS belongs on the PC - why I'm waiting for Halo OS X before playing it).
But I also have a job, two kids, a wife who likes the wild monkey sex at times - and every so often, I have to travel.
So for me, I might take my PS2/Gamecube/GBA on the road (I'd take the Xbox, but it would bring my luggage over the weight limit....), or plug a game into the laptop (my Powerbook plays Max Payne and such pretty surprisingly well).
But I can't imagine paying for a mothly service for a game I don't own, can't touch for myself, maybe sell later like I would a book or a CD. (Agh - RIAA lawyers - run!) I'm odd that way - I need that sense of ownership, that I can go to my little library and just pull it out whenever I want and play, not wait for the downloads/reinstalls (since it may be years until I replay an old classic, like Deus Ex or Wasteland or Fallout - you get the drill).
The system must also require a bandwidth connection, and while I'm sure they won't download the entire game to the hard drive (which, seeing as more games (aka [sarcasm]Baldur's Gate III: 20 CD's and counting[/sarcasm]....)), they'll still have to stream it. And I have other things I can be doing with my bandwidth.
I'm not saying it's a horrible idea for everybody - just not for me. For others, I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
*gloat gloat gloat*
Yeah, sign me up!
Really, the only thing that differentiates this 'game console' from a standard, Windows-running PC is that it has no way to get data on or off of it except through a dedicated connection to Infinium Labs' own servers via your broadband ISP, plus the fact that if you try to open it up or modify it or grab data from the hard drive, bad things will happen, starting with violation of the terms under which you will lease or purchase the Phantom.
The first question is why would I want this when there are PS2's and Xbox's to be had for less money. Especially when you consider that this is going to retail for around $400 plus a $9.95 per month subscription fee and some games will have a seperate charge not included in the subscription (so I gathered, I wasn't certain if the 9.95 subscription was for a service or a lease). All told the cost of this device is going to be steep.
Now on to my next biggest concern. Downloading games over the internet is all well and good for some games, but you're still going to have to wait a long time for it to download. This becomes even more evident to those users who have substandard broadband providers like I do.
Don't get me wrong, I think software delivery over the web is the wave of the future. In fact, I download a large number of the software I use (legally), but some titles are just too damn big.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Once again, the DRM world prepares to provide the smart-people-with-spare-time world with more amusement. Woo-Hoo!!
It would be fantastic if they could strike up a deal with the proper-owners of arcade boards and titles to set up a system where the Phantom runs a modified version of MAME, and Inifinium Labs' networks provide on-request ROMs to subscribers. Every time you hit "insert quarter", you get charged a nickel. Two cents go to the holder of the copyright, two to Infinium Labs, and one cent to PETA (I just threw that last one in for fun).
It'd be like having an infinitely large arcade in your home, and you wouldn't be doing it illegally. The people who wrote the software will be reimbursed, possibly even twenty five years after they stopped producing that game.
Also, imagine if they implemented something along the lines of Kaillera. You could team up with your kid brother from a thousand miles away to play NARC together, just like you did in high school, at the corner arcade.
So... let me get this straight.
If I buy this console, and a friend buys it too, we can't trade games?
Do I even "own" the games I pay for?
What happens when the console breaks down and I want to replace it? Did all my games vanish with it? Phantom, indeed!
Considering the amount of games available for my non-phantom computers, why would I ever want to bother with it? I wanted to be able to root for the underdog here, but there's just no way.
Not only do the specs appear...lacking, but this set depends upon a broadband connection. So sales are already limited to the number of people with broadband. Those people with broadband who are interested in using it for gaming already have existing solutions in the form of pre-existing consoles, already including one from M$.
I do not care how big your library is, I like to have my games in my hands. How am I supposed to loan my buddy my Metroid Prime or GTA3? I cannot with this business model.
The article makes a point of Roberts being a family man and the Phantom being a way to protect small children from the evils of violent gaming (how?). The box costs $400. I just do not think that price tag will fly today for parents buying a game system for small children. GCN has the most kid games, is the cheapest system on the market, and a little bit time by parents picking out games does the same thing.
I wonder how much of the $400 is attributed to the cost of XP?
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
No way this will work, because there will still be thousands of people who would insist upon owning actual copies of the games they play. There may be other things to analyze, such as bandwidth costs, etc (depending on the sizes of the games). It would be interesting to see them offering broadband to go along with the game, because thousands upon thousands of people STILL use dial-up.
And from the sounds of it, game licensing seem pretty exclusive to Infinium Labs for new games. Will they be offering any assistance to third-party developers, or will they be reaping the benefits for themselves?
I'm pretty sure these ideas have already been thought of, but I'm just tossing them back onto the table. *shrug*
-
And the Angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots! The cries of the carrots!"
If the only way to get data in or out of the system is via connection to outside servers, then I wouldn't want to own one. I want joysticks and a keyboard, at least, to input my data!
I think what he means is that if copyright didn't exist people would be much more careful about how and where they publish something they created. If I wrote a book and there was no such thing as copyright I might only print one copy and lend it to friends only so that somebody else doesn't take it and claim it as their own. That would mean the rest of the world would miss out on what might be a great work.
.[emphasis mine]"
The fact that copyrights expire is not an afterthought as you make it seem. Here is the applicable quote from the Constitution:
"The Congress shall have the power. . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. .
It is quite clear that the Founding Fathers fully intended copyrights to expire.
This is a risky proposition for the consumer. What would you do with this crippled PC if the company goes bankrupt? You can't use it anymore. You can't even run local games. It may not even be fit for modding. But I'm sure a true geek will manage a mod to get a blue LED on the thing.
--- I'm Green Hornet's sidekick not Inspector Clouseau's!
"As one industry observer pointed out when he first heard the Infinium Labs story, "You buy the console. You buy the games. Then you pay to play the games you bought on the console you bought. It's sort of like buying an arcade game but still having to put quarters in. And ads!"
Sounds like Circuit City's DIVX to me. God knows that went well.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
Wow, or I could spend that money making my OWN set top box which could:
- Connect to my wireless network to stream movies and music from my basement fileserver.
- Play games from the vast library that exists for PC (read: free if you're smart)
- Allow me to play older console games via emulators and a gamepad pro
- Hell, since I've got this little fast box I built I could also use it for LANS.
Sounds like this will sell well to me.... 8-|Following your logic, if I didn't want to give them to a dog, I didn't have to buy them. Assuming they were cheaper than a box of crackers (not necessarily valid!), am I depriving the Treats Industry of their due profits?
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
uses a proprietary encryption scheme
translated:
Some crappy, broken scheme baked up by programmers not professional cryptographers.
I'm glad it is not my venture captial money backing this broken puppy.
Sigh. Snake Oil FAQ or the Crypto mini FAQ and various Cryptogram will remind you, proprietary encryption is very bad.
I really doubt this "Phantom" will make any dent whatsoever. Look what it's up against: Xbox, GameCube, GameBoy Advance, Playstation 2.
These are all focused consoles with their own markets. There is overlap, but it's fairly well satured. Everyone who has broadband and cares about games will have an Xbox with Xbox Live!. Everyone who wants neat Japanese games will have a GameCube and PS2. Etc!
The Phantom is a joke. MS can pull off PC components in a game console because they have clout with nVidia and other people to spend millions of dollars fabbing specific parts. That company probably doesn't, as evidenced by their use of XP as the environment for the console.
What kind of game console doesn't have a bare-bones OS and SDK libs that are meant only for running one application ever?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I think you spend a little too much time listening to RMS. You don't copyright information. That is not possible. It is actually very clearly state on the Copyright website -
You cannot copyright..."Works consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship."
You can copyright your tangible analysis of information as long as it contains thoughts and ideas that are your own.
As for the money issue, copyright was created entirely with the idea of providing a living for people who create works of art and science.
Finally, I have created many works of art. I even consider this post to be a work of art. I find it very unlikely, however, that somebody in this universe is creating the same exact thing at the same exact time.
There was a great article in a recent Game Developer mag about the what it takes to port from PC to console (the example they worked through was JK2). All kinds of problems, mostly dealing with controls; for example, that little joystick thing on a gamepad is way less accurate than a mouse, so they had to turn the auto-aim up to compensate, but not so much that the player felt like the game was being played for them. Also, anyone who's played JK2 knows that the lightsaber battles require a lot of buttons, say you want to force push while you're in a saber lock, so they actually had to change game rules to allow for lower functionality. Seems like a pretty crappy trade-off to me.
On a distantly related note, when Return to Castle Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory was released, I thought, "Hey, free game," and downloaded it. It turned out to be so great that I willingly paid the $35 bucks at Target the next day for RTCW. If someone had said, "Hey, want to burn a copy of my RTCW?" I'd have said, "Naw, it's a fun game, I'm okay with chumping out $35 since everything they've ever done has whomped ass." That's how to sell video games.
With all of this DRM talk it seems as if it's the most important subject these days. If anything was ever the epitome of "big brother" it would be DRM. You buy a product but don't own it and only have certain uses for it as stipulated by what ever multi-national conglomerate.
These corporations are yielding more and more power and with their deep pockets they are shaping our future laws. Most people are completely ignorant to what is transpiring and the ramifications as applied to all parts of life. I'm not full of paranoia but the truth is right before our eyes.
I find it beyond frightening when a guy is busted for releasing the new Hulk movie online and is sentenced to a longer jail term than a rapist/robber. That was a very powerful moment to me. It says everything about the type of power behind the DRM movement.
I can see it getting to a point where the DRM is embedded in hardware and people who are anti-drm no longer upgrade because of this. The people who are ambivalent to all of this are in for a world of hurt once DRM starts to permeate through all parts of society and it's products.
As said before our only hope for ridding ourselves of DRM and it's derivatives is to speak with your wallet. The sad thing is we are a minority. The majority has no clue. DRM, disposable DVD's, & game keys are only the beginning if we don't make a strong statement.
I practice what I preach so I hope others do too.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Taggers can't resist a blank wall and hackers can't resist a DRM system.
Let me guess the ways the Phantom PC will phall:
1. Someone will hack the network protocol and find a way to stream those downloaded games to unprotected media.
2. Someone will find a bug in part of the DRM (the loader, maybe) that allows code to be inserted into the stack and WHAM.
3. Someone will make the inevitable mod chip and inevitably be sued.
4. Someone will... heck this is getting boring.
Did no-one learn a lesson from the 1980's? Guys, you CANNOT COPY PROTECT SOFTWARE!!! Jeez. It's like the movie where the bad guy says to the cop: "to stay alive, you have to have a good day, every day. If I (the crook) have just one good day, you're dead and I win."
Aw, let the games begin!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
If I had River Raid, and a friend had Pitfall II, we could simply trade cartridges. That's it. No online registration, no serial numbers, no boot-sector tampering. In other words, the concept is not exactly the same. You couldn't copy them, but you could use them with as many different devices as you'd like.
Yes, this is partly because having overly-difficult-too-copy hardware is different from fairly-easy-to-copy CD/DVDs. The problem is when DRM goes too far, and prevents legal use. Want to use your software at a friend's? Sorry. Want to install it on your sister's so she can play when you're not home? Nope. Tired of it, and want to sell it? Uh-uh - you don't own anything to sell.
So really, we didn't have DRM then. There were ways to copy the ROMs (they're all on line, if you want them). It just wasn't easy. Now that it is easy, DRM makes it impossible - removing legal use as well as illegal use.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
I mean, it says that you wil still have to pay less for you games. Ok, so I'll throw some numbers around. Right now 200$ for an XBOX. if you buy 5 games each year, you'll end up paying about 225$ dollars a year for games.
Let's say you use it 4 years. In total, you'll have spent about 1100$ for your 4 years of fun.
Now do the game math with their system.
400$ for the machine, add to the subscription fee for 4 years (essentially 9.99$ a month), you get and you get 880$. You are now left with 130$ dollars. Now, if they still want to beat XBOX on price, they are to charge maximum 6$ per games if you still want to own 20 games after 4 years. It said in the article that you would still have to buy the games at first, then rent them. He compared the idea to buying an arcade, and then putting quarters in it, which I find kinda dumb, but still, let's go on with our calculations.
Sooooooo. Even if they do sell the games 3$ (yeah right...), now that most consoles games ships on a DVD and may be bout 3 or 4 gigs (or if they're not, they'll be real soon), how the hell am I supposed to pay all the extra bandwidth these games will require to my ISP? For my part, I can download 10 gigs a month with my ISP. But a lot of people I know have only 5 gigs. So let's say you want that new Star Wars game with a hundred hours of FMV and it's 6 gigs. Then I guess you f***ed for one month and can't use the Internet, unless you want to pay more money for the bandwidth you used over your limit. (8.95$ CAN/Gig where I live, so about 5$US/Gig)
So this thing will make money unless
a) the games are unbelievably good and only on their console (not likely)
or
b) it's customers are not well educated (or stupid if you prefer to put it that way)
Even tough I think that scenario b) has a lot more of chances to happen that a), I don't think that this will work.
I'd almost be willing to put my hand in a fire if did succeed, but judging from the popularity of some products (none come to mind right now, but you know, there's something each week that you see on TV and you tell yourself "Are people really buying those? Am I the only one who doesn't?"), I won't.
(note: this is a lot of rambling & ranting, it won't necessarily all make sense to you.)
/images/ and got this:
They don't seem too keen on people actually using their site. When I tried to get to it, it told me I don't have Flash 6 (which I do, unfortunately), and then I clicked "Continue" to go on anyway it came back to tell me again that I don't have Flash. Fucking brilliant. So I decided to see if I could find something else, just for the heck of it. (after this, too, for some reason, the rest of the site worked) I went to
> YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED!
> AND WILL BE REPORTED TO THE PROPER AUTHORITIES!
> Your are attempting to illegally login into a secure server and may be breaking the electronic wire fraud laws.
> We monitor all login attempts and report any violations to the FBI we find suspicious.
> We will not tolerate any hacker attempts to this server.
> We record your IP address and originating domain and much more information to track you down. We use advanced intrusion detection software that reports to our security department in real-time and will allow them to see any intrusion attempts.
> Please be advised that we take this very seriously! We will take the full course of action in any occurrence!
> To report anything contact:
> security@infiniumlabs.com
I am not authorized? Authorized for what!? And they're going to report me to the authorities for going to the wrong page. Yeah, funny. And I like how they assume I am breaking into their server. Not to mention they'll have a pretty damned hard time trying to track me down. And of course, Going to an images directory = Advanced Cracking techniques, woo. So now I will be at the mercy of these people taking their full course of action against me (which is? Absolutely fucking nothing). *COWER*
That page is so silly that it makes me wonder if one or both of the following 2 are true:
1) Their webmaster is an idiot
2) This is a hoax/vaporware (there's probably a good reason it's called a phantom)
The article claims it isn't vaporware, but they give no reason to actually believe that, or why they say that.
The company currently doesn't seem to sell anything other than hats, mugs, and shirts.
The beta-testing application is pretty badly designed, especially compared to the rest of the site, but I guess that's not really a reason to doubt the existence of its product. Speaking of which, Why the HELL would they want my resume? WTF does that matter? After trying to sign up JFTFOI, the Sign Up button did nothing. Great.
Do we have to remind you for the 50billionth time that this level of fair use is history aka. pre-DMCA?
(that is if there is ANY DRM involved.)
Moral of the story: copy protected CD's hurt consumers.
The real moral, if this is the total story, is that the label and the stores don't care. As far as they know they just made another sale. The CD should have been returned to the store (after you made your copy) as not suitable for it's indended use and you should have received a full refund. That way copy protection hurts the people it should and when this happens enough it might go away.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Agreed, but go one step further. Even if you vote with your wallet, the companies are so full of hubris, that they would never believe that people are staying away because of DRM. They would blame piracy, fraud, or simply lie about it.
You bought it, it's yours. You can do whatever you want with it, besides distribute it to other people.
Actually, since most people can read around here, I'm gonna guess you are the only one.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
so how long do they really think they can operate before someone provides a 3rd party server? what was that? the sound of a business model rapidly evaporating? its like providing a deadlock, and paying for a guy to stand there beside your door with a fist full of silly putty asking you for a key impression.
dms0
-= world leaders choose world leaders not us, not a democracy, not a revolution! =-