Slashdot Mirror
Pirates Vs. Publishers
1up is running a piece looking at the fight between pirates and publishers in the games industry. They use StarForce, and their frustrating copy protection scheme, as a basis for their discussion of both sides of the issue. From the article: "The goal isn't to encourage people to be honest, or to drive innovation in the hacker community, or to be an irritant because you've lost your CD and want to play. The goal of a publisher in picking a copy protection service is to make more money by selling more copies. The logic is that if it's impossible to pirate the game, then people have to buy it if they want it. Why doesn't that work? If your copy protection is StarForce, then it doesn't work because people are boycotting your copy protection. StarForce, which installs a hard-to-remove driver onto your computer, has an unproven but generally accepted track record of causing computers to slow down -- at best. Some reports have complained of permanently damaged physical drives or hard drives."
Perhaps if they want people to stop stealing their software, they should stop calling software-stealers such a cool nickname. Arrrr!
If they want to bitch about lost sales to me, I'll call them on their lying marketing and slanted, paid-off reviews.
Lying marketing? Aren't you repeating yourself here?
This is like calling someone a "stupid idiot".
P.S. If I've offended any marketing people here, that was my intention.
When did you last hear about International Talk Like a Publisher Day?
GalCiv2 doesn't have multiplayer
Why not go back to the days of looking up phrases in the manual?
I still remember an engineering application for the Mac which used that approach. Just before shipping the product, they made some change to the manual which forced repagination of some of the later pages. So when the program asked for "the last word on page 20", it would work fine, but if it asked for "the last word on page 250", it would fail. Grrr. Took me weeks to figure out what was wrong, and even longer before the company finally corrected the problem.