Slashdot Mirror
Free Games As a Solution To Game Piracy
christ, jesus H writes "PC gaming may not be dying, but it is in a state of flux. We're seeing developers and publishers blaming piracy for all the ills of PC gaming, but attempts to rein in pirates with the help of DRM only annoys and mobilizes the legitimate customers of your games. The solution? According to David Perry of Shiny Games, PC games are going to be free." (And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below.)
"And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below."
Umm, a copyright violation? Copyright infringement? Why not just call it what it is instead of bringing in some new word that's going to have a specific connotation?
Holy crap can we stop with the "PC gaming is dead / dying" mantra? It's simply not true.
- US PC Gaming Revenues 2007 - $2.76 billion +12%
- US PC Gaming Revenues 2008 - $3.1 billion +14% (forecast)
- Worldwide PC Gaming 2007 - $8.3 billion +14%
- Worldwide PC Gaming 2008 - $9.6 billion +16% (forecast)
Those numbers are from the May MaximumPC. PC gaming is *not* dead, it's growing. Stop spreading the FUD.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
It's not stolen, it's not pirated... it's an "Unlicensed Copy". Nothing more, nothing less.
Blizzard is entirely unlike most game companies. Blizzard values its customers and wants them to have as good a time as possible. They don't just abandon products, they release no-CD patches. They allow their customers to enter their CD key on the website and download the entire game (useful if you bought the PC version and now want to play on a Mac), even if said game was released eleven years ago. Heck, they still have tech support subsites for Lost Vikings and Rock N' Roll Racing - titles they released back when the company was still called Silicon & Synapse.
Blizzard puts the customer first and only delivers polished products, release dated be damned. And that's why everyone loves them. Now compare that to, oh, just about everyone. It's a shame Looking Glass died, but the retail version of System Shock 2 was unbeatable for most people because a crucial window wasn't breakable. Piranha Bytes' The Gothic 3 gold master was so unready for production that they had to release the first patch on launch day. BioShock is a prime example of DRM gone bad^H^H^Hworse as many players are locked out of the game for too many reinstalls before they even played the game once - reinstalls which they accumulated trying to get the game to work.
To put it like Zero Punctuation's Yahtzee might: The video game industry is a sea of vomit and that's the qualitative standard against which new games are measured. The better ones are usually very nice and pretty examples of vomit but they're still vomit. The few gems people like Blizzard release can't change the fact that we're waist-deep in gastric acid.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
If you violate the law, you are a criminal.
Not true. Some laws specify civil torts while others specify crimes. You become a criminal by violating the laws that specify crimes. This isn't philosophical bullshit.
Copyright infringement (my favorite replacement term) can either be a civil tort or criminal depending on the purpose and circumstances. In most cases, especially involving P2P sharing, the infringement is a civil tort.
However, theft is always criminal. Sure, it might have to exceed a certain threshold to be a felony, but stealing even a fraction of a penny is a crime.
Theft is always a crime. Copyright infringement is only a crime in certain instances. Again, this is not philosophical bullshit.
Arguing that theft and copyright infringement are the same thing demonstrates a lack of understanding the difference between civil and criminal law not to mention the purpose and nature of copyright law.
Having worked for blizzard, I can assure you we shipped at least diablo, diablo II, starcraft, broodwar, lord of destruction, warcraft III, frozen throne, and wow with lots of software bugs.
Not many fatal bugs, but plenty of bugs. I personally fixed about 300 non play balance bugs that went into various patches.
Bugs are unavoidable in large software projects. Avoiding serious bugs that will make your customers unhappy is mostly about devoting sufficient testing resources to finding that class of bugs before shipping, and planning for extended work hours right after release to quickly fix the most serious bugs that escaped your testing.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking