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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.)
I prefer the term "stealing games" myself. It fits well, does away with the positive connotations that the term "piracy" has gained in some circles, and -perhaps most important- it really makes the pirates mad.
Bootlegging: to produce, reproduce, or distribute illicitly or without authorization
This helps to distinguish private copying from for-profit counterfeiting by organized crime.
They'll be encumbered with ad- and mal- ware.
Sure, free games may solve game "piracy", but it doesn't address what is killing PC gaming. Which are A) Windows, B) Insane hardware requirements and C) Consoles. When all PC games become cross platform (Linux, Windows and Mac), require the average hardware and will run decently on low-end hardware (for example, now it would need to run on 512 MB of RAM and a cheap Intel graphics card), and be better than the games on consoles. Once they solve all those problems PC gaming may be mainstream, but right now they confine themselves to a small niche.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I would still be willing to BUY games (I don't pirate them, I just haven't found much to interest me, console OR desktop alike).
Again, I would still be willing to BUY games if they would stop rehashing half witted half finished games. So few companies really release good games, and everyone expects insane growth. Always "growth". Perhaps some retards somewhere forgot that you can only grow so much before your body either collapses under its own weight or you evolve into something else. Otherwise, no luck.
Blizzard always releases late. People understand them. Why? Because Blizzard, ID, Ravensoft and no others I can think of, have managed to release a bug free or complete product. Most of their fixes, in my memory, have been playbalancing, rare bugs on rare configs, etc. But their games WORK. Other people's games... often hit and run.
Why is it that so FEW companies actually put out workable, GOOD products? Perhaps if more of them did, and if shoddy products were to be refunded in FULL, then perhaps better products would "revitalize" the market.
Games don't need to be free. Shitty ones and incomplete ones should be. The "no return if opened" policy is bullshit. It just allows a company to sell a shitty game and get away with it. It allows a store to carry a non tested product and get away with it. But hell, if pharmaceutical companies and electronics and even car companies can get away with shoddy products, why not the software industry? If the customers keep waiting for governments to step in and save them, they ought to realize that it is MUCH easier to buy off bureaucrats and politicians than ten thousand pissed off freemen customers, some of whom might be willing and able to use their rights (from the vocal to the physical) when other means fail to extract remedy for shoddy product and vaporware sold as an actual, complete product. Fraud of this sort should be held accountable by the victims, the customers. Until the customers demand quality, and stand by that remark... and demand refunds on shitty products, until that occurs... well, nothing's gonna change.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Just make them good. I have no problem with paying for my games (I do so for every game I have a copy of), but I'm not going to go out and buy a crap game if I can help it.
Of course the industry needs to stop crying wolf as well. While sales from brick and morter stores are going down like a brick, a lot of that is being picked up by services like Steam, because Valve seems to have realised that attempting to screw your customers just doesn't work.
Ummm... Quantity != Quality. Just look at games for the Wii, sure there are some good ones, Super Smash Bros Brawl, and Super Mario Galaxy to name just two, but if you go into any major store you find that about 75% of Wii games are crappy mini-game collections with virtually no purpose that involve shaking around the Wii remote to try to do something.
Even if you look back to the NES where we only had a few major developers there was a lot of quality games made, games that pushed the hardware to the limit. In the SNES/Genesis era things stayed the same. But once we got to the PS1/N64 era, we got flooded with a ton of really crappy games. Think about it, once Disney games were good, at least decent, and worth playing, then midway into the '90s something started to go terribly, terribly wrong. Every movie had some lame video game tie-in, games started to all be the same, originality seemed to be confined to first-party developers. We are still there, you only need to take a look at the Wii.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Valve has a nice vision:
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=160866
Have to say I agree with them.
I recently bought a new, up-to-date PC with dual cores and all the bells and whistles. After playing nothing but WoW, Civ and other less-powerhungry games on my trusty old 1,2 GHz Celeron and Win'98, I could finally check out all the games I missed.
So far: Half-Life 2, Orange Box (consisting of EP1&EP2 too, and Portal). Love it. Also love Steam. It works.
Another case: Galactic Civilizations 2. Stardock's Stardock Central (and the parallel, Impulse), rock.
NO Copy protection. No DVD in drive bullshit. No running through the hoops. Before, when I bought a game it was always running via gamecopyworld.com to get the crack. Another game that I got was Crysis. Fine, gamecopyworld has cracks - except there isn't one for the 64-bit 1.21 version. So I was stuck with the DVD in drive..
Then, as an old Baldur's Gate&Torment&Kotor fan, I heard that Bioware had done a new RPG - Mass Effect. To avoid hassle, I googled for what copy protection it's using - and read about the whole phone-home-schema. I can run Steam in offline mode. Stardock Central doesn't phone home. But these guys seriously thought that spyware in your PC is ok?!
I was already firing up my torrent client, but then I read http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/09/2318229 about EA loosening the DRM and actually bought the game instead.
Gotta love Valve. And Blizzard.
... is because they're based on the 'technology first, everything else second' formula that's been the defacto standard for PC game development since the late nineties, which was the point where the costs were starting to rise and publishers losing interest in being innovative, instead opting for easy tried-and-true-but-with-more-powerful-technology cash-ins. This worked as long as people were interested in upgrading their hardware not only for games but also to improve their overall computer usage experience, but since the advent of Windows XP (plus service packs) and the P4/Athlon XP generation of CPUs many users have found themselves able to carry out their computer-related activities well enough not to need further upgrades.
The PC gaming market is effectively destroying itself by sticking to this paradigm, because the amount of people who own top-end hardware isn't going to increase - someone who plays games and is looking to buy a PC today isn't going to opt for one with a fancy GPU from Nvidia or ATI that's able to run top-end PC games because even if a particular game isn't available for anything but the PC you can for most part find console games with comparable technology and playability. The PC doesn't have the technological advantage it used to have over consoles or at least it doesn't play as much of a role anymore because even if Crysis looks nicer than, say, Gears of War, for most people the latter is going to be good enough. Graphics in games have advanced to the point where they have become a commodity, and when people will no longer latch on to your game because it's technologically superior because your competitors offer something that might be somewhat inferior but still good enough you have get to them by other means. So far the gaming industry's reacted kind of similar to the music industry (where the music is a commodity as it's all seemingly factory produced) in the face of this - more focus on branding and controlling news- and retail outlets (hence the increase lately in reports of "professional reviewers" being restricted in terms of what they're allowed to print in reviews).
What most of PC game developers or former PC game developers refuse to admit to is that there's a huge market beyond the one that finds your technology the most appealing aspect of your game. The Sims and subsequent sequels proved it existed. People who shuffle The Sims, WoW etc. into their own categories as phenomenon that cannot be repeated simply don't understand that these games were and continue to be successful because they appeal to people by having good gameplay, which is far more universal than having cutting edge technology. And contrary to what these people think, their success can be repeated - but in order to do so you need innovative and creative gameplay and creating such takes talent; something the video game industry as a whole is surprisingly devoid of.
You don't have to demo a Blizzard game to know it's worth the money, either. Crap, that was your point.... anyway...
I think part of the point is that the business model for the industry is broken. Paying 50 bucks to find out a game sucks really ... sucks. And currently, demos only seem to work from companies that are consistently good producers anyway. That could change.
Yeah, I think some publishers are going to have to look at different business models for releasing and profiting from games. However, I think shareware may be a better model than ad support.
In a perfect world everything's free and people are so honest and civil-minded that they donate their money to content provider's as appropriate. blah blah blah. Personally, the system we have seems just fine. Pirating is heavily skewed towards the younger and less affluent anyway.
Graphical equivalent of the Wii on the PC? It only outputs video at 480i, and only has 24MB of memory for its graphics adaptor. You can buy a card to do that for well under $100. The PC games industry is currently booming. All this "PC games are dead" is complete bullshit.
The NES saw the release of something like 700 games. I think most were Mega Man titles, actually. A lot were high-quality, but most were complete crap, even worse than South Park for N64. I guess they were lovable, though. Of the games I had/have, some are now called classics, depsite the fact that they're basically unplayable, or terrible adaptations of movies/shows (it didn't start with 3D consoles...check out Friday the 13th). Something that controlled like Ironsword would be laughed at these days. But at least it had cool songs and artwork, not many of them even had that.
Now it's the FPS you can't escape from. Back then you had your platformers, beat-em-up platformers, action platformers, and the occasional top-down game. You'd think some of the third-party software makers could have come up with a decent platform engine, but they didn't. For every playable game like Mega Man or Shatterhand, there was Wrestlemania or Rollergames, where "winning" meant not developing childhood arthritis. Don't get me wrong, I loved those games, but I don't think quality has gone downhill overall from the 80s. Up, if anything. There'll always be the ones you love to remember and the ones you would like to forget.
bnetd? The reverse engineered version of their free online service, minus the check for a legitimate copy of the game?
How exactly can they justify not shutting that down?
There is inherent difference between an item in my house and an item elsewhere. Mainly, that one item is in my house and the other is elsewhere.
Deprive someone of physical property for the sake of your own use and you have committed theft.
Deprive someone of physical property for the sake of resale, and you've both committed theft and entered the black market.
Copy the property or recipe for the property, you have violated copyright violation because you have an unlicensed copy.
Copy the property or recipe for the property for the sake of sale, and you've both created unlicensed copies and you're bootlegging.
Theft/black market deprives people of ownership/possession, use, and potential profits.
Creating unlicensed copies and/or bootlegging only deprives people of potential profits.
This is a very common misconception about the costs for playing games on a PC. I have seen your argument over and over again, so I hope you see my response/correction.
A computer that is used for work or general "home" stuff does not come with good graphics in most cases. These machines are 100 percent focused on non-games related tasks, so as a result, you should not put those functions into the "cost for the games portion of the computer". You can also look at this from another point of view, where if you ONLY buy a computer to play games and NOTHING else, then the cost of a gaming computer is much more expensive than a console, but if you plan to buy a computer for other things as well as playing games, you can now split the costs up.
HP Pavilion desktop computer with AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 3GB RAM(DDR2), 360GB hard drive, integrated NVIDIA graphics and onboard sound will cost you $530 from Best Buy. Add a 19 inch screen, and you are looking at under $700 for the complete machine. Notice that there is nothing here that is focused on playing games.
So, what would turn the above computer into a decent gaming computer? The video card, which will run between $200 and $300 for a card that is probably more powerful than what you would see in an Xbox 360 or PS3. That is the only price you are really paying to play games here.
What many people do not think about is how many people use a flat panel TV to play their game console on. If you don't watch TV on that big flat panel screen, you should now add the price of the screen to your game console. That will be upwards of $800. Suddenly, the cost of a game console is quite a bit higher than the computer. In the same way I write off the non-gamer components from a computer, you can theoretically write down the cost of that flat panel TV if you watch TV on it.
So, what platform costs more to operate now? Do you connect your PS3 to a regular TV?
He's put a nail in his coffin if he thinks he can rely on this. It's an insecure solution that will only turn people off more.
Micropay for items ingame is slightly harder to patch than disabling serial protection, if properly implemented. But not by very much, and we're really good at it, thanks, pretty much the computer does all the hard work now.
People don't want to whip out their credit card in midgame and use it to buy a +3 sword of shiny metal bits. At least I don't.
Try donations instead. You might be surprised, if your content is any good. If it's not, you may as well piss of your users with DRM (as if that worked), because they're not going to like the game once they start playing anyway.
Keep selling games. Stop whining about people sharing with each other. Or, if you like whining so much, maybe do some polls and find out what the REAL reason people don't want to give you money for your work is.
You like watching David Perry? Oh. You watched him make Earthworm Jim, then, I guess? That was pretty impressive, that character really entered society. Let's see what he did after that... OH! It was all derivative crud. Maybe you should stop following game developers around and thinking their shit smells good, and get a clue.
"You're doing something that doesn't harm anyone in any way"
Let me guess, you don't rely on selling games for a living do you?
You are talking shit. long winded shit to justify stealing games, just don't embarrass yourself by this rationalizing to people who actually lose sales to piracy...
If I make a game, and you want to play it, and you refuse to pay me for my work, you are a thief. you can type pages of bullshit to try and weasel out of it, I'll always call a thief a thief, a leech a leech and a scumbag with a sense of entitlement a scumbag with a sense of entitlement.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Except writing a bad game review gets you fired so they're not at all accurate and doesn't give you any idea how it will play on your computer, xbox or TV screen.
The history of game reviews is littered with bribery and it's still the case. Reviews are complete bullshit.