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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.
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?
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?
"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