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Game Developer's Response To Pirates
cliffski writes "A few days ago, indie PC games developer Positech publicly called for people pirating their games to explain why, in an open and honest attempt to see what the causes of gaming piracy were. Hundreds of blog posts, hundreds more emails and several server-reboots later, the developer's reply is up on their site. The pirates had a lot to say, on subjects such as price, DRM, demos and the overall quality of PC games, and Positech owner Cliffski explains how this developer at least will be changing their approach to selling PC games as a result. Is this the start of a change for the wider industry? Or is this the only developer actively listening to the pirates point of view?"
As far as having a good "taster", Id did pretty well with this. With say DOOM, you knew up front that the game would have a total of three episodes. Id let you play pretty much the first third of the game free. Hell, their demos even had some replay value. As it turned out, their clueful use of shareware pretty much made them back then.
Of course, not all games are as episodic but it you could draw some rules of thumb from it. A first time player casually making his way through DOOM's first 9 levels will take about 1.5 to 3 hours to do it. So it seems you have to give a quality experience for at least that amount of time to start some buzz going and of course the paid portion of the game has to maintain that quality so you'll tell your friends and blogs that the rest of the game is worth paying for.
I'd also suggest not continually have the player running into physical barriers and what not that aren't present in the payware version. Just structure the demo such that the game can be experienced for that critically addictive amount of time. Building in nags and frustrations will keep your prospective customer from getting hooked and wanting more. Rather you need an end that takes some period of time to encounter whether it be "level 9" or a decently far extent of a game universe. A game using the hub and spoke system should supply a quest or two say.
We can draw a parallel from the serialized stories of yesteryear. A good solid first installment is what is needed to get the reader caring about the story and characters. The "gotta know" sets in so the rest are bought.
Debunking Wine Myths
for those applications that do work and from a purely subjective point of view, performance is good. There is no obvious performance loss
http://www.winehq.org/site/myths#slow
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
As we're talking about games here let's just say that
for those applications that do work and from a purely subjective point of view, performance is good. There is no obvious performance loss
is total bullshit.
Yes I know it's a wonder and everything that I can play selected DirectX games under Linux at all. But those people claiming they run Half-Life 2 (or any source based game) through wine and it runs "the same as in Windows" kinda piss me off.
Personally if I run Team Fortress 2 in wine I see a huge performance loss. I play with DX9, FSAA and full details in Vista and get about 80-100 frames average. Using wine the game will only allow DX8.1, medium detail levels and using FSAA is right out...and it still runs with less than 60 frames most of the time. All this at 1680x1050 with an 8800GTS and a Q6600.
If we're talking about apps then yes, performance loss is minimal. Or at least performance loss is not apparent since modern machines are overpowered for most applications anyway...
But games still run like shit a good deal of the time.