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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?"
Most responses were, "we'd pay for your games if you'd remove the key protections"
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
When a no-cd crack or hacked exe for a game I purchased is released, I usually use it instead of carrying the CDs around with my laptop.
Kudos to Valve's Steam letting me download and install the game on multiple machines without treating me like a frickin' crook.
And the occasional time I've actually downloaded and ran a pirate game just to see if it was worth buying. I've been burned on way too many awesome demos and lackluster final games to drop $50 on a whim.
1. Lose the damn copy protection.
2. Use Steam or develop a system where people aren't chained to a CD or Jewel case with a cryptic serial number on it.
3. Release honest demos.
4. Don't get bought by EA, they have no honor.
Someone *this* in touch with not only their customers but with obvious potential customers definitely knows what they're doing.
I'm seriously considering buying a few of his games even though I've never heard of the company before.
PS: If you need a very experienced web developer...
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Nice to hear from you chris, and I wish you luck with that puzzley-platformer of yours!
I used to find it amusing that people are willing to live with Steam's DRM, but complain about DRM in general. I've personally resisted Steam for years and years before I finally decided that Steam's DRM is actually palatable compared to some of the shit that's out there (securom).
What's disappointing is how badly the large shops are butchering the PC gaming market with DRM that absolutely sucks. Bioshock, Mass Effect and Spore are all games I wanted to play but at this point I will not dump the money down for them. Even the Steam version of Bioshock contains securom. How screwed up is that?
I'm at the point now where I'm slowly turning towards indie developers for most of my gaming neads (Stardock) and I'm really really glad that Positech has made it to slashdot or I'd never have heard of this company. I'll have to look at their games more closely.
This developer needs to be modded up. I wrote and told them that I used to pirate games after I bought them because the pirate editions were generally easier to use and I didn't have to have a disk laying around to play it. I then explained that due to my limited time as a father messing around with any of it was crap and that I pretty much quit playing PC games in general. If this whole asking our customers what they want thing catches on maybe I'll finally be able to get what I want, when I want it, and the way I want it. Perhaps I could get back into video games on the PC again.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
No one sells Ultima, Pools of Radiance, or Summer Games for the C64 anymore. If I wanted to play this game, my only choice would be to pirate it unless I could find a working copy on Ebay.
Services like Gametap and Good Ol' Games need to fill this market so that people don't have to become criminals to play games of yonder years.
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.
It's simple as that. If you just make games where you have the biggest player audience instead of making games for those that are most likely to pay for their games, you're prone to having a lot of copies. If your market demographics consist mainly of people with little money and/or a low chance of getting caught, you will be copied.
There are simply people who buy and there are people who copy. And no copyprotection, no DRM, no law will get the latter to buy your games. If anything, DRM will drive those that would buy them (like me) away.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I like that guy's attitude.
Instead of corporate PR bullshit, he's honest, open and willing to discuss with his potential clients.
My answer to his question would most likely have been : I just fucking hate big games companies who are run by corporate idiots.
I'll probably give one of his games a try, just to encourage this kind of behavior.
This guys sounds like a genuinely decent guy who's making efforts to make customers happy to reduce pirating; that's all great, but it seems to me, having never heard of his company, he's done an awesome job of getting a lot of free advertising.
Not that that will keep me from perusing his games...
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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?
Fnord.
Your site says you do Mac ports. Can we get some Linux ports as well please?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I personally pay for 100% of the games that I play on the Wii. Just wanted to throw that out there as a partial suggestion.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
When you buy a game you're not buying a game, you're buying the fun you'll have playing it, and the price you pay for a game is more than the dollar amount on the sticker, it includes all the games of the same class you bought which didn't provide the requisite entertainment.
If every game were fantastic then people would probably be perfectly willing to pay $60(or $100 in my neck of the woods, which with today's exchange rates is criminal) for it, because you'd be getting good value for entertainment.
However since even with proper research it seems these days that best case scenario only 1 in 3 games really provides you with value on the entertainment front, from an entertainment perspective that game actually costs at least $180[$AU300] because for every good game you manage to buy and which provides value for money, you generally bought two which got dull after the first level, didn't offer what they promised, or were generally crap. This markup shall hereafter be referred to as the dud factor.
The problem with Braid, and for that matter probably with this guys games, is that the class of game they exist in(small studio amateur) has a much higher incidence of crap(or at least games which while good didn't provide value for money) compared even to most commercial games these days. This means that even if your game provides as much entertainment as a commercial title, the dud factor makes your game seem, at half the price, to be even more expensive. The hotdog and novelty t-shirt in the penny-arcade comic are both known quantities and so don't have this dud factor markup. If you get a bad hotdog you can usually complain and get another one, and you can see everything that the t-shirt is when you hold it in your hands.
This kind of sucks for small development shop games, as even if they're the most incredible thing in the world very few people will buy it at a higher price, but in other ways it's a good thing, because it means that if you're clever and you build up a good reputation so that people can feel confident in your product you can reduce the dud factor and therefor increase the price you can charge for your games.
I can't speak for the OP, but my interpretation was that people who are more likely to find DRM annoying are those who have to circumvent it - rather than for people who brought the game legit.
While DRM does cause issues in legit copies sometimes, the "anti DRM" group would be over-represented by the former rather than the latter.
When you say Cracked copies have no drm - what you mean is they have no drm because it was disabled, which importantly needs to be updated for each patch, causing more inconvenience for the pirate then for the legit owner. (I'm speaking here out of experience on both sides)
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
I pirate games because I don't want to spend money on them. I really don't care that some programmer or company is getting shafted out of my dollars. That's money I could spend on other pleasures. Why would I give them my money so that they can use it to compete with me for tangible resources like real estate, luxuries, and women? I don't bloody care. Call me a thief, so what? What are you going to do about it? Is it unfair, uncivilized, uncouth? Not my problem. I do what I want. In an age when I can download whatever games I want for free, actually paying for them is like putting my money in a shredder. I'm not gonna try to tap dance around it and defend my actions because I really don't have to until I'm standing before a judge. This isn't a troll or sarcastic post. I really don't have any scruples about this crap.
When I wanted to check out "The Sims 2" I went out of my way to pirate it. EA's managed to alienate me (a customer who's spent thousands of dollars on their products) to the point where I'll actually spend more than $50 worth of my time to get a torrent.
Do the opposite of what they do, like George Costanza.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
I pirate games 'cause pirates are so cool dude!
Or I do it because I don't make enough to afford rent, food, gas, electricity, water (the basics) and internet, movies, music, WoW, etc. fun stuff.
Plus I have a relatively short attention span for most games, but longer than a demo version. If I truly like the game, I will spend money on it, so that I can own it. Though I usually wait for the game to come down in price.
The last great game that I... "Evaluated the full version" of was Call of Duty 4. I want to buy this game, I enjoyed it, and though I wouldn't play it daily, I'd still pay for it. But it's out of my price range (how long has it been out and it's still $50 "on sale" locally to me?). Once it drops in price a little, I'll gladly pay for the good game.
Basically I pirate, cause I'm poor, and cheap, and have the attention span of a coked out squirrel. Make a game fun, and affordable, and I'll throw money at you.
Well, part of the big joke is that a game, once cracked, a game effectively has no DRM, no nag screens, no internet phoning home, no CD-ROM checks, etc. A legally purchased game continues to require these things, and over the long run, is more annoying than a cracked copy. This has been a problem with music, too, because an MP3 with no DRM will play on any device (which is a lot more than an encrypted AAC file).
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
to claim that DRM is a reason to steal the whole game?
Y'know, I attended a talk by RMS in New Zealand about copyright law last night (13th), and he put forward the view that anyone should be allowed to make unmodified copies of a product (for non-commercial use). Also, he mentioned people should only have files protected by "Digital Restrictions Management" if they had the facilities available to bypass that protection using free software.
My interpretation of what he said was that software piracy is a fallacy. Making copies of things is human nature and should not be restricted.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Why not make it easy for me to try out a demo and upgrade to the full version, I can pay $20 up front, or play an extended demo and play to the end of the demo (say halfway through the full thing, or with weapons/skills/whatever only in the full version) and pony up $20. But make it easy, like literally hit a key combo in game that launches my default browser to the right URL, payment should take ~10 seconds or less, and then the game goes legit (automatically or in some very easy manner). Literally make it as easy as buying a cup of coffee (probably one reason so many people buy cups of coffee =). It shouldn't interrupt the game for more than 60 seconds to upgrade. I suspect if there were games with this system they'd sell relatively well.
DRM causes issues in legit copies a LOT. I have a lot of games that worked when I bought them but don't work on my new hardware.
My solution wasn't to pirate... my solution was to stop buying PC games altogether. I have no hidden agenda when I say DRM prevents me from buying software.
I now have dozens of 360 and Wii games.. all paid for. I'm never going back to PC gaming.
Did anyone else notice the 2 copyrighted images from "Pirates of the Caribbean" on the article. For some reason, I doubt he properly licensed those, but I'm sure that is completely different than pirating a game.
If a game needs administrator privileges to install, its DRM is too intrusive. It's just not acceptable to give some no-warranty game the privilege to overwrite your system settings and install hidden software. There's a moderately high probability of hostile code being present, a strong possibility that the DRM system will open a security hole, and a high probability that the software will not uninstall fully.
If it won't install with unprivileged user privileges, it's hostile code. Send it back.
I greatly respect what RMS has done, but there are a lot of things I really enjoy that I can't really see coming out in a noncommercial form. I can *maybe* see some tipjar model where copies are freely made but the game still is commercially successful, but only maybe.
Would I have gotten Baldur's Gate 2, Dark Knight, Portal, or a hundred other amazing pieces of IP if those people couldn't expect to get paid?
I do believe that DRM should have a backdoor. All DRM should have to explicitly spell out what you CANNOT do, and everything else should be allowed. The "cannot do" and the product should be registered with someone (library of congress?) along with software capable of removing it entirely. In the event someone is restricted from doing something not on the predeclared "cannot" list, they should be able to acquire the "crack" from the LoC.
I think a system like this, where people could, in general, feel comfortable they'd get what they paid for, would make people much more ready to buy things with DRM. Maybe not. It would for me.
I've often thought that offering a "format guarantee" sticker on media would spur sales. I think people are tired of having bought the vinyl, the 8-track, the cassette, the CD, the mp3; or, alternately, the betamax tape, the VHS tape, the laserdisc, the DVD, the HD-DVD/Bluray disc. Enough. I want to pay for content once. Then I want to get it in whatever formats I want for a nominal fee (ie, cost of media). I want to be able to send in a hundred DVDs, and get back a hundred blu-ray discs for $200 + $10 shipping.
Anyhow, I digress. I think opposing the moral rights DRM tries to protect is in error. Original, creative works deserve some measure of limited-time protection. But I also think trampling consumers on the way to maximizing profits is both self-destructive for the creators and unpleasant for consumers.
Indeed. Including a cloth map, a moonstone and an ankh in the packaging (Rest in Peace, Origin :~( ) will make more people buy the actual game instead of copying than any DRM ever will.
I think it'd fall under Fair Use since its a two frames out of a 1-2 hours movie, appropriately cropped/zoomed to focus on the faces. Quite common in movie reviews and what not.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
I do not live in US. But i have a kickass machine config, a fast 2 Mbps internet, and buy most of the games like CoH, CoH: OF, Age of Empires, etc.
Most games sold online or through Amazon are available only to US residents/credit card holders.
This forces me to pirate games that i love to buy, but CANNOT buy because the stupid publisher thinks US==World.
I had to ask my sis-in-law to buy games like Company of Heroes/Opposing Fronts from US, because these games are not available where i live and amazon refuses to ship them.
OTOH Stardock/Impulse pioneered a way to buy games without the US restrictions. So i ended up buying most of my games from them.
Second reason is DRM crap.
I bought crysis and i ended up with SecurROM which slowed down my DVD read/write drive to such an extent i had to reinstall XP.
Now? Crysis sits on my desk and i play CoH.
Third is the way the authentication of keys work.
I had to reinstall XP (problem above) without uninstalling anything (could not boot up PC).
Most games allowed me to reinstall without trouble (like CoH, Age of Empires, etc).
Stardock automatically allowed me to download same games once again without asking major questions.
WarCraft refused, saying am pirating.
Rise of nations refused to go online stating same reason.
Both support people were helpful, but wanted me to scan the original DVDs, proof of purchase and a signed affidavit stating i bought it from so-so dealer.
I bought Rise of nations a long time ago. Shifted homes thrice. P-of-Purchase NA. So no online! I sent the jpg shots of my game DVD, and a CD key paper i had retained.
When support refused to activate it, i cracked it.
After all, am "helping" the company to provide me the service i paid for. Right?
Short story: KISS and allow anyone to purchase your games from anywhere. Don't insist on stupid lawyers to restrict regions/countries.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Sure, I only know very few game writes, so the stats are a bit thin, but the game writers I know are the worst pirates of all the people I know. They will readily pirate both material as well as development tools, OSs etc then bitch like hell if anyone rips off their games.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's quite simple. Gaming in general (both PC and console) has evolved quite a bit in the past couple generations. I can't say that there won't be any new innovations, but I can say with certainty that almost everything has been tried at least once.
With that in mind, there are a number of gimmicks that game studios use when producing games. IMHO, the worst are the following:
1: Adding artificially hard/non-linear barriers to progression. The most recent splinter cell game is a great example of this. While the previous ones were quite linear and relatively free of frustrating gaps, "Double Agent" had several things that seemed as if they were put in there just for the sake of taking up the playerâ(TM)s time. Don't take a 7 hour game and try to stretch it to 12 with garbage.
(2 and 3 are somewhat similar and several games are offenders of both. They are, however, separate problems)
2: Using flashy pre-rendered cut scenes to advance major story points or game play. Part of me misses the age of cartridge consoles. With only 64Mbit to play with, these kind of antics were basically impossible. In todayâ(TM)s age of double sided DVD's and even BD-ROM discs, a game could conceivably have hours of cut-scenes. If I wanted to watch cut scenes (no matter how well animated) I'd rent a movie. If they take up more then 50% of the time spent playing, I generally skip them or have a beer/sandwich. Consequently, I miss out anything that's contained in them that is important or significant to the game
3: Trying to make up for poorly designed or un-engaging game play with flashy/unique/overly high-quality graphics. Thanks to the availability of substantial hardware resources in the current generation of consoles (excluding the WII, of course), it's quite easy to fill a game with high polygon count skinned, boned models wrapped in super detailed textures, multiple light sources and hand perfected pixel shaders. It might look really spectacular, but that doesn't really mean anything if it's not any fun. Once again, if I wanted to look at something rendered absolutely perfectly, I'd watch a Pixar movie.
4: Having a selection of difficulty levels that has little effect on the game. 15 years ago, Doom offered 5 different skill levels. While the playerâ(TM)s choice didn't massively change the game, it did incrementally increase the difficulty. The monsters were harder to kill, more populous and while health packs had less effect, more ammo was spawned. I would hope that modern games could do better then that. Doom ran fine at 33Mhz. Modern consoles have roughly 10,200 MHz at their disposal. There is no excuse for difficulty levels to do nothing more then spawn more or harder to kill Napâ(TM)s.
Finally, the biggest and most annoying thing about the current generation of video games:
5. Today's game producers tend to front load their game's content. I've never found a published statistic, but my estimation is that only about 40% of games purchased are ever fully completed by their purchasers. The player either tires of the game before the end, or gets another game to play before they finish. Since most games today are part of a series and are expected to remain viable for use in future sequels/ newer consoles, the game companies cheat on the content. They put, in my estimation, 75% of the best content in the first 50% of the game. The hardcore gamers and series fans will always buy the next sequel. They're hoping that by front-loading the best content, the semi-casual player that only finished half of the previous title in the series will have liked it enough to buy the new one when it comes out. While I understand their logic, I'd really like to get more for my money. 8-10 hours from a game that costs $50-60. That's between $5-7.50 per hour. I don't know what everyone elseâ(TM)s thoughts are, but I think that minimum wag
Stealing (literally) whatever we want, hurting people who get in our way, having sex with anybody we find desirable, and driving as fast as *you* feel safe doing (or faster, if you're an adrenaline junkie) are all human nature too. As are many other despicable things. Civilization is not built on embracing "human nature" nearly as much as it is built on *containing* it for the good of all of us.
If you want to argue that piracy, software or otherwise, benefits the community as a whole, I'll listen. If you want to quote some idealist, then put a downright out-of-touch-with-reality interpretation on it and justify that as "human nature", please go find somewhere else to do.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
ozmanjusri's debunking is quite on-target to be honest. I've played WoW under Gentoo, and it's maximum frame rate was about 2/3rd that of windows (natively). In fact, Wine's average framerate before I added 2GiB more RAM was generally better than Windows. (Of course, this last tidbit might be due to the fact that Windows, with 1GiB RAM, was eating up far more than X--but I suspect a better VM, too.) If you plan on playing a game under Wine that is purported to do well, you should probably at least check the Gentoo World of Warcraft Howto and browse the performance tweaks section. Applying the registry tweak really does work, if you're playing an OpenGL game.
Of course, the game very likely has to be an OpenGL game in order to work in the first place. But, in the case of WoW, OpenGL mode isn't slow because it's running under Wine--it's slow because of Blizzard's implementation. (Seriously--try running WoW in OpenGL mode under Windows, you'll lose approximately the same FPS as you would under Wine.) Plus, in a rather odd twist of irony, Tribes' dedicated server (the original Tribes!) runs somewhat better under Wine!
He who has no
If you just code and do nothing else then fine, I can see you won't see the problems. OK, here's a *simple* example from c.a. 1990: You have a simple dictionary program which runs on MS-DOS (using a memory swapping TSR). Three editions. Easy huh? Wrong - dead wrong - try QA/ing that across at least (I stopped counting at 13) variants of DOS, network shells, DR-DOS, PC-MOS 386.. (it goes on and on). Oh and by the way marketing doesn't want pirates to be able to take the Lite version and use it with the "Pro" files etc. etc.. (That's just in this example a little Greek-English dictionary called Gword).
This was also a good example of insane copy protection as it (I fought this hard but lost!) locked to many of the hardware features of the machine it installed on. Net result: the more copies the company sold, the more support calls generated for new S/N's...
The funniest thing was that someone *did* hack me (yippee!) and I got sent a SYMDEB script to patch the code. Took a while to stop laughing about that. The later windows version only had a registration number and was (is?) widely pirated, but I always took the view that it was a good advert for the company anyway...
Re "most users don't want tech support" - here's another anecdote, this time from the mid 80's. When I was at TDI in Bristol UK in the 80's porting the UCSD p-system one of my colleagues ported it to the Sinclair QL. TDI had decided that there was to be *no* tech support for this system. Very clearly in the manual it said that. Didn't stop Sinclair QL users swamping tech support - nobody reads the manual anyway.
Andy
to be honest that ad is there partly because otherwise the page looked horribly bleak and colorless. I know it still looks a bit grim.
The original question wasn't a big attempt at a crusade, in fact it was deliberately targeted just at people pirating *my* games. I could get a general view of piracy of photoshop and mp3s anywhere, I wanted more focused replies than that. A lot of general piracy arguments aren't applicable to me (lack of demos, CD checks etc), so I needed to find out more specific answers than that.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I keep pounding this drum: the future is already here, at least in China.
Problem: the core gaming audience won't pay for games. (Maybe its because they're poor, although darn, they cough up money for their iPods, sneakers, designer clothes, meals, computers, and ...)
Solution: don't sell games.
Sell items -- $1 for a Sword of Extra Harming. Sell server access -- $12 for a month of WoW. And when it ceases to be profitable, turn the whole system off and let the customers whine if that makes them feel better. They'll be back, because your business model is the only one in town. (Ever wonder why you can find a zillion Japanese games in the US, but the only Chinese/Korean imports are item selling games? It is not because Korea couldn't do a console RPG to save their lives -- it is because no Korean businessman is going to front $100 million to develop the Korean Final Fantasy when they can actually make money on Item Selling MMORPG #416.)
Slashdot should be careful of what it wishes for. It is very possible that in 2020 you'll never be accused of stealing a game ever again, simply because there are no games which can be owned in any sense of the word we're familiar with.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I still don't get how buying from steam is any different to buying from me, other than you may already have an account on steam.
For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.
[...]
I'm really hassling my payment provider to support amazons one-click method. For me, I think that's even more convenient than steam.
Well, that's basically it for the digital distribution point - people don't like to fill out forms, they don't like to give away their data; not their email, not their name and especially not their address, so the common accounts most people already have, Steam and Paypal, should be used whenever possible.
Since your payment provider requires people to fill out that boring form every time someone purchases something, why don't you support Paypal directly? Just return a page with a download-link and/or serial key like other services do. One of your competitors when it comes to getting money from pirates, Rapidshare, does exactly that. If that's not possible on part of your payment provider then you should consider switching to a different one, perhaps one that doesn't support Paypal on it's own. Even if you drop it altogether and use Paypal as the only payment method, you might be better of.
For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.
Didn't they create Steamworks and recently released an SDK so that every developer can finally get their games on Steam? I didn't really look into it but where is the problem? Do they have some kind of requirements you can't meet?
Well, he's an indie developer, so some of his games are only $10 to begin with. That would probably be the minimal I'd give anyone as a donation. If you aren't worth $10, you aren't worth a donation at all. Plus you'd get a game, you'd be able to try it out, and you might even like it. If there is a donation box, you could still use that, but at the prices of these games, I'd just recommend buying one if you really want to support him.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
> If you aren't worth $10, you aren't worth a donation at all.
Meh, if every slashdot user were to donate me $1, I would still be very, very happy (AC also accepts euros *hint hint*).
You said : Software publishers fail to appreciate that their software is an add-on to an operating system and collection of existing software and data and should try to coexist and cooperate within that environment as a guest should behave himself in your home.
Thats Wrong, no one buys a computer to run an OS, people use OSes to run applications on their computers. Apps sell computers OSses run those apps.
You also said : People are willing to buy when it's worth buying.
Thats wrong too, if people can get it for free and dont get any kind of punishment for it , they wont pay for it (I know there are a few exceptions).
I wont judge the motives that anyone copies something, but one thing is for sure, there are no noble motives either, a game isnt exactly food or medication or any kind of thing you need to live. There is NO justification for copying software and using it on a regular basis, there are : free alternatives for most apps, games arent a prime necessity, if games are too expensive is because people DO pay that kind of money for them, try this, do not buy new games if they are too expensive, buy 2nd hand ones. So IMHO if you want to copy games and movies do whatever you want but dont waste bandwidht saying that you do so because of _insert_noble_and_oh_so_sad_story_ , you do it because you are being selfish and do not want to pay the price that someone asked for it, and because you can do it and get away with it !!!
Jorge
A friend I had over at Loki said that lots of people said they wanted Linux versions, but when they actually did the ports, the market wasn't there.
The key seems to also be to release concurrently if possible. With Linux or even MacOS you either need to do release concurrently or get the port out before it works with Wine or Cedega or people just buy the Windows version (mac gamers will dual boot or run Windows or Linux in Parallels - I have an acquaintance that runs Parallels-Linux-WINE on a macbook pro because he refuses to run Windows and loves Counterstrike).
You know what I love about Slashdot? When people post snarky grammar corrections that are themselves incorrect. So someone should go ahead and fire up their response to me now.
I do not think the word 'objective' means what you think it means. It doesn't mean 'rigorous scientific study'. It means
So, for example, if you were to turn on an FPS display (for example, by pressing CTRL-R in WoW), then run once in linux and run the same scene in Windows, then reported the framerate the display told you, that would be objective.
If instead, you just ran around in the game on both platforms and said 'this one feels slower than that one', that would be subjective.
Of course, don't let silly things like 'facts' get in the way of being snarky to an anonymous person on the internet. I sure didn't. :)
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Because consoles have DRM built-in?
Who gives a shit? At least consoles WORK. Take a look at how long it took me to get a copy of Dark Messiah working on my computer: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/08/02/why-pc-games-suck/
If I had bought the Xbox 360 version of the same game, I would have been done in less than a minute. You put in the disk, it works. Period.
Comment of the year