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The State of Piracy and DRM In PC Gaming
VideoGamer sat down with Randy Stude, president of the PC Gaming Alliance, to talk about the state of piracy and DRM in today's gaming industry. He suggests that many game studios have themselves to blame for leaks and pre-launch piracy by not integrating their protection measures earlier in the development process. He mentions that some companies, such as Blizzard and Valve, have worked out anti-piracy schemes that generate much less of a backlash than occurred for Spore . Stude also has harsh words for companies who decline to create PC versions of their games, LucasArts in particular, saying, "LucasArts hasn't made a good PC game in a long time. That's my opinion. ... It's ridiculous to say that there's not enough audience for that game ... and that it falls into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC. That's an uneducated response." Finally, Stude discusses what the PCGA would like to see out of Vista and the next version of Windows.
A subscription MMO would have lapsed, and I would likely have lost my characters or their gear.
This is why I don't play WoW.
There are better and real reasons not to play WoW. Lapsed accounts do not lose characters, nor their stuff. That is a lie or you do not have the command of the English language that you think you have.
If I had mod points (of course you never do when you need 'em), I'd mod you up some more with +1 suddenoutbreakofcommonsense.
I am also angered by the views of many people in the tangible vs digital reproduction discussion.
Just because a copy costs $0, the initial investment is there just as with tangible goods. The dumbed down math looks something like this (IANAEconomist):
(((development cost) / (minimum expected number of sales)) + (reproduction cost)) * (profit margin) = sale price
The only difference between tangible and digital is that the reproduction cost is now 0. I completely fail to see how this makes sale price 0 as well, as some people seem to think it should be.
Now of course, if the situation warrants it, you can change that formula if you do business a different way. But you can't ever take out the (development cost) part. Radiohead came out on top (I think) just because of the very big number of sales. This will only work in certain instances. 'Small businesses' can't do this, the list of situations where this just doesn't work is endless.
What ticks me off most is the argument that if you copy a digital good it isn't stealing, because the original is still there. Perhaps the word stealing is not 100% literally correct, I will grant you that. However, you are still denying income to the authors. The argument that you would not have bought it doesn't fly either. If it is useful and provides a function people need, people will buy it. However, if they can get it for free, they will do that instead.
In the end, all these people are doing is making sure the developers cant feed their children and move to other things instead. Bottom line is they don't want to pay up, and make up all kinds of excuses why they shouldn't have to. It's like a little kid in the candy store, mommy doesn't want to buy you the candy, so they go crying and stomping around. Grow up.
And then of course the OSS enthousiasts will show up claiming it works for project X and Y so it should work for Z as well. Big-corp A will pay coders to work on it! Now, there is nothing wrong with OSS, in fact, I think it's great. But this model, again, does not work for a lot of projects, and all you're doing this is actually putting more into Big-corp A. Sell support contracts? Again, this works for some projects, not for others. Kinda put the effort out of trying to write decent software that doesn't need support too. The development cost has to be made back somewhere.
In the end, there are different business models, some work for some things, others for others. Thinking one-size-fits-all is IMHO shortsighted. And just because the business model used for product X you want is not agreeable to you, does NOT give you ANY right whatsoever to just pirate it instead.