Slashdot Mirror
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.
Because there are a LOT of douchebag moderators who either:
are complete fucking morons who don't read the comments they moderate or don't grasp the concept of context or don't understand what they read and decide to moderate it anyway, or
are deliberately being assholes.
The problem is that it's encouraging "creativity" in the wrong places. If the industry abandoned traditional business models, we'd never have Portal or Ico. These games would not have been improved with online-play.
I realize your mother was a bra-burning "I don't need a man!" feminist so perhaps you have become used to hyphenation, but "online play" is not a hyphenated word. Shit, at least your error was novel. Usually people capitalize words that are not proper nouns when they want to display shitty attention to detail and command of their native language. You were kind enough to fuck up in a novel way.
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.
Like anyone gives a fuck what some clown stuck in the 1990s has to say about modern gaming.
Microsoft has been letting go or closing large numbers of Xbox first party or exclusive developers over the past year or two. The now only have Rare, Lionhead, Turn 10, and maybe one more working on Xbox titles.
Microsoft has also been moving Xbox services over to Vista and been starting to work on Vista exclusive titles and marketing.
Everything indicates Microsoft is preparing to let the Xbox quietly fade out in the market as they turn their attention back to Windows gaming. It would be a gigantic humiliation for the company if they outright killed off the Xbox mess after so many years and so many billions of dollars wasted on it.
With the recent 40 billion dollar stock buyback program and renewed talk about restarting the Yahoo take over efforts again, the willingness to continue to throw billions down the Xbox rathole look to be at an end. The Xbox 360 was supposed to be the one that the Xbox team finally did right after the first console's marketplace flop. They are lucky they even got a second chance with the 360.
Consoles are based on two fundamental pillars 1) Exclusive content and 2) Manufacturing technology. Microsoft already had the smallest by far exclusive content/developers at the start of this generation and it has continually gotten smaller as they have closed down or let go studio after studio. And the lack of manufacturing capabilities as turned out to be a complete fiasco with the hardware failures.
I think Microsoft knows they need to dump the Xbox mess and return their attention in full to Windows gaming. They have made a start over the past year and I expect we will see more over the next year as the 360 dies off in the market.
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.