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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.
I think the obvious answer to this problem is to distribute all games from here on out through Steam.
(not really)
But honestly, Steam's a great platform for game distribution. You have your own account and once your purchased game is installed you can re-install it as you like through said account.
Okay, to back up the original post, I used to contract for Epicgames on the Unreal series. When developing for the main PC market, we were constantly rolling our specs and expectations forward and backwards, gain some here, lose some there, roll up with this new tech etc. When porting to consoles everything was set in lovely stone. This is the amount of memory you have, this is how much transfer you have. It is amazingly much easier to do development work when you have limits like "Your textures for this level/environment cannot be more than xxx megs total" or "your level has to be under xxx megs in file size to load properly". This is black and white. You know the performance you will get, you won't see a shift here or there. On the other hand, working with the PC development, it's not black and white, it's all a shifting gradient.
Let me use a slashdot friendly car analogy.
Working with a console is like buying a little hatchback and keeping it factory standard. You know how fast it goes, you know how much you can pop into the back before it gets too much. Working with PC's is like going to a custom car show. Each one is different, you don't know how fast they go and you don't even know if there is space beside the subs in the back to fit any luggage.
Which one can potentially be better is a no brainer, but which one is easier to plan around is just as plain.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
If we're going to talk about MMORPGs, PlaneShift is often overlooked IMHO, and it's very much free-to-play, as well as in beer and (mostly) libre (although note the proprietary licence for art and game rules, more about protecting the quality and consistency of the game than anything else).
It's not as popular as WoW by any means, but it's certainly a lot of fun, even given the fact that it's pre-1.0 in terms of status.
The democratic nature of FOSS is its main weakness, and in the context of games, makes FOSS nearly impossible to pull off.
Unlike most FOSS projects I've seen, which is basically a core developed by a handful of developers, consistently added on and improved by additions and fixes from the community at large. This works great for enterprise software and web apps, where iterative development on top of ever-changing demands demands this sort of development - whatever features are most needed tend to make it into the next release, etc etc.
Games don't work like this. Games do not have evolving feature sets. They have a spec'ed scope, and the development team executes it, end of story. They also require vision and centralized leadership - something FOSS projects find very difficult, since the voluntary nature of the whole thing makes it such that "unsexy" features never get worked on. In a game, unsexy features that don't get coded = game that never ships.
Oh, and games require extensive amounts of art. I would argue that for most games, more artists are needed than coders, by at least a 2:1 margin. I don't see that many capable artists in the FOSS scene, do you?
XNA,Xbox live.
Frankly, I was a game developer (during 18 years !) and I will never touch XNA, even with a ten-foot pole.
There are several reasons:
1) being tied to XBox. Nowadays, you have to be able to port your game on all the consoles. You don't have the luxury to write a game for only one platform, and being forced to rewrite your code for the other ones.
2) C#. I now code a web application in VB.NET, and it's great for this kind of task. But if you want to write a game, it's doomed from the beginning if you work in C#. Sure, it's great to use, but how can you trust a garbage collected language during in game ? Slowdowns may appear anywhere during a game, and such bugs are impossible to reproduce.
3) XBox: XBox is perhaps a success in US, but in the rest of the world, it's largely unknown.
If you want to make money, think: Wii, PS3 then XBox 360.
Wow.
Ok so I'm a young gamer (Aussie by the way).
But just to put an addendum on my previous post, I'll quickly mention a story. Month ago I bought Crysis warhead, legitimately bought it, installed it on the two computers I have that run Crysis, this is fine they say, 5 installs they say. Two weeks ago the game wouldn't load and all I got was a message saying if I wanted to play to "purchase another copy" because I had exceeded my 5 installs. This was utter bullshit, I played their game (money game) and they dicked me. It took another week to resolve the issue, and I was more or less accused of being a liar by the phone staff, in the politest possible way of course.
I just want to make sure my story is repeated all over the internet as many times as possible. People DO get locked out of their games for no reason with this shit. The fact that the issue was resolved is meaningless, to me there never should have been an issue to resolve.