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PCGA To "Take Up the Challenge of Piracy"
Ars Technica reports that the PC Gaming Alliance has declared themselves the "guardians of PC gaming," which includes finding ways to help gamers decide on gaming hardware, and to make progress on the issues of piracy and DRM.
"[PCGA President Randy Stude said,] 'The PCGA will take up the challenge of piracy, not to assume the responsibility that the ESA has taken on... rather the PCGA would like to address the methodology that publishers might be able to take to solve, or to do a better job trying to solve, the piracy challenge for their substantial investments in content.' The PCGA won't give a standard approach to publishers, saying it is much more likely it will release a series of recommendations to publishers, and track piracy on an annual basis to see if the problem is growing or shrinking. The PCGA is also working on methods for members to track how effective their antipiracy measures are once a game has been released."
Members include Microsoft and WildTangent.
I think I'm gonna be sick.
I'd prefer to have Penny-Arcade as the "Guardians of PC Gaming"
With simply needing a legit key to play online. Because even the primarily single player games you'll still want to play online for the occasional frag. But the DRM has gotten so nasty lately that I'm afraid to buy any games for fear it'll bone my PC. So hopefully they'll address the issue of DRM making the pirate version so much better than the retail. While I don't pirate I'd be afraid to play Spore or C&C 3 simply because the DRM is so nasty. So in those cases the pirates win because I'm afraid to buy them and the pirates get the game for free. So sorry EA,but the DRM is just too nasty to have your product anywhere near my PC.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If you can beat the pirates on the first 3 points, people are generally a lot more willing to pay.
Isn't that the standard body for chimp golfing?
Why do people still use PCs for gaming? PCs are business tools... Consoles are better for gaming because the game development company can rely upon a specific hardware configuration.
This isn't a troll, but an honest observation.
the difference here is if there was a mistake on a wikipedia page you see the fix now. If you stumble across an old magazine that had a print error you don't necessarily have the page 400 font size 3 correction printed 6 issues later laying beside it..
My brother and I recently started an independent video game company and I had seen the PCGA covered on Slashdot a few times before. Looking for resources to help us, I called them up asking what they could do for us as a Mac, Windows, and Linux video game developer. They basically straight up said, "well... nothing". To be 100% honest, I do not really know what they do. If I had not seen them on Slashdot, I would not have known they existed.
I look forward to the day when they can do something for us, but until then as a PC game developer, albeit small, I can let you guys know that these guys don't represent us in any way shape or form. However, I wish them luck on their anti-piracy endeavor.
Meanwhile, on our end, we are going to lay off the invasive DRM and instead rely on creating high quality downloadable content and other online features like multiplayer which provide a clear incentive to purchase our game.
http://www.xkcd.com/488/
Steal it, and you're a criminal. Get the DRM locked media, something happens with technology that makes you have to try and remove the DRM lock just to use what you bought, and you're a criminal too.
Piracy will be way more popular now that every company is scrambling to DRM-lock their products (sort of like the Sony 'rootkit' happy fun time, companies have decided when we pay for something, they can stick whatever they want in their product and let us sort out the mess leftover).