Slashdot Mirror
The Evolution of Multiplayer Games and Online Play
Ranga14 writes "The recently announced Command & Conquer 4 seems to be following the same path of Blizzard's Starcraft 2 in having no LAN/offline multiplayer. They will require users to be logged in at all times to even be able to play any facet of the game. What will this mean for LAN parties, gaming events and those who don't play online? Is this a sound business decision, or do EA & Blizzard not get that this method of attempting to thwart piracy will fail like others have?"
I think it's a wrong move, but not because of LAN parties. LAN parties used to be a thing when internet was scarce, connections were slow and often you also had metered lines that only let you transfer so much traffic per month. Today, with bandwitdths that break the mbit borders easily and often hover about 10mbit, carrying your computer somewhere is, at best, something you'd do for special occasions. Events, maybe sponsored, where you may even win a prize for being good. Not just "getting together to play".
My argument against those mandatory online services is simple: What if the company ceases to exist or ceases to support the product? Good bye multiplayer (or even singleplayer)? Today I could still fire up a game of Starcraft, locally or through the internet, I needn't connect with BattleNet (let's assume it ever went away), I could play SC for as long as there is TCP/IP v4 around. Dunno if it works with v6, someone would have to try.
Tying a game to its maker essentially results in a better rental version. And I refuse to pay premium for renting a game.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
what will happen to co-op?
body massage!
If you can't play the game except through their online service, I assume they're not actually charging you for the game software itself?
No, of course not. They'd never double-charge people for a game, would they?
I think it's a wrong move, but not because of LAN parties. LAN parties used to be a thing when internet was scarce
Holy crap, I mean, I know someone who's only contact with *people* is when he has a LAN party. All this would do is remove any incentive he may have to wash...
This isn't 2001 when bandwidth meant dial-up and your local network was running at 10Mbps so the internet connection was an issue. This is 2009 when your internet connection is running at 8Mbps+ and your network is a mixture of hardwired and 802.11n. I've seen people on TRAINS with a 3G connection playing WoW, sure they get the occasional lag, but mainly it appears to be fine for them and that is on a TRAIN.
My backup storage is at Amazon
My email is at Google
My home network is accessible via VPN where ever I am in the world
My printer is on WiFi
One laptop is always on a 3G connection
One laptop is always on WiFi
One desktop is always on WiFi
One desktop is always hard-wired
I can flatten the network to include the in-laws if I need to do some tech support for them and they are 400+ miles away and I could do that from a laptop 5000+ miles away if I wanted to.
My point is that who the hell worries about a personal LAN environment for things like Gaming where most people have decent internet connections and really wouldn't have a problem either sharing the bandwidth (if they want to be social) or staying at home and going broad (if they want to be virtually sociable).
I really don't get why people in IT keep wanting things to be the same as they were at a specific point in time. I don't want to lug servers around for LAN parties, I don't want to have a dial-up connection to the internet and I really don't give a shit if games developers assume I have an internet connection for a multi-player game.
People will probably bleat about "piracy" and that this just "sucks" so here is and answer... if you want to do LAN parties and want to pirate software
Don't play games that require you to authenticate via a central server
See easy isn't it? Now stop bleating that people aren't making your piracy easy.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
so you can't play it on a plane, train the channel tunnel so on and so forth.
Don't you love it when the summary already tells you which is your position? I mean, the editor may think it is not a good move, it will alienate users, and so on, but alright claiming that
do EA & Blizzard not get that this method of attempting to thwart piracy will fail like others have?
leaves little room for opinion. Makes you wonder why do they let us comment at all, since the truth has already been established.
Why can't
If they really have taken this decision as a measure to prevent piracy I am not sure why the summary above is so sure it will fail. Sure, the game will still be pirated and will still be available on the Pirate Bay in no time however this measure will probably reduce piracy.
If I was required to buy a legal licensed copy of the game to play online I probably would. The alternative is I download a hack that enables me to play a pirated copy, but if they ever patch the game or server to detect this hack that is massive risk as they have a permanent record me having used a hack.
My favourite online game is Americas Army. If you do well on my server I will look you up on this site (http://www.aa-accounthistory.com/). If I see a linked banned account, your gone and added to my server as a MAC ban. Since this history site links accounts by IP, MAC and the GUID associated with your account getting a banned account listed on it can be a right pain. To be thoroughly clear you may need to change you IP if you have a static address and also use a MAC changer (or buy a new network card).
To play any game well online takes practice. If you are going to download a pirated copy and then play until you get caught and your account banned that practice is wasted since any sort of online league play is out of the question. Also, if they implement a similar history tracking site then you may find you a new legal account from a bought copy is also banned as it is associated with a hacked previous illegal copy. There is nothing legally wrong with this as the shrink wrapped licence you have to agree to when you install the software probably mentions this could happen.
Ultimately this is what they are aiming for, they do not want to stop all piracy of their game since that is obviously impossible. They do want to keep it to a minimum by preventing illegal copies from being able to play online and hence they people using them will miss out on a large part of the gameplay. This is a major reason why game companies are moving towards games that involve an online component, it gives people an added reason to buy a legit copy.
I dont read
This will only encourage people to build add-ons for the game that allow LAN play. Its happened with dozens of games and frankly this is just plain stupid.
LANS are there for people to get together and have a good time. A LOT of people use wireless connections in their house and that shit is attrocious for LAN play. You can say what you want, but most home hardware that people buy just isn't designed for 6+ people gaming over the internet at the same time. Forget the connection... just the hardware.
A $20 hub lets 10 people play in a LAN where it costs a lot more to setup the same level of connection over the internet in one location. You can try to argue with me but the fact is you're wrong.
I love LANS. People in the same room, talking smack, eating pizza, it's so much better than being on a headset talking over ventrilo. You can see their expressions when you nail em or overwhelm their defenses... It's also being able to come to a physical location, and as we get older, there are no kids, no annoying significant others (we have women in our group so saying wives would be wrong) who keep interrupting. They are there and not being hit with interruptions.
I've lost all real desire to play SC2. I was so excited about it... but the whole point of SC2 is playing with friends and removing LAN play removes half of the reason I play games like that. Sure... we can play online... but it limits us, or requires us to move equipment to other parts of the house so we can all hook up to the router physically since wireless is terrible, and most of us don't have wireless cards for our Desktops. Any gamer who thinks they can beat me while using a laptop is in for one hell of a spanking.
This is a risky move on their part. If you want an example of what can occur when a company does something like this, and then decides that it may not be as profitable as it hopes look no further than Steel Battalion: Line of Contact from Capcom. That game was only out for right about 1 year before they shut down the campaign servers. After that a large portion of the game became unplayable. I doubt the Command & Conquer franchise will die, but I would be willing to venture a guess that in a few years the game may no longer be playable once the company realizes they have no obligation to keep these servers up and running.
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
I think you need LAN to have competitive play. I wont settle for a competitive match over the internet. Its not right. Although both users are fighting on the same equal grounds. It makes all the difference to defeat someone in real time. Blizzard should know this. There has to be LAN play. Maybe there will be some sort of Server Starcraft version that will be used for LAN Play. Could be interesting actually.
I think your point is accurate. I am absolutely certain the eventual goal is to squeeze money out of every second of time the gamers play the game, and the first step towards that goal is to have a means to account for all the time played.
What was free must now be monetized... how else can the business grow?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
The commentary added to the bottom of the summary is wrong. This has a good chance of success at thwarting piracy.
The goal of anti-piracy measures is never to eliminate 100% of piracy until the end of time. That's nearly impossible, and they know it. What they really want to do is make it so that either you can't pirate it for the frst little while, or that you don't want to. Having no functional online play whatsoever in the pirated version is a pretty effective way of making the pirated version worse then the retail version. (That's the opposite strategy of stuff like SecuROM, which generally makes the retail version worse then the pirated version.)
LAN functionality is a real problem in that department now, because it's used primarily for pirates to play on Hamachi (and the like) with each other. Remove it from the game entirely, and the pirates no longer have to simply bypass SecuROM or an offline disk check. They have to emulate Battle.net in order to get any multiplayer working.
Will they do that eventually? Absolutely. Will they do that within the first 2 week sales rush? Highly unlikely. If it takes them a couple months before the pirated versions have online play, then by the standard of what the companies are trying to do, it's a successful anti-piracy measure.
As usual, you crooks who rip off games because you want free stuff are just screwing it up for everybody else.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Dormitories in college tend to be amazing places for mass lan parties.
Back in 03 in my last year in a standard dormitory I remember whole floors engaging in multiplayer FPS and RTS games, doors open, taunting, cheering, and having fun.
This move is indeed dumb, especially given the ever tightening noose on college gateways.
If no patch is made to incorporate lan play into the game, it simply will not be used by a heavy portion of the target demographic for lack of feasibility.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Let's say they are successful, and they do make it such that you can't play online, or even at all without a legitimate copy. These copyright measures are obviously annoying to their legitimate customers, as evidenced by many /.ers here, and I'd venture a guess that they don't increase sales. I think that most people who pirate games wouldn't buy them anyways, they will just find something else to pirate. They may end up getting 5% of the people who would have pirated the game to buy it, but by annoying their paying customer base with limited functionality or a required connection to play I think it hurts sales more than it helps them in the long run. Pirates will always be there, freeloading your games, companies should worry about impressing their paying customer base.
This is the new paradigm for gaming. With new connectivity and methods of piracy the method for protecting the games assets has changed. The gaming industry, unlike the recording industries, has seen that the tides are changing and adapted to the new waters. LAN functionality was critical when the internet wasn't as assured. We're beyond that point and the delivery mechanism has changed to follow suit. Why everyone is so surprised an industry is evolving is beyond me. I'd have guessed /. would be some of the most understanding gamers on the web. Hell, we don't even know battle.net 2.0's functionality yet, and we're already burning the game at the stake for not having LAN. When has blizzard ever failed us? And we all act as if this is the first game ever to not have offline content. World of Warcraft, arguable Team Fortress 2 (sorta kinda), and it's too early with too little time to research for more than what's on the top of my head. But neither of those games flopped. LAN is going the way of VHS and dial-up modems. They still exist, but the people who use them aren't the same people who would be buying new blu-rays or games like StarCraft II. Honestly, if you want LAN play so bad just stick with StarCraft classic, nothing is truly wrong with that game aside from its horrendous resolution. Personally I don't give a damn if there is no LAN, I'm more than sure battle.net 2.0 will more than cover that functionality with gusto.
Hell, my Atari 400 came with 4 joystick ports.
I don't count the 8-bits because they barely had enough palette colors for two players + enemies, let alone four.
We had a multi-tap for our SNES so you could play 4 player games.
The NES, Super NES, PlayStation, and PlayStation 2 had hubs for gamepads. But these hubs often didn't come out until one or more years after the console's release, and apart from games such as Bomberman that were bundled with a hub, programmers couldn't depend on one being present. That's why the N64, Dreamcast, GameCube, and Xbox had more games that actually used four gamepads.
You have fond memories of late-1990s LAN gaming. But as I understand it, PCs in the 1990s were still considered too expensive for mom, dad, and three kids to own five PCs among them.
Once new game consoles came out that have ports for everyone to plug in their own audio/visual head set, then you'll have a case.
PSP.
You can still call it a "LAN Party". We do. It's kinda disingenuous, but who cares? We get together to play WoW at each other's houses all the time. My wireless network can handle it. It'll be the same for Starcraft and C&C. Whatever.
I deliminate with tabs. Get used to it.
I remember when a hub cost a lot more than $20 and broadband was a novelty. Back then, my friends and I would get together and hook our computers up via our serial ports using crossover cables to play Starcraft! Blizzard really went out of their way to give you lots of options for multiplay, and even the stranger ones (like serial-port daisychaining) had their uses.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
there you go. Add limitations, remove features, lower fun, push graphics and requirements up.
God's gift to chicks
in my country. despite that, i wont buy sc2 if its missing lan play. i see that many of our community members will do the same too. whichever executive moron came up with that no lan idea, can shove the cds up his ass now.
Read radical news here
These companies are looking for two things when they hogtie players to their online services:
1. Eliminate the possibility of resale or modification by binding the copy to your computer and forcing you to call home every time you play, giving absolute control over your copy and your playable content to the publisher. There's a lot of room for abuse here, and also a lot of room for even more complications than what PC gamers already have to deal with.
2. Conditioning players for more subscription-based gaming and a vastly more expensive gaming experience. If you don't think you won't be expected to pay extra to liberate your already bought copies of Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and Command & Conquer 4 once you get them, think again. These companies are taking the Korean approach, but here's the kicker - it was a pay-to-play method intended to support games that could be played FREE OF CHARGE, not games that are going to cost sixty dollars a pop.
Make no mistake about it. Vivendi and Electronic Arts are making some very bad moves. This stuff won't work, it won't fix anything, it will be broken, and it absolutely will piss a lot of people off. It already has. Fanboys might fall for this, but even kids can tell these publishers are asking us to get ripped off. They're MMOGifying everything just for the extra scratch while paring down features and even basic ownership, and that's bullshit.
This is exactly why everyone should play Starcraft: Brood War, you may argue that the UI and graphics are shit but hey, the same could be said about chess or go, I mean, having to actually move the peices with your hand? Worst UI design ever, yet people still play these games. Plus, Starcraft has a lot of gameplay and metagame, taking a long time to master unless you are a genius, making the gameplay never boring as it is a learning experience throughout, even the pro's are constantly learning and changing their strategies. But for such a game, the latency ( or time between when your mouse click or keyboard hit is registered ) in multilayer games is very important for micromanagement ( especially mutalisk harassment where mutalisks are timed to launch their attack on the edge of their range and move back immediately to achieve a very optimal and powerful guerrilla warfare effect when done repeatedly ). Which is why latency changing tools have been added to the game so that latency equal to that of lan can be archived on battle.net ( of course with a penalty to lag which is not the same as latency ). Graphics to me, mean nothing, because just look at the world around you, if you want to look at pretty pictures, just look out your window. Starcraft's online environment is ( IMO ) much more mature than other games ( eg Halo on Xbox live ) since the players online are ages 20+, the only players under the age of 20 playing starcraft online are kids from Korea. Teens new to gaming will generally not play Starcraft in north america as they have much newer games with better graphics to attract that age group. However the argument that LAN is dead to me is completely invalid as I on a weekly basis have lan parties at friend's places through a wireless router, and everyone has laptops so it is not like carrying around a pc, nowadays laptops are so portable as you can carry them in backpacks designed to carry laptops.
the entire PC market [...] it's a tiny fraction of the size of the console market.
I'd like to see your source that the PC gaming market is a tiny fraction of the PLAYSTATION 3 gaming market. Or are you taking all the mutually incompatible consoles and lumping them into one market?
I loved the original starcraft game but didn't really like playing online because of the cheating and honestly it's more fun to play in a room full of people you know. I also don't support this designed obsolescence crap. I can still load up starcraft and play it with my friends and will still be able to in 10 years regardless of what happens to blizzard.
I just sent off an email to blizzard telling them I'm not buying their new version and I suggest you do the same. It only takes a minute and if everyone started doing something other than sitting on their asses things might change.
http://us.blizzard.com/support/webform.xml?locale=en_US
I see no way to email EA without having an account. Maybe someone else can find a method.
I'd be much more willing to get into reverse engineering, actually.
How much does it cost to move from the United States, home of Slashdot and EA and myself, to a developed country without a tradition of vexatious litigation against reverse engineers?
Thanks to the Hamachi-loving jerks who spoil it for families like mine which use LAN disc-sharing legitimately.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Steam anyone? I've stood by steam since it first released. Amazing product, no one else has been able to recreate it and it took them years to get to the point there at. But they did hit the nail right on the head, and it seems that most dev's/producers don't wanna shell out the extra for productions costs so steam is lookin pretty good.
You know, I'm all about teh intarwebs. But this is stupid. I almost never play video games multiplayer. I play them mainly to GET AWAY from people. And because Windows is the dominant gaming OS my only Windows system isn't connected to my network at all. EA is killing video gaming single handedly. Bastards. Well they can keep their games.
Pax Vobiscum
I think tossing out LAN sucks for the same reason I don't like paying for xbox live or the fact I was annoyed at half life 2 and steam verification.
But look at the reality. Firstly, there will be a battle.net emulator in some capacity that you will be able to download on your network and play. No question. With a game this popular, someone will make it. Problem solved.
Second, as has been mentioned before, sc2 is peer to peer. Though, I am not 100% certain this is going to work behind a nat. I'm not 100% certain how nat works over your router, while everyone is 192.168.1.100 and .101 etc, battle.net might only know you as your router's ip address and not what is behind it... though, if the packets going out are routed right to your buddies nat ip, ie you are on .100 and packet is going to .101, I'm pretty sure the router is not going to send the packet along on the next hop towards blizzard, but instead back into your lan to your buddy. If that is the case, the only thing that happened is online authentication, enough that a modem could probably handle 15 people easily.
But again, if not is hiding the internal ip and blizz only sees the router ip for every person, maybe the routing will not work so hot.
*shrug* either way, the problem will get fixed, by someone. And trust me, if you still like a game enough to want to play it 10 years later, there will be a nice 'click me once to play' package someone has made out there.
Here in Korea, there are at least a dozen internet cafes every corner(seriously). In this land of 50 million people, there are over 20k internet cafes. That is like number of christian churches here as well. (25% of pop are Christians) People here go to internet cafes for gaming and it is same as LAN parties in the States. Except you pay $1.5/hr which is not that bad and even kids can afford it out of their pocket. In the case of Korea, people don't LAN party. They just party out at the internet cafe. And internet cafes got T1 connection so internet is no problem. (duh!) I guess US customers needs much more convincing argument that those listed here on slashdot. I wonder if battle net makes any big money off of advertisement they sell. I would suggest Blizzard to sell LAN party add on for something like $9.99. And require players to be verified some way. That way they don't lose marginal number of people who wish to play multiplayer offline. (which exactly doesn't make sense in Korea - Are you a hermit?)
Now what if these are say Xbox consoles with diablo 3, which now have to get online to play?
Microsoft will probably mandate that each developer include at least a single-player mode
What do you think MS is going to do when it's Blizzard's decision?
Microsoft can choose not to sign the binary. Unsigned binaries don't run on retail consoles.
Earlier this year, I dragged out some old RA and RA2 discs, and put together some low end win98 machines to run them on with my son. They do not have, and WILL NOT EVER have, any connection to the Internet. RA(/2) are getting a bit boring, and I was thinking of finding something newer. Obviously C&C 4 will not be appearing on the list of potential 'something newer', as I *refuse* to connect any wintendo machine to the Internet. I've got a perfectly good set of Ethernet cables connecting the machines, there is *NO* good reason they should need to connect to some remote server over the Internet in order to interplay.
Just something for EA to note. I wonder how many other people will refuse to buy this for the same reason, how many lost sales it will amount to that they will never be able to count.
What I would really like to know is how long will it take for a game as successful as Starcraft, now Starcraft 2, to have non official game servers, like bnetd and pvpgn.
If Blizzard and others do it correctly, it may be very very hard to implement these non-official servers. If they leave some code, some character behaviors on the server side, it will be nearly impossible to replicate them.
Think about any sort of AI in the game, or even simpler - simply counting damage impacts to each unit - what if that is done at the server-side? that's bye bye piracy... or, reimplementing major parts of the game.
NO-LAN haters created a petitiononline asking blizzard to introduce LAN playing in SC2...
http://www.petitiononline.com/LANSC2/petition.html
I will not deny that Starcraft: Brood War is a fantastic game. However, when the people at the top oppose simple automation features like autoharvest (for those who want it) or an idle worker hotkey "because it reduces the skill level required to play the game", I'd say it's a little past its prime. (I wish I could find a citation for that; it's something I heard someone tell me when I commented once that I hoped SC2 would have basic improvements like an idle worker key.) On the other hand, they did a really impressively good job to have it still being played 10 years later.
C&C Red Alert 3, the most recent game in the franchise, did not support LAN co-op play at launch. A group developed custom binaries that would let you play co-op on LAN, and went on to attempt to create a generalized replacement for EA's matchmaking servers.
In my personal experience attempting to play RA3 online co-op from behind NAT was flaky to the point of uselessness.
I wonder how all of these forthcoming "online only" RTS games will behave with multiple users behind NAT. That is my main concern when it comes to the lack of LAN play.
Cutting out LAN can really destroy gameplay for games that require massive amount of updates to the server, and a really low latency to function well. It also cuts off the possibility for users without a 10MBit/10Mbit connection to play games well online. The regular bandwidth for users is way too low to cut off LAN imho. Most online gaming on 1Mbit/1Mbit is a bad experience for those who like to play on a LAN connection.
Maybe they'll do the same thing that Valve does with their Valve Cybercafé program. Would probably be too expensive for small meetups. But would be fine for gaming events, tournaments, and Korean players (that mostly play at gaming centers anyway).
I predict that Starcraft 2 will be dead on arrival in the United States, even though it will probably be a very hot item in Asia.
1. The PC is nearly dead as a gaming platform thanks to Microsoft's plan to move PC gaming to Xbox. I see this as a positive step, since I don't like upgrading my hardware every year just to play a video game.
2. Abandoning Starcraft's primary audience (offline single player and LAN) means they won't get to play on the nostalgia crowd, so it's effectively a new franchise.
3. $180 for the "full" game makes it considerably more expensive than any other PC game to date (that's a year of WoW, paid up front).
To summarize: Smaller market + Fewer repeat customers + Higher price = Fail^3. Way to go Blizzard.
Perhaps LAN Parties are a thing of the past, but lunchtime office LAN play is alive and well. There are probably 30 people where I work who went out and bought everything in the Battlefield series due to the lunchtime office games. That is only one group that I work near. There are others in the facility.
However, most corporate firewalls block gaming sites. So this move will prevent us (and other companies like us) from doing the same with those two games. This will impact sales.
One thing to take into account is the level of "professional" (it's in quotations because well.. it's a computer game.) gaming in Korea and other countries, specifically with SC 1.
By nixing the LAN play, they are essentially mandating that b.net will be the venue for these tournaments/competitions.
While I know that South Korea is super wired, I find it unlikely that they are going to require professional Starcraft 2 players in Korea to have internet connections for all the computers in the events. I can't believe that they wouldn't make a LAN-only version for pro gaming.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
more than one installation behind the same router/firewall (would be common in an office environment)
not everyone opts to have their scores submitted
Taken from the 2D Boy website: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
In that blog post 2D Boy makes a more rigouous investigation of the subject, and comes out with a result of 82% piracy taking into account many factors.
From this they deduced that the level of piracy is probably less than 90%, but probably not much less.
It is interesting to note that the 2D Boy developer's stance on DRM is such:
i'm hoping that others will release information about piracy rates so that everyone could see if DRM is the waste of time and money that we think it is.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
Can someone tell me what's wrong with this idea?
Blizzard can get the best of both worlds like this:
1. Player buys Starcraft 2
2. Player logs on to Battle.net ONCE, and authenticates
3. Having authenticated, Player can play on LAN. Without authentication, LAN play is unavailable.
This way, Blizzard gets the best of both worlds, and so do we. There's no need to exclude LAN support altogether, since its inclusion in this model carries no penalties for anyone. Or am I missing something massive?
There's a good thread going on the Command and Conquer web site. http://forums.commandandconquer.com/jforum/posts/list/17550.page I'd suggest making your opinion known there. The EA devs might see what's going on. As for Starcraft 2. I believe there's an online petition for it someone online.
Finish the Fight!
I know I'm in the minority, but I work away from home (pretty much away from everything, including the internet) for 3-4 weeks at a time. And since I'm not home at the end of my shift, I do most of my gaming then. Anything that requires a connection is not getting any of my money. The other things (like shutting down their servers, etc) also applies. Less value = no sale.
I don't have newer cards in mine, either. I actually swear by this routine, seen here.
I tried that routine a couple times but failed miserably. I bought two PS2 games and tried to play them online, but both times I got DNAS Error -103: "This software title is not in service."
try explaining why you are abandoning the retail market to your bank manager or investors.
"Billy Mays here with How to Sell Your Product on Cable TV."
A lot of products, such as the ones that Billy Mays used to pitch before he died, are what they call as seen on TV. This means the advertisement for the product doesn't tell the audience to buy the product in a traditional retail store but instead gives a toll-free telephone number or a web URL where a customer can order one, and then the distributor ships the product in the mail. Why do these products go through a round of "as seen on TV" before (or instead of) traditional retail? To save money. Establishing relationships with a retail chain takes a lot of time==money that smaller studios developing PC games don't necessarily have.
I totally agree with this. Even as games get bigger and flashier I still pull out my old DOS games to play once and a while.
Despite new games coming out, the old games aren't just phased out, they are still competitive in enjoyment.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
Latency is the same thing as lag...
I still cannot play my Half Life 2 discs because I do not have access to the email account I originally installed steam with.
Moral: Register your own domain and forward its e-mail before signing up for such an important service. Then when you switch ISPs or webmails, you can switch the forwarding.
I have seen several studies indicating that people who pirate IP, also buy more IP.
The abbreviation "IP" can refer to copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, rights of publicity, or Internet Protocol routing contracts. Using "IP" to refer to all six carries a connotation that these exclusive rights are more similar than they actually are and that their respective scopes should be expanded. It's a seductive mirage. If you mean "people who pirate copyrighted works", why not just say "people who pirate copyrighted works"?
The only people using LAN nowadays are Hamachi-using freeloaders. Having LAN option = inviting pirates. The amount of people legitimately using LAN is statistically insignificant.
Then why do more games for Nintendo DS have DS-to-DS WLAN multiplayer than Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection multiplayer?
But there are many, many more people who would love to play games from time to time and don't want to do it on a tiny screen; consoles make that possible
As do home theater PCs. You can plug multiple game controllers into USB ports and play LJ65 or Lego $MOVIE or Serious Sam, just as one would on a console. HTPCs also have the advantage of having more indie games.
Nope, you can have very low latency yet high lag, or low lag and high latency. In a low-lag, high-latency scenario, your mouse clicks affect the game after a relatively long delay, however the game to you looks perfectly smooth, eg the game's speed is smooth and fast. In a low-latency high-lag scenario, your mouse clicks affect the game with a lot less delay ( lowest latency would be your mouse click affecting the game instantly ), but the high lag will mean that your game may look choppy or sluggish, yet your user inputs are highly responsive. This is at least true, in Starcraft, not sure about other games though. You can use a latency changer to change the latency to the same as LAN on battle.net however the game will more likely lag, as it requires stricter timings to and from the server and clients, using a high latency will allow the server more time to handle inputs from clients, allowing for games with less lag.