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DRM vs. Unfinished Games
Rod Cousens is the CEO of Codemasters, and he recently spoke with CVG about how he thinks DRM is the wrong way to fight piracy. Instead, he suggests that the games industry increase its reliance on downloadable content and microtransactions. Quoting:
"The video games industry has to learn to operate in a different way. My answer is for us as publishers to actually sell unfinished games — and to offer the consumer multiple micro-payments to buy elements of the full experience. That would create an offering that is affordable at retail — but over a period of time may also generate more revenue for the publishers to reinvest in our games. If these games are pirated, those who get their hands on them won't be able to complete the experience. There will be technology, coding aspects, that will come to bear that will unlock some aspects. Some people will want them and some won't. When it comes to piracy, I think you have to make the experience the answer to the issue — rather than respond the other way round and risk damaging that experience for the user."
Right? Not $60 for an unfinished game, then two or three extra $10 for addons?
You're right about the Humble Indie Bundle. They only made $1.3 million, that's shit!
You need to reread the snippet you quoted, very carefully this time, and go for comprehension of what was said.
People who don't want to pay to play your games are never going to pay to play your games.
People who want to play the game but are unwilling or unable to pay for it are very much included in the "people who don't want to pay to play" category.
The problem with DRM is that it takes a lot of us who were formerly in the "willing to pay to play" category and, because of the restrictions imposed by draconian DRM solutions, puts us in the "no longer interested in risking spending more time getting the game working than we spend actually playing it" category.
I have not purchased a game in some time (Myst: Uru was my last game purchase), and after having to go out and find and purchase an old DVD player because the game refused to play on a DVD drive capable of burning (lest it be copied, I guess), and dealing with SecuROM and a reinstall of my OS so I could burn music CDs from music I had purchased, and God only knows what other dumbfuckery I've had to cope with over the years, I decided I had had enough of having my system fucked with every time I wanted to spend $60 for a few weeks of entertainment.
I'd love to try a few games out here and there, and my wife and I used to be heavily into puzzle-type games (Myst series, Obsidian, Sanitarium, etc), and I used to enjoy an occasional FPS LANFest, but eventually I decided I pretty much needed a separate computer from the one that did my finances and email so I could reload the OS after each game to wipe out the latest crap introduced by the DRM. And, of course, that meant buying another $175 copy of Windows XP because, guess what? It had DRM too.
I decided bicycling and kayaking sounded like more fun.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Uhhh, WTF?
If I go into a store and see a product hanging on the wall saying "Game X, $10" and I buy it, I PAID FOR IT. If I get home and find out I need to buy a "code" to play this game, I'm pissed.
And that's exactly what happened with some games I bought through a local Office Max. SD cards with some old arcade games for the Palm. Heavily discounted/closeout, like $5, but nothing on the outside said anything about having to buy a code to play anything. I get the games in the Palm, wham, thanks for buying us, here's 10 seconds of demo, now go to this website and get the registration code for $x. Fuckers.
The problem with DRM is publishers retaining control on stuff you already paid for, after the fact.
Yeah, like those games.
The battle isn't in the crack teams' favor these days:
The PS3 has been shown to be 100% secure after the years it has been out.
I believe GeoHot might disagree with you in that regard
HD satellite is still unbroken.
Really? Which satellite network? BEV is cracked, as is N3 (So Dish) - Google "N3XT"
FairPlay for movies still has not been cracked, and no, using the analog hole or a program like SoundTaxi to "record" the played movie is not a crack. That is a transcoding.
I'm sure the QTFairUse guys would have done it, had not Apple C&D'd them into oblivion.
HDCP has been out for a while, still unbroken.
Really? Are you sure about that?
Recent iPhones are still not jailbroken.
Really? Ask PlanetBeing about that.
Windows 7 activation has yet to have a reliable bypass that doesn't turn the desktop black.
Really? 'cause I'm using This release (For educational purposes only, of course), and have no black desktop on either x86 and x64. As long as you don't install KB971033 (Which can be blacklisted in Windows Update), you're just fine.