I'm going to buck the Slashdot trend and look at it from the developers mindset.
I make a great product that I would like to sell and whos return will make my living. My issue is in examining the market and how my game is being received.
Take for example Call of Duty 4: I just looked up on isohunt.com for the torrent of Call of Duty 4 and found that there were currently *4000* (I rounded up from 3917) people involved in downloading it illegally. Note that this is *several* months after the game has been released and the total number of copies that have been illegally downloaded is probably in the vicinity of one hundred, if not a thousand times the current.
However, I will base it off of current numbers.
4000 * $50 = $200,000 = Four full time employees salaries. Those four thousand have cost the market an awful lot of money.
And that's only today, several months after it originally hit file sharing networks.
So yes, I damn well want people to pay for my software and unlike a console which has a *software AND Hardware DRM scheme as well* I have to build my own DRM.
Blockbuster games deserve every sale they get. While Bioshock and Mass Effect's DRM schemes are certainly frustrating in that too much re-installation results in an unplayable game, I ask that the users of Slashdot come up with an alternative that:
1. Prevents the playing of game by people who have not purchased it.
2. Has a protection scheme that is as transparent to the user as possible.
3. Works.
This is by no means a simple answer and I sure as hell wouldn't want to sell a game for the PC that could easily be cracked.
$200 by itself doesn't mean much. If I could make my car 10% faster for $200, I think that'd be great.
Clearly you haven't seen the Honda Civics around where I live. I don't know if their giant after market exhaust pipes make them go any faster, but they sure make them at least 10% more annoying...
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the horrible job mlb.com did implementing it on their site for live games. It's like watching it through a strobe light.
I'm going to buck the Slashdot trend and look at it from the developers mindset.
I make a great product that I would like to sell and whos return will make my living. My issue is in examining the market and how my game is being received.
Take for example Call of Duty 4: I just looked up on isohunt.com for the torrent of Call of Duty 4 and found that there were currently *4000* (I rounded up from 3917) people involved in downloading it illegally. Note that this is *several* months after the game has been released and the total number of copies that have been illegally downloaded is probably in the vicinity of one hundred, if not a thousand times the current.
However, I will base it off of current numbers.
4000 * $50 = $200,000 = Four full time employees salaries. Those four thousand have cost the market an awful lot of money.
And that's only today, several months after it originally hit file sharing networks.
So yes, I damn well want people to pay for my software and unlike a console which has a *software AND Hardware DRM scheme as well* I have to build my own DRM.
Blockbuster games deserve every sale they get. While Bioshock and Mass Effect's DRM schemes are certainly frustrating in that too much re-installation results in an unplayable game, I ask that the users of Slashdot come up with an alternative that:
1. Prevents the playing of game by people who have not purchased it.
2. Has a protection scheme that is as transparent to the user as possible.
3. Works.
This is by no means a simple answer and I sure as hell wouldn't want to sell a game for the PC that could easily be cracked.
This is my livelihood we're talking about.
No matter how many times I read that, I can't stop it from sounding like something the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons would say.
Sounds like someone was caught with the 'ol horse porn on his computer.
$200 by itself doesn't mean much. If I could make my car 10% faster for $200, I think that'd be great. Clearly you haven't seen the Honda Civics around where I live. I don't know if their giant after market exhaust pipes make them go any faster, but they sure make them at least 10% more annoying...
How long until Google's contributions to the open source community become regarded as financially motivated or opressive?
Rather, the question I want to know is, when will it become cool to hate Google?
Don't "upgrade".
Now Firefox will use up even MORE memory.