It's very likely that the insane DRM restrictions (like requiring an internet connection at all times) significantly reduced demand during the pirate-free period.
In other words, nobody pirated it for a while, but not as many people bought it as would have if there were no DRM but piracy was not an option. Basically Ubisoft's DRM cost them the same number of customers as would have pirated the game, which means their DRM system actually cost them tens of millions of dollars more than just using a serial number system and leaving it be, and it's going to continue costing them significant amounts of money until they can get away with pulling the plug in a few years. That will - seriously - piss off any Ubisoft customers who actually like to have a library of games they can play.
I think he's trying to say that games without DRM are more successful.
While it's hard to argue that piracy affects the bottom line of game sales (if piracy is an option, it WILL reduce demand for the retail version), there is little to no evidence that DRM measures reduce the amount of piracy. Due to their digital nature (the very thing that makes them easy to copy in the first place), once a game is cracked that particular version is cracked forever, and anybody with an internet connection can get it. Because no security can ever be 100% effective, DRM will always be cracked eventually.
What this means is companies are spending tens of millions of dollars that buys them just a few weeks of unpirated sales. That's it, it does not take the incentive to pirate away at all, and in the long run even the most draconian DRM only has a marginal affect on the amount of piracy that occurs. Therefor, any company that spends only a minimum amount of effort on a DRM scheme saves those tens of millions of dollars at the cost of those few weeks of unpirated sales. As Ben Franklin said: "A penny saved is a penny earned."
Assassin's Creed 2 is just one of many games that are proof positive of this fact.
Indeed, different company, but same issue here: I was going to buy Spore when it came out, because it sounded cool. When I found out about the DRM that amounts to their installing a rootkit on my system, I just downloaded the cracked version instead. I figure if they're going to treat me like a criminal from the get-go, why not earn the punishment? Turns out I had a much easier time of things than most anybody who actually paid for and installed the software. Go figure.
It's like the parents who leave the house for the afternoon, and tell the kids they have to do chores/homework and aren't allowed to watch any TV. Instead of trusting the kids at all, or even waiting till they get back to determine if they broke the rules and watched TV, the parents decide to punish the kids ahead of time because they know they'll break the rule anyway. Well, since they've already been punished for it, why wouldn't the kids watch TV when they aren't supposed to?
These fucked up DRM schemes are exactly the same - if I'm going to be punished for following the rules (heavy restrictions on use, rootkits, compatibility issues, etc), why the hell would I follow the rules? A lot of people already know most cracked versions are easier and more convenient to play compared to the retail versions, so where is the incentive to buy retail? Some people are honest enough to buy retail and then get the cracks, but you're still breaking the law so why bother buying in the first place?
I personally cannot wait till Apple takes over the market, open source crowd will shit their pants and realize how easy they had it with MS.
Apple will never take over the market until they license their OS to other hardware manufacturers.
Apple will never license their OS to other hardware manufacturers (hardware is actually their bread and butter, not software), ergo Apple will remain at the roughly 5% (it fluctuates, but always seems to come back) market share they've held for the last two decades.
If they were ever going to take over the market, they'd have done so by now. They need to crush hundreds of hardware manufacturers and thousands of software manufacturers in order to take over the market without any kind of OS licensing. Apple hardware and OSX is nice, but it's nowhere near that nice.
You mean cracking the servers and getting the game from them, and also the server platform, and then setting up a server, and then cracking the client so that it connects to the unofficial server.
Yup. New school, meet old school. That's exactly how hacking used to be done - breaking into various remote systems.
Really, all this will do is bring back the joy and challenge of hacking on a larger scale. Less brute force and more delicate subterfuge. If there are no more offline systems to hack, the offline hackers will just join back up with the remote systems hackers and the hacking world will be whole once more.;)
Indeed, "I'll believe it when I see it" is not a bad position to take with OnLive.
Seriously though, it's going to take a very long time before an online system can replace a local system - think about it, current bus technologies between hardware and TV/Monitor run in the multi-gigabit range.
Now that's uncompressed, Cable TV has shown that you can crank those numbers down quite a bit, but you're still talking about a lot of people completely saturating 200-300mbit connections to match the quality of video you get on your local hardware. The connection would have to be very very reliable as well - just a few hiccups in latency or speed can cause extreme annoyance for the gamer. So in reality you're looking at probably a 500mbit connection with a guarantee of no less than 300mbit or so.
It would take one hell of an infrastructure improvement to handle that.
It's also a moving target, because video advances continue (though slower than some would like), and by the time we get 500mbit connections in enough homes to make this viable (you'll always be cutting off a big chunk of the market with this setup), the target could very well need to be 1gbit to match local hardware.
The wonderful thing about his product though, is that he can keep selling it even after he has sold it.
He doesn't have 1.5 million accounts to sell once, he has 1.5 million accounts to sell over and over and over. He may only be able to get $50k for the lot, but he can sell them all a dozen times. Depending on if they catch him or not, and how effective they are at getting people to change their passwords (the only way to make the accounts worthless), this guy could make half a million dollars or more pretty easily.
Why does it need to be IPv6 only? Do you not understand how address translation works? We've been doing it for decades and you still don't see how this is going to work? This is simply protocol translation, and IPv6 hosts on IPv4 networks already do this.
IPv6 already reserves the IPv4 address block, all you need is a little simple protocol translation between your IPv6 addresses and your IPv4 addresses and everything is just fine. In other words, an IPv6 host can understand both IPv4 and IPv6 natively, they only need translation for the IPv4-only hosts. It's even a one-way translation issue, so you can easily set things up such that eventually IPv4 can go away completely.
Seriously, only geeks would get their panties in a bunch about something that is such a non-issue.
And then it really HAD to get done, and what do you know? Somebody did it after all.
Seriously, everything is pretty much in place to do the switch when it needs to happen. It's essentially just throwing the lever that is all that is left to do. It's not a big deal, we've been preparing for it for 12 years now.
I really don't see why everybody thinks this is going to be a big deal.
Most commercial grade gear is already IPv6 capable. It's going to be a few simple settings changes in most cases for the commercial outfits. For home consumers, more than likely any ISPs affected will just start doing some IPv6 to IPv4 translation for their old customers, and all new customers get IPv6 addresses.
Yeah there will be some costs, but it won't be significant with regards to the regular costs of doing business.
Why do you think the only people who are worried are geeks and the ARIN? Any businesses worried about it already did their cost analysis and said "Oh, is that all?" and have either made preparations or aren't going to worry about it for now.
My PC has been IPv6 compatible for like, six or eight years now I think. I'm not sure exactly.
I'm not sure why everyone is freaking out about this, it's a non-issue. Anybody using a home router might have to upgrade, but then again the ISP may just put in NAT routing to IPv4 so they don't have to deal with angry customers who's routers don't work.
It's not a big deal, and it can be dealt with when it's actually an issue. There is no need to worry about it now. As demand for IPv6 becomes high, routers will suddenly gain the functionality, because the routers are more than capable. More than likely there will even be firmware updates for current hardware to add it so you don't need to buy new gear.
The reason nobody is rushing to fix it is because it isn't a big problem.
It's not like the Y2K bug, where stuff could blow up if it wasn't fixed before the clock struck midnight.
You know what is going to happen the first time ARIN says no? The organization will go "Oh, ok.Can I get a nice block of IPv6 instead?" and add some protocol translation to their network to deal with anything that can't handle IPv6. Done. Problem solved.
In other words, there is nothing to freak out about at all.
Seriously people, get a grip! We've known the solution to the problem since the early 90's, at least, and implementing it is trivial.
That's not necessary, IPv6 already has the IPv4 address space blocked off and reserved for IPv4 addresses, so all you need is protocol translation for the systems that can't understand IPv6. It's not a hard problem. Yeah it will cost a little money, but really it's a drop in the bucket compared to everything else a business needs to deal with.
You band-aid it until you can justify the necessary overhaul. Eventually everyone will be on IPv6.
In other words, the reason nobody is rushing to fix it is because it's not that big of a deal. The problem is small enough that you won't really need to worry about it until it actually comes up.
As a final point, there is no pre-approval for apps. I don't know where you heard that but you were mislead.
Is Apple a good enough source for you?
It took an FCC letter of inquiry to get this little bit of information about Apple's App Store approval process. Every single app is reviewed by at least two staffers before it is allowed to go into the App Store. Google Voice is specifically mentioned, and that particular app has been "under review" by Apple for about six months now. Google resorted to a web app to allow iPhone users to access it.
Joe Hewitt, author of the iPhone's most popular app of all time - the Facebook app - quit developement for the iPhone altogether last november specifically because of Apple's App Store approval process.
Seriously, what planet have you been living on for the last couple years?
Google gained inside knowledge of the iPhone from their close ties with Apple. They broke those ties and created Droid.
I don't see how that has any bearing on this issue. And Google didn't create "Droid", Droid is a phone (with what I think is a cheap and retarded name). Google created "Android", which is a mobile OS.
Android is not like iPhone OS in very many ways. It's a competitor sure, but tit for tat is petty childish stuff. Wanting to make their own system because they think they can do better is hardly a sin. Saying they deserve punishment for it is, frankly, wrong. Apple approved, then unapproved Google's app because they wanted to make their own (I forget which app it was, exactly, I recall it being a big deal though). Rather than compete in their own marketplace, they decided to stifle the competition so their app would be the only option. That is just plain evil.
So it sounds like Google has simply said "Fine, if you don't want to work with us, why should we work with you?" What it means is now pretty much everything but the iPhone will have the best free turn-by-turn navigation system on the planet. Way to go Apple!
You really need to put a question mark at the end of that, it's hard enough to get tone from text, but incorrectly placing critical punctuation destroys the joke.
"Did you know B.G. bought evil from Satan." = wtf? Have this guy's brains been sucked out and replaced with a humorless robot's?
Whereas:
"Did you know B.G. bought evil from Satan?" = hehe, that's kinda funny.
Best:
"Fun fact: Satan now licenses evil from Bill Gates."
While these guys may have been doing a good deed, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you really have no choice but to treat it like a duck.
The only safe way to deal with even a friendly site that takes credit card numbers to trick users (in this case, to educate them instead of steal from them) is to block them. Tomorrow they may start recording the card numbers, or worse they've been collecting them for months, and now that they are shut down they start using them. It would be just another variation on a common con.
And those windmills they historically used to keep the land (polders) dry... oh man, that really must have dealt some blows to the environment...
Windmills have always bothered me as a potentially horrific source of damage to the environment, and I really wonder if the mad dash to throw them up everywhere hasn't been a mistake.
Think about it for a second, windmills literally suck energy out of the wind - wind that goes places and does things and is absolutely critical for most ecosystems on the planet to survive. Now, there may be absolutely nothing wrong with them at all, but it seems like we've just been rushing to use them without looking into the potential consequences. Isn't that the exact same mistake we made with oil?
And now the hot thing is to fuck with the tides. In the Netherlands they've already destroyed their coastal environment, so I can't see how putting in tidal generators would hurt anything, but these same groups of people are talking about tapping the Gulf Stream. That thing drives oceanic weather all around the globe and is literally the life blood of the Atlantic Ocean; weakening it too much just seems like a really really bad idea. The first few may be just fine, but there is going to be a point where you do damage with this stuff, and in our rush to be "Green" we could very well do things that are far more destructive than fossil fuels ever could be.
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It's very likely that the insane DRM restrictions (like requiring an internet connection at all times) significantly reduced demand during the pirate-free period.
In other words, nobody pirated it for a while, but not as many people bought it as would have if there were no DRM but piracy was not an option. Basically Ubisoft's DRM cost them the same number of customers as would have pirated the game, which means their DRM system actually cost them tens of millions of dollars more than just using a serial number system and leaving it be, and it's going to continue costing them significant amounts of money until they can get away with pulling the plug in a few years. That will - seriously - piss off any Ubisoft customers who actually like to have a library of games they can play.
Governments since the 1700's would disagree with you.
I think he's trying to say that games without DRM are more successful.
While it's hard to argue that piracy affects the bottom line of game sales (if piracy is an option, it WILL reduce demand for the retail version), there is little to no evidence that DRM measures reduce the amount of piracy. Due to their digital nature (the very thing that makes them easy to copy in the first place), once a game is cracked that particular version is cracked forever, and anybody with an internet connection can get it. Because no security can ever be 100% effective, DRM will always be cracked eventually.
What this means is companies are spending tens of millions of dollars that buys them just a few weeks of unpirated sales. That's it, it does not take the incentive to pirate away at all, and in the long run even the most draconian DRM only has a marginal affect on the amount of piracy that occurs. Therefor, any company that spends only a minimum amount of effort on a DRM scheme saves those tens of millions of dollars at the cost of those few weeks of unpirated sales. As Ben Franklin said: "A penny saved is a penny earned."
Assassin's Creed 2 is just one of many games that are proof positive of this fact.
Indeed, different company, but same issue here: I was going to buy Spore when it came out, because it sounded cool. When I found out about the DRM that amounts to their installing a rootkit on my system, I just downloaded the cracked version instead. I figure if they're going to treat me like a criminal from the get-go, why not earn the punishment? Turns out I had a much easier time of things than most anybody who actually paid for and installed the software. Go figure.
It's like the parents who leave the house for the afternoon, and tell the kids they have to do chores/homework and aren't allowed to watch any TV. Instead of trusting the kids at all, or even waiting till they get back to determine if they broke the rules and watched TV, the parents decide to punish the kids ahead of time because they know they'll break the rule anyway. Well, since they've already been punished for it, why wouldn't the kids watch TV when they aren't supposed to?
These fucked up DRM schemes are exactly the same - if I'm going to be punished for following the rules (heavy restrictions on use, rootkits, compatibility issues, etc), why the hell would I follow the rules? A lot of people already know most cracked versions are easier and more convenient to play compared to the retail versions, so where is the incentive to buy retail? Some people are honest enough to buy retail and then get the cracks, but you're still breaking the law so why bother buying in the first place?
I personally cannot wait till Apple takes over the market, open source crowd will shit their pants and realize how easy they had it with MS.
Apple will never take over the market until they license their OS to other hardware manufacturers.
Apple will never license their OS to other hardware manufacturers (hardware is actually their bread and butter, not software), ergo Apple will remain at the roughly 5% (it fluctuates, but always seems to come back) market share they've held for the last two decades.
If they were ever going to take over the market, they'd have done so by now. They need to crush hundreds of hardware manufacturers and thousands of software manufacturers in order to take over the market without any kind of OS licensing. Apple hardware and OSX is nice, but it's nowhere near that nice.
Keep dreaming fanboy.
Well, since paying customers weigh the same as ducks, they are all witches and deserve to be burned at the stake, obviously.
Once again Science and Justice rule the day!
You mean cracking the servers and getting the game from them, and also the server platform, and then setting up a server, and then cracking the client so that it connects to the unofficial server.
Yup. New school, meet old school. That's exactly how hacking used to be done - breaking into various remote systems.
Really, all this will do is bring back the joy and challenge of hacking on a larger scale. Less brute force and more delicate subterfuge. If there are no more offline systems to hack, the offline hackers will just join back up with the remote systems hackers and the hacking world will be whole once more. ;)
Indeed, "I'll believe it when I see it" is not a bad position to take with OnLive.
Seriously though, it's going to take a very long time before an online system can replace a local system - think about it, current bus technologies between hardware and TV/Monitor run in the multi-gigabit range.
Now that's uncompressed, Cable TV has shown that you can crank those numbers down quite a bit, but you're still talking about a lot of people completely saturating 200-300mbit connections to match the quality of video you get on your local hardware. The connection would have to be very very reliable as well - just a few hiccups in latency or speed can cause extreme annoyance for the gamer. So in reality you're looking at probably a 500mbit connection with a guarantee of no less than 300mbit or so.
It would take one hell of an infrastructure improvement to handle that.
It's also a moving target, because video advances continue (though slower than some would like), and by the time we get 500mbit connections in enough homes to make this viable (you'll always be cutting off a big chunk of the market with this setup), the target could very well need to be 1gbit to match local hardware.
The wonderful thing about his product though, is that he can keep selling it even after he has sold it.
He doesn't have 1.5 million accounts to sell once, he has 1.5 million accounts to sell over and over and over. He may only be able to get $50k for the lot, but he can sell them all a dozen times. Depending on if they catch him or not, and how effective they are at getting people to change their passwords (the only way to make the accounts worthless), this guy could make half a million dollars or more pretty easily.
"Experimental Use", they are reserved for the Internet Engineering Task Force - the IETF.
Why does it need to be IPv6 only? Do you not understand how address translation works? We've been doing it for decades and you still don't see how this is going to work? This is simply protocol translation, and IPv6 hosts on IPv4 networks already do this.
IPv6 already reserves the IPv4 address block, all you need is a little simple protocol translation between your IPv6 addresses and your IPv4 addresses and everything is just fine. In other words, an IPv6 host can understand both IPv4 and IPv6 natively, they only need translation for the IPv4-only hosts. It's even a one-way translation issue, so you can easily set things up such that eventually IPv4 can go away completely.
Seriously, only geeks would get their panties in a bunch about something that is such a non-issue.
Because you've run out of IPv4 addresses, that's the most compelling reason.
It's not a big deal though, we're ready for IPv6 now.
And then it really HAD to get done, and what do you know? Somebody did it after all.
Seriously, everything is pretty much in place to do the switch when it needs to happen. It's essentially just throwing the lever that is all that is left to do. It's not a big deal, we've been preparing for it for 12 years now.
Just chill out people, seriously.
I really don't see why everybody thinks this is going to be a big deal.
Most commercial grade gear is already IPv6 capable. It's going to be a few simple settings changes in most cases for the commercial outfits. For home consumers, more than likely any ISPs affected will just start doing some IPv6 to IPv4 translation for their old customers, and all new customers get IPv6 addresses.
Yeah there will be some costs, but it won't be significant with regards to the regular costs of doing business.
Why do you think the only people who are worried are geeks and the ARIN? Any businesses worried about it already did their cost analysis and said "Oh, is that all?" and have either made preparations or aren't going to worry about it for now.
My PC has been IPv6 compatible for like, six or eight years now I think. I'm not sure exactly.
I'm not sure why everyone is freaking out about this, it's a non-issue. Anybody using a home router might have to upgrade, but then again the ISP may just put in NAT routing to IPv4 so they don't have to deal with angry customers who's routers don't work.
It's not a big deal, and it can be dealt with when it's actually an issue. There is no need to worry about it now. As demand for IPv6 becomes high, routers will suddenly gain the functionality, because the routers are more than capable. More than likely there will even be firmware updates for current hardware to add it so you don't need to buy new gear.
99% of users have computers that handle IPv6 just fine, most consumer routers even do it just fine.
This is such a non-issue it's just hilarious watching everybody freak about it.
The reason nobody is rushing to fix it is because it isn't a big problem.
It's not like the Y2K bug, where stuff could blow up if it wasn't fixed before the clock struck midnight.
You know what is going to happen the first time ARIN says no? The organization will go "Oh, ok.Can I get a nice block of IPv6 instead?" and add some protocol translation to their network to deal with anything that can't handle IPv6. Done. Problem solved.
In other words, there is nothing to freak out about at all.
Seriously people, get a grip! We've known the solution to the problem since the early 90's, at least, and implementing it is trivial.
That's not necessary, IPv6 already has the IPv4 address space blocked off and reserved for IPv4 addresses, so all you need is protocol translation for the systems that can't understand IPv6. It's not a hard problem. Yeah it will cost a little money, but really it's a drop in the bucket compared to everything else a business needs to deal with.
You band-aid it until you can justify the necessary overhaul. Eventually everyone will be on IPv6.
In other words, the reason nobody is rushing to fix it is because it's not that big of a deal. The problem is small enough that you won't really need to worry about it until it actually comes up.
As a final point, there is no pre-approval for apps. I don't know where you heard that but you were mislead.
Is Apple a good enough source for you?
It took an FCC letter of inquiry to get this little bit of information about Apple's App Store approval process. Every single app is reviewed by at least two staffers before it is allowed to go into the App Store. Google Voice is specifically mentioned, and that particular app has been "under review" by Apple for about six months now. Google resorted to a web app to allow iPhone users to access it.
Joe Hewitt, author of the iPhone's most popular app of all time - the Facebook app - quit developement for the iPhone altogether last november specifically because of Apple's App Store approval process.
Seriously, what planet have you been living on for the last couple years?
Perhaps the one where he didn't have a clue where he was going? That's usually why people use sat-nav.
He just said "Wait a minute, that's not right at all" much, much later than he would have had he not been focusing on the sat-nav.
Of course, he'd probably be miles away from his destination and much more lost without it, but hey, whatever!
Google gained inside knowledge of the iPhone from their close ties with Apple. They broke those ties and created Droid.
I don't see how that has any bearing on this issue. And Google didn't create "Droid", Droid is a phone (with what I think is a cheap and retarded name). Google created "Android", which is a mobile OS.
Android is not like iPhone OS in very many ways. It's a competitor sure, but tit for tat is petty childish stuff. Wanting to make their own system because they think they can do better is hardly a sin. Saying they deserve punishment for it is, frankly, wrong. Apple approved, then unapproved Google's app because they wanted to make their own (I forget which app it was, exactly, I recall it being a big deal though). Rather than compete in their own marketplace, they decided to stifle the competition so their app would be the only option. That is just plain evil.
So it sounds like Google has simply said "Fine, if you don't want to work with us, why should we work with you?" What it means is now pretty much everything but the iPhone will have the best free turn-by-turn navigation system on the planet. Way to go Apple!
You really need to put a question mark at the end of that, it's hard enough to get tone from text, but incorrectly placing critical punctuation destroys the joke.
"Did you know B.G. bought evil from Satan." = wtf? Have this guy's brains been sucked out and replaced with a humorless robot's?
Whereas:
"Did you know B.G. bought evil from Satan?" = hehe, that's kinda funny.
Best:
"Fun fact: Satan now licenses evil from Bill Gates."
Though, to be honest, it's hard to call the guy who created the largest transparently operated charitable foundation in the world "evil". He may be nasty when it comes to business, but I can't really call him evil.
Yeah well, it's better than being anything else. ;)
I love when jealous people post snide remarks on American web sites, it just makes it all so clear how inferior they feel. :)
That's the point.
While these guys may have been doing a good deed, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you really have no choice but to treat it like a duck.
The only safe way to deal with even a friendly site that takes credit card numbers to trick users (in this case, to educate them instead of steal from them) is to block them. Tomorrow they may start recording the card numbers, or worse they've been collecting them for months, and now that they are shut down they start using them. It would be just another variation on a common con.
And those windmills they historically used to keep the land (polders) dry... oh man, that really must have dealt some blows to the environment...
Windmills have always bothered me as a potentially horrific source of damage to the environment, and I really wonder if the mad dash to throw them up everywhere hasn't been a mistake.
Think about it for a second, windmills literally suck energy out of the wind - wind that goes places and does things and is absolutely critical for most ecosystems on the planet to survive. Now, there may be absolutely nothing wrong with them at all, but it seems like we've just been rushing to use them without looking into the potential consequences. Isn't that the exact same mistake we made with oil?
And now the hot thing is to fuck with the tides. In the Netherlands they've already destroyed their coastal environment, so I can't see how putting in tidal generators would hurt anything, but these same groups of people are talking about tapping the Gulf Stream. That thing drives oceanic weather all around the globe and is literally the life blood of the Atlantic Ocean; weakening it too much just seems like a really really bad idea. The first few may be just fine, but there is going to be a point where you do damage with this stuff, and in our rush to be "Green" we could very well do things that are far more destructive than fossil fuels ever could be.