As with the record industry, the traditional publisher is quickly becoming an unnecessary link in the chain.
Online distribution means a lot more of the asking price goes back to the developers, as opposed to the publishers and other links in the distribution chain. That means they could sustain a fairly heavy loss in sales (due to the title being only being available online), while still earning as much in the end.
In other words, the developers do have a say. We can only hope the publishers die a sudden death along with the **AA.
There will always be those that choose to pirate software (it's not stealing unless you pick a box off a shelf in a store), and there will always be those that choose to buy.
I pirated a lot when I was younger and without disposable income. This lost the game companies little to nothing since there was no money to be had from me either way. I now have buckets of disposable income, but do not buy games with this sort of DRM. If they don't want my money, they don't get it. There are plenty of games without DRM for me to give my money for.
The fact games with no DRM whatsoever still turn a good profit (Stardock's titles are a prime example), proves beyond any doubt that tossing away DRM does not equal zero return on investment.
Chicken or egg? Not an interesting question, in my opinion. There has been piracy since the birth of the games industry. This hasn't prevented them from becoming so large they are now on par with the movie industry.
DRM is now an industry in itself. If not a single person on the planet pirated, the DRM industry would still somehow manage to sell their crippleware to game companies. It's not like they don't already produce fictional losses to rival that of the **AA.
And not playing is exactly what you'll be doing once they shut down the activation servers.
What you are doing, in effect, is accepting the fact you're renting a game, but still paying full price for it.
I for one won't accept that. Either slice the prices down to rental levels, or let me actually own the game I buy. They're doing a great job not getting my money. Not such a great job keeping me from enjoying the games. If they ever change their minds and want my money after all, they know what to do.
At least Bioshock and Mass Effect have used it so far. Unless enough people protested by not buying those, I don't see why they'd remove it from Spore.
It's a pity, but a lot of people either are ignorant about the DRM, or don't care. Obviously they never bought music from an online store that since shut down.
Yes, I know. But obviously he didn't request a ready trunk that way, he did it with a piece of metal. I don't know if what he did was in fact a workable exploit at the time, but I do know phone booths around here were prone to something similar (ie, not sound based). Anyways, my point was that while it may not have been entirely accurate, the fact was you *could* fool phone booths in much the manner that was portrayed in the move.
Lots of other small details were dead on. For those like me, with some interest in computers, a movie that actually got some things right was amazing. The movie *as a whole* is a different matter.
Even looking back now, how many other mainstream movies are there that gets even a single thing about this stuff right. I can't think of anything except the scenes in Wargames and the ssh root exploit in The Matrix (Reloaded, I think it was).
I was affected by it because of how realistic it was, obviously accepting the things they did to make it actually watchable.
We're talking acoustic modem, with realistic soundbit (from what I remember). Social engineering and research to figure out passwords, not just staring at a screen for 10 seconds before magically punching in the correct one. Back doors. Phreaking (dunno if the portrayal was accurate, but phone booths around these parts fell victim to something not too far removed from what was shown in the movie).
I agree with the article, the movie works even today. It's only a few years since I last watched it myself, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Huge waste of resources? Waste, ok, but huge? The default sidebar thingiemajigs don't exactly drain a few CPU cores and gigs of ram.
Anyhoo, yes, some people do really use them (Yahoo's in my case). While I could perfectly well live without it, I do find having the free space of all my partitions readily visible, along with CPU, harddrive and network usage and some other tidbits to be handy. When I played Eve Online for a bit I also found the Eve skill/training monitor rather nice.
At work I find a world clock widget to be very useful when it comes to keep tracking of the local time at our various offices. Before we changed our presence system I also had a self-created widget that listed the activity and phone numbers of people key to whatever I was working on at the moment.
Sure, all this information is available elsewhere. It's just not as convenient as the always present always updated desktop widgets. It's not for everybody, but it does have its uses.
This thing is getting long and it would take too much time out of a sunday morning to properly quote and format it, so I'll be a bit messy.
1. I'm not an OSS zealot. I develop closed source software for the Windows platform. I'm the sort of person RMS would burn at a stake if he could. That hardware requirements to satifsfy DRM drives up costs might not be correct, but it's not FUD since I, for one, find the argument for it in the previously linked article to be logical and probable. You don't. That's fine.
2. When you change the driver model of an operating system, if doing so from a purely technical point of view, you don't end up with what Vista did. Microsoft did not show the media companies the finger and state "we're doing this to improve reliability, flexibility while making it as easy as possible to develop for. You are of course more than welcome to develop any piece of software or hardware for our platform, like everybody else, but the technical solution will be done for technical reasons". They did it to make drivers harder to emulate in order to satisfy the media.
3. They're already asking you to buy special hardware. Have an amplifier with coax and optical inputs? Too bad, you need to buy a new one with HDMI that supports HDCP version x.x. Same goes for your early-adopter HD television. Do I think they'd ask people to buy a dongle to listen to music in Windows? No. But even if they did create such hardware they would for sure make it supported in Windows. Which means Windows would be left to doing what an operating system is meant to do, allow others to develop applications and hardware support for it.
4. As far as the kill switch, I specifically said "most operating systems". I did not state no other software had similar licensing schemes. I stated Vista has it and I do not feel comfortable with my operating system being designed to disable itself or parts of my hardware. For that matter, I do my best to stay away from software with the same inclinations as well.
That anybody believes DRM has a purpose (ie, works) is the reason this is even a topic. We can only hope software developers and media conglomerates alike wake up to the fact it never has and never will. They stop spending buckets of money on DRM, and we the consumers no longer have to fund that spending. And we get a better product to boot.
I believe the main point where we disagree is that you see no content without DRM. Thus supporting DRM is a value to the customer, because it leads to the content the customer wants. I, on the other hand, see DRM as wholly negative. It does not make a product cheaper, it does not give it better quality. In short, it adds nothing of value to me, the consumer. The only thing it adds is incompatibility and turns a "for buy" product into "for rent". I don't believe there'd be no more movies or music if DRM was completely wiped off the face of the planet. For one, there are more than enough people willing to pay to support that industry. Perhaps not in the size and form it is today, but there'd be movies and there'd be music. They're still earning money and it's hard to imagine piracy getting any worse than it is, since it's hard to imagine getting a hold of pirated content getting any easier than now.
As I mentioned before, DRM removes value without adding anything of the same. That applies to the DRM in Vista as well. And that is why I won't use it. Which is what this all started out with. If it doesn't bother you, use it all you like. The risk of being directly affected by the DRM is relatively small, but not all of us are willing to accept it. Vista does not give me anything that's worth having the DRM in there, or paying for the development of that DRM.
Vista was developed not as an OS to give customers a better experience, but as a DRM platform. This is rather evident in the final product.
Untrue.
What are you basing that on? Are you honestly stating you see enough innovation and technical progress in Vista to warrant its 6-7 years of development? Are you buying that they changed the driver model as a security measure as opposed to a vehicle for DRM implementation? Do you consider the extra cost in hardware and effort in driver creation to be advantageous to the consumer? If so, we just have to agree to disagree.
Not to mention it drives up the cost of hardware in general due to Microsoft now dictating certain aspects of hardware design to satisfy the DRM requirements.
No, the media companies are dictating what hardware needs to be capable of to be considered "safe".
Last I checked Microsoft was not a media company. They were under no obligation to remodel its operating system to cater for the media companies. In addition, the way in which Microsoft has chosen to implement is also likely to limit the possibilities of creating open source drivers. True, catering to the media companies is the root cause, but Microsoft choosing to do that instead of concentrating on creating the best possible operating system was their choice. Would the media companies stop making media if Microsoft did not re-engineer Vista to please them? Of course not, thus it would only have been a benefit to the consumers.
And what about when it breaks [msdn.com]?.
Human errors cause software problems. These things happen regardless of platform.
That is very true. However, most operating systems are not designed with "features" that exist exclusively to disable parts of the OS. Without those features there would be no way to erroneously trigger them. Making an operating system defective by design is not a good sales argument for me.
You leave out the part where you have the choice whether or not to go and stand under the bucker by avoiding DRM-encumbered content.
Please explain how not having any protected content on my machine removes the code designed to disable the OS or parts of it.
I can only reaffirm my original position. I'm staying away from Vista because it does not give me any significant new functionality, while it does remove some. Like being able to trust that the operating system will not intentionally break itself.
I fully realize I'm in the minority. Most people I know that stay away from Vista do so because they don't see anything in it worth having. So they'd rather stay with what they know. I can only hope that, as with music DRM, people will eventually come to realize there is no "good DRM". It's bad, in all shapes and sizes.
Vista was developed not as an OS to give customers a better experience, but as a DRM platform. This is rather evident in the final product.
The DRM is a large cause of the sluggishness and poor driver stability. Not to mention it drives up the cost of hardware in general due to Microsoft now dictating certain aspects of hardware design to satisfy the DRM requirements.
And what about when it breaks?.
I would say it is most relevant to me regardless of use. The OS is full of code designed specifically to deny my use of it. It doesn't matter that I "might never trigger it". What matters is that it's there. It's like having a bucket of acid over my head with the guy holding the chain swearing he won't let it drop unless I misbehave. Where is the sense in me paying a guy to do that?
Uhm, no, this is why I'm staying away from Vista for as long as humanly possible.
It has nothing to do with UAC, lack of drivers or lack of stability. It has to do with XP being to Vista what Linux is to XP when it comes to software that is designed to allow me to do what I want, as opposed to designed to prevent me from doing things.
Well, ok, there's also the fact that Vista has exactly one feature I might want at some point that I can't get in XP. That being DX10. I'm not paying the Microsoft tax just for DX10. Considering I know of no game as of today that requires it, there is no reason to "upgrade".
In fairness to Steam, the *only* game I'm aware of that has a limit on amount of installations, is Bioshock. And that wasn't Valve's idea.
It doesn't eliminate the fact that you need Steam installed and logged in, or logged in then put in offline mode I guess, to get to your games (even if you have a local backup created through Steam). But at least it's not actively designed to hamstring you other than as a byproduct of it being an online games distribution platform.
I'm more partial to Stardock's approach. Buy it in a store? No problem, install it when offline if you like. Want access to updates? You have to go online and authenticate. If you buy online though, Stardock has the same weakness. They should let us download an ISO of the unprotected version for safekeeping. Yes, you can get it from other sources and don't have to rely on a crack, but it's still a detractor.
No, it means that in order to download content your copy of the game has to prove it's legit. That, isolated, I think is perfectly fine. It offers the legit customers something the pirates do not get, automatic online content download.
The huge positive about this, of course, is that if you're offline for 10+ days you no longer lose your ability to play the game. So this is definitely a change for the better.
But for me, it's still a no go. I try very hard to avoid buying products that ties itself to a specific device. There are a couple of exceptions but Spore and ME won't be.
From what I remember the CD check for Tribes2 was removed in one of the later patches. But your point is still valid. CD checks were always pointless and only served to inconvenience the paying customer while pirates got a superior product.
I don't consider phoning home as a breach of my rights. I do consider it an inconvenience that outweighs my desire to play the game. I will not pay good money for a product that is designed to prevent me from using it.
Offline for 5-10 days? Sorry, you aren't allowed to play me anymore. Can't afford internet for a while? Sorry, you paid for me but if you can't also keep paying to stay online you're not getting to play me anymore. Installed me on 3 computers? Too bad, I don't care if you paid, I'm sure those computers do not belong to you and you can't install me anymore.
I'll keep putting my money on companies that want my business. Stardock is a good example.
Adding some verification to an MMO is nothing new 1. Spore is not an MMO. It's a single player game.
2. MMOs do not have these kinds of activation schemes. You have to log on to your account to play, it's the nature of the beast. It's not SecuROM or any variation thereof.
Returning to point #1. Spore is not an MMO. It uses the net to download content to populate your single player world. Nobody but you is playing the same game you are, you're just getting creatures from them.
People move. Internet outages happen. Not long ago Cogent did its thing (yet again) and de-peered Telia for weeks. Guess what, you're not going to be playing your Spore or Mass Effect while waiting for the net to get back in order. Once five-ten days (depending on when the previous activation was performed) is up you can forget about it. These games are defective by design and not going to get any of my money, that's for sure.
I think it's a damn shame they're going this route. It's also a shame they'll still sell enough to turn a profit.
The public did not revolt against music DRM until stores started shutting down their activation servers and/or they discovered they were not allowed to move the music to their preferred device. Games are a different beast and might not ever see that kind of backlash from the customers, unfortunately. But we can hope.
You're not alone. I was absolutely going to buy Spore. Mass Effect, while not yet a sure thing, was very much in my line of sight.
Now, forget about it. I absolutely will not fund this kind of digital restriction with my cash.
Will I play Mass Effect if it's cracked? I assume so. Spore? Perhaps not, since it won't be half the game of its online version. But I'll probably have a look anyways.
I've returned purchases before once I've discovered activation schemes and hardware tie-in. At least this time the community was kind enough to inform me before purchase. Saves me a lot of hassle.
The only problem is I doubt there are enough of us. Success of non-DRMed titles like Sins of a Solar Empire is not enough to convince them DRM is not the way to go. They have to earn significantly less on a DRMed release than they estimate they would have done without DRM.
a gaming PC is substantially more expensive than a console For the first few months of a console's life, quite true. It doesn't take long for mid-range PCs to catch up and overtake the current "next gen" console though. Still more expensive, but not by a whole lot.
you frequently have driver and other compatibility problems YMMV I guess, but I can't even remember the last time I had any issues with getting a game installed and running.
a number of PC games are launched in a rather buggy state No arguing with that.
the overall performance level of consoles has improved a lot in the latest generation Covered in point #1.
In the PCs favor is a much larger versatility in games. Also some people might be able to justify buying a bit more of a PC than they really need for their surfing/writing/whatever so that they can play some games on it as well.
Is it dying? I'd say no. At worst it will lose the huge blockbuster titles. Not a terrible loss.
with the conclusion that many consumers are signing away their legal rights
One might argue that if the law is so weakly formulated that it is rendered invalid simply by one party telling the other that it is, then the law is the problem not the EULA. Haven't read TFA so no idea if this is just another misleading summary or not, but it strikes me as strange that would be possible in most any country.
Where I live there's no way to sign away my legal rights. A EULA can demand I agree to being boiled in oil if I reverse engineer the program, but that means less than the pixels used to display the EULA in the eyes of the law. Especially since reverse engineering something to make it suit my needs is explicitly protected by law last I heard.
Come to think of it, don't most EULAs actually include a phrase stating it's not applicable where void by local legislation?
Slashdot Mirror
As with the record industry, the traditional publisher is quickly becoming an unnecessary link in the chain.
Online distribution means a lot more of the asking price goes back to the developers, as opposed to the publishers and other links in the distribution chain. That means they could sustain a fairly heavy loss in sales (due to the title being only being available online), while still earning as much in the end.
In other words, the developers do have a say. We can only hope the publishers die a sudden death along with the **AA.
There will always be those that choose to pirate software (it's not stealing unless you pick a box off a shelf in a store), and there will always be those that choose to buy.
I pirated a lot when I was younger and without disposable income. This lost the game companies little to nothing since there was no money to be had from me either way. I now have buckets of disposable income, but do not buy games with this sort of DRM. If they don't want my money, they don't get it. There are plenty of games without DRM for me to give my money for.
The fact games with no DRM whatsoever still turn a good profit (Stardock's titles are a prime example), proves beyond any doubt that tossing away DRM does not equal zero return on investment.
Chicken or egg? Not an interesting question, in my opinion. There has been piracy since the birth of the games industry. This hasn't prevented them from becoming so large they are now on par with the movie industry.
DRM is now an industry in itself. If not a single person on the planet pirated, the DRM industry would still somehow manage to sell their crippleware to game companies. It's not like they don't already produce fictional losses to rival that of the **AA.
And not playing is exactly what you'll be doing once they shut down the activation servers.
What you are doing, in effect, is accepting the fact you're renting a game, but still paying full price for it.
I for one won't accept that. Either slice the prices down to rental levels, or let me actually own the game I buy. They're doing a great job not getting my money. Not such a great job keeping me from enjoying the games. If they ever change their minds and want my money after all, they know what to do.
At least Bioshock and Mass Effect have used it so far. Unless enough people protested by not buying those, I don't see why they'd remove it from Spore.
It's a pity, but a lot of people either are ignorant about the DRM, or don't care. Obviously they never bought music from an online store that since shut down.
Yes, I know. But obviously he didn't request a ready trunk that way, he did it with a piece of metal. I don't know if what he did was in fact a workable exploit at the time, but I do know phone booths around here were prone to something similar (ie, not sound based). Anyways, my point was that while it may not have been entirely accurate, the fact was you *could* fool phone booths in much the manner that was portrayed in the move.
Lots of other small details were dead on. For those like me, with some interest in computers, a movie that actually got some things right was amazing. The movie *as a whole* is a different matter.
Even looking back now, how many other mainstream movies are there that gets even a single thing about this stuff right. I can't think of anything except the scenes in Wargames and the ssh root exploit in The Matrix (Reloaded, I think it was).
I was affected by it because of how realistic it was, obviously accepting the things they did to make it actually watchable.
We're talking acoustic modem, with realistic soundbit (from what I remember). Social engineering and research to figure out passwords, not just staring at a screen for 10 seconds before magically punching in the correct one. Back doors. Phreaking (dunno if the portrayal was accurate, but phone booths around these parts fell victim to something not too far removed from what was shown in the movie).
I agree with the article, the movie works even today. It's only a few years since I last watched it myself, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Huge waste of resources? Waste, ok, but huge? The default sidebar thingiemajigs don't exactly drain a few CPU cores and gigs of ram.
Anyhoo, yes, some people do really use them (Yahoo's in my case). While I could perfectly well live without it, I do find having the free space of all my partitions readily visible, along with CPU, harddrive and network usage and some other tidbits to be handy. When I played Eve Online for a bit I also found the Eve skill/training monitor rather nice.
At work I find a world clock widget to be very useful when it comes to keep tracking of the local time at our various offices. Before we changed our presence system I also had a self-created widget that listed the activity and phone numbers of people key to whatever I was working on at the moment.
Sure, all this information is available elsewhere. It's just not as convenient as the always present always updated desktop widgets. It's not for everybody, but it does have its uses.
This thing is getting long and it would take too much time out of a sunday morning to properly quote and format it, so I'll be a bit messy.
1. I'm not an OSS zealot. I develop closed source software for the Windows platform. I'm the sort of person RMS would burn at a stake if he could. That hardware requirements to satifsfy DRM drives up costs might not be correct, but it's not FUD since I, for one, find the argument for it in the previously linked article to be logical and probable. You don't. That's fine.
2. When you change the driver model of an operating system, if doing so from a purely technical point of view, you don't end up with what Vista did. Microsoft did not show the media companies the finger and state "we're doing this to improve reliability, flexibility while making it as easy as possible to develop for. You are of course more than welcome to develop any piece of software or hardware for our platform, like everybody else, but the technical solution will be done for technical reasons". They did it to make drivers harder to emulate in order to satisfy the media.
3. They're already asking you to buy special hardware. Have an amplifier with coax and optical inputs? Too bad, you need to buy a new one with HDMI that supports HDCP version x.x. Same goes for your early-adopter HD television. Do I think they'd ask people to buy a dongle to listen to music in Windows? No. But even if they did create such hardware they would for sure make it supported in Windows. Which means Windows would be left to doing what an operating system is meant to do, allow others to develop applications and hardware support for it.
4. As far as the kill switch, I specifically said "most operating systems". I did not state no other software had similar licensing schemes. I stated Vista has it and I do not feel comfortable with my operating system being designed to disable itself or parts of my hardware. For that matter, I do my best to stay away from software with the same inclinations as well.
That anybody believes DRM has a purpose (ie, works) is the reason this is even a topic. We can only hope software developers and media conglomerates alike wake up to the fact it never has and never will. They stop spending buckets of money on DRM, and we the consumers no longer have to fund that spending. And we get a better product to boot.
I believe the main point where we disagree is that you see no content without DRM. Thus supporting DRM is a value to the customer, because it leads to the content the customer wants. I, on the other hand, see DRM as wholly negative. It does not make a product cheaper, it does not give it better quality. In short, it adds nothing of value to me, the consumer. The only thing it adds is incompatibility and turns a "for buy" product into "for rent". I don't believe there'd be no more movies or music if DRM was completely wiped off the face of the planet. For one, there are more than enough people willing to pay to support that industry. Perhaps not in the size and form it is today, but there'd be movies and there'd be music. They're still earning money and it's hard to imagine piracy getting any worse than it is, since it's hard to imagine getting a hold of pirated content getting any easier than now.
As I mentioned before, DRM removes value without adding anything of the same. That applies to the DRM in Vista as well. And that is why I won't use it. Which is what this all started out with. If it doesn't bother you, use it all you like. The risk of being directly affected by the DRM is relatively small, but not all of us are willing to accept it. Vista does not give me anything that's worth having the DRM in there, or paying for the development of that DRM.
Vista was developed not as an OS to give customers a better experience, but as a DRM platform. This is rather evident in the final product.
Untrue.
What are you basing that on? Are you honestly stating you see enough innovation and technical progress in Vista to warrant its 6-7 years of development? Are you buying that they changed the driver model as a security measure as opposed to a vehicle for DRM implementation? Do you consider the extra cost in hardware and effort in driver creation to be advantageous to the consumer? If so, we just have to agree to disagree.Not to mention it drives up the cost of hardware in general due to Microsoft now dictating certain aspects of hardware design to satisfy the DRM requirements.
No, the media companies are dictating what hardware needs to be capable of to be considered "safe".
Last I checked Microsoft was not a media company. They were under no obligation to remodel its operating system to cater for the media companies. In addition, the way in which Microsoft has chosen to implement is also likely to limit the possibilities of creating open source drivers. True, catering to the media companies is the root cause, but Microsoft choosing to do that instead of concentrating on creating the best possible operating system was their choice. Would the media companies stop making media if Microsoft did not re-engineer Vista to please them? Of course not, thus it would only have been a benefit to the consumers.And what about when it breaks [msdn.com]?.
Human errors cause software problems. These things happen regardless of platform.
That is very true. However, most operating systems are not designed with "features" that exist exclusively to disable parts of the OS. Without those features there would be no way to erroneously trigger them. Making an operating system defective by design is not a good sales argument for me.You leave out the part where you have the choice whether or not to go and stand under the bucker by avoiding DRM-encumbered content.
Please explain how not having any protected content on my machine removes the code designed to disable the OS or parts of it.I can only reaffirm my original position. I'm staying away from Vista because it does not give me any significant new functionality, while it does remove some. Like being able to trust that the operating system will not intentionally break itself.
I fully realize I'm in the minority. Most people I know that stay away from Vista do so because they don't see anything in it worth having. So they'd rather stay with what they know. I can only hope that, as with music DRM, people will eventually come to realize there is no "good DRM". It's bad, in all shapes and sizes.
I think you missed my point.
Vista was developed not as an OS to give customers a better experience, but as a DRM platform. This is rather evident in the final product.
The DRM is a large cause of the sluggishness and poor driver stability. Not to mention it drives up the cost of hardware in general due to Microsoft now dictating certain aspects of hardware design to satisfy the DRM requirements. And what about when it breaks?.
I would say it is most relevant to me regardless of use. The OS is full of code designed specifically to deny my use of it. It doesn't matter that I "might never trigger it". What matters is that it's there. It's like having a bucket of acid over my head with the guy holding the chain swearing he won't let it drop unless I misbehave. Where is the sense in me paying a guy to do that?
Uhm, no, this is why I'm staying away from Vista for as long as humanly possible.
It has nothing to do with UAC, lack of drivers or lack of stability. It has to do with XP being to Vista what Linux is to XP when it comes to software that is designed to allow me to do what I want, as opposed to designed to prevent me from doing things.
Well, ok, there's also the fact that Vista has exactly one feature I might want at some point that I can't get in XP. That being DX10. I'm not paying the Microsoft tax just for DX10. Considering I know of no game as of today that requires it, there is no reason to "upgrade".
A real pedantic would have commented on the misuse of the term "baud".
In fairness to Steam, the *only* game I'm aware of that has a limit on amount of installations, is Bioshock. And that wasn't Valve's idea.
It doesn't eliminate the fact that you need Steam installed and logged in, or logged in then put in offline mode I guess, to get to your games (even if you have a local backup created through Steam). But at least it's not actively designed to hamstring you other than as a byproduct of it being an online games distribution platform.
I'm more partial to Stardock's approach. Buy it in a store? No problem, install it when offline if you like. Want access to updates? You have to go online and authenticate. If you buy online though, Stardock has the same weakness. They should let us download an ISO of the unprotected version for safekeeping. Yes, you can get it from other sources and don't have to rely on a crack, but it's still a detractor.
No, it means that in order to download content your copy of the game has to prove it's legit. That, isolated, I think is perfectly fine. It offers the legit customers something the pirates do not get, automatic online content download.
The huge positive about this, of course, is that if you're offline for 10+ days you no longer lose your ability to play the game. So this is definitely a change for the better.
But for me, it's still a no go. I try very hard to avoid buying products that ties itself to a specific device. There are a couple of exceptions but Spore and ME won't be.
Until they turn off the activation server. And eventually, they will.
This has bitten consumers in the ass when it comes to music, don't let it get a foothold in gaming.
Indeed. I was unlucky enough to not realize Bioshock did this sort of thing until past release date, or I would've cancelled my preorder.
Getting rid of the 10 day idiocy was pretty much a given. But the deal breaker is still in place for me. Hardware lock-in.
At least this time I know about it in advance and can indeed vote with my wallet.
If you ended up in scary places it's just because you didn't know where to look. A google for gametitle + crack can send you to strange places.
Stick to mainstream sites like gamecopyworld if you're not really in the know.
From what I remember the CD check for Tribes2 was removed in one of the later patches. But your point is still valid. CD checks were always pointless and only served to inconvenience the paying customer while pirates got a superior product.
I don't consider phoning home as a breach of my rights. I do consider it an inconvenience that outweighs my desire to play the game. I will not pay good money for a product that is designed to prevent me from using it.
Offline for 5-10 days? Sorry, you aren't allowed to play me anymore. Can't afford internet for a while? Sorry, you paid for me but if you can't also keep paying to stay online you're not getting to play me anymore. Installed me on 3 computers? Too bad, I don't care if you paid, I'm sure those computers do not belong to you and you can't install me anymore.
I'll keep putting my money on companies that want my business. Stardock is a good example.
2. MMOs do not have these kinds of activation schemes. You have to log on to your account to play, it's the nature of the beast. It's not SecuROM or any variation thereof.
Returning to point #1. Spore is not an MMO. It uses the net to download content to populate your single player world. Nobody but you is playing the same game you are, you're just getting creatures from them.
People move. Internet outages happen. Not long ago Cogent did its thing (yet again) and de-peered Telia for weeks. Guess what, you're not going to be playing your Spore or Mass Effect while waiting for the net to get back in order. Once five-ten days (depending on when the previous activation was performed) is up you can forget about it. These games are defective by design and not going to get any of my money, that's for sure.
I think it's a damn shame they're going this route. It's also a shame they'll still sell enough to turn a profit.
The public did not revolt against music DRM until stores started shutting down their activation servers and/or they discovered they were not allowed to move the music to their preferred device. Games are a different beast and might not ever see that kind of backlash from the customers, unfortunately. But we can hope.
You're not alone. I was absolutely going to buy Spore. Mass Effect, while not yet a sure thing, was very much in my line of sight.
Now, forget about it. I absolutely will not fund this kind of digital restriction with my cash.
Will I play Mass Effect if it's cracked? I assume so. Spore? Perhaps not, since it won't be half the game of its online version. But I'll probably have a look anyways.
I've returned purchases before once I've discovered activation schemes and hardware tie-in. At least this time the community was kind enough to inform me before purchase. Saves me a lot of hassle.
The only problem is I doubt there are enough of us. Success of non-DRMed titles like Sins of a Solar Empire is not enough to convince them DRM is not the way to go. They have to earn significantly less on a DRMed release than they estimate they would have done without DRM.
In the PCs favor is a much larger versatility in games. Also some people might be able to justify buying a bit more of a PC than they really need for their surfing/writing/whatever so that they can play some games on it as well.
Is it dying? I'd say no. At worst it will lose the huge blockbuster titles. Not a terrible loss.
One might argue that if the law is so weakly formulated that it is rendered invalid simply by one party telling the other that it is, then the law is the problem not the EULA. Haven't read TFA so no idea if this is just another misleading summary or not, but it strikes me as strange that would be possible in most any country.
Where I live there's no way to sign away my legal rights. A EULA can demand I agree to being boiled in oil if I reverse engineer the program, but that means less than the pixels used to display the EULA in the eyes of the law. Especially since reverse engineering something to make it suit my needs is explicitly protected by law last I heard.
Come to think of it, don't most EULAs actually include a phrase stating it's not applicable where void by local legislation?
Either he's clueless, or his English is too poor to realize "depressed" and "desperate" are not synonyms. For his sake, I'm hoping it's the latter.
No argument from me. You're saying the same thing I did, albeit using a lot more words.