Actually now is really good time for gaming industry. There has been a lot more innovation and new kind of games and polishing than ever before. Portal, Internet co-op games like Left4Dead and Borderlands, the rise of roleplaying games again like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Fallout 3.. The upcoming Civilization V game will also change to hexes the first time in the series. Multiplayer shooter games like MW2 and Bad Company 2 have roleplaying, levels and class building elements in them. The popularity of Internet buying and Steam and other platforms, along with PS3 store and 360 XNA created really nice opportunities for indie game developers to sell their games and get audience. PS3's Heavy Rain is a lot different than other games too. I could go on, but you get the point.
I really can't see where you got this dark age of gaming industry from. I'm surprised at how good the current situation is.
btw, Activision was publisher of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, it was developed by Neversoft.
Do you really want to see store shelves full of titles such as: Doom The Next Generation Doom The Previous Generation Doom The Pizza Baker Doom The Sims Edition Doom: Modern Warfare Operation Flashpoint: Stripper Edition Alpha Centauri Party Games for Wii Need for Speed Biking Edition Mechwarrior Petz 7 Duke Nukem Rides With Ponies
and everything else in between that everyone and their mother would create with Visual Basic and try to cash in with the previously good names?
You don't lose the rights to an another party, but you will be unable to protect them in the future again because you didn't do so earlier either. If a company gets knowledge that their trademarks are used without their permission, they have to defend them.
To give an example for ruining the image and name - Do you really want 100 crappy games with Civilization or Baldur's Gate name slapped on it which have nothing to do with the original games or authors? Everyone would just try to cash in with the past good name and flood the market with shit games and decrease the general image of whole series, original games too.
That's kind of a good idea, but 10 years is too short time, especially now that we've starting to see a lot more re-releases and ports to current generation PC's and consoles of old games. Copyrights last a lot longer too. Losing control over IP is even more serious than over copyright of a single product. Losing the whole IP to the public domain means some idiots can seriously ruin the image of it.
Also, the idea of limiting control over IP goes directly against the reason why we actually have copyright laws. Copyright is meant to protect and enable the income of author and everyone involved for a period of time to fuel the innovation and creating something. If you release IP to public domain it does exactly the different - decreases innovation that goes making new IP. Isn't it the usual rant on slashdot anyway that game companies should come up more with new stuff?
It's good to know who are friends of gamers. Activision clearly isn't among them.
With Ubisoft pushing its always-online DRM and Activision doing this and releasing just something along the lines of Guitar Hero 28 and new WoW expansions, it's really surprising EA has become the good and innovative guy. They've dropped DRM in many games too and are developing innovative and new IP games like Mirrors Edge, Mass Effect, Dragon Age..
Linux has so small market share on desktop that MS probably don't want to spend the money just for that and doesn't see it as threat in the Silverlight vs Flash game. Remember that there is a Mac OSX plug-in out by Microsoft.
There's official Flash plug-in for Linux because Adobe wants to keep Flash as proprietary and closed as possible. In this case Silverlight is actually better, as the specs are open and everyone is free to develop their plug-in/player etc.
But that's only the Linux developers fault as they're lagging behind on the specs. The specs are out there to code it, you can't really blame MS for it.
It's not cherry-picking as the story is about Europe. As far as I know, the same applies to Norway, Finland and Denmark too, probably elsewhere in Europe too.
I can already see all the comments how MS would be favoring IE with this (summary conveniently left that one out), but as it is they're promoting the other browsers almost double more.
That means you have to try and do every possible thing in the game, in every possible area, with every possible combination to be sure to get everything.
And what about when the data sent back from the server is watermarked and leads back to the account used? That's really fast way to bust the crackers.
They better have freakishly good internet service for their servers, because if the game truly relies on the server for significant parts of the gameplay, then outages or slow-downs will piss off their customers very quickly.
You mean like MMO's? They run pretty good, and they do a lot more with the world and players than a system like this for a single player game would need to do.
There really isn't any ground for class action suit, as long as they describe in the game box / online sales page that it requires internet connection to work.
Yeah don't get me wrong, I don't support abusive DRM systems like that. I'm just replying to the assumption that there couldn't ever be an uncrackable DRM system with games. System like I described would work and remain uncrackable.
Did you read at all what I said? Sure, local server is probably trivial to make given enough time. But if the game streams content, code or other data from the server when it needs to in the game, or implements some functions only server-side (is the player at end of the level, spawn enemies when player opens a door and so on), all of that would have to be fetched and reimplemented. With large, open games theres a really good change you need to play hundreds of thousands of games to get all the content from the server, and then you also have to implement the server-side functions.
That means someone has to reverse engineer the protocol and code everything the real server has, like load/save system.
Personally I think they will take this one step further too and serve some data from the server too when an user needs it in the game. If you spread such around in the game wisely, it's not possible to ever retrieve and rebuild everything needed from the server.
This whole story is about how and why the DRM will work. It's kind of funny someone always comes along with "it will be cracked" without understanding any of the fundamentals behind how the game copy protections work.
I'm just waiting them to take this one little step further - stream parts of the game code, textures or other data from server (something not used often). Spread it randomly around the game and it becomes almost impossible to build a working crack.
If the person knows about an across-the-street webcam he can call the police because that's illegal.
Recording the view from my apartment window is not illegal, regardless of whether people get recorded sometimes.
It is in Sweden, as is taking photographs of people and publishing them. As a teen years ago I actually got in to trouble because of this - there was an accident and I took pictures of the people involved with my camera phone. Police officer came to me and said it's an illegal and asked me to delete the pictures and leave my info in case those pictures of the persons ever would had shown up on the Internet or elsewhere. I didn't know about this then, but I talked with my parents and even at school and everyone explained that specifically taking pictures of other persons in public also violates privacy laws. Seeing all the widely spread pictures on the Internet, I now think this is an extremely good privacy law to have.
What? People have known for decades that their movements would be permanently recorded by any nearby ATMs, convenience stores, or any other establishment with a video camera overlooking a public area.
Yes, that's why any such area with video cameras are by law required to have a warning sign about video surveillance, in places where a person can see it before entering the area. Any store, kiosk, postal office or any other place has such warning outside their doors if they do have a video surveillance. The same goes for public places like streets. It is required by law.
As I said earlier, we Europeans are more concerned about our personal privacy, for historical reasons too.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually now is really good time for gaming industry. There has been a lot more innovation and new kind of games and polishing than ever before. Portal, Internet co-op games like Left4Dead and Borderlands, the rise of roleplaying games again like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Fallout 3.. The upcoming Civilization V game will also change to hexes the first time in the series. Multiplayer shooter games like MW2 and Bad Company 2 have roleplaying, levels and class building elements in them. The popularity of Internet buying and Steam and other platforms, along with PS3 store and 360 XNA created really nice opportunities for indie game developers to sell their games and get audience. PS3's Heavy Rain is a lot different than other games too. I could go on, but you get the point.
I really can't see where you got this dark age of gaming industry from. I'm surprised at how good the current situation is.
btw, Activision was publisher of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, it was developed by Neversoft.
Do you really want to see store shelves full of titles such as:
Doom The Next Generation
Doom The Previous Generation
Doom The Pizza Baker
Doom The Sims Edition
Doom: Modern Warfare
Operation Flashpoint: Stripper Edition
Alpha Centauri Party Games for Wii
Need for Speed Biking Edition
Mechwarrior Petz 7
Duke Nukem Rides With Ponies
and everything else in between that everyone and their mother would create with Visual Basic and try to cash in with the previously good names?
You don't lose the rights to an another party, but you will be unable to protect them in the future again because you didn't do so earlier either. If a company gets knowledge that their trademarks are used without their permission, they have to defend them.
Wikipedia explains it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_rights
But note that it's not only about trademarks here, it's also about Intellectual Property.
To give an example for ruining the image and name - Do you really want 100 crappy games with Civilization or Baldur's Gate name slapped on it which have nothing to do with the original games or authors? Everyone would just try to cash in with the past good name and flood the market with shit games and decrease the general image of whole series, original games too.
That's kind of a good idea, but 10 years is too short time, especially now that we've starting to see a lot more re-releases and ports to current generation PC's and consoles of old games. Copyrights last a lot longer too. Losing control over IP is even more serious than over copyright of a single product. Losing the whole IP to the public domain means some idiots can seriously ruin the image of it.
Also, the idea of limiting control over IP goes directly against the reason why we actually have copyright laws. Copyright is meant to protect and enable the income of author and everyone involved for a period of time to fuel the innovation and creating something. If you release IP to public domain it does exactly the different - decreases innovation that goes making new IP. Isn't it the usual rant on slashdot anyway that game companies should come up more with new stuff?
It's good to know who are friends of gamers. Activision clearly isn't among them.
With Ubisoft pushing its always-online DRM and Activision doing this and releasing just something along the lines of Guitar Hero 28 and new WoW expansions, it's really surprising EA has become the good and innovative guy. They've dropped DRM in many games too and are developing innovative and new IP games like Mirrors Edge, Mass Effect, Dragon Age..
Linux has so small market share on desktop that MS probably don't want to spend the money just for that and doesn't see it as threat in the Silverlight vs Flash game. Remember that there is a Mac OSX plug-in out by Microsoft.
There's official Flash plug-in for Linux because Adobe wants to keep Flash as proprietary and closed as possible. In this case Silverlight is actually better, as the specs are open and everyone is free to develop their plug-in/player etc.
Good luck trying to use these features on your iPad. So much for multiplatform.
But that's only the Linux developers fault as they're lagging behind on the specs. The specs are out there to code it, you can't really blame MS for it.
It's not cherry-picking as the story is about Europe. As far as I know, the same applies to Norway, Finland and Denmark too, probably elsewhere in Europe too.
Is picking a worse random number generation function (the default one in C and JS) really fucking up?
And btw, it looks like their choice promotes all other browsers than IE almost 2x more!
Position I.E. Firefox Opera Chrome Safari
1 1304 2099 2132 2595 1870
2 1325 2161 2036 2565 1913
3 1105 2244 1374 3679 1598
4 1232 2248 1916 590 4014
5 5034 1248 2542 571 605
I can already see all the comments how MS would be favoring IE with this (summary conveniently left that one out), but as it is they're promoting the other browsers almost double more.
Lots and lots of bubble wrap?
Which have been all popped by the scientists.
That means you have to try and do every possible thing in the game, in every possible area, with every possible combination to be sure to get everything.
And what about when the data sent back from the server is watermarked and leads back to the account used? That's really fast way to bust the crackers.
They better have freakishly good internet service for their servers, because if the game truly relies on the server for significant parts of the gameplay, then outages or slow-downs will piss off their customers very quickly.
You mean like MMO's? They run pretty good, and they do a lot more with the world and players than a system like this for a single player game would need to do.
There really isn't any ground for class action suit, as long as they describe in the game box / online sales page that it requires internet connection to work.
Yeah don't get me wrong, I don't support abusive DRM systems like that. I'm just replying to the assumption that there couldn't ever be an uncrackable DRM system with games. System like I described would work and remain uncrackable.
You can always make a fake local server.
Did you read at all what I said? Sure, local server is probably trivial to make given enough time. But if the game streams content, code or other data from the server when it needs to in the game, or implements some functions only server-side (is the player at end of the level, spawn enemies when player opens a door and so on), all of that would have to be fetched and reimplemented. With large, open games theres a really good change you need to play hundreds of thousands of games to get all the content from the server, and then you also have to implement the server-side functions.
That means someone has to reverse engineer the protocol and code everything the real server has, like load/save system.
Personally I think they will take this one step further too and serve some data from the server too when an user needs it in the game. If you spread such around in the game wisely, it's not possible to ever retrieve and rebuild everything needed from the server.
And again, that's what counts. You're just saying again exactly the same that the article and summary did. What is your point?
If it goes down just for a minute or two, you won't have problems. Sure you might have to wait a minute, but other than that there's no problems.
In contrast, my own DSL goes down maybe one time every 2-3 years.
Nice FUD there. Have you completely ignored any of the stories detailing the system?
This whole story is about how and why the DRM will work. It's kind of funny someone always comes along with "it will be cracked" without understanding any of the fundamentals behind how the game copy protections work.
I'm just waiting them to take this one little step further - stream parts of the game code, textures or other data from server (something not used often). Spread it randomly around the game and it becomes almost impossible to build a working crack.
How things are in the US have nothing to do with the story. This is about Europe.
If the person knows about an across-the-street webcam he can call the police because that's illegal.
Recording the view from my apartment window is not illegal, regardless of whether people get recorded sometimes.
It is in Sweden, as is taking photographs of people and publishing them. As a teen years ago I actually got in to trouble because of this - there was an accident and I took pictures of the people involved with my camera phone. Police officer came to me and said it's an illegal and asked me to delete the pictures and leave my info in case those pictures of the persons ever would had shown up on the Internet or elsewhere. I didn't know about this then, but I talked with my parents and even at school and everyone explained that specifically taking pictures of other persons in public also violates privacy laws. Seeing all the widely spread pictures on the Internet, I now think this is an extremely good privacy law to have.
What? People have known for decades that their movements would be permanently recorded by any nearby ATMs, convenience stores, or any other establishment with a video camera overlooking a public area.
Yes, that's why any such area with video cameras are by law required to have a warning sign about video surveillance, in places where a person can see it before entering the area. Any store, kiosk, postal office or any other place has such warning outside their doors if they do have a video surveillance. The same goes for public places like streets. It is required by law.
As I said earlier, we Europeans are more concerned about our personal privacy, for historical reasons too.
Proofreading fail: Many people on this story seem to point out that you have no privacy outside your house (in US)