Security. This is the biggy. Given that the point of the is copy protection you have a real problem. If everything is at your site, ok you can take measures to do a real good job securing it. However if it is at various ISPs all over the world, that's a problem. All it takes is someone who works at one of those ISPs who also works with a pirate group to get the actual program off your server, since they have physical access that you can't monitor, and then the program is out in the open. Trying to secure against that with hundreds of sites around the world would be impossible.
Why are you certain they would partner with an ISP instead of using a fat pipe at a colo? Even if they partnered with an ISP they still have plenty of options when it comes to protecting the server code from local access. They also have plenty of options when it comes to making server code difficult to run locally. It's a much easier proposition than protecting a local engine from millions of prying eyes.
There was a period where you only bought a Mac if you were a die-hard fan willing to go any length for the company or a creative professional. Before OS X took off creative professionals were the only business group that Apple could depend on. Without MS Office the Mac was a no-sale for just about every type of professional. Even today there is still a lingering perception among graphic artists that if you are going to run Adobe software you are better off getting a Mac.
Apple is snubbing one of their oldest partners which isn't wise given how much Adobe software is purchased by OS X users. It wouldn't surprise me at all if their creative suite for OS X jumps in price in the next few years or gets feature delayed.
Just like the AJAX revolution but hopefully this one will go farther than a few web apps and a thousand headlines.
The Javascript revolutionaries will be in big trouble if Adobe actually fixes Flash which will probably happen long before HTML 5 is even close to comparable as an api.
for a business that has an 80% piracy rate they could care less about any mindshare from pirates who take away potential sales. Companies would rather have less piracy and more sales with which they could spend on advertising. Most software companies are small and medium businesses that need every sale they can get.
he never tried to lobby anyone. His motivation stems from his days at the MIT lab when he got angry over his buddies leaving lab to go pursue careers at proprietary companies.
He then created a psudeo-religion by declaring 'freedoms' instead of simply writing an open source that required derivative works to also be open.
It may seem deceptive to wrap your desires in 'freedoms' but your post is proof that it works....really well.
Let's ask a hundred thieves if they only steal because they have to.
Oh wow almost 100% respond yes.
Let's just ignore the cases where they are stealing luxury entertainment for their own personal enjoyment.
Companies can handle their own marketing. They'd rather not lose potential sales so they can have their game mentioned in a warez forum. When pc games are pirated at over 80% it's a joke to suggest that it is anything but negative.
and you think that will then get them to make DRM free games????? All you've done is started an asshole war.
The only way to show your non-support is to support competing products. Otherwise you're telling them that their game is of value to you but you don't want to pay for it.
Not that I have any faith in pc gamers to protest this properly. They're one of the worst groups on the internet when it comes to having a sense of entitlement. I say this as someone who has bought about a dozen video cards in the last 10 years.
Do you know their economic situations of all pirates?
They obviously have an above-average computer and are interested in the game, so why do you give them the benefit of the doubt?
I've met plenty of pc gamers that pirated single player games but always had money for their warcraft subscription.
Yes Ubisoft is pissing people off with this but it's probably a last attempt at supporting pc gaming. Pirates are the real problem, it isn't as if DRM free games are pirated any less.
you're basing your opinion on previous DRM where the same type of protection is repeated, i.e. cd-rom check.
With server DRM you have far more options because you can make content dependent upon the server. It's much more than a simple check. A well designed system would keep game logic on the server so pirating the client is pointless. You'd need someone on the inside to leak the server code and even then you would still have a lot of work to do. Ubisoft's implementation was rather weak given the possibilities.
in the past few years which is impressive for how young the project is.
I suspect the main reason is similar, it's simply more interesting than Linux.
Linux is a big messy monokernel and the people behind it can never agree on what it should be optimized for. It's a jack of all trades kernel that doesn't impress in any single area.
Linux was oversold on the desktop and who knows how long it will take for it to even get 5% share.
Compare this to 10 years ago when everyone thought Linux would be a major contender on the desktop by now. There's no more revolutionary spirit.
Linux is well established on phones and servers and doesn't need any help there.
now it's less interesting and more corporate.
Sure there are a lot of contributers but they are mostly working for companies like Red Hat and IBM. Linux used to be mostly a project of young volunteers so of course the average age of contributers has gone up.
Greg KH is also the one who wrote that report you linked to and he is the same person that is placing hope in retiring baby boomers.
They aren't making this stuff up, torrents are publicly tracked and it is clear that the pc has a serious piracy problem. Or maybe you don't think that a 90% piracy rate is a problem.
Oh and you're wrong about the PS3 having pirated games, it has DRM that still hasn't been cracked.
If games like Alan Wake are only on consoles then I could care less about pc gaming. I'll go where the games are and at the moment the pc doesn't cover enough genres.
rates. It's appeals to a demographic that is far less likely to pirate.
The panel was talking about the 'hardcore' section of pc gaming. Casual games and MMOs are doing great and no one disputes that.
All the people that pirated crysis wouldn't have paid for it? Even though it required a burley pc to run?
So Crytek has bad developers since they complained about piracy?
Actually most of the leading pc developers have complained about piracy in the last 5 years. They must all be bad. There can't be a problem. Everything is fine, please go back to making games and just ignore the fact that most pc gamers skip out on the bill.
Sell me an awesome game dirt cheap or I'll just pirate it. I don't care about the fact that in the gaming industry winners cover losers. I don't care that $50 is cheap when you consider inflation over the last 10 years. I know how to pirate so you better offer me the perfect game at the perfect price and even then I probably won't pay for it since I'm saving my money for a new video card.
Congrats on having the mentality of most pc gamers. This is why publishers are moving to consoles, online-only games or casual games like The Sims that are sold to 12 year old girls who don't have the same entitlement mentality as your 18-35 year old male that knows how to torrent.
Single player 'hardcore' games do not sell as well as they used.
I also don't buy that it is the interface that determines the challenge. There are plenty of challenging and tactical games on consoles. PC gaming is not as special as you would like to think.
so far it has kept the PS3 from becoming like the PS2 which had a black market when it came to games. Perhaps you think the people buying those black market games weren't a real loss?
People pirate because they don't want to pay. Within every group of pirates is a subset of people that would have payed if they had no choice. When you have a 10:1 piracy rate it only takes a 10% conversion of pirates to legit customers to double sales.
Pirates are motivated by a desire to pay without playing. You can't expect a publisher to just look the other way as 90% of the people that play the game don't pay for it.
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Security. This is the biggy. Given that the point of the is copy protection you have a real problem. If everything is at your site, ok you can take measures to do a real good job securing it. However if it is at various ISPs all over the world, that's a problem. All it takes is someone who works at one of those ISPs who also works with a pirate group to get the actual program off your server, since they have physical access that you can't monitor, and then the program is out in the open. Trying to secure against that with hundreds of sites around the world would be impossible.
Why are you certain they would partner with an ISP instead of using a fat pipe at a colo? Even if they partnered with an ISP they still have plenty of options when it comes to protecting the server code from local access. They also have plenty of options when it comes to making server code difficult to run locally. It's a much easier proposition than protecting a local engine from millions of prying eyes.
There was a period where you only bought a Mac if you were a die-hard fan willing to go any length for the company or a creative professional. Before OS X took off creative professionals were the only business group that Apple could depend on. Without MS Office the Mac was a no-sale for just about every type of professional. Even today there is still a lingering perception among graphic artists that if you are going to run Adobe software you are better off getting a Mac.
Apple is snubbing one of their oldest partners which isn't wise given how much Adobe software is purchased by OS X users. It wouldn't surprise me at all if their creative suite for OS X jumps in price in the next few years or gets feature delayed.
Just like the AJAX revolution but hopefully this one will go farther than a few web apps and a thousand headlines.
The Javascript revolutionaries will be in big trouble if Adobe actually fixes Flash which will probably happen long before HTML 5 is even close to comparable as an api.
for a business that has an 80% piracy rate they could care less about any mindshare from pirates who take away potential sales. Companies would rather have less piracy and more sales with which they could spend on advertising. Most software companies are small and medium businesses that need every sale they can get.
he never tried to lobby anyone. His motivation stems from his days at the MIT lab when he got angry over his buddies leaving lab to go pursue careers at proprietary companies.
He then created a psudeo-religion by declaring 'freedoms' instead of simply writing an open source that required derivative works to also be open.
It may seem deceptive to wrap your desires in 'freedoms' but your post is proof that it works....really well.
Let's ask a hundred thieves if they only steal because they have to.
Oh wow almost 100% respond yes.
Let's just ignore the cases where they are stealing luxury entertainment for their own personal enjoyment.
Companies can handle their own marketing. They'd rather not lose potential sales so they can have their game mentioned in a warez forum. When pc games are pirated at over 80% it's a joke to suggest that it is anything but negative.
there are options other than piracy here.
and you think that will then get them to make DRM free games????? All you've done is started an asshole war.
The only way to show your non-support is to support competing products. Otherwise you're telling them that their game is of value to you but you don't want to pay for it.
Not that I have any faith in pc gamers to protest this properly. They're one of the worst groups on the internet when it comes to having a sense of entitlement. I say this as someone who has bought about a dozen video cards in the last 10 years.
Do you know their economic situations of all pirates?
They obviously have an above-average computer and are interested in the game, so why do you give them the benefit of the doubt?
I've met plenty of pc gamers that pirated single player games but always had money for their warcraft subscription.
Yes Ubisoft is pissing people off with this but it's probably a last attempt at supporting pc gaming. Pirates are the real problem, it isn't as if DRM free games are pirated any less.
you're basing your opinion on previous DRM where the same type of protection is repeated, i.e. cd-rom check. With server DRM you have far more options because you can make content dependent upon the server. It's much more than a simple check. A well designed system would keep game logic on the server so pirating the client is pointless. You'd need someone on the inside to leak the server code and even then you would still have a lot of work to do. Ubisoft's implementation was rather weak given the possibilities.
and same with many MMOs. Like it or not tying DRM to a server or hardware can work. Not that I expect Ubisoft to make it work properly any time soon.
in the past few years which is impressive for how young the project is. I suspect the main reason is similar, it's simply more interesting than Linux. Linux is a big messy monokernel and the people behind it can never agree on what it should be optimized for. It's a jack of all trades kernel that doesn't impress in any single area.
Linux was oversold on the desktop and who knows how long it will take for it to even get 5% share. Compare this to 10 years ago when everyone thought Linux would be a major contender on the desktop by now. There's no more revolutionary spirit. Linux is well established on phones and servers and doesn't need any help there.
now it's less interesting and more corporate. Sure there are a lot of contributers but they are mostly working for companies like Red Hat and IBM. Linux used to be mostly a project of young volunteers so of course the average age of contributers has gone up. Greg KH is also the one who wrote that report you linked to and he is the same person that is placing hope in retiring baby boomers.
hence Greg KH's hope that retired boomers will help them out.
they would have turned openSolaris into an M$ killer but they need to level up a few more characters first.
compared to consoles.
They aren't making this stuff up, torrents are publicly tracked and it is clear that the pc has a serious piracy problem. Or maybe you don't think that a 90% piracy rate is a problem.
Oh and you're wrong about the PS3 having pirated games, it has DRM that still hasn't been cracked.
If games like Alan Wake are only on consoles then I could care less about pc gaming. I'll go where the games are and at the moment the pc doesn't cover enough genres.
rates. It's appeals to a demographic that is far less likely to pirate.
The panel was talking about the 'hardcore' section of pc gaming. Casual games and MMOs are doing great and no one disputes that.
consoles are just plain better for the living room.
All the people that pirated crysis wouldn't have paid for it? Even though it required a burley pc to run?
So Crytek has bad developers since they complained about piracy?
Actually most of the leading pc developers have complained about piracy in the last 5 years. They must all be bad. There can't be a problem. Everything is fine, please go back to making games and just ignore the fact that most pc gamers skip out on the bill.
and your post proves it.
Sell me an awesome game dirt cheap or I'll just pirate it. I don't care about the fact that in the gaming industry winners cover losers. I don't care that $50 is cheap when you consider inflation over the last 10 years. I know how to pirate so you better offer me the perfect game at the perfect price and even then I probably won't pay for it since I'm saving my money for a new video card.
Congrats on having the mentality of most pc gamers. This is why publishers are moving to consoles, online-only games or casual games like The Sims that are sold to 12 year old girls who don't have the same entitlement mentality as your 18-35 year old male that knows how to torrent.
Single player 'hardcore' games do not sell as well as they used.
I also don't buy that it is the interface that determines the challenge. There are plenty of challenging and tactical games on consoles. PC gaming is not as special as you would like to think.
so far it has kept the PS3 from becoming like the PS2 which had a black market when it came to games. Perhaps you think the people buying those black market games weren't a real loss?
People pirate because they don't want to pay. Within every group of pirates is a subset of people that would have payed if they had no choice. When you have a 10:1 piracy rate it only takes a 10% conversion of pirates to legit customers to double sales.
World of Goo was pirated just as much as everything else even though it was DRM free and only $20
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars
Pirates are motivated by a desire to pay without playing. You can't expect a publisher to just look the other way as 90% of the people that play the game don't pay for it.