All the wireless tech in the world doesn't seem to be able to stand up against saturation in the band.
I say this, of course, as someone who lives in an apartment complex of 100's of units, all in close enough proximity that Wireless-N signals can be picked up pretty much anywhere in the complex from any users apartment. I had to forego wireless entirely and hard wire everything because every band was completely saturated with dozens of wireless networks. With the smart-switching shit that automatically looks for clean channels it's even worse; I've taken to illustrating the problem to friends at parties with the wifi scanner app on my phone, we all get a good laugh watching 10 networks bounce up and down the band constantly "Channel 1 is clean, quick, switch to channel 1! Shit, 9 other networks came with me...look, channel 3 is clean, quick, switch to channel 3! Fuck, they're following me! Channel 7 is clean, quick, switch to channel 7!!" all day long.
The wireless band is becoming way over saturated. Now that we have cars with built in hotspots it's going to get even worse. We need some sort of fundamental shift in the way we do wireless networking, either that, or we need to greatly expand the band and the range between channels so that 30 devices can cohabitate the same frequency range without completely fucking up throughput.
Hey, I'm not endorsing the practice, I'm just stating the reason why it is unlikely to change. There is no incentive for them to do so whatsoever from a business standpoint. Those required filler classes make them a ton of money.
And while those courses are being offered for free online at those prestigious universities, you'll notice you get no credit for them whatsoever. You still need to plunk down a good sized chunk of change if you want a degree, which honestly is all you're paying for when you go to college. These schools likely figured that offering some of the coursework online would serve as a good way to entice people to sign up as paying students, especially for online programs which are total cash cows for these universities. An instructor can monitor twice as many online courses as traditional ones in the same amount of time (if not even more), and the resources the college has to expend on those students is minimal, making it far more profitable.
This is why I think that distance learning is going to become more prevalent in the future. An accredited university can spin off a few online degree programs, use their current faculty to administrate it, and cash in, adding more programs as time goes on and thus increasing their profits even more. Like I said, secondary education is a business like anything else, they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Why on earth would they want to make college cheaper? It's a business like anything else. Everyone knows a fair amount of the courses in most degree programs are required solely for the purposes of generating income.
You don't get to have liberty at the expense of someone else's. Children have a right to be vaccinated against disease whether their parents "believe in it" or not. Just like they have a right not to be beaten every day, or a right to proper nutrition, or a right to education.
Yeah, a tyranny when children aren't forced to die of childhood ailments that are easily preventable because their parents are either misguided or outright ignorant.
I understand the slippery slope argument, but there has to be a line somewhere; we can't just let people do whatever they fuck they want to their children in the name of liberty. What about the liberty of the child? Using that logic, children are slaves to the whims of their parents, no matter what; their property to do with as they please. Clearly that's not the case; children have rights, too, and of those rights, the right to a safe and healthy childhood is paramount. Just as the state will not allow parents to beat their children, they will not allow their ignorance to be used as a legitimate reason to deny medical care. There is plenty of case law here in the United States that specifically reinforces these issues, and I expect Australia is no different.
The real question is whether the courts view denying vaccinations to be equivalent to denying proper medical care. This is a gray area, just like many aspects of raising a child. Most of the time the state takes the hands off approach you espouse. For instance, nutrition. Judging by the sheer number of morbidly obese children I see every day, and the growing obesity epidemic here in America, you tell me: Is it appropriate to allow a parent to let their child overeat to the point where they are extremely unhealthy? A child can't make this decision for themselves, and even if they could, there's nothing a child can do if their parents are morbidly obese themselves and refuse to change their own lifestyle. I see 8-year-old's in McDonald's that must weigh 100 pounds shoveling Big Macs in their mouths right alongside their 300 pound mothers and fathers and it kills me. What about religion? Is it right that a parent is allowed to raise a child like these kids in the Westboro Baptist Church?
While it bothers me that this shit goes on, I understand that personal liberty is important, and I agree that it's best that the government mind it's business as it were unless the cases are severe (although obviously severity is up to personal interpretation; the two linked videos fit my criteria for severe), vaccination is not just for the individual, it is for the group. Every parent that decides they don't want to vaccinate their child not only risks the life of their child but everyone they potentially come into contact with. There are people with compromised immune systems or other illnesses that would, but aren't able to, take certain vaccines, and because you just "don't trust it" for whatever random reason you have, your child could potentially facilitate their death. Measles, which has 60-70 cases a year typically, has 214 cases currently, due largely to unvaccinated children that could have otherwise been vaccinated.
Lets keep in mind that it is the parent's job to raise their kid, not the state's.
Lets also keep in mind that when the parent's can't seem to raise their kids correctly, it's the states job to step in and do what's right for the child. You want to let your kids stay up late at night? Whatever. You want to let your kid go without vaccinations that could potentially not only endanger their own lives but the lives of people around them if they contract these horrible diseases? No, sorry, you don't get to make that call.
Anti-vaccination bullshit is no different than those idiots that want to pray over their children when they get sick rather than get them 21st century medical treatment. You can pray all you fucking want in the waiting room, but the kid will get proper medical attention with or without your permission, and that's the way it's just gonna be.
I bet the millions of people that died all over the world from diseases like Polio and Smallpox would gladly have taken the vaccinations even given the risks.
It's ridiculous that there needs to be another fucking mass epidemic that costs millions of lives the world over before you idiots realize that the risks of being vaccinated are far outweighed by the risks of getting sick and fucking dying. Are people really this ignorant of history or do they just choose not to acknowledge it?
If your pseudo-scientific justification for not vaccinating your child could potentially impact my own progeny due to the reduced efficacy of herd immunity, you're damn right the government should mandate it.
You know that if these people had to go somewhere without the protection of herd immunity, like a 3rd world country, they'd be immunizing their kids in a second. Bunch of selfish twats...
That is why I hate liberals, they think name calling is the key to winning debates.
Is that what you guys call them? Because it honestly just seems like you guys speak your piece and then close your ears. I stopped "debating" politics with so many conservatives in person because I always just get the same Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin/Rush Limbaugh talking points regurgitated at me, even hilariously stupid shit like "Allowing gay marriage will destroy America and the institution of marriage itself!" or "Liberals want to keep abortion legal because they're trying to kill off African-Americans, who have more abortions than whites, thus proving their true intentions!" like people are actually out there forcing abortions on women against their will...
I don't know if you're one of "those" types of conservatives or not, but my point is, both sides have some pretty negative stereotypes to live down. How about we dispense with all that useless shit and, you know, actually discuss shit rationally?
Of course, if you'd rather just apply stereotypes to people and argue with a preconceived notion all day long, be my guest. It's pretty much the theme of the 2012 race anyway...
Absolutely. And it's not necessarily limited to the PC, either; I've put thousands of hours into the game Farcry 2, which has an amazing map editor for a console. Whereas most console games, especially FPS's, die off on XBL after 6 months or so, there are still tons of people playing Farcry 2, and they're predominately playing custom designed maps. The game had a ton of value added and it cost Ubisoft nothing, just by allowing the community to create their own maps. I probably spent more time designing my own custom maps than I did playing on them, and the creativity in some of the maps was truly mind-blowing, enough that Ubisoft really should have put them on the payroll for level design.
It's amazing how the same company can have two completely different mindsets when it comes to things like this.
Are any FF games being made today that you'll play in 10 years? 20 years? What about other JRPGs or CRPGs?
How the hell do I know what I'm going to be doing 10 years from now? I don't own a time machine. For all we know the world cold be a post-apocalyptic wasteland a year from now and we could all be playing Fallout 3 in real life!!
I know there are a lot of shitty games out there today, but they're not all shitty. I don't play everything that came out back in 1991, either; there were many, many shitty NES and SNES games, too.
If I'm not playing any games from the current console generation in 10 years, it will be because they locked us out of all of them with DRM and the other ridiculous bullshit they use to try and fight an unwinnable war against piracy, not because the games themselves were necessarily all bad, and honestly, I don't believe there is any DRM or other content protection scheme that can't or won't be broken later. The only way they're going to have total, 100% control of their I.P. is if they lock the only copies they have in a vault and never release them. Otherwise, it's just a matter of time...
To libertarians this probably looks like a communist nightmare,
What doesn't look like a communist nightmare to them?
Half the people fear mongering about communism don't even know what the fuck it is outside of "HURR DURR CHINA AND NORTH KOREA." The sheer numbers of those same people that equate it with fascism alone is a good indicator that they have no fucking clue what they're talking about.
They can and do, now, especially on services like Steam, but it's nowhere near as prevalent as it seems to be on consoles, especially XBL. There's fucking DLC for anything on there...
What if the software doesn't recognize that I'm watching when I really am? What if I'm blind or too occupied with my eyes to sit there and watch an ad? Like, for instance, if I'm driving down the road and I launch Pandora on my phone, I gotta pull over to watch an ad first while it scans my eyes and makes sure that they're focused on the screen?
I mean, what next, commercials that pause themselves on your TV if you have the audacity to get up to take a piss on a commercial break? Previews that won't let you watch the DVD you just bought until you devote those 3 minutes of your life to watching the trailer of a movie you don't give a fuck about to watch the one you went out and bought?
Would you put it past Big Media and their ilk in the software world to shoehorn shit like this into every corner of every device used to consume media on the market? Based on the way things are going, and their desperation due to the continued collapse of their monopolies on entertainment, I wouldn't put anything past these people...
All of which are at least a decade old to run 20+ year old ROM dumps which didn't have DRM.
Moron.
You really are a moron, aren't you? Keep trollin', trollin' trollin' trollin'....YEAH!
I was just playing Goldeneye 007 on Project64 a few days ago. I can even use my Xbox 360 controller and edit the control scheme to bring it inline with the current standard FPS control scheme that, when it was released way back in 1997, didn't yet exist (thanks, Halo!). I also recently replayed Final Fantasy III (or Final Fantasy VI, depending on where you're from) on Zsnes, that's from 1994, as well as all the NES-era Mega Man's, which date between 1987-1992. And although I haven't played any recently, I've played quite a few MAME and Coleco/Atari roms as well.
I did this all on a Q6600 running Windows 7 I built just 4 years ago.
So, in order to play offline, I must go online to enable playing offline? And the game must be fully patched even if I am playing offline? And how does it verify if the game is fully patched? Does it need a web connection to check?
Yeah, much easier to just steal the fucking game and have this idiotic shit stripped out from get go.
Agree 100%. When the pirated experience is 100 times better than the legitimate one, who's fault is that?
Back in the day, before the PC developers got greedy and wanted to milk every possible revenue stream, they used to encourage modders to add content to their games. Many bugs were fixed with patches developed for free by fans in the gaming community. Then they realized that allowing people to create their own new content was cutting off their revenue stream to create their own new content, but even that wasn't so bad.
It was when they locked out the community and started racing to the bottom that shit got really ridiculous. Official expansions started adding less and less content for the same price, and then, once internet connectivity became a standard in consoles, DLC became the norm and the race to the bottom got even lower. Now they don't even have to release a proper full game at launch, they can release 2/3's of one and then sell you the rest for another ten or twenty bucks a few months down the road. And God Forbid it's a multiplayer game like CoD, they can milk the map pack bullshit for at least a year or two, and if you don't want to buy them, that's cool, they'll just degrade your online experience until you either stop playing (and thus get your poor ass off their servers) or you give in and buy the fucking add-ons.
But that's their biggest market for clueless consumers that don't know the game they're buying is a piece of shit! What are they supposed to do, make good games? Don't you know how expensive that is???
Same here. I've been burned way too many times buying full-priced games at launch that ended up being buggy pieces of crap or just pieces of crap entirely. There are few developers out there that I trust to release consistently good games. I always test drive before I buy.
The harder they make it for me to do so, the less inclined I am to buy their game.
Because me (and more people like me) see steam as "DRM done right", instead of locking down the game so it becomes unplayable, steam has added value.
That's all well and good; I know plenty of people that feel the same way about iTunes, but it should be up to the consumer to decide if they want to use that software. Many games are coming out nowadays requiring Steam, games that don't even have an online component at all require it.
Besides, what happens when Steam goes offline? Millions upon millions of copies of games out there are going to turn into coasters or useless bits on a hard drive, and all because some far flung authentication server went offline. Certainly doesn't leave me with too many warm and fuzzy feelings...
If companies thought they could sell as many copies of a game released only on the PC as they could console games you bet they would release more for the PC even if it requires spending a little bit more on doing QA.
I think it's more that the companies know that they can't sell ridiculous reskins for $2 a pop to the PC market.
This is why the major developers love the console market. Also why they're starting to move to the Facebook and mobile game markets. They want to cash in on the millions of people that say "Eh, $2 isn't that much." Next thing you know they've sunk $100 into new buildings for their farm.
Hell, with android's face recognition, it won't be long before you're the only one who can read the article in the magazines/newspapers you subscribe to and if you hand it to someone else the screen will go blank.
Damn right. I read an article a year or so ago (that I can't seem to find now, unfortunately) about patents for ways to use face tracking to ensure you were actually watching the ads being served on your device; if you weren't giving it your full attention, the ad paused until you did. It's not bad enough we have to sit through ads anywhere and everywhere anymore, now we'l have no choice but to watch the things...
Slashdot Mirror
All the wireless tech in the world doesn't seem to be able to stand up against saturation in the band.
I say this, of course, as someone who lives in an apartment complex of 100's of units, all in close enough proximity that Wireless-N signals can be picked up pretty much anywhere in the complex from any users apartment. I had to forego wireless entirely and hard wire everything because every band was completely saturated with dozens of wireless networks. With the smart-switching shit that automatically looks for clean channels it's even worse; I've taken to illustrating the problem to friends at parties with the wifi scanner app on my phone, we all get a good laugh watching 10 networks bounce up and down the band constantly "Channel 1 is clean, quick, switch to channel 1! Shit, 9 other networks came with me...look, channel 3 is clean, quick, switch to channel 3! Fuck, they're following me! Channel 7 is clean, quick, switch to channel 7!!" all day long.
The wireless band is becoming way over saturated. Now that we have cars with built in hotspots it's going to get even worse. We need some sort of fundamental shift in the way we do wireless networking, either that, or we need to greatly expand the band and the range between channels so that 30 devices can cohabitate the same frequency range without completely fucking up throughput.
Hey, I'm not endorsing the practice, I'm just stating the reason why it is unlikely to change. There is no incentive for them to do so whatsoever from a business standpoint. Those required filler classes make them a ton of money.
And while those courses are being offered for free online at those prestigious universities, you'll notice you get no credit for them whatsoever. You still need to plunk down a good sized chunk of change if you want a degree, which honestly is all you're paying for when you go to college. These schools likely figured that offering some of the coursework online would serve as a good way to entice people to sign up as paying students, especially for online programs which are total cash cows for these universities. An instructor can monitor twice as many online courses as traditional ones in the same amount of time (if not even more), and the resources the college has to expend on those students is minimal, making it far more profitable.
This is why I think that distance learning is going to become more prevalent in the future. An accredited university can spin off a few online degree programs, use their current faculty to administrate it, and cash in, adding more programs as time goes on and thus increasing their profits even more. Like I said, secondary education is a business like anything else, they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Why on earth would they want to make college cheaper? It's a business like anything else. Everyone knows a fair amount of the courses in most degree programs are required solely for the purposes of generating income.
You don't get to have liberty at the expense of someone else's. Children have a right to be vaccinated against disease whether their parents "believe in it" or not. Just like they have a right not to be beaten every day, or a right to proper nutrition, or a right to education.
Yeah, a tyranny when children aren't forced to die of childhood ailments that are easily preventable because their parents are either misguided or outright ignorant.
I understand the slippery slope argument, but there has to be a line somewhere; we can't just let people do whatever they fuck they want to their children in the name of liberty. What about the liberty of the child? Using that logic, children are slaves to the whims of their parents, no matter what; their property to do with as they please. Clearly that's not the case; children have rights, too, and of those rights, the right to a safe and healthy childhood is paramount. Just as the state will not allow parents to beat their children, they will not allow their ignorance to be used as a legitimate reason to deny medical care. There is plenty of case law here in the United States that specifically reinforces these issues, and I expect Australia is no different.
The real question is whether the courts view denying vaccinations to be equivalent to denying proper medical care. This is a gray area, just like many aspects of raising a child. Most of the time the state takes the hands off approach you espouse. For instance, nutrition. Judging by the sheer number of morbidly obese children I see every day, and the growing obesity epidemic here in America, you tell me: Is it appropriate to allow a parent to let their child overeat to the point where they are extremely unhealthy? A child can't make this decision for themselves, and even if they could, there's nothing a child can do if their parents are morbidly obese themselves and refuse to change their own lifestyle. I see 8-year-old's in McDonald's that must weigh 100 pounds shoveling Big Macs in their mouths right alongside their 300 pound mothers and fathers and it kills me. What about religion? Is it right that a parent is allowed to raise a child like these kids in the Westboro Baptist Church?
While it bothers me that this shit goes on, I understand that personal liberty is important, and I agree that it's best that the government mind it's business as it were unless the cases are severe (although obviously severity is up to personal interpretation; the two linked videos fit my criteria for severe), vaccination is not just for the individual, it is for the group. Every parent that decides they don't want to vaccinate their child not only risks the life of their child but everyone they potentially come into contact with. There are people with compromised immune systems or other illnesses that would, but aren't able to, take certain vaccines, and because you just "don't trust it" for whatever random reason you have, your child could potentially facilitate their death. Measles, which has 60-70 cases a year typically, has 214 cases currently, due largely to unvaccinated children that could have otherwise been vaccinated.
Lets keep in mind that it is the parent's job to raise their kid, not the state's.
Lets also keep in mind that when the parent's can't seem to raise their kids correctly, it's the states job to step in and do what's right for the child. You want to let your kids stay up late at night? Whatever. You want to let your kid go without vaccinations that could potentially not only endanger their own lives but the lives of people around them if they contract these horrible diseases? No, sorry, you don't get to make that call.
Anti-vaccination bullshit is no different than those idiots that want to pray over their children when they get sick rather than get them 21st century medical treatment. You can pray all you fucking want in the waiting room, but the kid will get proper medical attention with or without your permission, and that's the way it's just gonna be.
I bet the millions of people that died all over the world from diseases like Polio and Smallpox would gladly have taken the vaccinations even given the risks.
It's ridiculous that there needs to be another fucking mass epidemic that costs millions of lives the world over before you idiots realize that the risks of being vaccinated are far outweighed by the risks of getting sick and fucking dying. Are people really this ignorant of history or do they just choose not to acknowledge it?
If your pseudo-scientific justification for not vaccinating your child could potentially impact my own progeny due to the reduced efficacy of herd immunity, you're damn right the government should mandate it.
You know that if these people had to go somewhere without the protection of herd immunity, like a 3rd world country, they'd be immunizing their kids in a second. Bunch of selfish twats...
That is why I hate liberals, they think name calling is the key to winning debates.
Is that what you guys call them? Because it honestly just seems like you guys speak your piece and then close your ears. I stopped "debating" politics with so many conservatives in person because I always just get the same Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin/Rush Limbaugh talking points regurgitated at me, even hilariously stupid shit like "Allowing gay marriage will destroy America and the institution of marriage itself!" or "Liberals want to keep abortion legal because they're trying to kill off African-Americans, who have more abortions than whites, thus proving their true intentions!" like people are actually out there forcing abortions on women against their will...
I don't know if you're one of "those" types of conservatives or not, but my point is, both sides have some pretty negative stereotypes to live down. How about we dispense with all that useless shit and, you know, actually discuss shit rationally?
Of course, if you'd rather just apply stereotypes to people and argue with a preconceived notion all day long, be my guest. It's pretty much the theme of the 2012 race anyway...
Absolutely. And it's not necessarily limited to the PC, either; I've put thousands of hours into the game Farcry 2, which has an amazing map editor for a console. Whereas most console games, especially FPS's, die off on XBL after 6 months or so, there are still tons of people playing Farcry 2, and they're predominately playing custom designed maps. The game had a ton of value added and it cost Ubisoft nothing, just by allowing the community to create their own maps. I probably spent more time designing my own custom maps than I did playing on them, and the creativity in some of the maps was truly mind-blowing, enough that Ubisoft really should have put them on the payroll for level design.
It's amazing how the same company can have two completely different mindsets when it comes to things like this.
Are any FF games being made today that you'll play in 10 years? 20 years? What about other JRPGs or CRPGs?
How the hell do I know what I'm going to be doing 10 years from now? I don't own a time machine. For all we know the world cold be a post-apocalyptic wasteland a year from now and we could all be playing Fallout 3 in real life!!
I know there are a lot of shitty games out there today, but they're not all shitty. I don't play everything that came out back in 1991, either; there were many, many shitty NES and SNES games, too.
If I'm not playing any games from the current console generation in 10 years, it will be because they locked us out of all of them with DRM and the other ridiculous bullshit they use to try and fight an unwinnable war against piracy, not because the games themselves were necessarily all bad, and honestly, I don't believe there is any DRM or other content protection scheme that can't or won't be broken later. The only way they're going to have total, 100% control of their I.P. is if they lock the only copies they have in a vault and never release them. Otherwise, it's just a matter of time...
To libertarians this probably looks like a communist nightmare,
What doesn't look like a communist nightmare to them?
Half the people fear mongering about communism don't even know what the fuck it is outside of "HURR DURR CHINA AND NORTH KOREA." The sheer numbers of those same people that equate it with fascism alone is a good indicator that they have no fucking clue what they're talking about.
They can and do, now, especially on services like Steam, but it's nowhere near as prevalent as it seems to be on consoles, especially XBL. There's fucking DLC for anything on there...
What if the software doesn't recognize that I'm watching when I really am? What if I'm blind or too occupied with my eyes to sit there and watch an ad? Like, for instance, if I'm driving down the road and I launch Pandora on my phone, I gotta pull over to watch an ad first while it scans my eyes and makes sure that they're focused on the screen?
I mean, what next, commercials that pause themselves on your TV if you have the audacity to get up to take a piss on a commercial break? Previews that won't let you watch the DVD you just bought until you devote those 3 minutes of your life to watching the trailer of a movie you don't give a fuck about to watch the one you went out and bought?
Would you put it past Big Media and their ilk in the software world to shoehorn shit like this into every corner of every device used to consume media on the market? Based on the way things are going, and their desperation due to the continued collapse of their monopolies on entertainment, I wouldn't put anything past these people...
All of which are at least a decade old to run 20+ year old ROM dumps which didn't have DRM.
Moron.
You really are a moron, aren't you? Keep trollin', trollin' trollin' trollin'....YEAH!
I was just playing Goldeneye 007 on Project64 a few days ago. I can even use my Xbox 360 controller and edit the control scheme to bring it inline with the current standard FPS control scheme that, when it was released way back in 1997, didn't yet exist (thanks, Halo!). I also recently replayed Final Fantasy III (or Final Fantasy VI, depending on where you're from) on Zsnes, that's from 1994, as well as all the NES-era Mega Man's, which date between 1987-1992. And although I haven't played any recently, I've played quite a few MAME and Coleco/Atari roms as well.
I did this all on a Q6600 running Windows 7 I built just 4 years ago.
"Question: Must all of my computers have internet access to use Steam?"
"Answer: Steam requires an internet connection for each computer intended to play Steam games."
"Question: What is Steam's Offline Mode and how do I use it?"
The Steam client application's files must be updated to allow for the use of Offline Mode.
So, in order to play offline, I must go online to enable playing offline? And the game must be fully patched even if I am playing offline? And how does it verify if the game is fully patched? Does it need a web connection to check?
Yeah, much easier to just steal the fucking game and have this idiotic shit stripped out from get go.
Agree 100%. When the pirated experience is 100 times better than the legitimate one, who's fault is that?
Back in the day, before the PC developers got greedy and wanted to milk every possible revenue stream, they used to encourage modders to add content to their games. Many bugs were fixed with patches developed for free by fans in the gaming community. Then they realized that allowing people to create their own new content was cutting off their revenue stream to create their own new content, but even that wasn't so bad.
It was when they locked out the community and started racing to the bottom that shit got really ridiculous. Official expansions started adding less and less content for the same price, and then, once internet connectivity became a standard in consoles, DLC became the norm and the race to the bottom got even lower. Now they don't even have to release a proper full game at launch, they can release 2/3's of one and then sell you the rest for another ten or twenty bucks a few months down the road. And God Forbid it's a multiplayer game like CoD, they can milk the map pack bullshit for at least a year or two, and if you don't want to buy them, that's cool, they'll just degrade your online experience until you either stop playing (and thus get your poor ass off their servers) or you give in and buy the fucking add-ons.
Ubisoft can suck a dick.
But that's their biggest market for clueless consumers that don't know the game they're buying is a piece of shit! What are they supposed to do, make good games? Don't you know how expensive that is???
Same here. I've been burned way too many times buying full-priced games at launch that ended up being buggy pieces of crap or just pieces of crap entirely. There are few developers out there that I trust to release consistently good games. I always test drive before I buy.
The harder they make it for me to do so, the less inclined I am to buy their game.
It's ridiculous to consider anyone playing the same game in 10 or 20 years.
Yeah, that explains the lack of emulators, roms, and disc images all over the internet, am I right??
Moron.
SHOOT THE HOSTAGE!
Because me (and more people like me) see steam as "DRM done right", instead of locking down the game so it becomes unplayable, steam has added value.
That's all well and good; I know plenty of people that feel the same way about iTunes, but it should be up to the consumer to decide if they want to use that software. Many games are coming out nowadays requiring Steam, games that don't even have an online component at all require it.
Besides, what happens when Steam goes offline? Millions upon millions of copies of games out there are going to turn into coasters or useless bits on a hard drive, and all because some far flung authentication server went offline. Certainly doesn't leave me with too many warm and fuzzy feelings...
If companies thought they could sell as many copies of a game released only on the PC as they could console games you bet they would release more for the PC even if it requires spending a little bit more on doing QA.
I think it's more that the companies know that they can't sell ridiculous reskins for $2 a pop to the PC market.
This is why the major developers love the console market. Also why they're starting to move to the Facebook and mobile game markets. They want to cash in on the millions of people that say "Eh, $2 isn't that much." Next thing you know they've sunk $100 into new buildings for their farm.
Hell, with android's face recognition, it won't be long before you're the only one who can read the article in the magazines/newspapers you subscribe to and if you hand it to someone else the screen will go blank.
Damn right. I read an article a year or so ago (that I can't seem to find now, unfortunately) about patents for ways to use face tracking to ensure you were actually watching the ads being served on your device; if you weren't giving it your full attention, the ad paused until you did. It's not bad enough we have to sit through ads anywhere and everywhere anymore, now we'l have no choice but to watch the things...
After that, maybe we'll get better clarity on why companies seem to be walking away from the PC more and more these days.
The fact that they can milk the fuck out of console players with DLC probably doesn't hurt, either.
This is why developers love the shit out of consoles.