Excellent post. DRM is still DRM and I have the same problems as you. The true test of how good Valve's system will be is when things start to go wrong.
So i have a trust in "the community". People want to play multiplayer and there's nothing that the publishers of the games can do to stop them.
Heh did you read that bnetd article? It shows precisely what publishers do to stop them - send in the lawyers.
When they have a vested interest in control - like Blizzard does with these games - they will stomp them. And in this case we're talking really old games! Fortunately Blizzard still support them - they're actually the opposite of a shitty game developer as they see the real, tangible advantages of long-term support for their games in terms of the brand recognition it creates.
So this was more about supporting the matchmaking and whatnot.
Right - but with an open dedicated server based model,/they can't take this away/, because people can just create their own matchmaking systems. Often ones that will be superior to the original because they can be done on a per-community basis.
Its not that it's proving successful, its more of a lack of options
Right, but the reason there's a lack of options (for, say, dedicated server-based multiplayer PC games) is because we're seeing less of a focus on creating dedicated server based games. There is more focus on/controlling/ the multiplayer infrastructure now - and one reason is probably so they can simply turn it off when they want you to upgrade to the latest version.
Hardware fails and that will render all these old tech and games obsolete no matter how much you don't want to lose these games. Systems like NES, SNES, Genesis, they are mostly gone aside from a rare special-built system but then the games are going away to, as time really does kill all things material.
Those are all examples of closed systems though. Nintendo don't want people thinking SNES or NES - they want them thinking Wii and Wii games and DS!
Now we have game roms and emulators, programs like DosBox. These show that the games will remain playable, granted not in their original form, but they are still there and still playable
The problem with this analogy though is that multiplayer games have the game server component - and reverse engineering that doesn't seem like something people do very often.
It's the server component that I'm talking about in my above post. If that is released as a free download, game developers can simply forget about supporting their games online and let "the community" do it for them for free.
They don't need to provide legacy support for old games though - if their games are created in such a way that users can run their own game servers, someone else can do it as long as there's someone that still wants to play the game.
As others have pointed out in this discussion, PC games from as far back as Quake (1996) are still perfectly playable because it uses an 'open', dedicated server based framework for its multiplayer services.
Sadly, the PC world is catching up to the console world in this respect - because developers are less interested in having you play their game for more than ten years. They don't see the advantages in having a game that lives that long and instead want you to continue buying the next version every year or so. Unfortunately for people that care about having good games that will last for a really long time (like me), this model is proving super-successful.
Don't worry - the Windows version is having a lot of problems too - search for 'black screen' on their forums. I'm one of the (seemingly many) users afflicted with this - the game simply refuses to start maybe 80% of the time, dumping me at a black screen. I read some comments on the forum saying to just try and reload it over and over and thought "yeh, right, SURE", but I tried it and lo and behold, it works - I just have to keep starting the game, and if it doesn't load I pskill sc2.exe, then try again until it works.
I had the same experience as Engadget at first - tried it out and there was noticable lag. I asked the Sony guy about it and he said that it loses calibration sometimes when its in really crowded environments (this was at the launch at GDC last week). He recalibrated it (took about 1 minute absolute tops) and then I tried again and the lag was completely gone.
... I am regularly amazed by the sheer number of pharma ads on television. Depending on the time of day I can see anywhere between 50 to 100% of the ads on TV being about pharma products.
I'd worry about getting those ones down before I worried about the Internet ones.
heh, but in the real world, one of the bosses will suddenly find he can't watch youtube in his corner office, and complain about it to IT, who will then probably have a better opportunity to get rid of IE6 than they've had before
Do you have any implementation details of how you did this? This sounds like a really awesome and handy trick, love to know how it's done if you don't mind sharing!
Telcos are kicking and screaming and trying as hard as they can not to be dragged into the New Age.
I've often wondered when the Carriers would hijack Android and do what they've done to other phones in the past and implement a "on our network, you use our Appstore."
This has already happened here in Australia - you can't use the Android AppStore if you're on Optus (one of the major mobile phone companies here).
Apple has done more to blow away this monopoly than anyone else - it's made people realise that there's no need to be shackled to their telco and paying $5 for ringtones, etc. Telcos need to stop clinging to the past and display some adaptability here.
I'm hoping someone on this side of the pond starts up a telco whose entire focus is being dumb pipes, and starts stocking all the good phones like the N900 (which Australian telcos refuse to stock).
FWIW, I have switched to reading almost exclusively on iPod Touch using Stanza (also available for iPhone).
I know everyone loves e-ink; I've looked at several e-ink devices and they look pretty great (especially the iliad, except last time I checked it was AUD$1000 here). I find the LCD screen is perfectly adequate for reading (I read at least an hour a day on this, usually more). It's not great in direct sunlight, but it's easily doable, and its rare that I want to sit out in the Australian sun and enjoy a nice book. I travel a lot and the benefits of a backlit screen are immense - I can read anywhere, in almost any conditions.
The battery life is pretty good - easily keeps me going for long trips (14-24 hours travel time) (I don't read the entire time), even listening to music occasionally as well. If it gets low I can always top it up from my laptop, too.
I like having it in a device I can also use for video, Internet, email, etc. Lots of advantages. I can live without e-ink for now. Plus the ipod Touch is around the same price as most entry level e-ink readers.
The biggest issue is lack of good, competitively priced content. There are some good stores in Stanza (which, incidentally, was bought by Amazon recently - wtf isn't the Amazon store in Stanza yet (Kindle)) but not enough to really make it easy/simple enough to get good content. You've got to look elsewhere.
No, that's still not stealing. It's still copyright infringement. If he say, stole the disc from his company and kept it in a vault, then that would constitute theft. Otherwise, it's still copyright infringement.
But in this case, the copyright infringement is WORSE than the theft by several orders of magnitude. He "stole" a copy and gave it to thousands of other people.
Copyright infringement should be treated totally different to real physical theft, I agree - but it's not some magical term that reduces the impact to near zero.
1) If you want to charge me $15 for an ebook, I would like to get the ebook immediately, followed by the real printed book in snail mail. Don't care how long it takes to arrive, as long as it does.
2) If you want to charge me $15 for a paperback, I would like to be able to register online somehow and also download the ebook.
ie: the ebook costs practically fuck all to duplicate and distribute. Leverage that advantage and turn it into a bonus.
I will not pay $15 for an ebook, ever. Especially if it's festooned with DRM. I will wait until the paperback is out (of course, I'm in Australia, where we get royally fucked because of bullshit book distribution laws, so it'll be more like $22 for the paperback, but still).
Most games that use a client/server based model where the usual gameplay instance is small (ie, not an MMO) scale perfectly already. You just throw in more hardware, start a few new server instances, and presto.
I can see a system like this being useful for MMOs, but for all the other games that/aren't/ MMOs - all they need to do to create a scalable multiplayer architecture is just do what the likes of id Software, Epic, and Valve have done for years - make a decent dedicated server platform for your game and release it for free.
There's this one road I go down -- 30kph speed limit, and yet every car behind me always seems to catch up and pass me rather quickly when I'm going along at 30kph. In fact, I would say that most are going 50kph. That's more than 66% over the speed limit.
My brother is a cycler and comes home regularly with tales that make me cringe for his safety.
I've often wondered if he had an LED display on the back of his bike that showed how fast he was riding, if cars would be more prone to backing off. He is like you sound - regularly doing the speed limit - and is overtaken a lot, I assume because people think "well, bikes are slow, so I can drive faster".
The ability to own a gun doesn't magically equal freedom though. Surely you realise how many of your rights have been eroded over the last few years, especially since September 11?
You're getting less and less free every day. Things like ACTA, warrantless wiretapping - all those little things are your freedoms circling the drain. Clutching on to your firearm and whispering about freedom is utterly meaningless while that is happening.
I consider myself a hardcore PC gamer. I pretty much switched to playing multiplayer FPS games almost exclusively after Doom came out; I just love the genre and the competition of playing against real people. I loved it so much it ended up becoming my job; me and some friends founded a company to provide multiplayer gaming servers for other people in Australia (which went on to become the biggest online game service provider in Australia, blahblahbalhablah).
As a Ye Olde Time PC gamer, I remember the days of games like Doom, Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal - when you could drop AUD$80 on a game and know that you were going to be able to play that game for years, because it had freely downloadable and publicly available dedicated servers, meaning anyone could run a server anywhere in the world, at any time, with any settings. Not only that, the games were generally moddable - which meant the game experience would always be changing.
This model brought about things like Counter-Strike (probably the most successful multiplayer FPS ever), Desert Combat (directly responsible for the development of Battlefield 2), Day of Defeat (one of the first of manymanymany WW2 shooters). It brought about Team Fortress, which has since turned into Team Fortress 2 - another staggering success story. (Lucky Valve are still on the ball.)
There's been a clear paradigm shift recently though. I feel that it began with Battlefield 2, and more games are following the new model. Yes, there's a clear focus on console gaming. But more significantly, I feel, is the focus on trying to really sell brands over and over again as fast as possible.
With few exceptions (Blizzard, Valve), game developers and publishers don't want you to be playing the same game for three or four years. They want you to upgrade to the new hotness so they can get another chunk of cash out of you.
I didn't buy MW2 - I'm completely and utterly uninterested in it if it doesn't have dedicated servers, and I put my money where my mouth is and didn't buy it even though I've heard its pretty awesome. But it's hard for me to come out and say what IW are doing is clearly wrong - because obviously it's commercially successful. I do feel it's not in the best interests of gamers - I think we'd get much more/value/ if they went back to the old model. But MW2 has set a precedent, and I'm sure MW3 is already on the drawing board and not very far away.
Our company has provided commercial game server management services for almost 10 years for a large ISP client in Australia. We have watched games rise and fall over this entire time. And the games with dedicated server software - games like Quake, which came out in 1996 - are still just as playable today as they were back then (often more so thanks to enhanced community-created features).
There are a few exceptions to that - AvP2 ran into problems recently when they shut down the master server/s. But a community project has worked around this.
We recently published a guide - the Mammoth Dedicated Server Guide - for game developers and publishers trying to explain to them why they should release dedicated server software (inspired in no small part by Modern Warfare 2's lack of dedicated server). We're hoping to make more people aware of it, and more importantly, more gamers aware of the issues surrounding games without dedicated servers (such as this story!!!!), so that when they're choosing what games to spend money on, they can show more discrimination.
A politician's conversations, when they are being done in his role as a representative of the public, should be a matter of public record anyway, surely?
I just flat-out refuse to pay 50% more for the same content in basically the same format that the publisher already has filed away somewhere. When do you think the last time that a major popular author wrote out a manuscript on a typewriter was? Or longhand? You know it's already in an electronic document format somewhere.
Neal Stephenson apparently wrote the entire Baroque Cycle by hand using a fountain pen. Old school!
For me the best solution to the ebook price debacle would be to sell ebooks at the same price as regular books, let me download the ebook instantly, and then send me the paper book in the mail. I like having the paper books around. It's like when I buy CDs - I get the CD, rip it, then throw it on the shelf never to be used again (unless I lose my mp3 collection or something).
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent post. DRM is still DRM and I have the same problems as you. The true test of how good Valve's system will be is when things start to go wrong.
So i have a trust in "the community". People want to play multiplayer and there's nothing that the publishers of the games can do to stop them.
Heh did you read that bnetd article? It shows precisely what publishers do to stop them - send in the lawyers.
When they have a vested interest in control - like Blizzard does with these games - they will stomp them. And in this case we're talking really old games! Fortunately Blizzard still support them - they're actually the opposite of a shitty game developer as they see the real, tangible advantages of long-term support for their games in terms of the brand recognition it creates.
So this was more about supporting the matchmaking and whatnot.
Right - but with an open dedicated server based model, /they can't take this away/, because people can just create their own matchmaking systems. Often ones that will be superior to the original because they can be done on a per-community basis.
Its not that it's proving successful, its more of a lack of options
Right, but the reason there's a lack of options (for, say, dedicated server-based multiplayer PC games) is because we're seeing less of a focus on creating dedicated server based games. There is more focus on /controlling/ the multiplayer infrastructure now - and one reason is probably so they can simply turn it off when they want you to upgrade to the latest version.
Hardware fails and that will render all these old tech and games obsolete no matter how much you don't want to lose these games. Systems like NES, SNES, Genesis, they are mostly gone aside from a rare special-built system but then the games are going away to, as time really does kill all things material.
Those are all examples of closed systems though. Nintendo don't want people thinking SNES or NES - they want them thinking Wii and Wii games and DS!
Now we have game roms and emulators, programs like DosBox. These show that the games will remain playable, granted not in their original form, but they are still there and still playable
The problem with this analogy though is that multiplayer games have the game server component - and reverse engineering that doesn't seem like something people do very often.
It's the server component that I'm talking about in my above post. If that is released as a free download, game developers can simply forget about supporting their games online and let "the community" do it for them for free.
They don't need to provide legacy support for old games though - if their games are created in such a way that users can run their own game servers, someone else can do it as long as there's someone that still wants to play the game.
As others have pointed out in this discussion, PC games from as far back as Quake (1996) are still perfectly playable because it uses an 'open', dedicated server based framework for its multiplayer services.
Sadly, the PC world is catching up to the console world in this respect - because developers are less interested in having you play their game for more than ten years. They don't see the advantages in having a game that lives that long and instead want you to continue buying the next version every year or so. Unfortunately for people that care about having good games that will last for a really long time (like me), this model is proving super-successful.
Don't worry - the Windows version is having a lot of problems too - search for 'black screen' on their forums. I'm one of the (seemingly many) users afflicted with this - the game simply refuses to start maybe 80% of the time, dumping me at a black screen. I read some comments on the forum saying to just try and reload it over and over and thought "yeh, right, SURE", but I tried it and lo and behold, it works - I just have to keep starting the game, and if it doesn't load I pskill sc2.exe, then try again until it works.
Presumably, the same morals that they use to justify why they won't let porn (or a myriad of other applications) in the AppStore.
Noone seems to have mentioned that Google now owns On2 so presumably could do the same thing w/ VP6 which is a much more advanced codec?
I do exactly the same as the GP, so I'm really interested to know how exactly can we otherwise evaluate if a game is good enough to buy.
Don't buy games that don't have demos, ever.
Now I know how to get rid of all that shit (short of culling my noob friends).
Thank you, Streisand effect!
I had the same experience as Engadget at first - tried it out and there was noticable lag. I asked the Sony guy about it and he said that it loses calibration sometimes when its in really crowded environments (this was at the launch at GDC last week). He recalibrated it (took about 1 minute absolute tops) and then I tried again and the lag was completely gone.
... I am regularly amazed by the sheer number of pharma ads on television. Depending on the time of day I can see anywhere between 50 to 100% of the ads on TV being about pharma products.
I'd worry about getting those ones down before I worried about the Internet ones.
heh, but in the real world, one of the bosses will suddenly find he can't watch youtube in his corner office, and complain about it to IT, who will then probably have a better opportunity to get rid of IE6 than they've had before
Do you have any implementation details of how you did this? This sounds like a really awesome and handy trick, love to know how it's done if you don't mind sharing!
where are my mod points when I need them?
Telcos are kicking and screaming and trying as hard as they can not to be dragged into the New Age.
I've often wondered when the Carriers would hijack Android and do what they've done to other phones in the past and implement a "on our network, you use our Appstore."
This has already happened here in Australia - you can't use the Android AppStore if you're on Optus (one of the major mobile phone companies here).
Apple has done more to blow away this monopoly than anyone else - it's made people realise that there's no need to be shackled to their telco and paying $5 for ringtones, etc. Telcos need to stop clinging to the past and display some adaptability here.
I'm hoping someone on this side of the pond starts up a telco whose entire focus is being dumb pipes, and starts stocking all the good phones like the N900 (which Australian telcos refuse to stock).
FWIW, I have switched to reading almost exclusively on iPod Touch using Stanza (also available for iPhone).
I know everyone loves e-ink; I've looked at several e-ink devices and they look pretty great (especially the iliad, except last time I checked it was AUD$1000 here). I find the LCD screen is perfectly adequate for reading (I read at least an hour a day on this, usually more). It's not great in direct sunlight, but it's easily doable, and its rare that I want to sit out in the Australian sun and enjoy a nice book. I travel a lot and the benefits of a backlit screen are immense - I can read anywhere, in almost any conditions.
The battery life is pretty good - easily keeps me going for long trips (14-24 hours travel time) (I don't read the entire time), even listening to music occasionally as well. If it gets low I can always top it up from my laptop, too.
I like having it in a device I can also use for video, Internet, email, etc. Lots of advantages. I can live without e-ink for now. Plus the ipod Touch is around the same price as most entry level e-ink readers.
The biggest issue is lack of good, competitively priced content. There are some good stores in Stanza (which, incidentally, was bought by Amazon recently - wtf isn't the Amazon store in Stanza yet (Kindle)) but not enough to really make it easy/simple enough to get good content. You've got to look elsewhere.
No, that's still not stealing. It's still copyright infringement. If he say, stole the disc from his company and kept it in a vault, then that would constitute theft. Otherwise, it's still copyright infringement.
But in this case, the copyright infringement is WORSE than the theft by several orders of magnitude. He "stole" a copy and gave it to thousands of other people.
Copyright infringement should be treated totally different to real physical theft, I agree - but it's not some magical term that reduces the impact to near zero.
1) If you want to charge me $15 for an ebook, I would like to get the ebook immediately, followed by the real printed book in snail mail. Don't care how long it takes to arrive, as long as it does.
2) If you want to charge me $15 for a paperback, I would like to be able to register online somehow and also download the ebook.
ie: the ebook costs practically fuck all to duplicate and distribute. Leverage that advantage and turn it into a bonus.
I will not pay $15 for an ebook, ever. Especially if it's festooned with DRM. I will wait until the paperback is out (of course, I'm in Australia, where we get royally fucked because of bullshit book distribution laws, so it'll be more like $22 for the paperback, but still).
Most games that use a client/server based model where the usual gameplay instance is small (ie, not an MMO) scale perfectly already. You just throw in more hardware, start a few new server instances, and presto.
I can see a system like this being useful for MMOs, but for all the other games that /aren't/ MMOs - all they need to do to create a scalable multiplayer architecture is just do what the likes of id Software, Epic, and Valve have done for years - make a decent dedicated server platform for your game and release it for free.
There's this one road I go down -- 30kph speed limit, and yet every car behind me always seems to catch up and pass me rather quickly when I'm going along at 30kph. In fact, I would say that most are going 50kph. That's more than 66% over the speed limit.
My brother is a cycler and comes home regularly with tales that make me cringe for his safety.
I've often wondered if he had an LED display on the back of his bike that showed how fast he was riding, if cars would be more prone to backing off. He is like you sound - regularly doing the speed limit - and is overtaken a lot, I assume because people think "well, bikes are slow, so I can drive faster".
The ability to own a gun doesn't magically equal freedom though. Surely you realise how many of your rights have been eroded over the last few years, especially since September 11?
You're getting less and less free every day. Things like ACTA, warrantless wiretapping - all those little things are your freedoms circling the drain. Clutching on to your firearm and whispering about freedom is utterly meaningless while that is happening.
I consider myself a hardcore PC gamer. I pretty much switched to playing multiplayer FPS games almost exclusively after Doom came out; I just love the genre and the competition of playing against real people. I loved it so much it ended up becoming my job; me and some friends founded a company to provide multiplayer gaming servers for other people in Australia (which went on to become the biggest online game service provider in Australia, blahblahbalhablah).
As a Ye Olde Time PC gamer, I remember the days of games like Doom, Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal - when you could drop AUD$80 on a game and know that you were going to be able to play that game for years, because it had freely downloadable and publicly available dedicated servers, meaning anyone could run a server anywhere in the world, at any time, with any settings. Not only that, the games were generally moddable - which meant the game experience would always be changing.
This model brought about things like Counter-Strike (probably the most successful multiplayer FPS ever), Desert Combat (directly responsible for the development of Battlefield 2), Day of Defeat (one of the first of manymanymany WW2 shooters). It brought about Team Fortress, which has since turned into Team Fortress 2 - another staggering success story. (Lucky Valve are still on the ball.)
There's been a clear paradigm shift recently though. I feel that it began with Battlefield 2, and more games are following the new model. Yes, there's a clear focus on console gaming. But more significantly, I feel, is the focus on trying to really sell brands over and over again as fast as possible.
With few exceptions (Blizzard, Valve), game developers and publishers don't want you to be playing the same game for three or four years. They want you to upgrade to the new hotness so they can get another chunk of cash out of you.
I didn't buy MW2 - I'm completely and utterly uninterested in it if it doesn't have dedicated servers, and I put my money where my mouth is and didn't buy it even though I've heard its pretty awesome. But it's hard for me to come out and say what IW are doing is clearly wrong - because obviously it's commercially successful. I do feel it's not in the best interests of gamers - I think we'd get much more /value/ if they went back to the old model. But MW2 has set a precedent, and I'm sure MW3 is already on the drawing board and not very far away.
Our company has provided commercial game server management services for almost 10 years for a large ISP client in Australia. We have watched games rise and fall over this entire time. And the games with dedicated server software - games like Quake, which came out in 1996 - are still just as playable today as they were back then (often more so thanks to enhanced community-created features).
There are a few exceptions to that - AvP2 ran into problems recently when they shut down the master server/s. But a community project has worked around this.
We recently published a guide - the Mammoth Dedicated Server Guide - for game developers and publishers trying to explain to them why they should release dedicated server software (inspired in no small part by Modern Warfare 2's lack of dedicated server). We're hoping to make more people aware of it, and more importantly, more gamers aware of the issues surrounding games without dedicated servers (such as this story!!!!), so that when they're choosing what games to spend money on, they can show more discrimination.
A politician's conversations, when they are being done in his role as a representative of the public, should be a matter of public record anyway, surely?
I just flat-out refuse to pay 50% more for the same content in basically the same format that the publisher already has filed away somewhere. When do you think the last time that a major popular author wrote out a manuscript on a typewriter was? Or longhand? You know it's already in an electronic document format somewhere.
Neal Stephenson apparently wrote the entire Baroque Cycle by hand using a fountain pen. Old school!
For me the best solution to the ebook price debacle would be to sell ebooks at the same price as regular books, let me download the ebook instantly, and then send me the paper book in the mail. I like having the paper books around. It's like when I buy CDs - I get the CD, rip it, then throw it on the shelf never to be used again (unless I lose my mp3 collection or something).