That's a complaint about the DMCA and has nothing to do with whether MS is or is not allowed to officially license or refuse to officially license any particular game. Even without a DMCA, you'd be hard pressed to sell a game that only worked on a hacked console (both for legal/IP reasons, and just because the customer base would be small and people - rightly - wouldn't trust unofficial software).
FYI, this whole game licensing situation is a direct result of the video game crash of 1983 when consoles WERE open for anyone to make software for, and it ruined the industry with boatloads of shitware.
Does a company really have the power to decide who and what can be developed for a piece of hardware it makes?
Yes. When you buy their console, you're agreeing to work within their closed system. If you don't like the rides in the amusement park, don't buy a ticket. This is not a new policy. MS has never approved an AO game for certification for Xbox or Xbox 360.
Are you kidding? I was amazed it lasted longer than Caprica. No one I knew watched it or cared about it, even people who loved SG1 and Atlantis. Even I only watched it begrudgingly, hoping at some point it would stop being so bad.
There's no rhetorical trick. There is a large group of people on the internet with diverse opinions who use some set of internet forums. At any time some small subset of these people may call themselves "Anonymous" and attack or protest some random thing that they think is either funny or important. This subset may or may not include the same people at any given time. Their reasons may or may not even be the same. Their intelligence and actually level of anonymity may vary.
What country do you live in? (not a sarcastic question). I've bought every expansion and never gotten a free month of game time. I live in the U.S. It's possible it's a regional thing. Either that or you're mistaking the Battlechest, which includes both classic WoW (which does include a month of free game time) and TBC (which does not) for just a copy of TBC.
We're not talking about queues. we're talking about the login servers being physically unavailable. As in, you can't even get into a queue. And it only really applied to the first hour or so the game was available in EU/NA.
It's because this is the first expansion you could buy digitally before it was released, to have it unlock at exactly midnight (plus or minus a few hours depending on region). Previously, people had to physically buy a copy at the store at midnight, so unless you had a buddy that worked at Gamestop, you were actually in line or driving home for the next hour or so after midnight, and on top of that, it was always based on midnight local time. So not only were logins spread out by time zone, they were spread out by physical travel time from the store to the home.
This time, you have people who bought it online, and people who bought their physical copies and installed them hours ago sitting at home waiting for exactly the designated time to simultaneously login at once. And if the other poster is correct, now their login servers have to share time with SC2 players, which is also not something they previous had to deal with.
They really were just setting themselves up for disaster, but apparently whatever system they used to enable the digital download versions had to be run at the same time for the entire region, and I guess they didn't want to discourage/encourage digital purchases by giving an advantage/disadvantage to those who purchased online vs. in the store.
All I want to do is get most of the easy quests out of the way and enjoy the game for one month (the month that comes with the expansion).
FYI, Blizzard has never given people a free month for buying an expansion. You might be given an e-mail begging you to come back and try it for 10 days if your account is inactive, but that's it.
I think it has more to do with enjoying playing with those people than it does WoW itself. The people I know who still play WoW (including myself) play with good friends, either real world friends or those they met online.
Call me back when Farmville manages to get both $15 a month and $50 every 2 years from its users (plus $25 a pop for race change, faction change, and server transfer, which some users make pretty liberal use of in my experience). Or maybe I just don't understand how lucrative ad revenue can be.
The female and casual market is an addition to the games market, not a replacement. No one is going to throw away their Xbox 360 in favor of Farmville.
Id never had as much money as Valve got from HL and CS. They could never have made the investment necessary to create Steam without getting permanent support from a publisher who would have ruined it before it left the cradle out of fear of it destroying them. And I don't know why you even mentioned Bioware, they don't make FPS games and they use Steam, like Id does, and EA has owned them for 3 years (which from some perspectives means that Id ate their lunch by lasting longer as an independent game company).
So if you're not talking about a specific game genre in the market, and you're not talking about digital distribution, and you're not talking about independence from publishers, what the hell are you talking about?
It costs money, it costs time, it costs support post-launch. Unable? No. Unwilling? If the return on investment (both monetary and effort) isn't there, then yes.
Remember that before Quake Live, Id games' online support basically consisted of a master server that just gave you a list of servers, and an FTP server with patches that relied on popular mirror sites to prevent it from going down due to demand (which it sometimes still did when new patches were released). They didn't even host their own servers, much less their own online distribution platform for the assets of the entire game. And Quake Live is basically an 11 year old game at this point. The size of the assets, method of distribution, and demand for the game are all going to be different (smaller) from a brand new AAA title like Rage is intended to be.
If Apple does the hosting for you, but Android does not (for files over 30 MB), that's a huge difference.
I think one thing Google could do to address these kinds of complaints is to delineate it more clearly. To computer savvy people, it's pretty obviously a different, discrete "section" of the page than the actual search results, but to people like my grandma (and apparently the author of this article) it appears to simply be the first search result.
How about instead of coming up with some new bullshit gimmick to carry your movie, you just make a good movie, and then use whatever cinematic techniques will best enhance a given part of the movie.
Although I will say there are 2 camera techniques I can't stand. Shaky cam and low FPS in action movies. To me, neither of these "enhance" the action, or make it more "frantic". I have 20/20 vision and visual acuity honed by years of playing video games and all they do is make it so I can't tell what the fuck is going on. The worst examples I can come up with are certain parts of Gladiator and the first Transformers movie. Transformers was especially bad because the things already look like random shards of colored metal. Batman Begins had a couple bad parts, too, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Your personal computer.
That's a complaint about the DMCA and has nothing to do with whether MS is or is not allowed to officially license or refuse to officially license any particular game. Even without a DMCA, you'd be hard pressed to sell a game that only worked on a hacked console (both for legal/IP reasons, and just because the customer base would be small and people - rightly - wouldn't trust unofficial software).
FYI, this whole game licensing situation is a direct result of the video game crash of 1983 when consoles WERE open for anyone to make software for, and it ruined the industry with boatloads of shitware.
Yes. When you buy their console, you're agreeing to work within their closed system. If you don't like the rides in the amusement park, don't buy a ticket. This is not a new policy. MS has never approved an AO game for certification for Xbox or Xbox 360.
As much as I loved SG-1, after 10 seasons it was (arguably past) time to call it quits.
Are you kidding? I was amazed it lasted longer than Caprica. No one I knew watched it or cared about it, even people who loved SG1 and Atlantis. Even I only watched it begrudgingly, hoping at some point it would stop being so bad.
I read that as "fraked" like Jonathan Frakes, instead of "frakked" like the BSG expletive. Is "fraked" really the "correct" spelling? "Fracked"?
There's no rhetorical trick. There is a large group of people on the internet with diverse opinions who use some set of internet forums. At any time some small subset of these people may call themselves "Anonymous" and attack or protest some random thing that they think is either funny or important. This subset may or may not include the same people at any given time. Their reasons may or may not even be the same. Their intelligence and actually level of anonymity may vary.
What country do you live in? (not a sarcastic question). I've bought every expansion and never gotten a free month of game time. I live in the U.S. It's possible it's a regional thing. Either that or you're mistaking the Battlechest, which includes both classic WoW (which does include a month of free game time) and TBC (which does not) for just a copy of TBC.
We're not talking about queues. we're talking about the login servers being physically unavailable. As in, you can't even get into a queue. And it only really applied to the first hour or so the game was available in EU/NA.
Considering the comic was about the Cataclysm beta... unlikely.
Seriously, what the fuck did you expect?
It's because this is the first expansion you could buy digitally before it was released, to have it unlock at exactly midnight (plus or minus a few hours depending on region). Previously, people had to physically buy a copy at the store at midnight, so unless you had a buddy that worked at Gamestop, you were actually in line or driving home for the next hour or so after midnight, and on top of that, it was always based on midnight local time. So not only were logins spread out by time zone, they were spread out by physical travel time from the store to the home.
This time, you have people who bought it online, and people who bought their physical copies and installed them hours ago sitting at home waiting for exactly the designated time to simultaneously login at once. And if the other poster is correct, now their login servers have to share time with SC2 players, which is also not something they previous had to deal with.
They really were just setting themselves up for disaster, but apparently whatever system they used to enable the digital download versions had to be run at the same time for the entire region, and I guess they didn't want to discourage/encourage digital purchases by giving an advantage/disadvantage to those who purchased online vs. in the store.
FYI, Blizzard has never given people a free month for buying an expansion. You might be given an e-mail begging you to come back and try it for 10 days if your account is inactive, but that's it.
I think it has more to do with enjoying playing with those people than it does WoW itself. The people I know who still play WoW (including myself) play with good friends, either real world friends or those they met online.
Call me back when Farmville manages to get both $15 a month and $50 every 2 years from its users (plus $25 a pop for race change, faction change, and server transfer, which some users make pretty liberal use of in my experience). Or maybe I just don't understand how lucrative ad revenue can be.
The female and casual market is an addition to the games market, not a replacement. No one is going to throw away their Xbox 360 in favor of Farmville.
Id never had as much money as Valve got from HL and CS. They could never have made the investment necessary to create Steam without getting permanent support from a publisher who would have ruined it before it left the cradle out of fear of it destroying them. And I don't know why you even mentioned Bioware, they don't make FPS games and they use Steam, like Id does, and EA has owned them for 3 years (which from some perspectives means that Id ate their lunch by lasting longer as an independent game company).
So if you're not talking about a specific game genre in the market, and you're not talking about digital distribution, and you're not talking about independence from publishers, what the hell are you talking about?
It costs money, it costs time, it costs support post-launch. Unable? No. Unwilling? If the return on investment (both monetary and effort) isn't there, then yes.
Remember that before Quake Live, Id games' online support basically consisted of a master server that just gave you a list of servers, and an FTP server with patches that relied on popular mirror sites to prevent it from going down due to demand (which it sometimes still did when new patches were released). They didn't even host their own servers, much less their own online distribution platform for the assets of the entire game. And Quake Live is basically an 11 year old game at this point. The size of the assets, method of distribution, and demand for the game are all going to be different (smaller) from a brand new AAA title like Rage is intended to be.
If Apple does the hosting for you, but Android does not (for files over 30 MB), that's a huge difference.
Guess you're not very internet savvy then. :( You probably download a lot of trojans.
I think one thing Google could do to address these kinds of complaints is to delineate it more clearly. To computer savvy people, it's pretty obviously a different, discrete "section" of the page than the actual search results, but to people like my grandma (and apparently the author of this article) it appears to simply be the first search result.
How about instead of coming up with some new bullshit gimmick to carry your movie, you just make a good movie, and then use whatever cinematic techniques will best enhance a given part of the movie.
Although I will say there are 2 camera techniques I can't stand. Shaky cam and low FPS in action movies. To me, neither of these "enhance" the action, or make it more "frantic". I have 20/20 vision and visual acuity honed by years of playing video games and all they do is make it so I can't tell what the fuck is going on. The worst examples I can come up with are certain parts of Gladiator and the first Transformers movie. Transformers was especially bad because the things already look like random shards of colored metal. Batman Begins had a couple bad parts, too, I think.
What a civil and polite post you've created.
I'm an engineer (well, comp sci, so sort of) and I can write A+ English papers all day. I just fucking hate doing it.
He can if it's OR and not XOR.
IMO Windows didn't fix UI lag until 7 (arguably Vista) and OSX still hasn't fixed it to my satisfaction.