Some of the best sites on the net are both high quality and pay. And one of the reasons people flock to them? No ads!
We're seeing it ourselves at smugmug. It's been a core "feature" and selling point since Day 1. Why? Because I hate ads and I'm willing to pay not to see them.
We've seen this sort of thing over and over. "No one will pay for HBO!"... "No one will ever buy bottled water!"... Well, it turns out, people DO pay when they can get something of higher quality/value/less pain.
Of particuarly interest to/. readers are probably those sites with open, thriving, growing APIs. smugmug's got one, as does flickr.
The result, of course, is tons of user-created uploaders, organizers, applications, and even sister web services. Pretty sweet, if you ask me, and lots of fun. There's not many things more rewarding than a customer discovering the API and coming up with something brilliant.
Disclaimer: I co-founded smugmug, so bias is present, but I've been a geek my whole life, so open APIs still get me excited.:)
I'm the CEO at smugmug.com, arguably one of flickr's better competitors. (Actually, since we were here before them and have larger share, I suppose they're one our better competitors. Whatever).
Luckily, the flickr gang and I have had a chance to meet and hang out, and to be honest, they're very smart, talented people. There are a lot of other companies playing in this space, and most of them don't have a clue.
I think it would help all of us who are clueful if someone (the media, geeks who have family that hang on their every word, etc) would sit up and notice that sites like ofoto and shutterfly provide *really poor* sharing. They're sorta like the AOL of photo sharing. Thank goodness sites like smugmug and flickr exist once people discover how not-useful their sites are.
Kudos to the flickr guys for the great reviews! They deserve them.
Don
Re:Steam-like online distrubtion is inevitable
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
Yes, if they had to shut the service down for some reason, they would do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
They're gamers too, and since I personally know them, I can speak to their character. Contrary to popular/. opinion, not everyone who's out to make a buck is evil.:)
Don
Re:Steam-like online distrubtion is inevitable
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
I keep hearing this argument over and over: "it should be cheaper if I download it."
I can't understand this argument at all, hopefully you or someone else can help illuminate me.
It's the same game. The major cost of the game is not the CD. It's the long hours of work by 65-100 people involved in the title. It's the 6 years of effort and time.
There's a very real possibility that Half-Life 2 couldnt' have gotten made like it is today without banking on Steam being a success. It was a *very* expensive game to make. Just do the math on the # of employees, the # of years, etc. The higher margin on Steam might very well be a necessity just for Valve to break even or profit.
Given a choice between a game as good and as polished as Half-Life 2 for $50 via Steam, or a much lesser game for $40 via Steam, which would you choose?
If you want Half-Life 3 to be as incredible as Half-Life 2, Steam *must* be a success. The economics dictate it. The # of people buying PC games isn't appreciating much, but the budget is skyrocketing. Valve *must* find more margin somewhere, and Steam is their solution.
I'd love to understand the other side of the viewpoint though. Why would you demand a lower price, knowing that it would destroy the quality of future titles?
Don
Re:Steam-like online distrubtion is inevitable
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
I should be clear here: I'm not suggesting a move away from the publisher-developer model.
Publishers take a lot of flak, but they do provide valuable services: financing, marketing, quality assurance, etc. For a small developer, those resources are invaluable. There's a reason even companies like id and Epic, with a long string of continous hits and plenty of cash, keep using publishers.
I'm not saying the relationship won't change - it probably will, and has a few times in gaming's past already.
But the big move here is the move away from (or at least an alternative to) retail. The retailer takes a pretty huge chunk of the dough from the title. With that chunk back in play, both the developer and publisher stand to benefit.
Requiring the CD in the drive AND Steam is idiotic, I agree. Alas, I'm fairly positive that was mandated by Vivendi, Half-Life 2's publisher. I doubt Valve would care one way or the other, what with Steam.
Steam clearly has its fair share of problems. But I'm optimistic both about its ability to evolve to compensate and overcome them and about the ability for other people in the industry to take not of its shortcomings and create good alternatives.
I think if it failed completely, we'd be stuck with retail for quite awhile longer. I've seen the way VC and other investors react when there's some high-profile crater in a new space... it takes awhile to forget.
Don
Re:Steam-like online distrubtion is inevitable
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
Yes, if you're installing a brand-new copy of the game and there isn't a Steam server to talk to, there might be issues.
A standalone patch could solve it, easily. (And as some have noted, there are probably some shady patches out there that do just this already).
But more importantly, Steam isn't very costly to operate in a "authentication only" mode, so I can't see this piece going away anytime soon. It's probably pennies per transaction, if it's even that high.
The costly piece (relatively speaking) is the actual transmission of gigabytes worth of data. That piece isn't necessary to let you play your retail copy, so it's not a big issue.
Look, the bottom line is, I lose or destroy CDs all the time. I have tons of games I'd love to replay, but I can't find the CDs. Steam disappearing is no different than losing a CD, except that it's far far less likely to happen since it's a money-making venture. It would be idiotic of them to shut it down when it's generating cash.
Don
Re:Steam-like online distrubtion is inevitable
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
Note: I don't work for Valve, I'm just a fan who has some friends there. My word isn't gospel (and you're insane if that ever crossed your mind;)
Steam doesn't need to talk to the servers except during initial install. You can run it for years in disconnected mode, and it doesn't need to run on every boot. You can, if you'd like, connect just once and never again. Your game keeps working.
I seriously doubt Steam will get discontinued anytime within the usual "shelf life" of HL2, so it's probably a non-issue, but I don't see why it would be difficult to extricate Steam from HL2 if it had to die.
Don
Re:Steam-like online distrubtion is inevitable
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
I have to politely disagree.:)
Steam works fine in a disconnected mode after you've authenticated, for one thing.
And for another, it's completely braindead easy for them to push out a small patch to Steam users that removes Steam as a requirement for unlocking/playing/whatever if they decide to shutdown the service. All installed and future copies can easily be un-Steamed.
Don
Re:Steam-like online distrubtion is inevitable
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
For those inclined not to click, the short story is thus:
- Half-Life 2 took tens of millions of $$ to make and 6 years. - Valve only makes $5-10 per copy retail. - With Steam, they can make closer to $25-30 per copy.
= We get better games if Steam is a success* = If it's not, we'll see retail prices rise to $60-80 in the near future to compensate.
Long live Steam!
* If you buy into the more time + more money = better game. Given the right talent, I think it does, but there's always games like Rollercoaster Tycoon to prove us wrong...
Don
Steam-like online distrubtion is inevitable
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I wrote a short entry on Steam and why online distribution (or a worse alternative) is inevitable for PC games (console too, eventually). I'd love to hear some commentary on it from fellow/.ers.
Also, I've heard many complaints about Steam's bandwidth and whatnot. The solution is simple, and Valve went so far as to hire Bram Cohen, of BitTorrent fame, at one point to work on Steam. (Note the timestamp on this article before complaining I'm outta date:) No clue why it doesn't intelligently swarm yet...
We used to use Gallery for our photos, but while it's easily the best installable package around, and much better than lots of online photo sharing places, we eventually outgrew it. It wasn't easy enough for my computer-illiterate family members, and it wasn't powerful or stylish enough for those who were literate.
Rather than look elsewhere, I built my own. It's now a thriving service all it's own, and our mantras are Easy and Style. Every decision we make is governed by those two directives, and it's paying off. We have soccer moms, Grandmas, servicement stationed in Iraq, and many many more using the service. Howard Dean runs his presidential campaign using smugmug.
The downside is that it's not free. You get a week to try it out free, but then it's $30/year (not month!). That gets you a fantastic, stylish, and easy-to use photo sharing site with unlimited storage. Best of all, it can be customized to link seamlessly with other websites, such as your blog or whatever you'd like.
My wife (emphoto.com) is a pro-photographer, so we follow all of this very closely. She's using Canon 10D and D60 bodies, but the EOS Rebel looks like a great camera, especially for the price.
I run a photo sharing site that quite a lot of pro photographers use, and they've taken a lot of test shots with them already:
I'm a little concerned that this may lead to no x86-64 (Opteron, Althon64) support from RedHat.:(
HP co-owns the IP for Itanium with Intel, so they have a vested interest in seeing Itanium get lots of support, and AMD x86-64 get none. RedHat has already announced Itanium versions of Advanced Server, but AFAIK, has been silent on the x86-64 front.
SuSE has announced long ago that they'd release x86-64 versions of their distro to coincide with Opteron's release, and they seem to be actively involved with that process.
Am I being paranoid here? Or does it look like RH might not support the most cost-effective 64bit platform going? Not all of us have deep pockets for I2.:(
You're correct. We tried to think of the most common things people would want to do with their purchased content, but it would be impossible for us to anticipate every use. This is a very good point.
I should note that getting copyright holders to agree to our less-restricted DRM was like pulling teeth sometimes. One of the reasons we had to implement a DRM at all (it was something like a 51% / 49% vote for DRM over no DRM... very close) was to appease them. Without their content, we couldn't even try our concept.
I happen to think that there needs to be a balance between customer needs and copyright holder's. Most DRMs err on stripping away all or nearly all customer rights, but we tried to get somewhere in between where all parties are happy. Deciding where to draw the line is difficult.
I'm afraid that without some sort of control, many copyright holders will prevent their content from ever showing up digitally, which I think would be a shame. It's not nearly as simple to digitize and transmit a book as it is other forms of media, so without their involvement, it might never happen.:(
I didn't mention it in the article, but we did do this.
When reading or printing the document, the original purchaser's full name was embedded in the lower-right corner of the document. My other posts here outline our fair-use stance, but basically, peopel were encouraged to copy, print, and share their documents. They can do that with a magazine, right? Shouldn't be any different for our eMatter.
It was a key feature from day one, and I don't know why I didn't mention it in the article. Silly me.
Our solution specifically encouraged fair-use copying, sharing, and unlimited printing. So by your definition, I guess we weren't a DRM.
Since we did make some attempt to prevent mega-easy outright theft of the content, while not preventing the original customer their fair-use rights, I still consider it to be a DRM. Just a DRM done "The Right Way" (or at least a big step in that direction).
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the best sites on the net are both high quality and pay. And one of the reasons people flock to them? No ads!
... "No one will ever buy bottled water!" ... Well, it turns out, people DO pay when they can get something of higher quality/value/less pain.
We're seeing it ourselves at smugmug. It's been a core "feature" and selling point since Day 1. Why? Because I hate ads and I'm willing to pay not to see them.
We've seen this sort of thing over and over. "No one will pay for HBO!"
Viva pay internet!
Of particuarly interest to /. readers are probably those sites with open, thriving, growing APIs. smugmug's got one, as does flickr.
:)
The result, of course, is tons of user-created uploaders, organizers, applications, and even sister web services. Pretty sweet, if you ask me, and lots of fun. There's not many things more rewarding than a customer discovering the API and coming up with something brilliant.
Disclaimer: I co-founded smugmug, so bias is present, but I've been a geek my whole life, so open APIs still get me excited.
For the curious, we actually ran an intensive, scientific, blind "taste test" of all the major labs/printing services.
Details to be found here.
Enjoy!
Don
Hey, thanks. :)
I'm the CEO at smugmug.com, arguably one of flickr's better competitors. (Actually, since we were here before them and have larger share, I suppose they're one our better competitors. Whatever).
Luckily, the flickr gang and I have had a chance to meet and hang out, and to be honest, they're very smart, talented people. There are a lot of other companies playing in this space, and most of them don't have a clue.
I think it would help all of us who are clueful if someone (the media, geeks who have family that hang on their every word, etc) would sit up and notice that sites like ofoto and shutterfly provide *really poor* sharing. They're sorta like the AOL of photo sharing. Thank goodness sites like smugmug and flickr exist once people discover how not-useful their sites are.
Kudos to the flickr guys for the great reviews! They deserve them.
Don
Yes, if they had to shut the service down for some reason, they would do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
/. opinion, not everyone who's out to make a buck is evil. :)
They're gamers too, and since I personally know them, I can speak to their character. Contrary to popular
Don
I keep hearing this argument over and over: "it should be cheaper if I download it."
I can't understand this argument at all, hopefully you or someone else can help illuminate me.
It's the same game. The major cost of the game is not the CD. It's the long hours of work by 65-100 people involved in the title. It's the 6 years of effort and time.
There's a very real possibility that Half-Life 2 couldnt' have gotten made like it is today without banking on Steam being a success. It was a *very* expensive game to make. Just do the math on the # of employees, the # of years, etc. The higher margin on Steam might very well be a necessity just for Valve to break even or profit.
Given a choice between a game as good and as polished as Half-Life 2 for $50 via Steam, or a much lesser game for $40 via Steam, which would you choose?
If you want Half-Life 3 to be as incredible as Half-Life 2, Steam *must* be a success. The economics dictate it. The # of people buying PC games isn't appreciating much, but the budget is skyrocketing. Valve *must* find more margin somewhere, and Steam is their solution.
I'd love to understand the other side of the viewpoint though. Why would you demand a lower price, knowing that it would destroy the quality of future titles?
Don
I should be clear here: I'm not suggesting a move away from the publisher-developer model.
Publishers take a lot of flak, but they do provide valuable services: financing, marketing, quality assurance, etc. For a small developer, those resources are invaluable. There's a reason even companies like id and Epic, with a long string of continous hits and plenty of cash, keep using publishers.
I'm not saying the relationship won't change - it probably will, and has a few times in gaming's past already.
But the big move here is the move away from (or at least an alternative to) retail. The retailer takes a pretty huge chunk of the dough from the title. With that chunk back in play, both the developer and publisher stand to benefit.
Requiring the CD in the drive AND Steam is idiotic, I agree. Alas, I'm fairly positive that was mandated by Vivendi, Half-Life 2's publisher. I doubt Valve would care one way or the other, what with Steam.
Steam clearly has its fair share of problems. But I'm optimistic both about its ability to evolve to compensate and overcome them and about the ability for other people in the industry to take not of its shortcomings and create good alternatives.
I think if it failed completely, we'd be stuck with retail for quite awhile longer. I've seen the way VC and other investors react when there's some high-profile crater in a new space... it takes awhile to forget.
Don
Yes, if you're installing a brand-new copy of the game and there isn't a Steam server to talk to, there might be issues.
A standalone patch could solve it, easily. (And as some have noted, there are probably some shady patches out there that do just this already).
But more importantly, Steam isn't very costly to operate in a "authentication only" mode, so I can't see this piece going away anytime soon. It's probably pennies per transaction, if it's even that high.
The costly piece (relatively speaking) is the actual transmission of gigabytes worth of data. That piece isn't necessary to let you play your retail copy, so it's not a big issue.
Look, the bottom line is, I lose or destroy CDs all the time. I have tons of games I'd love to replay, but I can't find the CDs. Steam disappearing is no different than losing a CD, except that it's far far less likely to happen since it's a money-making venture. It would be idiotic of them to shut it down when it's generating cash.
Don
Note: I don't work for Valve, I'm just a fan who has some friends there. My word isn't gospel (and you're insane if that ever crossed your mind ;)
Steam doesn't need to talk to the servers except during initial install. You can run it for years in disconnected mode, and it doesn't need to run on every boot. You can, if you'd like, connect just once and never again. Your game keeps working.
I seriously doubt Steam will get discontinued anytime within the usual "shelf life" of HL2, so it's probably a non-issue, but I don't see why it would be difficult to extricate Steam from HL2 if it had to die.
Don
I have to politely disagree. :)
Steam works fine in a disconnected mode after you've authenticated, for one thing.
And for another, it's completely braindead easy for them to push out a small patch to Steam users that removes Steam as a requirement for unlocking/playing/whatever if they decide to shutdown the service. All installed and future copies can easily be un-Steamed.
Don
For those inclined not to click, the short story is thus:
- Half-Life 2 took tens of millions of $$ to make and 6 years.
- Valve only makes $5-10 per copy retail.
- With Steam, they can make closer to $25-30 per copy.
= We get better games if Steam is a success*
= If it's not, we'll see retail prices rise to $60-80 in the near future to compensate.
Long live Steam!
* If you buy into the more time + more money = better game. Given the right talent, I think it does, but there's always games like Rollercoaster Tycoon to prove us wrong...
Don
I wrote a short entry on Steam and why online distribution (or a worse alternative) is inevitable for PC games (console too, eventually). I'd love to hear some commentary on it from fellow /.ers.
:) No clue why it doesn't intelligently swarm yet...
Also, I've heard many complaints about Steam's bandwidth and whatnot. The solution is simple, and Valve went so far as to hire Bram Cohen, of BitTorrent fame, at one point to work on Steam. (Note the timestamp on this article before complaining I'm outta date
Don
We used to use Gallery for our photos, but while it's easily the best installable package around, and much better than lots of online photo sharing places, we eventually outgrew it. It wasn't easy enough for my computer-illiterate family members, and it wasn't powerful or stylish enough for those who were literate.
:)
Rather than look elsewhere, I built my own. It's now a thriving service all it's own, and our mantras are Easy and Style. Every decision we make is governed by those two directives, and it's paying off. We have soccer moms, Grandmas, servicement stationed in Iraq, and many many more using the service. Howard Dean runs his presidential campaign using smugmug.
The downside is that it's not free. You get a week to try it out free, but then it's $30/year (not month!). That gets you a fantastic, stylish, and easy-to use photo sharing site with unlimited storage. Best of all, it can be customized to link seamlessly with other websites, such as your blog or whatever you'd like.
Howard Dean's presidential campaign: http://photos.deanforamerica.com/
My wife's photography business: http://emphoto.smugmug.com/
We are, of course, Linux, Mac OS X, and yes, even Windows friendly.
Check it out. We're small, but profitable, and I promise we have the best customer service on the net. We always will.
My wife (emphoto.com) is a pro-photographer, so we follow all of this very closely. She's using Canon 10D and D60 bodies, but the EOS Rebel looks like a great camera, especially for the price.
I run a photo sharing site that quite a lot of pro photographers use, and they've taken a lot of test shots with them already:
Garden
Test shots
Botanical Center
Botanical Center #2
Sunset
Night Shots
A Wedding
Westminster City Park
dpreview also has a great review, as always.
Don
Here it is, tons of bandwidth, not going anywhere like some of the others (I own the site): Penny Arcade Archive
Enjoy!
Ok, I'm probably dumb and paranoid. :)
... is yours?
Found a press release about it, afterall, so perhaps RedHat will still be supporting Hammer.
Let's hope so.
Don my smug mug is on smugmug
I'm a little concerned that this may lead to no x86-64 (Opteron, Althon64) support from RedHat. :(
:(
... is yours?
HP co-owns the IP for Itanium with Intel, so they have a vested interest in seeing Itanium get lots of support, and AMD x86-64 get none. RedHat has already announced Itanium versions of Advanced Server, but AFAIK, has been silent on the x86-64 front.
SuSE has announced long ago that they'd release x86-64 versions of their distro to coincide with Opteron's release, and they seem to be actively involved with that process.
Am I being paranoid here? Or does it look like RH might not support the most cost-effective 64bit platform going? Not all of us have deep pockets for I2.
Don
my smug mug is on smugmug
Well crap. Somehow slash is messed up. This was a reply to someone's post in their Journal, NOT a reply to anything in this thread.
:)
I think slash is getting a little confused.
I think your test works, stil. :)
:(
Though I'm not sure how the goatse got in here. Dangit. I'm rarely caught with my guard down, but I was that time.
You just proved our point. Our DRM was never, ever billed as a secure solution. Only an easy-to-use solution.
Don
You're correct. We tried to think of the most common things people would want to do with their purchased content, but it would be impossible for us to anticipate every use. This is a very good point.
:(
I should note that getting copyright holders to agree to our less-restricted DRM was like pulling teeth sometimes. One of the reasons we had to implement a DRM at all (it was something like a 51% / 49% vote for DRM over no DRM... very close) was to appease them. Without their content, we couldn't even try our concept.
I happen to think that there needs to be a balance between customer needs and copyright holder's. Most DRMs err on stripping away all or nearly all customer rights, but we tried to get somewhere in between where all parties are happy. Deciding where to draw the line is difficult.
I'm afraid that without some sort of control, many copyright holders will prevent their content from ever showing up digitally, which I think would be a shame. It's not nearly as simple to digitize and transmit a book as it is other forms of media, so without their involvement, it might never happen.
Don
You're wrong. We did want you to copy your document. Back it up, share it with friends, read it on your desktop and laptop.
We wanted to make it as close to a magazine as possible without outright allowing free transmission.
I think we struck the right balance.
Don
I didn't mention it in the article, but we did do this.
When reading or printing the document, the original purchaser's full name was embedded in the lower-right corner of the document. My other posts here outline our fair-use stance, but basically, peopel were encouraged to copy, print, and share their documents. They can do that with a magazine, right? Shouldn't be any different for our eMatter.
It was a key feature from day one, and I don't know why I didn't mention it in the article. Silly me.
Don
Our solution specifically encouraged fair-use copying, sharing, and unlimited printing. So by your definition, I guess we weren't a DRM.
Since we did make some attempt to prevent mega-easy outright theft of the content, while not preventing the original customer their fair-use rights, I still consider it to be a DRM. Just a DRM done "The Right Way" (or at least a big step in that direction).
Don
It was a little more complex than that, since the PDFs themselves were encrypted (admittedly, with Adobe's flawed solution).
But the general idea was to allow fair-use copying, prevent casual thievery, and be easy-to-use.
Hard-core security wasn't a concern *at all* since it would make the document difficult to use.
Ease of use, and the ability for the consumer to do *what they wanted* (such as copying, sharing, and printing) was a core design goal.
Don