Looks like you need to learn to read. There's nothing in there that says they're absolutely going to remove it before release. Read it carefully: if they find something better than GameGuard, they're going to switch to that, but in the mean time, they're sticking with GameGuard.
Depends on who you've contracted the work out to. I'm not kidding. Some inspectors "know" the contractors such that they only do a cursory inspection of the finished product before signing it off.
That is assuming the applications are compiled as large address-aware in the first place. If they're not, then they still won't be able to use more than 2GB. All we're talking about here is doubling the limit, but if you're going to exceed 2GB, you're probably going to run into the 4GB barrier eventually anyway.
Goes even further than that. A given process can only use 2GB of memory, no matter how you set up your licensing, no matter whether you're using a 32-bit or 64-bit Windows OS, if the developers were stupid enough to not compile it as large address-aware.
You could, but you'd just be preaching to the choir. Check out the Steampowered forums sometime, there's more than enough whining about Valve to meet anyone's quota.
And no, I guarantee you, if their track record is of any indication, they'd find something they screwed up and have to issue a day zero fix even if they've ironed out all the bugs in the PC release. Which they probably won't. They still haven't fixed facestabs and invisible players, and the latest update broke rocketjumping.
You're misrepresenting the facts here. Yes, they have to pay MS or Sony to certify the content, but what if Valve explicitly wants the content to be released for free? Sony and MS aren't going to go along with this, because Sony and MS want to charge money for it. Sony and MS would be fine with the updates costing a small amount, say, $5, because they'd still get a share of each sale. But a share of diddly squat is still diddly squat.
And the free third party content can be so damn good the game developers get permission from the modders to publish it as an official add-on. Anyone remember how CounterStrike started out? Garry's Mod? Day of Defeat? TF2's community maps? And that's just on Valve's end.
I wouldn't play Supreme Commander on a system with specs as outdated as a 360 or PS3. Hell, I had trouble convincing myself to play SupCom on a PC until I splurged on computer hardware that's way overkill for what the game requires.
And then you get to the cost of the games and the cost of the DLC and realize that either you'll be starved for content or you'll be paying out the ass anyways. So much for consoles being "cheaper."
Of course it's complacency. PC users don't stand for this shit, because they know they have alternatives. If you don't want to pay for content that should've been in the game in the first place, then you're probably going to pirate it despite whatever protections the publishers think are going to prevent that from happening. They're slowly wising up to this: companies like Valve, Bioware and Stardock release updates/"DLC" for free on the PC knowing damn well that it's going to generate more interest in the core game, equaling more game sales.
Owning a gaming PC might be considered graphic proof of having more money than sense, at least until you start seeing just how fickle PC gamers are when it comes to what games they're buying and WHY they're buying those games. Console gamers, despite the argument that consoles are cheaper, will inevitably demonstrate that they'll buy just about anything available on the service because they're starved for content and don't realize (or care) just how hard they're getting screwed.
I wouldn't call a gamepad "designed" for precision aiming in two dimensions. You will inevitably require some sort of computer-assisted targeting (we PC users call this "autoaim") to make up for the fact that you're approximating X-Y coordinates with a severely motion-limited joystick. Some games even go so far to include explicit target designation where the fun of playing a first person shooter is diluted down to the interactivity of a quicktime event. Select your enemy, press a button to fire, first person to get the timing right wins because your shots will never miss. It's bullshit. If you took those handicaps away from gamepad players and put them on the same servers as keyboard-and-mouse players, the gamepad players would ragequit in less than five minutes cuz there would be no contest whatsoever.
In that case, they probably have to pay the console companies to get their DLC "approved" in the first place. Knowing Valve's penchant for fucking things up so bad with every update that they have to release "fixes" for the updates sometimes on the same day as the updates themselves, it doesn't make much financial sense to support the game on a platform where they're going to get screwed each time they have to fix something that they broke with an update in the first place.
So again, blame goes to Sony and Microsoft for being greedy douchebags.
You should play Fallout 3 on the PC, although after you're done modding it, you'll probably have to use editbin or some other tool to flag the executable as large address-aware to get the damn thing to stop crashing as easily. Throwing this tip out there because Bethsoft still doesn't get it.
Valve isn't the only company that does this. Stardock has been doing this with Galactic Civilizations 2 for much longer than Valve has with TF2, it just doesn't get the same amount of attention because GC2 is a PC-only TBS whereas TF2 is a multiplatform FPS.
Not even close. The end user can modify the game to his heart's content provided he knows how, with a PC. Good fucking luck accomplishing the same with the console. All you're getting with a console is "approved" content, ergo content that the publisher thinks is good enough to charge for.
This isn't "modding," this is "charging for updates."
Or they could just stop being cheap greedy bastards with how much you pay for games and additional content. I mean, for the sake of context, look at how much you pay for Fallout 3 DLC as opposed to the core game itself. It's disproportionate. You might get 30-50 hours out of the core game, and if you play through every bit of the core game, you'll easily get 120 hours out of it. The DLC? $10 each for a couple more hours at best.
And there are quite a few PC-exclusive games that can be considered casual games. So what? The point is not whether the games are casual versus non-casual, it's whether the consoles themselves are casual versus non-casual. You sit on a couch in front of a television to use a console. Not necessarily so with a PC. You play games on a console, and that's pretty much it. Not necessarily so with a PC. You pay a small up front cost to get the console. Not necessarily so with a PC. You're stuck with whatever content the designer of the console wants you to have access to. Not necessarily so with a PC. You are trading functionality and freedom for convenience, and convenience always comes with an attached price tag.
Then why's it such a big deal in the first place? You own a console, you pay for content, and when more content is released, you pay for that too. It's the nature of the platform, and you damn well knew that when you bought the console in the first place. Just like with the PC, you damn well know that you can get, for free, just about anything that rivals what you'd have to pay for, even operating systems, and no one entity controls everything that you have access to. Again, it's the nature of the platform. So I'll ask you again, why is this such a big deal in the first place? Why all the whining over having to pay for DLC on consoles and not on PCs? Isn't that the tradeoff for paying a fraction of what a PC costs up-front?
No, you said an open beta gets you tons of feedback that's useless. In effect implying that there's no reason at all to run an open beta in the first place.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but the inherent nature of the PC platform precludes releasing a perfectly stable 1.0 release that will run on anything and everything that could be called a PC, completely done, completely bug-free? So as far as the PC platform is concerned, "a good QA team" only serves to run damage control reports to the devs on what they found wrong, even though chances are, you're only scraping the surface of what's really wrong with the product and you can't possibly find out everything that's wrong until your customers get a hold of it. So why keep it out of their hands in the first place?
Incidentally, "adding features" and "fixing bugs" can be considered the same thing, since a feature that is commonly requested is for the product to actually work.
So rather than getting tons of feedback about whether or not the game actually runs right is "useless?" Having worked with a good QA team, how many of your products were released to manufacturing only for a large number of your customers complaining in under a week that their newly-purchased assumed-to-be-done wondering-how-the-fuck-this-buggy-shit-got-past-QA product doesn't work?
Let's modify this a bit. Consoles are generally used by casual gamers, who own a computer but don't use it for gaming because they likely have neither the time nor the patience to learn how to game on it. Otherwise, why pay another huge sum of money for a gaming platform when you already have a gaming platform that can run just about anything? No, they buy consoles because they're idiots. They don't want to learn the system, they just want to play the games. Convenience comes at a cost, and they're fine with that cost up until finding out that those of us who bothered to learn how to game on PCs don't necessarily have to pay for the same content that they do.
That's because the one thing studios just don't get is that QA on the PC is inherently pointless. You want good QA? Fire your QA team and let your devs run free open betas.
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Or at very least, don't build your data center on the ground floor in an area prone to flooding.
Looks like you need to learn to read. There's nothing in there that says they're absolutely going to remove it before release. Read it carefully: if they find something better than GameGuard, they're going to switch to that, but in the mean time, they're sticking with GameGuard.
Just get central air.
Depends on who you've contracted the work out to. I'm not kidding. Some inspectors "know" the contractors such that they only do a cursory inspection of the finished product before signing it off.
That is assuming the applications are compiled as large address-aware in the first place. If they're not, then they still won't be able to use more than 2GB. All we're talking about here is doubling the limit, but if you're going to exceed 2GB, you're probably going to run into the 4GB barrier eventually anyway.
Goes even further than that. A given process can only use 2GB of memory, no matter how you set up your licensing, no matter whether you're using a 32-bit or 64-bit Windows OS, if the developers were stupid enough to not compile it as large address-aware.
You could, but you'd just be preaching to the choir. Check out the Steampowered forums sometime, there's more than enough whining about Valve to meet anyone's quota.
And no, I guarantee you, if their track record is of any indication, they'd find something they screwed up and have to issue a day zero fix even if they've ironed out all the bugs in the PC release. Which they probably won't. They still haven't fixed facestabs and invisible players, and the latest update broke rocketjumping.
You're misrepresenting the facts here. Yes, they have to pay MS or Sony to certify the content, but what if Valve explicitly wants the content to be released for free? Sony and MS aren't going to go along with this, because Sony and MS want to charge money for it. Sony and MS would be fine with the updates costing a small amount, say, $5, because they'd still get a share of each sale. But a share of diddly squat is still diddly squat.
And the free third party content can be so damn good the game developers get permission from the modders to publish it as an official add-on. Anyone remember how CounterStrike started out? Garry's Mod? Day of Defeat? TF2's community maps? And that's just on Valve's end.
I wouldn't play Supreme Commander on a system with specs as outdated as a 360 or PS3. Hell, I had trouble convincing myself to play SupCom on a PC until I splurged on computer hardware that's way overkill for what the game requires.
And then you get to the cost of the games and the cost of the DLC and realize that either you'll be starved for content or you'll be paying out the ass anyways. So much for consoles being "cheaper."
Of course it's complacency. PC users don't stand for this shit, because they know they have alternatives. If you don't want to pay for content that should've been in the game in the first place, then you're probably going to pirate it despite whatever protections the publishers think are going to prevent that from happening. They're slowly wising up to this: companies like Valve, Bioware and Stardock release updates/"DLC" for free on the PC knowing damn well that it's going to generate more interest in the core game, equaling more game sales.
Owning a gaming PC might be considered graphic proof of having more money than sense, at least until you start seeing just how fickle PC gamers are when it comes to what games they're buying and WHY they're buying those games. Console gamers, despite the argument that consoles are cheaper, will inevitably demonstrate that they'll buy just about anything available on the service because they're starved for content and don't realize (or care) just how hard they're getting screwed.
I wouldn't call a gamepad "designed" for precision aiming in two dimensions. You will inevitably require some sort of computer-assisted targeting (we PC users call this "autoaim") to make up for the fact that you're approximating X-Y coordinates with a severely motion-limited joystick. Some games even go so far to include explicit target designation where the fun of playing a first person shooter is diluted down to the interactivity of a quicktime event. Select your enemy, press a button to fire, first person to get the timing right wins because your shots will never miss. It's bullshit. If you took those handicaps away from gamepad players and put them on the same servers as keyboard-and-mouse players, the gamepad players would ragequit in less than five minutes cuz there would be no contest whatsoever.
In that case, they probably have to pay the console companies to get their DLC "approved" in the first place. Knowing Valve's penchant for fucking things up so bad with every update that they have to release "fixes" for the updates sometimes on the same day as the updates themselves, it doesn't make much financial sense to support the game on a platform where they're going to get screwed each time they have to fix something that they broke with an update in the first place.
So again, blame goes to Sony and Microsoft for being greedy douchebags.
You should play Fallout 3 on the PC, although after you're done modding it, you'll probably have to use editbin or some other tool to flag the executable as large address-aware to get the damn thing to stop crashing as easily. Throwing this tip out there because Bethsoft still doesn't get it.
Valve isn't the only company that does this. Stardock has been doing this with Galactic Civilizations 2 for much longer than Valve has with TF2, it just doesn't get the same amount of attention because GC2 is a PC-only TBS whereas TF2 is a multiplatform FPS.
Not even close. The end user can modify the game to his heart's content provided he knows how, with a PC. Good fucking luck accomplishing the same with the console. All you're getting with a console is "approved" content, ergo content that the publisher thinks is good enough to charge for.
This isn't "modding," this is "charging for updates."
Or they could just stop being cheap greedy bastards with how much you pay for games and additional content. I mean, for the sake of context, look at how much you pay for Fallout 3 DLC as opposed to the core game itself. It's disproportionate. You might get 30-50 hours out of the core game, and if you play through every bit of the core game, you'll easily get 120 hours out of it. The DLC? $10 each for a couple more hours at best.
And there are quite a few PC-exclusive games that can be considered casual games. So what? The point is not whether the games are casual versus non-casual, it's whether the consoles themselves are casual versus non-casual. You sit on a couch in front of a television to use a console. Not necessarily so with a PC. You play games on a console, and that's pretty much it. Not necessarily so with a PC. You pay a small up front cost to get the console. Not necessarily so with a PC. You're stuck with whatever content the designer of the console wants you to have access to. Not necessarily so with a PC. You are trading functionality and freedom for convenience, and convenience always comes with an attached price tag.
Then why's it such a big deal in the first place? You own a console, you pay for content, and when more content is released, you pay for that too. It's the nature of the platform, and you damn well knew that when you bought the console in the first place. Just like with the PC, you damn well know that you can get, for free, just about anything that rivals what you'd have to pay for, even operating systems, and no one entity controls everything that you have access to. Again, it's the nature of the platform. So I'll ask you again, why is this such a big deal in the first place? Why all the whining over having to pay for DLC on consoles and not on PCs? Isn't that the tradeoff for paying a fraction of what a PC costs up-front?
No, you said an open beta gets you tons of feedback that's useless. In effect implying that there's no reason at all to run an open beta in the first place.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but the inherent nature of the PC platform precludes releasing a perfectly stable 1.0 release that will run on anything and everything that could be called a PC, completely done, completely bug-free? So as far as the PC platform is concerned, "a good QA team" only serves to run damage control reports to the devs on what they found wrong, even though chances are, you're only scraping the surface of what's really wrong with the product and you can't possibly find out everything that's wrong until your customers get a hold of it. So why keep it out of their hands in the first place?
Incidentally, "adding features" and "fixing bugs" can be considered the same thing, since a feature that is commonly requested is for the product to actually work.
So rather than getting tons of feedback about whether or not the game actually runs right is "useless?" Having worked with a good QA team, how many of your products were released to manufacturing only for a large number of your customers complaining in under a week that their newly-purchased assumed-to-be-done wondering-how-the-fuck-this-buggy-shit-got-past-QA product doesn't work?
Bullshit. Valve can't force the issue on the PS3 if they're contractually limited to letting EA call the shots on it.
Let's modify this a bit. Consoles are generally used by casual gamers, who own a computer but don't use it for gaming because they likely have neither the time nor the patience to learn how to game on it. Otherwise, why pay another huge sum of money for a gaming platform when you already have a gaming platform that can run just about anything? No, they buy consoles because they're idiots. They don't want to learn the system, they just want to play the games. Convenience comes at a cost, and they're fine with that cost up until finding out that those of us who bothered to learn how to game on PCs don't necessarily have to pay for the same content that they do.
That's because the one thing studios just don't get is that QA on the PC is inherently pointless. You want good QA? Fire your QA team and let your devs run free open betas.