I'm not sure how you got to +5 Insightful but you might want to re-read what he said a few times, because you've clearly completely mis-interpreted it.
He has, I thought quite clearly, said that the piracy rates of his game seem unaffected since he stopped using DRM. It's not an argument for it, it's an argument to not bother, because with or without DRM the piracy rates appear similar. It's the piracy itself that is the "unavoidable fact" that he makes reference to.
Maybe thats where you and at least 4 other people got confused. I honestly can't see how you could have possibly read it in the way that your analogy reads.
DRM is fundimentally flawed in that it only affects your paying customers.
And pirating because of DRM is fundamentally flawed is that it only affects the suffering devs, and not the publisher for whom the fault of including the DRM lays squarely at the feet of.
The same publisher that will just keep pushing for harder DRM because they aren't seeing the sales they want, and are seeing ever rising piracy. Meanwhile the devs just get dissolved because their game doesn't sell as well as the publisher wants.
Just to make your lack of understanding of the situation complete, this is where you now tell me that it's a simple case of the developer holding out until they find a publisher that is happy to release a DRM free product. Because that will be good for a laugh.
What the hell. I pine for the days of cd-checks being the worst type of DRM. Granted a laptop is a different setup. But a 1tb SATA is about the price of a new game in Australia, so I can have an ever expanding folder purely of ISOs of games I've bought, imaged and then just mounted in a virtual drive for when I want to play them. It's much the same as buying a CD nowdays; you buy it, rip it, then put the CD away safely for the next time you need to rip it, which is unlikely to be soon.
Not only that, it was the root cause. People seem to forget that. So many people whinge and bitch about DRM and how they might as well pirate because pirates get the better run of it. But that will just continue the vicious circle. Piracy got us to where we are today with painful DRM and limitations on the amount of times we can even install a fucking game, which is utterly ridiculous. And yet people seem to claim that the answer is more piracy, as if that will somehow fix the problem with DRM, when in fact it will only make it worse.
Whatever the answer to this downward spiral is, it's not JUST PIRATE IT HURR. The real concern is that it's gone too far. It's become a cruel hypocrisy. If you pirate it, the sales aren't seen, the lack of them is attributed to piracy or a bad game, and the IP or the devs are dropped (or both), and nobody wins. If you vote with your wallet, the lost sales are attributed to piracy or a bad game, and the same happens as before. Ubisoft say that PoP will come out without DRM, and we'll see what happens. Ubisoft are now touting an online constant DRM platform like Steam but (yes it's possible) worse. Obviously that didn't work out so well, but we're so deep into it now that it didn't even have to be piracy. The latest PoP was a god-awful game with zero challenge so it's not suprising that, for whatever reason, it wasn't seen to sell well, but the only reasoning ascribed to bad sales nowadays is piracy. Every game is expected to do exceedingly well, and if it doesn't, well it's piracy (but lets drop the devs and the IP just in case).
About the only real way to do it is to have torrents that are purely for the game cracks, and then pony up for the legit game and then crack it to avoid DRM. The sales are good, and the torrent lists just show game cracks instead of full ISOs. It's not ideal but it's not as bad as showing 5000 people downloading the latest game. This is how I buy my PC games nowadays, but it's hard to find torrents that are literally just the DRM skipping crack. I purchased a copy of ANNO 1404 at full price (I was too impatient to wait for a price drop, it seemed that awesome, and it is), and I still had to wait for a full ISO to download just so I could grab the crack for TAGES off of it.
Either that or just ditch modern gaming altogether.
Hell, the golden age of gaming was still the Playstation 2 and on the PC in the time period up till about 2004, just before developers really got into the mindset that most games could be pushed to console and be given a shitty PC port afterwards, and the DRM mindset wasn't as ingrained as it is now. You could stick with that time period, and maybe have a Dreamcast off to the side, and not have to deal with insane DRM, get games dirt cheap and still have a solid line up of titles for a very long time. Maybe reach out into the now for a few key titles like Stalker and Oblivion (after you grab about 3gb worth of mods) just for kicks. But I digress.
If your books are about half imagery and half story, when the movies end up having about an hours worth of plot and the rest as battle scenes and aforementioned imagery then I guess you have done a bang-up job. But Dune is a bit of a bigger undertaking. It's like trying to create a movie around The Foundation Saga. It's just not as easy as massive battle scenes full of cut and paste soldiers.
One of the biggest shames in PC RPG history is the amount of RPGs that use real-time or pause time combat. Baldur's Gate should have never been pause-time, and all those first person RPGs (Ravenloft etc) that have this idiotic mouse hammering real time combat... ugh.
Well, nerds already hate flash, so if something that is going to be popular with the un-tech-savvy (or wanna-be tech savvy) crowd is going to drop flash, then there's hope yet. Oh god I'm so close to hoping for success for Apple. I think I hear the stamping of distant hooves.
"I don't think so. 20 years is lot of years. Even the TV I bough 10 years ago doesn't work anymore (not showing tv channels at least), because digital TV got instructed. Did it really bother me that much? Not really. I just bough a new one with lots of new fancy features and HD picture.
Not everything in life last forever. The pizza I ate yesterday is gone. It was still good and I enjoyed the experience. So is my ex but I enjoyed that experience too and now its time to move into new things."
How the fuck did such completely irrelevant comparisons become rated insightful.
We've finally gone full circle; the justifications for DRM/game ownership/control have become as retarded as the justifications for piracy.
Posting your crap online makes it that much easier to ignore than if you bother people in the streets or coming knocking on their doors bothering them in the name of your chosen mythology.
This invitation should extend to all religious institutions and their constituents.
Looking Glass Studios went out of business even though they've produced over half a dozen of the best games of all time. Terra Nova, Thief 1 and 2, System Shock 1 and 2, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, Car and Driver, Flight Unlimited. Actually, if you find a list of their games you'll see that they didn't really had any failures.
Black Isle were producing great games and still broke down, although Interplay may not have helped that situation. Troika then died and Obsidian have only really done NWN2, unless you actually want to count unfinished but still released games in KOTOR2.
People always bitch about good games being ignored nowadays as if it's some sort of new occurrence, and how crap games kill companies if they hit hard enough. But great companies can still die purely because you can create games that are simply too awesome for mainstream gaming to handle.
Starcraft Ghost actually is evidence for Tobor's post, you do realise? Blizzard saw that Ghost wasn't going to be up to scratch and canned it, thus preserving their perfect track record. Cancelled games can hardly affect this, otherwise we'd be talking about Warcraft Adventures well before any mention of Ghost.
privacy will come back - MAYBE - in another generation or two. once this one has grown up and found out the hard way, society might start to veer back a little bit. but it WILL take being burned for the kids to day to really find out.
Wanna know something really depressing? It probably never will, because in the same way that speeding and not wearing seatbelts causes deadly car accidents, stuff like 'being burned' always happens to 'someone else'. And generally, like the car accident victim, the person getting burned is then no longer in a position to warn others of the dangers of what they're doing. Where are you going to warn Facebook users that Facebook is privacy adverse place and then convince them that this a problem? Facebook? It's probably all they read.
I presume the "Informative" bit of this post's karma is that we are now suitably informed that you know nothing of PC gaming, and that you're one of those horribly painful people who will claim that there can't possibly be a problem for anyone because you personally haven't experienced it. That's fantastic, thanks for posting.
PC did multiplayer first, it did it better and, when not getting hand me down console port versions of games and their multiplayer structure, still does it best. Complete control is in the hands of the gamers, and because we're not one-button-online-play requiring retards and in posession of the intelligence and attention-span required to create and administer our own servers, it was great and provided the flexibility to not only simply play the games but to create new experiences out of the base game. Now the console kiddies come along with their only experience of multiplayer being Multiplayer->Find Server->Join, to whom a 'mod' is sticking Gears of War faceplate on their 360, and in their limited view of the world think that this is how it's always been done, and dribble the type of bullshit above about how people who they don't understand don't know what their talking about and how things they've probably never experienced are crap.
You have truly blessed us with your insight, kind sir, and I thank you for taking out the time to do so.
The fact is that for all the graphic superiority and mouse/keyboard functionality, the PC has it's own flaws that degrade the game to the point where you aren't satisfied by it. Also, do you really think that having private servers would help? Or have private servers been putting a pretty enough band-aid on the PC gaming experience that people haven't noticed it's not quite what it's cracked up to be?
Clueless. Truly clueless. What flaws are you talking about anyway? I wanted to just quote that line out of context but even context here it makes no sense as you haven't actually prefaced or cited it with anything that would make sense.
And then this deliberate levelling adds another level of default advantage to the actual learning advantage that comes from doing anything for longer than someone else. The difference is that, using the old model, if you're just plain good at, say, FPS in general, you can still come in fresh and get some kills and provide a challenge for existing players. Nowadays coming in 2-3 months after release means that your relative skill is no longer an issue, people are artifically boosted to the point where it's unfair from the start. But lets face it, if there is one thing that the current generation of gaming kids loves, it's endlessly killing people with no chance of themself being killed. Now it's just officially sanctioned instead of requiring cheats. But of course cheats still exist on top of that. So it's just easier to play the older games where the retard-cheat mindset people have moved on from long ago.
It's the truth. If you look carefully in the first Batman, you can see Alfred lying prone with a rifle on the edge of the grassy knoll overlooking the alleyway in which the lives of Thomas and Martha Wayne were taken.
Back and to the left. Back and to the left. Back and to the left.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure how you got to +5 Insightful but you might want to re-read what he said a few times, because you've clearly completely mis-interpreted it.
He has, I thought quite clearly, said that the piracy rates of his game seem unaffected since he stopped using DRM. It's not an argument for it, it's an argument to not bother, because with or without DRM the piracy rates appear similar. It's the piracy itself that is the "unavoidable fact" that he makes reference to.
Maybe thats where you and at least 4 other people got confused. I honestly can't see how you could have possibly read it in the way that your analogy reads.
DRM is fundimentally flawed in that it only affects your paying customers.
And pirating because of DRM is fundamentally flawed is that it only affects the suffering devs, and not the publisher for whom the fault of including the DRM lays squarely at the feet of.
The same publisher that will just keep pushing for harder DRM because they aren't seeing the sales they want, and are seeing ever rising piracy. Meanwhile the devs just get dissolved because their game doesn't sell as well as the publisher wants.
Just to make your lack of understanding of the situation complete, this is where you now tell me that it's a simple case of the developer holding out until they find a publisher that is happy to release a DRM free product. Because that will be good for a laugh.
What the hell. I pine for the days of cd-checks being the worst type of DRM. Granted a laptop is a different setup. But a 1tb SATA is about the price of a new game in Australia, so I can have an ever expanding folder purely of ISOs of games I've bought, imaged and then just mounted in a virtual drive for when I want to play them. It's much the same as buying a CD nowdays; you buy it, rip it, then put the CD away safely for the next time you need to rip it, which is unlikely to be soon.
Piracy was around long before DRM.
Not only that, it was the root cause. People seem to forget that. So many people whinge and bitch about DRM and how they might as well pirate because pirates get the better run of it. But that will just continue the vicious circle. Piracy got us to where we are today with painful DRM and limitations on the amount of times we can even install a fucking game, which is utterly ridiculous. And yet people seem to claim that the answer is more piracy, as if that will somehow fix the problem with DRM, when in fact it will only make it worse.
Whatever the answer to this downward spiral is, it's not JUST PIRATE IT HURR. The real concern is that it's gone too far. It's become a cruel hypocrisy. If you pirate it, the sales aren't seen, the lack of them is attributed to piracy or a bad game, and the IP or the devs are dropped (or both), and nobody wins. If you vote with your wallet, the lost sales are attributed to piracy or a bad game, and the same happens as before. Ubisoft say that PoP will come out without DRM, and we'll see what happens. Ubisoft are now touting an online constant DRM platform like Steam but (yes it's possible) worse. Obviously that didn't work out so well, but we're so deep into it now that it didn't even have to be piracy. The latest PoP was a god-awful game with zero challenge so it's not suprising that, for whatever reason, it wasn't seen to sell well, but the only reasoning ascribed to bad sales nowadays is piracy. Every game is expected to do exceedingly well, and if it doesn't, well it's piracy (but lets drop the devs and the IP just in case).
About the only real way to do it is to have torrents that are purely for the game cracks, and then pony up for the legit game and then crack it to avoid DRM. The sales are good, and the torrent lists just show game cracks instead of full ISOs. It's not ideal but it's not as bad as showing 5000 people downloading the latest game. This is how I buy my PC games nowadays, but it's hard to find torrents that are literally just the DRM skipping crack. I purchased a copy of ANNO 1404 at full price (I was too impatient to wait for a price drop, it seemed that awesome, and it is), and I still had to wait for a full ISO to download just so I could grab the crack for TAGES off of it.
Either that or just ditch modern gaming altogether.
Hell, the golden age of gaming was still the Playstation 2 and on the PC in the time period up till about 2004, just before developers really got into the mindset that most games could be pushed to console and be given a shitty PC port afterwards, and the DRM mindset wasn't as ingrained as it is now. You could stick with that time period, and maybe have a Dreamcast off to the side, and not have to deal with insane DRM, get games dirt cheap and still have a solid line up of titles for a very long time. Maybe reach out into the now for a few key titles like Stalker and Oblivion (after you grab about 3gb worth of mods) just for kicks. But I digress.
LOTR was thought to be impossible.
If your books are about half imagery and half story, when the movies end up having about an hours worth of plot and the rest as battle scenes and aforementioned imagery then I guess you have done a bang-up job. But Dune is a bit of a bigger undertaking. It's like trying to create a movie around The Foundation Saga. It's just not as easy as massive battle scenes full of cut and paste soldiers.
Battlefield Earth all but proved that great sci-fi books are often unfilmable.
Old? Turn Based?
Knights of the Old Republic is neither.
One of the biggest shames in PC RPG history is the amount of RPGs that use real-time or pause time combat. Baldur's Gate should have never been pause-time, and all those first person RPGs (Ravenloft etc) that have this idiotic mouse hammering real time combat ... ugh.
I so did not post anon.
Well, nerds already hate flash, so if something that is going to be popular with the un-tech-savvy (or wanna-be tech savvy) crowd is going to drop flash, then there's hope yet. Oh god I'm so close to hoping for success for Apple. I think I hear the stamping of distant hooves.
Cd-check algorithms, I'm sorry I ever complained about you. In fact, you're still here. Problem is you're not alone.
If you want freedom, you have the PC.
I use Steam
DOES NOT COMPUTE
The cracked / pirated version OF THE EXE is simply superior.
If you're not buying the game, you're part of the reason why were here in the first place.
Rentals are meant to be cheap and easy. If you wanted expensive and complicated, you'd buy it.
"I don't think so. 20 years is lot of years. Even the TV I bough 10 years ago doesn't work anymore (not showing tv channels at least), because digital TV got instructed. Did it really bother me that much? Not really. I just bough a new one with lots of new fancy features and HD picture.
Not everything in life last forever. The pizza I ate yesterday is gone. It was still good and I enjoyed the experience. So is my ex but I enjoyed that experience too and now its time to move into new things."
How the fuck did such completely irrelevant comparisons become rated insightful.
We've finally gone full circle; the justifications for DRM/game ownership/control have become as retarded as the justifications for piracy.
APPLAUD YOU BASTARDS
I have nothing of value to add except to say that this is fucking brilliant.
Imagine a million cats being swung by their tails, all at once.
Posting your crap online makes it that much easier to ignore than if you bother people in the streets or coming knocking on their doors bothering them in the name of your chosen mythology.
This invitation should extend to all religious institutions and their constituents.
Looking Glass Studios went out of business even though they've produced over half a dozen of the best games of all time. Terra Nova, Thief 1 and 2, System Shock 1 and 2, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, Car and Driver, Flight Unlimited. Actually, if you find a list of their games you'll see that they didn't really had any failures.
Black Isle were producing great games and still broke down, although Interplay may not have helped that situation. Troika then died and Obsidian have only really done NWN2, unless you actually want to count unfinished but still released games in KOTOR2.
People always bitch about good games being ignored nowadays as if it's some sort of new occurrence, and how crap games kill companies if they hit hard enough. But great companies can still die purely because you can create games that are simply too awesome for mainstream gaming to handle.
Starcraft Ghost actually is evidence for Tobor's post, you do realise? Blizzard saw that Ghost wasn't going to be up to scratch and canned it, thus preserving their perfect track record. Cancelled games can hardly affect this, otherwise we'd be talking about Warcraft Adventures well before any mention of Ghost.
privacy will come back - MAYBE - in another generation or two. once this one has grown up and found out the hard way, society might start to veer back a little bit. but it WILL take being burned for the kids to day to really find out.
Wanna know something really depressing? It probably never will, because in the same way that speeding and not wearing seatbelts causes deadly car accidents, stuff like 'being burned' always happens to 'someone else'. And generally, like the car accident victim, the person getting burned is then no longer in a position to warn others of the dangers of what they're doing. Where are you going to warn Facebook users that Facebook is privacy adverse place and then convince them that this a problem? Facebook? It's probably all they read.
I presume the "Informative" bit of this post's karma is that we are now suitably informed that you know nothing of PC gaming, and that you're one of those horribly painful people who will claim that there can't possibly be a problem for anyone because you personally haven't experienced it. That's fantastic, thanks for posting.
PC did multiplayer first, it did it better and, when not getting hand me down console port versions of games and their multiplayer structure, still does it best. Complete control is in the hands of the gamers, and because we're not one-button-online-play requiring retards and in posession of the intelligence and attention-span required to create and administer our own servers, it was great and provided the flexibility to not only simply play the games but to create new experiences out of the base game. Now the console kiddies come along with their only experience of multiplayer being Multiplayer->Find Server->Join, to whom a 'mod' is sticking Gears of War faceplate on their 360, and in their limited view of the world think that this is how it's always been done, and dribble the type of bullshit above about how people who they don't understand don't know what their talking about and how things they've probably never experienced are crap.
You have truly blessed us with your insight, kind sir, and I thank you for taking out the time to do so.
The fact is that for all the graphic superiority and mouse/keyboard functionality, the PC has it's own flaws that degrade the game to the point where you aren't satisfied by it. Also, do you really think that having private servers would help? Or have private servers been putting a pretty enough band-aid on the PC gaming experience that people haven't noticed it's not quite what it's cracked up to be?
Clueless. Truly clueless. What flaws are you talking about anyway? I wanted to just quote that line out of context but even context here it makes no sense as you haven't actually prefaced or cited it with anything that would make sense.
And then this deliberate levelling adds another level of default advantage to the actual learning advantage that comes from doing anything for longer than someone else. The difference is that, using the old model, if you're just plain good at, say, FPS in general, you can still come in fresh and get some kills and provide a challenge for existing players. Nowadays coming in 2-3 months after release means that your relative skill is no longer an issue, people are artifically boosted to the point where it's unfair from the start. But lets face it, if there is one thing that the current generation of gaming kids loves, it's endlessly killing people with no chance of themself being killed. Now it's just officially sanctioned instead of requiring cheats. But of course cheats still exist on top of that. So it's just easier to play the older games where the retard-cheat mindset people have moved on from long ago.
World War 2 itself pre-dates Wolfenstein. HA PWNED
Situation: I am being "cyber-stalked".
Solution: Log off WOW.
I'm certain I've seen this exact same logic used elsewhere, except followed up with "... and you let the terrorists win".
It's the truth. If you look carefully in the first Batman, you can see Alfred lying prone with a rifle on the edge of the grassy knoll overlooking the alleyway in which the lives of Thomas and Martha Wayne were taken.
Back and to the left.
Back and to the left.
Back and to the left.