IANAL but that sounds like a really strong case for a Class Action against Ubisoft.
There's absolutely no reason why these games companies can't just release the server software out into the wild so gamers can fire up their own local servers - even better, Open Source the server and there's not even a need to support it any more, those that can code will happily do it.
I wonder how well the "fit for purpose" rule applies here - in that, you bought the game on the understanding you could play it networked without any time limits and that, as of the point where the servers were turned off, it is NOT "fit for purpose" any more.
The problem I have with micro-transactions is that before micro-transactions ever existed, the stuff you'd pay for now would have been given away freely or lumped together in an eventual expansion disk.
Unfortunately, games companies have realised that they can call an expansion disk a sequel and charge twice the price for it...
I think anyone who believes DRM is just about restricting piracy is a fool to themselves - all piracy does is gives the games publishers the excuse they need to foist DRM on everyone.
Whilst online gaming and MMORPGs hold no interest for me (a bit of Quake 3 or UT2004 over the Internet is enough), the success of World of Warcraft and other games of that ilk has demonstrated clearly to games companies that players are prepared to pay monthly subscriptions for games.
And since no media/entertainment company actually wants us to "buy once, use it forever" any more, to them DRM is a great way of enforcing a rental model and having us set up monthly bank debits into their coffers - result = PROFIT!!!
I second credit going to Good Old Games - a great idea well executed.
As for Steam, it's not full-blown in-your-face DRM control but I still think it's too restrictive. Sometimes I want to be able to LAN play with a few friends and offline mode on Steam seems flaky at best.
Apologies for messing up on the embedded link, that's what comes from having a bit of keyboard delay whilst an application is compiling in the background of my Gentoo Linux PC...
The link is Good Old Games, though I suspect many on here already know the site.
I actually stopped buying many games because of the very poor quality information on the back of game boxes - specifically to do with what's required for local LAN gaming.
If you go back to the days of Red Alert 2, for example, it was possible to buy one copy of a game but install it on multiple PCs on a local LAN so that you could invite a friend over and enjoy a LAN gaming session. However, whereas whether you could do this or not used to be on the back of the game box, these days there is no mention of it - I suspect because now no games really support it, the games company preferred option being to connect to their games servers (e.g. Steam).
I don't necessarily want to be able to buy one copy of a game and install it for simultaneous play on multiple machines, but I also think that it's a bit extreme to be expected to buy a copy of the full game for each machine in order to do it - the classic recent example of this I came across was "World In Conflict Complete Edition" which, no matter how much I tried, wouldn't let me do local LAN play with it.
Many years ago I used to download cracked games from Usenet and hand them freely out to friends. But for the sake of paying out a few pounds (by the time the games get to the budget labels) compared to the problems with spreading viruses and having to explain to a lot of those friends how to install the games and get them working, I just stopped doing it.
As Cliff Harris says in the article, people will always copy stuff that costs any amount of money, sometimes only because of the "prestige" of being the first one to do it. So it's about time games companies realise this and stop with the alienating the honest customers - i.e. give us the play features we want (like LAN play facility) and stop with the restrictive DRM mechanisms.
It's truly ridiculous, in these days of optical drive-less netbooks, that a game that can be fully installed onto a hard disk still requires you to carry around the game disk with you, especially as if that disk gets damaged in transit, you have to pay for a replacement copy.
Nowadays, I still game a lot but I either play Open Source/free games or buy them on Good Old Games where optical disks and DRM are not a problem.
Hoorah! I have been saying this for years, at last someone who agrees!
All hackers are geeks, obsessive tinkerers who are prepared to go to any length to get something working the way they want it to. You cannot hack a closed system, therefore Apple users are not geeks - they're just people who want it easy but don't want to be part of the mainstream.
I've tinkered with computers for almost 30 years, right from the days of hacking in Z80 machine code on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. But things really took off for "tinkerers" with the shareware and freeware revolution that came about around the times of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, with (then) huge repositories like Aminet, Fred Fish, etc.
I've always tinkered with Windows (I hate eye-candy GUIs, I prefer functionality and speed) but for me Linux brought that to a whole new level and back to the days of the Amiga - it's now got to a point where I am never satisfied with the optimisations in packaged Linux distributions and now just use Gentoo Linux, in which I can tinker with compiler optimisation flags to my heart's content.
How come you, like at least two other repliers to my comment, seem to have the capability of reading the original article but not my response?
If you had read my posting correctly, you would have read into it that if it *WERE* possible for the iPad to support Flash games or emulators, then it would be a relatively *EASY* task of getting 1000 games onto an iPad. This is because you would not necessarily need an icon for *EACH* game because you would select the game you wanted from a pull down menu within the emulator or in the Flash tool.
*HOWEVER*, because most games on the App Store are individual downloads (maybe with the exception of some card games that support multiple versions of solitaire, or something like that), then you would need a separate icon and screen space for it for each game.
*THEREFORE* you would need to move across multiple screens, I suggest maybe as many as 20 for an iPad (because I guess one screen holds around 50 icons), in order to get to the game you wanted. This of course assumes there is no limit to the number of icons with apps you can display, or the number of screens they can be displayed upon.
What I *DARED* to suggest to those of you living in your "Apple is perfection" world is that such a large amount of icons would be far more manageable if there is an app where icons can be grouped within folders - however, I am not aware of an app that does this, at least on the Touch.
Therefore, I am stating that the author's statement of having "thousands of games" on one iPad, whilst feasibly possible from a storage perspective, would be incredibly slow to use because you would need to scroll through multiple screens to get to the game icon you actually wanted.
I'm not going to repeat myself, please read my original post once again - I know what I said.
And if you believe 1000 icons *ARE* manageable on an iPhone or iPad, then kindly enlighten me - as a techie, I am always interested in hearing how a problem is surmounted.
But as I look at my iPod Touch now, one screen holds up to 16 icons (I assume it's the same for the iPhone). Therefore, to hold 1000 icons would need 62.5 screens - it would be quite a task to scroll through that many screens to get to a game near the end, and that does assume the Touch/iPhone can have that many screens.
If there is an app to do some kind of folder management of icons, then that would make it much easier to organise.., plus I'm guessing the iPad screen holds maybe 50 icons per screen, but that would still need 20-odd screens for all of them.
So if you believe I am wrong then I am more than happy for you to tell me how so - so please enlighten me.
I suspect no fanboi buys it for the simple fact that Axiotron won't be allowed to put an Apple logo on the back of it.
After all, the whole purpose of the Apple logo is to position oneself in Starbucks in such a way as to use the logo to beam reflective light straight into the eyes of any customer walking into the establishment.
This ensures that all customers exercise their best behaviour because they know they basque in the righteous glory of one of the "Elite Few".
Right, I want you to hold your breath, count to 10, then read my article again, this time properly.
Now, can you please tell me, as the Apple expert you obviously are, how easy it would be to manage 1000 icons across multiple screens on the iPad such that the article author's statement of "thousands" of games can be deemed to be valid.
I am making the assumption that, just like the iPod Touch, there is no way to physically group icons in logical folders - in which case each game would need its own icon somewhere on one of a multiple number of screens.
Now that I've made it as simple as possible for you, either provide an intelligent answer or not comment at all - just please don't go flying off again at a tangent.
But every other Mac user on here tells me that they like OS X because there's no need to resort to using the command line as it basically takes care of itself to the point where non-savvy users can find it even easier to use than Windows.
However, you are telling me now that there is a requirement to use a command-line shell, so this kind of contradicts what all the others have been saying.
I admit, in your case, you probably do care whether or not it's running a UNIX core if you want to know what commands you can possibly use at the shell prompt - but, again, I go back to the question as to why a non-savvy user would be remotely interested in knowing what OS runs at the core.
Did I not say that a 64GB iPad could hold 1000 games averaging 65MB each?
Again, if you read my post properly, I commented on the capability of the UI to display that many pages of icons because, presumably, the interface is similar to the Touch where you just create game/app launchers on different pages, rather than being able to create folders to have more of a tree-like standard OS structure.
My point being that if each "page" can display, say, 50 icons, having to scroll through up to 20 pages to find one of your "thousand" games would be fairly unmanageable.
You're off on a tangent again, I don't need a lecture in UI programming because it's not a field I'm ever likely to go into.
But your point is what, precisely?
I use apps like Firefox, Thunderbird & Sunbird primarily because I can use them on multiple platforms, I take it as read that they have a fairly intuitive UI on the basis that I find them usable in the first place. I also cannot think of much in the way of differences in the UIs between the Windows and Linux versions, except maybe for the location of the Settings stuff in the menus.
And why do you keep ignoring my original question? I'm asking you, genuinely because I don't use OS X at all, what so great about the UI that it can add any additional usability to an email client?
But the whole point of the article seems to be to find possible uses for this product, in this case as a board game platform, which makes me wonder what usage it has in the first place.
If you do so you will see that I *WROTE* precisely what you said - namely that *BECAUSE* it cannot support Flash games or emulators, then it is quite impracticable to assume that it can support thousands of games - which presumably can only be downloaded from the Apple Store.
and because the iPad is a computer it can store thousands of games and add a variety of interactive features.
This is a great example of typical Fanboi "engage brain before mouth" syndrome. Let's look at this statement at bit more...
Firstly, it doesn't support Flash so you can't download and play the thousands of Flash games on the Internet.
Secondly, Apple doesn't make emulators available on the Apple store because of copyright restrictions - therefore there's no way of playing NES, Amiga, MAME or any other game ROMs on it, most of which would be tiny in size.
Thirdly, the biggest iPAD is 64GB which means that to get a "thousand" games on it, each game would need to average no more than 65MB.
Okay, I guess that's possible from a storage perspective, but how will that work from a UI perspective?
If each game has its own icon to select in order to play it, how many screens are you going to need to need to scroll through to get to one of the last games in your list of "thousands". Does the UI actually *SUPPORT* having that many screens of icons?
So you're saying that Apple don't know how to market their products correctly because they have an inability to demonstrate the majority of its features at the product launch? Interesting...
I'm beginning to think that you know nothing about interfaces.
I know how to use them. Other than that, I program in shell script, Perl & a bit of C, pretty much all command-line stuff so, no, I don't know how to program interfaces.
So now I've answered your question honestly, would you like to answer mine as to what more an email client needs to do?
We're not allowed to compare the iPad's functionality to a netbook because we're told it isn't a PC...
However, according to this article, it IS a games console. In which case, can we start speculating how that "hefty" 1GB A4 CPU copes with Call Of Duty Modern Warfare compared to the X-Box then?
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL but that sounds like a really strong case for a Class Action against Ubisoft.
There's absolutely no reason why these games companies can't just release the server software out into the wild so gamers can fire up their own local servers - even better, Open Source the server and there's not even a need to support it any more, those that can code will happily do it.
I wonder how well the "fit for purpose" rule applies here - in that, you bought the game on the understanding you could play it networked without any time limits and that, as of the point where the servers were turned off, it is NOT "fit for purpose" any more.
The problem I have with micro-transactions is that before micro-transactions ever existed, the stuff you'd pay for now would have been given away freely or lumped together in an eventual expansion disk.
Unfortunately, games companies have realised that they can call an expansion disk a sequel and charge twice the price for it...
I think anyone who believes DRM is just about restricting piracy is a fool to themselves - all piracy does is gives the games publishers the excuse they need to foist DRM on everyone.
Whilst online gaming and MMORPGs hold no interest for me (a bit of Quake 3 or UT2004 over the Internet is enough), the success of World of Warcraft and other games of that ilk has demonstrated clearly to games companies that players are prepared to pay monthly subscriptions for games.
And since no media/entertainment company actually wants us to "buy once, use it forever" any more, to them DRM is a great way of enforcing a rental model and having us set up monthly bank debits into their coffers - result = PROFIT!!!
I second credit going to Good Old Games - a great idea well executed.
As for Steam, it's not full-blown in-your-face DRM control but I still think it's too restrictive. Sometimes I want to be able to LAN play with a few friends and offline mode on Steam seems flaky at best.
Apologies for messing up on the embedded link, that's what comes from having a bit of keyboard delay whilst an application is compiling in the background of my Gentoo Linux PC...
The link is Good Old Games, though I suspect many on here already know the site.
I actually stopped buying many games because of the very poor quality information on the back of game boxes - specifically to do with what's required for local LAN gaming.
If you go back to the days of Red Alert 2, for example, it was possible to buy one copy of a game but install it on multiple PCs on a local LAN so that you could invite a friend over and enjoy a LAN gaming session. However, whereas whether you could do this or not used to be on the back of the game box, these days there is no mention of it - I suspect because now no games really support it, the games company preferred option being to connect to their games servers (e.g. Steam).
I don't necessarily want to be able to buy one copy of a game and install it for simultaneous play on multiple machines, but I also think that it's a bit extreme to be expected to buy a copy of the full game for each machine in order to do it - the classic recent example of this I came across was "World In Conflict Complete Edition" which, no matter how much I tried, wouldn't let me do local LAN play with it.
Many years ago I used to download cracked games from Usenet and hand them freely out to friends. But for the sake of paying out a few pounds (by the time the games get to the budget labels) compared to the problems with spreading viruses and having to explain to a lot of those friends how to install the games and get them working, I just stopped doing it.
As Cliff Harris says in the article, people will always copy stuff that costs any amount of money, sometimes only because of the "prestige" of being the first one to do it. So it's about time games companies realise this and stop with the alienating the honest customers - i.e. give us the play features we want (like LAN play facility) and stop with the restrictive DRM mechanisms.
It's truly ridiculous, in these days of optical drive-less netbooks, that a game that can be fully installed onto a hard disk still requires you to carry around the game disk with you, especially as if that disk gets damaged in transit, you have to pay for a replacement copy.
Nowadays, I still game a lot but I either play Open Source/free games or buy them on Good Old Games where optical disks and DRM are not a problem.
Yes, they do, and it's detailed here.
Hoorah! I have been saying this for years, at last someone who agrees!
All hackers are geeks, obsessive tinkerers who are prepared to go to any length to get something working the way they want it to. You cannot hack a closed system, therefore Apple users are not geeks - they're just people who want it easy but don't want to be part of the mainstream.
How on earth is a device that prominently features a web browser a closed system?
Well the lack of Flash support starts to suggest to me it's a bit closed...
As for mobile Safari - a turd I can carry about with me is still a turd.
Agree totally.
I've tinkered with computers for almost 30 years, right from the days of hacking in Z80 machine code on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. But things really took off for "tinkerers" with the shareware and freeware revolution that came about around the times of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, with (then) huge repositories like Aminet, Fred Fish, etc.
I've always tinkered with Windows (I hate eye-candy GUIs, I prefer functionality and speed) but for me Linux brought that to a whole new level and back to the days of the Amiga - it's now got to a point where I am never satisfied with the optimisations in packaged Linux distributions and now just use Gentoo Linux, in which I can tinker with compiler optimisation flags to my heart's content.
Thanks... it took a long time getting there but at last someone gives me a practical response.
How come you, like at least two other repliers to my comment, seem to have the capability of reading the original article but not my response?
If you had read my posting correctly, you would have read into it that if it *WERE* possible for the iPad to support Flash games or emulators, then it would be a relatively *EASY* task of getting 1000 games onto an iPad. This is because you would not necessarily need an icon for *EACH* game because you would select the game you wanted from a pull down menu within the emulator or in the Flash tool.
*HOWEVER*, because most games on the App Store are individual downloads (maybe with the exception of some card games that support multiple versions of solitaire, or something like that), then you would need a separate icon and screen space for it for each game.
*THEREFORE* you would need to move across multiple screens, I suggest maybe as many as 20 for an iPad (because I guess one screen holds around 50 icons), in order to get to the game you wanted. This of course assumes there is no limit to the number of icons with apps you can display, or the number of screens they can be displayed upon.
What I *DARED* to suggest to those of you living in your "Apple is perfection" world is that such a large amount of icons would be far more manageable if there is an app where icons can be grouped within folders - however, I am not aware of an app that does this, at least on the Touch.
Therefore, I am stating that the author's statement of having "thousands of games" on one iPad, whilst feasibly possible from a storage perspective, would be incredibly slow to use because you would need to scroll through multiple screens to get to the game icon you actually wanted.
Is that *NOW* clear enough for you?
Oh, now somebody is telling me what I wrote...
I'm not going to repeat myself, please read my original post once again - I know what I said.
And if you believe 1000 icons *ARE* manageable on an iPhone or iPad, then kindly enlighten me - as a techie, I am always interested in hearing how a problem is surmounted.
But as I look at my iPod Touch now, one screen holds up to 16 icons (I assume it's the same for the iPhone). Therefore, to hold 1000 icons would need 62.5 screens - it would be quite a task to scroll through that many screens to get to a game near the end, and that does assume the Touch/iPhone can have that many screens.
If there is an app to do some kind of folder management of icons, then that would make it much easier to organise.., plus I'm guessing the iPad screen holds maybe 50 icons per screen, but that would still need 20-odd screens for all of them.
So if you believe I am wrong then I am more than happy for you to tell me how so - so please enlighten me.
I suspect no fanboi buys it for the simple fact that Axiotron won't be allowed to put an Apple logo on the back of it.
After all, the whole purpose of the Apple logo is to position oneself in Starbucks in such a way as to use the logo to beam reflective light straight into the eyes of any customer walking into the establishment.
This ensures that all customers exercise their best behaviour because they know they basque in the righteous glory of one of the "Elite Few".
I believe they are currently trying to develop a version of Monopoly that is even better than Microsoft's version.
Right, I want you to hold your breath, count to 10, then read my article again, this time properly.
Now, can you please tell me, as the Apple expert you obviously are, how easy it would be to manage 1000 icons across multiple screens on the iPad such that the article author's statement of "thousands" of games can be deemed to be valid.
I am making the assumption that, just like the iPod Touch, there is no way to physically group icons in logical folders - in which case each game would need its own icon somewhere on one of a multiple number of screens.
Now that I've made it as simple as possible for you, either provide an intelligent answer or not comment at all - just please don't go flying off again at a tangent.
Thanks.
Right.
But every other Mac user on here tells me that they like OS X because there's no need to resort to using the command line as it basically takes care of itself to the point where non-savvy users can find it even easier to use than Windows.
However, you are telling me now that there is a requirement to use a command-line shell, so this kind of contradicts what all the others have been saying.
I admit, in your case, you probably do care whether or not it's running a UNIX core if you want to know what commands you can possibly use at the shell prompt - but, again, I go back to the question as to why a non-savvy user would be remotely interested in knowing what OS runs at the core.
Did I not say that a 64GB iPad could hold 1000 games averaging 65MB each?
Again, if you read my post properly, I commented on the capability of the UI to display that many pages of icons because, presumably, the interface is similar to the Touch where you just create game/app launchers on different pages, rather than being able to create folders to have more of a tree-like standard OS structure.
My point being that if each "page" can display, say, 50 icons, having to scroll through up to 20 pages to find one of your "thousand" games would be fairly unmanageable.
You're off on a tangent again, I don't need a lecture in UI programming because it's not a field I'm ever likely to go into.
But your point is what, precisely?
I use apps like Firefox, Thunderbird & Sunbird primarily because I can use them on multiple platforms, I take it as read that they have a fairly intuitive UI on the basis that I find them usable in the first place. I also cannot think of much in the way of differences in the UIs between the Windows and Linux versions, except maybe for the location of the Settings stuff in the menus.
And why do you keep ignoring my original question? I'm asking you, genuinely because I don't use OS X at all, what so great about the UI that it can add any additional usability to an email client?
I agree.
But the whole point of the article seems to be to find possible uses for this product, in this case as a board game platform, which makes me wonder what usage it has in the first place.
As I said, engage brain before mouth.
Read what I wrote again... properly.
If you do so you will see that I *WROTE* precisely what you said - namely that *BECAUSE* it cannot support Flash games or emulators, then it is quite impracticable to assume that it can support thousands of games - which presumably can only be downloaded from the Apple Store.
and because the iPad is a computer it can store thousands of games and add a variety of interactive features.
This is a great example of typical Fanboi "engage brain before mouth" syndrome. Let's look at this statement at bit more...
Firstly, it doesn't support Flash so you can't download and play the thousands of Flash games on the Internet.
Secondly, Apple doesn't make emulators available on the Apple store because of copyright restrictions - therefore there's no way of playing NES, Amiga, MAME or any other game ROMs on it, most of which would be tiny in size.
Thirdly, the biggest iPAD is 64GB which means that to get a "thousand" games on it, each game would need to average no more than 65MB.
Okay, I guess that's possible from a storage perspective, but how will that work from a UI perspective?
If each game has its own icon to select in order to play it, how many screens are you going to need to need to scroll through to get to one of the last games in your list of "thousands". Does the UI actually *SUPPORT* having that many screens of icons?
The author's comments just make NO sense...
So you're saying that Apple don't know how to market their products correctly because they have an inability to demonstrate the majority of its features at the product launch? Interesting...
I'm beginning to think that you know nothing about interfaces.
I know how to use them. Other than that, I program in shell script, Perl & a bit of C, pretty much all command-line stuff so, no, I don't know how to program interfaces.
So now I've answered your question honestly, would you like to answer mine as to what more an email client needs to do?
We're not allowed to compare the iPad's functionality to a netbook because we're told it isn't a PC...
However, according to this article, it IS a games console. In which case, can we start speculating how that "hefty" 1GB A4 CPU copes with Call Of Duty Modern Warfare compared to the X-Box then?