Fair enough. I forgot the BS rootkit nonsense in bioshock. That's not an example of good copy protection. Let's pretend that bioshock had you log in to a steam style system (with a reasonable provision for a server outage) to install or asked you for a unique CD key? Would that prevent you from buying it? That's a better question.
I don't think you are being fair. There is a segment of people who might pirate games and who might buy them. For one, I'm a member. for another thing, there is some empirical evidence to support the notion that the populace isn't divided into unrepentant pirates and la abiding dopey citizens.
I also feel that you are understating the costs to piracy for the user. It is a non-trivial expenditure of my time to look for cracks and downloads of these games. It is probably much harder for my mom. If I had to, I could probably get a cracked copy of a game after a few tries, but if the game costs 50 bucks it probably isn't worth it. It gets less worth it as chances of failure (for the crack) go up. For a program like photoshop, I am willing to spend more time and effort getting a crack (if I didn't use gimp) because I'm not spending 11 bajillion dollars to get it. But if my time is worth something, I'm not going to bother pirating a 20 dollar game if it takes me more than an hour or so. Some people are more efficient at getting those copies than others. Presumably you could find a pirated copy of whatever in 10 seconds flat and you could distinguish between good copies and bad copies with ease. That means that you face a much shallower tradeoff for your time. My mom faces a considerably steeper tradeoff, probably steep enought hat she would never contemplate piracy, just on the grounds that she would spend days just figuring out how the fuck to do it.
I can't stop you from pirating the game. I've already said I don't care. But I can stop me. Your assertion that once a game is cracked for one person it is cracked for everyone is an oversimplification. It's true for the people who download it and get it to work. For everyone else, it is still locked.
I'll say it again, a consequence of those drastic diminishing marginal returns is that the first few dollars spent in piracy prevention REALLY pay off. More than in other areas (probably). It doesn't pay to spend all your money as a company on it, but it is an easy choice between having minimal copy protection (that is easy to break) and having none. Don't oversimplify things. I'm not missing the point.
I think we agree (or would) on a lot of things. Offering a full featured teaser and charging for the (easy to police for copyright problems) multiplayer is a GREAT solution. That offers copy protection for the customers that want to pay for it in an inobtrusive way. That's what the guy isn't saying. It's not like they would be cool with you ripping them off for the multiplayer (though it is clearly possible). That's their real game.
He just needs to be clear about it. That isn't zero copy protection. That is smart copy protection designed to make customers happy, not pissed off. I like stardock. I like most shareware game companies. Since I grew up on macs, those are the only companies I knew, because most "real" games didn't get ported (except mist......woo....hoo....). Shareware companies have the right idea about copy protection for THEIR level of game making. If EA produced sins of a solar empire, you might feel less of a twinge about ripping them off. I alwas felt bad about ripping those shareware guys off because their site always made it seem like they were eating cat food and my purchase would help them feed their kids. The feeling of altrusism is hard to replicate.
They are on the way to the right idea. but they deliberately (because they are pushing their business model as teh awesome) are understating the nature of piracy (queue scary MPAA ghosts and PSA's about how ripping GTA means you fund terrorism). The low level piracy problem is converting those firs few chunks of potential pirates/buyers to buyers. The money still means that most game companies will choose the conventional route for now.
Well, most businesses are insane because the managers are in some sort of KEEERAZY world where perfect DRM is right around the corner and it will only be a matter of time before every instance of every digital product is paid for. Some of them (like id, blizzard, valve (sometimes)) understand the nature of the copy protection problem they face and respond to it appropriately. Some don't.
Still, the cost paid for DRM is sunk. Marginal costs are very low. The companies face a declining average cost curve. IF your price is higher than the average cost (including DRM) they make money (and thus will sell the game). If selling to you would be a loss (and it isn't a razor blade situation), they won't do it.
Sensible, non-intrusive copy protection like a saner version of steam is a perfectly reasonable solution. A rootkit is not.
Here's why. Because if something has a marginal product that is dropping fast (large diminishing marginal returns), that means that those first few dollars are REALLY, REALLY worth it. In a way, this makes sense. Word of mouth is STILL an important evenue for game advertising. If the word is "F this, just download it", then you have not only lost one potential sale but 2. As you raise that number, network problems ((2^n)-1) work against you. What is that 10-20k (just sptiballing) better spent as? Some more flashes in a battle sequence? Hiring Spock instead of Chekhov for voice acting?
I'm not making an argument FOR 100% piracy protection. That's lunacy. I'm saying that it is WELL worth the money to prevent the simplest attempts at piracy.
How that impacts paying users is important. But...only so. For one, if the choice is between a few slashdot types getting their panties ina twist about putting a cd key in and 500,000 dollars in sales, the answer is clear. But it should NEVER come to that. Design should be such that piracy protections are transparent. When designers find that tradeoffs become unbearable, they should be able to show this to the producers and recommend throttling back on the restrictions. Your satisfaction as a paying user should be important to the company, but that doesn't mean that anything that you might consider an inconvenience should be jettisoned.
The work of the company should be in making it less difficult to get a legitimate copy. That's the other half of copy protection. Digital distribution is the way to do that. I bought wow at 10:30 PM. It took about 20 minutes to download, about the same time it would have taken me to get to best buy. Blizzard would have done better by updating their digital distribution version to the newest live rev, but whatever. The idea was that both sides of the equation need to be dealt with.
Not to be offensive, but you aren't the target of the DRM solution. you probably don't buy games like bioshock because you've grown out of them. EXPLICITLY, the reason for game DRM is to stop the people who would buy the game but would rather pirate it. If you wouldn't pirate it or buy it, then who cares what you think? I would bet that the mere absence of DRM isn't what brought you to sins of a solar empire.
The reason for that DRM is based on that concern. It is a design problem to make sure that you aren't put off by it as a paying consumer. That's it. It should be up to a software designer to make a DRM scheme that doesn't screw customers over. Unfortunately, it is and will remain a design need to have DRM on these games. This doesn't mean it needs to be intrusive. I would prefer it not act like microsoft or generate too many false positives. I would honestly prefer that it be invisible, known only to the user if there is a problem. Unfortunately right now our software designers seem to be pumping out DRM that is in everyone's face. That will change.
The market just doesn't work like video and music. The arguments are different.
Your first paragraph offers a very sane solution. I think most games should be authenticated or delivered through a Steam style system with a "cd key" as an offline backup.
debating your second paragraph is a task for another thread, but I don't feel that you are correct. Work doesn't get done without a promise of repayment. That payment doesn't have to be monetary, as we learned with Linux, but most people learned the wrong lesson. People thought that the Linux lesson was that the appropriate payment was ZERO. That's not true, there are payments made to the makers of open souarce software, most of them just aren't monetary. Status counts, in a big way. Status explains why schoolteachers in singapore are largely talented and highly competent where in the US they are much less so (no offense to any teachers, but you know what I'm talking about). For people not motivated by status, monopoly rights on information (which can't be secured any other way, obviously) allow for some motivation to create. This doesn't mean I support the CURRENT US copyright scheme, which is asinine in so many ways. But the basic idea is sound.
they stop people who don't know that first level. that might be a huge fraction, depending on the game audience. I'm not advocating just using CD keys. I personally think that some variant of Steam is preferred because it offers the most chance for authentication with the least intrusion.
I'm not disputing that the cracks are easy to find, but the that doesn't change the basic argument. some large chunk of people will be tempted to say "fuck it, I'll just buy it at EB" rather than d/l a gigabyte game and find a crack.
This will get EASIER, not harder, as digital distribution makes it so that it is reasonable to distribute say, Madden online for a credit card charge. Then the choice is download it for free and mess around w/ the crack or pay 30 bucks and download the game in the same time.
Shareholders aren't managers. A company's discretion is not changed wildly by their public/private status. Shareholders may vote, choose new managers, or in RARE cases, sue, but they usually don't get (or want) control over the day to day running of a business. Most shareholders aren't active investors concerned with specific policies. they are mutual funds, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and the like. They don't know and don't care. They invest based on fundamentals and their needs to diversify. That they would become involved in an issue this arcane is silly.
But presumably someone who pirates the game and plays it won't buy the game. That's not a bad argument.
Here's the deal sparky. Money spent on copy protection sees some pretty high diminishing marginal returns. The first few bucks (say, on actually having a CD key) stop the 8-12 year olds who would just download it and play it. The next large chunk of money (some online authentication) stops another class of people from just getting the iso and the crack and running it. After that you are investing HUGE amounts of money pissing people off with rootkits and background processes and not deterring too many pirates per dollar.
Having diminishing returns on the dollar does not automatically mean that the first dollar shouldn't be spent.
I don't mean to sound like a copyright hawk (I'm not), but this advice is awful for game makers outside the freeware/shareware model. for one, no large game company is going to listen to this guy, so this ends up another tidbit for armchair game developers on slashdot to tell each other and assume it is true.
For another thing, it isn't true. It's bad advice on face. Any product which takes significant production costs but can be gained for the use of a user's time (read: free) will lose money if the product is sold at marginal cost--or, if the product is offered at some rate above marginal cost but that cost is avoided for most users. The nature of game design is huge up front costs and a probable revenue stream to make up for those costs and generate a profit. If the average user out there can costlessly pirate the game, a good deal of that revenue stream is lost.
This does NOT mean that games should have 100% piracy protection features. That's also stupid. It is arguably physically impossible to prevent a (non-remotely authenticated) game from playing on a computer where the user has custody. All of the required parts are there--it's the same argument for DRM. No one is going to generate a copy protection scheme for computer games with 100% efficacy. What it SHOULD mean is that a reasonable protection should exist to prevent most copying, just like plenty of games have now. No spyware, no intrusive checks. Just some reasonable authentication measures. All you need to do is prevent a good percentage of people who would pirate it costlessly by downloading it. Not everyone.
Steam is a flawed example of what might work very well. Steam can (probably) be spoofed, but who cares? Most of us don't spoof it. WoW is another good example, their game works on a subscription model, so it is almost pointless to pirate it. Q3 is close to the extreme--it's probably pretty easy to pirate it and the demo basically includes the game (for the most part).
the right answer is to find an envelope type solution. Envelopes don't prevent people from stealing or reading your mail. They don't even ensure that you can check 100% if your mail has been read in transit. but they deter the least motivated due to the minimal effort required (versus a postcard) and they deter others based on the threat of detection. there is no reason to build a piracy scheme similar to the HDMI demands--don't get me started. but it also is not even remotely realistic that major software companies will take a shareware outlook to piracy in the near future.
I didn't miss the point. Just abstract it. Corporations don't have a lifespan but their interests do. Without a forward contract (which is the only way to secure this voyage), no corporation would pay for ore to be mined, shipped over a 100-200 year period and the money shipped BACK over 100-200 years (or wired over 10-20 years). They would just invest in something else shorter term and less risky. Think about it now. If GE (just for example) put billions of dollars into a mars probe, they could get a fothold on a whole new planet and in 200-300 years have all SORTS of new goods and markets. Why don't they begin building that probe RIGHT NOW, because their managers, shareholders and employees all live less than 100 years. AND they are more inclined to take up shorter term, less risky prospects.
No forward contract, no mining. But a forward contract does allow for mining....it just makes it harder to be the first few there.
This is a pretty optimistic assessment. I mean, just look at what goes in to mining and extraction of resources on THIS planet in order to make them viable. How much infrastructure is required to turn iron in the ground into HY-80 steel? I'll answer: a shitload. That's even assuming the iron is good enough in the first place. The "mine it yourself" idea works great on Gilligan's Island and Star Trek but doesn't make any sense when you REALLY think about it. How would you design a probe short of magic to extract, refine, test and smelt an arbitrarily large number of metals without those pieces taking up a significant portion of the payload? Even optimists on that front (like Bob Zubrin) realize that you need to pick specific materials to look for and design for the low hanging fruit so to speak.
And your first point that space has unlimited resources compared to earth is absurd. Compared to earth space has practically zero resources. None. In comparison to earth, the resources of space over any volume are effectively zero. There is 4-15 light years of not a whole lot between us and anything else. You have to go 30-40 MILLION miles even in this solar system to get to someplace that isn't the moon. Where on earth do you need to go 40 million miles to get something? The problem with space travel is that resources are astonishingly scarce. Part of the work of designing craft is in addressing that scarcity.
Neither of those positions need to be true. And the first point is completely false. The Nash equilibrium of a specific game is unique to that game. It may be the best outcome for the group as well as for the individual, but it usually isn't--that's where the meat of early game theory was (prisoner's dilemma, tragedy of the commons, cournot doupoly).
The second point is probably true in some sense but is functionally meaningless for most cases
This is pretty accurate. It's basically a forward contract that will be resold. too bad it would suffer from some liquidity and risk preference problems.:)
We would buy it but who on the other end would sell it. the idea behind free exchange is mutually beneficial transactions. Unless we presume that the ship owners buy the goods (entirely possible), then there isn't someone around to sell them. Err...let's put it this way. We would like for that ship to appear in ordbit, but in order for it to do so, someone has to make a decision on the other planet and hope that we will buy something basically thousands of years in the future.
There ARE models for this. I don't agree with the OP that it is hopeless. It is just different. the east india company provides a good model for talking about these kinds of situations, as do futures markets from a long time ago (think Denmark). The company mines the ore on the basis of a forward contract for ore prices with the ship owner. The ship owner pays that miner and transports the goods to earth, where presumably he can make enough money to recoup his payment and more.
In this case, the ship owner has to be pretty sure that the value of titanium is going to be high enough to be worth his while AND he has to accompany the ship. If the ship owner lives on the mining planet, this doesn't make any sense. He will truly be dead before the goods get to Earth. So think about that.
Just flush them out now. Mark me -1 flamebait for this, but this post will bring out the people insisting on the strict superiority of gold over other forms of investment. While in this case, gold in a safe place (or any other precious metal) would be a better choice over a possibly unmanaged and eventually insolvent investment fund, THAT DOESN'T MEAN that gold is always better or what not.
On a note, I recall reading that section of the book. It comes at the end of "island in the Sky", a remarkably sober book about colonizing space (sober in light of crazier scifi/colonization books). For some reason I read it first and the pessimism of the article stuck with me, setting the tone for the whole book. That's not bad--our views about space travel and the future need pessimism, but I felt that it was the overriding theme.
In the end, there is no free lunch. While you could predict that interstellar travel would change time preference for some, there are a few caveats to make here:
1. Perhaps travel is so expensive that the change in time preference for some doesn't impact the market as a whole. If you have a vanishingly small group of people pushing the discount rate down, does it affect the prevailing rate? You could argue that the income effect of the billionaires of the world might be analogous. While Bill Gates may have the latitude to spend more money on small purchases than they might be worth to him systematically, that does not do much to change the price I pay for those same products.
2. Travellers will face a STEEP opportunity cost. There isn't any other way to describe it. They may (as the article in "islands in the sky" suggests) spend their wealth ENTIRELY on acclimating themselves to a radically different world or insulating themselves from that new world. In other words, this would be like taking a trip from ancient greece to the Soviet Union. You don't speak the language, you don't understand the culture, the medium of exchange, almost everything. You would be lucky if you weren't put in a circus or a museum.
3. In the longer term, risk dominates. Inflation risk and default risk historically rise to 1.0 as time marches on. There are vanishingly view equity or debt instruments that are still valid from 200 years ago. they exist, most notably in the low countries and england, but they are few and far between. What happens in the event of hyperinflation, panics or fraud (although the last one could be accounted for given a persistent third party overseer)?
4. Adverse selection. This is a corrolary of the risk argument. What bank would be likely to write a contract to make an astronomical payment in the far future? A bank that is likely to be solvent that whole time (assuming the bank knows with certainty) might, but would be FAR less likely to do so than a bank who might default on the contract.
5. Explicit cost. While this might eventually become a non-issue, we have to be real about what is at stake. A long term space voyage is basically one way in the eyes of the company chartering the craft. Unlike a 767 from NY to London, when the space ship returns, it will be obsolete, or at least at the end of its viable life. Each trip presents a large fixed cost for the charter company. This may not translate directly as a large enough cost to a consumer if the flight manifest is big enough, but it isn't trivial.
Given the fanciful nature of their claims they have been wildly successful. Think of it this way. they have an uphill battle in undermining one of the basic tenets of a major branch of science. in order to get ID taught instead of evolution they have to reject a well vetted and well supported theory and replace it with wish thinking. That there are states in the union ho teach it is a testemant to the political power of those who preach it.
Also, the courts are not the battlefield they are looking to enter. they are pushing for school board and textbook adoption board change. THAT is the critical element.
there ARE errors in the decision making process. they occur from limited information and high tradeoffs. Personally, I have the advantage of not paying per credit (I'm on the GI Bill), but if I were, 300-500 per credit (it's a public school) is a pretty strong incentive to chose a class that I can pass and that I like. Given that pressure and a limited time frame for decision, problems can occur.
Another thing we have to consider is that going to school isn't the only thing people do. This is similar to the political choice problem. We don't all spend large amounts of time searching through the possible courses we can take and making large expenditures of our time in determining fit. Some of us have jobs, wives, etc. I don't mean this is in an angry us vs. you sense. I just mean that researching future classes might be lower on the priority list. As such, it means those who don't want to research should probably pick a class they are liable to pass. This is exacerbated by the fact that most college graduates are not going to have their particular classes scrutinized. We may see colleges as a check on filler courses for high school students (and graduate school as the same for college students) because they observe apparent class difficulty. Very few other points of observation exist. That means that if the choice is between a hard class where I get a C and an easy class where I get an A, I will probably pick the easy class (all things being equal).
My last point about replacing a possibly cool class with a lame class is the unpleasant outcome of these information and incentive problems. The outcome is that basic req classes get filled up as students who care only about a certain outcome. Some classes are taken because students know they can walk into the exam and pass it.
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In re: tags. Eat me. Hitting shift is easier than inlining .
Fair enough. I forgot the BS rootkit nonsense in bioshock. That's not an example of good copy protection. Let's pretend that bioshock had you log in to a steam style system (with a reasonable provision for a server outage) to install or asked you for a unique CD key? Would that prevent you from buying it? That's a better question.
I don't think you are being fair. There is a segment of people who might pirate games and who might buy them. For one, I'm a member. for another thing, there is some empirical evidence to support the notion that the populace isn't divided into unrepentant pirates and la abiding dopey citizens.
I also feel that you are understating the costs to piracy for the user. It is a non-trivial expenditure of my time to look for cracks and downloads of these games. It is probably much harder for my mom. If I had to, I could probably get a cracked copy of a game after a few tries, but if the game costs 50 bucks it probably isn't worth it. It gets less worth it as chances of failure (for the crack) go up. For a program like photoshop, I am willing to spend more time and effort getting a crack (if I didn't use gimp) because I'm not spending 11 bajillion dollars to get it. But if my time is worth something, I'm not going to bother pirating a 20 dollar game if it takes me more than an hour or so. Some people are more efficient at getting those copies than others. Presumably you could find a pirated copy of whatever in 10 seconds flat and you could distinguish between good copies and bad copies with ease. That means that you face a much shallower tradeoff for your time. My mom faces a considerably steeper tradeoff, probably steep enought hat she would never contemplate piracy, just on the grounds that she would spend days just figuring out how the fuck to do it.
I can't stop you from pirating the game. I've already said I don't care. But I can stop me. Your assertion that once a game is cracked for one person it is cracked for everyone is an oversimplification. It's true for the people who download it and get it to work. For everyone else, it is still locked.
I'll say it again, a consequence of those drastic diminishing marginal returns is that the first few dollars spent in piracy prevention REALLY pay off. More than in other areas (probably). It doesn't pay to spend all your money as a company on it, but it is an easy choice between having minimal copy protection (that is easy to break) and having none. Don't oversimplify things. I'm not missing the point.
I think we agree (or would) on a lot of things. Offering a full featured teaser and charging for the (easy to police for copyright problems) multiplayer is a GREAT solution. That offers copy protection for the customers that want to pay for it in an inobtrusive way. That's what the guy isn't saying. It's not like they would be cool with you ripping them off for the multiplayer (though it is clearly possible). That's their real game.
He just needs to be clear about it. That isn't zero copy protection. That is smart copy protection designed to make customers happy, not pissed off. I like stardock. I like most shareware game companies. Since I grew up on macs, those are the only companies I knew, because most "real" games didn't get ported (except mist......woo....hoo....). Shareware companies have the right idea about copy protection for THEIR level of game making. If EA produced sins of a solar empire, you might feel less of a twinge about ripping them off. I alwas felt bad about ripping those shareware guys off because their site always made it seem like they were eating cat food and my purchase would help them feed their kids. The feeling of altrusism is hard to replicate.
They are on the way to the right idea. but they deliberately (because they are pushing their business model as teh awesome) are understating the nature of piracy (queue scary MPAA ghosts and PSA's about how ripping GTA means you fund terrorism). The low level piracy problem is converting those firs few chunks of potential pirates/buyers to buyers. The money still means that most game companies will choose the conventional route for now.
Well, most businesses are insane because the managers are in some sort of KEEERAZY world where perfect DRM is right around the corner and it will only be a matter of time before every instance of every digital product is paid for. Some of them (like id, blizzard, valve (sometimes)) understand the nature of the copy protection problem they face and respond to it appropriately. Some don't.
Still, the cost paid for DRM is sunk. Marginal costs are very low. The companies face a declining average cost curve. IF your price is higher than the average cost (including DRM) they make money (and thus will sell the game). If selling to you would be a loss (and it isn't a razor blade situation), they won't do it.
Sensible, non-intrusive copy protection like a saner version of steam is a perfectly reasonable solution. A rootkit is not.
Oh, I see. Well, then we are pretty much in agreement. :) hear, hear!
Here's why. Because if something has a marginal product that is dropping fast (large diminishing marginal returns), that means that those first few dollars are REALLY, REALLY worth it. In a way, this makes sense. Word of mouth is STILL an important evenue for game advertising. If the word is "F this, just download it", then you have not only lost one potential sale but 2. As you raise that number, network problems ((2^n)-1) work against you. What is that 10-20k (just sptiballing) better spent as? Some more flashes in a battle sequence? Hiring Spock instead of Chekhov for voice acting?
I'm not making an argument FOR 100% piracy protection. That's lunacy. I'm saying that it is WELL worth the money to prevent the simplest attempts at piracy.
How that impacts paying users is important. But...only so. For one, if the choice is between a few slashdot types getting their panties ina twist about putting a cd key in and 500,000 dollars in sales, the answer is clear. But it should NEVER come to that. Design should be such that piracy protections are transparent. When designers find that tradeoffs become unbearable, they should be able to show this to the producers and recommend throttling back on the restrictions. Your satisfaction as a paying user should be important to the company, but that doesn't mean that anything that you might consider an inconvenience should be jettisoned.
The work of the company should be in making it less difficult to get a legitimate copy. That's the other half of copy protection. Digital distribution is the way to do that. I bought wow at 10:30 PM. It took about 20 minutes to download, about the same time it would have taken me to get to best buy. Blizzard would have done better by updating their digital distribution version to the newest live rev, but whatever. The idea was that both sides of the equation need to be dealt with.
as long as the price paid is above the average cost of making it....uhhhhhh, yeah. What kind of question is this?
Not to be offensive, but you aren't the target of the DRM solution. you probably don't buy games like bioshock because you've grown out of them. EXPLICITLY, the reason for game DRM is to stop the people who would buy the game but would rather pirate it. If you wouldn't pirate it or buy it, then who cares what you think? I would bet that the mere absence of DRM isn't what brought you to sins of a solar empire.
The reason for that DRM is based on that concern. It is a design problem to make sure that you aren't put off by it as a paying consumer. That's it. It should be up to a software designer to make a DRM scheme that doesn't screw customers over. Unfortunately, it is and will remain a design need to have DRM on these games. This doesn't mean it needs to be intrusive. I would prefer it not act like microsoft or generate too many false positives. I would honestly prefer that it be invisible, known only to the user if there is a problem. Unfortunately right now our software designers seem to be pumping out DRM that is in everyone's face. That will change.
The market just doesn't work like video and music. The arguments are different.
Your first paragraph offers a very sane solution. I think most games should be authenticated or delivered through a Steam style system with a "cd key" as an offline backup.
debating your second paragraph is a task for another thread, but I don't feel that you are correct. Work doesn't get done without a promise of repayment. That payment doesn't have to be monetary, as we learned with Linux, but most people learned the wrong lesson. People thought that the Linux lesson was that the appropriate payment was ZERO. That's not true, there are payments made to the makers of open souarce software, most of them just aren't monetary. Status counts, in a big way. Status explains why schoolteachers in singapore are largely talented and highly competent where in the US they are much less so (no offense to any teachers, but you know what I'm talking about). For people not motivated by status, monopoly rights on information (which can't be secured any other way, obviously) allow for some motivation to create. This doesn't mean I support the CURRENT US copyright scheme, which is asinine in so many ways. But the basic idea is sound.
they stop people who don't know that first level. that might be a huge fraction, depending on the game audience. I'm not advocating just using CD keys. I personally think that some variant of Steam is preferred because it offers the most chance for authentication with the least intrusion.
I'm not disputing that the cracks are easy to find, but the that doesn't change the basic argument. some large chunk of people will be tempted to say "fuck it, I'll just buy it at EB" rather than d/l a gigabyte game and find a crack.
This will get EASIER, not harder, as digital distribution makes it so that it is reasonable to distribute say, Madden online for a credit card charge. Then the choice is download it for free and mess around w/ the crack or pay 30 bucks and download the game in the same time.
Shareholders aren't managers. A company's discretion is not changed wildly by their public/private status. Shareholders may vote, choose new managers, or in RARE cases, sue, but they usually don't get (or want) control over the day to day running of a business. Most shareholders aren't active investors concerned with specific policies. they are mutual funds, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and the like. They don't know and don't care. They invest based on fundamentals and their needs to diversify. That they would become involved in an issue this arcane is silly.
But presumably someone who pirates the game and plays it won't buy the game. That's not a bad argument.
Here's the deal sparky. Money spent on copy protection sees some pretty high diminishing marginal returns. The first few bucks (say, on actually having a CD key) stop the 8-12 year olds who would just download it and play it. The next large chunk of money (some online authentication) stops another class of people from just getting the iso and the crack and running it. After that you are investing HUGE amounts of money pissing people off with rootkits and background processes and not deterring too many pirates per dollar.
Having diminishing returns on the dollar does not automatically mean that the first dollar shouldn't be spent.
I don't mean to sound like a copyright hawk (I'm not), but this advice is awful for game makers outside the freeware/shareware model. for one, no large game company is going to listen to this guy, so this ends up another tidbit for armchair game developers on slashdot to tell each other and assume it is true.
For another thing, it isn't true. It's bad advice on face. Any product which takes significant production costs but can be gained for the use of a user's time (read: free) will lose money if the product is sold at marginal cost--or, if the product is offered at some rate above marginal cost but that cost is avoided for most users. The nature of game design is huge up front costs and a probable revenue stream to make up for those costs and generate a profit. If the average user out there can costlessly pirate the game, a good deal of that revenue stream is lost.
This does NOT mean that games should have 100% piracy protection features. That's also stupid. It is arguably physically impossible to prevent a (non-remotely authenticated) game from playing on a computer where the user has custody. All of the required parts are there--it's the same argument for DRM. No one is going to generate a copy protection scheme for computer games with 100% efficacy. What it SHOULD mean is that a reasonable protection should exist to prevent most copying, just like plenty of games have now. No spyware, no intrusive checks. Just some reasonable authentication measures. All you need to do is prevent a good percentage of people who would pirate it costlessly by downloading it. Not everyone.
Steam is a flawed example of what might work very well. Steam can (probably) be spoofed, but who cares? Most of us don't spoof it. WoW is another good example, their game works on a subscription model, so it is almost pointless to pirate it. Q3 is close to the extreme--it's probably pretty easy to pirate it and the demo basically includes the game (for the most part).
the right answer is to find an envelope type solution. Envelopes don't prevent people from stealing or reading your mail. They don't even ensure that you can check 100% if your mail has been read in transit. but they deter the least motivated due to the minimal effort required (versus a postcard) and they deter others based on the threat of detection. there is no reason to build a piracy scheme similar to the HDMI demands--don't get me started. but it also is not even remotely realistic that major software companies will take a shareware outlook to piracy in the near future.
I didn't miss the point. Just abstract it. Corporations don't have a lifespan but their interests do. Without a forward contract (which is the only way to secure this voyage), no corporation would pay for ore to be mined, shipped over a 100-200 year period and the money shipped BACK over 100-200 years (or wired over 10-20 years). They would just invest in something else shorter term and less risky. Think about it now. If GE (just for example) put billions of dollars into a mars probe, they could get a fothold on a whole new planet and in 200-300 years have all SORTS of new goods and markets. Why don't they begin building that probe RIGHT NOW, because their managers, shareholders and employees all live less than 100 years. AND they are more inclined to take up shorter term, less risky prospects.
No forward contract, no mining. But a forward contract does allow for mining....it just makes it harder to be the first few there.
This is a pretty optimistic assessment. I mean, just look at what goes in to mining and extraction of resources on THIS planet in order to make them viable. How much infrastructure is required to turn iron in the ground into HY-80 steel? I'll answer: a shitload. That's even assuming the iron is good enough in the first place. The "mine it yourself" idea works great on Gilligan's Island and Star Trek but doesn't make any sense when you REALLY think about it. How would you design a probe short of magic to extract, refine, test and smelt an arbitrarily large number of metals without those pieces taking up a significant portion of the payload? Even optimists on that front (like Bob Zubrin) realize that you need to pick specific materials to look for and design for the low hanging fruit so to speak.
And your first point that space has unlimited resources compared to earth is absurd. Compared to earth space has practically zero resources. None. In comparison to earth, the resources of space over any volume are effectively zero. There is 4-15 light years of not a whole lot between us and anything else. You have to go 30-40 MILLION miles even in this solar system to get to someplace that isn't the moon. Where on earth do you need to go 40 million miles to get something? The problem with space travel is that resources are astonishingly scarce. Part of the work of designing craft is in addressing that scarcity.
Neither of those positions need to be true. And the first point is completely false. The Nash equilibrium of a specific game is unique to that game. It may be the best outcome for the group as well as for the individual, but it usually isn't--that's where the meat of early game theory was (prisoner's dilemma, tragedy of the commons, cournot doupoly).
The second point is probably true in some sense but is functionally meaningless for most cases
This is pretty accurate. It's basically a forward contract that will be resold. too bad it would suffer from some liquidity and risk preference problems. :)
We would buy it but who on the other end would sell it. the idea behind free exchange is mutually beneficial transactions. Unless we presume that the ship owners buy the goods (entirely possible), then there isn't someone around to sell them. Err...let's put it this way. We would like for that ship to appear in ordbit, but in order for it to do so, someone has to make a decision on the other planet and hope that we will buy something basically thousands of years in the future. There ARE models for this. I don't agree with the OP that it is hopeless. It is just different. the east india company provides a good model for talking about these kinds of situations, as do futures markets from a long time ago (think Denmark). The company mines the ore on the basis of a forward contract for ore prices with the ship owner. The ship owner pays that miner and transports the goods to earth, where presumably he can make enough money to recoup his payment and more. In this case, the ship owner has to be pretty sure that the value of titanium is going to be high enough to be worth his while AND he has to accompany the ship. If the ship owner lives on the mining planet, this doesn't make any sense. He will truly be dead before the goods get to Earth. So think about that.
This has already been posted on a blog about economics specifically (aside from the freakonomics blog. Here is the link.
Just flush them out now. Mark me -1 flamebait for this, but this post will bring out the people insisting on the strict superiority of gold over other forms of investment. While in this case, gold in a safe place (or any other precious metal) would be a better choice over a possibly unmanaged and eventually insolvent investment fund, THAT DOESN'T MEAN that gold is always better or what not.
Just some thoughts:
On a note, I recall reading that section of the book. It comes at the end of "island in the Sky", a remarkably sober book about colonizing space (sober in light of crazier scifi/colonization books). For some reason I read it first and the pessimism of the article stuck with me, setting the tone for the whole book. That's not bad--our views about space travel and the future need pessimism, but I felt that it was the overriding theme.
In the end, there is no free lunch. While you could predict that interstellar travel would change time preference for some, there are a few caveats to make here:
1. Perhaps travel is so expensive that the change in time preference for some doesn't impact the market as a whole. If you have a vanishingly small group of people pushing the discount rate down, does it affect the prevailing rate? You could argue that the income effect of the billionaires of the world might be analogous. While Bill Gates may have the latitude to spend more money on small purchases than they might be worth to him systematically, that does not do much to change the price I pay for those same products.
2. Travellers will face a STEEP opportunity cost. There isn't any other way to describe it. They may (as the article in "islands in the sky" suggests) spend their wealth ENTIRELY on acclimating themselves to a radically different world or insulating themselves from that new world. In other words, this would be like taking a trip from ancient greece to the Soviet Union. You don't speak the language, you don't understand the culture, the medium of exchange, almost everything. You would be lucky if you weren't put in a circus or a museum.
3. In the longer term, risk dominates. Inflation risk and default risk historically rise to 1.0 as time marches on. There are vanishingly view equity or debt instruments that are still valid from 200 years ago. they exist, most notably in the low countries and england, but they are few and far between. What happens in the event of hyperinflation, panics or fraud (although the last one could be accounted for given a persistent third party overseer)?
4. Adverse selection. This is a corrolary of the risk argument. What bank would be likely to write a contract to make an astronomical payment in the far future? A bank that is likely to be solvent that whole time (assuming the bank knows with certainty) might, but would be FAR less likely to do so than a bank who might default on the contract.
5. Explicit cost. While this might eventually become a non-issue, we have to be real about what is at stake. A long term space voyage is basically one way in the eyes of the company chartering the craft. Unlike a 767 from NY to London, when the space ship returns, it will be obsolete, or at least at the end of its viable life. Each trip presents a large fixed cost for the charter company. This may not translate directly as a large enough cost to a consumer if the flight manifest is big enough, but it isn't trivial.
Just some thoughts.
Given the fanciful nature of their claims they have been wildly successful. Think of it this way. they have an uphill battle in undermining one of the basic tenets of a major branch of science. in order to get ID taught instead of evolution they have to reject a well vetted and well supported theory and replace it with wish thinking. That there are states in the union ho teach it is a testemant to the political power of those who preach it.
Also, the courts are not the battlefield they are looking to enter. they are pushing for school board and textbook adoption board change. THAT is the critical element.
this is, for all intents and purposes, the same article as this
there ARE errors in the decision making process. they occur from limited information and high tradeoffs. Personally, I have the advantage of not paying per credit (I'm on the GI Bill), but if I were, 300-500 per credit (it's a public school) is a pretty strong incentive to chose a class that I can pass and that I like. Given that pressure and a limited time frame for decision, problems can occur.
Another thing we have to consider is that going to school isn't the only thing people do. This is similar to the political choice problem. We don't all spend large amounts of time searching through the possible courses we can take and making large expenditures of our time in determining fit. Some of us have jobs, wives, etc. I don't mean this is in an angry us vs. you sense. I just mean that researching future classes might be lower on the priority list. As such, it means those who don't want to research should probably pick a class they are liable to pass. This is exacerbated by the fact that most college graduates are not going to have their particular classes scrutinized. We may see colleges as a check on filler courses for high school students (and graduate school as the same for college students) because they observe apparent class difficulty. Very few other points of observation exist. That means that if the choice is between a hard class where I get a C and an easy class where I get an A, I will probably pick the easy class (all things being equal).
My last point about replacing a possibly cool class with a lame class is the unpleasant outcome of these information and incentive problems. The outcome is that basic req classes get filled up as students who care only about a certain outcome. Some classes are taken because students know they can walk into the exam and pass it.