Blame the pirates. seriously. I cut out the middle man and sell software direct and low prices, with no DRM straight to the customers. you know what happens? people pirate the stuff and distruibute it online. Thats the thanks I get. When pirate kiddies dont give a damn whose work they take, and blatantly copy peoples work without thought for the consequences, who can blame people who reach for DRM to protect their hard work? I hear a lot of people blaming DRM for piracy. That's not good enough, because even non-DRMed stuff gets pirated, and the kids (and often not kids, but adults who should know better) doing it don't give a shit. I'll start complaining about DRM when the anti-DRM people get their house in order and have the guts to denounce the software and movie pirates for what they are.
surely this is totally different. If someone borrows a book from you, you no longer have that book. That's perfectly ok. If the person who borrowed it loves it, they may buy their own copy when they return yours. That's perfectly cool. The problem is when they copy the book. Now there are two copies but only one was paid for. That the situation that has got us to this point.(lawyers, DRM etc.) I doubt many media companies or software companies are that bothered about people lending each other the odd DVD, book or game. It's when such arguments are used to defend some 'l33t p1r4t3' who shares 6 gigs of mp3s in his p2p shared directory, and leaves his machine on 24/7 on 8 mb broadband.... that's just a silly and indefensible extrapolation of 'fair use'. I don't know exactly where the line should be drawn, but I know theres clearly a lot of people who just out and out copyright thieves, and it doesn't help the fair use, anti-drm lobby *at all* to defend their actions in any way. On the other hand, the MPAA etc could do their side (and in some ways, mine, as a copyright holder) a great deal of good by showing far better judgement in when and who they prosecute. There are enough people out their to make good examples of, without having to sue people lip-synching on youtube, or making other very minor breaches of copyright.
So there's no possibility that anyone who makes TV shows or movies that get uploaded to YouTube against their copyright could possibly not be as EVIL as the mafia and/or hitler / satan?
I don't understand this slashdot obsession that anyone who makes original content and wants to enforce copyright is somehow worse than osama bin laden? Nobody cared about people enforcing copyright 20 years ago. Just suddenly when everyone finds it easy to break the law, everyone gets upset about it being enforced. weird.
"take that all you dumb schmucks living in my neighbourhood who will have to pay higher taxes because I dodge mine!"
If you don't want to pay taxes, go live in Afghanistan, but don't moan when you get there about the lack of roads, police and other social gods. Stuff like street lighting has to be paid for. What makes you so special that you think you should not contribute?
you cant just claim that and expect it will go unchallenged. You have obviously never worked anywhere where people are using pirated copies of photoshop and 3D Studio MAX. To suggest that a company employing 100 people can't afford such products is nonsense, they steal it because they think they won't get caught. simple.
Yup, enough people are honest, even given rampant piracy to support games that take a handfull of people 6 months to make. Now explain how this scales up to todays 10 million dollar games, where P2P has made piracy way easier and more convenient than at any point in history. To claim that people with thousand dollar PCs taking 30 dollar software products for free will not hurt the production of said software is just bullshit, often spoken as some kind of weak justification by the pirates.
what total nonsense. WInzip isnt popular because of piracy. Its popular because the demo has no serious usage limitatiomns. And I'm sick of hearing this nonsense about people being placed neatly in the 'legit user' or 'leeching pirate scum' category. There are shades of grey in verything. Many people pirating games still pay for a MMORPG account. Many people who buy all their games will admit to maybe having a dodgy copy of photoshop. Saying pirates wouldnt buy anyway is just self-justification to make those pirates seem less like leeches for doing what they do.
Then unlike 99% of software developers, you must be living off daddy's trust fund. If that's the case, release it as freeware. If you need to pay for the tools of your trade, plus eat and pay rent, you will find that its preferable if people pay for what you produce. Besides, just because *you* claim to want to see your hard work hacked doesn't mean this attitude applies to anyone else. You can't take someone else's software for free on the basis of "if I were him, I wouldn't mind". The fact is you are NOT him.
This isn't some innocent kid downloading an MP3 he already owned a CD of, This is a member of a warez group. hardly an innocent bystander.
there's is freedom TO do X. (this is a conservative view of freedom) and a freedom FROM X (often a left wing view) Often these things don't happily co-exist. If I have the freedom to blast out rock music, does my neighbour have freedom from noise pollution? If I'm free to choose the skin colour of my staff, are my potential staff free from racism?
Don't talk about 'freedom' as though its so easily defined. We could argue that polar bears have a freedom to exist, and that climate change is infringing their freedom, therefore incandescent lightbulb use is affecting polar bears freedom. All I'm saying is that 'freedom' is a useless word, often bandied about when people aren't thinking things through.
Are the people of Iraq more free now than under saddam? In what ways?
And you can even be a waiter, a shelf-stacker in a grocery store, or a taxi driver.
I think there is actually a market for games that feature people of every race without going into clichéd stereotypes. The thing is, most game designers, producers and biz people will not make them. I've worked for a few big game companies, and out of maybe 200 people in those companies, I can only think of ONE black guy, a pretty cool dude who used to draw judge dredd apparently. Bear in mind this was London, where the racial mix is pretty varied. I always found that weird, and kind of creepy. I know that a lot of game employees are supposedly well-adjusted liberal middle class people with no prejudice (so they would claim) but its' always spooky to work somewhere with hardly any women and pretty much no non-whites. The games industry needs more black people, it also needs more women, and not just working as receptionists. In fact, does anyone even know a games company with a male receptionist? (wherever I worked, the receptionists always looked like supermodels).
*probably emerge*. I don't like the 'probably' bit. Besides how long is long enough to know it's safe? remember thalidomide (no idea of the spelling!). Granted, the chances of GM potatoes seriously screwing me up are maybe one in a million, but guess what... food is the ONLY product that I purchase which actually gets absorbed into my body. I don't care so much about the safety or purity of the rubber on my shoes, or the safety of metals in my car or the glass in my windows, because I don't stick these things inside my body.
Its the precautionary principle at work. In the US and the UK, neither of us have trouble feeding our populations. I can grow potatoes in my back garden just fine, and farmers here still grow more than enough for all of us without using a GM variety. I'll stick to what I know, with food, and that excludes GM. I have nothing against the 'principle' of GM food, I'm sure in 200 years all our food will be GM, and far better for us as a result. I just don't trust companies like Monsanto to be as secure and safe about testing the stuff and I would like. Maybe after extensive controlled tests funded by government, over a VERY long time-scale, with widespread open informed public debate, I'll come around. but so far, the tactics used by the GM food lobby to actively prevent labelling of GM food, lobbying for less and less exclusion zones around test sites... none of this fills me with confidence for the safety of their product. If you want to replace the food that people have eaten all their lives with a new product, you have to ensure that product is massively beneficial to *them*, not just a longer shelf life to boost the stores profits. Organic food is massively popular in the UK, I reckon partly because brits are sick of the dodgy practices and tactics employed by the GM food and factory-farming supporters. If your product is really better than what we have, why resort to all this?
I see, so nothing else had changed at that time, and the before and after situations differ dramatically, yet you refuse to see any link. I guess you reckon smoking doesn't cause any health problems right?
This is the last country on earth to have no TV, until 2002. When foreign TV was introduced, complete with violent porgrams, the crime rate in the country went ballistic. The country now has all kinds of social problems that were previously unheard of. People often claim you cant tell the effects TV has because there is no test case. they are wrong Bhutan was a perfect test case, and a damning one for showing TVs potential negative effects.
"Since the April 2002 crime wave, the national newspaper, Kuensel, has called for the censoring of television (some have even suggested that foreign broadcasters, such as Star TV, be banned altogether). An editorial warns: "We are seeing for the first time broken families, school dropouts and other negative youth crimes. We are beginning to see crime associated with drug users all over the world - shoplifting, burglary and violence..."
no idea why you are modded flamebait. I agree with the general sentiment that I don't like microsoft dictating game design IN ANY WAY to the developers. This is why I am a PC developer and not a console one. I don't give a damn what Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo think about game design, its the developer and the designers job to work out what is cool, not the platform 'owner'. I worked in the retail industry for 2 years on an xbox launch title, similar to speedball, financed by microsoft. After 2 years they canned it, and said "all games should have a targeting cursor, you know...like halo." I'm pretty certain if will wright was making sim city for microsoft they would can it for 'not being enough like halo'. Fuck halo. It's a good game, but it is not the ONLY flipping game. If Microsoft want to rebadge their games machine "the Halo 360" then go for it, just don't kid anyone that they are supporting innovative and experimental new games, when they clearly just want lots of identikit halo clones. Has it ever occurred to someone at microsoft that supporting a controller that the game isnt designed for might negatively impact the game design? first that, now a dictat about multiplayer interfaces. What next? an approved list of character names? maybe ever game will have to have voice-overs in the same clichéd butch style? maybe all games will have to use bump mapping? or HDR lighting? never let marketing droids influence game design.
I see, I didn't realise 100% of the USA population owned a vehicle and drove. No wonder your carbon usage is so high. Other countries have public transport.
so you agree that if google are notified of adsense on a site that is clearly and openly trading copyrighted material, that google should freeze their account immediately yes? There are some sites that are a grey area, but some blatantly are not. I'd like to see google cut off the supply of ad funds to those sites.
give me a break. If your a respectable business and you find out that you are clearly working with criminals you have a moral and legal obligation to stop dealing with them and notify the cops. I'm pretty sure in the Uk if you ignored this you would be guilty of all kinds of stuff, obstruction of justice, yada yada. Saying to the judge "I made it easy for you by selling him the ferraris your honour" would just get you laughed at.
Why is everyone defending this? because you happen to like downloading copyrighted stuff for free? what if the site was a race hate site? is that just hunky dory? Imagine complaining to google about them making piles of cash from the KKK website, and to be told "tough shit, we ain't the cops pal". Is that OK?
No respectable company should carry on like this. The fact that a lot of slashdot people dislike the RIAA doesn't make what google are doing defensible. They can omit some results in search terms if they like (see china), don't kid yourself it would be hard for them not to place adsense on pirate sites.
yawn. If the grocery store had a guy set aside specifically to work with the pirate to help make him a millionaire, then I'd say you have some kind of comparison.
Try to at least read the summary here, before engaging in automatic "it involves teh evil RIAA therefore they must be wrong" slashdot groupthink.
Jesus. Nobody was even suggesting that google even tell the RIAA about it. All they want them to do is not to work actively with pirates to make them into millionaires. This is hardly an evil shock tactic.
that's not vaguely what is suggested or said. try reading the article. Google didn't accidentally let a pirate site through the net. They awarded an account manager to them, and generated a million dollars worth of revenue for them. They made 2 guys who were trying to make money from trading copyrighted content into millionaires, no doubt boosting some google profits at the same time. Try and at least read the summary.
If your company is knowingly helping to do business with a company that is breaking the law, you don't think you have a duty to stop doing business with them? Imagine your a second-hand computer store that realises that the guy who turns up every monday with a bunch of new PCs is quite clearly stealing them from nearby offices. Do you think you have a leg to stand on when you say its nothing to do with you? Its a different situation if you don't know that a business you deal with is engaged in illegal activity. In a case where you clearly do, and clearly take no action, I'm guessing you are on extremely dodgy ground legally. I would much rather live in a world where legit businesses like google took reasonable steps to *not* work with dodgy companies who are engaged in illegal activity.
Just because this might involve the 'RIAAmob' doesn't mean that google is innocent.
This is stupid. Why can't these people just put some effort into *enforcing* copyright. It wouldn't be hard to run a p2p client, find a few hundred people sharing copyrighted music, log the IPs, contact their ISPS and prosecute.* When they do that, I'm all in favour (as long as they make reasonable efforts to ensure they have the right people), after all, people *do* illegally share copyrighted songs over the net. However, replacing enforcement of the law with a tax is just insane. Why don't we stop arresting burglars, and instead charge everyone a 'burglary' tax? What's needed is enforcement of existing law, not new law, and not new taxes.
*yes it can be a bit more involved, but that's why companies have lawyers.
I sympathise, but that will be EAs decision. I worked at a company doing a game that had extensive mod support planned. After the hot coffee fiasco, pretty much all mod support was pulled, and discussions were seriously held by company lawyers (idiots) as to how easily we could encrypt everything to prevent anyone ever altering any of it. The enemy of easy mod support is not the designer. it's the lawyer. or the finance guy that doesn't see any bottom line in it.
Don't rethink it, it's fine, but in practice you need to dump the first person idea. games done in 3D in FP mode cost a fortune if you want to have large variety of environment, unless you let the community build it (like second life) which can end up incoherent and messy. The solution is to drop all pretence at being a realistic fully rendered 3D world. To do the game you are describing, you need to switch to 2D, or even a text based game, but it can be done. I found it very easy to add new careers, gameplay elements and situations to my stab at this genre (www.kudosgame.com), purely because the cost to adding a new job / item / event was simply some design, a bit of gameplay code and maybe some text or stock imagery. Everyone wants a fully rendered totally freeform photorealistic game, but you are talking about the fictional metaverse or matrix there, and its not coming anytime soon. In the meantime, we can really go to town with less pretty, but very expandable worlds, if we avoid the need for it to be 3D.
Slashdot Mirror
Blame the pirates.
seriously.
I cut out the middle man and sell software direct and low prices, with no DRM straight to the customers. you know what happens?
people pirate the stuff and distruibute it online. Thats the thanks I get. When pirate kiddies dont give a damn whose work they take, and blatantly copy peoples work without thought for the consequences, who can blame people who reach for DRM to protect their hard work?
I hear a lot of people blaming DRM for piracy. That's not good enough, because even non-DRMed stuff gets pirated, and the kids (and often not kids, but adults who should know better) doing it don't give a shit. I'll start complaining about DRM when the anti-DRM people get their house in order and have the guts to denounce the software and movie pirates for what they are.
surely this is totally different. If someone borrows a book from you, you no longer have that book. That's perfectly ok. If the person who borrowed it loves it, they may buy their own copy when they return yours. That's perfectly cool.
The problem is when they copy the book. Now there are two copies but only one was paid for. That the situation that has got us to this point.(lawyers, DRM etc.)
I doubt many media companies or software companies are that bothered about people lending each other the odd DVD, book or game. It's when such arguments are used to defend some 'l33t p1r4t3' who shares 6 gigs of mp3s in his p2p shared directory, and leaves his machine on 24/7 on 8 mb broadband.... that's just a silly and indefensible extrapolation of 'fair use'.
I don't know exactly where the line should be drawn, but I know theres clearly a lot of people who just out and out copyright thieves, and it doesn't help the fair use, anti-drm lobby *at all* to defend their actions in any way.
On the other hand, the MPAA etc could do their side (and in some ways, mine, as a copyright holder) a great deal of good by showing far better judgement in when and who they prosecute. There are enough people out their to make good examples of, without having to sue people lip-synching on youtube, or making other very minor breaches of copyright.
So there's no possibility that anyone who makes TV shows or movies that get uploaded to YouTube against their copyright could possibly not be as EVIL as the mafia and/or hitler / satan?
I don't understand this slashdot obsession that anyone who makes original content and wants to enforce copyright is somehow worse than osama bin laden? Nobody cared about people enforcing copyright 20 years ago. Just suddenly when everyone finds it easy to break the law, everyone gets upset about it being enforced.
weird.
your wrong. what you mean to say is
"take that all you dumb schmucks living in my neighbourhood who will have to pay higher taxes because I dodge mine!"
If you don't want to pay taxes, go live in Afghanistan, but don't moan when you get there about the lack of roads, police and other social gods. Stuff like street lighting has to be paid for. What makes you so special that you think you should not contribute?
you cant just claim that and expect it will go unchallenged. You have obviously never worked anywhere where people are using pirated copies of photoshop and 3D Studio MAX. To suggest that a company employing 100 people can't afford such products is nonsense, they steal it because they think they won't get caught. simple.
Yup, enough people are honest, even given rampant piracy to support games that take a handfull of people 6 months to make. Now explain how this scales up to todays 10 million dollar games, where P2P has made piracy way easier and more convenient than at any point in history.
To claim that people with thousand dollar PCs taking 30 dollar software products for free will not hurt the production of said software is just bullshit, often spoken as some kind of weak justification by the pirates.
what total nonsense. WInzip isnt popular because of piracy. Its popular because the demo has no serious usage limitatiomns. And I'm sick of hearing this nonsense about people being placed neatly in the 'legit user' or 'leeching pirate scum' category. There are shades of grey in verything. Many people pirating games still pay for a MMORPG account. Many people who buy all their games will admit to maybe having a dodgy copy of photoshop.
Saying pirates wouldnt buy anyway is just self-justification to make those pirates seem less like leeches for doing what they do.
Then unlike 99% of software developers, you must be living off daddy's trust fund.
If that's the case, release it as freeware. If you need to pay for the tools of your trade, plus eat and pay rent, you will find that its preferable if people pay for what you produce.
Besides, just because *you* claim to want to see your hard work hacked doesn't mean this attitude applies to anyone else. You can't take someone else's software for free on the basis of "if I were him, I wouldn't mind". The fact is you are NOT him.
This isn't some innocent kid downloading an MP3 he already owned a CD of, This is a member of a warez group. hardly an innocent bystander.
there's is freedom TO do X. (this is a conservative view of freedom) and a freedom FROM X (often a left wing view)
Often these things don't happily co-exist. If I have the freedom to blast out rock music, does my neighbour have freedom from noise pollution?
If I'm free to choose the skin colour of my staff, are my potential staff free from racism?
Don't talk about 'freedom' as though its so easily defined. We could argue that polar bears have a freedom to exist, and that climate change is infringing their freedom, therefore incandescent lightbulb use is affecting polar bears freedom.
All I'm saying is that 'freedom' is a useless word, often bandied about when people aren't thinking things through.
Are the people of Iraq more free now than under saddam? In what ways?
"Meanwhile, "Middle Class Accountant: The First-Person Actuarial" would sell to _nobody_ 8-)."
actually it sells pretty well...
Ok so you can't be an accountant (yet) but you can be a lawyer:
http://www.kudosgame.com/
And you can even be a waiter, a shelf-stacker in a grocery store, or a taxi driver.
I think there is actually a market for games that feature people of every race without going into clichéd stereotypes. The thing is, most game designers, producers and biz people will not make them. I've worked for a few big game companies, and out of maybe 200 people in those companies, I can only think of ONE black guy, a pretty cool dude who used to draw judge dredd apparently. Bear in mind this was London, where the racial mix is pretty varied.
I always found that weird, and kind of creepy. I know that a lot of game employees are supposedly well-adjusted liberal middle class people with no prejudice (so they would claim) but its' always spooky to work somewhere with hardly any women and pretty much no non-whites.
The games industry needs more black people, it also needs more women, and not just working as receptionists. In fact, does anyone even know a games company with a male receptionist? (wherever I worked, the receptionists always looked like supermodels).
*probably emerge*. I don't like the 'probably' bit. Besides how long is long enough to know it's safe? remember thalidomide (no idea of the spelling!).
Granted, the chances of GM potatoes seriously screwing me up are maybe one in a million, but guess what... food is the ONLY product that I purchase which actually gets absorbed into my body. I don't care so much about the safety or purity of the rubber on my shoes, or the safety of metals in my car or the glass in my windows, because I don't stick these things inside my body.
Its the precautionary principle at work. In the US and the UK, neither of us have trouble feeding our populations. I can grow potatoes in my back garden just fine, and farmers here still grow more than enough for all of us without using a GM variety.
I'll stick to what I know, with food, and that excludes GM. I have nothing against the 'principle' of GM food, I'm sure in 200 years all our food will be GM, and far better for us as a result. I just don't trust companies like Monsanto to be as secure and safe about testing the stuff and I would like. Maybe after extensive controlled tests funded by government, over a VERY long time-scale, with widespread open informed public debate, I'll come around. but so far, the tactics used by the GM food lobby to actively prevent labelling of GM food, lobbying for less and less exclusion zones around test sites... none of this fills me with confidence for the safety of their product. If you want to replace the food that people have eaten all their lives with a new product, you have to ensure that product is massively beneficial to *them*, not just a longer shelf life to boost the stores profits.
Organic food is massively popular in the UK, I reckon partly because brits are sick of the dodgy practices and tactics employed by the GM food and factory-farming supporters. If your product is really better than what we have, why resort to all this?
I see, so nothing else had changed at that time, and the before and after situations differ dramatically, yet you refuse to see any link. I guess you reckon smoking doesn't cause any health problems right?
you would do well to read about Bhutan:
5 769,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,97
This is the last country on earth to have no TV, until 2002. When foreign TV was introduced, complete with violent porgrams, the crime rate in the country went ballistic. The country now has all kinds of social problems that were previously unheard of.
People often claim you cant tell the effects TV has because there is no test case. they are wrong Bhutan was a perfect test case, and a damning one for showing TVs potential negative effects.
"Since the April 2002 crime wave, the national newspaper, Kuensel, has called for the censoring of television (some have even suggested that foreign broadcasters, such as Star TV, be banned altogether). An editorial warns: "We are seeing for the first time broken families, school dropouts and other negative youth crimes. We are beginning to see crime associated with drug users all over the world - shoplifting, burglary and violence..."
no idea why you are modded flamebait. I agree with the general sentiment that I don't like microsoft dictating game design IN ANY WAY to the developers. This is why I am a PC developer and not a console one. I don't give a damn what Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo think about game design, its the developer and the designers job to work out what is cool, not the platform 'owner'.
I worked in the retail industry for 2 years on an xbox launch title, similar to speedball, financed by microsoft. After 2 years they canned it, and said "all games should have a targeting cursor, you know...like halo." I'm pretty certain if will wright was making sim city for microsoft they would can it for 'not being enough like halo'.
Fuck halo.
It's a good game, but it is not the ONLY flipping game.
If Microsoft want to rebadge their games machine "the Halo 360" then go for it, just don't kid anyone that they are supporting innovative and experimental new games, when they clearly just want lots of identikit halo clones.
Has it ever occurred to someone at microsoft that supporting a controller that the game isnt designed for might negatively impact the game design? first that, now a dictat about multiplayer interfaces. What next? an approved list of character names? maybe ever game will have to have voice-overs in the same clichéd butch style? maybe all games will have to use bump mapping? or HDR lighting?
never let marketing droids influence game design.
I see, I didn't realise 100% of the USA population owned a vehicle and drove. No wonder your carbon usage is so high. Other countries have public transport.
so you agree that if google are notified of adsense on a site that is clearly and openly trading copyrighted material, that google should freeze their account immediately yes?
There are some sites that are a grey area, but some blatantly are not. I'd like to see google cut off the supply of ad funds to those sites.
give me a break. If your a respectable business and you find out that you are clearly working with criminals you have a moral and legal obligation to stop dealing with them and notify the cops. I'm pretty sure in the Uk if you ignored this you would be guilty of all kinds of stuff, obstruction of justice, yada yada. Saying to the judge "I made it easy for you by selling him the ferraris your honour" would just get you laughed at.
Why is everyone defending this? because you happen to like downloading copyrighted stuff for free? what if the site was a race hate site? is that just hunky dory? Imagine complaining to google about them making piles of cash from the KKK website, and to be told "tough shit, we ain't the cops pal". Is that OK?
No respectable company should carry on like this. The fact that a lot of slashdot people dislike the RIAA doesn't make what google are doing defensible. They can omit some results in search terms if they like (see china), don't kid yourself it would be hard for them not to place adsense on pirate sites.
yawn.
If the grocery store had a guy set aside specifically to work with the pirate to help make him a millionaire, then I'd say you have some kind of comparison.
Try to at least read the summary here, before engaging in automatic "it involves teh evil RIAA therefore they must be wrong" slashdot groupthink.
Jesus. Nobody was even suggesting that google even tell the RIAA about it. All they want them to do is not to work actively with pirates to make them into millionaires. This is hardly an evil shock tactic.
that's not vaguely what is suggested or said. try reading the article.
Google didn't accidentally let a pirate site through the net. They awarded an account manager to them, and generated a million dollars worth of revenue for them. They made 2 guys who were trying to make money from trading copyrighted content into millionaires, no doubt boosting some google profits at the same time.
Try and at least read the summary.
If your company is knowingly helping to do business with a company that is breaking the law, you don't think you have a duty to stop doing business with them?
Imagine your a second-hand computer store that realises that the guy who turns up every monday with a bunch of new PCs is quite clearly stealing them from nearby offices. Do you think you have a leg to stand on when you say its nothing to do with you?
Its a different situation if you don't know that a business you deal with is engaged in illegal activity. In a case where you clearly do, and clearly take no action, I'm guessing you are on extremely dodgy ground legally.
I would much rather live in a world where legit businesses like google took reasonable steps to *not* work with dodgy companies who are engaged in illegal activity.
Just because this might involve the 'RIAAmob' doesn't mean that google is innocent.
forgive my ignorance but are there not some mothers of 4 in the USA who cannot afford an SUV?
Do they starve?
This is stupid.
Why can't these people just put some effort into *enforcing* copyright. It wouldn't be hard to run a p2p client, find a few hundred people sharing copyrighted music, log the IPs, contact their ISPS and prosecute.*
When they do that, I'm all in favour (as long as they make reasonable efforts to ensure they have the right people), after all, people *do* illegally share copyrighted songs over the net. However, replacing enforcement of the law with a tax is just insane. Why don't we stop arresting burglars, and instead charge everyone a 'burglary' tax?
What's needed is enforcement of existing law, not new law, and not new taxes.
*yes it can be a bit more involved, but that's why companies have lawyers.
I sympathise, but that will be EAs decision. I worked at a company doing a game that had extensive mod support planned. After the hot coffee fiasco, pretty much all mod support was pulled, and discussions were seriously held by company lawyers (idiots) as to how easily we could encrypt everything to prevent anyone ever altering any of it.
The enemy of easy mod support is not the designer. it's the lawyer. or the finance guy that doesn't see any bottom line in it.
Don't rethink it, it's fine, but in practice you need to dump the first person idea. games done in 3D in FP mode cost a fortune if you want to have large variety of environment, unless you let the community build it (like second life) which can end up incoherent and messy.
The solution is to drop all pretence at being a realistic fully rendered 3D world. To do the game you are describing, you need to switch to 2D, or even a text based game, but it can be done. I found it very easy to add new careers, gameplay elements and situations to my stab at this genre (www.kudosgame.com), purely because the cost to adding a new job / item / event was simply some design, a bit of gameplay code and maybe some text or stock imagery.
Everyone wants a fully rendered totally freeform photorealistic game, but you are talking about the fictional metaverse or matrix there, and its not coming anytime soon. In the meantime, we can really go to town with less pretty, but very expandable worlds, if we avoid the need for it to be 3D.