Re:Would some one please explain...
on
The Day Against DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
oh dear. I guess people like you dont think that JRR tolkein deserved a single penny for writing his books? you think that Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, iain Banks, George Lucas, gene roddenberry, all these people should have become plumbers instead. increasingly, everything that we create is becoming reproduceable in digital form. You seem to think that nobody that creates anything that can be digital work should be paid. how quaint. I guess you dont understand the concept of fixed and marginal costs, or basic economics. Or that the people who create all this 'art; need to be paid for their work, else they too will have to go become plumbers. I'd rather live in a world where great art and information was actually produced, rather than a world where everyone did manual work because its the only wat to ensure they get paid. People like you are entirely the problem.
because you realise that a lot of effort went into creating it, the author needs to eat too, you enjoy it, and your not just a leech?
Re:Would some one please explain...
on
The Day Against DRM
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
your not missing anything, I agree with you 100%. I dislike DRM, and dont use it for my games, but I absolutely see why it is used. As a content creator, I know what its like to see people happily taking your hard work for nothing, and then even giving you a hard time if you suggest that people should pay for it. (esp as I make free demos available, there are really no excuses).
The trouble is, for even daring to suggest that DRM has its place, and that file sharing copyrighted material is illegal, you can expect to be criticised, insulted, and generally modded down to oblivion. Thats the current slashdot philosophy. All companies are evil (unless they are somehow connected to linux), everyone who is caught coopying files illegally is absolutely 100% innocent, and anyone who disagrees is some evil, stupid luddite. Welcome to slashdot. Not a friendly place for the creators of digital content.
or better still, how the screenshots in magazines and on websites look nothing like the game looks like on ANY rig. I'll never forget the first time I asked an artist what he was doing to hear him say "Touching up screenshots for a magazine." I had no idea that ever 'triple a' game developer runs its screenshots through the art department to touch up the particle effects and the shadows to make them look better. If you have a brand new alienware PC and the screenshots still look better, thats why, they arent really bare screenshots at all. Bastards.
hey, lets not kid ourselves we are routing for the 'little guy' here. Tescos is one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the UK, representing 12.5% of ALL retail spending. They made 2.5 Billion pounds profit (4/7 Billion dollars) in the last year. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4941236.stm)
This is not your little rebellious mom n pop software company.
Because the kind of person that will buy anti-virus software in a supermarket is not likely to know what to do with downloaded zip or rar file they will get from sourceforge.
sorry, im busy actually MAKING the content that people like you think you are entitled top. I dont have time to wade through this predictable crap. How old are you? 12? You are EXACTLY the problem I was talking about, and ironically enough, you dont even see it.
how has technology made the makers of photoshop redundant. "The market will stand" only works as a test if the market is not bypassed. surely thsi is obvious. the price that the market will stand for a porsche is $0, if we could all get stolen ones for free. This is no argument at all. You cant talk about market forces in the same breath as zero-cost copying.
Well it is a 'principle' in the same way that comunism is a principle, but I dont agree that it is one that can coexist in any sane way with capitalism. If your starting point is "all information should be free" how do you expect the people who actually make that information for a living are going to meet you halfway? You layughably say im the pot calling the kettle black, then in the very next sentence draw a line in the sand where you basically refuse to pay for anything digital. It's arguing from that point of view that has got us exactly where we are right now. I'm well aware of the arguments that people use to justify copyright theft. They are frankly, laughable, and entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. This is about excessive DRM, and consumer rights, not some debate over the very legitimacy of the concepts of copyright or IP, which most grown up sane people realise are required for a modern, capitalist economy.
Its people like you who try to connect a sane debate over consumer rights and DRM with some hippie philosophy of abolishing intellectual property that has prevented there being any sane debate on the issue. If the campaigners against DRM also rant about how all information should be free, they will never get any sympathy, any compromise, or any attention from mainstream politicians.
To everyone campaigning against DRM (I'm against it too, and dont use it), it would be wise to distance yourself from the 'information wants to be free' crowd. They just make a mockery of the whole debate, and allow corporations to label you all as thieves.
well it would be a good start to accept that piracy harms the companies who make the content. Or is even this not common ground that can be agreed upon?
On the one hand we have the idiots like Sony with their rootkit, the starforce gang, and the people prosecuting kids dancing in their living rooms on youtube. on the other hand, we have the hardcore software crackers, the 'pirate party' and the pirate bay and their ilk, with zero respect for intellectual property or the rights of the content creators.
We need intelligent, reasonbale debate on the issue, where both sides can accept some basic principles. Nobody will care what the RIAA or MPAA or Sony say on the topic any more, as they have screwed the customers and lost credibility. Nobody on the content side (including msyelf) listens to the 'pirate party', 'pirate bay' or their defenders, as they have blatantly supported illegal distribution withgout any attempt to compensate the content creators. We need more people like this, more discussion like this. Unless the anti-DRM people can frame their arguments reasonably, politicians will undoubtably listen just to the big corporate lobbyists. The companies can always argue that piracy is costing jobs and affecting the economy. they can also buy influence. In a straight out slanging match, the RIAA/MPAA will win. Keep the debate reasonable, and dont let the people you oppose have the ammunition they need to shout you down. Calling a movement against DRM the 'pirate party' is possibly just as stupid on the anti-drm side, as sonys rootkit was on their side.
how about c) whether or not it encouraged people to research and invest in the production of new products? or does that not matter? maybe we should be content with just remixing the last 50 years content and IP endlessly with nothing new being added?
But games depreciate WAY quicker than that. A game that came out in 2005 will run fine for me today, In fact my hardware is from then anyway, ditto my O/S. You have a fair point with 10 year or 20 year old games, but theres no reason why a game shouldnt hold its price for 2,3 or 4 years. cars wear out, games don't. People invent new graphics and physics techs, but not all games are graphically based anyway. take a game like 'lux' (a risk-style strategy game). Lux is as good now (and as popular now) as it was 3 or 4 years ago (probably more). I think its the same price too. I think it bizzare that you see the latest greatest FPS for £35, and then 2 months later its £20, a year later its £5. Thats mad. I might have the exact same hardware, and get the exact same experience a year later. There is some argument that this is done to maximise revenue from each segment of the market, but I still think that retail games depreciate way faster than they need to.
sony. not bethseda. Its a smart move for bethseda. But from sonys POV, this is no Halo. Is this why they want me to spend so much? to play old PC games?
agreed, I can already play this on my PC, and as my slightly old PC is probably now worth less than a new Playstation 3, why bother? At least the XBox had halo, a game that PC players drooled over for years only to ahve it snatched away from them. This smacks of desperation. Possibly some big name devs who they were relying on for more original launch titles decided against it?
Ok firstly, ist VERY difficult to draw any conclusions on this either way, there are too many variables. However, nobody ever mentions human nature when it comes to the old anecdote game. Slashsot has a lot of this, I've already seen many posts like this:
"you know, I wasnt interested in song X, but I downloaded it for free, and after a few days it grew on me, and what the hell, I ordered the CD, so they got an extra sale"
Thats fine, almost certainly true, and people are being honest about it, and thats great. but the thing is, as well as being honest, its uplifiting, and makes you feel good, justified and a generally fair guy. take anecdote B:
"I was thinking about buying game X, but I was on the fence. Then someone gave me a pirate copy. I played it, enjoyed it, but never got around to buying the full version. Why bother? I already had a copy"
Thats me talking, about 8 years ago maybe. I don't pirate anything these days. the thing is, admitiing this, makes me feel like a bit of a dick, a tightass, and not an especially reasonable guy. You dont hear people admit they pirated X, and listen to it every day, but never buy it, because its not such a cool thing to admit. But that doesnt mean that it doesnt happen a LOT.
Quoting "time to complete" on a game is nonsense, and always has been. Time to complete for a 12 year old kid? for a thirty year old guy? for someone whose crap at FPS games? for which level of difficulty? I play games because i want to immerse myself in another world, and play with some interesting stuff. Its not a race. I dont keep a clock going as I play (although oblivion does that for me for some reason). Whats important is FUN, nothing else. People can't easily define fun, so they try to come up with other metrics. how many unique units does it have? How long is it to complete? How many DVDs does it come on. I had someone complain about one of my games once because it was "only 23 MB". Apparnatly they didnt want a "good" game, a "fun" game or an "original game" or even a "game with depth", they just wanted one with a bigger filesize. I played Elite for most of my childhood. it was 48k. Was I ripped off? whats the time to complete for Chess anyway? I'm still working on that one.
One day maybe game reviewers and publishers will shut up about how much bump mapping the game has, shut up about what hollywood actor did the voiceover, shut up about how long they *think* it takes to complete it, and just sell their game on the basis of it being a GOOD game.
King Kong is a long movie. Its also shit (in my opinion, YMMV). Applying the metric to books and movies is clearly nonsense, so why apply it to games?
In so much as I try to encourage political debate on the forums for my politics game here: http://www.positech.co.uk/forums I think I've been ok so far, even though the discussion is fairly sparse. One reason for this is that the nature of the game is entirely about politicl policies and actual implementation, rather than rhetoric or 'principles', so possibly that skews the discussion away from the more flamebait related areas. One thing I suspect helps si that if I start a poll or topic, I always try to rpesent both sides to the question within the question itself, in order to get the principle of balanced debate there at the very start.
yes they do. Carmack released the quake source code, because he had enough cash to allow it, and believee din the idea. On a way smaller scale, the source code for my first game (http://www.positech.co.uk/starminer) is also freely available. I'd be amazed if the source to my other current games isnt released within the next 5 years. In fact, theres ample evidence of people doing this.
how often do you need a new phone exactly? I've owned 3 in my life. the first lost its screen over time, the second was stolen. I've had the third maybe 3 years now, and see no reason to upgrade it. It makes phone calls. Job done. Foe everything else phones do, I have a home PC. I drive, so I dont need a phone to play games on at the bus stop, and i can't think why people MUST speak to me instantly anyway. most of the time the things left in a drawer anyway. The thought of getting through so many phone upgrades that I use a vending machine just seems totally alien.
Slashdot Mirror
oh dear.
I guess people like you dont think that JRR tolkein deserved a single penny for writing his books? you think that Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, iain Banks, George Lucas, gene roddenberry, all these people should have become plumbers instead. increasingly, everything that we create is becoming reproduceable in digital form. You seem to think that nobody that creates anything that can be digital work should be paid. how quaint.
I guess you dont understand the concept of fixed and marginal costs, or basic economics. Or that the people who create all this 'art; need to be paid for their work, else they too will have to go become plumbers. I'd rather live in a world where great art and information was actually produced, rather than a world where everyone did manual work because its the only wat to ensure they get paid.
People like you are entirely the problem.
because you realise that a lot of effort went into creating it, the author needs to eat too, you enjoy it, and your not just a leech?
your not missing anything, I agree with you 100%. I dislike DRM, and dont use it for my games, but I absolutely see why it is used. As a content creator, I know what its like to see people happily taking your hard work for nothing, and then even giving you a hard time if you suggest that people should pay for it. (esp as I make free demos available, there are really no excuses).
The trouble is, for even daring to suggest that DRM has its place, and that file sharing copyrighted material is illegal, you can expect to be criticised, insulted, and generally modded down to oblivion. Thats the current slashdot philosophy. All companies are evil (unless they are somehow connected to linux), everyone who is caught coopying files illegally is absolutely 100% innocent, and anyone who disagrees is some evil, stupid luddite.
Welcome to slashdot. Not a friendly place for the creators of digital content.
or better still, how the screenshots in magazines and on websites look nothing like the game looks like on ANY rig. I'll never forget the first time I asked an artist what he was doing to hear him say "Touching up screenshots for a magazine." I had no idea that ever 'triple a' game developer runs its screenshots through the art department to touch up the particle effects and the shadows to make them look better. If you have a brand new alienware PC and the screenshots still look better, thats why, they arent really bare screenshots at all.
Bastards.
hey, lets not kid ourselves we are routing for the 'little guy' here. Tescos is one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the UK, representing 12.5% of ALL retail spending. They made 2.5 Billion pounds profit (4/7 Billion dollars) in the last year.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4941236.stm)
This is not your little rebellious mom n pop software company.
a student. thought so. when you stop living of daddies trust fund, you might grow up, and realsie stuff needs to be paid for.
Because the kind of person that will buy anti-virus software in a supermarket is not likely to know what to do with downloaded zip or rar file they will get from sourceforge.
sorry, im busy actually MAKING the content that people like you think you are entitled top. I dont have time to wade through this predictable crap. How old are you? 12?
You are EXACTLY the problem I was talking about, and ironically enough, you dont even see it.
how has technology made the makers of photoshop redundant. "The market will stand" only works as a test if the market is not bypassed. surely thsi is obvious. the price that the market will stand for a porsche is $0, if we could all get stolen ones for free. This is no argument at all.
You cant talk about market forces in the same breath as zero-cost copying.
Well it is a 'principle' in the same way that comunism is a principle, but I dont agree that it is one that can coexist in any sane way with capitalism. If your starting point is "all information should be free" how do you expect the people who actually make that information for a living are going to meet you halfway? You layughably say im the pot calling the kettle black, then in the very next sentence draw a line in the sand where you basically refuse to pay for anything digital.
It's arguing from that point of view that has got us exactly where we are right now.
I'm well aware of the arguments that people use to justify copyright theft. They are frankly, laughable, and entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. This is about excessive DRM, and consumer rights, not some debate over the very legitimacy of the concepts of copyright or IP, which most grown up sane people realise are required for a modern, capitalist economy.
Its people like you who try to connect a sane debate over consumer rights and DRM with some hippie philosophy of abolishing intellectual property that has prevented there being any sane debate on the issue. If the campaigners against DRM also rant about how all information should be free, they will never get any sympathy, any compromise, or any attention from mainstream politicians.
To everyone campaigning against DRM (I'm against it too, and dont use it), it would be wise to distance yourself from the 'information wants to be free' crowd. They just make a mockery of the whole debate, and allow corporations to label you all as thieves.
well it would be a good start to accept that piracy harms the companies who make the content. Or is even this not common ground that can be agreed upon?
On the one hand we have the idiots like Sony with their rootkit, the starforce gang, and the people prosecuting kids dancing in their living rooms on youtube. on the other hand, we have the hardcore software crackers, the 'pirate party' and the pirate bay and their ilk, with zero respect for intellectual property or the rights of the content creators.
/MPAA will win. Keep the debate reasonable, and dont let the people you oppose have the ammunition they need to shout you down. Calling a movement against DRM the 'pirate party' is possibly just as stupid on the anti-drm side, as sonys rootkit was on their side.
We need intelligent, reasonbale debate on the issue, where both sides can accept some basic principles. Nobody will care what the RIAA or MPAA or Sony say on the topic any more, as they have screwed the customers and lost credibility. Nobody on the content side (including msyelf) listens to the 'pirate party', 'pirate bay' or their defenders, as they have blatantly supported illegal distribution withgout any attempt to compensate the content creators.
We need more people like this, more discussion like this. Unless the anti-DRM people can frame their arguments reasonably, politicians will undoubtably listen just to the big corporate lobbyists. The companies can always argue that piracy is costing jobs and affecting the economy. they can also buy influence. In a straight out slanging match, the RIAA
how about c) whether or not it encouraged people to research and invest in the production of new products? or does that not matter? maybe we should be content with just remixing the last 50 years content and IP endlessly with nothing new being added?
But games depreciate WAY quicker than that. A game that came out in 2005 will run fine for me today, In fact my hardware is from then anyway, ditto my O/S. You have a fair point with 10 year or 20 year old games, but theres no reason why a game shouldnt hold its price for 2,3 or 4 years.
cars wear out, games don't. People invent new graphics and physics techs, but not all games are graphically based anyway.
take a game like 'lux' (a risk-style strategy game). Lux is as good now (and as popular now) as it was 3 or 4 years ago (probably more). I think its the same price too.
I think it bizzare that you see the latest greatest FPS for £35, and then 2 months later its £20, a year later its £5. Thats mad. I might have the exact same hardware, and get the exact same experience a year later.
There is some argument that this is done to maximise revenue from each segment of the market, but I still think that retail games depreciate way faster than they need to.
sony. not bethseda. Its a smart move for bethseda. But from sonys POV, this is no Halo. Is this why they want me to spend so much? to play old PC games?
agreed, I can already play this on my PC, and as my slightly old PC is probably now worth less than a new Playstation 3, why bother?
At least the XBox had halo, a game that PC players drooled over for years only to ahve it snatched away from them. This smacks of desperation. Possibly some big name devs who they were relying on for more original launch titles decided against it?
Ah well I saw it on DVD, it may well have been the 'stroke the directors ego cut'.
Ok firstly, ist VERY difficult to draw any conclusions on this either way, there are too many variables. However, nobody ever mentions human nature when it comes to the old anecdote game.
Slashsot has a lot of this, I've already seen many posts like this:
"you know, I wasnt interested in song X, but I downloaded it for free, and after a few days it grew on me, and what the hell, I ordered the CD, so they got an extra sale"
Thats fine, almost certainly true, and people are being honest about it, and thats great. but the thing is, as well as being honest, its uplifiting, and makes you feel good, justified and a generally fair guy. take anecdote B:
"I was thinking about buying game X, but I was on the fence. Then someone gave me a pirate copy. I played it, enjoyed it, but never got around to buying the full version. Why bother? I already had a copy"
Thats me talking, about 8 years ago maybe. I don't pirate anything these days. the thing is, admitiing this, makes me feel like a bit of a dick, a tightass, and not an especially reasonable guy. You dont hear people admit they pirated X, and listen to it every day, but never buy it, because its not such a cool thing to admit. But that doesnt mean that it doesnt happen a LOT.
Quoting "time to complete" on a game is nonsense, and always has been. Time to complete for a 12 year old kid? for a thirty year old guy? for someone whose crap at FPS games? for which level of difficulty?
I play games because i want to immerse myself in another world, and play with some interesting stuff. Its not a race. I dont keep a clock going as I play (although oblivion does that for me for some reason).
Whats important is FUN, nothing else. People can't easily define fun, so they try to come up with other metrics.
how many unique units does it have?
How long is it to complete?
How many DVDs does it come on.
I had someone complain about one of my games once because it was "only 23 MB". Apparnatly they didnt want a "good" game, a "fun" game or an "original game" or even a "game with depth", they just wanted one with a bigger filesize. I played Elite for most of my childhood. it was 48k. Was I ripped off?
whats the time to complete for Chess anyway? I'm still working on that one.
One day maybe game reviewers and publishers will shut up about how much bump mapping the game has, shut up about what hollywood actor did the voiceover, shut up about how long they *think* it takes to complete it, and just sell their game on the basis of it being a GOOD game.
King Kong is a long movie. Its also shit (in my opinion, YMMV). Applying the metric to books and movies is clearly nonsense, so why apply it to games?
In so much as I try to encourage political debate on the forums for my politics game here:
http://www.positech.co.uk/forums
I think I've been ok so far, even though the discussion is fairly sparse. One reason for this is that the nature of the game is entirely about politicl policies and actual implementation, rather than rhetoric or 'principles', so possibly that skews the discussion away from the more flamebait related areas.
One thing I suspect helps si that if I start a poll or topic, I always try to rpesent both sides to the question within the question itself, in order to get the principle of balanced debate there at the very start.
yes they do. Carmack released the quake source code, because he had enough cash to allow it, and believee din the idea. On a way smaller scale, the source code for my first game (http://www.positech.co.uk/starminer) is also freely available. I'd be amazed if the source to my other current games isnt released within the next 5 years.
In fact, theres ample evidence of people doing this.
how often do you need a new phone exactly? I've owned 3 in my life. the first lost its screen over time, the second was stolen. I've had the third maybe 3 years now, and see no reason to upgrade it. It makes phone calls. Job done. Foe everything else phones do, I have a home PC. I drive, so I dont need a phone to play games on at the bus stop, and i can't think why people MUST speak to me instantly anyway. most of the time the things left in a drawer anyway.
The thought of getting through so many phone upgrades that I use a vending machine just seems totally alien.
grow up and get a job little boy. then maybe you will realsie the need for people who create things to be paid. Till then, go clean your room.
please make an effort to be less of an arrogant misinformed cunt, and maybe i will.
I'd like to humbly submit my local plumbers site:
http://www.lunns.net/showerspares/
extra points for the drifting 'lunns' text.