Sure, you should be compensated, but if you're in the "charity business", you would think you'd be a little more ethically inclined. How do you justify hundreds of thousands in salary for a position where you head a *charity*? I would say $500,000/yr is a bit extreme for the Red Cross and $1,000,000/yr is a bit extreme for the United Way. You aren't talking about providing salaries that make sure these people can focus on the job rather than living in a cardboard box. You're talking about paying them enough to be millionaires on charitable donations.
Exactly how are you going to resell physical media that is useless, because you already used up the serial key when you logged into EA's website and registered the game with it - thereby rendering the physical copy useless to anyone who isn't you? That has nothing to do with it being acquired digitally and is the way most games are going these days. The days of buying a game (digitally or physically) and not having it locked down to one account and one person are almost entirely long gone.
Of course the fringe things are going to be among the first that you list.
People are always so fucking infatuated with themselves that they can't wait to tell you about all the things they're into that you've probably never heard of. The fact that it's fringe and you haven't heard of it convinces them that they're just that much cooler.
Listen, people are idiots and fools are easily parted with their money. More, people have a short attention span and never follow up on the results.
People were suckered into the whole Haiti thing last year. Morons "texting" cash to charities and schiesters like Bill Clinton and George Bush encouraging people to "just send us your cash". And in the end? No accountability. I don't even need to go into the troubles with the Red Cross and the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars, can't seem to account for where all that money went to. Last I recall, Clinton was present to see the handing over of three million bucks or some similarly ridiculously low number.
You had global donations from governments promised in the billions (at least five billion, I believe). You had moron celebrities holding telethons and telling you that you should give your cash.
And idiots gave their cash. But they never looked in on what was going on. Why should they? I texted my $10 to some place, so I'm a good person now! I don't need to figure out whatever happened after that!
Meanwhile, it's a year later and we're told that people are still living in tents and everyone is dying of dysentery or whatever.
Of course, Japan is less likely to be prone to this kind of problem, I think. The only concern there will be with fake charities trying to scam you out of donations through fake websites and other services. And that's what this article was talking about, to begin with. The problem in Haiti was different, in that they're not the power that is Japan. They're fucking Haiti. And actual real organizations simply behaved criminally after extorting donations from you.
Geeks have a very misconceived perception of how the world views them. It has always been common on Slashdot (and elsewhere, in more recent years) to convince each other that geek is hip and geeks are the new hotness and that everyone loves a geek. The truth is, the world doesn't.
I know plenty of people who think of videogames as something that entertained them in their youth, but now that they're adults, it's not relevant. I've even come across plenty of teenagers while playing with my buddies in online games (Call of Duty, for example), who don't understand why guys in their late 20s or even 30s would be playing videogames. I've even read forum discussions asking the question of how long people will play videogames or when it's time to stop playing (and these discussions are ON game sites, mind you!) and a common response from young people is that they'll probably stop when they're around 20 or 30. Sometimes maybe 40. If teenagers think playing games into adulthood is ridiculous, how do you think other adults (and especially older adults) think of you?
I once wryly reacted to myself doing or saying something kind of shamefully geeky by snickering and saying "god damn, I'm such a geek". In front of a girl I'd been with for awhile. Her response? She very quickly showed great concern and assured me that I wasn't a geek and I shouldn't say that about myself. In her mind, a "geek" was an insult. A derision. I guarantee she's not alone. Hell, you even see it on a regular basis in modern media, when someone is referred to as a "geek" or a "nerd" in a very derogatory way.
So yeah, there are a LOT of things out there that you may not be ashamed of, but that you wouldn't want publicly associated with yourself. It's one of the problems many people had with Blizzard's attempt to force everyone to use their real full names in the forums (sorry, but my full name is a private thing which I do care to guard, if at all possible - thanks Blizzard!). It's the problem a lot of people have with the idea of some enforced internet-wide identity requirement. There is value in anonymity.
I enjoy videogames. I would absolutely not want friends, future girlfriends, family of future friends or girlfriends, employers, government agents, or others to be looking up information on me and find a ton of videogame related stuff associated with my name. Not because I'm ashamed of being interested in videogames, but because I know that all of those people would unfairly judge me for it. That because I play videogames a few hours a month, I might not be able to get a security clearance, because someone sees videogames as something only an untrustworthy addictive personality would engage in. Or that a future girlfriend might see it as a sign of permanent immaturity. Or that an employer might see it as a potential problem of some sort.
It's the same reason people often don't want their lack of religious belief to be public. Again, not ashamed of it, but being an atheist is not exactly something you want to risk being known about you when the chances are strong a future employer or manager is a devout religious person and holds strong prejudices against you based solely on that (you know, prejudices like our former president had when he said that he doesn't believe atheists can be patriots and maybe shouldn't even be citizens).
Of course, the number of devious ways this could be utilized are nearly endless.
I'm definitely tired of having to remember countless sets of credentials across every publisher and distributor and developer out there, due to the need to register games these days. Even on consoles! And it gets even worse when it comes to DLC. The processes and methods seem so haphazardly slapped together that you can't be assured they'll even be accessible a year or three down the road, or if your content will vanish into the ether. One of the worst offenders seems to be Ubi (of which EA owns a stake). Every time I play an UBI game, it wants my UBI login, which I can't fucking ever remember for the life of me. Especially if it's a game I'm sitting down to play on the damn *console*. Not to mention the way they attempt to lock all of this stuff down to ONE account. No more buying a game so you and your sibling can play it. Or buying one game for you and your housemates to play it. Nope. Got four gamers living in an apartment? Buy four copies.
Anyway, I posted this in the Dragon Age 2 discussion on Slashdot this week and thought it might be worth copying it here, too:
====================
Pre-load.
Decrypt.
Launch.
Configure.
Click "register on bioware's website to get full access to content".
Once I was on the bioware site, I had to hunt down what my login credentials for their site were.
Once I had the login credentials and logged in, I had to enter a code to register the game and unlock the content.
The key didn't work.
I went to the Steam forums and looked for a thread that discussed the same thing, which explained which of the several keys/codes were actually needed.
Went back to the bioware site and entered a key. Waited for it to activate it.
Did the same thing with the second key.
Launched the game again.
Didn't want it running in the default "windowed full screen" mode and set it to "full screen".
When it asked me to confirm to keep settings (with a countdown timer), it didn't show a cursor, so I had to wait out the timer and do it all over again. This time it showed the cursor and let me commit the changes.
The game notified me that it had lost connection with the bioware servers and that I would not have access to certain content, until it was connected again.
I opened up the "DLC" section in the game and none of the content I just entered the serials to receive appeared.
Launched the game and began to play it, before I decided I wasn't in the mood for having cut-scenes every 45 seconds and quit for the time being.
Found out about the PC texture pack and clicked the link.
Took me to the bioware site, where I had to login again.
Downloaded the 1gb installer.
Ran the texture installer.
Launched the game again.
Went to Options/Settings=>Video=>Selected "high-resolution textures".
Went back to the DLC section. DLC still isn't there.
Clicked on the button to view DLC on my account, which took me back to Bioware's site again, but just showed me two items I already received with the purchase that said "buy now".
Clicked on Profile=>My Registered Content on the website.
Took me to a huge list of my registered content, which shows it for every platform (each console, to
There sure has been a lot of revolving door action in this administration, for a President who vowed there would be none. It's business as usual, as conflicts of interest abound with the appointment of big private industry leaders to significant posts and the vacating of significant posts leads to those persons capitalizing on their position (and, often, the actions they took while holding that position which just so happen to be in the same field of interest as the company's they're now leaving for) to private industry.
Boy, all those iPhone owners who had a bad experience under AT&T and voiced their concerns and complains better watch out. They might also learn the valuable lesson that you should keep your mouth shut and never be critical of anything, lest someone terminate your access to a service or use of an owned product.
Deleting a post or banning a poster from posting is one thing. Restricting access to things they have bought from your company is another. And, frankly, what better place to complain about a product or company than to/at the product or company? You might not get any traction from voicing your opinion about Valve and Steam at their forums, but you're *definitely* not going to get any traction by voicing it at an entirely unrelated forum somewhere else.
Of course, we're also operating under the assumption that the poster did something truly vile. Truly was ruining the experience of other forum members through his behavior. We don't know if that was the case. Maybe it really was some sort of retaliation for merely making a statement against the company (and the statement he claimed to have made seems incredibly tame and uninteresting). Regardless, none are justification for restricting access to the software which has no relation to the forums.
Also, you have to remember that a lot of customers aren't thinking about EA. In the poster's mind, he was commenting about Bioware's relationship with EA on Bioware's website. Of course, they're now one and the same, but that's a distinction that might easily be lost.
No, when it comes to movies, music, software, books, and even a lot of hardware (PS3, etc), you exchange money for a license. If you also have some sort of physical items involved, the license describes in what ways you can use the item and under what conditions use of that item can be revoked. Of course, this only works in the creator's favor and never yours. For instance, you are licensing content. Just because you own a CD doesn't mean you own the music on it. You own the physical CD, but are provisionally allowed by the license to use he music which is on it. If that CD is lost, you have to buy that physical CD again to have a license to listen to that music. Even though you are licensing the CONTENT and not the MEDIA, they'll never, say, give you access to the media without paying for it all over again.
That's one of the reasons I hate iTunes so much. There is no physical item involved. Just a license to listen to the music. But you can only ever download it one time. If something happens to that, you have to buy the license all over again. For an item that doesn't actually exist anywhere to begin with. Kind of absurd.
Only Valve's own games allow you to redeem serials from a physical copy into the Steam service, though someone else here mentioned they did that with Civilization IV, so maybe there are a few other exceptions. Additionally, some games now use Steamworks, which utilizes the Steam framework (I think Civ V might be one). So even if you buy a physical copy of a game, you'll still have to access it via services like Steam.
In fact, as developers begin using Steamworks as a solution to a lot of their backend stuff, you'll start to find even fewer reasons to bother with a phsyical copy of a game. For example, take this from the Steamworks product wiki at Valve. And note that some of the stuff seems to be fairly "evil", but it's not like every other company isn't already implementing something like this or won't be in the future. My view is merely that at least Valve has given me a great experience as a gamer and customer for the past decade and the client is very customer-friendly. A single login and a single client and everything makes sense (unless the labyrinthine bullshit involved to access other similar services, like EA, UBI and so on offer).
And again, remember, the below things are going to be limitations and services placed on PHYSICAL copies of the media. Not merely the digital versions!
Encrypted retail media Protect your day one release by shipping encrypted media to stores worldwide. No worry that your game will leak early from the manufacturing path, because your game stays encrypted until the moment you decide to release it.
Anti-piracy End-to-end anti-piracy solution. Steamworks provides both a wrapper to protect your application and online authentication. Your game is associated with a single customer account, which is used for multiplayer authentication (no more “shared” key lists on the Internet). Plus, the ongoing benefits of customers being current and connected on Steam make piracy an unattractive option.
Territory control Open up new markets. Games can be set to authenticate only in specific regions, allowing you to go day-and-date worldwide without the worry of grey marketing of products intended for specific territories.
Key-based authentication Easy, known, and proven path for customers to authenticate their game. Keys are the backbone for inventory control and sales data. Keys can be customized for region, content, language, and SKU.
As you point out, your diskless utilization of these is only possible because of the digital services. Unfortunately, the games for which you can redeem serials on Steam from physical purchases are very few. In fact, this is the first I had ever heard of anything that wasn't a Valve game being able to do this (and not 100% of Valve games can even be redeemed on the Steam service, either).
Also, I don't have to install anything a second time, either. I have a drive set for my steamapps folder. New machine? Install the 1.5mb Steam client and point/symlink it to the drive for its steamapps folder. I currently have something like 350 of my games from Steam installed on this machine (yeah, I know, that's a little overboard).
That license included a clause (either directly in it or extended to and by use of their website) that said they had the right to in one or more ways restrict access to that game.
With a digital version, I don't have to store them anywhere. I don't have to switch out discs. I don't have to worry about theft. I don't have to worry about physical damage to the media. I don't have to down to the local game store (which in most cases means Walmart, Target, Best Buy, GameStop or other questionable retail outlets). I don't have to pay tax. I don't have to spend the time going and picking it up or dealing with asshats. I don't have to wake up in what is the "middle of my night" (I work at night) so I can get to the store on the store's time frame. I can usually get games digitally that have long since stopped being stocked at the store (especially since it's getting harder to find a great selection of PC games in stores). I don't have to deal with serials (usually, since they're handled by Steam).
Digital stuff isn't perfect and has a lot of potential for abuse, but it's hard to establish that it's in any way worse than physical content downfalls (except for the whole part where you pay full retail price on new games, despite not having any of the traditional retail expenses to justify the overhead . . . but that has more to do with negotiations with retailers, where publishers and developers would be dropped from, say, Walmart if they gave digital uses a steep discount over retail price).
Yeah, physical media is great, until it is lost or damaged. And until you have to finger through your collection of physical media and manually remove/insert them into your drive every time (and, of course, hope they still actually work - especially over time). Not to mention, having physical media really wouldn't help in these situations since you still have to sign up for an online BioWare/EA Social Network account to activate/register/use your content and then you have to login to that account via your game every time.
First thing I do on any browser is remove the bookmark bar and any related bookmark stuff. I used delicious, in the past. Currently, I use pinboard.in -- great service. Can instantly search and access my bookmarks in a number of ways from any web enabled device. Can even update bookmarks by email. Can import/export openly. Can access cached stores of every page. Tag clouds. No performance hit on the browser for having thousands of bookmarks. It has really entirely superseded the need for in-browser bookmarks for me, for about five years, now. Using in-browser bookmarks, to me, is a lot like using a browser that doesn't offer tabbing functionality, these days.
Because people like to play videogames and Electronic Arts either puts out your favorite game, owns your favorite developer, is planning to own your favorite developer, or has an existing minority stake in your favorite publisher or developer. I mean, seriously, it's hard to come up with a list of great games that doesn't have a huge amount of EA representation. They're not even the only "evil" corporate game publisher/developer out there, so you'd have to boycott others in a similar situation. It'd be kind of like refusing to support Microsoft, Apple, and Canonical. There are still alternatives . . . but they're pretty limited.
If you are a game reviewer and you displease the publisher or developer today, you can pay the price, tomorrow. You'll be cut off from demos, early reviews, meetings, press events and other access to their people or games.
Now, we can finally extend that to the consumers. Too critical of our company, developers, DLC practices, or product? Oops, sorry! Enjoy your next year without access to your "owned" content.
While people could theoretically boycott (not that it would accomplish anything), EA is enormous. If they don't already own your favorite developer today, they will soon. And if they don't, one of the other two major evil corporate game developers and publishers will.
Can anyone actually point to a time when commercial software was not merely "licensed" to people? As far as I know, music, movies, and software have always been merely "licensed" to the purchaser, no matter what media it was on, what items they physically owned, and so on. Was there actually a time when you could own any of the aforementioned items and truly "own" it, short of duplicating for illegitimate resale/distribution purposes?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, you should be compensated, but if you're in the "charity business", you would think you'd be a little more ethically inclined. How do you justify hundreds of thousands in salary for a position where you head a *charity*? I would say $500,000/yr is a bit extreme for the Red Cross and $1,000,000/yr is a bit extreme for the United Way. You aren't talking about providing salaries that make sure these people can focus on the job rather than living in a cardboard box. You're talking about paying them enough to be millionaires on charitable donations.
Exactly how are you going to resell physical media that is useless, because you already used up the serial key when you logged into EA's website and registered the game with it - thereby rendering the physical copy useless to anyone who isn't you? That has nothing to do with it being acquired digitally and is the way most games are going these days. The days of buying a game (digitally or physically) and not having it locked down to one account and one person are almost entirely long gone.
In which case, you will have to buy another $60 copy of the game, because the serial key will be registered under your banned account.
Of course, they say that. They need a regular source of income for their highly paid professional charity executives.
Of course the fringe things are going to be among the first that you list.
People are always so fucking infatuated with themselves that they can't wait to tell you about all the things they're into that you've probably never heard of. The fact that it's fringe and you haven't heard of it convinces them that they're just that much cooler.
Listen, people are idiots and fools are easily parted with their money. More, people have a short attention span and never follow up on the results.
People were suckered into the whole Haiti thing last year. Morons "texting" cash to charities and schiesters like Bill Clinton and George Bush encouraging people to "just send us your cash". And in the end? No accountability. I don't even need to go into the troubles with the Red Cross and the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars, can't seem to account for where all that money went to. Last I recall, Clinton was present to see the handing over of three million bucks or some similarly ridiculously low number.
You had global donations from governments promised in the billions (at least five billion, I believe). You had moron celebrities holding telethons and telling you that you should give your cash.
And idiots gave their cash. But they never looked in on what was going on. Why should they? I texted my $10 to some place, so I'm a good person now! I don't need to figure out whatever happened after that!
Meanwhile, it's a year later and we're told that people are still living in tents and everyone is dying of dysentery or whatever.
Of course, Japan is less likely to be prone to this kind of problem, I think. The only concern there will be with fake charities trying to scam you out of donations through fake websites and other services. And that's what this article was talking about, to begin with. The problem in Haiti was different, in that they're not the power that is Japan. They're fucking Haiti. And actual real organizations simply behaved criminally after extorting donations from you.
Geeks have a very misconceived perception of how the world views them. It has always been common on Slashdot (and elsewhere, in more recent years) to convince each other that geek is hip and geeks are the new hotness and that everyone loves a geek. The truth is, the world doesn't.
I know plenty of people who think of videogames as something that entertained them in their youth, but now that they're adults, it's not relevant. I've even come across plenty of teenagers while playing with my buddies in online games (Call of Duty, for example), who don't understand why guys in their late 20s or even 30s would be playing videogames. I've even read forum discussions asking the question of how long people will play videogames or when it's time to stop playing (and these discussions are ON game sites, mind you!) and a common response from young people is that they'll probably stop when they're around 20 or 30. Sometimes maybe 40. If teenagers think playing games into adulthood is ridiculous, how do you think other adults (and especially older adults) think of you?
I once wryly reacted to myself doing or saying something kind of shamefully geeky by snickering and saying "god damn, I'm such a geek". In front of a girl I'd been with for awhile. Her response? She very quickly showed great concern and assured me that I wasn't a geek and I shouldn't say that about myself. In her mind, a "geek" was an insult. A derision. I guarantee she's not alone. Hell, you even see it on a regular basis in modern media, when someone is referred to as a "geek" or a "nerd" in a very derogatory way.
So yeah, there are a LOT of things out there that you may not be ashamed of, but that you wouldn't want publicly associated with yourself. It's one of the problems many people had with Blizzard's attempt to force everyone to use their real full names in the forums (sorry, but my full name is a private thing which I do care to guard, if at all possible - thanks Blizzard!). It's the problem a lot of people have with the idea of some enforced internet-wide identity requirement. There is value in anonymity.
I enjoy videogames. I would absolutely not want friends, future girlfriends, family of future friends or girlfriends, employers, government agents, or others to be looking up information on me and find a ton of videogame related stuff associated with my name. Not because I'm ashamed of being interested in videogames, but because I know that all of those people would unfairly judge me for it. That because I play videogames a few hours a month, I might not be able to get a security clearance, because someone sees videogames as something only an untrustworthy addictive personality would engage in. Or that a future girlfriend might see it as a sign of permanent immaturity. Or that an employer might see it as a potential problem of some sort.
It's the same reason people often don't want their lack of religious belief to be public. Again, not ashamed of it, but being an atheist is not exactly something you want to risk being known about you when the chances are strong a future employer or manager is a devout religious person and holds strong prejudices against you based solely on that (you know, prejudices like our former president had when he said that he doesn't believe atheists can be patriots and maybe shouldn't even be citizens).
Of course, the number of devious ways this could be utilized are nearly endless.
I'm definitely tired of having to remember countless sets of credentials across every publisher and distributor and developer out there, due to the need to register games these days. Even on consoles! And it gets even worse when it comes to DLC. The processes and methods seem so haphazardly slapped together that you can't be assured they'll even be accessible a year or three down the road, or if your content will vanish into the ether. One of the worst offenders seems to be Ubi (of which EA owns a stake). Every time I play an UBI game, it wants my UBI login, which I can't fucking ever remember for the life of me. Especially if it's a game I'm sitting down to play on the damn *console*. Not to mention the way they attempt to lock all of this stuff down to ONE account. No more buying a game so you and your sibling can play it. Or buying one game for you and your housemates to play it. Nope. Got four gamers living in an apartment? Buy four copies.
Anyway, I posted this in the Dragon Age 2 discussion on Slashdot this week and thought it might be worth copying it here, too:
====================
Pre-load.
Decrypt.
Launch.
Configure.
Click "register on bioware's website to get full access to content".
Once I was on the bioware site, I had to hunt down what my login credentials for their site were.
Once I had the login credentials and logged in, I had to enter a code to register the game and unlock the content.
The key didn't work.
I went to the Steam forums and looked for a thread that discussed the same thing, which explained which of the several keys/codes were actually needed.
Went back to the bioware site and entered a key. Waited for it to activate it.
Did the same thing with the second key.
Launched the game again.
Didn't want it running in the default "windowed full screen" mode and set it to "full screen".
When it asked me to confirm to keep settings (with a countdown timer), it didn't show a cursor, so I had to wait out the timer and do it all over again. This time it showed the cursor and let me commit the changes.
The game notified me that it had lost connection with the bioware servers and that I would not have access to certain content, until it was connected again.
I opened up the "DLC" section in the game and none of the content I just entered the serials to receive appeared.
Launched the game and began to play it, before I decided I wasn't in the mood for having cut-scenes every 45 seconds and quit for the time being.
Found out about the PC texture pack and clicked the link.
Took me to the bioware site, where I had to login again.
Downloaded the 1gb installer.
Ran the texture installer.
Launched the game again.
Went to Options/Settings=>Video=>Selected "high-resolution textures".
Went back to the DLC section. DLC still isn't there.
Clicked on the button to view DLC on my account, which took me back to Bioware's site again, but just showed me two items I already received with the purchase that said "buy now".
Clicked on Profile=>My Registered Content on the website.
Took me to a huge list of my registered content, which shows it for every platform (each console, to
There sure has been a lot of revolving door action in this administration, for a President who vowed there would be none. It's business as usual, as conflicts of interest abound with the appointment of big private industry leaders to significant posts and the vacating of significant posts leads to those persons capitalizing on their position (and, often, the actions they took while holding that position which just so happen to be in the same field of interest as the company's they're now leaving for) to private industry.
Boy, all those iPhone owners who had a bad experience under AT&T and voiced their concerns and complains better watch out. They might also learn the valuable lesson that you should keep your mouth shut and never be critical of anything, lest someone terminate your access to a service or use of an owned product.
Deleting a post or banning a poster from posting is one thing. Restricting access to things they have bought from your company is another. And, frankly, what better place to complain about a product or company than to/at the product or company? You might not get any traction from voicing your opinion about Valve and Steam at their forums, but you're *definitely* not going to get any traction by voicing it at an entirely unrelated forum somewhere else.
Of course, we're also operating under the assumption that the poster did something truly vile. Truly was ruining the experience of other forum members through his behavior. We don't know if that was the case. Maybe it really was some sort of retaliation for merely making a statement against the company (and the statement he claimed to have made seems incredibly tame and uninteresting). Regardless, none are justification for restricting access to the software which has no relation to the forums.
Also, you have to remember that a lot of customers aren't thinking about EA. In the poster's mind, he was commenting about Bioware's relationship with EA on Bioware's website. Of course, they're now one and the same, but that's a distinction that might easily be lost.
No, when it comes to movies, music, software, books, and even a lot of hardware (PS3, etc), you exchange money for a license. If you also have some sort of physical items involved, the license describes in what ways you can use the item and under what conditions use of that item can be revoked. Of course, this only works in the creator's favor and never yours. For instance, you are licensing content. Just because you own a CD doesn't mean you own the music on it. You own the physical CD, but are provisionally allowed by the license to use he music which is on it. If that CD is lost, you have to buy that physical CD again to have a license to listen to that music. Even though you are licensing the CONTENT and not the MEDIA, they'll never, say, give you access to the media without paying for it all over again.
That's one of the reasons I hate iTunes so much. There is no physical item involved. Just a license to listen to the music. But you can only ever download it one time. If something happens to that, you have to buy the license all over again. For an item that doesn't actually exist anywhere to begin with. Kind of absurd.
Only Valve's own games allow you to redeem serials from a physical copy into the Steam service, though someone else here mentioned they did that with Civilization IV, so maybe there are a few other exceptions. Additionally, some games now use Steamworks, which utilizes the Steam framework (I think Civ V might be one). So even if you buy a physical copy of a game, you'll still have to access it via services like Steam.
In fact, as developers begin using Steamworks as a solution to a lot of their backend stuff, you'll start to find even fewer reasons to bother with a phsyical copy of a game. For example, take this from the Steamworks product wiki at Valve. And note that some of the stuff seems to be fairly "evil", but it's not like every other company isn't already implementing something like this or won't be in the future. My view is merely that at least Valve has given me a great experience as a gamer and customer for the past decade and the client is very customer-friendly. A single login and a single client and everything makes sense (unless the labyrinthine bullshit involved to access other similar services, like EA, UBI and so on offer).
And again, remember, the below things are going to be limitations and services placed on PHYSICAL copies of the media. Not merely the digital versions!
Encrypted retail media
Protect your day one release by shipping encrypted media to stores worldwide. No worry that your game will leak early from the manufacturing path, because your game stays encrypted until the moment you decide to release it.
Anti-piracy
End-to-end anti-piracy solution. Steamworks provides both a wrapper to protect your application and online authentication. Your game is associated with a single customer account, which is used for multiplayer authentication (no more “shared” key lists on the Internet). Plus, the ongoing benefits of customers being current and connected on Steam make piracy an unattractive option.
Territory control
Open up new markets. Games can be set to authenticate only in specific regions, allowing you to go day-and-date worldwide without the worry of grey marketing of products intended for specific territories.
Key-based authentication
Easy, known, and proven path for customers to authenticate their game. Keys are the backbone for inventory control and sales data. Keys can be customized for region, content, language, and SKU.
As you point out, your diskless utilization of these is only possible because of the digital services. Unfortunately, the games for which you can redeem serials on Steam from physical purchases are very few. In fact, this is the first I had ever heard of anything that wasn't a Valve game being able to do this (and not 100% of Valve games can even be redeemed on the Steam service, either).
Also, I don't have to install anything a second time, either. I have a drive set for my steamapps folder. New machine? Install the 1.5mb Steam client and point/symlink it to the drive for its steamapps folder. I currently have something like 350 of my games from Steam installed on this machine (yeah, I know, that's a little overboard).
How is some guy playing a single player game ruining your experience?
Goods WERE exchanged.
The player paid EA money.
EA gave the player a license.
That license included a clause (either directly in it or extended to and by use of their website) that said they had the right to in one or more ways restrict access to that game.
I can clarify it all rather simply, for you.
he wasn't able to use his *single player* game
is actually:
he wasn't able to use EA's single player game
With a digital version, I don't have to store them anywhere. I don't have to switch out discs. I don't have to worry about theft. I don't have to worry about physical damage to the media. I don't have to down to the local game store (which in most cases means Walmart, Target, Best Buy, GameStop or other questionable retail outlets). I don't have to pay tax. I don't have to spend the time going and picking it up or dealing with asshats. I don't have to wake up in what is the "middle of my night" (I work at night) so I can get to the store on the store's time frame. I can usually get games digitally that have long since stopped being stocked at the store (especially since it's getting harder to find a great selection of PC games in stores). I don't have to deal with serials (usually, since they're handled by Steam).
Digital stuff isn't perfect and has a lot of potential for abuse, but it's hard to establish that it's in any way worse than physical content downfalls (except for the whole part where you pay full retail price on new games, despite not having any of the traditional retail expenses to justify the overhead . . . but that has more to do with negotiations with retailers, where publishers and developers would be dropped from, say, Walmart if they gave digital uses a steep discount over retail price).
Yeah, physical media is great, until it is lost or damaged. And until you have to finger through your collection of physical media and manually remove/insert them into your drive every time (and, of course, hope they still actually work - especially over time). Not to mention, having physical media really wouldn't help in these situations since you still have to sign up for an online BioWare/EA Social Network account to activate/register/use your content and then you have to login to that account via your game every time.
First thing I do on any browser is remove the bookmark bar and any related bookmark stuff. I used delicious, in the past. Currently, I use pinboard.in -- great service. Can instantly search and access my bookmarks in a number of ways from any web enabled device. Can even update bookmarks by email. Can import/export openly. Can access cached stores of every page. Tag clouds. No performance hit on the browser for having thousands of bookmarks. It has really entirely superseded the need for in-browser bookmarks for me, for about five years, now. Using in-browser bookmarks, to me, is a lot like using a browser that doesn't offer tabbing functionality, these days.
Because people like to play videogames and Electronic Arts either puts out your favorite game, owns your favorite developer, is planning to own your favorite developer, or has an existing minority stake in your favorite publisher or developer. I mean, seriously, it's hard to come up with a list of great games that doesn't have a huge amount of EA representation. They're not even the only "evil" corporate game publisher/developer out there, so you'd have to boycott others in a similar situation. It'd be kind of like refusing to support Microsoft, Apple, and Canonical. There are still alternatives . . . but they're pretty limited.
If you are a game reviewer and you displease the publisher or developer today, you can pay the price, tomorrow. You'll be cut off from demos, early reviews, meetings, press events and other access to their people or games.
Now, we can finally extend that to the consumers. Too critical of our company, developers, DLC practices, or product? Oops, sorry! Enjoy your next year without access to your "owned" content.
While people could theoretically boycott (not that it would accomplish anything), EA is enormous. If they don't already own your favorite developer today, they will soon. And if they don't, one of the other two major evil corporate game developers and publishers will.
Can anyone actually point to a time when commercial software was not merely "licensed" to people? As far as I know, music, movies, and software have always been merely "licensed" to the purchaser, no matter what media it was on, what items they physically owned, and so on. Was there actually a time when you could own any of the aforementioned items and truly "own" it, short of duplicating for illegitimate resale/distribution purposes?
So you're the guy who still uses bookmarks!