Yeah, I don't know who these "pirates" supposedly are. There may be a few mass copiers, but I think that almost everyone who copied games as a kid (when you have no resources of your own and therefore no way to acquire a game or other software) grew up to prefer paying for their software. Out of obligation to give value for value. Out of desire for a less risky, better performing, less hassle experience, and because the option was no longer "copy it or don't have it at all" but "copy it or buy it".
It seemed like everyone copied everything in the 90s, whether by 0day BBSes or by floppies from friends, or by renting software from Software Pipeline on floppies. In the last 10+ years, I don't think I've known anyone who does that. It's much more convenient to get the full game with nothing missing and no risks than deal with the copying hassle. And you know you're contributing back to seeing more great games down the road. (Even though you also get burned by paying retail for shitty games or dealing with even shittier DRM experiences and games that are so buggy so as to leaving you feeling ripped off).
I would find it almost impossible to believe that the percentage of players copying games in 2011 is anywhere near as high as the percentage that did so in the 90s.
I would rather developers create games that worked well on both consoles and PC and made optimal use of both (not maxing out the console experience and then merely porting that identical experience to the PC without optimizing it for the PC -- for a much better experience with the game). More importantly, that they also made the game available somehow on all platforms for the purchaser. Why? Well, sometimes I want to play something on my PC with my pair of 30" 2560x1600 monitors and a keyboard and a mouse, hunched over my desk and with a browser and chat window open.
Other times, I want to relax on my sofa with a 65" 1080p screen and my massive audio system and just one button away from putting the game down and leaning over for a nap.
You don't have to deal with navigating the stupid OS menus to find where your game is and launch it or deal with a quickbar full of shortcuts. You look at your tiny steam window and select the game you want to play under the section in which you've categorized it. Plus, it tracks that you've played it and for how long, if you like knowing how your game play time breaks down.
I have all of my almost 400 Steam games installed right now, plus the few non-steam games (Star Craft, EVE, etc) launching through the interface. Can you imagine how ridiculously messy it would be to pick through nearly 400 games using the standard shitty Windows menu system?
That isn't what they're doing, though. They're not saying "let's make the most awesome fun game possible with the available tools and platforms". They're saying "let's make the most awesome fun game possible that runs on 2005's hardware and then stuff it on the PC for a few extra sales". It's fine to want to make more fun and more awesome stuff more efficiently. More computing power (not only graphically) definitely contributes to that. Especially on the concurrent complexity in what you're seeing on the screen and the way what you see on screen is behaving (from realistic and complex movement to better audio and more players at a time in multi-player and more in-depth AI). Instead of taking advantage of that on the PC to push things forward, they're saying "We've maxed out performance on CONSOLES, so the only important thing now is ease of development".
It's more like a developer saying "we've maxed out the performance of games on a Nokia phone from 2002, so rather than pushing things forward by developing more involved and complex games for smart phones in 2011, we just need to make it easier to develop games for that old Nokia".
Granted, consoles are where all the sales are at, so that's why the focus is on maxing out their performance and not bothering to exceed that capacity on PCs (in fact, I've seen some developers suggest that they don't want their game to appear too much better on the PC, because it might deter console owners from the title - so they want something closer to parity between the two). But then, that's the point really. The PC is treated as nothing much more than just another console with a different interface. Sure, it might have 2011 hardware, but the game was probably designed with the sole focus being on the 2005 console hardware. Unless you're talking about games from Blizzard and maybe Valve among a few others (and excluding MMOs, obviously).
Traditional Netflix is more convenient than traditional movie renting, but that's not what they have to compete with. You have to compete with the other options that are currently out there. It's difficult for "Content not found -> Select DVD -> Wait for DVD -> Insert DVD -> Pack DVD back up -> Put DVD in mail -> Wait for DVD to be returned (before you can get another)" to beat "Content not found -> Find on indexer and click link to watch in a few minutes to a few hours (depending on type and popularity of content)."
Steam is merely a distribution system, however. It doesn't resolve the issues with developers attitudes toward PC gaming. I recently saw an interview with a developer who is creating a new engine who said that graphics are no longer important (nor AI or anything else, presumably, since the following is the only item he stressed importance of) -- only the ease of use of the development tools was. His reasoning was that we've basically reached the limits of the current console generation.
It used to be that PC gaming drove the industry, so you made your game as amazing for the PC as you could. Then you did your best to replicate as much of that experience on the console. It would seem that, but for a few exceptions such as Blizzard, the focus is now on pumping new franchise titles out as fast as possible with efficient tools that make the most of the consoles and then dumping whatever that comes out to be over onto the PC. Sort of like saying "we develop our content for the iPod viewing experience", but then also distributing the content to iMax theaters, because hey -- it's an extra potential buck, even if it's just an afterthought.
OF course, Steam also has it's own slew of problems. There's often external registrations and restrictions that apply to games through Steam. Games are often unbelievably buggy to the point of being unusable (go read the forums for people's experiences with Fallout 3 that continue even to this day and then a whole slew of similar problems with Fallout: New Vegas). Then there's the issue of games not being maintained so that their patching is out of sync with the real product (and then Steam puts the onus for it on the developers/publishers and the developers/publishers put it back on Steam and nothing is ever accomplished). Or worse, the lack of maintenance extends to some games no longer working on newer operating systems (seemingly sensible, until you remember that most titles on GoG are a decade or three old and run on modern operating systems -- all for about five bucks). Then there's the endless DLC and the rip-off multi-versions that come out for a year or two and the stupid participation in "custom DLC for retail outlets for pre-orders".
I love Steam. I have almost 400 titles on Steam. . . But it feels very much like the best of breed. That is, the best of a dying breed. It's only of value so long as the wealth of content for the PC is enormous and offers something consoles can't (other than just a venue for countless little indie games, spreading dual stick shooters like a plague).
It's nice that Amazon is offering it with the accounts, even though I'll never use it. Netflix has four times the streaming selection (which is still only about 5% of what it SHOULD be) and it's in higher quality on more devices for only $8/mo.
Of course, Netflix has plenty of downfalls, too. Their selection is only about 20,000 (and for all I know, they count an entire season of a TV show as 26 items or something). Worse, half of their selection is that fucking poor quality Starz stuff (which usually expires and is no longer available by the time you actually get around to watching it).
You could cut a huge portion of people's *ahem* alternative methods for acquiring content if you just made all movies and television shows ever made available via an affordable on-demand service like Netflix on as many platforms and devices as possible with no limited number of hours you could watch in a month. And if you could make even new content available within 24hrs of airing on TV via the same service, you would curtail about 99% of alternative content acquisition methods.
If Netflix streaming was pretty much every TV show ever made plus about 150,000 or 200,000 movies, I'd probably pay $50/mo for it (as long as I wasn't limited to streaming to ONE device at a time -- since you can watch cable on as many televisions in the house as you want, as long as you have the cheap-ish box connected to each television).
I can tell you - when I search for a movie or show that is on Netflix, but only available via DVD (place order, wait for availability, have it mailed to you, check the mail, put it in the player, watch it, put it back in the envelope, mail it back, hope it doesn't get lost or pilfered in the USPS, etc) . . . the last option I'm considering is "yeah, I think I'll just go ahead and get the DVD from netflix". . .
Fortunately, *THIS* dotcom bubble is just full of stupid bullshit like social networks and casual games, instead of real companies that actually do something.
No, this kid's hack is the reason you can do things like run homebrew and linux again. Like you could when you first bought your PS3, before they updated firmware to prevent it from allowing you to do the very thing it was capable of doing when you bought it. What other people have done with the ability to do what you want with your own hardware is their own doing; not his.
Unfortunately, the general public sees him as a pirate, a thief, and a lot of other things that I won't be so crude as to repeat, here. I believe the comments I saw posted in one of his videos tended to be something like this: "I hope you enjoy getting your ass pounded in prison for being a thief just because you couldn't get mommy to buy you games".
The overwhelming majority of people outside of this little circle of geekdom has always had this ignorant view that anyone doing anything that doesn't strictly adhere to the corporate view of what you are "allowed to do with things you own" are vile criminals.
Or . . . you know, an extremely useful way to keep someone apprised of communications without actually including them in communications. Say, when you are perhaps communicating information to a client and want an engineer to be up to speed on what is being communicated to said client, but you don't want to unnecessarily directly involve said engineer to the point that the client would just start spamming the engineer directly or that the engineer would start getting copied on every single piece of future communication in the thread.
That's lame. I grew up with BBSes and the internet, in an age when most adults didn't have a clue. I saw porn. I saw anarchist material. I saw things which were obscene, idiotic, offensive, or just play absurd. From at least the age of twelve. I grew up fine. I wasn't abducted, raped, or brought into a cult. If your kids can't pick and choose and navigate their own content before the age of twelve, they may be mildly retarded.
Children don't have much of that, as it is. I absolutely do not envy children who have to grow up today. Over-protected, over-monitored, over-controlled. They aren't necessarily any worse as kids were in the 90s or 80s or 70s or 60s, but they sure as hell have to put up with a lot more and have far less freedom than most of us grew up with.
My mother was barely a high school girl when we landed on the moon and since the last time we stepped foot on something other than the earth, she had children who grew to be old enough to have children who were as old as she was, then. We keep cutting budgets, because "we don't need all that there space sci-fi mumbo-jumbo when they can't even fix the potholes in front of mah damn house durr durr durr!". We talk about grand attempts to Mars, which we then never fund or push forward after having fancy press conferences about it. Then we do the same with plans to . . . go back to the moon.
I suppose an optimistic way to look at it is that while we may see no advances in exploration in the near future, we do continue to increase technology which will in turn make future exploration even more successful. Sort of the way you could set a computer to cracking an encryption today that could do it in a few hours, while if you had started cracking that encryption in 1980 and let that computer keep running, it still wouldn't have completed the calculations, today. Still, that doesn't put one at ease over the general lack of ambition. Not to mention the amount that the last major space effort contributed to the technological advances that we have today and are now counting on continuing to advance at a rate so as to re-jumpstart the space exploration.
I think it's safe to resign ourselves to little more happening in our lives. Our best hope is that while the likes of Carmack are building low orbit space planes and the likes of Richard Branson are building low orbit space hotels (which, let's recognize, are going to be nothing more than crammed little pods for decades to come), they somehow stumble into a viable commercial reason to explore some space out there. Otherwise, we're generations away from much more than sending RC cars to the surface of Mars, again.
They've been doing that for decades, though. They're just applying it to the rest of society, instead of some guy's office or some kid's bedroom. Every time there is any criminal (or civil, for that matter) litigation regarding infractions where computers are involved, they swoop in and grab everything - related to the actual issue at hand. Then they filter through it at their leisure, later.
I give it ten years before anyone providing an online service of any kind (web site, email, ftp server) is obligated by law to turn on remote system logging for all services, so that it is stored in some giant government database where they can access any logs for anything at any time. All they have to do is insinuate that another 9/11 is inevitable to roll it right on through.
I find it rather disgusting that they're so grossly abusing resources and the law to ruin a man who is only guilty of using someone's image without their permission (if even that), while actual in-school activities like physical violence and intimidation between students is probably ignored. I saw a lot of shit occur in the hallways when I was in school in the 90s that no adult would ever be expected to tolerate, but everyone at every level of the system looks the other way (at most treating it as "boys/girls will be boys/girls").
But some guy makes an amusing video for comedic value and he's somehow a predator. Go figure.
High school students aren't supposed to be exploited by a musician for comedic value. They're supposed to be molested by their teachers. Preferably, by their female teachers, so that we can all say "man, I wish I'd had that happen to me, when I was in school" and give her a slap on the wrist.
Slashdot Mirror
A stitch in time, saves nine.
Yeah, I don't know who these "pirates" supposedly are. There may be a few mass copiers, but I think that almost everyone who copied games as a kid (when you have no resources of your own and therefore no way to acquire a game or other software) grew up to prefer paying for their software. Out of obligation to give value for value. Out of desire for a less risky, better performing, less hassle experience, and because the option was no longer "copy it or don't have it at all" but "copy it or buy it".
It seemed like everyone copied everything in the 90s, whether by 0day BBSes or by floppies from friends, or by renting software from Software Pipeline on floppies. In the last 10+ years, I don't think I've known anyone who does that. It's much more convenient to get the full game with nothing missing and no risks than deal with the copying hassle. And you know you're contributing back to seeing more great games down the road. (Even though you also get burned by paying retail for shitty games or dealing with even shittier DRM experiences and games that are so buggy so as to leaving you feeling ripped off).
I would find it almost impossible to believe that the percentage of players copying games in 2011 is anywhere near as high as the percentage that did so in the 90s.
I would rather developers create games that worked well on both consoles and PC and made optimal use of both (not maxing out the console experience and then merely porting that identical experience to the PC without optimizing it for the PC -- for a much better experience with the game). More importantly, that they also made the game available somehow on all platforms for the purchaser. Why? Well, sometimes I want to play something on my PC with my pair of 30" 2560x1600 monitors and a keyboard and a mouse, hunched over my desk and with a browser and chat window open.
Other times, I want to relax on my sofa with a 65" 1080p screen and my massive audio system and just one button away from putting the game down and leaning over for a nap.
You don't have to deal with navigating the stupid OS menus to find where your game is and launch it or deal with a quickbar full of shortcuts. You look at your tiny steam window and select the game you want to play under the section in which you've categorized it. Plus, it tracks that you've played it and for how long, if you like knowing how your game play time breaks down.
I have all of my almost 400 Steam games installed right now, plus the few non-steam games (Star Craft, EVE, etc) launching through the interface. Can you imagine how ridiculously messy it would be to pick through nearly 400 games using the standard shitty Windows menu system?
That isn't what they're doing, though. They're not saying "let's make the most awesome fun game possible with the available tools and platforms". They're saying "let's make the most awesome fun game possible that runs on 2005's hardware and then stuff it on the PC for a few extra sales". It's fine to want to make more fun and more awesome stuff more efficiently. More computing power (not only graphically) definitely contributes to that. Especially on the concurrent complexity in what you're seeing on the screen and the way what you see on screen is behaving (from realistic and complex movement to better audio and more players at a time in multi-player and more in-depth AI). Instead of taking advantage of that on the PC to push things forward, they're saying "We've maxed out performance on CONSOLES, so the only important thing now is ease of development".
It's more like a developer saying "we've maxed out the performance of games on a Nokia phone from 2002, so rather than pushing things forward by developing more involved and complex games for smart phones in 2011, we just need to make it easier to develop games for that old Nokia".
Granted, consoles are where all the sales are at, so that's why the focus is on maxing out their performance and not bothering to exceed that capacity on PCs (in fact, I've seen some developers suggest that they don't want their game to appear too much better on the PC, because it might deter console owners from the title - so they want something closer to parity between the two). But then, that's the point really. The PC is treated as nothing much more than just another console with a different interface. Sure, it might have 2011 hardware, but the game was probably designed with the sole focus being on the 2005 console hardware. Unless you're talking about games from Blizzard and maybe Valve among a few others (and excluding MMOs, obviously).
Traditional Netflix is more convenient than traditional movie renting, but that's not what they have to compete with. You have to compete with the other options that are currently out there. It's difficult for "Content not found -> Select DVD -> Wait for DVD -> Insert DVD -> Pack DVD back up -> Put DVD in mail -> Wait for DVD to be returned (before you can get another)" to beat "Content not found -> Find on indexer and click link to watch in a few minutes to a few hours (depending on type and popularity of content)."
Steam is merely a distribution system, however. It doesn't resolve the issues with developers attitudes toward PC gaming. I recently saw an interview with a developer who is creating a new engine who said that graphics are no longer important (nor AI or anything else, presumably, since the following is the only item he stressed importance of) -- only the ease of use of the development tools was. His reasoning was that we've basically reached the limits of the current console generation.
It used to be that PC gaming drove the industry, so you made your game as amazing for the PC as you could. Then you did your best to replicate as much of that experience on the console. It would seem that, but for a few exceptions such as Blizzard, the focus is now on pumping new franchise titles out as fast as possible with efficient tools that make the most of the consoles and then dumping whatever that comes out to be over onto the PC. Sort of like saying "we develop our content for the iPod viewing experience", but then also distributing the content to iMax theaters, because hey -- it's an extra potential buck, even if it's just an afterthought.
OF course, Steam also has it's own slew of problems. There's often external registrations and restrictions that apply to games through Steam. Games are often unbelievably buggy to the point of being unusable (go read the forums for people's experiences with Fallout 3 that continue even to this day and then a whole slew of similar problems with Fallout: New Vegas). Then there's the issue of games not being maintained so that their patching is out of sync with the real product (and then Steam puts the onus for it on the developers/publishers and the developers/publishers put it back on Steam and nothing is ever accomplished). Or worse, the lack of maintenance extends to some games no longer working on newer operating systems (seemingly sensible, until you remember that most titles on GoG are a decade or three old and run on modern operating systems -- all for about five bucks). Then there's the endless DLC and the rip-off multi-versions that come out for a year or two and the stupid participation in "custom DLC for retail outlets for pre-orders".
I love Steam. I have almost 400 titles on Steam. . . But it feels very much like the best of breed. That is, the best of a dying breed. It's only of value so long as the wealth of content for the PC is enormous and offers something consoles can't (other than just a venue for countless little indie games, spreading dual stick shooters like a plague).
It's nice that Amazon is offering it with the accounts, even though I'll never use it. Netflix has four times the streaming selection (which is still only about 5% of what it SHOULD be) and it's in higher quality on more devices for only $8/mo.
Of course, Netflix has plenty of downfalls, too. Their selection is only about 20,000 (and for all I know, they count an entire season of a TV show as 26 items or something). Worse, half of their selection is that fucking poor quality Starz stuff (which usually expires and is no longer available by the time you actually get around to watching it).
You could cut a huge portion of people's *ahem* alternative methods for acquiring content if you just made all movies and television shows ever made available via an affordable on-demand service like Netflix on as many platforms and devices as possible with no limited number of hours you could watch in a month. And if you could make even new content available within 24hrs of airing on TV via the same service, you would curtail about 99% of alternative content acquisition methods.
If Netflix streaming was pretty much every TV show ever made plus about 150,000 or 200,000 movies, I'd probably pay $50/mo for it (as long as I wasn't limited to streaming to ONE device at a time -- since you can watch cable on as many televisions in the house as you want, as long as you have the cheap-ish box connected to each television).
I can tell you - when I search for a movie or show that is on Netflix, but only available via DVD (place order, wait for availability, have it mailed to you, check the mail, put it in the player, watch it, put it back in the envelope, mail it back, hope it doesn't get lost or pilfered in the USPS, etc) . . . the last option I'm considering is "yeah, I think I'll just go ahead and get the DVD from netflix". . .
That's why it's funny. :)
And accurate . . . : (
Fortunately, *THIS* dotcom bubble is just full of stupid bullshit like social networks and casual games, instead of real companies that actually do something.
How long until the creators of Angry Birds sues this guy for putting Scorched Earth on the TI-84? :P
Shiny!
No, this kid's hack is the reason you can do things like run homebrew and linux again. Like you could when you first bought your PS3, before they updated firmware to prevent it from allowing you to do the very thing it was capable of doing when you bought it. What other people have done with the ability to do what you want with your own hardware is their own doing; not his.
By millions, you mean hundreds.
Unfortunately, the general public sees him as a pirate, a thief, and a lot of other things that I won't be so crude as to repeat, here. I believe the comments I saw posted in one of his videos tended to be something like this: "I hope you enjoy getting your ass pounded in prison for being a thief just because you couldn't get mommy to buy you games".
The overwhelming majority of people outside of this little circle of geekdom has always had this ignorant view that anyone doing anything that doesn't strictly adhere to the corporate view of what you are "allowed to do with things you own" are vile criminals.
Saying BCC is dead because people use facebook is like saying SSH or FTP is dead, because my mom doesn't use either.
Yeah. Political bullshit.
Or . . . you know, an extremely useful way to keep someone apprised of communications without actually including them in communications. Say, when you are perhaps communicating information to a client and want an engineer to be up to speed on what is being communicated to said client, but you don't want to unnecessarily directly involve said engineer to the point that the client would just start spamming the engineer directly or that the engineer would start getting copied on every single piece of future communication in the thread.
That's lame. I grew up with BBSes and the internet, in an age when most adults didn't have a clue. I saw porn. I saw anarchist material. I saw things which were obscene, idiotic, offensive, or just play absurd. From at least the age of twelve. I grew up fine. I wasn't abducted, raped, or brought into a cult. If your kids can't pick and choose and navigate their own content before the age of twelve, they may be mildly retarded.
Children don't have much of that, as it is. I absolutely do not envy children who have to grow up today. Over-protected, over-monitored, over-controlled. They aren't necessarily any worse as kids were in the 90s or 80s or 70s or 60s, but they sure as hell have to put up with a lot more and have far less freedom than most of us grew up with.
My mother was barely a high school girl when we landed on the moon and since the last time we stepped foot on something other than the earth, she had children who grew to be old enough to have children who were as old as she was, then. We keep cutting budgets, because "we don't need all that there space sci-fi mumbo-jumbo when they can't even fix the potholes in front of mah damn house durr durr durr!". We talk about grand attempts to Mars, which we then never fund or push forward after having fancy press conferences about it. Then we do the same with plans to . . . go back to the moon.
I suppose an optimistic way to look at it is that while we may see no advances in exploration in the near future, we do continue to increase technology which will in turn make future exploration even more successful. Sort of the way you could set a computer to cracking an encryption today that could do it in a few hours, while if you had started cracking that encryption in 1980 and let that computer keep running, it still wouldn't have completed the calculations, today. Still, that doesn't put one at ease over the general lack of ambition. Not to mention the amount that the last major space effort contributed to the technological advances that we have today and are now counting on continuing to advance at a rate so as to re-jumpstart the space exploration.
I think it's safe to resign ourselves to little more happening in our lives. Our best hope is that while the likes of Carmack are building low orbit space planes and the likes of Richard Branson are building low orbit space hotels (which, let's recognize, are going to be nothing more than crammed little pods for decades to come), they somehow stumble into a viable commercial reason to explore some space out there. Otherwise, we're generations away from much more than sending RC cars to the surface of Mars, again.
They've been doing that for decades, though. They're just applying it to the rest of society, instead of some guy's office or some kid's bedroom. Every time there is any criminal (or civil, for that matter) litigation regarding infractions where computers are involved, they swoop in and grab everything - related to the actual issue at hand. Then they filter through it at their leisure, later.
I give it ten years before anyone providing an online service of any kind (web site, email, ftp server) is obligated by law to turn on remote system logging for all services, so that it is stored in some giant government database where they can access any logs for anything at any time. All they have to do is insinuate that another 9/11 is inevitable to roll it right on through.
I find it rather disgusting that they're so grossly abusing resources and the law to ruin a man who is only guilty of using someone's image without their permission (if even that), while actual in-school activities like physical violence and intimidation between students is probably ignored. I saw a lot of shit occur in the hallways when I was in school in the 90s that no adult would ever be expected to tolerate, but everyone at every level of the system looks the other way (at most treating it as "boys/girls will be boys/girls").
But some guy makes an amusing video for comedic value and he's somehow a predator. Go figure.
Does this prosecutor also say that all sex is rape or that a man is violating a woman's dignity every time he even looks in her direction?
What dictionary are you working from, where shock value is a synonym for pornography?
Also, your asshole kids are getting a free ride on my tax dollars. The least I can get in return are a few laughs.
High school students aren't supposed to be exploited by a musician for comedic value. They're supposed to be molested by their teachers. Preferably, by their female teachers, so that we can all say "man, I wish I'd had that happen to me, when I was in school" and give her a slap on the wrist.