So, who wants to lay odds on how long they can stay in business once hackers start buying all of their hardware and not using the proprietary services?
I tried it, and it identified one spyware program...incorrectly.
It tagged the C:\WINDOWS\lhsp\tv\tvenuax.dll file as a spyware program, even though it is really the "Lernout & Hauspie TruVoice American English TTS Engine Wrapper", published by Microsoft! If I had just accepted it's recommendation, it would have caused a problem on my system.
I have no problem with the games going away. Every game is going to have a certain lifespan, and that's just the way it works.
However, I'm not going to spend my money to "buy" a game that depends on remote servers to play. I don't by any games that don't have a single-player mode.
If all I'm paying is a monthly fee, then they can shut it down and stop charging me. I won't feel like I've had something stolen. But if I "bought" a game, in a box, with manuals, then I expect to be able to play indefinitely.
Let's look at World of Warcraft for an example. They want $15 a month to play. So the most they should charge for a box in a store is $15 + cost of materials + store markup. No way that's $55.
However, I don't even want to pay that. They want me to take out a subscription? Fine, but you have to let me try it for free for a month. Worst case, you let me have the client for free, and charge me for one month, no rebill. If I decide I want to subscribe, then I should just be able to roll over into a recurring subscription.
The expense of developing the game, the online materials, hosting the client, etc. is just the cost of doing business, and it should be factored into the monthly fee.
No. I'd pay $0 for the download. I also want a free trial period of at least 7 days, and if I liked the gameplay, I'd sign up for a monthly subscription.
I haven't played CoH because there's no free download or trial period.
I played WoW on the 10 day free trial, but even though I had the game installed, they wanted $55 to keep playing.
I played the SW:G on the 7 day free trial, but quit for the same reasons as WoW.
I won't buy a MMO game. I just can't see spending $55 dollars to buy a game client, then have to fork over monthly fees to use it. I don't want to be at the mercy of my ISP or the game provider. "Earth & Beyond" and "Motor City Online" both folded up leaving anyone who bought the game in a lurch.
I'd be willing to subscribe, and maybe pay a small account setup fee (no more than $10), but no way will I spend money to "buy" a game that I can't play without a subscription.
I think AO had a great idea in letting the client be downloadable, but they still wanted to charge me $30 bucks to "buy" the game. Same with SW:G. I had already downloaded the full client, but they wanted me to go to a store and buy a box (that was already obsolete!) just to get a license key. If they had an option just to sell a cheap license key, I'd be playing it right now.
Actually, what I think he's saying is that Halo 2, in the first day of sales, outsold the entire run of Halo.
That doesn't make sense in the context of this story. Halo sold 5 million units in 2 years, and Halo 2 didn't sell that many the first day. It only reached that number recently.
I think this guy did the right thing. It was illegal, and he didn't want to be a party to a crime. His wife probably wouldn't have bought it if she knew it was illegal. I've seen these things in the malls, but never bought one because of obvious copyright violations.
However, I have purchased most of the Jakks Pacific licensed game units. Itt's a great idea, as long as you don't break the law.
Because it's true. This comment was almost exaclty what I was going to post. I've had to deal ith the incredibly broken output of Frontpage, and the idiosyncracies of IE for years.
To be fair, it certainly is not correct behavior for a browser (or any program) to crash on bad input. But citing IE for it's ability to deal with malformed input (which is another way of saying "lack of standards compliance") is pretty funny.
I had this problem crop up when I first got a GeForce 3 based card on my CRT. The lag showed up in Half-Life and other games. I turned off anti-aliasing, and everything went back to normal.
Driver does work on XP. I've never been able to get past the qulifying mission, so I can't tell if there's a later crash bug, but it seems to work fine, and looks great as well.
The Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit is a wonderful thing. I'm surprised more companies don't use it to make older games playable.
Does anyone know about any master repository holding more of these kinds of fixes? This is the first one I've seen that wasn't built-in to the toolkit.
I did try Everquest. I had a friend who bought it for me as a present, so it was his money, not mine. I played the one-month trial, but it just wasn't enough fun. I spent a lot of time running around from place to place, fighting the same old monsters. The nearly complete lack of any role-playing by the other people was also a big disappointment.
I don't have a problem with the idea of a monthly fee, but I strongly object to having to shell out for a box and CD.
I used the Star Wars Galaxies free trial, but found out that, even though I had the full game installed on my machine, there was no way to simply go to a full-time live subscription without going to a store and buying a box. So, I dropped the game right away. What's the point of providing a freely downloadable full game client, then making me go buy a box? Even if they wanted me to just buy a license key for $10 or $15, that might have been acceptable. But the CD and manuals are already obsolete!
Likewise, I'm haven't bought City of Heroes (in spite of wanting to play very, very much) because:
1. I refuse to pay more than $29.99 for a game (and usually wait until the price is $19.99).
2. I won't pay a penny for a MMORPG that I can't try first.
3. I won't buy a MMORPG that requires me to buy the box and CD, instead of letting me download the client.
I would like to point out that ID has provided what can be termed the "ultimate" support. They released the source code to their old games. As a result, I can play old ID games on modern machines with modern machines and snazzy graphics, and the games are maintained by people who do it as a labor of love.
Not so good behind a corporate proxy
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I can't get to anything on freecache.org (or archive.org) from where I work. Our so-called "SmartFilter" blocks access as follows:
Access denied by SmartFilter content category. The requested URL belongs to the following category: Anonymizer.
I used to be a serious trek fan, but after TNG ended, I feel the quality of the shows (DS9, Voyager, Enterprise) has deteriorated. I feel Rick Berman has ruined Star Trek.
I was actually pretty excited by the premise of Enterprise, and enjoyed the first season. The second season was weak, and the "improvements" in the third season completely ruined the show for me. I watched 2 episodes and dropped it. I did watch the "Archer Loses His Memory" episode, and frankly I would have rather watched a series that started from that point than the restored timeline.
My original statement was that the PC games were harder to stock and manage, so the small mall-sized stores stock less of them than the easier to manage, uniformly packaged console games.
You're saying that there aren't as many PC games, so naturally EBgames stocks more console games.
I follow that up with the fact that there are MORE PC game releases, and of types that console games can't do as well.
Your reply doesn't address the facts, just makes some kind of non-sensical declaration, and proclaims the debate closed.
If you have pertinent facts that apply to this discussion, please share them.
The whole point of this thread is that those stores aren't stocking enough PC game titles. They limit stuff to the "blockbuster" (or hoped-for blockbuster), and bypass a lot of the PC games that are released. Your earlier statement was that there are more console titles released compared to PC games. What you're saying now is that those stores stock more console games than PC games, which is what we've all been commenting on.
No way. There's way more PC games out there. You have to count educational games, kids games, and things that you simply can't do with a console. There's lots of little game developers that release for the PC, but will never get enough traction to get a console deal.
Think of companies like Spiderweb Software. They make some moderately popular RPGs tha would be difficult to port to a console, and tough to sell in the console market.
I vote with my wallet, and my vote says "No game is worth more than $29.99". That's my cutoff for buying a new game that I REALLY, REALLY want. Most other games, that I'm interested in but not drooling over, don't get purchased until they're at $19.99 or less. That means that I buy most games at the bargain bin.
I simply refuse to pay $50 for a game. The times I've broken that rule have been disasters. I was very excited about "Tron 2.0". I paid $49.99, and was totally disappointed.
Sadly, I'll probably cave again when "Doom 3", Duke Nukem Forever", and "Half-Life 2" come out.
I think it's more a case of storage, staging, and sell-through.
The stores simply don't have the room to accomodate the larger boxes, either in the back room or on the shelves. It's much easier to stock the CD cases that modern console games come in.
I also think its easier to sell an older console game than an older, "B-list" PC game. I can still go into EBGames and find new copies of "Hyperblade" selling for $1.99. They can't unload it, even at that price.
So, they push the console games, which are easier to manage, and the PC games suffer, and sales start to drop, and it goes into a "death spiral".
My local game stores (EB Games, GameStop, etc) have a small PC section, in the back, with the games lined up like books so you just see the edge. They aren't sorted by name, developer, or genre. They're just shoved up there randomly. On any slightly busy day, you can't even get back to them to browse because of the crowds.
The console games take up the front, well lit areas. They are laid out facing the customer, with decent spacing between the titles. Each console has more wall space than the PC games. Until relatively recently, even the Dreamcast had more space in some of the stores.
Even in the larger stores (Best Buy and CompUSA), the PC game section has been shrinking while the console section has been growing.
So, it's been getting much more difficult to buy PC games at these stores. So what does that do to sales? Sales go down, the stores stock less PC games, leading to lower sales, etc.
On the other hand, these stores are very tiny. PC games are in large, non-uniform boxes (this has been changing in recent years, but not enough) compared to the standard size of console game packaging. They can store more product more efficiently with console games vs. PC games.
Slashdot Mirror
So, who wants to lay odds on how long they can stay in business once hackers start buying all of their hardware and not using the proprietary services?
I tried it, and it identified one spyware program...incorrectly.
It tagged the C:\WINDOWS\lhsp\tv\tvenuax.dll file as a spyware program, even though it is really the "Lernout & Hauspie TruVoice American English TTS Engine Wrapper", published by Microsoft! If I had just accepted it's recommendation, it would have caused a problem on my system.
I have no problem with the games going away. Every game is going to have a certain lifespan, and that's just the way it works.
However, I'm not going to spend my money to "buy" a game that depends on remote servers to play. I don't by any games that don't have a single-player mode.
If all I'm paying is a monthly fee, then they can shut it down and stop charging me. I won't feel like I've had something stolen. But if I "bought" a game, in a box, with manuals, then I expect to be able to play indefinitely.
Let's look at World of Warcraft for an example. They want $15 a month to play. So the most they should charge for a box in a store is $15 + cost of materials + store markup. No way that's $55.
However, I don't even want to pay that. They want me to take out a subscription? Fine, but you have to let me try it for free for a month. Worst case, you let me have the client for free, and charge me for one month, no rebill. If I decide I want to subscribe, then I should just be able to roll over into a recurring subscription.
The expense of developing the game, the online materials, hosting the client, etc. is just the cost of doing business, and it should be factored into the monthly fee.
No. I'd pay $0 for the download. I also want a free trial period of at least 7 days, and if I liked the gameplay, I'd sign up for a monthly subscription.
I haven't played CoH because there's no free download or trial period.
I played WoW on the 10 day free trial, but even though I had the game installed, they wanted $55 to keep playing.
I played the SW:G on the 7 day free trial, but quit for the same reasons as WoW.
I won't buy a MMO game. I just can't see spending $55 dollars to buy a game client, then have to fork over monthly fees to use it. I don't want to be at the mercy of my ISP or the game provider. "Earth & Beyond" and "Motor City Online" both folded up leaving anyone who bought the game in a lurch.
I'd be willing to subscribe, and maybe pay a small account setup fee (no more than $10), but no way will I spend money to "buy" a game that I can't play without a subscription.
I think AO had a great idea in letting the client be downloadable, but they still wanted to charge me $30 bucks to "buy" the game. Same with SW:G. I had already downloaded the full client, but they wanted me to go to a store and buy a box (that was already obsolete!) just to get a license key. If they had an option just to sell a cheap license key, I'd be playing it right now.
Actually, what I think he's saying is that Halo 2, in the first day of sales, outsold the entire run of Halo.
That doesn't make sense in the context of this story. Halo sold 5 million units in 2 years, and Halo 2 didn't sell that many the first day. It only reached that number recently.
I think this guy did the right thing. It was illegal, and he didn't want to be a party to a crime. His wife probably wouldn't have bought it if she knew it was illegal. I've seen these things in the malls, but never bought one because of obvious copyright violations.
However, I have purchased most of the Jakks Pacific licensed game units. Itt's a great idea, as long as you don't break the law.
Because it's true. This comment was almost exaclty what I was going to post. I've had to deal ith the incredibly broken output of Frontpage, and the idiosyncracies of IE for years.
To be fair, it certainly is not correct behavior for a browser (or any program) to crash on bad input. But citing IE for it's ability to deal with malformed input (which is another way of saying "lack of standards compliance") is pretty funny.
I had this problem crop up when I first got a GeForce 3 based card on my CRT. The lag showed up in Half-Life and other games. I turned off anti-aliasing, and everything went back to normal.
Driver does work on XP. I've never been able to get past the qulifying mission, so I can't tell if there's a later crash bug, but it seems to work fine, and looks great as well.
The Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit is a wonderful thing. I'm surprised more companies don't use it to make older games playable.
Does anyone know about any master repository holding more of these kinds of fixes? This is the first one I've seen that wasn't built-in to the toolkit.
I did try Everquest. I had a friend who bought it for me as a present, so it was his money, not mine. I played the one-month trial, but it just wasn't enough fun. I spent a lot of time running around from place to place, fighting the same old monsters. The nearly complete lack of any role-playing by the other people was also a big disappointment.
I don't have a problem with the idea of a monthly fee, but I strongly object to having to shell out for a box and CD.
I used the Star Wars Galaxies free trial, but found out that, even though I had the full game installed on my machine, there was no way to simply go to a full-time live subscription without going to a store and buying a box. So, I dropped the game right away. What's the point of providing a freely downloadable full game client, then making me go buy a box? Even if they wanted me to just buy a license key for $10 or $15, that might have been acceptable. But the CD and manuals are already obsolete!
Likewise, I'm haven't bought City of Heroes (in spite of wanting to play very, very much) because:
1. I refuse to pay more than $29.99 for a game (and usually wait until the price is $19.99).
2. I won't pay a penny for a MMORPG that I can't try first.
3. I won't buy a MMORPG that requires me to buy the box and CD, instead of letting me download the client.
He was also excellent in Tachyon: The Fringe. Tons of really great dialog.
So does Neo.
Oops.
I would like to point out that ID has provided what can be termed the "ultimate" support. They released the source code to their old games. As a result, I can play old ID games on modern machines with modern machines and snazzy graphics, and the games are maintained by people who do it as a labor of love.
I can't get to anything on freecache.org (or archive.org) from where I work. Our so-called "SmartFilter" blocks access as follows:
Access denied by SmartFilter content category. The requested URL belongs to the following category: Anonymizer.
I used to be a serious trek fan, but after TNG ended, I feel the quality of the shows (DS9, Voyager, Enterprise) has deteriorated. I feel Rick Berman has ruined Star Trek.
I was actually pretty excited by the premise of Enterprise, and enjoyed the first season. The second season was weak, and the "improvements" in the third season completely ruined the show for me. I watched 2 episodes and dropped it. I did watch the "Archer Loses His Memory" episode, and frankly I would have rather watched a series that started from that point than the restored timeline.
Star Trek: Rest in Peace
My original statement was that the PC games were harder to stock and manage, so the small mall-sized stores stock less of them than the easier to manage, uniformly packaged console games.
You're saying that there aren't as many PC games, so naturally EBgames stocks more console games.
I follow that up with the fact that there are MORE PC game releases, and of types that console games can't do as well.
Your reply doesn't address the facts, just makes some kind of non-sensical declaration, and proclaims the debate closed.
If you have pertinent facts that apply to this discussion, please share them.
The whole point of this thread is that those stores aren't stocking enough PC game titles. They limit stuff to the "blockbuster" (or hoped-for blockbuster), and bypass a lot of the PC games that are released. Your earlier statement was that there are more console titles released compared to PC games. What you're saying now is that those stores stock more console games than PC games, which is what we've all been commenting on.
No way. There's way more PC games out there. You have to count educational games, kids games, and things that you simply can't do with a console. There's lots of little game developers that release for the PC, but will never get enough traction to get a console deal.
Think of companies like Spiderweb Software. They make some moderately popular RPGs tha would be difficult to port to a console, and tough to sell in the console market.
I vote with my wallet, and my vote says "No game is worth more than $29.99". That's my cutoff for buying a new game that I REALLY, REALLY want. Most other games, that I'm interested in but not drooling over, don't get purchased until they're at $19.99 or less. That means that I buy most games at the bargain bin.
I simply refuse to pay $50 for a game. The times I've broken that rule have been disasters. I was very excited about "Tron 2.0". I paid $49.99, and was totally disappointed.
Sadly, I'll probably cave again when "Doom 3", Duke Nukem Forever", and "Half-Life 2" come out.
I think it's more a case of storage, staging, and sell-through.
The stores simply don't have the room to accomodate the larger boxes, either in the back room or on the shelves. It's much easier to stock the CD cases that modern console games come in.
I also think its easier to sell an older console game than an older, "B-list" PC game. I can still go into EBGames and find new copies of "Hyperblade" selling for $1.99. They can't unload it, even at that price.
So, they push the console games, which are easier to manage, and the PC games suffer, and sales start to drop, and it goes into a "death spiral".
My local game stores (EB Games, GameStop, etc) have a small PC section, in the back, with the games lined up like books so you just see the edge. They aren't sorted by name, developer, or genre. They're just shoved up there randomly. On any slightly busy day, you can't even get back to them to browse because of the crowds.
The console games take up the front, well lit areas. They are laid out facing the customer, with decent spacing between the titles. Each console has more wall space than the PC games. Until relatively recently, even the Dreamcast had more space in some of the stores.
Even in the larger stores (Best Buy and CompUSA), the PC game section has been shrinking while the console section has been growing.
So, it's been getting much more difficult to buy PC games at these stores. So what does that do to sales? Sales go down, the stores stock less PC games, leading to lower sales, etc.
On the other hand, these stores are very tiny. PC games are in large, non-uniform boxes (this has been changing in recent years, but not enough) compared to the standard size of console game packaging. They can store more product more efficiently with console games vs. PC games.
I swear, there have been more dupes in the past few months. At least this one is 2 months old.