Nintendo responded by telling people to stop looking only at the first week's sales because there's more than one week or month for the game to sell in and on platforms like the DS and Wii they actually do instead of hitting near-zero sales after two months and a pricedrop after three more. Their example is CoD4 for the DS which sold 36k in the first month and 500k lifetime-to-date.
There's always a large supply of young and mature (I mean the kind who's too mature to think blood explosions are funny) people who could become gamers with the right game. In fact Nintendo is now winning precisely by expanding their appeal to these people with more game variety. The people who actually grew up with games and now demand M ratings are a minority, some grew up with them but lapsed, others outgrew the age where violence seems like a good part of a game and many didn't have games in their own childhood and still need to be introduced to gaming for the first time. [url=http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/2008/08/episode-eleven-can-it-happen-to-us.html]The comic book industry tried to grow up along with its fans too[/url].
That the Wii can't compete with the HD consoles visually is not an accident or a result of weakness, had they wanted to they could have made a machine that'll easily go head to head with them (they did last gen without breaking a sweat/loss per console and they had more than enough spare cash to afford R&D). They didn't. They analyzed the market and determined that the people who actually demand HD graphics before they're willing to purchase a game are few, many people, even the regular gamers, don't put so much emphasis on graphics that a good game with last gen graphics can't sell to them. Additionally last gen graphics are significantly cheaper (AAA games are 2.5 times as expensive on the HD consoles as on last gen systems) and it's a lot more profitable to innovate (much easier when you've got to invest less per attempt and can actually accept a few failures if you have to) and find new ways to appeal to people who haven't been appealed to before. Of course that didn't start with the Wii, the first experiment was the DS which is now the best system of the current generation hands down (and when it was launched people predicted its doom at the hands of the PSP because the PSP has better graphics). After the test run succeeded they went full scale on it with the Wii and it succeeded, as expected.
It seems to me that DS games automatically get lower ratings simply because violence in 2d is less realistic and detailled so while on other systems M ratings almost appear to be the default on the DS you'd really have to reach to get one as your usual run-and-gun games won't even get close to one.
You know, I'm not sure we can point at a complex system like that and go "it can't be factor X because it's factor Y" as it's entirely possible that there is more than one factor involved.
Of course the climate changes by itself, the problem is that it's changing faster than it should and it's doing so because of the greenhouse gasses. Often people here act like they're the first ones to ever think of factors like sun activity but those have been calculated and found insufficient to explain the change we're seeing.
China and India are gigantic and were underdeveloped compared to their population size, telling them to reduce their emissions when they have almost none would mean freezing them in their then-current situation and basically say that the ceiling you get is based on how much CO2 you already produce and if you weren't already a major producer you're out of luck and can remain in the stone age while the supremacy of the first world nations gets solidified due to their larger capacity caps and thus higher ability to develop their industry even in the future. Yes, if they wanted to reduce emissions they'd have to cap those countries too and make the total cap lower than the current output but it'd end up with first world countries having to cut more than 50% of their emissions and they simply wouldn't sign then.
I think the standard is something like giving it to people you don't know. Posting it where it's accessible to anyone who comes along is publishing, showing it in a private area where only people you chose get to enter is not. Might still violate privacy though.
Well, the competition is failing to take away WoW's marketshare. I don't think WoW is so terribly unique that there's no way anybody could ever make a competitor that will beat it but it doesn't look like the competition has any clue how to make one.
Fair use for criticism means you can put excerpts of the thing you're criticising into your article, it doesn't mean you can warez the game you're reviewing.
People are still more willing to buy a game when they can't get almost the same thing for free without any legal or moral issues (and yes, for many people taking a game for free when you're supposed to buy it is wrong). I don't think distributing it for free and selling serials would make sense unless they go the shareware route where the key also unlocks some singleplayer material and such. They can offer a demo for free if they want (and for a multiplayer game like Demigod it probably makes more sense anyway since multiplayer tends to be more fun than playing against bots and what amounts to an advertisement should show the most fun parts of the game).
The idea of a cd-key is stupid, people will brute force
Er, only if the guy who designed your key system failed his cryptography exam really badly. If your key validation consists of storing the issued keys on a server, randomly generating them (with a good RNG) when you issue them and using the full key space (no algorithm to limit it down except maybe for a 1-2 character checksum at the end if you need clientside catching of bad inputs) any attempt to brute force the keys should be clearly visible to your server and, if you set the server up to have a minimum delay between two validations from the same client (1-2 seconds would already work), should not be doable in reasonable time provided your keyspace is sufficiently large compared to the number of issued but unactivated keys.
I cannot fault you on your statement about their reputation being tarnished, and was very confused that they would let pirated people play online using their servers. Usually pirated copies of a game don't cost the company anything, while due to them letting them on the servers a pirated copy actually costs the company money.
It was an update server apparently, the warez versions cannot enter the multiplayer server.
So already IN ONE SINGLE WEEK, Gas Powered Games and Stardock have lost 80% of the potential revenue of the game
That's only if you count everyone who cares enough to download the game as potential full price revenue (downloading has a very low threshold, much lower than even "I'll wait for a pricedrop", so that's not really potential revenue in a realistic sense, merely as a theoretical optimum) and assume that the game will not sell afterwards.
Besides, they stated the hit was from automatic update features, the warez versions cannot play online and from what I've read so far the game's singleplayer mode is practically nonexistent and it's entirely meant for online multiplayer, thus the value of the warez version is significantly lower than that of the legal version so "upgrading" is likely for those people who want to really play the game.
2 years is way too short, less than the evelopment time on many games, I'd say it does have to be at least 10 minimum (it's not a long time except for very short lived media and well, limits like 17 years for patents do seem to be fair enough with plenty of public domain inventions now available, make it too short and people will just wait a bit to get it for free) and I'd actually make it usage dependent (something like 2-3 years after the work or a fairly close derivative* is no longer available for new purchase by the public after it was first published, possibly even with a very high upper limit if it is kept available in order to encourage preservation of older works). Almost all works fall out of relevance within a few years and as such would probably no longer be kept available by the publisher and a usage scheme would then allow the public to utilize them and preserve them. Some works archieve so much popularity that they remain relevant for decades and IMO that should be rewarded in some form because it really requires a stroke of genius to make it for that long.
*=To be fair to serial works. It'd suck to end up with some key characters in a long running series being public domain and ending up with tons of knockoffs, it'd suck even more for the average joe who wouldn't keep a clean enough distinction between the parts that have expired and those that haven't and might reference a too recent event in the series' plot which would then be infringing despite other parts of the series no longer being covered and no matter how short your term is, as long as it's above zero that problem remains.
Use occam's razor and go with the simplest explanation: People pirate because they want free shit and it's easier in some cases than going to the store.
Especially in Europe where going to the store and paying the 50€ they're asking for also requires waiting until next month for the game to actually be released.
You know they can't censor anything they didn't invent themselves, right? (cue people pointing at Disney which is wrong since they cannot restrict the use of the original fairy tales, only their own adaptions which have their own ideas added) You're acting like they can prevent you from sharing your own ideas. They don't have control over all information or all sharing, they only have control over the sharing of the specific information they created. If you don't deal with their information you are unrestricted. There is no reason for you to share their information, it's not your idea anyway so you're not restricted in your ideas (cue people pointing at derivative works, the ideas you added are indeed yours but those works tend to include ideas that are not your own and when those ideas still belong to someone you only have shared ownership of the result and predictably won't be able to act alone on the entirety of it just as you don't get to own the whole house just by owning a room in it).
Unless you have some serious disorder there's nothing forcing you to deal with their information and we're not talking about something like eating vegan where you have to adjust your life heavily to compensate, there's no need to compensate for not touching their information. You can just avoid it by not even looking at it.
Depends on how they handle complaints. If they actually cooperate and delete torrents/shut down trackers if the rightsholder of the work being shared complains it should be legitimate enough. AFAIK there are already limits to what a service can do regarding user-supplied data, I don't think a large file server can refuse an order to remove infringing material and expect to come away unharmed.
Tracking for a specific torrent is pretty much actively helping distribute the material that torrent covers, I don't think it should be different from simply hosting the covered material yourself. Note that most big file servers let users upload stuff and invariably end up with warez uploaded but don't get sued by the copyright holders, AFAIK a service like that is protected as long as it removes material upon request (in the US that is codified into the law with the DMCA, it varies in other countries). You could run a torrent site like any other file uploading service.
It was specifically set up to track torrents that exchange copyrighted material without permission of the rightsholder. The intent was to provide a place where people can download warez. That's what really matters here, they intended to facilitate copyright infringement while Google was intended as a generic index so claiming Google is just as liable is ignoring common sense.
I think for proper justice it doesn't matter how the details of the technology work, it matters that the site was set up and used for copyright infringement on a large scale. The technology was just a transparent attempt at dodging the law anyway and AFAIK many legal systems allow judges to ignore the letter of the law a bit when it's necessary to serve the spirit of the law.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also a shitload of great games that came out for the system in that timespan, in fact I'd say more than on the home consoles.
Nintendo responded by telling people to stop looking only at the first week's sales because there's more than one week or month for the game to sell in and on platforms like the DS and Wii they actually do instead of hitting near-zero sales after two months and a pricedrop after three more. Their example is CoD4 for the DS which sold 36k in the first month and 500k lifetime-to-date.
Aw shit, too confused by the tons of different formats every single comment system feels the need to invent (I've seen systems that reversed the label and URL placement in their tags...) so here's the link clickable for the people who can't be arsed to select that and hit "go to URL".
There's always a large supply of young and mature (I mean the kind who's too mature to think blood explosions are funny) people who could become gamers with the right game. In fact Nintendo is now winning precisely by expanding their appeal to these people with more game variety. The people who actually grew up with games and now demand M ratings are a minority, some grew up with them but lapsed, others outgrew the age where violence seems like a good part of a game and many didn't have games in their own childhood and still need to be introduced to gaming for the first time. [url=http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/2008/08/episode-eleven-can-it-happen-to-us.html]The comic book industry tried to grow up along with its fans too[/url].
That the Wii can't compete with the HD consoles visually is not an accident or a result of weakness, had they wanted to they could have made a machine that'll easily go head to head with them (they did last gen without breaking a sweat/loss per console and they had more than enough spare cash to afford R&D). They didn't. They analyzed the market and determined that the people who actually demand HD graphics before they're willing to purchase a game are few, many people, even the regular gamers, don't put so much emphasis on graphics that a good game with last gen graphics can't sell to them. Additionally last gen graphics are significantly cheaper (AAA games are 2.5 times as expensive on the HD consoles as on last gen systems) and it's a lot more profitable to innovate (much easier when you've got to invest less per attempt and can actually accept a few failures if you have to) and find new ways to appeal to people who haven't been appealed to before. Of course that didn't start with the Wii, the first experiment was the DS which is now the best system of the current generation hands down (and when it was launched people predicted its doom at the hands of the PSP because the PSP has better graphics). After the test run succeeded they went full scale on it with the Wii and it succeeded, as expected.
It seems to me that DS games automatically get lower ratings simply because violence in 2d is less realistic and detailled so while on other systems M ratings almost appear to be the default on the DS you'd really have to reach to get one as your usual run-and-gun games won't even get close to one.
You know, I'm not sure we can point at a complex system like that and go "it can't be factor X because it's factor Y" as it's entirely possible that there is more than one factor involved.
Of course the climate changes by itself, the problem is that it's changing faster than it should and it's doing so because of the greenhouse gasses. Often people here act like they're the first ones to ever think of factors like sun activity but those have been calculated and found insufficient to explain the change we're seeing.
China and India are gigantic and were underdeveloped compared to their population size, telling them to reduce their emissions when they have almost none would mean freezing them in their then-current situation and basically say that the ceiling you get is based on how much CO2 you already produce and if you weren't already a major producer you're out of luck and can remain in the stone age while the supremacy of the first world nations gets solidified due to their larger capacity caps and thus higher ability to develop their industry even in the future. Yes, if they wanted to reduce emissions they'd have to cap those countries too and make the total cap lower than the current output but it'd end up with first world countries having to cut more than 50% of their emissions and they simply wouldn't sign then.
I think the standard is something like giving it to people you don't know. Posting it where it's accessible to anyone who comes along is publishing, showing it in a private area where only people you chose get to enter is not. Might still violate privacy though.
I wish celebrities wouldn't count as public interest, would keep the news much less cluttered.
Well, the competition is failing to take away WoW's marketshare. I don't think WoW is so terribly unique that there's no way anybody could ever make a competitor that will beat it but it doesn't look like the competition has any clue how to make one.
If you're going for narrow definitions at least get them right, piracy can also involve aircraft.
Oh come on, you can't rape the English language, that slutty bastard will give you consent if you so much as look at it.
Fair use for criticism means you can put excerpts of the thing you're criticising into your article, it doesn't mean you can warez the game you're reviewing.
People are still more willing to buy a game when they can't get almost the same thing for free without any legal or moral issues (and yes, for many people taking a game for free when you're supposed to buy it is wrong). I don't think distributing it for free and selling serials would make sense unless they go the shareware route where the key also unlocks some singleplayer material and such. They can offer a demo for free if they want (and for a multiplayer game like Demigod it probably makes more sense anyway since multiplayer tends to be more fun than playing against bots and what amounts to an advertisement should show the most fun parts of the game).
The idea of a cd-key is stupid, people will brute force
Er, only if the guy who designed your key system failed his cryptography exam really badly. If your key validation consists of storing the issued keys on a server, randomly generating them (with a good RNG) when you issue them and using the full key space (no algorithm to limit it down except maybe for a 1-2 character checksum at the end if you need clientside catching of bad inputs) any attempt to brute force the keys should be clearly visible to your server and, if you set the server up to have a minimum delay between two validations from the same client (1-2 seconds would already work), should not be doable in reasonable time provided your keyspace is sufficiently large compared to the number of issued but unactivated keys.
I cannot fault you on your statement about their reputation being tarnished, and was very confused that they would let pirated people play online using their servers. Usually pirated copies of a game don't cost the company anything, while due to them letting them on the servers a pirated copy actually costs the company money.
It was an update server apparently, the warez versions cannot enter the multiplayer server.
So already IN ONE SINGLE WEEK, Gas Powered Games and Stardock have lost 80% of the potential revenue of the game
That's only if you count everyone who cares enough to download the game as potential full price revenue (downloading has a very low threshold, much lower than even "I'll wait for a pricedrop", so that's not really potential revenue in a realistic sense, merely as a theoretical optimum) and assume that the game will not sell afterwards.
Besides, they stated the hit was from automatic update features, the warez versions cannot play online and from what I've read so far the game's singleplayer mode is practically nonexistent and it's entirely meant for online multiplayer, thus the value of the warez version is significantly lower than that of the legal version so "upgrading" is likely for those people who want to really play the game.
2 years is way too short, less than the evelopment time on many games, I'd say it does have to be at least 10 minimum (it's not a long time except for very short lived media and well, limits like 17 years for patents do seem to be fair enough with plenty of public domain inventions now available, make it too short and people will just wait a bit to get it for free) and I'd actually make it usage dependent (something like 2-3 years after the work or a fairly close derivative* is no longer available for new purchase by the public after it was first published, possibly even with a very high upper limit if it is kept available in order to encourage preservation of older works). Almost all works fall out of relevance within a few years and as such would probably no longer be kept available by the publisher and a usage scheme would then allow the public to utilize them and preserve them. Some works archieve so much popularity that they remain relevant for decades and IMO that should be rewarded in some form because it really requires a stroke of genius to make it for that long.
*=To be fair to serial works. It'd suck to end up with some key characters in a long running series being public domain and ending up with tons of knockoffs, it'd suck even more for the average joe who wouldn't keep a clean enough distinction between the parts that have expired and those that haven't and might reference a too recent event in the series' plot which would then be infringing despite other parts of the series no longer being covered and no matter how short your term is, as long as it's above zero that problem remains.
Use occam's razor and go with the simplest explanation: People pirate because they want free shit and it's easier in some cases than going to the store.
Especially in Europe where going to the store and paying the 50€ they're asking for also requires waiting until next month for the game to actually be released.
You know they can't censor anything they didn't invent themselves, right? (cue people pointing at Disney which is wrong since they cannot restrict the use of the original fairy tales, only their own adaptions which have their own ideas added) You're acting like they can prevent you from sharing your own ideas. They don't have control over all information or all sharing, they only have control over the sharing of the specific information they created. If you don't deal with their information you are unrestricted. There is no reason for you to share their information, it's not your idea anyway so you're not restricted in your ideas (cue people pointing at derivative works, the ideas you added are indeed yours but those works tend to include ideas that are not your own and when those ideas still belong to someone you only have shared ownership of the result and predictably won't be able to act alone on the entirety of it just as you don't get to own the whole house just by owning a room in it).
Unless you have some serious disorder there's nothing forcing you to deal with their information and we're not talking about something like eating vegan where you have to adjust your life heavily to compensate, there's no need to compensate for not touching their information. You can just avoid it by not even looking at it.
Depends on how they handle complaints. If they actually cooperate and delete torrents/shut down trackers if the rightsholder of the work being shared complains it should be legitimate enough. AFAIK there are already limits to what a service can do regarding user-supplied data, I don't think a large file server can refuse an order to remove infringing material and expect to come away unharmed.
Tracking for a specific torrent is pretty much actively helping distribute the material that torrent covers, I don't think it should be different from simply hosting the covered material yourself. Note that most big file servers let users upload stuff and invariably end up with warez uploaded but don't get sued by the copyright holders, AFAIK a service like that is protected as long as it removes material upon request (in the US that is codified into the law with the DMCA, it varies in other countries). You could run a torrent site like any other file uploading service.
It was specifically set up to track torrents that exchange copyrighted material without permission of the rightsholder. The intent was to provide a place where people can download warez. That's what really matters here, they intended to facilitate copyright infringement while Google was intended as a generic index so claiming Google is just as liable is ignoring common sense.
The first amendment also predates the internet, should we have politicians rewrite that one?
I think for proper justice it doesn't matter how the details of the technology work, it matters that the site was set up and used for copyright infringement on a large scale. The technology was just a transparent attempt at dodging the law anyway and AFAIK many legal systems allow judges to ignore the letter of the law a bit when it's necessary to serve the spirit of the law.