The more they squeeze, the more many escape. To protest against this increase in squeezing us, am downloading Beyonce, Miley Cyrus and Akon albums and i plan to put them in my premium RS account and sharing it with others.
Nope. Considering that corporations are never convicted and jailed, the maximum Merck will get is a $10K fine and a settlement from Merck that says it will not do so in future. What about the Doctors whose lives it destroyed? Collateral Damage. When will we realize that Corporations are like Terminator: 1) They have no shame. 2) They have no remorse. 3) They never stop until they destroy you. The only way to stop corporations is to destroy them completely: which means it must be disbanded, its board jailed and its CEO banned from taking similar jobs or promoting any company. Sigh... that is but a dream. In Asia such a concept does not extend as such in practice. Usually the CEO/Chairman is jailed or convicted of a crime.
Our schools did NOT teach us much, since teaching us anything beyond adding 1+2 will result in a lawsuit against the school for discrimination. Idiocracy was a GREAT movie, too bad it didn't do well since people couldn't digest facts.
Dear Senator, Killing me would cause a loss of income to Pharma companies and RIAA and the Authors Guild. Do you seriously want them to stop giving you any more "campaign" funds? Thanks
Don't worry, they already did that. In 2000 i opened a library account in Sydney, Australia at a Public Library: All i needed was a letter addressed to my home address and my name on it. I showed them my latest Telstra bill and i had my account opened in 20 mins. FFW to 2004, in Boston USA, when i went to open an account at a public library i had to show: my passport as ID, my check book for address proof, and a letter addressed to me to show that i lived there (No, a check book is only 10 points). It took 20 mins.
If i continue to live, am a threat to the Hearse makers consortium. If i die, am a threat to the pharma companies. If i read, am a threat to RIAA. If i write, am a threat to MPAA. If a watch a movie, am a threat to Authors Guild If i sit at home idle, am a threat to Comcast Cable. If i browse the internet, am a threat to NY Times So basically, everything i do or not do is a threat to some industry.
We gotta stop these RIAA/MPAA morons before they ruin every little thing. Next thing these morons would change the law to outlaw public libraries. Politicians as they always are, care about the next campaign, and almighty money. So they would say to the public that terrorists used libraries to steal ideas for making bombs, and so libraries must be closed or terrorists would take over the world. O'Reilly would jump in with a pinhead or patriot question about Paris Hilton being a pinhead for supporting libraries and Miley Cyrus as a patriot for saying libraries are dull (Jamie Foxx says that Cyrus should make a s*x tape in Library). First of all, create a group, donate liberally to it, hire the best lobbyist and make politicians fight for you, against RIAA/MPAA. Fight fire with fire.
Knowing how congress works, the looong speech given by each candidate before he punches is enough to take down the Server with GBs of chat traffic. Plus they will be each supported by millions of lobbyists on each side of the ring, all trying to muscle in on the limited bandwidth. As a spanner, AT&T will in its supreme wisdom, choose that day to begin its trials of Throttle-And-Cap system...
...and am disgusted by the fact that you liberal morons want to handle KSM with kid gloves, milk & cookies especially after he murdered 2000+ Human Beings. KSM should be happy with his treatment and pray he is executed by injection rather than forced to serve time in Federal Prisons... being an "intimate" friend of Bubba & his gang.
If i pirate Music with these Satellites, does the RIAA sue the US Navy for "facilitators of illegal downloading" ? I would be thrilled to read in the newspapers the next day that RIAA lawyers were water boarded 183 times by the marines...
Am NOT trying to justify either means of distribution is better than the other. I was trying to tell you the advantages of each one and disadvantages of each one. Its up to you to make a decision.
When faced with the choice of choosing between groceries or game, a wise mother choses groceries. But then many moronic parents still choose Tequila....
True. But allowing the whole Game to be distributed by others is a better choice. Like WarCraft clients. Hell i can install it in as many PCs i want. I can download it from anywhere. But that's limited to online play. While the game executable can be distributed by anyone, to unlock would require a special file, got by purchasing (much like earlier day shareware or even WinRAR, but more robust).
What i stated was preconditions for sole online distros. PayPal and iTunes do not exactly match. iTunes still accepts PayPal, but PayPal insists (Apple) that my account is funded with a US billing address. Like i care. You are talking about Hosting. Am talking about others too. Electrical Telegraphy did NOT send Moby Dick to my home. The internet can. 24x7. Payment for bandwidth is advice to the newcomers. Most think bandwidth is free. To make sure they understand that they can't send across a 1.7GB crap called Tales of Valor and cry when AT&T charges them. So, why exactly were you commenting my posts?
Your forgot to include the troubles and issues of online distros: 1) You MUST support every single country's credit card. On the internet nobobody cares you are from USA or EU. They wanna play. And if you limit them, you pay the price of a pirated copy. 2) You MUST have 24x7x365 online access. No lunch breaks, no Christmas holidays, no bathroom breaks. Your time is NOT your time. You don't own it anymore. Even if you fail and go bankrupt you MUST provide access to your products. For instance i bought a huge number of mobipocket ebooks from paperbackdigital.com They went kaput. What did mobipocket.com say? Not our problem. What did i do? Downloaded pirated copies of those books. Would i trust mobipocket once more? NOPE. Did they get the message? NOPE. 3) Localized problems are Global problems. As i said earlier, if your online server is down due to a power cutoff (a la NYC) or Earthquake, your customer in Florida or South Africa doesn't care a sh1t. OTOH if you had sold through GameStop and Keene,NH Gamestop closed due to earthquake, it was not your problem. Welcome to One World. 4) You WILL be using a brand new mode of distribution: one that did not exist for 100 years. if you are shipping DVDs to Gamestop, you used a distribution that was tested over time, perfected over time, clockwork, covered under bank guarantees, etc. Not digital. 5) You WILL pay for bandwidth. Bandwidth is free is a myth. Steam will charge you for distribution by volume. Impulse does the same. Only other seemingly free route is BitTorrent, but only if you allow others to seed without permission. That means allowing unknown people to load up all your DVDs on to their plane, throwing it out of the window over towns, villages and cities, and You ferevntly hoping a few of those morons call you, pay you to load the Game on to their PCs. Tough Luck. OTOH, if you use DRM to control installs, you pay the price of a backlash where your Game will be pirated out of spite. 6) Unless you are paying the costs for every piracy, meaning you pay for bandwidth so that some thief can play your game without paying you, stop worrying about piracy. If your printing presses were not used to print your book, you are not paying the cost. And NO, not every pirated copy is a valid sale. 11 yr old kids don't have 49.99 They WILL pirate. Get used to it. Be happy you are not paying for their torrents. All said and done, make sure you are funded adequeately. Banks get queasy when you don't include DRM and all that crap. Good Luck.
From time immemorial man has had the tendency to acquire for free if he could get away with it. Stealing Electricity when it was introduced was a BIG problem. Big enough for many companies to die. Eventually it got straightened out. Same was with Telegraph. The number of times codes changed in Telegraph is too numerous. Since telegraph companies charged by word, companies had exotic dictionaries with vast number of definitions for each word: Long sentences for single meaningless words. So was it with Telephone. People still steal phone talk time through pranks, tapping, etc. Internet stealing through WiFi... You can't prevent stealing. You can only control your own costs so that a stolen Game did NOT result in adding to your costs. Like DemiGod is doing now for Stardock. A.license file which embeds the user's email ID, hardware ID and a few random details is quite hard to break yet not too costly. No, DRM would not do it. Gamers get mad when their PCs are hacked legally. If your Game is stolen, and exchanged for free in torrents, but it does NOT add to your running costs, forget worrying about it. What does not cost you, should not worry you. Of course your lawyers will argue that each illegal install is money stolen from you: that's not entirely true. A 11-yr old kid may want to play, but does not have the money to buy it. He will somehow steal it. You can't get money from him. But you can bet that he will praise it to his friends, some of whom will buy it. Other crowd is the earning well-to-do crowd. They will the latest. And they will yours. Others are professional hackers. They thrive on challenge. They WILL crack the most hardest Games, even BioShock. You can't control them. Some, like me, will buy out of loyalty, or will crack it if it can't be bought in my country, or play a hacked version to see if its Good and buy it to keep my PC free of Trojans. And yes, i buy every Game stardock makes: Why? NO DRM. I don't even play their Games. I just buy and that's it. I play Company of heroes ONLY. Not even Crysis. But i still buy Political Machine, Gal Civ II, DemiGod, etc. Why? NO DRM, plus i like Stardock. Their support is cool and their CEO seems to have realized that DRM a la, BioShock hits them back. Thier only slip up was online resources. This is where they pay costs. If yours is not online gaming, then you are good to go. People who steal your Game may buy, may not. But as long as they don't cost YOU in server time or resources, why worry? Its a Business Risk. Much like CISCO doesn't care if clone copies of their routers are sold in China. Why? They don't incur costs on such cloned copies. So no worry. Think about it, but consult with a lawyer. IANAL. So beware. I talk from my experience only.
Yet you mention all that and then claim I'm wrong.
Sorry. I didn't mean you were wrong. If i had implied it, am really sorry. You seem to have gone through all the options and done a good deal of research. That said, online distribution is more of a pain than DVDs. With physical media you have a proven, established, experienced network that works like clockwork. With online like Steam or impulse, you entering a new world. Many things may go wrong which are not covered under SLA. For instance Steam servers may melt, Earthquakes in CA which really do not concern the man in CT (but yet gets affected), etc. Your local problems become globalized and they are YOUR problems. If a DVD shop were to experience an Earthquake, it is the shop's problem. not yours. But if the same Earthquake hits Steam, you are hammered because ALL your customers are hammered. Ratings as you say is a BIG, BIG pain in the A$$. Relic is now trying BitTorrent-like P2P downloads to speed up patches. But even that is slower than Direct from Steam (comcast anyone). You may want to look at separating content from the license. Meaning you upload the stuff to BitTorrent. It takes its own path much like the latest DVD Screener finds its way. Others take care of distribitution. You then sell only Licenses to the Game. Like winrar does. No, not like Shareware. You still provide direct content and your own torrents, but people are free to download from elsewhere (like Rapidshare, Torrent, FilePlanet, who cares). Once they install, they need a license file to unlock. This is generated uniquely for each user and centrally validated. Like a COM GUID. Universally valid ID and yet unique. Tied to User , but not tied to online. Yes, hackers WILL hack your game to produce a hot rodded license file. That's the price you pay.
You need a small lesson in Economics 101 my friends: 1) The cost of a product is NOT equal to its cost of manufacture, storage, shipping & profit. It is much more complex. For instance store display: Shelves are pricey. If you do not want your Game to be relegated to the corner, you better be prepared to give the Retailer a larger share of your take. 2) The cost of in-store advertising, banking costs (LoC, and other bank costs), add up to your margin; Seriously you are not thinking of shipping 100,000 copies of Tales of Valor to Gamestop without buying insurance against their bankruptcy, not to mention getting their banker to issue you a letter of credit, accounting fiascos, etc. Its not just production+marketing costs. (FYI marketing is NOT selling. Marketing includes everything). 3) Storage space, warehouse rentals, insurance, shipper costs, insurance, finances, banking lines of credit, etc., take a bite out of your profit. Getting a DVD manufacturer to press 1000 DVD at 30p is the start of your troubles. The maker will charge you for shipping to/from his factory, you need space to store it till you ship it to shops/retailers/direct purchases, money to tide you over until then, etc. Which is why CDs cost $19.99. (all of the money does not line up the RIAA pockets. And NO, am NOT a supporter of RIAA/MPAA. I buy my music from Russian websites). So, there goes your arguments. Being Digital involves a different set of troubles: You need to purchase bandwidth and in this age of throttling, double-dipping by AT&T, you need the clout of Google and the bank balance of Bill Gates to muscle in on a online store like Impulse or Steam. They handle your troubles for a fee. And that is not cheap. You need to tie up with PayPal or credit card processors who take a a cut. You need to make sure your latest fixpacks or updates are shipped via the same media. You need to make sure your online support is available 24x7x365. And NO, you cannot set timings like 9AM-6PM Central. You DO NOT sell at BestBuy. The customers fix your timing. And according to them they ARE calling you at 9.30AM their time. NO they don't care if its 10.30PM your time. You need to make sure that if you want to sell a second Game you better be prepared to make sure your planned downtimes are PLANNED. No unscheduled downtime. If its down for 10 mins, its down for 10x1,000,000 mins (1,000,000 users). Above all, prepare to have DVDs ready for shipping when somene wants the physical copy and is willing to pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
The more they squeeze, the more many escape.
To protest against this increase in squeezing us, am downloading Beyonce, Miley Cyrus and Akon albums and i plan to put them in my premium RS account and sharing it with others.
Nope.
Considering that corporations are never convicted and jailed, the maximum Merck will get is a $10K fine and a settlement from Merck that says it will not do so in future.
What about the Doctors whose lives it destroyed?
Collateral Damage.
When will we realize that Corporations are like Terminator:
1) They have no shame.
2) They have no remorse.
3) They never stop until they destroy you.
The only way to stop corporations is to destroy them completely: which means it must be disbanded, its board jailed and its CEO banned from taking similar jobs or promoting any company.
Sigh... that is but a dream.
In Asia such a concept does not extend as such in practice. Usually the CEO/Chairman is jailed or convicted of a crime.
Our schools did NOT teach us much, since teaching us anything beyond adding 1+2 will result in a lawsuit against the school for discrimination.
Idiocracy was a GREAT movie, too bad it didn't do well since people couldn't digest facts.
Excuse me?
What model does Comcast, AT&T, Sony Music and Bank of America have in common?
Dear Senator,
Killing me would cause a loss of income to Pharma companies and RIAA and the Authors Guild.
Do you seriously want them to stop giving you any more "campaign" funds?
Thanks
Don't worry, they already did that.
In 2000 i opened a library account in Sydney, Australia at a Public Library: All i needed was a letter addressed to my home address and my name on it. I showed them my latest Telstra bill and i had my account opened in 20 mins.
FFW to 2004, in Boston USA, when i went to open an account at a public library i had to show: my passport as ID, my check book for address proof, and a letter addressed to me to show that i lived there (No, a check book is only 10 points). It took 20 mins.
If i continue to live, am a threat to the Hearse makers consortium.
If i die, am a threat to the pharma companies.
If i read, am a threat to RIAA.
If i write, am a threat to MPAA.
If a watch a movie, am a threat to Authors Guild
If i sit at home idle, am a threat to Comcast Cable.
If i browse the internet, am a threat to NY Times
So basically, everything i do or not do is a threat to some industry.
We gotta stop these RIAA/MPAA morons before they ruin every little thing.
Next thing these morons would change the law to outlaw public libraries. Politicians as they always are, care about the next campaign, and almighty money. So they would say to the public that terrorists used libraries to steal ideas for making bombs, and so libraries must be closed or terrorists would take over the world.
O'Reilly would jump in with a pinhead or patriot question about Paris Hilton being a pinhead for supporting libraries and Miley Cyrus as a patriot for saying libraries are dull (Jamie Foxx says that Cyrus should make a s*x tape in Library).
First of all, create a group, donate liberally to it, hire the best lobbyist and make politicians fight for you, against RIAA/MPAA. Fight fire with fire.
Knowing how congress works, the looong speech given by each candidate before he punches is enough to take down the Server with GBs of chat traffic.
Plus they will be each supported by millions of lobbyists on each side of the ring, all trying to muscle in on the limited bandwidth.
As a spanner, AT&T will in its supreme wisdom, choose that day to begin its trials of Throttle-And-Cap system...
I know. That's why i added Enjoy-:) after that: meaning i wasn't disputing what you said but providing you with more anecdotal evidence of the same.
Here is your proof
Enjoy -:)
...and am disgusted by the fact that you liberal morons want to handle KSM with kid gloves, milk & cookies especially after he murdered 2000+ Human Beings.
KSM should be happy with his treatment and pray he is executed by injection rather than forced to serve time in Federal Prisons... being an "intimate" friend of Bubba & his gang.
Marines are always so coool.
They shoot themselves in the head to see who survives.
No wonder Marines are not allowed to use Armor or Artillery.
If i pirate Music with these Satellites, does the RIAA sue the US Navy for "facilitators of illegal downloading" ?
I would be thrilled to read in the newspapers the next day that RIAA lawyers were water boarded 183 times by the marines...
Not SEALS.
Marines.
Where did you get the idea SEALS are used to protect Satellites?
Am NOT trying to justify either means of distribution is better than the other.
I was trying to tell you the advantages of each one and disadvantages of each one.
Its up to you to make a decision.
When faced with the choice of choosing between groceries or game, a wise mother choses groceries. But then many moronic parents still choose Tequila....
True. But allowing the whole Game to be distributed by others is a better choice. Like WarCraft clients. Hell i can install it in as many PCs i want.
I can download it from anywhere.
But that's limited to online play.
While the game executable can be distributed by anyone, to unlock would require a special file, got by purchasing (much like earlier day shareware or even WinRAR, but more robust).
What i stated was preconditions for sole online distros. PayPal and iTunes do not exactly match.
iTunes still accepts PayPal, but PayPal insists (Apple) that my account is funded with a US billing address. Like i care.
You are talking about Hosting. Am talking about others too.
Electrical Telegraphy did NOT send Moby Dick to my home. The internet can. 24x7.
Payment for bandwidth is advice to the newcomers. Most think bandwidth is free. To make sure they understand that they can't send across a 1.7GB crap called Tales of Valor and cry when AT&T charges them.
So, why exactly were you commenting my posts?
Gamestop was ONE Retailer. BestBuy, Walmart, etc. also exist. Compare that with sole online distro.
Your forgot to include the troubles and issues of online distros:
1) You MUST support every single country's credit card. On the internet nobobody cares you are from USA or EU. They wanna play. And if you limit them, you pay the price of a pirated copy.
2) You MUST have 24x7x365 online access. No lunch breaks, no Christmas holidays, no bathroom breaks. Your time is NOT your time. You don't own it anymore. Even if you fail and go bankrupt you MUST provide access to your products. For instance i bought a huge number of mobipocket ebooks from paperbackdigital.com They went kaput. What did mobipocket.com say? Not our problem. What did i do? Downloaded pirated copies of those books. Would i trust mobipocket once more? NOPE. Did they get the message? NOPE.
3) Localized problems are Global problems. As i said earlier, if your online server is down due to a power cutoff (a la NYC) or Earthquake, your customer in Florida or South Africa doesn't care a sh1t. OTOH if you had sold through GameStop and Keene,NH Gamestop closed due to earthquake, it was not your problem. Welcome to One World.
4) You WILL be using a brand new mode of distribution: one that did not exist for 100 years. if you are shipping DVDs to Gamestop, you used a distribution that was tested over time, perfected over time, clockwork, covered under bank guarantees, etc. Not digital.
5) You WILL pay for bandwidth. Bandwidth is free is a myth. Steam will charge you for distribution by volume. Impulse does the same. Only other seemingly free route is BitTorrent, but only if you allow others to seed without permission. That means allowing unknown people to load up all your DVDs on to their plane, throwing it out of the window over towns, villages and cities, and You ferevntly hoping a few of those morons call you, pay you to load the Game on to their PCs. Tough Luck. OTOH, if you use DRM to control installs, you pay the price of a backlash where your Game will be pirated out of spite.
6) Unless you are paying the costs for every piracy, meaning you pay for bandwidth so that some thief can play your game without paying you, stop worrying about piracy. If your printing presses were not used to print your book, you are not paying the cost. And NO, not every pirated copy is a valid sale. 11 yr old kids don't have 49.99 They WILL pirate. Get used to it. Be happy you are not paying for their torrents.
All said and done, make sure you are funded adequeately. Banks get queasy when you don't include DRM and all that crap.
Good Luck.
From time immemorial man has had the tendency to acquire for free if he could get away with it. .license file which embeds the user's email ID, hardware ID and a few random details is quite hard to break yet not too costly.
Stealing Electricity when it was introduced was a BIG problem. Big enough for many companies to die. Eventually it got straightened out.
Same was with Telegraph. The number of times codes changed in Telegraph is too numerous. Since telegraph companies charged by word, companies had exotic dictionaries with vast number of definitions for each word: Long sentences for single meaningless words.
So was it with Telephone. People still steal phone talk time through pranks, tapping, etc.
Internet stealing through WiFi...
You can't prevent stealing.
You can only control your own costs so that a stolen Game did NOT result in adding to your costs. Like DemiGod is doing now for Stardock.
A
No, DRM would not do it. Gamers get mad when their PCs are hacked legally.
If your Game is stolen, and exchanged for free in torrents, but it does NOT add to your running costs, forget worrying about it. What does not cost you, should not worry you.
Of course your lawyers will argue that each illegal install is money stolen from you: that's not entirely true. A 11-yr old kid may want to play, but does not have the money to buy it. He will somehow steal it. You can't get money from him. But you can bet that he will praise it to his friends, some of whom will buy it.
Other crowd is the earning well-to-do crowd. They will the latest. And they will yours.
Others are professional hackers. They thrive on challenge. They WILL crack the most hardest Games, even BioShock. You can't control them.
Some, like me, will buy out of loyalty, or will crack it if it can't be bought in my country, or play a hacked version to see if its Good and buy it to keep my PC free of Trojans. And yes, i buy every Game stardock makes: Why? NO DRM. I don't even play their Games. I just buy and that's it. I play Company of heroes ONLY. Not even Crysis. But i still buy Political Machine, Gal Civ II, DemiGod, etc. Why? NO DRM, plus i like Stardock.
Their support is cool and their CEO seems to have realized that DRM a la, BioShock hits them back.
Thier only slip up was online resources. This is where they pay costs.
If yours is not online gaming, then you are good to go.
People who steal your Game may buy, may not. But as long as they don't cost YOU in server time or resources, why worry?
Its a Business Risk. Much like CISCO doesn't care if clone copies of their routers are sold in China. Why? They don't incur costs on such cloned copies. So no worry.
Think about it, but consult with a lawyer. IANAL. So beware. I talk from my experience only.
Sorry. I didn't mean you were wrong. If i had implied it, am really sorry.
You seem to have gone through all the options and done a good deal of research.
That said, online distribution is more of a pain than DVDs. With physical media you have a proven, established, experienced network that works like clockwork.
With online like Steam or impulse, you entering a new world. Many things may go wrong which are not covered under SLA.
For instance Steam servers may melt, Earthquakes in CA which really do not concern the man in CT (but yet gets affected), etc.
Your local problems become globalized and they are YOUR problems. If a DVD shop were to experience an Earthquake, it is the shop's problem. not yours. But if the same Earthquake hits Steam, you are hammered because ALL your customers are hammered.
Ratings as you say is a BIG, BIG pain in the A$$.
Relic is now trying BitTorrent-like P2P downloads to speed up patches.
But even that is slower than Direct from Steam (comcast anyone).
You may want to look at separating content from the license.
Meaning you upload the stuff to BitTorrent. It takes its own path much like the latest DVD Screener finds its way. Others take care of distribitution.
You then sell only Licenses to the Game.
Like winrar does. No, not like Shareware. You still provide direct content and your own torrents, but people are free to download from elsewhere (like Rapidshare, Torrent, FilePlanet, who cares).
Once they install, they need a license file to unlock. This is generated uniquely for each user and centrally validated. Like a COM GUID. Universally valid ID and yet unique. Tied to User , but not tied to online.
Yes, hackers WILL hack your game to produce a hot rodded license file. That's the price you pay.
You need a small lesson in Economics 101 my friends:
1) The cost of a product is NOT equal to its cost of manufacture, storage, shipping & profit. It is much more complex. For instance store display: Shelves are pricey. If you do not want your Game to be relegated to the corner, you better be prepared to give the Retailer a larger share of your take.
2) The cost of in-store advertising, banking costs (LoC, and other bank costs), add up to your margin; Seriously you are not thinking of shipping 100,000 copies of Tales of Valor to Gamestop without buying insurance against their bankruptcy, not to mention getting their banker to issue you a letter of credit, accounting fiascos, etc. Its not just production+marketing costs. (FYI marketing is NOT selling. Marketing includes everything).
3) Storage space, warehouse rentals, insurance, shipper costs, insurance, finances, banking lines of credit, etc., take a bite out of your profit.
Getting a DVD manufacturer to press 1000 DVD at 30p is the start of your troubles. The maker will charge you for shipping to/from his factory, you need space to store it till you ship it to shops/retailers/direct purchases, money to tide you over until then, etc.
Which is why CDs cost $19.99. (all of the money does not line up the RIAA pockets. And NO, am NOT a supporter of RIAA/MPAA. I buy my music from Russian websites).
So, there goes your arguments.
Being Digital involves a different set of troubles: You need to purchase bandwidth and in this age of throttling, double-dipping by AT&T, you need the clout of Google and the bank balance of Bill Gates to muscle in on a online store like Impulse or Steam. They handle your troubles for a fee. And that is not cheap.
You need to tie up with PayPal or credit card processors who take a a cut.
You need to make sure your latest fixpacks or updates are shipped via the same media.
You need to make sure your online support is available 24x7x365. And NO, you cannot set timings like 9AM-6PM Central. You DO NOT sell at BestBuy. The customers fix your timing. And according to them they ARE calling you at 9.30AM their time. NO they don't care if its 10.30PM your time.
You need to make sure that if you want to sell a second Game you better be prepared to make sure your planned downtimes are PLANNED. No unscheduled downtime. If its down for 10 mins, its down for 10x1,000,000 mins (1,000,000 users).
Above all, prepare to have DVDs ready for shipping when somene wants the physical copy and is willing to pay for it.