People like you and me and anyone else who thinks the products are overpriced are not going to buy them. Either the companies making the products will be forced to lower the price to a more optimal one, or they will be able to keep it at the same price.
The problem is that they are claiming loss of sales for piracy done by people who never would have bought the game in the first place since the price is not right.
However if people pirate the game now, then they're never going to buy it later, even if the publisher reduces the price.
Additionally, if you're used to getting games for free, suddenly any cost seems "overpriced" in relation to what you've previously been paying.
1. Not enough money to purchase the game.
You gain: Word of mouth for good games.
You lose: Word of mouth for bad games. At worst, you lose one sale. Generally, nothing is lost.
WRONG!
In general, no-one has enough money to buy everything they want but has enough money to buy some of the things they want. Every purchase is a choice between buying the item and buying something else desirable.
When some items can easily be obtained illegally for free, it becomes more preferable to buy items which can't be obtained for free. I might be torn between buying and game and buying a new graphics card. I'm more likely to spend my money on the graphics card because I know I'll be able to pirate the game.
DRM doesn't stop piracy indefinitely, but as long as it works long enough for the initial rush of sales to die down, they fine with that. It's when the DRM is ineffective enough to be cracked zero-day or day-one that they consider a failure, because then piracy takes a measurable chunk out of their sales.
I read that bit of the article (and I agree with it) but unfortunately the words of publishers don't stand up to their actions.
If this is indeed the case, why don't we see more games having their DRM lifted after a few months? (A few games have done this, see UT2004 and Supreme Commander)
Maybe it's just that after you've paid your money, the publisher no longer has any incentive to provide you with services or maybe they just want to kill off the second games market completely. Either way, it's not helping thier customer relations.
Without looking too closely at the question of right or wrong, the result of these competing sides of greed is clear.
With traditional PC games making less money, game developers and publishers are going to move their focus into areas where the return on investment is better: console games and cheap to make casual games.
Whether right or wrong, the greed of pirates is making the pc gaming market less attractive to publishers.
Did you completely fail to read the article before commenting?
Allow me to point you to this helpful nugget on page 8:
The argument that removing DRM will result in a net increase in sales has no basis in fact based on the evidence at hand. Not only does gaming history show that unprotected games simply lead to more piracy, recent history also demonstrates clearly that simply removing DRM is not the answer to piracy. As we saw in the Scale of Piracy section, many popular games which have no intrusive DRM, such as Assassin's Creed, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and World of Goo, also have some of the highest piracy rates in 2008. Indeed as I write this, the new Prince of Persia game was released yesterday for PC (December 10, 2008) with absolutely no DRM protection, and a quick look at torrents shows that the cracked version is available, and on two popular torrent links alone there are over 23,000 people downloading the game within the first 24 hours. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear: DRM does not cause piracy, piracy results in DRM.
Movies, on the other hand, are a whole different question to pc games.
I guess they argue that because JS is a client-side program, you have to send the JS parts of your web application to the user and are therefore distributing it just by letting anyone use it.
I'm not sure how the GPL works with respect to licensing parts of a webapp. Can you just distribute the JS parts under the GPL and keep the server-side closed source?
Seeing as you have to send the client the source code to allow them to run the javascript and it's effectively impossible to prevent them from re-using it somewhere else it's not such a big deal to allow your javascript code to be open sourced.
I'd suggest -1 since that's the most likely preference.
It doesn't really matter which it is as you can add a modifier for each of the moderation types in your preferences (should you dislike reading funny posts or enjoy a good bit of flamebait.)
I preferred the shake to sync method where two phones would be held together and shaken randomly. Both phones take accelerometer measurements and use the pattern they were shaken in as a shared secret.
There is no reason that being unable to play Half-Life 2 offline should be a consequence of being on dialup, Steam simply sucks if you have a slow connection. It takes ages to connect or to start in offline mode and isn't very user friendly if you don't want to update your games.
All EULAs start with some phrase like "You may not use this software if you do not agree to this licence." If they didn't, you wouldn't have to agree to the licence to use the software.
Hell, even Metal Gear Solid had something like this - one of the access codes you needed to proceed with the game was printed on the back of the game case. Bugger if you were playing a burned copy!
As someone who had a physical copy and spent half an hour wondering how you were supposed to get Snake to read the number on the disk with the Metal Gear test data, this particular bit of the game really pissed me off.
To be fair, my boss is technically very competent so I've never had the problem of explaining something like this but I've never seen an easier way to use local stuff remotely.
At work, plug in, open outlook. Away from work, plug in, run OpenVPN, open outlook.
The ideal checkout would be "enter your VISA/Mastercard/whatever userid" - and done.
The user gets a signed "request to authorize payment" in a standard format that he can actually understand (what am I buying and from where) and after authorization the merchant gets a signed confirmation including the user's shipping address.
Slashdot Mirror
However if people pirate the game now, then they're never going to buy it later, even if the publisher reduces the price.
Additionally, if you're used to getting games for free, suddenly any cost seems "overpriced" in relation to what you've previously been paying.
WRONG!
In general, no-one has enough money to buy everything they want but has enough money to buy some of the things they want. Every purchase is a choice between buying the item and buying something else desirable.
When some items can easily be obtained illegally for free, it becomes more preferable to buy items which can't be obtained for free. I might be torn between buying and game and buying a new graphics card. I'm more likely to spend my money on the graphics card because I know I'll be able to pirate the game.
I read that bit of the article (and I agree with it) but unfortunately the words of publishers don't stand up to their actions.
If this is indeed the case, why don't we see more games having their DRM lifted after a few months? (A few games have done this, see UT2004 and Supreme Commander)
Maybe it's just that after you've paid your money, the publisher no longer has any incentive to provide you with services or maybe they just want to kill off the second games market completely. Either way, it's not helping thier customer relations.
Without looking too closely at the question of right or wrong, the result of these competing sides of greed is clear.
With traditional PC games making less money, game developers and publishers are going to move their focus into areas where the return on investment is better: console games and cheap to make casual games.
Whether right or wrong, the greed of pirates is making the pc gaming market less attractive to publishers.
Did you completely fail to read the article before commenting?
Allow me to point you to this helpful nugget on page 8:
Movies, on the other hand, are a whole different question to pc games.
You appear to have completely missed his point.
DRM (like door locks) is useless for preventing the large scale piracy but effective at stopping casual piracy between friends.
I guess they argue that because JS is a client-side program, you have to send the JS parts of your web application to the user and are therefore distributing it just by letting anyone use it.
I'm not sure how the GPL works with respect to licensing parts of a webapp. Can you just distribute the JS parts under the GPL and keep the server-side closed source?
Seeing as you have to send the client the source code to allow them to run the javascript and it's effectively impossible to prevent them from re-using it somewhere else it's not such a big deal to allow your javascript code to be open sourced.
I'd suggest -1 since that's the most likely preference.
It doesn't really matter which it is as you can add a modifier for each of the moderation types in your preferences (should you dislike reading funny posts or enjoy a good bit of flamebait.)
I preferred the shake to sync method where two phones would be held together and shaken randomly. Both phones take accelerometer measurements and use the pattern they were shaken in as a shared secret.
There is no reason that being unable to play Half-Life 2 offline should be a consequence of being on dialup, Steam simply sucks if you have a slow connection. It takes ages to connect or to start in offline mode and isn't very user friendly if you don't want to update your games.
The key difference there being that the artist can decide at stop contracting the services of the MAFIAA and still own the original rights.
They might then choose to contract someone else to distribute their works, perhaps because their fees are lower (think iTMS or Amazon here).
Isn't this the case in real life too?
If I hold my finger at arms length and look at something across the room I can see my finger twice.
You don't need a licence to run software.
All EULAs start with some phrase like "You may not use this software if you do not agree to this licence." If they didn't, you wouldn't have to agree to the licence to use the software.
Except that some web forms (and some mail servers) won't accept an email address with a '+' in it.
We use these types of addresses at work to organise replies to tickets and some people's mail set-ups really screw things up.
Hell, even Metal Gear Solid had something like this - one of the access codes you needed to proceed with the game was printed on the back of the game case. Bugger if you were playing a burned copy!
As someone who had a physical copy and spent half an hour wondering how you were supposed to get Snake to read the number on the disk with the Metal Gear test data, this particular bit of the game really pissed me off.
Are you saying that you could get a signed certificate for mail.google.com or amazon.co.uk?
If not then CA-signed certs are still worthwhile.
Then you're missing his point.
The great thing about PCs is that they're open, you have full control over what software you run on it and you can do whatever you like with it.
Traditionally, phones have been excessively locked down.
I would guess the yellow light time is constant, but if the lights saw a car speeding towards them, they would immediately turn yellow.
Anything else would be more dangerous.
Gamers came over to XP as soon as they bought a new PC.
Those of us who couldn't afford to upgrade stuck with 98 since XP ran like a pig.
VPN Go!
To be fair, my boss is technically very competent so I've never had the problem of explaining something like this but I've never seen an easier way to use local stuff remotely.
At work, plug in, open outlook.
Away from work, plug in, run OpenVPN, open outlook.
Sorted.
If you're panning to the right then the line is too long.
I also use vim but I'm still young and have no excuse.
Your coding style is atrocious. Using capital letters for classes is preferred but, failing that, at least be consistent.
Surely you're aware that almost all of Netcraft's analysis concerns servers, not visitors.
Google (with all their user search data) are in a much better position to comment on the popularity of E3.
(Netcraft does have site visit data collected from their toolbar but google's sample is much larger and less biased.)
Bollocks.
Draw your line from the closing brace up to the first line with any text on it, that line is the start of your block.
Having your opening braces on an empty line might be more aesthetically pleasing but has zero advantage in making the code clearer.
Either way, the most important thing is to have everyone do it the same way, every time.
Sounds like Paypal.