One of the reasons why I love my ISP is that this doesn't happen. I pay for a 20mbps down/5mbps up Fibre line, and I get that. Not just in speed tests either, downloading from fast servers (like Impulse, and Steam if you pick the right region) gets me that full out in real world usage.
Actually they bumped it up to 25 just recently due to competition, and I only noticed because everything I was downloading sped up. It's awesome. Hell, these guys don't even do traffic shaping.
(This is Aliant FibreOP, in Canada. Only available in New Brunswick right now.)
I played it all the way from the original Eul version, and those weren't buggy or newbie hostile at all. It got a lot more hostile to newbies in remakes as the complexity shot through the roof.
There's really no problem with him maintaining it, he's done a good job. There is a problem with claiming they're in the moral right to trademark it because the original author is working there, because that's a bald faced lie.
Except they don't. They have the second maintainer of DotA Allstars on board (the original developer of that worked on League of Legends). DotA itself was made by yet another person who isn't involved in either of them.
I'd love to know how you trademark something made by someone else and which someone else has already used on released games.
Icefrog is NOT the original developer. I don't know where that nonsense keeps coming from.
The original developer is named Eul, and he made it way back before The Frozen Throne came out. He then stopped supporting it. Guinsoo then made DotA Allstars. Icefrog took that over at version 6, and is the current maintainer.
I don't know how you go from "second maintainer of a remake" to "original author", but it's amazing how fast that spread around the Internet.
I'm not entirely sure what the complexity of the game has to do with a comment about hardcore players being willing to pay for it, but alright. Any excuse to bash those damn WoW players, right? If the comparison makes no sense whatsoever I'm sure it's really the fault of those evil guys at Blizzard somehow.
"It's a good system I think, rewards the hardcore fans."
Isn't that a bad system? The hardcore fans are the ones most likely to keep paying you cash money. Letting your best market off for free is a good way to turn down revenue.
And if the pirate version doesn't work because the game flat out won't function without a connection to corporate server X, their options become buy it or don't play it.
We're seeing more and more of that because it's such an attractive option for the people making games. At some point they need to get paid or they won't be making many more games.
Sales on AC2 were lower because AC1 wasn't a very good game, especially on PC. Sales on sequels are always driven by what people thought of previous games in the series.
As for the other point, it does match mine. People want to play game X. If they can't play game X for $0, they're more likely to buy it then if they can play it for $0. Even if it weren't true, preventing cheapskate pirates with a sense of entitlement from playing things they didn't pay for is still a worthwhile cause.
Funny how that doesn't apply to the DRM free version. In that case the Pirate Bay Edition has the same advantage it has over a DRM game: it costs $0. There's ALWAYS an excuse people come up with for why it's okay to pirate something.
The truth is that it's all bullshit excuses created by people unwilling to admit that they're cheap. It's about money. Nothing else.
It took a month before there was a properly working pirate version of Assassins Creed 2. So, some DRM schemes do work pretty well. Thanks to the cheapskate pirates, we can expect a lot more of that.
You don't think LAN play was removed from Starcraft 2 for technical reasons, do you? It's all because of cheapskate pirates ripping game developers off. Welcome to the future.
With a 90% piracy rate on DRM free games, clearly catering to your paying customers is working out pretty well. What was the successful piracy rate on these very locked down games again?
These excuses don't hold up in the market anymore. The data is conclusive: people are cheap and will pirate it if there's an easy way to do so.
Their problem seems to be that it's downloading and indexing a multi-GB IMAP mailbox. If you're indexing local messages during an upgrade there's no download, so it's only going to take as long as your disk can get through it.
In the tested situation it's downloading, storing, then indexing. So it's tying everything up for a very long period of time until all that is done.
So you can pay it based on usage, or you can pay it through taxes?
Paying it based on usage makes alternatives more cost-competitive, and encourages conservation. Paying it through taxes encourages people to bitch about taxes being too high while running giant deficits.
I have two cats. One of them doesn't respond to her name (she went through multiple owners before we got her and I think each one called her something else).
The other one we've had most of his life, and he'll come running down the stairs from the top floor if you say his name.
So, it seems to depend on the cat, and most likely how strong their association is between the name and something good (feeding).
According to Stardock's CEO, these numbers are wrong. Going by raw sales numbers, he says the digital number is actually closer to 25%.
Why the discrepency? Well, he has actual numbers for retail and Impulse (which he happens to own). He doesn't have numbers for Steam. Of course, neither does NPD. Their digital numbers are based on an online survey. These are not real sales numbers by any measure of the word, they're the sales equivalent of a biased online public opinion poll.
If I stood in the electronics aisle of Walmart and did a survey there, I'd find shockingly different numbers too. Unfortunately since we don't have accurate sales data for anybody, we're left with this kind of guess work.
Wow, yeah. That's a great example of customer service adding value to a product.
It also helps that the Economist tends to have quality and unique content. It's something you can find from 5000 other sources at the same time, as opposed to your average newspaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel needs people to think they need these faster multi core CPUs they keep cranking out.
And who is better at slowing Windows down to the point of uselessness then Mcafee?
It's a perfect fit. We'll see you slow, bloated software, then also sell you CPUs to make your computer usable.
One of the reasons why I love my ISP is that this doesn't happen. I pay for a 20mbps down/5mbps up Fibre line, and I get that. Not just in speed tests either, downloading from fast servers (like Impulse, and Steam if you pick the right region) gets me that full out in real world usage.
Actually they bumped it up to 25 just recently due to competition, and I only noticed because everything I was downloading sped up. It's awesome. Hell, these guys don't even do traffic shaping.
(This is Aliant FibreOP, in Canada. Only available in New Brunswick right now.)
I'd pay to see that.
I played it all the way from the original Eul version, and those weren't buggy or newbie hostile at all. It got a lot more hostile to newbies in remakes as the complexity shot through the roof.
There's really no problem with him maintaining it, he's done a good job. There is a problem with claiming they're in the moral right to trademark it because the original author is working there, because that's a bald faced lie.
Except they don't. They have the second maintainer of DotA Allstars on board (the original developer of that worked on League of Legends). DotA itself was made by yet another person who isn't involved in either of them.
I'd love to know how you trademark something made by someone else and which someone else has already used on released games.
Icefrog is NOT the original developer. I don't know where that nonsense keeps coming from.
The original developer is named Eul, and he made it way back before The Frozen Throne came out. He then stopped supporting it. Guinsoo then made DotA Allstars. Icefrog took that over at version 6, and is the current maintainer.
I don't know how you go from "second maintainer of a remake" to "original author", but it's amazing how fast that spread around the Internet.
I'm not entirely sure what the complexity of the game has to do with a comment about hardcore players being willing to pay for it, but alright. Any excuse to bash those damn WoW players, right? If the comparison makes no sense whatsoever I'm sure it's really the fault of those evil guys at Blizzard somehow.
Oh ok, that clarifies it. Thanks. :)
"It's a good system I think, rewards the hardcore fans."
Isn't that a bad system? The hardcore fans are the ones most likely to keep paying you cash money. Letting your best market off for free is a good way to turn down revenue.
"Assuming that they are correct (which I'm not willing to do), how many of those "90%" would have bought the game if it had DRM?"
Is that number > 0? Probably. People pirate because it's easy and they're cheap. When it's harder, you see less of it happening. (See: Xbox 360.)
And if the pirate version doesn't work because the game flat out won't function without a connection to corporate server X, their options become buy it or don't play it.
We're seeing more and more of that because it's such an attractive option for the people making games. At some point they need to get paid or they won't be making many more games.
Sales on AC2 were lower because AC1 wasn't a very good game, especially on PC. Sales on sequels are always driven by what people thought of previous games in the series.
As for the other point, it does match mine. People want to play game X. If they can't play game X for $0, they're more likely to buy it then if they can play it for $0. Even if it weren't true, preventing cheapskate pirates with a sense of entitlement from playing things they didn't pay for is still a worthwhile cause.
Funny how that doesn't apply to the DRM free version. In that case the Pirate Bay Edition has the same advantage it has over a DRM game: it costs $0. There's ALWAYS an excuse people come up with for why it's okay to pirate something.
The truth is that it's all bullshit excuses created by people unwilling to admit that they're cheap. It's about money. Nothing else.
It took a month before there was a properly working pirate version of Assassins Creed 2. So, some DRM schemes do work pretty well. Thanks to the cheapskate pirates, we can expect a lot more of that.
You don't think LAN play was removed from Starcraft 2 for technical reasons, do you? It's all because of cheapskate pirates ripping game developers off. Welcome to the future.
With a 90% piracy rate on DRM free games, clearly catering to your paying customers is working out pretty well. What was the successful piracy rate on these very locked down games again?
These excuses don't hold up in the market anymore. The data is conclusive: people are cheap and will pirate it if there's an easy way to do so.
And you think that group is bigger then the group who would buy a game if they couldn't get it for free from a warez site instead?
I call bullshit. Most pirates are just cheapskates, nothing more.
This post deserves bonus points for getting so many people to reply while totally missing the joke.
Their problem seems to be that it's downloading and indexing a multi-GB IMAP mailbox. If you're indexing local messages during an upgrade there's no download, so it's only going to take as long as your disk can get through it.
In the tested situation it's downloading, storing, then indexing. So it's tying everything up for a very long period of time until all that is done.
People keep saying that, but when have Linux games ever actually done well commercially?
So you can pay it based on usage, or you can pay it through taxes?
Paying it based on usage makes alternatives more cost-competitive, and encourages conservation. Paying it through taxes encourages people to bitch about taxes being too high while running giant deficits.
I have two cats. One of them doesn't respond to her name (she went through multiple owners before we got her and I think each one called her something else).
The other one we've had most of his life, and he'll come running down the stairs from the top floor if you say his name.
So, it seems to depend on the cat, and most likely how strong their association is between the name and something good (feeding).
Me too! I'd love to see this style of space combat come back. That'd be awesome.
According to Stardock's CEO, these numbers are wrong. Going by raw sales numbers, he says the digital number is actually closer to 25%.
Why the discrepency? Well, he has actual numbers for retail and Impulse (which he happens to own). He doesn't have numbers for Steam. Of course, neither does NPD. Their digital numbers are based on an online survey. These are not real sales numbers by any measure of the word, they're the sales equivalent of a biased online public opinion poll.
If I stood in the electronics aisle of Walmart and did a survey there, I'd find shockingly different numbers too. Unfortunately since we don't have accurate sales data for anybody, we're left with this kind of guess work.
Wow, yeah. That's a great example of customer service adding value to a product.
It also helps that the Economist tends to have quality and unique content. It's something you can find from 5000 other sources at the same time, as opposed to your average newspaper.
What a shame that such a lousy game is getting a sequel and Alpha Protocol isn't.
This is not an industry that rewards trying new things. It does reward poor franchise tie-ins apparently.