But it was more than just that. It was cross-platform, which won them a lot of hearts from the Linux and Mac people. It's indie developers, which a lot of us feel closer to and more readily give them our money. It was DRM-free, which is one more reason to actually buy it. And it was a "choose your price", which takes away one of the most typical last-minute-resistance issues "hm, I kinda like it, but it's too expensive".
All in all, it was a good deal, absolutely. And even though I already owned World of Good, I gave them something well above their reported averages. And you know what? I made a copy for my girlfriend because I figured that we could just the same have bought it twice for half the money each, so what's the problem? And with the "no DRM" approach, I could. And I'm pretty sure they don't mind. And that's how the software business ought to work.
We all say "vote with your wallet" all the time. Apparently, a lot of us did.
An executive at EA just blew his nose on $1,030,536. They are not interested.
Who cares? I'm damn sure both the customers and the developers in this deal are happy as can be. So everyone actually involved in the deal is happy - that's good business.
And I'm pretty sure the developers made a shitload more money than they expected.
Software theft exceeded $51 billion in commercial value in 2009, according to the BSA. IDC says lowering software piracy by just 10 percentage points during the next four years would create nearly 500,000 new jobs and pump $140 billion into 'ailing economies.'...
10% of $51 billion = $5.1 billion times 4 years = $20.4 billion
err... what kind of growth rate do these dimwits assume to arrive at $140 billion?
"Few if any industries could withstand the theft of $51 billion worth of their products."
That's because in a theft you lose the item in question, so $123 gazillion of theft means you produced, but can no longer sell, them.
On the other hand, your $456 fantastillion in piracy means that people who didn't pay have a copy - as do you, and sales continue. That's quite a bit of a difference.
And let's not even talk about the bullshit way that they come up with these numbers. I sell software, too. I just don't live in a dream world where I believe everyone in the world is a potential customer, so every unauthorized copy is identical to a lost sale.
While we're at the tiny brain: Unauthorized copying is not theft. It is unauthorized copying. It is illegal, it is a crime, but it isn't theft. Theft is when you take something away from someone. There's a difference, and it matters. For one thing, the astronomical figures of the "piracy statistics" would not be physically possible with theft.
Only if the assumption that unauthorized copying is the only reason for DRM is true.
There are reasons to believe that is not the case. Tying a game to hardware, or limited installs, for example, does very little to curb actual unauthorized copying - the warez guys will remove the check anyways. It does, however, eliminate the second hand and rental markets.
Wow, you are fucking moron. You don't want DRM, don't fucking steal. Got that? Or is that too fucking difficult for you tiny little brain?
So, what you're saying is, that someone who has never ever stolen or copied illegally in his life would not get DRM? So if my grandmother (who has never touched a computer) were to go to the next store and buy Spore, she would magically get a version without DRM?
Either that, or it's you who has a tiny... brain, of course.:-)
There is more than enough very loud complaining about the warez groups already, the content and media industries are practically drowning decision makers in statistics of real and imagined loss. I don't think adding a voice to that would make a difference.
However, the fallout from the (largely ineffective) countermeasures needs a few more voices.
And yes, sometimes it is the right thing to do to blame the victims, if they are overreacting. Blaming the US for an unfounded war on Iraq is acceptable, even if they were the victims in 9/11. Blaming someone to shoot the murderer of his wife and kids in court is acceptable - while you can sympathize with his reaction, it is still illegal. Blaming airport security to have become an abomination with no proven track record of increased effectiveness, and so on and so on.
Not every reaction is good, even if you are a victim.
That is only true for dead languages. Languages that are still in use can change their meaning over time.
You are trying to claim that this is a natural drift. It isn't, it is engineered by marketing and PR jobs. As it stands, real piracy has come back into focus recently, and a lot more people than you may think are quite aware of the difference.
Yes, languages change. That doesn't mean that every change some interest group wants to push has to be accepted.
No, your prediction is missing the point by roughly half an AU.
A lot of people with tons of technical knowledge are Mac owners and Apple fans. Lots of the people I know who are could easily write their own device drivers. But do they want to do that, or would they rather waste their time on more interesting things?
It's not about not being able to do low-level stuff, it's about not wanting to bother.
As in IT security: Don't carry what you don't need.
I assume your car and bike are both stationed at your home. So why would you want to carry their keys with you all the time? That's a bit like working as root - it's a small convenience at the price of a huge security risk, namely if you make a mistake, you lose everything.
Same for your roof. That's a key I keep at home at all times and only take out when I go up there. Why would I want to take that with me?
Unauthorized copying (remember: "Piracy" is that thing done on sea where people get killed) has been around forever, and will be around forever. Consider that a fact.
How you act with regards to facts of the outside world says a lot about your personality. Basically, you can accept them, you can cry and whine about how unfair it all is, or you can try to change things. Usually, you don't fall into one extreme but a mixture with one dominant trait.
The music, movie and computer games industry largely falls into the second, with a slight bit of the third. The problem with people like this is that the feeling of "the world is soooo unfair" is close to "I am entitled to be treated better". Which leads to irrational and counterproductive actions (the 3rd trait).
For example, copy protection has long since left acceptable territory and entered ridiculous. And in many parts, has already crossed ridiculous and entered offensive. If you hit Google with "SecuROM" and a few terms of your choice, you'll find it fucks up people's machines, causes crashes and sometimes makes the entire system unbootable.
As a legitimate customer, I've long tired of being treated like at the airport in the privacy of my own home. No, your stupid game is not important enough that I'd give up the confidentiality or integrity of my entire work environment. No, you can't have root access. You want to be sure I am a legitimate customer, fine. But I want to be sure that this is still my computer, which means not handing you the keys. I don't give the TV people access to my fusebox either, just because I watch their program. I don't give my car keys to the guy washing the windows. Know your place, then we can have a business relationship.
As it is, there's a good number of games that I would buy, but don't, because I'm not putting up with this shit.
And, quite frankly, there's a lot of times where I'm happy the crackers got it done, just because maybe, just maybe, the stupid fucks who put money into pointless, evil DRM schemes may learn that it's not worth it.
Use some customer-friendly, easy copy protection, that's ok with me. Unique key, ok. Some CD checks on the installer, fine.
Having to have the CD in the drive to play? Have you idiots heard of notebooks? SecuROM, Starforce, any-other-DRM-crap? See above. Limited number of activations? I'm sorry, if the doctors don't consider you insane, the doctors should hand back their licenses
Most importantly: Make good games. There is still a short list of companies out there where I know I'll buy their next game for sure. Because they've never let me down, and they don't fuck with their customers, they please them. And you other stupid gits in the industry better learn that fucking and pleasing are only the same thing in a different "business".
The supporting scientific evidence that they provided (the psychological experiment) seems to me to be bogus (and its results misinterpreted).
That's why scientific papers are peer-reviewed, and not slashdot-reviewed.
This experiment has been repeated, by many different experimentors in many different variations. The candle experiment is simply the most famous and easiest-to-explain one. But guess what? It has dozens of confirmations and - to the best of my knowledge - not one experiment that came to a different conclusion.
So, with all due respect, armchair psychology does not invalidate actual research done by actual scientists in actual labs.
This is, to paraphrase a several year old speech, one of the simultaneously most verified and most ignored insights of social science. It's been known literally for a few decades, and there are at least 80 studies all coming to the same result.
At the same time, the business world is busy completely ignoring what comes as close to fact as anything in social science ever will.
The "why" is easy, of course. Those who could change the system are those profiting most from it. The bonus of a regular employee is a few thousand bucks, maybe. The bonus of a CEO is quite regularily in the millions.
And all the evidence in the world points to these millions having a negative impact on his performance. So if you were in his position, and knew about this research, you'd change the system and eliminate the bonus payments. Right? Right? You'd go for the factors that are shown to actually improve performance, such as meaning and empowerment. Right? What are those few millions you earn compared to the real value generators?
product by Microsoft, it had generated a lot of discussion as what the iPad should have been
Mod summary +5 Funny.
You are looking to Microsoft for a "should have been" on a mobile device? Please. A tablet is all about the UI. If the UI sucks, the tablet sucks. You simply have no other access to the device, and input and output are so close together, if Apple can't get it right, nobody can. And Microsoft least of all. When's the last time they had a good interface design idea? Seriously, I mean it.
Windows Mobile is largely a failure because it's clunky. By the time the few people I know who have a Windows Mobile phone have got out their pens and clicked through the menues to start dialing, everyone else - iPhone, Android, regular phone, even Blackberry - has already dialed half the number.
All the/. geeks fall for the feature list, but it isn't about features, it's about useability. Everyone except the 1% tech dudes doesn't care for what they could potentially, theoretically, maybe with some hacking, use a device for. What matters is what the device can actually, easily be used for.
And in that department, it is sometimes better to restrict the functionality and make a limited subset easier to use.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an iPad owner and likely won't become one, as it is too limited for my taste, too. But I'm pretty sure nobody is going to come out with a better tablet for the next few years.
And then you throw in the App Store, call it "Apple" and you've made a point?
Comparing two things of different kinds can be acceptable at times, if it is obvious you are comparing what they do have in common. But four things, of which you named one incorrectly? Yes, call it pedantry, I still do believe that truth starts by calling things by their proper names.
You could, for example, have an App Store with all Open source programs. Absolutely nothing's stopping you. The concepts don't exclude each other.
- Open source: A concept - Proprietary software: A collective term for actual implementations of code - Apple: A (hardware, mostly) company - App Store: An online sales channel
You compare these with each other and get modded "insightful"? *sigh* - there were times on/. when "category mistake" wasn't a foreign term to the majority of readers (or mods).
And I'm pretty sure that at least 120 of them sucked.
The problem with Powerpoint is exactly that it makes it so easy - it's like giving a 747 with toy-plane controls to everyone on the block. Sure it makes it damn easy for everyone to fly. And no one who has any sanity left wants to be within 100 miles of there. Quite similar to Powerpoint, really.
Microsoft is good at stuff like that. Word makes it so easy to write documents from letters to books. And who notices that the typesetting, default fonts, layout and pretty much everything else sucks?
I seriously hope that you are not equating the Catholic Church to the likes of Al Capone and the rest.
So do I - Al Capone is but a faint shadow of a wannabe gangster compared to the evils of the Catholic Church. And, more importantly, one of the two is able to commit blatant crimes in bright daylight and stay untouched for century upon century, while the others gig was a couple years.
No, comparing the two wouldn't do it justice. The Mafia has a lot to learn from the Catholic Church. Frankly, is anyone surprised they both hail from the same country?
people with a purposeful intent to do criminal activities and avoid the law.
You mean, like people who with full knowledge of child rape going on do not only not inform the local authorities, but actively cover it up, threaten the victims and move the priest doing it to some other jurisdiction where they put him in charge of children again?
The Church, as a whole, is not trying to molest kids and get away with it. Trying to hide your mistakes can't be lumped into that same category.
The only reason your first sentence is true is, to put it pluntly, because "The Church" doesn't have a dick to put into some kid. If you haven't followed the news for the past five years or so: This is not a few isolated cases. This is a lot of cases, widespread, in pretty much every country the Catholic Church operates in, and with systematic treatment within the church including cover up and repeated removals of the culprits from the jurisdictions that could touch them.
Hiding your mistakes is one thing. Systematically ensuring they can go on is in an entirely different league.
2) One side effect is to inflame the divisions between nations and people are inflamed.
Of course, he conveniently ignores the ugly truth that the #1 issue, far ahead of anything else, about which people get inflamed, is religion.
Of course, you'd not expect the head of a major religion to come forward and say that, but this old tribal custom of thinking your god is bigger than the other guys god is practically designed to devide people. The only evolution it has had in the past few millenia is to slightly redefine "people" from "my tribe" to "people who believe in the same holy book".
We must be in a condition of having nothing to hide.
How about we start with bringing all the cases of child abuse to the attention of the proper authorities, instead of covering them up and being a lot more concerned with the shame and bad PR than the victims?
Slashdot Mirror
Point for you. :-)
Yes, EA doesn't do it because right now, their business model works better. For them. In the short term. We'll see how much longer.
I see.
Where exactly do these additional $3-$4 come from? Magic?
True, it was a big marketing stunt.
But it was more than just that. It was cross-platform, which won them a lot of hearts from the Linux and Mac people. It's indie developers, which a lot of us feel closer to and more readily give them our money. It was DRM-free, which is one more reason to actually buy it. And it was a "choose your price", which takes away one of the most typical last-minute-resistance issues "hm, I kinda like it, but it's too expensive".
All in all, it was a good deal, absolutely. And even though I already owned World of Good, I gave them something well above their reported averages. And you know what? I made a copy for my girlfriend because I figured that we could just the same have bought it twice for half the money each, so what's the problem? And with the "no DRM" approach, I could. And I'm pretty sure they don't mind. And that's how the software business ought to work.
We all say "vote with your wallet" all the time. Apparently, a lot of us did.
An executive at EA just blew his nose on $1,030,536. They are not interested.
Who cares? I'm damn sure both the customers and the developers in this deal are happy as can be. So everyone actually involved in the deal is happy - that's good business.
And I'm pretty sure the developers made a shitload more money than they expected.
Software theft exceeded $51 billion in commercial value in 2009, according to the BSA. IDC says lowering software piracy by just 10 percentage points during the next four years would create nearly 500,000 new jobs and pump $140 billion into 'ailing economies.' ...
10% of $51 billion = $5.1 billion
times 4 years = $20.4 billion
err... what kind of growth rate do these dimwits assume to arrive at $140 billion?
"Few if any industries could withstand the theft of $51 billion worth of their products."
That's because in a theft you lose the item in question, so $123 gazillion of theft means you produced, but can no longer sell, them.
On the other hand, your $456 fantastillion in piracy means that people who didn't pay have a copy - as do you, and sales continue. That's quite a bit of a difference.
And let's not even talk about the bullshit way that they come up with these numbers. I sell software, too. I just don't live in a dream world where I believe everyone in the world is a potential customer, so every unauthorized copy is identical to a lost sale.
Unauthorized copying (aka theft)
While we're at the tiny brain: Unauthorized copying is not theft. It is unauthorized copying. It is illegal, it is a crime, but it isn't theft. Theft is when you take something away from someone. There's a difference, and it matters. For one thing, the astronomical figures of the "piracy statistics" would not be physically possible with theft.
Only if the assumption that unauthorized copying is the only reason for DRM is true.
There are reasons to believe that is not the case. Tying a game to hardware, or limited installs, for example, does very little to curb actual unauthorized copying - the warez guys will remove the check anyways. It does, however, eliminate the second hand and rental markets.
Wow, you are fucking moron. You don't want DRM, don't fucking steal. Got that? Or is that too fucking difficult for you tiny little brain?
So, what you're saying is, that someone who has never ever stolen or copied illegally in his life would not get DRM? So if my grandmother (who has never touched a computer) were to go to the next store and buy Spore, she would magically get a version without DRM?
Either that, or it's you who has a tiny... brain, of course. :-)
There is more than enough very loud complaining about the warez groups already, the content and media industries are practically drowning decision makers in statistics of real and imagined loss. I don't think adding a voice to that would make a difference.
However, the fallout from the (largely ineffective) countermeasures needs a few more voices.
And yes, sometimes it is the right thing to do to blame the victims, if they are overreacting. Blaming the US for an unfounded war on Iraq is acceptable, even if they were the victims in 9/11. Blaming someone to shoot the murderer of his wife and kids in court is acceptable - while you can sympathize with his reaction, it is still illegal. Blaming airport security to have become an abomination with no proven track record of increased effectiveness, and so on and so on.
Not every reaction is good, even if you are a victim.
That is only true for dead languages. Languages that are still in use can change their meaning over time.
You are trying to claim that this is a natural drift. It isn't, it is engineered by marketing and PR jobs. As it stands, real piracy has come back into focus recently, and a lot more people than you may think are quite aware of the difference.
Yes, languages change. That doesn't mean that every change some interest group wants to push has to be accepted.
No, your prediction is missing the point by roughly half an AU.
A lot of people with tons of technical knowledge are Mac owners and Apple fans. Lots of the people I know who are could easily write their own device drivers. But do they want to do that, or would they rather waste their time on more interesting things?
It's not about not being able to do low-level stuff, it's about not wanting to bother.
As in IT security: Don't carry what you don't need.
I assume your car and bike are both stationed at your home. So why would you want to carry their keys with you all the time? That's a bit like working as root - it's a small convenience at the price of a huge security risk, namely if you make a mistake, you lose everything.
Same for your roof. That's a key I keep at home at all times and only take out when I go up there. Why would I want to take that with me?
Unauthorized copying (remember: "Piracy" is that thing done on sea where people get killed) has been around forever, and will be around forever. Consider that a fact.
How you act with regards to facts of the outside world says a lot about your personality. Basically, you can accept them, you can cry and whine about how unfair it all is, or you can try to change things. Usually, you don't fall into one extreme but a mixture with one dominant trait.
The music, movie and computer games industry largely falls into the second, with a slight bit of the third. The problem with people like this is that the feeling of "the world is soooo unfair" is close to "I am entitled to be treated better". Which leads to irrational and counterproductive actions (the 3rd trait).
For example, copy protection has long since left acceptable territory and entered ridiculous. And in many parts, has already crossed ridiculous and entered offensive. If you hit Google with "SecuROM" and a few terms of your choice, you'll find it fucks up people's machines, causes crashes and sometimes makes the entire system unbootable.
As a legitimate customer, I've long tired of being treated like at the airport in the privacy of my own home. No, your stupid game is not important enough that I'd give up the confidentiality or integrity of my entire work environment. No, you can't have root access. You want to be sure I am a legitimate customer, fine. But I want to be sure that this is still my computer, which means not handing you the keys. I don't give the TV people access to my fusebox either, just because I watch their program. I don't give my car keys to the guy washing the windows. Know your place, then we can have a business relationship.
As it is, there's a good number of games that I would buy, but don't, because I'm not putting up with this shit.
And, quite frankly, there's a lot of times where I'm happy the crackers got it done, just because maybe, just maybe, the stupid fucks who put money into pointless, evil DRM schemes may learn that it's not worth it.
Use some customer-friendly, easy copy protection, that's ok with me. Unique key, ok. Some CD checks on the installer, fine.
Having to have the CD in the drive to play? Have you idiots heard of notebooks?
SecuROM, Starforce, any-other-DRM-crap? See above.
Limited number of activations? I'm sorry, if the doctors don't consider you insane, the doctors should hand back their licenses
Most importantly: Make good games. There is still a short list of companies out there where I know I'll buy their next game for sure. Because they've never let me down, and they don't fuck with their customers, they please them. And you other stupid gits in the industry better learn that fucking and pleasing are only the same thing in a different "business".
The supporting scientific evidence that they provided (the psychological experiment) seems to me to be bogus (and its results misinterpreted).
That's why scientific papers are peer-reviewed, and not slashdot-reviewed.
This experiment has been repeated, by many different experimentors in many different variations. The candle experiment is simply the most famous and easiest-to-explain one. But guess what? It has dozens of confirmations and - to the best of my knowledge - not one experiment that came to a different conclusion.
So, with all due respect, armchair psychology does not invalidate actual research done by actual scientists in actual labs.
This is, to paraphrase a several year old speech, one of the simultaneously most verified and most ignored insights of social science. It's been known literally for a few decades, and there are at least 80 studies all coming to the same result.
At the same time, the business world is busy completely ignoring what comes as close to fact as anything in social science ever will.
The "why" is easy, of course. Those who could change the system are those profiting most from it. The bonus of a regular employee is a few thousand bucks, maybe. The bonus of a CEO is quite regularily in the millions.
And all the evidence in the world points to these millions having a negative impact on his performance. So if you were in his position, and knew about this research, you'd change the system and eliminate the bonus payments. Right? Right? You'd go for the factors that are shown to actually improve performance, such as meaning and empowerment. Right? What are those few millions you earn compared to the real value generators?
product by Microsoft, it had generated a lot of discussion as what the iPad should have been
Mod summary +5 Funny.
You are looking to Microsoft for a "should have been" on a mobile device? Please. A tablet is all about the UI. If the UI sucks, the tablet sucks. You simply have no other access to the device, and input and output are so close together, if Apple can't get it right, nobody can. And Microsoft least of all. When's the last time they had a good interface design idea? Seriously, I mean it.
Windows Mobile is largely a failure because it's clunky. By the time the few people I know who have a Windows Mobile phone have got out their pens and clicked through the menues to start dialing, everyone else - iPhone, Android, regular phone, even Blackberry - has already dialed half the number.
All the /. geeks fall for the feature list, but it isn't about features, it's about useability. Everyone except the 1% tech dudes doesn't care for what they could potentially, theoretically, maybe with some hacking, use a device for. What matters is what the device can actually, easily be used for.
And in that department, it is sometimes better to restrict the functionality and make a limited subset easier to use.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an iPad owner and likely won't become one, as it is too limited for my taste, too. But I'm pretty sure nobody is going to come out with a better tablet for the next few years.
And then you throw in the App Store, call it "Apple" and you've made a point?
Comparing two things of different kinds can be acceptable at times, if it is obvious you are comparing what they do have in common. But four things, of which you named one incorrectly? Yes, call it pedantry, I still do believe that truth starts by calling things by their proper names.
You could, for example, have an App Store with all Open source programs. Absolutely nothing's stopping you. The concepts don't exclude each other.
- Open source: A concept
- Proprietary software: A collective term for actual implementations of code
- Apple: A (hardware, mostly) company
- App Store: An online sales channel
You compare these with each other and get modded "insightful"? *sigh* - there were times on /. when "category mistake" wasn't a foreign term to the majority of readers (or mods).
And I'm pretty sure that at least 120 of them sucked.
The problem with Powerpoint is exactly that it makes it so easy - it's like giving a 747 with toy-plane controls to everyone on the block. Sure it makes it damn easy for everyone to fly. And no one who has any sanity left wants to be within 100 miles of there. Quite similar to Powerpoint, really.
Microsoft is good at stuff like that. Word makes it so easy to write documents from letters to books. And who notices that the typesetting, default fonts, layout and pretty much everything else sucks?
I seriously hope that you are not equating the Catholic Church to the likes of Al Capone and the rest.
So do I - Al Capone is but a faint shadow of a wannabe gangster compared to the evils of the Catholic Church. And, more importantly, one of the two is able to commit blatant crimes in bright daylight and stay untouched for century upon century, while the others gig was a couple years.
No, comparing the two wouldn't do it justice. The Mafia has a lot to learn from the Catholic Church. Frankly, is anyone surprised they both hail from the same country?
people with a purposeful intent to do criminal activities and avoid the law.
You mean, like people who with full knowledge of child rape going on do not only not inform the local authorities, but actively cover it up, threaten the victims and move the priest doing it to some other jurisdiction where they put him in charge of children again?
The Church, as a whole, is not trying to molest kids and get away with it. Trying to hide your mistakes can't be lumped into that same category.
The only reason your first sentence is true is, to put it pluntly, because "The Church" doesn't have a dick to put into some kid. If you haven't followed the news for the past five years or so: This is not a few isolated cases. This is a lot of cases, widespread, in pretty much every country the Catholic Church operates in, and with systematic treatment within the church including cover up and repeated removals of the culprits from the jurisdictions that could touch them.
Hiding your mistakes is one thing. Systematically ensuring they can go on is in an entirely different league.
I'm an atheist too, and I want to say for the record that the Catholic Church is not my enemy.
Only because burning the likes of of fell out of fashion some time ago, and not exactly because the church wanted it to.
Make no mistake, they do consider you as being their enemy. You don't have to actively fight them, but you'd be foolish to not be at least careful.
2) One side effect is to inflame the divisions between nations and people are inflamed.
Of course, he conveniently ignores the ugly truth that the #1 issue, far ahead of anything else, about which people get inflamed, is religion.
Of course, you'd not expect the head of a major religion to come forward and say that, but this old tribal custom of thinking your god is bigger than the other guys god is practically designed to devide people. The only evolution it has had in the past few millenia is to slightly redefine "people" from "my tribe" to "people who believe in the same holy book".
We must be in a condition of having nothing to hide.
How about we start with bringing all the cases of child abuse to the attention of the proper authorities, instead of covering them up and being a lot more concerned with the shame and bad PR than the victims?
What's this doing on /.? Is there anyone here who really thinks the pope has something to say?
We don't read 18th century bad literature when we design our computer systems. Why should we listen to religious cavemen when designing our society?