So tick them to work in offline mode, and they work forever (at least on that machine, and possibly if you just copy the Steam folder to another computer, I haven't tried).
And with a company like Valve, I'd really expect them to release a tool to free all your games if/when they go out of business. The fact that they got there first and have such a good system makes it seem likely that they'll be around for a good while yet though.
IMO if the "bigger titles in PSN" were priced more reasonably (publishers must make crazy profit on brand new games - often I wait for games to get down to 50-75% of the original price before buying, unless I know I'm going to be getting a very good game), and people had more HDD space, I don't think it would be an issue.
Actually, thinking about it, the used game market is probably contributing to some of what makes the current market so crap:
1) People probably buy potentially shitty games without even trying the demo, knowing they can just sell it on. Maybe they even know the game is shitty, but are just playing it to boost their gamerscore. I've heard that some people actually do that, farm gamerscore. This results in less demos being produced, and even shitty games still getting sales.
2) People buy games at prices that they don't actually think the game is worth, knowing they can sell them on. Maybe one person buys a game at £40 and then sells to someone else for £20. Even if both people have only paid £20 each, this perpetuates individual games costing £40, which must be an insane profit margin considering games often come down to £20 within a few months. If all game were £20 instead of £40 at launch, I bet there would actually be more initial sales of the game overall, and therefore more word of mouth which would create even more sales (assuming the game is actually worth it).
I often wait until games get cheaper before buying them, unless I know they're going to be very good games, which I can only really know by playing a demo or by word of mouth. I don't think the real issue here is being able to sell on games, I think it's games being too expensive to begin with. I never sell on games, as I pay what I'm happy to pay to play them, and if they're actually good games then I will want to play them again from time to time, or share them with friends (which you can still do with a decent made online system - I have some of my games on my flatmate's PS3, bro's PS3, and soon I'll register my account on my sis's new PS3, so she'll be able play through Monkey Island 5 and a whole bunch of other games).
There's a big difference between knowing what ethics are, and being an ethical person.
I've never taken a business management course in my life btw, I've just witnessed situations where people take liberties with what may be considered ethical for their own benefit, or those of a business. Often such things can bite you in the ass (and deservedly so), but people who get close to the line without stepping over it, obviously have a good advantage when it comes to things like taxes etc. By all accounts most companies do their utmost to avoid taxes by offshoring parts of the business for example. Even if such things are legal, not everyone would consider them ethical, as it's taking money away from the local economy, etc.
Yeah, my first PS3 died last year (after about 3 years of use), but you can register your account on up to 5 machines at a time. As long as the account is registered on that PS3, you can play the games whether you're online or not.
I think I'm actually at my limit now though, so if my current one or my friend/family's PS3 with my account on it dies, I'll probably have to phone up Sony to de-register the dead ones.
What difference is there between "owning" a game and having it on your Steam account? You'd really prefer to install 100 games one at a time from the disc every time you get a new PC or console, rather than just log into your account and having a game downloaded and installed with a couple of clicks?
Tying purchases to an account (completely independent of hardware, of course) is a great idea. It makes things even more convenient than the old way of doing things.
With Steam, you can choose for certain games to run in "offline mode". I haven't used Steam for a few years so I don't know if this has changed recently.
On the PS3 and Wii, you can play all your downloaded games while offline.
I recently bought an Xbox too, though I've only bought one Arcade game so far, and thankfully my net connection is fairly reliable. I wasn't aware they wouldn't work without a net connection, it's definitely a situation where cracking games starts to become morally acceptable. For example on PC I used to buy my games legally but then download the NoCD crack so that I didn't need to have the disc in the drive despite all the content already being on the HDD.
If that explanation still sounds like a justification then I'm sorry, perhaps a better example would be a noisy neighbour. The neighbour might know that they are being so noisy that you can hear them, and even though you may be annoyed at it, unless it's past a certain time of day, or above a certain noise level, you can't really do anything about it but ask them to keep it down. Maybe they'll be nice and comply, maybe not.
Again, don't try to take the analogy too far, I'm just trying to illustrate how people could still be acting "within the confines of the law", while still being outside what we might think of as acceptable behaviour. In business this type of behaviour can obviously be beneficial in some situations, where you are complying with the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
Yeah I think you're taking the analogy a little far. It was not meant to be any kind of justification for breaking the law, it was an example of grey areas before the law is being broken.
In the analogy, the point where a businessman is actually breaking the law IRL would be the point where a Police official considers that they have to pull someone over for speeding - which is usually not just from going over the speed limit by a couple of mph. Any point before they need to be pulled over is a grey area where the person driving is probably being much safer by paying more attention to the road than making sure they're sticking exactly at the limit. Anything where you're just getting a warning is a grey area. Even if you're doing 32mph on purpose, you can't really get a ticket for it (assuming for the purposes of this analogy that it is safe to currently be doing 32mph, dry roads, no pedestrians around, etc), and nobody is going to point at you and say you're evil.
It shall be a sad day when I see console owners having to input serial numbers to play games.
Just get rid of the discs and tie all games to an account, Steam style. That gets rid of a lot of the issues. Steam is even more convenient than using discs, while at the same time probably being even more "secure". We're already halfway there, as you can download games tied to your account (and actually can have your account on up to 5 PS3s, so I put my account on my little brother's PS3 so he can share my games) but obviously not everyone has internet, and HDD costs/sizes are still not quite there for being able to store every single game+updates on your console yet, but I hope with the next generation that they'll have a lot more games available for download rather than on disc.
By the sounds of it, they settled for cheaper than the amount that they'd set aside in case of lawsuits, so somehow I still think they came out on top. For one thing they were still making interest on the money that they'd set aside. The interest on 50M over a few years is not to be sniffed at.
Everybody is supposed to work within the confines of the law, but we all tend to push it if we think we can get away with it. Everyone goes over the speed limit a little bit sometimes (probably most of the time). That's generally ignored by the Police and not seen as too bad by other people. Some people go over it by a lot and risk getting caught, but they still obviously consider the risk worth it.
With grey areas like this I don't have too much of a problem. If you can copy a game and make it a better game, rather than just make it a cheap cash-in on the original, then that is respectable (see Saints Row - it's a blatant rip-off of GTA, but I've discovered that it's very good - better than GTA even - and therefore I respect the developers for it). That is IMO healthy competition and good for the consumer.
What I consider going too far are the anti-competitive practices that Microsoft and Intel have been convicted of, paying people off not to sell competitor's products, etc. That is speeding 100mph above the limit, next to a school, at lunchtime. It's despicable, and I'm not buying any of their products where I can avoid it (obviously I can't avoid it completely as I have to buy computers for work, and sometimes there are no reasonable alternatives).
I didn't say to make the most of the short term or to try to screw people over necessarily. IMO that is not good business sense unless you're one of those douchy CEOs looking to make a quick buck and then jump ship. I'm just saying that if it's legal, then I don't blame a company for doing such things.
For example with the first Saints Row game it was obviously a rip off of GTA and I found that kind of despicable. For some reason I decided to try the second game though, when it got really cheap, and I found it was actually better than GTA III and therefore worlds more fun than GTA IV. It took the same concept and improved upon it, even if basically the whole style and interface seemed a direct rip-off of GTA III.
If a manufacturer is actually doing something that hurts its customers, like the infamous formula from Fight Club about the cost of a recall to fix a fatal design flaw vs the cost of lawsuits from customers dying, then that is pretty despicable, and certainly doesn't inspire me to buy a vehicle from that manufacturer even if my own vehicle is 100% safe.
If on the other hand it's copying a game, and the copying is fairly obvious, but not actually illegal, then I don't have so much of a problem. In this specific case, I think what is going on probably is illegal on some grounds though, especially character design. At least TwistedPixel are getting some free publicity out of it even if they don't have much chance of getting anything worthwhile from suing Capcom.
Well, he didn't explicitly say iOS, he just said the OS. Technically speaking you are modifying the OS of the phone if you replace it with something else. Jus sayin.
But I also assumed the guy was talking about not being able to modify iOS directly. Everybody is correct apart from the hoity toity "you are absolutely incorrect" AC.
It's nice to see someone here who actually thinks about things rather than just spouting idealistic nonsense!
I found out how things work here the hard way, being an early adopter of cheap Chinese tablets:) It's not Google's fault if a chip manufacturer doesn't provide driver updates for Eclaire or FroYo for example. Even the tablet manufacturer can't do anything about it other than move to newer chips for their next device, especially if they're a very small business.
Yeah, I was fairly sure that one of the Xboxes had a PPC processor, but couldn't remember which one. When I went to the Wikipedia article for the 360 I thought it said "Xeon" rather than Xenon, my bad.
Data East also released http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_Champ>Karate Champ, the first side on beat'em up, 4 years before Street Fighter came out.. so while the Fighter's History poster and style does look very much like Street Fighter, you could still make the case that Capcom were the first to actually copy anything in this instance.
Or substitute it for the RIAA, who last week were discovered to have been illegally selling songs over and above the number that they were legally licensed to sell, and not giving any of the profit to the artists.
It's not an ethics program, it's a business program. To do as well as you can in any system, you need to make the most of every resource you have and stretch the rules as far as possible.
I wouldn't do these things myself, but I can see the "business sense" in your little formula. Whoever can bend the rules the most has a good chance of being the most successful, as long as they don't go too far.
Agreed, just manually upgraded from 2.1 to 2.2 last week. The article has it wrong about 2.2 not being officially available yet, though there have been issues with OTA updates.
Slashdot Mirror
Might as well have used Windows Sound Recorder.. bleh. I hate how stupid people are.
except possibly OS 10.x by Apple who fix bugs at a rapid rate.
Really? I read they've had a known bug in the IPv6 implementation for years now. Maybe they're faster with security updates?
So tick them to work in offline mode, and they work forever (at least on that machine, and possibly if you just copy the Steam folder to another computer, I haven't tried).
And with a company like Valve, I'd really expect them to release a tool to free all your games if/when they go out of business. The fact that they got there first and have such a good system makes it seem likely that they'll be around for a good while yet though.
Heh, I see I repeated myself there. That's what I get for going back and rewriting sections of my posts.
IMO if the "bigger titles in PSN" were priced more reasonably (publishers must make crazy profit on brand new games - often I wait for games to get down to 50-75% of the original price before buying, unless I know I'm going to be getting a very good game), and people had more HDD space, I don't think it would be an issue.
Actually, thinking about it, the used game market is probably contributing to some of what makes the current market so crap:
1) People probably buy potentially shitty games without even trying the demo, knowing they can just sell it on. Maybe they even know the game is shitty, but are just playing it to boost their gamerscore. I've heard that some people actually do that, farm gamerscore. This results in less demos being produced, and even shitty games still getting sales.
2) People buy games at prices that they don't actually think the game is worth, knowing they can sell them on. Maybe one person buys a game at £40 and then sells to someone else for £20. Even if both people have only paid £20 each, this perpetuates individual games costing £40, which must be an insane profit margin considering games often come down to £20 within a few months. If all game were £20 instead of £40 at launch, I bet there would actually be more initial sales of the game overall, and therefore more word of mouth which would create even more sales (assuming the game is actually worth it).
I often wait until games get cheaper before buying them, unless I know they're going to be very good games, which I can only really know by playing a demo or by word of mouth. I don't think the real issue here is being able to sell on games, I think it's games being too expensive to begin with. I never sell on games, as I pay what I'm happy to pay to play them, and if they're actually good games then I will want to play them again from time to time, or share them with friends (which you can still do with a decent made online system - I have some of my games on my flatmate's PS3, bro's PS3, and soon I'll register my account on my sis's new PS3, so she'll be able play through Monkey Island 5 and a whole bunch of other games).
There's a big difference between knowing what ethics are, and being an ethical person.
I've never taken a business management course in my life btw, I've just witnessed situations where people take liberties with what may be considered ethical for their own benefit, or those of a business. Often such things can bite you in the ass (and deservedly so), but people who get close to the line without stepping over it, obviously have a good advantage when it comes to things like taxes etc. By all accounts most companies do their utmost to avoid taxes by offshoring parts of the business for example. Even if such things are legal, not everyone would consider them ethical, as it's taking money away from the local economy, etc.
Yeah, my first PS3 died last year (after about 3 years of use), but you can register your account on up to 5 machines at a time. As long as the account is registered on that PS3, you can play the games whether you're online or not.
I think I'm actually at my limit now though, so if my current one or my friend/family's PS3 with my account on it dies, I'll probably have to phone up Sony to de-register the dead ones.
Well, we don't always get what we like.
What difference is there between "owning" a game and having it on your Steam account? You'd really prefer to install 100 games one at a time from the disc every time you get a new PC or console, rather than just log into your account and having a game downloaded and installed with a couple of clicks?
Tying purchases to an account (completely independent of hardware, of course) is a great idea. It makes things even more convenient than the old way of doing things.
That's an example of a bad way of doing things.
With Steam, you can choose for certain games to run in "offline mode". I haven't used Steam for a few years so I don't know if this has changed recently.
On the PS3 and Wii, you can play all your downloaded games while offline.
I recently bought an Xbox too, though I've only bought one Arcade game so far, and thankfully my net connection is fairly reliable. I wasn't aware they wouldn't work without a net connection, it's definitely a situation where cracking games starts to become morally acceptable. For example on PC I used to buy my games legally but then download the NoCD crack so that I didn't need to have the disc in the drive despite all the content already being on the HDD.
If that explanation still sounds like a justification then I'm sorry, perhaps a better example would be a noisy neighbour. The neighbour might know that they are being so noisy that you can hear them, and even though you may be annoyed at it, unless it's past a certain time of day, or above a certain noise level, you can't really do anything about it but ask them to keep it down. Maybe they'll be nice and comply, maybe not.
Again, don't try to take the analogy too far, I'm just trying to illustrate how people could still be acting "within the confines of the law", while still being outside what we might think of as acceptable behaviour. In business this type of behaviour can obviously be beneficial in some situations, where you are complying with the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
Yeah I think you're taking the analogy a little far. It was not meant to be any kind of justification for breaking the law, it was an example of grey areas before the law is being broken.
In the analogy, the point where a businessman is actually breaking the law IRL would be the point where a Police official considers that they have to pull someone over for speeding - which is usually not just from going over the speed limit by a couple of mph. Any point before they need to be pulled over is a grey area where the person driving is probably being much safer by paying more attention to the road than making sure they're sticking exactly at the limit. Anything where you're just getting a warning is a grey area. Even if you're doing 32mph on purpose, you can't really get a ticket for it (assuming for the purposes of this analogy that it is safe to currently be doing 32mph, dry roads, no pedestrians around, etc), and nobody is going to point at you and say you're evil.
It shall be a sad day when I see console owners having to input serial numbers to play games.
Just get rid of the discs and tie all games to an account, Steam style. That gets rid of a lot of the issues. Steam is even more convenient than using discs, while at the same time probably being even more "secure". We're already halfway there, as you can download games tied to your account (and actually can have your account on up to 5 PS3s, so I put my account on my little brother's PS3 so he can share my games) but obviously not everyone has internet, and HDD costs/sizes are still not quite there for being able to store every single game+updates on your console yet, but I hope with the next generation that they'll have a lot more games available for download rather than on disc.
By the sounds of it, they settled for cheaper than the amount that they'd set aside in case of lawsuits, so somehow I still think they came out on top. For one thing they were still making interest on the money that they'd set aside. The interest on 50M over a few years is not to be sniffed at.
Everybody is supposed to work within the confines of the law, but we all tend to push it if we think we can get away with it. Everyone goes over the speed limit a little bit sometimes (probably most of the time). That's generally ignored by the Police and not seen as too bad by other people. Some people go over it by a lot and risk getting caught, but they still obviously consider the risk worth it.
With grey areas like this I don't have too much of a problem. If you can copy a game and make it a better game, rather than just make it a cheap cash-in on the original, then that is respectable (see Saints Row - it's a blatant rip-off of GTA, but I've discovered that it's very good - better than GTA even - and therefore I respect the developers for it). That is IMO healthy competition and good for the consumer.
What I consider going too far are the anti-competitive practices that Microsoft and Intel have been convicted of, paying people off not to sell competitor's products, etc. That is speeding 100mph above the limit, next to a school, at lunchtime. It's despicable, and I'm not buying any of their products where I can avoid it (obviously I can't avoid it completely as I have to buy computers for work, and sometimes there are no reasonable alternatives).
I didn't say to make the most of the short term or to try to screw people over necessarily. IMO that is not good business sense unless you're one of those douchy CEOs looking to make a quick buck and then jump ship. I'm just saying that if it's legal, then I don't blame a company for doing such things.
For example with the first Saints Row game it was obviously a rip off of GTA and I found that kind of despicable. For some reason I decided to try the second game though, when it got really cheap, and I found it was actually better than GTA III and therefore worlds more fun than GTA IV. It took the same concept and improved upon it, even if basically the whole style and interface seemed a direct rip-off of GTA III.
If a manufacturer is actually doing something that hurts its customers, like the infamous formula from Fight Club about the cost of a recall to fix a fatal design flaw vs the cost of lawsuits from customers dying, then that is pretty despicable, and certainly doesn't inspire me to buy a vehicle from that manufacturer even if my own vehicle is 100% safe.
If on the other hand it's copying a game, and the copying is fairly obvious, but not actually illegal, then I don't have so much of a problem. In this specific case, I think what is going on probably is illegal on some grounds though, especially character design. At least TwistedPixel are getting some free publicity out of it even if they don't have much chance of getting anything worthwhile from suing Capcom.
Well, he didn't explicitly say iOS, he just said the OS. Technically speaking you are modifying the OS of the phone if you replace it with something else. Jus sayin.
But I also assumed the guy was talking about not being able to modify iOS directly. Everybody is correct apart from the hoity toity "you are absolutely incorrect" AC.
It's nice to see someone here who actually thinks about things rather than just spouting idealistic nonsense!
I found out how things work here the hard way, being an early adopter of cheap Chinese tablets :) It's not Google's fault if a chip manufacturer doesn't provide driver updates for Eclaire or FroYo for example. Even the tablet manufacturer can't do anything about it other than move to newer chips for their next device, especially if they're a very small business.
Plenty of source material for political satire?
Yeah, I was fairly sure that one of the Xboxes had a PPC processor, but couldn't remember which one. When I went to the Wikipedia article for the 360 I thought it said "Xeon" rather than Xenon, my bad.
Data East also released http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_Champ>Karate Champ, the first side on beat'em up, 4 years before Street Fighter came out.. so while the Fighter's History poster and style does look very much like Street Fighter, you could still make the case that Capcom were the first to actually copy anything in this instance.
Or substitute it for the RIAA, who last week were discovered to have been illegally selling songs over and above the number that they were legally licensed to sell, and not giving any of the profit to the artists.
It's not an ethics program, it's a business program. To do as well as you can in any system, you need to make the most of every resource you have and stretch the rules as far as possible.
I wouldn't do these things myself, but I can see the "business sense" in your little formula. Whoever can bend the rules the most has a good chance of being the most successful, as long as they don't go too far.
Hey, at least this way TwistedPixel are getting some free advertising. I'm not that interested in the game yet, but at least I'm now aware of it.
I accuse you of sarcasm!
Agreed, just manually upgraded from 2.1 to 2.2 last week. The article has it wrong about 2.2 not being officially available yet, though there have been issues with OTA updates.