The trick is, you can't judge the success of this strategy on the sales of Settlers 7. Sure, there might be an uptick in sales for this game, because they can't pirate it, but what happens when users frustrated by this don't buy Settlers 8? Will people blame that on DRM?
Yeah, I totally agree. Big Game Industry is making experiments these days with all sorts of DRM and DLC schemes. Even some titles shipped without any kind of DRM or even a basic form of CD-Key to see if it would change a thing.
My guess is that the effect of such schemes are minimal. I think good PC-only title can still make good money, but for all console ports the PC version is pretty much dead.
Currently Big Game Industry still allocates some resources in the last mile-stone to make a shippable PC version. Shippable meaning buggy, hungry on resources, needing the latest video card and often still with console artifacts in them (like you are asked to press "O" and "X" buttons instead of key names). They also "consolize" most game genres and now you cannot do without dumbed-down interfaces, targetting aids, etc.
At some point, my guess is that they will stop to bother.
Who I really blame for this are the gamers themselves. They don't realize their consoles are just a DRM-packed, slow PC, and proudly decide to chose for a DRM, costly solution to gaming, instead of refusing to buy consoles and stick to PC.
As far as I can tell, the article you are pointing to refers to Silent Hunter 5, and both Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers 7 remain uncracked.
Also note that the solidity of DRM techniques like these depend at how much time the developers spend to "secure" their product. My guess is that for Silent Hunter 5, a very niche product, they only did the minimum. But for their big titles they probably have hordes of programmers messing the game pretty much beyond recognition without the connection to the server. Oh, that never makes it impossible to crack, but it's no longer a simple matter of by-passing some CD key checks by inserting NOPs, you really have to build a set of tools around a particular title and it can take weeks to do so...
And that's really their goal. Most of the sales of a game are done during the first few days / weeks. If it takes a month to crack the damn thing, they have reached their goal.
If they sell 10'000 more titles because frustrated kids can't find their free crack and must beg their parents to go to the store, they have reached their goal. I'm eager to see their financial numbers about this - I'm still skeptical it will change anything, but we'll see.
Now to answer your question: you are supposed to pay because 1) it is illegal to do otherwise 2) you support the developers of the games you love.
Wiseass like you wonder why all PC games are crap and developers focus on console gaming since the Internet got popularized...
(PS: that is not to say I'm all for these draconian DRM practices. I don't really care about the "always connected" feature as long as the requirements are clearly visible when you buy the game, but I don't like the fact that it prevents resale).
It is when the reason for the suppression is a law. That is, they (ostensibly) don't really "want" to do it otherwise. If you can't grok that even a little bit, then shut up and let the citizens talk.
That's pure business decision:
1) I scratch your back you scratch mine - big business probably pay them or give them incentive to find automated ways to find copyrighted material.
2) It's probably less costly to apply a guilty until proven innocent policy than the other way around. That means that there are very few false positive using such system. The article's author has been unfortunate in this matter, but notice he can contact Google to have his stuff back online.
There are about a dozen DRM-related discussions on Slashdot every month. I usually stand behind them, but in this case that's complete FUD.
No. It "belongs" to the being it was taken from. The being it was taken from has first "copyright"/"patent"/"trademark" to it (add whatever terms the lawyers feel necessary, here)
It does not matter who sequenced it first. It does not matter whether it has unique properties. It does not matter who it was taken from, whether they consented to it, or not.
No corporation, government, nor any other entity, can own anything about me that I do not give explicitly give them rights to.
Now if you could just stop flushing parts of yourself down the toilet everyday and dropping hairs everywhere that would help your point...
You see yourself as your own owner? I'm wondering what Heidegger would have thought of that...
I half agree with you. Well, you can put your computer in hibernation/sleep mode. Works for me and a lot of folks. It does exactly what you describe.
I even think that nowadays that should be the default option for "shutdown".
But you still need to shutdown or reboot from time to time. And there's no easy halfway solution there. If you had to reboot for a problem, it means the original image may already be wrong / corrupted and you need to re-do all the testing and scripts. If you had to reboot for a hardware change, or kernel change etc. Well, same thing.
But yeah, I'm all for sleeping instead of shutdown-ing being the default!
(Note: on Windows, it should sleep 3/4 of the time and reboot 1/4 of the time, just for safe measures)
Not sure what all you guys have against GTA IV on PC. Aside the fact that it takes like 15 minutes to start the game because you have to create accounts in Game for Windows, update Game for Windows etc. it runs quite well and I never had any bug or isssue.
Of course, you needed a decent gaming machine for the time.
It's like saying Doom 3 is a pile of sh** because about nobody could run it correctly at the time of release.
Note that I'm not arguing that they couldn't have made a better port, it's just that I don't understand why this is cited as one of the worst example of PC porting in gaming history.
Just to set things straight, I'm not the original poster and simply commented on the situation.
If you want my personal opinion, I agree the original post is very short-sighted if not trollish and would probably have modded him so as well, I don't want to argue with that. But the replies are also sohrt-shighted and trollish - saying that "almost no person jailbreaking their phone use unauthorized and/or pirated apps" is as absurd as the OP - that was my point.
The vast majority of jail-breakers don't pirate apps. Well that or I hang out with the wrong people -- jailbreaking is extremely common, but I haven't seen an iPhone with a pirated app yet.
You probably don't hang out with any high school or college kid...
Anyway, I like how someone that starts a debate is now modded as "Troll" and an army of knights in shiny armors having the same kind of single-sided argument get modded Informative and Insightful.
Linking to an article mentioning Linus and an older advertisement, with a tiny bit of new information (a 200$ cut because of an about-to-be ruling by the FCC), that overall shows Google in a positive light. With clumsy maths at the end.
How hard is it to just keep up on security patches for old browsers?
It's not a question of being "hard" or not - maintaining another platform/configuration simply takes time and resources. As I understand, on top of that there was a big deprecation of API calls moving from 10.4, so they also need specialized people that know their way around and systems that have 10.4 installed ready for testing.
When a user reports a problem on 10.4, someone has to spend a day trying to reproduce it and find its way through old code...
Build breaks because of old forgotten code made for 10.4...
At this point it's purely a business decision - keeping support for 10.4 adds the need for X extra developers and delays releases for Y days. Is it worth the cost?
Slashdot Mirror
The trick is, you can't judge the success of this strategy on the sales of Settlers 7. Sure, there might be an uptick in sales for this game, because they can't pirate it, but what happens when users frustrated by this don't buy Settlers 8? Will people blame that on DRM?
Yeah, I totally agree. Big Game Industry is making experiments these days with all sorts of DRM and DLC schemes. Even some titles shipped without any kind of DRM or even a basic form of CD-Key to see if it would change a thing.
My guess is that the effect of such schemes are minimal. I think good PC-only title can still make good money, but for all console ports the PC version is pretty much dead.
Currently Big Game Industry still allocates some resources in the last mile-stone to make a shippable PC version. Shippable meaning buggy, hungry on resources, needing the latest video card and often still with console artifacts in them (like you are asked to press "O" and "X" buttons instead of key names). They also "consolize" most game genres and now you cannot do without dumbed-down interfaces, targetting aids, etc.
At some point, my guess is that they will stop to bother.
Who I really blame for this are the gamers themselves. They don't realize their consoles are just a DRM-packed, slow PC, and proudly decide to chose for a DRM, costly solution to gaming, instead of refusing to buy consoles and stick to PC.
As far as I can tell, the article you are pointing to refers to Silent Hunter 5, and both Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers 7 remain uncracked.
Also note that the solidity of DRM techniques like these depend at how much time the developers spend to "secure" their product. My guess is that for Silent Hunter 5, a very niche product, they only did the minimum. But for their big titles they probably have hordes of programmers messing the game pretty much beyond recognition without the connection to the server. Oh, that never makes it impossible to crack, but it's no longer a simple matter of by-passing some CD key checks by inserting NOPs, you really have to build a set of tools around a particular title and it can take weeks to do so ...
And that's really their goal. Most of the sales of a game are done during the first few days / weeks. If it takes a month to crack the damn thing, they have reached their goal.
If they sell 10'000 more titles because frustrated kids can't find their free crack and must beg their parents to go to the store, they have reached their goal. I'm eager to see their financial numbers about this - I'm still skeptical it will change anything, but we'll see.
Now to answer your question: you are supposed to pay because 1) it is illegal to do otherwise 2) you support the developers of the games you love.
Wiseass like you wonder why all PC games are crap and developers focus on console gaming since the Internet got popularized ...
(PS: that is not to say I'm all for these draconian DRM practices. I don't really care about the "always connected" feature as long as the requirements are clearly visible when you buy the game, but I don't like the fact that it prevents resale).
" If you can't fix it - give it more features! "
Did God say that after giving women boobs?
"advanced file management, better remote desktop experience, easier notes synchronization and a generally smoother user experience"
I requested those *specifically*!
from Intendix.
Now Twitter char limit
Seems reasonable.
It is when the reason for the suppression is a law. That is, they (ostensibly) don't really "want" to do it otherwise. If you can't grok that even a little bit, then shut up and let the citizens talk.
That's pure business decision:
1) I scratch your back you scratch mine - big business probably pay them or give them incentive to find automated ways to find copyrighted material.
2) It's probably less costly to apply a guilty until proven innocent policy than the other way around. That means that there are very few false positive using such system. The article's author has been unfortunate in this matter, but notice he can contact Google to have his stuff back online.
There are about a dozen DRM-related discussions on Slashdot every month. I usually stand behind them, but in this case that's complete FUD.
I'll have to stop missing the ESC and ~ key!
Most annoying thing: press F1 in a software like Visual Studio and have to wait 5 minutes for it to refresh online help.
... free broadcast (hosting, distribution)
... having people being forced to listen to your rant
... having people not disagreeing with you, or actively trying to mute you
Don't say that Google supressing videos like they want is a matter of free speech.
People of Earth, at 18:00 GMT March 10 we all jump at the same time and regain our microsecond!
No. It "belongs" to the being it was taken from. The being it was taken from has first "copyright"/"patent"/"trademark" to it (add whatever terms the lawyers feel necessary, here)
It does not matter who sequenced it first. It does not matter whether it has unique properties. It does not matter who it was taken from, whether they consented to it, or not.
No corporation, government, nor any other entity, can own anything about me that I do not give explicitly give them rights to.
Now if you could just stop flushing parts of yourself down the toilet everyday and dropping hairs everywhere that would help your point ...
You see yourself as your own owner? I'm wondering what Heidegger would have thought of that ...
Don't get all upset. It's a vulgarization article with a lot of sensationalism indeed, but that doesn't mean all studies it quotes are unsound.
I half agree with you. Well, you can put your computer in hibernation/sleep mode. Works for me and a lot of folks. It does exactly what you describe.
I even think that nowadays that should be the default option for "shutdown".
But you still need to shutdown or reboot from time to time. And there's no easy halfway solution there. If you had to reboot for a problem, it means the original image may already be wrong / corrupted and you need to re-do all the testing and scripts. If you had to reboot for a hardware change, or kernel change etc. Well, same thing.
But yeah, I'm all for sleeping instead of shutdown-ing being the default!
(Note: on Windows, it should sleep 3/4 of the time and reboot 1/4 of the time, just for safe measures)
"My toaster runs linux and it can boot instantly!" Big freaking deal.
I think that according to the Slashdot crowd, a toaster that runs Linux IS a big freaking deal!
Not sure what all you guys have against GTA IV on PC. Aside the fact that it takes like 15 minutes to start the game because you have to create accounts in Game for Windows, update Game for Windows etc. it runs quite well and I never had any bug or isssue.
Of course, you needed a decent gaming machine for the time.
It's like saying Doom 3 is a pile of sh** because about nobody could run it correctly at the time of release.
Note that I'm not arguing that they couldn't have made a better port, it's just that I don't understand why this is cited as one of the worst example of PC porting in gaming history.
That's a mighty small value of "permanent".
You're unfailing, poignant logic would make you the ideal candidate to work at Google.
Except you didn't "start a debate"
Just to set things straight, I'm not the original poster and simply commented on the situation.
If you want my personal opinion, I agree the original post is very short-sighted if not trollish and would probably have modded him so as well, I don't want to argue with that. But the replies are also sohrt-shighted and trollish - saying that "almost no person jailbreaking their phone use unauthorized and/or pirated apps" is as absurd as the OP - that was my point.
The vast majority of jail-breakers don't pirate apps. Well that or I hang out with the wrong people -- jailbreaking is extremely common, but I haven't seen an iPhone with a pirated app yet.
You probably don't hang out with any high school or college kid ...
Anyway, I like how someone that starts a debate is now modded as "Troll" and an army of knights in shiny armors having the same kind of single-sided argument get modded Informative and Insightful.
IS_INTERESTING(823648) surely returns true since today!
Google Buzz's Skyrocketing Usage
When the usage passed from 0 to 1, one might argue it got infinitely more popular!
A story with double-D, I could digg it :)
You haven't seen Avatar, have you?
Your love is fading ...
I just made a giant masterpiece printed all over the greatest world newspaper nerds!
My brother is wearing the other one ...
Such a bitch. Everyone knows the other Google is dirty.
to actually make the video, or can you use Win/Mac?
Just create a makefile listing all the video segments you want to glue together, that's very easy to do on Linux under 500 lines of code.
Linking to an article mentioning Linus and an older advertisement, with a tiny bit of new information (a 200$ cut because of an about-to-be ruling by the FCC), that overall shows Google in a positive light. With clumsy maths at the end.
Slashdot at its best!
How hard is it to just keep up on security patches for old browsers?
It's not a question of being "hard" or not - maintaining another platform/configuration simply takes time and resources. As I understand, on top of that there was a big deprecation of API calls moving from 10.4, so they also need specialized people that know their way around and systems that have 10.4 installed ready for testing.
When a user reports a problem on 10.4, someone has to spend a day trying to reproduce it and find its way through old code ...
Build breaks because of old forgotten code made for 10.4 ...
At this point it's purely a business decision - keeping support for 10.4 adds the need for X extra developers and delays releases for Y days. Is it worth the cost?