That's done by addressing your client's needs and wants while providing solid service. A salesman's only true asset are the relationships he has forged.
If you think sales is all about exploiting people, you won't last long.
You can't. And that's the point. If you can't prove or disprove something; if you cant test something, then it's not science. It's irrelevant to science. It's not science's job to test something that's logically untestable.
Who cares whether or not there's an unprovable Being making sure that gravity on earth accelerates objects at 9.8m^2? What we know is that so far gravity on earth has been consistent. That we can test; that we can use. We learn the rules of the game and exploit it to make our lives easier.
Astrology by itself isn't harmful. It's a tool that controls people; like religion. And like religion, it's not a transparent system. It will lead to real harmful effects.
Humans are humans after all. If a transparent system of control can be corrupted, what more of a system without transparency?
Here's a quote from Jonathan Hickman's Pax Romana on religion as a method of control:
"Religion hides evil behind a veil of righteousness. It attacks legitimate questions by simply calling them immoral. [...] It's worse than that. Religion feeds off of than within us which cries out to understand our place in the universe, but crushes spirituality under false rules and demands acceptable behavior."
I know people will hate me for saying this, but in a way, it's better if everyone sees practically the same movie. If we're all seeing slightly different views, then we won't all have quite the same experience. I think there's something to be said for having a particular view of the scene intended by the director.
It just adds another dimension that directors can explore. What they'll release will still be what they intended, just like any other artist on any other medium.
Imagine what this new dimension could add to a "film". Depending on one's POV, one can get a different insight and experience. Talk about an opportunity for almost unlimited replayability.
It doesn't change the past leaks, no. But it does question the leadership of Wikileaks and its future. If he's convicted, there'll be a need for a new figurehead; if he's acquitted on the other hand, well... let's just say it might not be wise to have a man suspected of rape and harassment to be handling leaks.
One more advantage that PCs have over consoles is that a high end PC hardware can be vastly more superior to the consoles. Even if the console players use a mouse and a keyboard to play their games, I believe that generally PC players would still be better.
From my own experiences playing FPS games, the difference between a PC that could run a game at 300++ frames per second over one that runs it at 100 frames per second is... night and day. I can't quite explain why but it's there.
Anyways, PC gamers also have access to settings that console gamers don't have. This allows PC gamers to see more by running the game at a higher resolution, increasing their FOV, removing the HUD and/or gun models, etc. It's also far more common for PC players to use a headphone that practically pinpoints to them where his/her targets are.
These small customizations and advantages quickly add up; which in competitive settings, makes a world of difference.
As one who lives in Southeast Asia, I'd like to share my own 2 cents here.
The general indie film's target market here at least belong to the upper middle-income class. They comprise of slightly less than 4% of the total population in the Philippines. (See, the income inequality here is so high that those in the lower middle-income bracket worry about going hungry still.) And considering that indie films aren't marketed extensively, your left with a really very very small market.
It's tough but hey, that's the indie game. Now, you'd also have to understand that the people who buy pirated stuffs here usually don't belong to the indie market. Would the folks who pirated your film ever watch it in the theaters? Hell no. It's not a blockbuster film that everybody else would be talking about for the next three weeks. They'd rather save that money for food.
The good news here is that the people that are able and willing to spend money to see indie films, will, given the opportunity to do so. The bad news is since distributors snubs the small but dedicated market they have here, they're forced to watch the film through other means - be it legal or not. Hell, I know a lot of people here who pays extra for shipping just to watch indie flicks.
So... You don't like Ubisoft's DRM but since you really really like AC2, you wait for a crack then still buy the game?
Look it's your money and everything so you're free to use it however you want, but to me buying their game whilst hating their DRM is very short sighted and counter-intuitive. If the current DRM-Crack arms war continues to escalate, I fear we'll just end up with a subscription model or something so draconian that pirates might just not be able to crack. You might be able to play Assassin's Creed 2 for now; but come Assassin's Creed 3, we'll all be fucked.
I'd rather we just all stop buying Ubisoft's product now, even if that means we won't be playing their latest games, and hope that they shape up. Send a clear message to them that they're going to lose their customers and sales unless they remove their fucking DRM.
You cant really compare an MMO and a single-player game.
Indeed you can't but I'm afraid you missed Jurily's main insight: "the [game] you pay for is better than the one you get for free." That doesn't mean moving/locking parts of the game to your servers; once it's been cracked (and it really only takes one), pirates gets the better copy than legit owners. (Let's not even mention how cumbersome all this is.) No, what you should focus on is making your legit buyer's experience better than the pirated version.
How? Well I don't have all the answers but I believe Stardock might have the right ideas: involve yourselves with your community; be part of custom content distribution; and continued game support through patches (bug fixes, new features, and new content). For multiplayer games, have a hand on the internet match making service to limit and weed out trouble players. Limit all those services only to your legit owners and pirates looking in would feel nothing but jealousy and inferiority.
In the non-software part of the world, it's no different - fake Nike shoes or Rolex watches are crap next to the real ones. Those who buy the fake ones wouldn't have likely bought the real ones anyways; moreover, the fakes make legit owners feel better and justified about their purchase. Likewise, I could see how pirated copies on the net would promote the game for free that could very well lead to increased sales!
Treat your customers like royalty and pirates would pay to be one.
Sad but that's probably true unless if the parents of the child intervenes of course (which they should). I'm not yet a parent but I believe they should be the primary educator of their children - they know their child's strengths and weaknesses after all. Encouraging a child's curiosity and imagination and all that. Schools should only serve as a supplementary education.
And even if a child is unlucky enough to have irresponsible parents and end "up on welfare floating between dead end jobs," at the very least, he gets an education and with it the tools for self improvement. One can only blame his parents & society for so much; ultimately, he/she is answerable only to themselves.
For them, buying twenty copies of UT2004 to play over LAN for one day is ridiculous (and a serious rip-off). But, buying UT3 or CS-Source over steam to play people around the world is 100% ok!
Exactly. To take it further, the best "investment" I ever made was buying half-life. I played it for 8 years! Not because it had the best single player (I haven't even finished it, one day I will!) or multiplayer experience, but because of all the amazing mods it had. I suddenly found that the game was really 15 different games.
It's the same with Starcraft & Broodwar, I had played it for a couple of years straight, and yet every so often I would install it and waste a good hour or two on tower defense maps (the original).
Looking more at the games that I own, it seems multiplayer games are the only games that would sell. But then there's also Civilizations 4 and Galactic Civilizations II, which I never played online but still play extensively today, and it tells me that probably majority of gamers only buy games that offers high replay value or unlimited hours of gaming.
And I remember Portal (2-6 hours), The Monkey Island III, and Final Fantasy 7 which are all relatively quick games but I still bought and thoroughly enjoyed, even if I only played them once or twice.
And though there are plenty of copies out there for the said games I mentioned... most of my friends, cousins, and I still bought legit copies (even when we were teens back then and had no jobs).
Maybe it is a money issue... but maybe more importantly, it's the value of these games. If developers/distributors want to convert these 'pirates' into customers, they should polish their games and show some passion to their customers/communities.
E.A. for example, and in my own experiences pirating their games, are notorious in releasing unfinished games. Their games don't make it easy for modders and don't bother listening to community complaints. Suffice to say, I even stopped downloading their games off of torrents.
A pirate, paying for nothing, refusing to even look at their products.
They do it because they think some games are not worth paying fifty bucks to get eight hours of gameplay.
I'd rather think that more often than not the people that pirates games do so because it's free, convenient, and consequent-free.
Think of it from the point of view of kids. All they'll need is a computer and a broadband connection and they'll be able to play all the latest games(movies, music, applications, books, comics, etc.) that they want.
The only incentive to buy games is for multiplayer and new updates. Stardock understands this, and thus controls their patch distribution to the ones that have legitimate copies for Galactic Civilizations II.
And the kids who do pirate now, will eventually grow up and get jobs and more importantly, money. Hopefully by then, with all the years of guilt of screwing good developers, they would buy the games that brought hours of fun to their lives.
At least, that's what I did. Doesn't make up for all of my past actions but it did remove the guilt of screwing the really good game makers out there. And for the other hundreds of buggy/DRM-ed games & software out there, I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for them and will now avoid them.:)
Bottom line, I bet it's all about money. A small percentage of pirates might be pirates because of their ideologies on DRM and whatnot, but that's just a handful of souls.
Developers/distributors thinking that every pirated copy is a lost sale is idiotic and hopeless. There will always be piracy, better to just not think about them and concentrate on making a good product. It could be a marketing tool even if the game is well made: All things being fair, the more people playing the game the more mods, custom content, and vibrant communities will form.
Why 7-Up? I remember when I was young our family doctor always recommended 7-up too when I had a bout of diarrhea or food poisoning. But as I grew up, I just drank Gatorade and it worked fine (thinking that it should rehydrate me even better than a cola).
Does 7-Up have more electrolytes in them than sprite? Why not coke, pepsi, or mountain dew? And would Gatorade be even better than 7-Up?
Do you think in our calculations it's as important to distinguish between 2147483648 and 2147483649 as between 5 and 6?
Dumbass!
How about we run the calculations 10 times and find out which one is correct? Since the inaccuracies happen only very rarely, you can run the calculation thrice and see which one have the same answer.
I too am quite interested if the SecuROM is really able to screw a PC up, and how exactly. As Edgewize pointed out, many of the complainers do seem a bit hysterical.
But that's besides the point anyways, what would people's reaction would be if SecuROM or DRM applications works flawlessly as intended without causing any harm to the system?
Re:Surely it's a joke (was:Market research!?)
on
The Making of Bioshock
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· Score: 2, Insightful
But which would have netted them more - losing customers who are turned off by their DRM schemes or losing customers who was able to get a copy off a torrent and never bothered to buy it even though she/he thoroughly enjoyed it?
Has anyone ever studied that trade-off/relationship? (Oh and not those who claim that every copy of piracy is a lost sale.)
I agree, but that 5 minutes easily became 30 minutes for me and in the end I just got a crack for my Vista.:P
My HP laptop came with a Vista product key but it turns out it isn't automatically activated online. You'd have to call it in their phone activation system. So after dialing it twice it turns out it won't work there too, you'd have to speak with a real person (a Singaporean who sounds pissed off in my case, not that it matters though). After finally getting my activation key, turns out the dude gave me the wrong one twice or I wrote it down wrong twice as it failed to activate my copy. Anyways, I proceeded to just download an activation crack and lived happily ever after, well not really. Vista is a terrible OS, might as ell have used XP if the drivers weren't a bitch. (HP recovery CD was out of the question because of the bloat included.)
Maybe when I reformat my laptop in the next month I might just go back to XP, from what I read it's faster with games too. Kubuntu / OpenSuse would have been preferable but I'm not entirely sure that a virtualized xp can run my games without a moderate fps penalty or other windows program like Photoshop and Maya without performance problems. I'm too lazy for a dual-boot system.
Can anyone shed light on the performance of virtualized XP under linux running games and big applications?
First of all I totally agree with your post. The way corporations buy up all the patents and copyrights and suing one another endlessly is getting silly. Granted there are legitimate claims but some of the cases we often see here in/. is so sad that we just find it funny. And in this copyright & patent war of theirs, the collateral damage will be everyone else.
Hopefully a time will not come when copyrights and patents start to do the opposite of what it was intended for in the first place - to encourage innovation and creativity. At least that's what I think they're for...
Off topic: Whoa I never knew the happy birthday song is copyrighted. Does that mean that every time it plays over the radio, the station pays for it? I wonder if that is true in countries outside of USA, like here in the Philippines...
I routinely exceed every skill my parents (or anyone) tries to teach me in a few months Ask for lessons in humility. He has exceeded that one as well, you insensitive clod!
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A good salesman builds relationships.
That's done by addressing your client's needs and wants while providing solid service. A salesman's only true asset are the relationships he has forged.
If you think sales is all about exploiting people, you won't last long.
I think you're overestimating the amount of time / work / brain power segregating waste will take.
After a couple of weeks to a month, it'll be second nature to you. You don't waste time thinking about which shoe goes to your left foot do you?
As for a compelling reason, you'd have to search that one out for yourself. For me, I just see it as something sensible thing to do - it's efficient.
Anyways, a city ordinance would be a great compelling reason. :P
You can't. And that's the point. If you can't prove or disprove something; if you cant test something, then it's not science. It's irrelevant to science. It's not science's job to test something that's logically untestable.
Who cares whether or not there's an unprovable Being making sure that gravity on earth accelerates objects at 9.8m^2? What we know is that so far gravity on earth has been consistent. That we can test; that we can use. We learn the rules of the game and exploit it to make our lives easier.
Astrology by itself isn't harmful. It's a tool that controls people; like religion. And like religion, it's not a transparent system. It will lead to real harmful effects.
Humans are humans after all. If a transparent system of control can be corrupted, what more of a system without transparency?
Here's a quote from Jonathan Hickman's Pax Romana on religion as a method of control:
"Religion hides evil behind a veil of righteousness. It attacks legitimate questions by simply calling them immoral. [...] It's worse than that. Religion feeds off of than within us which cries out to understand our place in the universe, but crushes spirituality under false rules and demands acceptable behavior."
I know people will hate me for saying this, but in a way, it's better if everyone sees practically the same movie. If we're all seeing slightly different views, then we won't all have quite the same experience. I think there's something to be said for having a particular view of the scene intended by the director.
It just adds another dimension that directors can explore. What they'll release will still be what they intended, just like any other artist on any other medium.
Imagine what this new dimension could add to a "film". Depending on one's POV, one can get a different insight and experience. Talk about an opportunity for almost unlimited replayability.
It doesn't change the past leaks, no. But it does question the leadership of Wikileaks and its future. If he's convicted, there'll be a need for a new figurehead; if he's acquitted on the other hand, well... let's just say it might not be wise to have a man suspected of rape and harassment to be handling leaks.
One more advantage that PCs have over consoles is that a high end PC hardware can be vastly more superior to the consoles. Even if the console players use a mouse and a keyboard to play their games, I believe that generally PC players would still be better.
From my own experiences playing FPS games, the difference between a PC that could run a game at 300++ frames per second over one that runs it at 100 frames per second is... night and day. I can't quite explain why but it's there.
Anyways, PC gamers also have access to settings that console gamers don't have. This allows PC gamers to see more by running the game at a higher resolution, increasing their FOV, removing the HUD and/or gun models, etc. It's also far more common for PC players to use a headphone that practically pinpoints to them where his/her targets are.
These small customizations and advantages quickly add up; which in competitive settings, makes a world of difference.
As one who lives in Southeast Asia, I'd like to share my own 2 cents here.
The general indie film's target market here at least belong to the upper middle-income class. They comprise of slightly less than 4% of the total population in the Philippines. (See, the income inequality here is so high that those in the lower middle-income bracket worry about going hungry still.) And considering that indie films aren't marketed extensively, your left with a really very very small market.
It's tough but hey, that's the indie game. Now, you'd also have to understand that the people who buy pirated stuffs here usually don't belong to the indie market. Would the folks who pirated your film ever watch it in the theaters? Hell no. It's not a blockbuster film that everybody else would be talking about for the next three weeks. They'd rather save that money for food.
The good news here is that the people that are able and willing to spend money to see indie films, will, given the opportunity to do so. The bad news is since distributors snubs the small but dedicated market they have here, they're forced to watch the film through other means - be it legal or not. Hell, I know a lot of people here who pays extra for shipping just to watch indie flicks.
So... You don't like Ubisoft's DRM but since you really really like AC2, you wait for a crack then still buy the game?
Look it's your money and everything so you're free to use it however you want, but to me buying their game whilst hating their DRM is very short sighted and counter-intuitive. If the current DRM-Crack arms war continues to escalate, I fear we'll just end up with a subscription model or something so draconian that pirates might just not be able to crack. You might be able to play Assassin's Creed 2 for now; but come Assassin's Creed 3, we'll all be fucked.
I'd rather we just all stop buying Ubisoft's product now, even if that means we won't be playing their latest games, and hope that they shape up. Send a clear message to them that they're going to lose their customers and sales unless they remove their fucking DRM.
Indeed you can't but I'm afraid you missed Jurily's main insight: "the [game] you pay for is better than the one you get for free." That doesn't mean moving/locking parts of the game to your servers; once it's been cracked (and it really only takes one), pirates gets the better copy than legit owners. (Let's not even mention how cumbersome all this is.) No, what you should focus on is making your legit buyer's experience better than the pirated version.
How? Well I don't have all the answers but I believe Stardock might have the right ideas: involve yourselves with your community; be part of custom content distribution; and continued game support through patches (bug fixes, new features, and new content). For multiplayer games, have a hand on the internet match making service to limit and weed out trouble players. Limit all those services only to your legit owners and pirates looking in would feel nothing but jealousy and inferiority.
In the non-software part of the world, it's no different - fake Nike shoes or Rolex watches are crap next to the real ones. Those who buy the fake ones wouldn't have likely bought the real ones anyways; moreover, the fakes make legit owners feel better and justified about their purchase. Likewise, I could see how pirated copies on the net would promote the game for free that could very well lead to increased sales!
Treat your customers like royalty and pirates would pay to be one.
Could you share your explanations on why you'll, "never spend a dime on one of their products again"?
It's a feature.
Sad but that's probably true unless if the parents of the child intervenes of course (which they should). I'm not yet a parent but I believe they should be the primary educator of their children - they know their child's strengths and weaknesses after all. Encouraging a child's curiosity and imagination and all that. Schools should only serve as a supplementary education.
And even if a child is unlucky enough to have irresponsible parents and end "up on welfare floating between dead end jobs," at the very least, he gets an education and with it the tools for self improvement. One can only blame his parents & society for so much; ultimately, he/she is answerable only to themselves.
However god is not perfect.
By definition, "God" is perfect and makes no mistake.
For them, buying twenty copies of UT2004 to play over LAN for one day is ridiculous (and a serious rip-off). But, buying UT3 or CS-Source over steam to play people around the world is 100% ok!
Exactly. To take it further, the best "investment" I ever made was buying half-life. I played it for 8 years! Not because it had the best single player (I haven't even finished it, one day I will!) or multiplayer experience, but because of all the amazing mods it had. I suddenly found that the game was really 15 different games.
It's the same with Starcraft & Broodwar, I had played it for a couple of years straight, and yet every so often I would install it and waste a good hour or two on tower defense maps (the original).
Looking more at the games that I own, it seems multiplayer games are the only games that would sell. But then there's also Civilizations 4 and Galactic Civilizations II, which I never played online but still play extensively today, and it tells me that probably majority of gamers only buy games that offers high replay value or unlimited hours of gaming.
And I remember Portal (2-6 hours), The Monkey Island III, and Final Fantasy 7 which are all relatively quick games but I still bought and thoroughly enjoyed, even if I only played them once or twice.
And though there are plenty of copies out there for the said games I mentioned... most of my friends, cousins, and I still bought legit copies (even when we were teens back then and had no jobs).
Maybe it is a money issue... but maybe more importantly, it's the value of these games. If developers/distributors want to convert these 'pirates' into customers, they should polish their games and show some passion to their customers/communities.
E.A. for example, and in my own experiences pirating their games, are notorious in releasing unfinished games. Their games don't make it easy for modders and don't bother listening to community complaints. Suffice to say, I even stopped downloading their games off of torrents.
A pirate, paying for nothing, refusing to even look at their products.
They do it because they think some games are not worth paying fifty bucks to get eight hours of gameplay.
I'd rather think that more often than not the people that pirates games do so because it's free, convenient, and consequent-free.
Think of it from the point of view of kids. All they'll need is a computer and a broadband connection and they'll be able to play all the latest games(movies, music, applications, books, comics, etc.) that they want.
The only incentive to buy games is for multiplayer and new updates. Stardock understands this, and thus controls their patch distribution to the ones that have legitimate copies for Galactic Civilizations II.
And the kids who do pirate now, will eventually grow up and get jobs and more importantly, money. Hopefully by then, with all the years of guilt of screwing good developers, they would buy the games that brought hours of fun to their lives.
At least, that's what I did. Doesn't make up for all of my past actions but it did remove the guilt of screwing the really good game makers out there. And for the other hundreds of buggy/DRM-ed games & software out there, I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for them and will now avoid them. :)
Bottom line, I bet it's all about money. A small percentage of pirates might be pirates because of their ideologies on DRM and whatnot, but that's just a handful of souls.
Developers/distributors thinking that every pirated copy is a lost sale is idiotic and hopeless. There will always be piracy, better to just not think about them and concentrate on making a good product. It could be a marketing tool even if the game is well made: All things being fair, the more people playing the game the more mods, custom content, and vibrant communities will form.
Why 7-Up? I remember when I was young our family doctor always recommended 7-up too when I had a bout of diarrhea or food poisoning. But as I grew up, I just drank Gatorade and it worked fine (thinking that it should rehydrate me even better than a cola).
Does 7-Up have more electrolytes in them than sprite? Why not coke, pepsi, or mountain dew? And would Gatorade be even better than 7-Up?
Do you think in our calculations it's as important to distinguish between 2147483648 and 2147483649 as between 5 and 6?
Dumbass!
How about we run the calculations 10 times and find out which one is correct? Since the inaccuracies happen only very rarely, you can run the calculation thrice and see which one have the same answer.
Possible? Workable? Inefficient?
I too am quite interested if the SecuROM is really able to screw a PC up, and how exactly. As Edgewize pointed out, many of the complainers do seem a bit hysterical.
But that's besides the point anyways, what would people's reaction would be if SecuROM or DRM applications works flawlessly as intended without causing any harm to the system?
You just don't get it.
But which would have netted them more - losing customers who are turned off by their DRM schemes or losing customers who was able to get a copy off a torrent and never bothered to buy it even though she/he thoroughly enjoyed it?
Has anyone ever studied that trade-off/relationship? (Oh and not those who claim that every copy of piracy is a lost sale.)
I agree, but that 5 minutes easily became 30 minutes for me and in the end I just got a crack for my Vista. :P
My HP laptop came with a Vista product key but it turns out it isn't automatically activated online. You'd have to call it in their phone activation system. So after dialing it twice it turns out it won't work there too, you'd have to speak with a real person (a Singaporean who sounds pissed off in my case, not that it matters though). After finally getting my activation key, turns out the dude gave me the wrong one twice or I wrote it down wrong twice as it failed to activate my copy. Anyways, I proceeded to just download an activation crack and lived happily ever after, well not really. Vista is a terrible OS, might as ell have used XP if the drivers weren't a bitch. (HP recovery CD was out of the question because of the bloat included.)
Maybe when I reformat my laptop in the next month I might just go back to XP, from what I read it's faster with games too. Kubuntu / OpenSuse would have been preferable but I'm not entirely sure that a virtualized xp can run my games without a moderate fps penalty or other windows program like Photoshop and Maya without performance problems. I'm too lazy for a dual-boot system.
Can anyone shed light on the performance of virtualized XP under linux running games and big applications?
Ok, stop right there. I do hope that you're just aiming for a +5 Funny mod and that whoosh I'm hearing is the joke over my head.
The Ark that clonan is obviously referring to is The Ark of the Covenant.
Come on! You're on Slashdot.
The least one could do is to google it.
First of all I totally agree with your post. The way corporations buy up all the patents and copyrights and suing one another endlessly is getting silly. Granted there are legitimate claims but some of the cases we often see here in /. is so sad that we just find it funny. And in this copyright & patent war of theirs, the collateral damage will be everyone else.
Hopefully a time will not come when copyrights and patents start to do the opposite of what it was intended for in the first place - to encourage innovation and creativity. At least that's what I think they're for...
Off topic: Whoa I never knew the happy birthday song is copyrighted. Does that mean that every time it plays over the radio, the station pays for it? I wonder if that is true in countries outside of USA, like here in the Philippines...