Publishers should pirate their own games
on
Pirates Vs. Publishers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It is clear piracy is strictly beneficial and helps publishers sell more games and make money. A publisher can outpirate a pirate if they wanted to because all a pirate do is remove whatever anti-piracy stuff a publisher put in, which the publisher can do by just not putting it in in the first place. So if a publisher is to pirate their own games, they'll reap all the benefits of piracy, get a great name from the gaming community, and earn a ton of money.
The reason why this has never been done is because it doesn't work like that. If piracy is always helpful, people would've figured this out by now and pirate their own games. Piracy is almost always strictly harmful to the publisher. The only question is that does your piracy countermeasure costs you even more money than the amount lost to piracy? Clearly if your piracy countermeasure is horrible, it'd turn off legitmate buyers from your game and you'd lose more than you gain. But this case is also hardly universal.
Suppose I have a theory that God exists, but he will only let his presence known to stop a black hole generator from destroying Earth. This is falsifiable if we can build a black hole generator and watch Earth get sucked up into it. Ignoring the concerns for preservation of Earth, is this now a theory? We could conceivably have the technology to build a black hole eventually, so it is testable. Is this a theory? No, not until we can build a black hole generator to test this (perhaps on a planet other than our own) and see if God appears as predicted, or not.
It is possible there is a way to disprove God exists that we are not aware of yet. Does this mean there is now a theory of God? Clearly it can explain anything we need to be explained, and maybe someday someone will find a way to disprove it.
Scientific theories are not proved. Good theories are just never disproven. We don't have a proof on why the Law of Thermodynamics must hold true. It is just that no one has ever observed this law being violated. I recall you can restate 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as entropy always increases. Well, let's assume the Big Crunch happens. If universe is getting smaller, then it'd have to be the case the entropy spontaneously decreases (everything is getting crunched together and thus more orderly). Voila, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics can be violated if the universe doesn't expand forever (which we're not sure until only very recently). Again, it is a Law because it has never been observed to be violated. It is not an inherently true property of the universe under any circumstance.
Further, a theory has to be disprovable to be a theory. We have the theory of gravity and we believe it works because if it doesn't work like what we claim, we would observe a lot of contradictions from just about everything. The Laws of Therodynamics can be disproved, and we believe the law works because it's never been disproved despite plenty of ways to do it. Something that cannot be disproved at all is not a scientific theory. It is only a hypothesis.
A game can't be responsible for more system sales than the number of copies it sold. No one bought a Playstation 1 because of Final Fantasy 7, but did not buy Final Fantasy 7. At best every person who bought Final Fantasy 7 also bought a Playstation 1 for solely this game. There is no doubt that FF7 jump started the PSX considerably, but in the grand scheme of things, it'd be lucky to contribute to 1/10th of the eventual success.
A FF or DQ game sells around 3 millions. If you assume the buying population of these games are pretty similar then let's say a FF + DQ game combines for 5 million unique players. Again, if all 5 million players bought a PS2 for one of those games, that leaves 5 million PS2 down. I don't know what the PS2 numbers shipped are for individual regions, but I know worldwide number is 100+ million and Japan has to have at least 1/3rd, so that'd leave you with 28 million PS2s left, which would still be plenty for a commanding lead in Japan.
While we may think Japanese are so hardcore into RPGs that they would buy a system for a RPG they didn't buy, I doubt that's how it actually works. There's a lot more to RPGs than just SQIX.
The sequel to the sequel to the sequel of FF7 is also a lot more well-known, on a worldwide level, than Final Fantasy 3 which didn't even make it out of Japan.
There are over 100 million PS2s sold in the world. If you take every Square game sold on the PS2 and count the number of unique fans that comprised them, I doubt that number is even more than 10 million (it's almost always the same people buying the same SQIX games). If every unique fan bought a PS2 solely because of a SQIX game, then what the heck are the other 90 million PS2 owners who did not buy a Square game doing? Did they buy the system for the privilege to own the system that SQIX develops for?
Enix was a non presence outside of Japan. While Enix might have been content to what amounts to printing money in Japan, the merger was necessary to get any kind of worldwide status.
On the subject of being arrogant, Enix did not support Nintendo either in the N64 era. While SQIX might be a significant presence in Japan, they might be surprised to find that the rest of world do not care about them as much as they think, just as Japan does not care about Madden 0X or GTA. However the rest of the world is a bigger market than Japan, so it'd be a good idea for them to start catering to the rest of the world.
Nintendo, whose (Pokemon/Zelda/Mario/whatever) sold (some large number of copies) in (some short number of days), will be heavily supporting the Wii so they have already won the battle, and if they do not support Wii too much, then the Wii is surely doomed.
I am as big a Square fan as anyone else, but if every unique person who bought a Square game bought a PS2 solely because of some Square game and Square never existed, then PS2's worldwide numbers would decrease no more than the # of unique Square fans that exist. This would make them go from what, 100 million PS2s to 90 million at best? The Playstation 2 dominance always rested on the quantity. There simply isn't enough games sold to per any company to explain why there are so many PS2s in the world. Will losing Square hurt? Sure, losing anything hurts. But I doubt Square is even responsible for 1/10th of the success of PS2. In fact I don't think any one company, including Sony themselves, is responsible for 1/10th of PS2's total sales.
Why would you ever base on a game just on how long it is? I remember some computer games say on the back of the box says 'infinite replayability' which means they can put 'infinite hours' for the length. Does that mean it's good? It doesn't mean anything.
It seems like people approach games by quantity, not quality these days. If it lasts twice as long you're getting twice the playtime for your money! Who cares if it's not anything you'd want to be playing for twice the length of time? Longer games are only better if they are good quality for that long period of time.
You never needed a serious firepower for a computer opponent that pretends to be actually doing something before ultimately rolling over. To think that humans can even compete against computer in games that tests physical accuracy (computer is infinite more accurate than any human) or multitasking is simply foolish.
If failure means 'fail to utterly dominate the market like PS and PS2', which is certainly a valid criteria, then it does seem like PS3 is definitely going to fail. Note that you can get a 51% market share, which would be plenty good for any companies not named Sony, and still be considered a failure relative to the PS and PS2.
If you take every combination of skill distribution and call that a 'class', you now have a class-based system. Of course unless you've only 3 skills, you'll quickly get way too many classes, which is what happens in the class based systems, and it becomes a balancing nightmare. Since MMORPG is competitive, you have to have some semblance of balance because while it might be fine for a single player game or a small multiplayer game (say, 4-8) to have some utterly overpowered or useless equivalent classes, this is not okay in a MMORPG. The number of equivalent classes to balance, in a skill-based system, is simply intractable. Heck, people have a hard time balancing 5 or 10 classes and yet people expect to have any sembalance equality when you deal with an effectively hundreds, if not more classes?
Final Fantasy 9, which was released in Japan with no strategy guides because Square was experimenting with their PlayOnline system which is basically a strategy guide online for FF9 at that point, and later Square blamed the lack of strategy guides as the reason for poor sales of FF9. Now of course there could be any number of reasons why FF9 sold less than any other FF, but this is about as close you can get to a controlled sample (most FFs sold awfully similar numbers) since it just isn't possible to release the game without a strategy guide, observe what happens, and then do over.
Developers didn't really catch on the fact that strategy guides help sell games while generating a tidy profit themselves, but once they do, it is obvious that you must make your game hard/obscure enough for people to be buying the strategy guides. I don't like this game design because it's introducing complexity/difficulty for the sake of just doing it (to the players, anyway). Though with the availability of sites such as gamefaqs.com, at least you have a free way out of this mess.
I think it's funny people that although we think of humans as better than computer at strategy, the so-called strategy games are a contest of how well you can micromanage/click things, where the computer are infinitely better than us. You can do 100 or 500 actions per minute? The computer can do thousands per minute if not more and never make a mistake. And yet we somehow pride in being able to play like an inferior computer by clicking very fast.
Since that's the only aspect where trying to model the human behavior is interesting/useful. I don't see how this represents an advancement, though. If you have a perfect memory of every hand someone played, of course it is not hard to say that last time he played like this the outcome was XYZ, so I'll guess this is the general case (clearly over a very large number of hands, this should be true). Deep Blue had Kasparov's likely moves programmed in to help. This might make the computer better at beating humans, but I don't see how you can say it is more intelligent.
Also, such a program will be trivially defeated if you assume that reading a player incorrectly results a loss that offsets the gains by reading the player correctly, as then you just need to flip a coin to decide on your strategy, and the computer will never be able to predict you with a better than 50% accuracy. Of course, the computer can probably come up with a strategy that minimizes the losses even when its prediction is wrong so it's likely to win anyway, but I think trying to predict human behavior is the wrong way to go.
you can replace Samus with Mario
on
Samus vs. The Galaxy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Or Megaman, or just about any of the under/undeveloped characters of video game lore. Where does Mario come from? Did he descend from an ancient race of plumbers gifted with shapeshift/morphing abilities through catalysts? Why does he fight for the Mushroom Kingdom?
Some characters are just more interesting/better designed than others, and Samus would be one of them. It is not the absence of information that makes her special because there are way too many video characters that lack an interesting background.
But there is something unique about older games: they are shorter. At some point the video game industry becomes a place where the value of a game is not judged by some enjoyable-ness factor of the game, but how many hours you get out of it. That is not to say older games have to be superior, but they don't go out of their way to add extra playing time for the sake of putting 'X00 hours of gameplay' on the box. Indeed given the storage concerns of the past, you can't even cram in extra stuff just for the sake of doing that, because you would run out of storage room first.
Also, I'd argue the ability to save/load anywhere on an emulator enhances people's perception of older games. There are plenty of RPGs in the past that are mega maze crawls with no save points in between. If you actually have to play such a game it'd be quite a painful experience because you literally cannot leave in under X hours. Emulators essentially enhance the gaming experience by allowing you to break down an otherwise painful long stretch of boredom (and if you enjoy these things, you could just not use these features, so it's the best of both worlds). The Turbo feature found on most emulators also greatly enhances the value of a RPG by shortening the otherwise boring random battles (and if you find them fun, you can always do it at the regular speed).
I look at older games as enjoyable not because of how everything back in the good old days was better, but rather now I have the tools to make older games more enjoyable. If I can make my PS2 run 5 times faster at the switch of a button, an otherwise boring game could be tolerable, but this technology only exists with older games via emulator. Given the choice of 2 equally boring game, I might as well pick the one that I can speed up 5 times and not waste as much time.
What 3rd party games can be more exclusive than all of Nintendo's games, which has always been exclusive to only Nintendo games, or Final Fantasy 7, the game people usually attribute as the turning point of the PS1 era console war? There is strenght in numbers, but you're looking at some combination of exclusive games that will have to exceed Nintendo's own exclusive games, and by a very significant margin since history has shown that Nintendo's own games aren't close to enough to generate what's needed to overcome the PS1/PS2. Don't forget that Nintendo is at a decidedly disadvantageous situation in all non-exclusive games that do not make significant use of their controller due to lack of hardware firepower.
XBox 360 is aiming for about 15 million shipped, so that sounds like a good number to be ahead of your competitors by. Because Nintendo is clearly behind on anything that isn't exclusive due to hardware, that means they'll have to make up at least 15 million hardware sales through a combination of exclusive games, price, and other features (one would assume if a hardware is sold not due to these strengths, then a similar sale would be made for XBox 360/PS3). I'm not an analyst, but this doesn't seem to be the surest thing in the world I'd bet on. It is certainly within the realm of doable, but it's definitely not certain, either.
And every console war has been decided by the 3rd party games. If you assume that every Nintendo game bought translates to a system sold, and assuming tastes in Nintendo games are pretty similar (e.g. Mario and Zelda captures essentially the same group, so that 1 Mario and 1 Zelda game translates to 1 Nintendo system sold, not 2), then you get the number of Nintendo systems sold due to Nintendo games isn't anywhere close to the number of PS1 or PS2s. For that matter, it also isn't close to the number of NES, SNES, or GB/GBAs sold. If winning means 'getting the biggest marketshare', then winning obviously has to come from being diverse because even the biggest software powerhouses don't come close to explaining the hardware sales even if they're so powerful that every game sold led to a hardware purchase. It has long been said that FF7 was supposed to be the turning point of PS1 in Japan, but FF7, for all its glory, only sold ~3 million in Japan, which means no more than 3 million people bought a PS1 due to FF7 in Japan (assuming no one bought a PS1 due to FF7 but did not purchase the game, which would indeed be odd) which isn't close to the number of PS1s sold in Japan.
Now there's no doubt FF7 provided the push PS1 needed, but in the grand scheme of things, no one company accounts for any significant part of a successful system's fanbase.
Of course there is. For example you will rarely see any major, if any, RPG released in Japan near a FF or DQ release. In fact FF and DQ avoids each other on release dates back when Square and Enix are two separate companies because it'd simply be a bad idea if you release 2 huge RPG titles near each other.
It's not the gaming populace's fault if your game is released at the same time of the Harry Potter equivalent of your genre and thus your game failed due to that. If you don't have what it takes to take on the heavyweights, don't mess with them.
We're talking about the online market here, which almost certainly means subscription-based games which is extremely resilient to piracy. Nothing else could possibly succeed in the piracy capital of the world.
I see this commonly brought up by Nintendo fans, that Nintendo is making money. How exactly does this matter if you're not a Nintendo stockholder? Do you think Sony or Microsoft will fold just because they don't make as much money as Nintendo on their primary games? Profitabilty might have affected Sega (who made some really good game but not profitable enough to keep system alive), but I don't see it affected Microsoft or Sony, at least not for a long time.
I thought people say it's the games that matter, so what does it matter if someone is losing a ton of money to bring out a great system? As long as Sony and Microsoft doesn't collapse from being unprofitable (which appears to be a very unlikely event), whether the company behind it is profitable or not doesn't really matter. Take-Two lost a lot of money on GTA due to the Hot Coffee incident and this obviously means they make less money than they could have been. Does this mean the best-selling game on the PS2 is now suddenly not as good because it wasn't as profitable as it could've been? Again, if being unprofitable forces Take-Two to close, then it is a valid concern. But if not, then only the end result, namely the games we have available, matters.
Slashdot Mirror
It is clear piracy is strictly beneficial and helps publishers sell more games and make money. A publisher can outpirate a pirate if they wanted to because all a pirate do is remove whatever anti-piracy stuff a publisher put in, which the publisher can do by just not putting it in in the first place. So if a publisher is to pirate their own games, they'll reap all the benefits of piracy, get a great name from the gaming community, and earn a ton of money.
The reason why this has never been done is because it doesn't work like that. If piracy is always helpful, people would've figured this out by now and pirate their own games. Piracy is almost always strictly harmful to the publisher. The only question is that does your piracy countermeasure costs you even more money than the amount lost to piracy? Clearly if your piracy countermeasure is horrible, it'd turn off legitmate buyers from your game and you'd lose more than you gain. But this case is also hardly universal.
Suppose I have a theory that God exists, but he will only let his presence known to stop a black hole generator from destroying Earth. This is falsifiable if we can build a black hole generator and watch Earth get sucked up into it. Ignoring the concerns for preservation of Earth, is this now a theory? We could conceivably have the technology to build a black hole eventually, so it is testable. Is this a theory? No, not until we can build a black hole generator to test this (perhaps on a planet other than our own) and see if God appears as predicted, or not.
It is possible there is a way to disprove God exists that we are not aware of yet. Does this mean there is now a theory of God? Clearly it can explain anything we need to be explained, and maybe someday someone will find a way to disprove it.
Scientific theories are not proved. Good theories are just never disproven. We don't have a proof on why the Law of Thermodynamics must hold true. It is just that no one has ever observed this law being violated. I recall you can restate 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as entropy always increases. Well, let's assume the Big Crunch happens. If universe is getting smaller, then it'd have to be the case the entropy spontaneously decreases (everything is getting crunched together and thus more orderly). Voila, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics can be violated if the universe doesn't expand forever (which we're not sure until only very recently). Again, it is a Law because it has never been observed to be violated. It is not an inherently true property of the universe under any circumstance.
Further, a theory has to be disprovable to be a theory. We have the theory of gravity and we believe it works because if it doesn't work like what we claim, we would observe a lot of contradictions from just about everything. The Laws of Therodynamics can be disproved, and we believe the law works because it's never been disproved despite plenty of ways to do it. Something that cannot be disproved at all is not a scientific theory. It is only a hypothesis.
A game can't be responsible for more system sales than the number of copies it sold. No one bought a Playstation 1 because of Final Fantasy 7, but did not buy Final Fantasy 7. At best every person who bought Final Fantasy 7 also bought a Playstation 1 for solely this game. There is no doubt that FF7 jump started the PSX considerably, but in the grand scheme of things, it'd be lucky to contribute to 1/10th of the eventual success.
A FF or DQ game sells around 3 millions. If you assume the buying population of these games are pretty similar then let's say a FF + DQ game combines for 5 million unique players. Again, if all 5 million players bought a PS2 for one of those games, that leaves 5 million PS2 down. I don't know what the PS2 numbers shipped are for individual regions, but I know worldwide number is 100+ million and Japan has to have at least 1/3rd, so that'd leave you with 28 million PS2s left, which would still be plenty for a commanding lead in Japan.
While we may think Japanese are so hardcore into RPGs that they would buy a system for a RPG they didn't buy, I doubt that's how it actually works. There's a lot more to RPGs than just SQIX.
The sequel to the sequel to the sequel of FF7 is also a lot more well-known, on a worldwide level, than Final Fantasy 3 which didn't even make it out of Japan.
There are over 100 million PS2s sold in the world. If you take every Square game sold on the PS2 and count the number of unique fans that comprised them, I doubt that number is even more than 10 million (it's almost always the same people buying the same SQIX games). If every unique fan bought a PS2 solely because of a SQIX game, then what the heck are the other 90 million PS2 owners who did not buy a Square game doing? Did they buy the system for the privilege to own the system that SQIX develops for?
Enix was a non presence outside of Japan. While Enix might have been content to what amounts to printing money in Japan, the merger was necessary to get any kind of worldwide status.
On the subject of being arrogant, Enix did not support Nintendo either in the N64 era. While SQIX might be a significant presence in Japan, they might be surprised to find that the rest of world do not care about them as much as they think, just as Japan does not care about Madden 0X or GTA. However the rest of the world is a bigger market than Japan, so it'd be a good idea for them to start catering to the rest of the world.
Nintendo, whose (Pokemon/Zelda/Mario/whatever) sold (some large number of copies) in (some short number of days), will be heavily supporting the Wii so they have already won the battle, and if they do not support Wii too much, then the Wii is surely doomed. I am as big a Square fan as anyone else, but if every unique person who bought a Square game bought a PS2 solely because of some Square game and Square never existed, then PS2's worldwide numbers would decrease no more than the # of unique Square fans that exist. This would make them go from what, 100 million PS2s to 90 million at best? The Playstation 2 dominance always rested on the quantity. There simply isn't enough games sold to per any company to explain why there are so many PS2s in the world. Will losing Square hurt? Sure, losing anything hurts. But I doubt Square is even responsible for 1/10th of the success of PS2. In fact I don't think any one company, including Sony themselves, is responsible for 1/10th of PS2's total sales.
Why would you ever base on a game just on how long it is? I remember some computer games say on the back of the box says 'infinite replayability' which means they can put 'infinite hours' for the length. Does that mean it's good? It doesn't mean anything.
It seems like people approach games by quantity, not quality these days. If it lasts twice as long you're getting twice the playtime for your money! Who cares if it's not anything you'd want to be playing for twice the length of time? Longer games are only better if they are good quality for that long period of time.
You never needed a serious firepower for a computer opponent that pretends to be actually doing something before ultimately rolling over. To think that humans can even compete against computer in games that tests physical accuracy (computer is infinite more accurate than any human) or multitasking is simply foolish.
If failure means 'fail to utterly dominate the market like PS and PS2', which is certainly a valid criteria, then it does seem like PS3 is definitely going to fail. Note that you can get a 51% market share, which would be plenty good for any companies not named Sony, and still be considered a failure relative to the PS and PS2.
If you take every combination of skill distribution and call that a 'class', you now have a class-based system. Of course unless you've only 3 skills, you'll quickly get way too many classes, which is what happens in the class based systems, and it becomes a balancing nightmare. Since MMORPG is competitive, you have to have some semblance of balance because while it might be fine for a single player game or a small multiplayer game (say, 4-8) to have some utterly overpowered or useless equivalent classes, this is not okay in a MMORPG. The number of equivalent classes to balance, in a skill-based system, is simply intractable. Heck, people have a hard time balancing 5 or 10 classes and yet people expect to have any sembalance equality when you deal with an effectively hundreds, if not more classes?
Developers didn't really catch on the fact that strategy guides help sell games while generating a tidy profit themselves, but once they do, it is obvious that you must make your game hard/obscure enough for people to be buying the strategy guides. I don't like this game design because it's introducing complexity/difficulty for the sake of just doing it (to the players, anyway). Though with the availability of sites such as gamefaqs.com, at least you have a free way out of this mess.
I think it's funny people that although we think of humans as better than computer at strategy, the so-called strategy games are a contest of how well you can micromanage/click things, where the computer are infinitely better than us. You can do 100 or 500 actions per minute? The computer can do thousands per minute if not more and never make a mistake. And yet we somehow pride in being able to play like an inferior computer by clicking very fast.
Also, such a program will be trivially defeated if you assume that reading a player incorrectly results a loss that offsets the gains by reading the player correctly, as then you just need to flip a coin to decide on your strategy, and the computer will never be able to predict you with a better than 50% accuracy. Of course, the computer can probably come up with a strategy that minimizes the losses even when its prediction is wrong so it's likely to win anyway, but I think trying to predict human behavior is the wrong way to go.
Some characters are just more interesting/better designed than others, and Samus would be one of them. It is not the absence of information that makes her special because there are way too many video characters that lack an interesting background.
The best MMORPG customer is the guy who subscribes but doesn't play (and probably posting on why your game sucks, but is still paying).
Also, I'd argue the ability to save/load anywhere on an emulator enhances people's perception of older games. There are plenty of RPGs in the past that are mega maze crawls with no save points in between. If you actually have to play such a game it'd be quite a painful experience because you literally cannot leave in under X hours. Emulators essentially enhance the gaming experience by allowing you to break down an otherwise painful long stretch of boredom (and if you enjoy these things, you could just not use these features, so it's the best of both worlds). The Turbo feature found on most emulators also greatly enhances the value of a RPG by shortening the otherwise boring random battles (and if you find them fun, you can always do it at the regular speed).
I look at older games as enjoyable not because of how everything back in the good old days was better, but rather now I have the tools to make older games more enjoyable. If I can make my PS2 run 5 times faster at the switch of a button, an otherwise boring game could be tolerable, but this technology only exists with older games via emulator. Given the choice of 2 equally boring game, I might as well pick the one that I can speed up 5 times and not waste as much time.
XBox 360 is aiming for about 15 million shipped, so that sounds like a good number to be ahead of your competitors by. Because Nintendo is clearly behind on anything that isn't exclusive due to hardware, that means they'll have to make up at least 15 million hardware sales through a combination of exclusive games, price, and other features (one would assume if a hardware is sold not due to these strengths, then a similar sale would be made for XBox 360/PS3). I'm not an analyst, but this doesn't seem to be the surest thing in the world I'd bet on. It is certainly within the realm of doable, but it's definitely not certain, either.
Now there's no doubt FF7 provided the push PS1 needed, but in the grand scheme of things, no one company accounts for any significant part of a successful system's fanbase.
It's not the gaming populace's fault if your game is released at the same time of the Harry Potter equivalent of your genre and thus your game failed due to that. If you don't have what it takes to take on the heavyweights, don't mess with them.
We're talking about the online market here, which almost certainly means subscription-based games which is extremely resilient to piracy. Nothing else could possibly succeed in the piracy capital of the world.
I thought people say it's the games that matter, so what does it matter if someone is losing a ton of money to bring out a great system? As long as Sony and Microsoft doesn't collapse from being unprofitable (which appears to be a very unlikely event), whether the company behind it is profitable or not doesn't really matter. Take-Two lost a lot of money on GTA due to the Hot Coffee incident and this obviously means they make less money than they could have been. Does this mean the best-selling game on the PS2 is now suddenly not as good because it wasn't as profitable as it could've been? Again, if being unprofitable forces Take-Two to close, then it is a valid concern. But if not, then only the end result, namely the games we have available, matters.