The "fanatical patriotism" of certain parts the US military (especially the Marine Corps) that leads to obeying even the most ridiculous of orders;
All militaries are like that, at least successful ones. If yours isn't, I hope you don't need to rely on them anytime soon.
The "at will" employment situation that guarantees people in the lower rungs of society are basically slaves to their bosses' whims to avoid being fired;
I'm in an "at will" state and I love it. I have just as much power as my boss-- you know what? If you're unskilled and ineffective, yes you should be afraid of being fired. If you're skilled, effective and even slightly ambitious your boss should be afraid of you. (Specifically: you leaving.)
Nobody in this state is a slave unless they want to be.
The security theatre at airports and tourist attractions that basically forces you to do certain things or be denied access
This one I agree with you with.
(which sometimes isn't an option (such as if your "at will" employer has told you to fly somewhere))...
Then grow a pair and tell him you won't go. Look, the government can't help you if you're afraid to stand up for yourself. It's not your nanny, you have live your own life. (Another way the US view of the world contrasts with the UK view, although that's sadly changing: GOVERNMENT!!! SAVE ME FROM UNHEALTHY TRANSFATS!!! I CAN'T STOP SHOVING FOOD IN MY FAT MAW WITHOUT YOU!!!)
Other than the names, I don't see a huge difference. Just think of when a butler in a fancy British home says that "the master of the house is not home at present", or that he is "the humble servant" - he doesn't really mean "master" and "servant" as you appear to be thinking... he really just means "boss" and "employee".
Except in the TV episodes I'm talking about, they literally do mean "master" and "servant", and sometimes the "servant" is actually a full-blown slave to boot. You never see this type of relationship in American TV. That's all I'm pointing out.
Of course, this being Slashdot, pointing out anything about the US instantly brings the US-haters out of the woodwork, so I guess I shouldn't have expected better. At least you had actual examples, as opposed to the other guy who (apparently) thinks we're all brainwashed by TV.
It always makes me chuckle a bit when I watch the new Doctor Who episodes and they're always completely obsessed over master/servant relationships, usually with characters loudly proclaiming that they are either a master or servant of somebody else. Even when they're in the far future settings.
It doesn't come up in all the episodes, but when it does, it's one of those things so alien to the American way of thinking that it just throws me for a loop a bit. I've gone through my entire life in the US, and so far I've never been "master" of anybody, and I've never been "servant" of anybody, and that's exactly the way I like it.
I'm not going to reply to your whole post, because this conversation is tiring me, and it's now MORE than obviously you're never going to even attempt to support your initial statement no matter how long this goes on.
Also, reduced feature sets in software don't actually save money. You have to code the feature anyway, it costs you extra money to make sure it can be left out and everything works without it. Software removes features for market segmentation, not because it somehow makes things cheaper.
That is complete nonsense.
No, it hasn't, it's been completely pointless for the last 25 years, because anybody who wanted to pirate the game did anyway. Piracy existed back when I was in primary school, and still exists now. Various anti-copy mechanisms didn't stop anything back then, and still don't. DRM is pointless.
You missed the point. You said it was suicide, I said if it was suicide, then after 25 years of it they'd probably be dead and they aren't. You then wrote this response which has absolutely nothing to do with your initial statement (that DRM is suicide.)
Not only can you not debate, you can't even keep a single thread of conversation in your brain longer than 5 minutes, apparently. You're the enemy of rational thought and civil debate.
Reduce casual piracy. How is it supposed to be doing that, given the miserable failure that it is? I give Spore as an example as how it's completely failing to do that.
Nooooo, you said that Wikipedia said that it's the most pirated game of 2008. It's possible for it to simultaneously: 1) Be defeating casual piracy efforts with DRM 2) Be the most pirated game of 2008
Those two things aren't mutually-exclusive. Once again, you've shown absolutely nothing.
They did do some changes. Spore got the activation limit bumped, then released on Steam without the original DRM. Now I wonder, why would they relax those restrictions, if it wasn't losing them sales?
Because DRM systems are often made less restrictive after the title is released; I can think of a dozen games where this has happened. It has nothing to do with the success of the DRM system, it only has to do with the vast majority of the game income coming in the first few months of sales.
Well, exactly. Music is much, much easier to pirate. So by all logic, un-DRMed music should be suicide. But hey, what you know, it's selling, and stores are dropping the DRM.
No it's not. The only way I can think of that it's easier is that the download size is smaller... other than that, it's exactly the same.
Really music artists are probably nervous as heck at the prospect of their game not selling.
Wha-huh? Are you talking about the composer of the video game soundtrack? You lost me.
I disagree with the "massive" part. The numbers normally discussed suggest a 90% loss or something equally gigantic. This is peanuts in comparison. And again, the stats show that if you want 10% more, make a Mac version.
It takes more than 10% additional effort to produce a version for another platform. I hate to break this to you, buddy, but we're in a world where game makers are contemplating not even making *Windows* versions in favor of consoles... I recall (and I'm not going to cite this, because you're an idiot) the makers of Modern Warfare 2 saying that even with the reduced feature-set, and piracy completely aside, the Windows version of the game barely broke even.
Mac has no chance at all in this market, unless you're a small-fry like Wolfire.
I'm sorry, the "THE FUCKING LAW" argument never impressed me much. Some things are legal and shouldn't be, and some aren't and should be. Repeat after me: law doesn't equal morality.
Not that it's my argument anyway, but that point seemed to be worth making.
If you think the law is not moral, then work to change the law. Don't just break it!
No, I'm arguing a very simple thing: ignore the assholes, and make your customers happy, because you know, those are the ones that actually pay you the money, and may choose not to.
Yeah, but they're already doing that... so you're really saying nothing!
Oh wait, once again you're equating "your customers" with DaleGlass (1068434). Let's try this yet again:
The World Does Not Fucking Revolve Around You!
Maybe it'll sink in this time.
Then you have no business sense. Every retail business has to contend with things like product breakage, employees stealing the product, etc. The sane ones recognize that pissing off 20% of the customer base to stop 10% loss doesn't make financial sense, so while they do work against it, they avoid going completely nuts and having military security on the premises.
Yes, but you haven't shown that's what the game industry is doing. I under-fucking-stand your fucking assertion here, what I want is proof that the games industry actually is alienating 20% of their customers to combat 10% loss. Because the "Look In A Fucking Gaming Store" law says that ain't happening, and you've provided jack to back it up. And conversation is going in circles.
The same thing here. Too much DRM, and it annoys customers who decide not to buy, tell everybody around why they didn't, and in extre
Does NZ still have the insanely-high import duties on electronics? Man, when I was there, even a beige box cost almost twice what it did in the US due to that. I remember thinking: "hey NZ, if you haven't succeeded in creating a local electronics industry by this point, you might as well just give up and get rid of the duties."
Sorry, this is just plain prejudice. For business purposes EU is one big country.
Oh come on! I'm not buying that one. The US isn't even "one big country", and it's *actually* a big country... take a look at the difference in consumer laws between California and Texas, to pull two big states out of a hat.
Soulskill rightly notes that at least some of the complained-about policies boil down to Apple's adherence to local copyright and licensing laws.
And who is that? Why should I care what they think? I thought at first that it might be a Slashdot commenter, but that name doesn't show up on this post.
How would what? Your question doesn't make sense. What are you asking?
There you have an example with Spore. Please explain where the effect was. It still got released on BT before the official release. It's entirely trivial to "casually pirate" it. Wikipedia says it was the "most pirated game of 2008".
Ok, so these three points translate as: 1) Not relevant to my point 2) Not relevant to my point (also incorrect) 3) Not relevant to my point
So was all the drama really worth it? I really doubt it, because that HAD to lose sales, while it obviously completely failed to prevent any piracy.
You can doubt all you want, but EA hasn't gotten rid of DRM on any of their titles.
Once I heard of the DRM I decided not to buy it, and until that point I was quite interested.
Yes, and let me try this one more time:
The World Does Not Fucking Revolve Around You
Please explain where the difference is. Music should be even worse, as it's contained in small files that are useful on their own.
Well, the difference is music "is contained in small files that are useful on their own." That's the fucking difference. You typed it in the same paragraph where you asked what the difference was, idiot.
The cost of producing a song (the smallest unit of "music") is orders of magnitude less than the cost of producing an entire video game (the smallest unit of "video game"). That *is* the difference. The economics are all out-of-whack from that alone.
Proof please. All instances of "massive loss" I've seen assume that 1 copy=1 lost sale. But that's clearly bullshit.
Ok then let's go by Wolfire's numbers-- 10% is still massive loss. Christ. Am I debating with a kindergartner or something?
In any case, it's not "clearly bullshit." There are two components to piracy: A) People who pirate the game who would have bought it anyway B) People who pirate the game with no intention of buying it
See what they have in common? BOTH OF THEM ARE IN VIOLATION OF THE FUCKING LAW YOU FUCKING DOUCHE.
Whatever the percentage of A compared to B is, you're arguing in favor of assholes who have zero respect for the time and effort of game creators.
Your argument, in short, is: "hey games industry, FUCK YOU."
I'm NEVER going to agree with that, whether the number in A is 100%, 10% or 0.01%.
If you don't like the law, then try to change the law. But you don't just go around breaking it at a whim because it's hard to get caught. Seriously, the rest of us are trying to run a fucking civilization here.
Why would they bitch about it? Those people who are not your customers don't have DRM! They got their copy from BitTorrent pre-cracked, and it installed without asking any questions. It doesn't do CD checks, doesn't have activation, doesn't refuse to work with DaemonTools, and has no installation limits. Besides, it often starts faster and crashes less. They have absolutely nothing to bitch about.
Then explain Slashdot. Are you brand-new here?
That's the funny thing about DRM -- the people it annoys are the customers.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. You haven't acknowledged that it's possible to have DRM and not annoy customers. Of course, since you have an apparent IQ of 75, I guess I wouldn't have expected you to examine the problem from all angles.
Every Spore pirate out there has no clue what the hoopla is all about, because for them it works perfectly fine, and they can install it anywhere they want as many times as they want.
Yes, but Spore is an EA game. EA.
The shittiness is due to it being EA, not due to it having DRM. (At best, you can say that it's due to it having EA DRM.) Look, EA hates their customers. EA makes buggy, shitty games. EA engages in anti-competitive practices and is actively trying to become a monopoly in the gaming space. EA IS SHIT. EA HATES YOU
It's not the same program as Notepad.exe. Christ, it would be nice if people would download and try it before spouting off in the comments here, but I guess that's not going to happen.
Dude, it's a totally different product then what we're talking about. Yes, Notepad++ has a shit-ton of features (and a mostly-broken GUI.) The one feature JamesPad has that Notepad++ does not is that it just auto-saves all your notes, without nagging you about filenames or disks or any bullshit, when you close it. And restores them all nag-free when you open it.
It's very much relevant. I don't know of a single game that hasn't been cracked. No matter what you do, no matter how you try to stop it, eventually I can get a copy from bittorrent. So you'd be wasting money.
Point A doesn't lead to point B here. If DRM is effective at reducing casual piracy, then it's not wasting money.
It did happen
Holy fuck, a cite!? It's almost as if you're not spewing nothing but ignorance! Of course, it's a cite of The Inquirer. Better than nothing, I guess... slightly.
Online music stores have ditched it, which seems to point to something.
Possibly, and yet games are not music.
Also, it's very attractive to blame every loss of sales on piracy. It's something external you can blame and avoid ever blaming yourself for anything.
Ok, but it's simultaneously true that massive amounts of loss is due to piracy. Again, you're writing irrelevance here... that paragraph has nothing to do with the problem at hand.
Many claims not to buy a game because of DRM are met with disbelief.
That's because a lot of people: 1) Bitch about DRM, then buy the game anyway. 2) Bitch about DRM, but they really weren't your customers in the first place.
In the same way a lot of people who pirate weren't your customers, a lot of people who bitch about DRM aren't your customers. That doesn't stop them from bitching. Hell, Slashdot Games seems to be read entirely by people who, by and large, do not actually buy video games. But they sure as hell bitch about DRM.
So, yes, when people lie or are hypocrites, their claims are met with disbelief. Incredible, huh?
It wouldn't be the first time an ineffective measure was adopted even though it miserably failed to work. See also the war on drugs that keeps their merchants in business, and the prohibition that miserably failed to do anything useful, and still took a long time to get rid of.
Except that it's not illegal to publish a game with no DRM. You're talking about legislation, we're talking about the voluntary actions of game publishers. Once again, you're verging on "completely irrelevant" here.
You haven't provided a *single number* to back up your point. Look, to make a case, you need at least:
1) A good estimate of the number people who pirate the title 2) A good estimate of the number of people who would not buy the title had it DRM (which, contrary to Slashdot's estimation, is extremely tiny) 3) An estimate of the cost of developing adequate DRM policies and code
You haven't provided any of those numbers. Not even rough estimates. You have absolutely no case here, none at all.
Instead of providing figures to back-up your assertion, you throw in shit like your point 5 which is completely irrelevant to the problem, and point 6 which appears to be a scaremongering urban legend at best.
And then to really make it all come together, you back away from your original assertion by adding weasel words (very possibly) to it when you re-state it in point 7. I seriously don't know why you even bothered replying, since you'd added nothing to the conversation.
Is it possible you're correct? Yes, I concede that. Is it likely? No-- if it was, then you'd see major studios ditching DRM as quickly as possible. The "Law Of Look In A Goddamned Gaming Store" says that your assertion is wrong, and I see no reason to believe that all game studios are somehow insane and you're not.
Dude you have to put the "too long, didn't read" version at the *top*. Otherwise the people who didn't read the wall of text won't read the tl;dr either.
Uh, maybe I misread, but wasn't his conclusion that 10% of piracy is probably completely genuine?
Look, Wolfire doesn't care about piracy because they're a tiny indie studio and they care a lot more about getting their games into people's hands than anything else. That's true of pretty much every tiny indie studio. While it's great that he's running the numbers and figuring out a better estimate for the piracy rate, his opinion on DRM is *not relevant* to studios like, for example, Nintendo.
And that's assuming you agree with his conclusion. I also think his argument is completely flawed. Whether you could have otherwise afforded the game or not, the fact is you still pirated it. I mean, there's no "oh well he couldn't afford it anyway" clause to any other kind of theft, right? Why should there be one for IP theft?
Man if I ever get enough free time, I've always been meaning to go through Slashdot and prove your premise. (Which I agree with.) I *know* there were posters here saying they'd gladly pay a dollar a track for music back when the Napster affair was in the news-- when iTunes began selling music for exactly that price, suddenly every single one of them changed their mind and said $1 is too much.
I did believe that at one time. I changed my mind when Apple was one of the *last* music stores to get off of DRM, and not even close to the first. I now think that Apple was just lying to us all the time and didn't mind DRM at all.
Not to exonerate Steam, but there are tons of apps that have issues with spotty internet connections.
One I have to constantly deal with is Windows Folder Share (or whatever the hell it's called now...) which, if it starts up once with a flaky connection, instantly assumes that there is no Internet connection at all, also that your username and password are wrong. It's about the most retarded "no network connection available" behavior I've ever seen.
What's even worse is that the same Windows Live product line includes Windows Live Messenger which is very good at handling spotty connections in an intelligent way.
BTW, on the Apple-talking-about-DRM thing? It's not like Apple has never lied to the public before. Remember when.Mac was supposed to be "free forever?" Turns out, in Apple language, "forever" is about 2 years, then it costs a hundred bucks.
Look, regardless of whether Apple loves or hates DRM, the fact remains that *Amazon* (and some other vendors) negotiated the sale of DRM-free music before Apple did. That's why they get the credit, and Apple remains the company that loves DRM. If Apple wanted "hates DRM" on their resume, they should have acted quicker to beat Amazon to the punch.
We judge them by actions, not words. No matter how much they *say* they hate DRM, Amazon was much more influential in getting rid of it.
Without the success of Apple's much-less restrictive scheme, the record companies would never have considered allowing Amazon to sell DRM-free songs.
Whaaa?
Because Apple gave the record companies DRM like they asked for, Apple is responsible for Amazon's being DRM-free? That doesn't make any goddamned sense. Is that your real argument or some kind of prank?
Slashdot Mirror
The "fanatical patriotism" of certain parts the US military (especially the Marine Corps) that leads to obeying even the most ridiculous of orders;
All militaries are like that, at least successful ones. If yours isn't, I hope you don't need to rely on them anytime soon.
The "at will" employment situation that guarantees people in the lower rungs of society are basically slaves to their bosses' whims to avoid being fired;
I'm in an "at will" state and I love it. I have just as much power as my boss-- you know what? If you're unskilled and ineffective, yes you should be afraid of being fired. If you're skilled, effective and even slightly ambitious your boss should be afraid of you. (Specifically: you leaving.)
Nobody in this state is a slave unless they want to be.
The security theatre at airports and tourist attractions that basically forces you to do certain things or be denied access
This one I agree with you with.
(which sometimes isn't an option (such as if your "at will" employer has told you to fly somewhere))...
Then grow a pair and tell him you won't go. Look, the government can't help you if you're afraid to stand up for yourself. It's not your nanny, you have live your own life. (Another way the US view of the world contrasts with the UK view, although that's sadly changing: GOVERNMENT!!! SAVE ME FROM UNHEALTHY TRANSFATS!!! I CAN'T STOP SHOVING FOOD IN MY FAT MAW WITHOUT YOU!!!)
Other than the names, I don't see a huge difference. Just think of when a butler in a fancy British home says that "the master of the house is not home at present", or that he is "the humble servant" - he doesn't really mean "master" and "servant" as you appear to be thinking... he really just means "boss" and "employee".
Except in the TV episodes I'm talking about, they literally do mean "master" and "servant", and sometimes the "servant" is actually a full-blown slave to boot. You never see this type of relationship in American TV. That's all I'm pointing out.
Of course, this being Slashdot, pointing out anything about the US instantly brings the US-haters out of the woodwork, so I guess I shouldn't have expected better. At least you had actual examples, as opposed to the other guy who (apparently) thinks we're all brainwashed by TV.
It always makes me chuckle a bit when I watch the new Doctor Who episodes and they're always completely obsessed over master/servant relationships, usually with characters loudly proclaiming that they are either a master or servant of somebody else. Even when they're in the far future settings.
It doesn't come up in all the episodes, but when it does, it's one of those things so alien to the American way of thinking that it just throws me for a loop a bit. I've gone through my entire life in the US, and so far I've never been "master" of anybody, and I've never been "servant" of anybody, and that's exactly the way I like it.
I'm not going to reply to your whole post, because this conversation is tiring me, and it's now MORE than obviously you're never going to even attempt to support your initial statement no matter how long this goes on.
Also, reduced feature sets in software don't actually save money. You have to code the feature anyway, it costs you extra money to make sure it can be left out and everything works without it. Software removes features for market segmentation, not because it somehow makes things cheaper.
That is complete nonsense.
No, it hasn't, it's been completely pointless for the last 25 years, because anybody who wanted to pirate the game did anyway. Piracy existed back when I was in primary school, and still exists now. Various anti-copy mechanisms didn't stop anything back then, and still don't. DRM is pointless.
You missed the point. You said it was suicide, I said if it was suicide, then after 25 years of it they'd probably be dead and they aren't. You then wrote this response which has absolutely nothing to do with your initial statement (that DRM is suicide.)
Not only can you not debate, you can't even keep a single thread of conversation in your brain longer than 5 minutes, apparently. You're the enemy of rational thought and civil debate.
Reduce casual piracy. How is it supposed to be doing that, given the miserable failure that it is? I give Spore as an example as how it's completely failing to do that.
Nooooo, you said that Wikipedia said that it's the most pirated game of 2008. It's possible for it to simultaneously:
1) Be defeating casual piracy efforts with DRM
2) Be the most pirated game of 2008
Those two things aren't mutually-exclusive. Once again, you've shown absolutely nothing.
They did do some changes. Spore got the activation limit bumped, then released on Steam without the original DRM. Now I wonder, why would they relax those restrictions, if it wasn't losing them sales?
Because DRM systems are often made less restrictive after the title is released; I can think of a dozen games where this has happened. It has nothing to do with the success of the DRM system, it only has to do with the vast majority of the game income coming in the first few months of sales.
Well, exactly. Music is much, much easier to pirate. So by all logic, un-DRMed music should be suicide. But hey, what you know, it's selling, and stores are dropping the DRM.
No it's not. The only way I can think of that it's easier is that the download size is smaller... other than that, it's exactly the same.
Really music artists are probably nervous as heck at the prospect of their game not selling.
Wha-huh? Are you talking about the composer of the video game soundtrack? You lost me.
I disagree with the "massive" part. The numbers normally discussed suggest a 90% loss or something equally gigantic. This is peanuts in comparison. And again, the stats show that if you want 10% more, make a Mac version.
It takes more than 10% additional effort to produce a version for another platform. I hate to break this to you, buddy, but we're in a world where game makers are contemplating not even making *Windows* versions in favor of consoles... I recall (and I'm not going to cite this, because you're an idiot) the makers of Modern Warfare 2 saying that even with the reduced feature-set, and piracy completely aside, the Windows version of the game barely broke even.
Mac has no chance at all in this market, unless you're a small-fry like Wolfire.
I'm sorry, the "THE FUCKING LAW" argument never impressed me much. Some things are legal and shouldn't be, and some aren't and should be. Repeat after me: law doesn't equal morality.
Not that it's my argument anyway, but that point seemed to be worth making.
If you think the law is not moral, then work to change the law. Don't just break it!
No, I'm arguing a very simple thing: ignore the assholes, and make your customers happy, because you know, those are the ones that actually pay you the money, and may choose not to.
Yeah, but they're already doing that... so you're really saying nothing!
Oh wait, once again you're equating "your customers" with DaleGlass (1068434). Let's try this yet again:
The World Does Not Fucking Revolve Around You!
Maybe it'll sink in this time.
Then you have no business sense. Every retail business has to contend with things like product breakage, employees stealing the product, etc. The sane ones recognize that pissing off 20% of the customer base to stop 10% loss doesn't make financial sense, so while they do work against it, they avoid going completely nuts and having military security on the premises.
Yes, but you haven't shown that's what the game industry is doing. I under-fucking-stand your fucking assertion here, what I want is proof that the games industry actually is alienating 20% of their customers to combat 10% loss. Because the "Look In A Fucking Gaming Store" law says that ain't happening, and you've provided jack to back it up. And conversation is going in circles.
The same thing here. Too much DRM, and it annoys customers who decide not to buy, tell everybody around why they didn't, and in extre
The difference between "trolling" and "bad article" is: is it purposefully stupid in order to get outraged replies? Or merely ignorantly stupid.
Since the author here insists he's not stupid, personally, my first inclination would be to call this trolling as well.
Does NZ still have the insanely-high import duties on electronics? Man, when I was there, even a beige box cost almost twice what it did in the US due to that. I remember thinking: "hey NZ, if you haven't succeeded in creating a local electronics industry by this point, you might as well just give up and get rid of the duties."
This was in about 2001.
Sorry, this is just plain prejudice. For business purposes EU is one big country.
Oh come on! I'm not buying that one. The US isn't even "one big country", and it's *actually* a big country... take a look at the difference in consumer laws between California and Texas, to pull two big states out of a hat.
Soulskill rightly notes that at least some of the complained-about policies boil down to Apple's adherence to local copyright and licensing laws.
And who is that? Why should I care what they think? I thought at first that it might be a Slashdot commenter, but that name doesn't show up on this post.
God Slashdot summaries suck.
(This one gets flame-y.)
How would it?
How would what? Your question doesn't make sense. What are you asking?
There you have an example with Spore. Please explain where the effect was. It still got released on BT before the official release. It's entirely trivial to "casually pirate" it. Wikipedia says it was the "most pirated game of 2008".
Ok, so these three points translate as:
1) Not relevant to my point
2) Not relevant to my point (also incorrect)
3) Not relevant to my point
So was all the drama really worth it? I really doubt it, because that HAD to lose sales, while it obviously completely failed to prevent any piracy.
You can doubt all you want, but EA hasn't gotten rid of DRM on any of their titles.
Once I heard of the DRM I decided not to buy it, and until that point I was quite interested.
Yes, and let me try this one more time:
The World Does Not Fucking Revolve Around You
Please explain where the difference is. Music should be even worse, as it's contained in small files that are useful on their own.
Well, the difference is music "is contained in small files that are useful on their own." That's the fucking difference. You typed it in the same paragraph where you asked what the difference was, idiot.
The cost of producing a song (the smallest unit of "music") is orders of magnitude less than the cost of producing an entire video game (the smallest unit of "video game"). That *is* the difference. The economics are all out-of-whack from that alone.
Proof please. All instances of "massive loss" I've seen assume that 1 copy=1 lost sale. But that's clearly bullshit.
Ok then let's go by Wolfire's numbers-- 10% is still massive loss. Christ. Am I debating with a kindergartner or something?
In any case, it's not "clearly bullshit." There are two components to piracy:
A) People who pirate the game who would have bought it anyway
B) People who pirate the game with no intention of buying it
See what they have in common? BOTH OF THEM ARE IN VIOLATION OF THE FUCKING LAW YOU FUCKING DOUCHE.
Whatever the percentage of A compared to B is, you're arguing in favor of assholes who have zero respect for the time and effort of game creators.
Your argument, in short, is: "hey games industry, FUCK YOU."
I'm NEVER going to agree with that, whether the number in A is 100%, 10% or 0.01%.
If you don't like the law, then try to change the law. But you don't just go around breaking it at a whim because it's hard to get caught. Seriously, the rest of us are trying to run a fucking civilization here.
Why would they bitch about it? Those people who are not your customers don't have DRM! They got their copy from BitTorrent pre-cracked, and it installed without asking any questions. It doesn't do CD checks, doesn't have activation, doesn't refuse to work with DaemonTools, and has no installation limits. Besides, it often starts faster and crashes less. They have absolutely nothing to bitch about.
Then explain Slashdot. Are you brand-new here?
That's the funny thing about DRM -- the people it annoys are the customers.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. You haven't acknowledged that it's possible to have DRM and not annoy customers. Of course, since you have an apparent IQ of 75, I guess I wouldn't have expected you to examine the problem from all angles.
Every Spore pirate out there has no clue what the hoopla is all about, because for them it works perfectly fine, and they can install it anywhere they want as many times as they want.
Yes, but Spore is an EA game. EA.
The shittiness is due to it being EA, not due to it having DRM. (At best, you can say that it's due to it having EA DRM.) Look, EA hates their customers. EA makes buggy, shitty games. EA engages in anti-competitive practices and is actively trying to become a monopoly in the gaming space. EA IS SHIT. EA HATES YOU
It's not the same program as Notepad.exe. Christ, it would be nice if people would download and try it before spouting off in the comments here, but I guess that's not going to happen.
Thank you for pissing me off with your ignorance.
Dude, it's a totally different product then what we're talking about. Yes, Notepad++ has a shit-ton of features (and a mostly-broken GUI.) The one feature JamesPad has that Notepad++ does not is that it just auto-saves all your notes, without nagging you about filenames or disks or any bullshit, when you close it. And restores them all nag-free when you open it.
Apples, meet oranges.
Try JamesPad, it's a quick and dirty app I wrote that saves the notepad when you close the window, like old-school Mac Classic's notepad program:
http://blakeyrat.com/jamespad/
Requires Windows and .net 2.0 (I believe... some .net version.)
It's very much relevant. I don't know of a single game that hasn't been cracked. No matter what you do, no matter how you try to stop it, eventually I can get a copy from bittorrent. So you'd be wasting money.
Point A doesn't lead to point B here. If DRM is effective at reducing casual piracy, then it's not wasting money.
It did happen
Holy fuck, a cite!? It's almost as if you're not spewing nothing but ignorance! Of course, it's a cite of The Inquirer. Better than nothing, I guess... slightly.
Online music stores have ditched it, which seems to point to something.
Possibly, and yet games are not music.
Also, it's very attractive to blame every loss of sales on piracy. It's something external you can blame and avoid ever blaming yourself for anything.
Ok, but it's simultaneously true that massive amounts of loss is due to piracy. Again, you're writing irrelevance here... that paragraph has nothing to do with the problem at hand.
Many claims not to buy a game because of DRM are met with disbelief.
That's because a lot of people:
1) Bitch about DRM, then buy the game anyway.
2) Bitch about DRM, but they really weren't your customers in the first place.
In the same way a lot of people who pirate weren't your customers, a lot of people who bitch about DRM aren't your customers. That doesn't stop them from bitching. Hell, Slashdot Games seems to be read entirely by people who, by and large, do not actually buy video games. But they sure as hell bitch about DRM.
So, yes, when people lie or are hypocrites, their claims are met with disbelief. Incredible, huh?
It wouldn't be the first time an ineffective measure was adopted even though it miserably failed to work. See also the war on drugs that keeps their merchants in business, and the prohibition that miserably failed to do anything useful, and still took a long time to get rid of.
Except that it's not illegal to publish a game with no DRM. You're talking about legislation, we're talking about the voluntary actions of game publishers. Once again, you're verging on "completely irrelevant" here.
You haven't provided a *single number* to back up your point. Look, to make a case, you need at least:
1) A good estimate of the number people who pirate the title
2) A good estimate of the number of people who would not buy the title had it DRM (which, contrary to Slashdot's estimation, is extremely tiny)
3) An estimate of the cost of developing adequate DRM policies and code
You haven't provided any of those numbers. Not even rough estimates. You have absolutely no case here, none at all.
Instead of providing figures to back-up your assertion, you throw in shit like your point 5 which is completely irrelevant to the problem, and point 6 which appears to be a scaremongering urban legend at best.
And then to really make it all come together, you back away from your original assertion by adding weasel words (very possibly) to it when you re-state it in point 7. I seriously don't know why you even bothered replying, since you'd added nothing to the conversation.
Is it possible you're correct? Yes, I concede that. Is it likely? No-- if it was, then you'd see major studios ditching DRM as quickly as possible. The "Law Of Look In A Goddamned Gaming Store" says that your assertion is wrong, and I see no reason to believe that all game studios are somehow insane and you're not.
Dude you have to put the "too long, didn't read" version at the *top*. Otherwise the people who didn't read the wall of text won't read the tl;dr either.
I'm saying companies would make more money if they spent less time on DRM, and more time on making their customers happy.
You haven't shown that at all. Unless you're taking your personal opinion, and extrapolating it to the entire rest of the planet.
If you want to prove a point, you have to get around to actually providing some evidence to prove the point. You haven't done that at all.
Uh, maybe I misread, but wasn't his conclusion that 10% of piracy is probably completely genuine?
Look, Wolfire doesn't care about piracy because they're a tiny indie studio and they care a lot more about getting their games into people's hands than anything else. That's true of pretty much every tiny indie studio. While it's great that he's running the numbers and figuring out a better estimate for the piracy rate, his opinion on DRM is *not relevant* to studios like, for example, Nintendo.
And that's assuming you agree with his conclusion. I also think his argument is completely flawed. Whether you could have otherwise afforded the game or not, the fact is you still pirated it. I mean, there's no "oh well he couldn't afford it anyway" clause to any other kind of theft, right? Why should there be one for IP theft?
Man if I ever get enough free time, I've always been meaning to go through Slashdot and prove your premise. (Which I agree with.) I *know* there were posters here saying they'd gladly pay a dollar a track for music back when the Napster affair was in the news-- when iTunes began selling music for exactly that price, suddenly every single one of them changed their mind and said $1 is too much.
I did believe that at one time. I changed my mind when Apple was one of the *last* music stores to get off of DRM, and not even close to the first. I now think that Apple was just lying to us all the time and didn't mind DRM at all.
Not to exonerate Steam, but there are tons of apps that have issues with spotty internet connections.
One I have to constantly deal with is Windows Folder Share (or whatever the hell it's called now...) which, if it starts up once with a flaky connection, instantly assumes that there is no Internet connection at all, also that your username and password are wrong. It's about the most retarded "no network connection available" behavior I've ever seen.
What's even worse is that the same Windows Live product line includes Windows Live Messenger which is very good at handling spotty connections in an intelligent way.
Why would you want to? Who knows.
But thousands of people use Chat Roulette, showing that there is a demand whether or not you personally care about the feature.
In other news, the world doesn't revolve around you.
Well, since the quality of Flash's authoring tools is nosediving in the last 4 versions, this probably won't be as hard as the parent implies.
BTW, on the Apple-talking-about-DRM thing? It's not like Apple has never lied to the public before. Remember when .Mac was supposed to be "free forever?" Turns out, in Apple language, "forever" is about 2 years, then it costs a hundred bucks.
Look, regardless of whether Apple loves or hates DRM, the fact remains that *Amazon* (and some other vendors) negotiated the sale of DRM-free music before Apple did. That's why they get the credit, and Apple remains the company that loves DRM. If Apple wanted "hates DRM" on their resume, they should have acted quicker to beat Amazon to the punch.
We judge them by actions, not words. No matter how much they *say* they hate DRM, Amazon was much more influential in getting rid of it.
Without the success of Apple's much-less restrictive scheme, the record companies would never have considered allowing Amazon to sell DRM-free songs.
Whaaa?
Because Apple gave the record companies DRM like they asked for, Apple is responsible for Amazon's being DRM-free? That doesn't make any goddamned sense. Is that your real argument or some kind of prank?
Apple only killed off DRM when Amazon started selling music with no DRM at lower prices than Apple. It was a reactionary move.