Man of Honour
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Benifets to be a pirate gamer :(
- Thread starter ColdAsIce
- Start date
I don't see how you came to that conclusion. Renting makes the game companies money, they make more money than they would have by not allowing renting and people buying games second hand instead. Pc games will be cheaper because the development costs are lower. Plus, pirating them is so easy you would never get away with charging what they charge for console games.
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Man of Honour
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That's all dependant on the price of a wholesale rental copy, which I don't have to hand.
Burnsy
Man of Honour
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You only have one platform to develop for rather than two or three. And you don't need a special licence from the company that owns the console for expensive dev kits etc. You can also distribute them for almost no cost online.
I can create and distribute a computer program in java which will work on all operating systems for nothing.
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If PC development costs are lower, and I don't think they are, then it's not for that reason. A PC is not the static platform that DirectX would have you believe. There is a near infinite combination of CPUs, graphics cards, RAM, Windows versions, driver versions, which makes it a nightmare to test for everything. If you develop a game for the PC, you have to test for and account for that.
If you develop for the XBOX360 you have to account for a couple of fixed versions. Same for the PS3. If you develop for the Wii you have one version to develop for.
Conversely, the high cost of R+D, etc is made up for the fact that you can sell one game many times.
If you can't sell enough copies to recoup your costs then that's an argument for amending your business model, long before it becomes an argument for abolishing the second hand market.
Maybe with a rental model, sure, but buying a game is not a rental. You pay a premium for the use of the IP with no rental costs after that. You are then free to transfer your rights to any subsequent seller for whatever premium they are willing to pay.
Except that 100 people downloading a game can all play it at once, whereas 100 people buying a second hand game have to form a very long queue.
Depends... If you're using something like the Doom 3 engine, say, then yes. Otherwise you just buy Visual C++ or whatever and off you go.
The cost of a devkit is probably fairly small compared to other costs involved in developing a game, particularly if the terms under which the kit is bought allow you to use it for more than one game, which I would think must be the case.
Where do you think the money came from to make World of Warcraft? It certainly didn't come from pirates.
Actually I see your point, The Sims was such a poor game.
You should also note, that EA are offering Battlefield Heroes for free. One of the most popular series on the PC platform. Hardly a poor game.
Man of Honour
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Dev kits, relatively speaking, are not that expensive. A 360 will set you back about £20k, but considering the overall dev costs, it's small and an asset not needed for every game.
As for your java comment, no game which requires a shred of performance will use managed code.
Burnsy
Are you on a different planet?
If the developers thought that, they wouldn't make and license rental version.
yes and it will be rubbish. A lot of money has to go on modelling and graphics. This is just going to keep going up s computers get more powerful.
Soldato
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Modding the orginal xbox was fun and great for a number of reasons. With the 360 though it is less appealing, for a start getting banned from xbox live makes it not even worth it for me. All the fun comes from xbox live!
Mate of mine has a flashed 360 and seriously it is ****** me off at the moment. He got GTA 2 days before release. Theres a custom disk for Guitar hero 3 with loads of new songs that are really good.
He can play online and it costs him nothing but bandwidth and blank disks to get new games.
I've gone completely legit and get a raw deal. It sucks
As far as getting games early goes, if you order with certain online etailers then you're pretty much guaranteed to get it before the release date.
Most etailers will ship it a fair few days in advance to ensure you get them for release. I've received and finished a fair few games before they've even been released because of this
They won't use RS for games like GTA IV, torrents? Newsgroups?
Anyway,
oh well, I guess it's your choice - you want a new game early than everyone else, mod your xbox. I was attempting to do it the other day but it's too much hassle for a short weekend.
Anyway,
oh well, I guess it's your choice - you want a new game early than everyone else, mod your xbox. I was attempting to do it the other day but it's too much hassle for a short weekend.
Caporegime
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two things made me laugh, it just so happens this is a long weekend
plus it takes about 2 minutes to open up a xbox 360, about 30 seconds to connect it up so the drive is hooked up to the pc, and a minute from boot to flashed firmware, another 30 seconds to disconnect it all and another 2 mins to put it all back together............ too much hassel?I still use it as just a demo really, I buy every game i really liked, its barely worth it for all the crap games on consoles. i've bought Mass Effect, crackdown and Gears came with the 360, GTA4 is ordered haven't played anything else for more than 30 mins because most of the games are so unbelievably terrible(all the film/tv spin offs plus a bunch more) or so completely unoriginal or just plain bad.
People get way to happy with attributing costs in developement on PC's to testing compatibility because of the far ranging differences between different PC's. Frankly thats cack, games go through beta testing 90% for the purpose of checking gameplay, getting feedback, finding bugs in the code that have nothing to do with the spec of the PC. finding and changing bad story, quests, guns, sounds etc. 10% is, oh that guys playing with a radeon 9200 or whatever, 5 mins with that card in a system, oh, it hates shader model 3.0, patch = adding a line of code that stops a 9200 from using shader model. IF a game is perfectly coded to work with dx9, its a safe bet 95% of systems will already work with that game on PC's, most of that other 5% have something wrong with their system, a fault with hardware, conflicting software in mem, malware/virus going on and about 0.5% of that 5% has a card that simply doesn't like one setting.
Console games are needlessly expensive as MS/SONY want to make money back off the software, not altogether unreasonable. The difference is ms and sony subsidise the cost of their hardware so people buy it and make money back through games(then at some point that just becomes pure profit), but PC owners by their PC for a variety of reasons, MS or sony don't lose any money by you buying a PC from them or not from them. So they aren't looking to make money back on the hardware.
I don't care if I pirate games, people say its a law like any other, thats fine, but I don't have to believe they are on the same scale as any other crime, I don't agree with the LAW in the first place. Its not the same as physical robbery, there isn't any risk, there isn't any lost profits. If i wasn't going to buy the game anyway, they would never get money off me. The only reason people like the RIAA complain about piracy is they just flat out assume, every stat they produce assumes you would have bought the game/dvd/album in the first place so you were going to give them £30 but then you stole it instead. This is not the case for 95% of pirate's, its more of a communistic thing in my book. I pay for the games i really want and can afford, and sometimes i try games i can't afford, or games i would simply never in a million years buy. NEver a single case in which I've pirated software I would have actually bought but then didn't. Even Stalker, which i had on pre-order and got 1-2 weeks before launch on pirate as I hate the fact i WAS buying it but was going to hear about it in spoilers for 2 weeks before i could play it. I dl'd it, played it, hated it, and didn't cancel my pre-order because I played it, still got the tin edition sitting here still sealed.
I'm stuck at home, in chronic pain, with very little money, very little to do, feeling like crap all the time. Seriously, how bad is it I play a few extra games of which anything thats good i choose to buy anyway?
I pay literally as much money as I can afford into the industry, choosing to give it to the companies I think deserve it most, and allow myself access to everything. There is literally NO MORE money I could spend here, so its sit at home bored, in pain, with nothing to do. Or play a few games, makes no difference to anyone in the world at all, takes no money from anyone at all, but I get a little more happyness out of life. Sure, pirating is the devils work.
Are you on another planet? Developers do not want rental stores to be open at all. If I remember correctly Nintendo tried to stop it from happening back in the SNES days, but they found a loophole which meant they couldn't include the manual or the original box when renting games out.And before anyone says it, no people do not rent games to try before they buy. a lot of research has shown very few people go out to buy the game after rental.
I don't really want to get into this argument but statements like this really annoy me.
Share the source. You can't claim that something backs up your argument by simply saying "well I read it somewhere" or just wildly proclaiming research has been done without at least saying where you found or heard of such research.
sigh at the peeps LOLLING at playing it 2 days before release when it was out earlier. Yes you are right but we were at a horror film festival for 4 days so he didn't get a chance to play GTA IV properly. Also my main point was as a pirate he gets his hands on about 100 extra songs on Guitar Hero II, extra content for nothing while the rest of us pay through the nose for a drible of 3 songs here or there!