yeah would still **** me off if i went on holiday only to have to go pay to use an internet connection every 10 days to play the damn game.
Benifets to be a pirate gamer :(
- Thread starter ColdAsIce
- Start date
yeah would still **** me off if i went on holiday only to have to go pay to use an internet connection every 10 days to play the damn game.
because you have created a copy/probably 2 when you should have purchased a second digital copy therefore you have deprived them of a sale.
not really, I do buy most of my games, and was going to buy that.
But now you've found a reason to justify it yourself?
no i don;t need a reason, I pirated stalker cause i couldn;t be arsed to wait for it to come out or to pay for it, same with most games i ave on pirate.
This choice between annoying DRM or nice quick clean pirate copy pirate wins...
Plus maybe the amount fo lost sales this will cost them may show them that people don't want drm ( just look at galactic civ 2)
Soldato
the only drm issues ive had on the pc where with system shock II and bioshock, funnily enough 
i have a lot of games, and simply pirating a game because of drm (which would be cracked anyway) is just a woeful excuse.
you say maybe it will teach them, maybe it will teach you if they pull out of the market all together because it's heading that way right now. pirating because of drm is a tiny problem compared to pirating because you can which is costing them far more in lost sales.
i have a lot of games, and simply pirating a game because of drm (which would be cracked anyway) is just a woeful excuse.you say maybe it will teach them, maybe it will teach you if they pull out of the market all together because it's heading that way right now. pirating because of drm is a tiny problem compared to pirating because you can which is costing them far more in lost sales.
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I think games maufacturers a 'marketting' DRM stuff in the wrong way.
They shouldn't be approaching it with the view to stopping piracy completely, because ultimately all the features they implement just inconvenience genuine users.
What they should be looking to do is realease a 'core' product (glorified demo?) that has little or no protection from pirates. And then make additional content available for genuine customers who take time to participate in online registration, or activation checks, or whatever.
They shouldn't be approaching it with the view to stopping piracy completely, because ultimately all the features they implement just inconvenience genuine users.
What they should be looking to do is realease a 'core' product (glorified demo?) that has little or no protection from pirates. And then make additional content available for genuine customers who take time to participate in online registration, or activation checks, or whatever.
Why not just run it all on a Client/Server model 
and then just sell a hardware activation dongle akin to the banks using your credit/debit chip and pin?
That way you have an payment authorisation that occurs, verifies the user is the person with the code and you as a development don't release the server side publically thus pirating is useless until people attempt to create their own version of the server.. (akin to the WoW unlicenced servers). The lead time for them to achieve this is going to make it that the pirate gets the game much farther down the line. Then the server/client networking can be changed on any update/booster pack..
and then just sell a hardware activation dongle akin to the banks using your credit/debit chip and pin?That way you have an payment authorisation that occurs, verifies the user is the person with the code and you as a development don't release the server side publically thus pirating is useless until people attempt to create their own version of the server.. (akin to the WoW unlicenced servers). The lead time for them to achieve this is going to make it that the pirate gets the game much farther down the line. Then the server/client networking can be changed on any update/booster pack..
Caporegime
What do you mean, 10-15 game engines? You mean 10-15 game types? What do you mean?
Shoseki said:
OK, that makes more sense, but it assumes that media companies are genuinely happy to license things to you, which you are not. You only have to look at some of the things Jack Valenti has said about how people should be allowed to use DVDs to realise that. They don't want you to have eternal access to content, and until they change their mind there's not a lot we can do. They want to keep selling us new and updated versions of the same old films, rather than just allowing us actual access to the underlying content. I'm not saying it wouldn't be better if we could all have access to Blade Runner in any format, but that the media companies won't allow it. If I have a film on VHS, there's no way they'll let me just take the DVD for free, then the Blu-Ray, then the media+1 format.
Shoseki said:
And yet, games companies are spending a fortune developing new engines. How much do you think it cost id to make the Doom 3 engine? If game engines were "good enough" or whatever you're claiming, surely they'd just stop and churn out the content in the way you desire.
Shoseki said:
Fair enough.
Shoseki said:
User generated content? Great. Buy moddable PC games and away you go. Not sure what point you're making there...
Shoseki said:
I mean level by level, and you know what I mean.
Shoseki said:
My point was that there has to be some challenge to playing a game. Where's the challenge if everything is available to you from the start? Why should I get good at a game if the last level is as easy as the first and I can see the end sequence or whatever any time I like?
Shoseki said:
Yes, there's a balance to be struck, but you seem to be in favour of tipping it so far over that there's almost no challenge whatsoever. I too agree with the game being a more holistic experience than just being about the challenge, but if all I wanted was a story with no challenge or skill required I'd go read a book or watch a film.
Shoseki said:
In that case I'd guess that we're both missing each other's points. The best option is probably in the middle somewhere. I just don't see how you can suggest people selling us games bit by bit or allowing us access to everything up front. It doesn't make sense.
Microsoft obviously don't care the systems are being modded. The gamertag system is an excellent way of tracking peoples activities.
Just by looking at someones gamertag you can tell with almost total accuracy whose a modder and who isn't.
Of course the worst ones are extremely easy to spot.
Microsoft have all that data at their finger tips. Not only that they have all your contact information.
Its not like they are skint, I don't know why they just don't start hitting people copyright infringement and start taking people to court. Do that a few times in each continent and people at the very least start getting twitchy about connecting that ethernet cable up to live.
Morally I don't care whether people do it or not. What does make me laugh is a game like rockband where they have played into the pirates hands. Offering the game unbundled for £95 and the games another £35.
The modders get rockband for a cut price, how nice of them to offer them that sort of deal. Surely anyone with any sense would have made sure atleast initially it was a complete package to make sure even the modders bought a legit copy.
Just by looking at someones gamertag you can tell with almost total accuracy whose a modder and who isn't.
Of course the worst ones are extremely easy to spot.
Microsoft have all that data at their finger tips. Not only that they have all your contact information.
Its not like they are skint, I don't know why they just don't start hitting people copyright infringement and start taking people to court. Do that a few times in each continent and people at the very least start getting twitchy about connecting that ethernet cable up to live.
Morally I don't care whether people do it or not. What does make me laugh is a game like rockband where they have played into the pirates hands. Offering the game unbundled for £95 and the games another £35.
The modders get rockband for a cut price, how nice of them to offer them that sort of deal. Surely anyone with any sense would have made sure atleast initially it was a complete package to make sure even the modders bought a legit copy.
Microsoft don't have all the data though, unless they can prove the firmware is modded they can't ban you based on you having games early.
If you went on live with an original modded Xbox you got banned instantly, I'm guessing they cannot see that your 360 has the modified firmware otherwise I'm sure many, many bans would have been handed out.
The bannings that have happened before are speculated to be from bad dvd images without stealth patches, but that has been eradicated now due to tools you can use to check the image before you burn it.
Well, I guess game types is an added dimension. My point was, that as the platforms upon which these games engines expand, the actual amount that the games engine itself has to implement reduces. So for example, when API's were non-existent, every game was practically unique, however, as API's such as DX get bigger and bigger, it will require only a few lines of code to produce the desired effect, it becomes simply a matter of linking 20 standard packages together rather than investing hundreds of hours into a brand new engine simply for a single game. Therefore the differences between the game engines themselves will become rather small, I believe the technicality of the engines will plateau and "graphics" and "physics" will not be a selling point when they are all as poweful as each other.
Of course, game type is another dimension to multiply the number of platforms, but often it is simply a matter of scripting your API to produce the desired effect - the number of different possible ways of playing using the Warcraft 3 engine is an example of that, which has led to new types of game, such as Tower Defence etc - more influential than the WC3 title itself which was just another RTS.
Of course they won't be happy - they have had it good for a looooong time now, and if anything piracy is going to force them to move on for the good. Imho piracy is actually *good* for the industry in this case, without competition there is no need for improvement. I don't expect them to give me a free DVD of the content if I have the old VHS copy, there is a lot of costs associated with the production of either - not original medium costs, but packaging, distribution, reformatting, the DVD extras etc. *Those* are the things that originally sold us the DVD format over the VHS... not purely things like picture quality that are very "qualitative" and difficult to quantify. Simple things like the ability to pause / search / jump to chapter X that we take for granted now.
Game engines may be technically complex but they are still very undeveloped in many ways - when we start seeing game "platforms" that mature, and remember that maturity often comes from use, and it took probably ten years of millions and millions of people using and developing on the Web platform before we started to see the kind of quality we regularly see now online. Gah I am bad at phrasing myself sometimes. The number of people using game engines, developing APIs and writing games is not very large. Plenty of companies, with a low % of actual developers, working in isolation in many parts. But there isn't a global *need* to develop common platforms for games. There are certain projects that have potential (I spent 3 years working with OpenSG as a graphics API) but they are more specific to a particular goal - OpenSG is just a layer on top of OpenGL that allows the use of distributed scenegraphs, things that aren't use in games (scenegraphs often, let alone distributed anything). So that is *graphics* "taken care" of, not the rest of a game engine.
User generated content, the term itself, is entirely up in the air at the moment. You could consider this entire thread "user created content", because the actual value that it has comes from the very users who consume it. This is probably most of the actual value of WoW - not the crappy boring quests, low resolution models, music that we've heard a hundred times - but the thrill of working with friends to defeat a mighty foe, the joy of beating a team (not AI generated by the company but another set of humans), the satisfaction of completing a set or finishing a particularly tedious grind. I spent 2 mindless days grinding the same mobs over and over ala "make love not warcraft" to get my reputation up to buy an epic necklace. I didn't have to do it, no-one made me do it, and the grind was tedious. But when I finished it, I felt satisfied that I had worked and worked at something and completed it - something that someone *couldn't* buy on ebay, *couldn't* get "boosted" by someone else and do in half an hour. It took discipline and commitment, and I got the necklace. The necklace itself is crappy and not that amazing, but it was the sense of *satisfaction* that I worked for, not the end product.
What I meant was, when you buy Halflife2 on steam, you buy the entire game whether you ever finish it or get to the final levels or not. But imagine logging onto steam and you have a selection of a hundred different campaigns to try, a hundred different gaming experiences based within the half-life world... you might not always understand the storyline (which gives motivation to complete in order) but you still have the choice, pick & mix... your friends recommend fight A but you read on a blog that mission 62 is particularly difficult and you feel like a challenge. Click a button, pay updated, mission downloaded, ready! And thats just the *official stuff*, not the fan stuff, but the companies are supposed to offer things that fans can't, and canon storylines and characters are often more lucrative than game engines/platforms. Which is why mario is so goddamned important to Nintendo
Yes but as I said, that is very, very old fashioned. If you played a lot of games recently, they put the game credits as a link on the front page. The challenge of the game is to beat it, not to see a crappy animation. You could probably see that online on youtube if you looked. The satisfaction comes from completing whatever it was you set out to fulfill. And if you get stuck on some earlier level, you can skip it and come back to it later.
Its a bit like Exam technique - just because you get stuck on the first question doesn't mean thats it for the entirety of the exam! And just because you fail an exam doesn't mean that with a little more study you can get it! Of course I am not suggesting we hand out everything for free, but people like to play in different ways and by typecasting, you immediately turn off a lot of people. By giving people choice, they are free to explore whatever it is that they enjoy.
There is no storyline in tetris, it is purely a skill-based game. The nice thing about it, is because there are other games to play, when you fancy a bit of tetris, you can pick it up and put it down without any issue.
Now imagine if "tetris" had been created by nintendo and bundled as world 3 of super mario land on the GB. Only those people that managed to complete the first two worlds would be able to play it. It might provide challenge to do that, but you haven't given people the choice to play. I understand your point concerning challenge, but anyone who ever cheats (most people try it at least once) realise that there isn't any fun in it after a while, it becomes more like game testing. I have a friend who is determined to never know cheat codes for any game, and whilst I respect his wishes, I do feel sometimes that he misses out. But that is his way of playing and I respect it.
I think because in this case "game" is too broad a term. Nowadays, anything about a game can be found out online - cheats, tricks, full walkthroughs, storylines etc etc. The one thing that they can't put online is the experience of the game itself. But the term "experience" is an incredibly broad term. Its a little like music - you can "experience" a song by downloading a digital copy illegally, but you can never download a "performance", because a performance is live, you have to be there to see them, experience the crowd, interact with them, essentially. The same with games. And how you choose to interact with them is far more important than simply the way that the developer *decided* you should interact with them.
Examples of emergent gameplay :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2f0aGMAx7w&feature=related (musical chairs in karazahn)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP6rSCVsP8M&feature=user (farcical football to allow both teams to stay in the league, Nice Guys Finish First, dawkins)
More if I can find them ^^
Soldato
http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=623831&forum=122
An interesting thread. An addon pack for Neverwinter Nights 2, the Mysteries of Westgate. It was finished sometime at the end of last year, but still hasn't been released because: "Atari has been working hard to develop a new security system that can be used not just for MoW but for all Atari products that need protection for data files without using the traditional route of wrapping the .exe file. Unfortunately, developing this system has taken longer than we anticipated and MoW’s release has suffered as a result, because it is the first product that will use this new system."
So they've had the game sitting on a shelf for four and a half months while they come up with some kind of anti-piracy which is going to be cracked in a couple of days. A week at most.
And this makes me really angry. If a game is finished, the developers are hapy that its finished, its not being rushed out of the door, then let us play it! a lot of the NWN2 community is angry with this, because Atari is hardly going to gain anything from this 4 month delay. And while I would have bought this game, I'm considering pirating it, just to send a STFU to Atari.
If it was delayed 4 months for bug fixes, stability issues and they were adding content, it would be fine.
An interesting thread. An addon pack for Neverwinter Nights 2, the Mysteries of Westgate. It was finished sometime at the end of last year, but still hasn't been released because: "Atari has been working hard to develop a new security system that can be used not just for MoW but for all Atari products that need protection for data files without using the traditional route of wrapping the .exe file. Unfortunately, developing this system has taken longer than we anticipated and MoW’s release has suffered as a result, because it is the first product that will use this new system."
So they've had the game sitting on a shelf for four and a half months while they come up with some kind of anti-piracy which is going to be cracked in a couple of days. A week at most.
And this makes me really angry. If a game is finished, the developers are hapy that its finished, its not being rushed out of the door, then let us play it! a lot of the NWN2 community is angry with this, because Atari is hardly going to gain anything from this 4 month delay. And while I would have bought this game, I'm considering pirating it, just to send a STFU to Atari.
If it was delayed 4 months for bug fixes, stability issues and they were adding content, it would be fine.
Soldato
I don't have any moral issues with Pirating software, games and movies. However I'd rather not mess about with my console and by games cheap (I.e. not at release date and pre owned if possible)
Exceptions to this are most A-List Nintendo Games and GTA IV (although I only paid £29 for GTA IV but because of shortages of Mario Kart Wii I had to pay £35
)
I sell or trade in when bored or I have completed them and so my gaming habit doesn't cost that much (less than my drinking money
)
Exceptions to this are most A-List Nintendo Games and GTA IV (although I only paid £29 for GTA IV but because of shortages of Mario Kart Wii I had to pay £35
)I sell or trade in when bored or I have completed them and so my gaming habit doesn't cost that much (less than my drinking money
)