Yeah, from reading the article, it appears as if he sees that "if" as not much of an "if" at all. Still, he has done a lot to work towards that position, which is more than I can say for any of the comparable writers.
Games are too expensive for all involved. I don't know where it started, the desire for cinematic qualities in games that is causing development budgets to go apeshit. Did it start with the PS?
What would they rather have us do? “Talk with our wallets” and not play the games at all, and certainly don’t buy them. Which would also kill the industry, but that’s somehow the more moral solution.
In other words, if the industry isn’t going to get the message no matter what we do and is going to die either way, why should we deny ourselves the few good games that get released?
I paraphrased, but that is the argument he's making.
Well, technically, he's saying that people can't buy the games they want- not that they do not want to buy them at all. He gives a lot of reasons for that; lack of demos, quite unrealistic pricing, ridiculous retail policy. Take this quote, for instance:
I think it’s largely created by a failure to adequately meet demand. If anything, piracy indicates a continued interest in games that are otherwise inaccessible for whatever reason, in most cases due to excessive prices.
And here's what you paraphrased:
"We aren't going to buy the game anyways so we might as well pirate it"...
Doesn't sound like the same. What exactly are you implying, anyway? That people pirate because they don't care about the game? So you're arguing people that would not have bought the game, because they have no interest whatsoever, are doing damage to the industry by... not buying it? Huh? Of course that makes no sense...
I'm a little sad, though, that the author got so little verifyable data. The article sometimes seems like a rather long educated guess (which the author admits, at least). Going by the picture he paints, the whole industry looks like a whole lot of barely qualified people having no idea how to play by the rules...
I'd like to see more articles going in-depth like that. Any ideas where to look for something like that? :?
Yeah, from reading the article, it appears as if he sees that "if" as not much of an "if" at all. Still, he has done a lot to work towards that position, which is more than I can say for any of the comparable writers.
Games are too expensive for all involved. I don't know where it started, the desire for cinematic qualities in games that is causing development budgets to go apeshit. Did it start with the PS?
They're not too expensive for all, just many. The problem is that most don't realize that and still try to be the next MW. (Namco is by far the most guilty of this.) Much of the industry revolves around the shotgun approach where most games aren't profitable but the ones that are carry the ones that aren't. If you threw enough out there your major successes would carry your failures. This worked prior to this generation where budgets were still smaller than what they are now. This generation, however, lowered the profit margins on successes and made failures more costly which is why we're seeing so many shifts in business philosophy these days.
Rakai on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]XBL: Rakayn | PS3: Rakayn | Steam ID
Let's be real here. Most people are goddamn idiots and given any opportunity to abuse the system and get something for free, they're going to take it. It doesn't say anything about the industry, it's simply human nature. Remember when PA advertised that indie game charity, where you could literally set your price, and a big percentage of people still pirated it?
Piracy is getting easier and more widespread, even with all the security measures publishers are taking. And the people pirating are the only ones to blame.
And there were numerous theories about why people pirated rather than pay a penny. Game piracy doesn't exist in a vacuum independent of any cause. That linked article might be long winded and highly accusatory, but that doesn't make the larger point that the industry isn't doing themselves any favours any less valid.
I started to skim, and then skip, once I realized how long it was though. So I won't comment on the stuff I only skimmed.
I will say that I agree that PC games would probably do better if there were more demos available. It's much easier to buy a game if you are assured that it will run on your system properly. It also helps if the demo is a good sales pitch.
Conventional marketing wisdom would seem to be that it's better not to release a demo, but instead depend on hype building trailers, at least pre-release. I guess the logic being that you risk the player finding out they don't wan the game I suppose.
Personally I agree with you that a demo's preferable. I know that personally I've gotten really excited about and bought games I was never interested in before, purely on the strength of an awesome demo (we'll avoid the question of which genres are better suited to having demos). The flipside is that I've also turned off of games that either sucked or just weren't my style, and a demo helped me make that decision. Which might be proving the point of the marketing study above, but really, you can't have it both ways and expect people to spend £30-£40 blind, then complain about the fact that people aren't as keen to take you up on it. It might work for major AAA titles that are super hyped, but for everyone else, you generally need all the help and word of mouth advertising you can get.
Like, you can legitimately get so much quality game-age for so little cash these days, stealing stuff is just such a shitty thing to do.
I have become a CAG addict. PC-wise, it's extremely rare for me to spend more than $5-10 on any game and I still end up with just about any game I could want from the AAA blockbusters to the indie hits. Anyone that uses cost as a reason is full of shit.
Rakai on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]XBL: Rakayn | PS3: Rakayn | Steam ID
Let's be real here. Most people are goddamn idiots and given any opportunity to abuse the system and get something for free, they're going to take it. It doesn't say anything about the industry, it's simply human nature. Remember when PA advertised that indie game charity, where you could literally set your price, and a big percentage of people still pirated it?
Piracy is getting easier and more widespread, even with all the security measures publishers are taking. And the people pirating are the only ones to blame.
And they still made a shitload of money, and said they were more than pleased with what they got. The conclusion is that you don't worry about how many people pirate your game, but how many buy it.
alset85 on
override said: I can't wait until Toady causes pressurized water to be able to actually damage things. I want to hit goblins with a shit cannon of such pressure that the meat is ripped from their bones
I know that "everyone" are going to buy SC2, but are people not genuinely disgusted when reviews of the game are like banned before release? That's an example of a developer overusing leverage, I think. Perhaps they are afraid of the little munchkin websites giving trollingly low scores for hits?
Nobody gives a shit about little munchkin websites though.
I dunno about that - larger companies seem pretty obsessed with keeping the entire exposure of the game as clinical as possible. Especially Activision is bordering on North Korean levels of message control and obsession with neat little smiles everywhere.
I don't understand why they bother though. Once you have a good name and a solid franchise reviewers just stop caring. Spirit Tracks was an abortion of a Zelda game (I would have become furious if I had actually bought it) and it almost has 90 % on Metafucktards or whatever. Complete submission.
Like, you can legitimately get so much quality game-age for so little cash these days, stealing stuff is just such a shitty thing to do.
I have become a CAG addict. PC-wise, it's extremely rare for me to spend more than $5-10 on any game and I still end up with just about any game I could want from the AAA blockbusters to the indie hits. Anyone that uses cost as a reason is full of shit.
Most consumers aren't educated enough to do this though. You think the 13 year-old's mom knows to use Red Flag Deals or Cheap Ass Gamer to wait to get her son a game? No, and I would bet a sizeable percentage of older gamers don't know either. Just look at the profits Gamestop rakes in every year, it shows that most gamers purchase their games from there, or a big box store like Best Buy or Future Shop. All they see is the $50-$60 (they are $70 here in Canada) price-point, and thus orient their purchases around that price point.
Compounded by the fact that PC games cannot be returned, and even console games depreciate very quickly (Gamestop resell prices are low, I'm sure you know this), it's easy to see that there's a huge opportunity cost for buying a full price game. Steam succeeds despite having a no-return policy because it is able to compete effectively via price. Activision is doing well in decreasing the price of its smaller PC games, such as Blur.
A large chunk of gamers are young, and they don't have much in the way of discretionary income. Asking these kids and their parents to drop such a large sum on a single game means the purchase has to be meaningful, and so they only buy the big triple-A titles that their friends are playing. Smaller games have to compete through price.
Point is: You can complain about cost being a non-issue. But you have to be a realist. If the customers aren't seeing the low-prices, then it's still an issue.
What gets me a bit depressed is seeing these big to huge titles get hyped up, then when you get to the store weeks after release the "used" stands are loaded with them. These cinematic experiences may be epic, but there is little replayability.
There was always very little 'replayability'. But as time passed, there were more options.
Everything is inherently replayable, but it is only the stuff we truly like that merits such a choice. In the end, that highly lauded RPG is only replayable because you chose to do it. Nothing essentially changes.
You know how millions were completely obsessed with devouring every iota of information in advance of The Phantom Menace or Jurassic Park? You remember how some magazine had a 40+ pages devoted to Matrix Reloaded?
Our industry is stuck in that mode constantly. Add to that our obsession with "artgames" and their "messages", not to mention how journalists, gamers and others are completely enveloped in the marketing circus constantly.
Nikkei reports today that Sony will be posting an operating profit of between 10 billion and 30 billion yen over the April through June quarter. The company posted a 25.7 billion yen loss in the same period the year before.
As contributors to the turnaround, the site lists strong sales of product in China, strong performance of new SLR camera models, and strong performance both domestic and abroad for LCD televisions.
It looks like video games contributed as well. Nikkei states that Sony's games and mobile division reached profitability for the quarter thanks to cost-cutting measures.
The Japanese language Nikkei report can be found here (free registration required).
Profits? That just means they are providing enough value in the PS3! :P
EVERYTHING. Random Car Models from 30 years ago. Snowblowers. Knitting. Obscure sports. A knock off Barbie doll. Most of these used to have fan or trade publications as well. Now they are just about all online.
Just that gamers are usually younger and almost by definition, tech savvy enough to handle the internet fairly well.
I will agree that the mainstream gaming press is too damn close to the source. The best analogy is what if all movie and television press was Entertainment Tonight, all fluff pieces, no critical content.
Like, you can legitimately get so much quality game-age for so little cash these days, stealing stuff is just such a shitty thing to do.
I have become a CAG addict. PC-wise, it's extremely rare for me to spend more than $5-10 on any game and I still end up with just about any game I could want from the AAA blockbusters to the indie hits. Anyone that uses cost as a reason is full of shit.
Most consumers aren't educated enough to do this though. You think the 13 year-old's mom knows to use Red Flag Deals or Cheap Ass Gamer to wait to get her son a game? .
The 13 year old's mom is not the one pirating games. Anybody who is pirating knows about the deals so lets not pretend otherwise.
Anyway that link is one of the stupidest things to ever be linked here (and thats saying a lot)
The problem with being too close to the source won't change until major newspapers have dedicated people reviewing video games. The gaming sites and magazines lean on video game advertising and previews. If the NY Times and Washington Post took video games seriously, we would have more coverage by actual critics instead of the fluff we get now.
Like, you can legitimately get so much quality game-age for so little cash these days, stealing stuff is just such a shitty thing to do.
I have become a CAG addict. PC-wise, it's extremely rare for me to spend more than $5-10 on any game and I still end up with just about any game I could want from the AAA blockbusters to the indie hits. Anyone that uses cost as a reason is full of shit.
Most consumers aren't educated enough to do this though. You think the 13 year-old's mom knows to use Red Flag Deals or Cheap Ass Gamer to wait to get her son a game? .
The 13 year old's mom is not the one pirating games. Anybody who is pirating knows about the deals so lets not pretend otherwise.
Anyway that link is one of the stupidest things to ever be linked here (and thats saying a lot)
I should add that pirating is big amongst university students and high school students as well (this is anecdotal but I'm thinking its true), who play a lot of video games but have a low discretionary income. Especially now that there's fewer jobs in the economy.
I liked how that writer did a lot of homework, but I hated nearly all his conclusions. Kinda like warping statistics for your own personal gain and viewpoint while ignore other parts.
Piracy is a problem obviously but its also complicated so I won't rant too much.
I will say though, anyone who justifies piracy since they wouldn't buy it anyway or can't afford it need to get a clue.
I feel most of the time its a "I can't afford ALL of them so I'll spend no money on any of them" mentality. Kinda like a keeping up with the Jones' mentality where you gotta have it all to be part of the crowd (aka this generations insane sense of entitlement). If your gonna spend your time playing games, spend some of your money wisely. It might not be a direct lost sale but its lost money to the industry somewhere.
The thing that always gets me about the "piracy only happens because you don't release demos" people is that they never bother to research whether their core assumption is actually right. If they looked at the download numbers they'd see that games with demos and good support still get huge piracy numbers. So do $10 games. If you're on a platform where piracy is easy you get pirated a lot, almost without exception.
Hell, I'd be happy to see them produce a single example of a well-reviewed non-MMO PC game that didn't see huge piracy numbers. I'm not aware of any.
The thing that always gets me about the "piracy only happens because you don't release demos" people is that they never bother to research whether their core assumption is actually right. If they looked at the download numbers they'd see that games with demos and good support still get huge piracy numbers. So do $10 games. If you're on a platform where piracy is easy you get pirated a lot, almost without exception.
Hell, I'd be happy to see them produce a single example of a well-reviewed non-MMO PC game that didn't see huge piracy numbers. I'm not aware of any.
I haven't really heard about Valve games being pirated, but maybe that's just because Valve doesn't complain about piracy that much.
The thing that always gets me about the "piracy only happens because you don't release demos" people is that they never bother to research whether their core assumption is actually right. If they looked at the download numbers they'd see that games with demos and good support still get huge piracy numbers. So do $10 games. If you're on a platform where piracy is easy you get pirated a lot, almost without exception.
Hell, I'd be happy to see them produce a single example of a well-reviewed non-MMO PC game that didn't see huge piracy numbers. I'm not aware of any.
I don't think anyone says lack of demos is the sole reason for piracy. There is a series of factors at work, including lack of demos. But anyway the goal for developers should be to have good value for their games and worry about getting people to buy their game, not thwart pirates. Piracy is here to stay and draconian DRM or platform exclusivity won't get you any goodwill. Only serious government enforcement could make a dent in piracy for Eastern Europe, China etc.
alset85 on
override said: I can't wait until Toady causes pressurized water to be able to actually damage things. I want to hit goblins with a shit cannon of such pressure that the meat is ripped from their bones
Anecdotal but true: Most of the pirates I know of DS and Wii games are over 40 and have children.
They see it as a huge bargain.
Absolutely. I fucking hate it too, it completely devalues games to those kids, making them the likely pirates of the future.
Me too, and just like Xenogears, most of the pirates that I know are also adults with children. As one told me, "They just can't pass up a chance to pay 40 bucks for like a hundred games!"
Heck, she was ok with it even after I told her it was highly illegal. :x
I feel most of the time its a "I can't afford ALL of them so I'll spend no money on any of them" mentality. Kinda like a keeping up with the Jones' mentality where you gotta have it all to be part of the crowd (aka this generations insane sense of entitlement). If your gonna spend your time playing games, spend some of your money wisely. It might not be a direct lost sale but its lost money to the industry somewhere.
Really, we're talking about this generations 'insane sense of entitlement', compared to generation X and the fucking boomers?
[strike]Twatty McAsshole[/strike] David Jaffe talked about the new Twisted Metal game at Comicon.
Jaffe shared some details about the characters and story in Twisted Metal. The four main characters are Sweet Tooth, Preacher, Dollface, and Mr. Grimm. They are all participating in the Twisted Metal competition, once again overseen by Calypso, who dangles the promise of a wish fulfilled for the victor. Though there won't be origin stories per se, players will find out information about each character's back story, such as the creation of Sweet Tooth's mask, Dollface's vain psychotic break, Preacher's righteous crusade, and Mr. Grimm's childhood trauma. These story elements will be revealed with live action cutscenes in the single-player campaign.
Didn't they pretty much do that already in the PS2 Twisted Metal game?
Jaffe closed out the panel by talking about "what could have been" -- ideas for this iteration of Twisted Metal that never came to fruition. The first was Twisted Metal: Apocalypse, a game set in after the destruction of civilization. One piece of concept art featured a bombed-out Mount Rushmore in the background, and others showed broken freeways and skeletal skyscrapers.
So instead of blowing things up, stuff is already blown up. HUGE difference.
The other was a version apparently inspired by games like Midnight Club, a slicker, more modern looking take on the franchise. Sweet Tooth was reimagined as a svelte, bald gangster with a flaming tattoo on his head, and different factions included Yakuza and the police. As Jaffe put it, this would have been "like a Michael Mann version of Twisted Metal."
Or, y'know, Grand Theft something or other.
BONUS QUOTE:
"Dollface came out of… not my ex-wife. My ex-wife is a great lady…" - Jaffe describing the inspiration for the character of Dollface
No matter how you slice it, pirates suck. Fortunately I know of very few of them in my circle of friends, and have never even seen an R4 card.
So long as there is a convenient option of "free", people will choose it over "not free but legal". Until there's some way of easily tracking and convicting people for theft, there's not going to be much people can do about it except hope to make it inconvenient. Unfortunately, it's usually the honest paying customers who get shafted when it's inconvenient.
Also, Borderlands DLC is 50% off this week. $5 or 400 MS Funbucks each. Probably going to finally grab Knoxx. Maybe Moxxy just for the storage..
Owners of the iPhone will be able to break electronic locks on their devices in order to download applications that have not been approved by Apple Inc. under government rules announced Monday.
The decision to allow the practice commonly known as "jailbreaking" is one of a handful of new exemptions from a federal law that prohibits the circumvention of technical measures that control access to copyrighted works. Every three years, the Library of Congress allows a handful of such exemptions to ensure that existing law does not prevent non-infringing use of copyrighted material.
Another exemption would allow owners of used cell phones to break access controls on their phones in order to switch wireless carriers
The government stamp of approval for pirating iPhone games.
Owners of the iPhone will be able to break electronic locks on their devices in order to download applications that have not been approved by Apple Inc. under government rules announced Monday.
The decision to allow the practice commonly known as "jailbreaking" is one of a handful of new exemptions from a federal law that prohibits the circumvention of technical measures that control access to copyrighted works. Every three years, the Library of Congress allows a handful of such exemptions to ensure that existing law does not prevent non-infringing use of copyrighted material.
Another exemption would allow owners of used cell phones to break access controls on their phones in order to switch wireless carriers
The government stamp of approval for pirating iPhone games.
To be fair jailbreaking isn't necessarily pirating, since the government's stance is that it'll allow you to download stuff that hasn't been approved by Apple. And Apple's notoriously ham-handed when it comes to turning down apps.
Then again, jailbreaking also makes it easier to download stuff that has been approved by Apple without paying for it.
[strike]Twatty McAsshole[/strike] David Jaffe talked about the new Twisted Metal game at Comicon.
Jaffe shared some details about the characters and story in Twisted Metal. The four main characters are Sweet Tooth, Preacher, Dollface, and Mr. Grimm. They are all participating in the Twisted Metal competition, once again overseen by Calypso, who dangles the promise of a wish fulfilled for the victor. Though there won't be origin stories per se, players will find out information about each character's back story, such as the creation of Sweet Tooth's mask, Dollface's vain psychotic break, Preacher's righteous crusade, and Mr. Grimm's childhood trauma. These story elements will be revealed with live action cutscenes in the single-player campaign.
Didn't they pretty much do that already in the PS2 Twisted Metal game?
Jaffe closed out the panel by talking about "what could have been" -- ideas for this iteration of Twisted Metal that never came to fruition. The first was Twisted Metal: Apocalypse, a game set in after the destruction of civilization. One piece of concept art featured a bombed-out Mount Rushmore in the background, and others showed broken freeways and skeletal skyscrapers.
So instead of blowing things up, stuff is already blown up. HUGE difference.
The other was a version apparently inspired by games like Midnight Club, a slicker, more modern looking take on the franchise. Sweet Tooth was reimagined as a svelte, bald gangster with a flaming tattoo on his head, and different factions included Yakuza and the police. As Jaffe put it, this would have been "like a Michael Mann version of Twisted Metal."
Or, y'know, Grand Theft something or other.
BONUS QUOTE:
"Dollface came out of… not my ex-wife. My ex-wife is a great lady…" - Jaffe describing the inspiration for the character of Dollface
Unfortunate implications are unfortunate. Dollface was a depressed female with confidence issues, working for a dollmaker, she spilled coffee on her boss so he locked her face in an S&M dollfaced mask with a key only he possessed.
And him just mentioning her is wrong on so many levels
To be fair jailbreaking isn't necessarily pirating, since the government's stance is that it'll allow you to download stuff that hasn't been approved by Apple. And Apple's notoriously ham-handed when it comes to turning down apps.
Then again, jailbreaking also makes it easier to download stuff that has been approved by Apple without paying for it.
Yup. I just didn't want to write all that out 8-)
The majority of people who are jailbreaking their phones are going to pirate software, just like every other platform that has been broken.
Posts
Games are too expensive for all involved. I don't know where it started, the desire for cinematic qualities in games that is causing development budgets to go apeshit. Did it start with the PS?
Well, technically, he's saying that people can't buy the games they want- not that they do not want to buy them at all. He gives a lot of reasons for that; lack of demos, quite unrealistic pricing, ridiculous retail policy. Take this quote, for instance:
And here's what you paraphrased:
Doesn't sound like the same. What exactly are you implying, anyway? That people pirate because they don't care about the game? So you're arguing people that would not have bought the game, because they have no interest whatsoever, are doing damage to the industry by... not buying it? Huh? Of course that makes no sense...
I'm a little sad, though, that the author got so little verifyable data. The article sometimes seems like a rather long educated guess (which the author admits, at least). Going by the picture he paints, the whole industry looks like a whole lot of barely qualified people having no idea how to play by the rules...
I'd like to see more articles going in-depth like that. Any ideas where to look for something like that? :?
They're not too expensive for all, just many. The problem is that most don't realize that and still try to be the next MW. (Namco is by far the most guilty of this.) Much of the industry revolves around the shotgun approach where most games aren't profitable but the ones that are carry the ones that aren't. If you threw enough out there your major successes would carry your failures. This worked prior to this generation where budgets were still smaller than what they are now. This generation, however, lowered the profit margins on successes and made failures more costly which is why we're seeing so many shifts in business philosophy these days.
Piracy is getting easier and more widespread, even with all the security measures publishers are taking. And the people pirating are the only ones to blame.
Like, you can legitimately get so much quality game-age for so little cash these days, stealing stuff is just such a shitty thing to do.
Conventional marketing wisdom would seem to be that it's better not to release a demo, but instead depend on hype building trailers, at least pre-release. I guess the logic being that you risk the player finding out they don't wan the game I suppose.
Personally I agree with you that a demo's preferable. I know that personally I've gotten really excited about and bought games I was never interested in before, purely on the strength of an awesome demo (we'll avoid the question of which genres are better suited to having demos). The flipside is that I've also turned off of games that either sucked or just weren't my style, and a demo helped me make that decision. Which might be proving the point of the marketing study above, but really, you can't have it both ways and expect people to spend £30-£40 blind, then complain about the fact that people aren't as keen to take you up on it. It might work for major AAA titles that are super hyped, but for everyone else, you generally need all the help and word of mouth advertising you can get.
I have become a CAG addict. PC-wise, it's extremely rare for me to spend more than $5-10 on any game and I still end up with just about any game I could want from the AAA blockbusters to the indie hits. Anyone that uses cost as a reason is full of shit.
And they still made a shitload of money, and said they were more than pleased with what they got. The conclusion is that you don't worry about how many people pirate your game, but how many buy it.
Steam ID
I dunno about that - larger companies seem pretty obsessed with keeping the entire exposure of the game as clinical as possible. Especially Activision is bordering on North Korean levels of message control and obsession with neat little smiles everywhere.
I don't understand why they bother though. Once you have a good name and a solid franchise reviewers just stop caring. Spirit Tracks was an abortion of a Zelda game (I would have become furious if I had actually bought it) and it almost has 90 % on Metafucktards or whatever. Complete submission.
Most consumers aren't educated enough to do this though. You think the 13 year-old's mom knows to use Red Flag Deals or Cheap Ass Gamer to wait to get her son a game? No, and I would bet a sizeable percentage of older gamers don't know either. Just look at the profits Gamestop rakes in every year, it shows that most gamers purchase their games from there, or a big box store like Best Buy or Future Shop. All they see is the $50-$60 (they are $70 here in Canada) price-point, and thus orient their purchases around that price point.
Compounded by the fact that PC games cannot be returned, and even console games depreciate very quickly (Gamestop resell prices are low, I'm sure you know this), it's easy to see that there's a huge opportunity cost for buying a full price game. Steam succeeds despite having a no-return policy because it is able to compete effectively via price. Activision is doing well in decreasing the price of its smaller PC games, such as Blur.
A large chunk of gamers are young, and they don't have much in the way of discretionary income. Asking these kids and their parents to drop such a large sum on a single game means the purchase has to be meaningful, and so they only buy the big triple-A titles that their friends are playing. Smaller games have to compete through price.
Point is: You can complain about cost being a non-issue. But you have to be a realist. If the customers aren't seeing the low-prices, then it's still an issue.
Steam: CavilatRest
Everything is inherently replayable, but it is only the stuff we truly like that merits such a choice. In the end, that highly lauded RPG is only replayable because you chose to do it. Nothing essentially changes.
I got to here and stopped reading.
Wanker.
EVERYTHING. Random Car Models from 30 years ago. Snowblowers. Knitting. Obscure sports. A knock off Barbie doll. Most of these used to have fan or trade publications as well. Now they are just about all online.
Just that gamers are usually younger and almost by definition, tech savvy enough to handle the internet fairly well.
I will agree that the mainstream gaming press is too damn close to the source. The best analogy is what if all movie and television press was Entertainment Tonight, all fluff pieces, no critical content.
The 13 year old's mom is not the one pirating games. Anybody who is pirating knows about the deals so lets not pretend otherwise.
Anyway that link is one of the stupidest things to ever be linked here (and thats saying a lot)
They see it as a huge bargain.
Most of them don't even know what it does, and are surprised when I tell them.
I should add that pirating is big amongst university students and high school students as well (this is anecdotal but I'm thinking its true), who play a lot of video games but have a low discretionary income. Especially now that there's fewer jobs in the economy.
Steam: CavilatRest
Absolutely. I fucking hate it too, it completely devalues games to those kids, making them the likely pirates of the future.
Piracy is a problem obviously but its also complicated so I won't rant too much.
I will say though, anyone who justifies piracy since they wouldn't buy it anyway or can't afford it need to get a clue.
I feel most of the time its a "I can't afford ALL of them so I'll spend no money on any of them" mentality. Kinda like a keeping up with the Jones' mentality where you gotta have it all to be part of the crowd (aka this generations insane sense of entitlement). If your gonna spend your time playing games, spend some of your money wisely. It might not be a direct lost sale but its lost money to the industry somewhere.
Hell, I'd be happy to see them produce a single example of a well-reviewed non-MMO PC game that didn't see huge piracy numbers. I'm not aware of any.
I haven't really heard about Valve games being pirated, but maybe that's just because Valve doesn't complain about piracy that much.
I don't think anyone says lack of demos is the sole reason for piracy. There is a series of factors at work, including lack of demos. But anyway the goal for developers should be to have good value for their games and worry about getting people to buy their game, not thwart pirates. Piracy is here to stay and draconian DRM or platform exclusivity won't get you any goodwill. Only serious government enforcement could make a dent in piracy for Eastern Europe, China etc.
Steam ID
Me too, and just like Xenogears, most of the pirates that I know are also adults with children. As one told me, "They just can't pass up a chance to pay 40 bucks for like a hundred games!"
Heck, she was ok with it even after I told her it was highly illegal. :x
Nintendo Network ID - Brainiac_8
PSN - Brainiac_8
Steam - http://steamcommunity.com/id/BRAINIAC8/
Add me!
Really, we're talking about this generations 'insane sense of entitlement', compared to generation X and the fucking boomers?
No.
Didn't they pretty much do that already in the PS2 Twisted Metal game?
So instead of blowing things up, stuff is already blown up. HUGE difference.
Or, y'know, Grand Theft something or other.
BONUS QUOTE:
Stay classy, Jaffe.
http://comic-con.gamespot.com/story/6270712/twisted-metal-panel-reveals-canceled-ideas/?tag=newstop%3Btitle%3B11
So long as there is a convenient option of "free", people will choose it over "not free but legal". Until there's some way of easily tracking and convicting people for theft, there's not going to be much people can do about it except hope to make it inconvenient. Unfortunately, it's usually the honest paying customers who get shafted when it's inconvenient.
Also, Borderlands DLC is 50% off this week. $5 or 400 MS Funbucks each. Probably going to finally grab Knoxx. Maybe Moxxy just for the storage..
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2012452170_apustecdigitalcopyright.html
The government stamp of approval for pirating iPhone games.
To be fair jailbreaking isn't necessarily pirating, since the government's stance is that it'll allow you to download stuff that hasn't been approved by Apple. And Apple's notoriously ham-handed when it comes to turning down apps.
Then again, jailbreaking also makes it easier to download stuff that has been approved by Apple without paying for it.
Unfortunate implications are unfortunate. Dollface was a depressed female with confidence issues, working for a dollmaker, she spilled coffee on her boss so he locked her face in an S&M dollfaced mask with a key only he possessed.
And him just mentioning her is wrong on so many levels
Yup. I just didn't want to write all that out 8-)
The majority of people who are jailbreaking their phones are going to pirate software, just like every other platform that has been broken.