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podperson
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For once I have to strongly disagree with one of Tycho's posts. I speak as a game developer. (I have no idea who the specific person Tycho was making fun of is, and he may well be a complete idiot or have said very stupid things very stupidly, but that's beside the point.)
When you sell a real, physical product (e.g. a car) even second-hand buyers are customers. For one thing, the price your product fetches new is in part driven by its resale value.
When you sell a product that is fundamentally an imaginary thing depending entirely on the social contract (software is sold as a "license" to run a bunch of bits through a CPU) it behooves you (the vendor) to maintain the fiction that it's a real product as much as possible. The alternative is suddenly discovering that no-one respects the social contract any more (and piracy reigns).
When you sell a real, physical product (e.g. a car) even second-hand buyers are customers. For one thing, the price your product fetches new is in part driven by its resale value.
When you sell a product that is fundamentally an imaginary thing depending entirely on the social contract (software is sold as a "license" to run a bunch of bits through a CPU) it behooves you (the vendor) to maintain the fiction that it's a real product as much as possible. The alternative is suddenly discovering that no-one respects the social contract any more (and piracy reigns).
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I know people don't like license control and other forms of copy protection, and clearly when it hurts people that pay for your stuff it's worse than nothing at all, but I'm generally on the wagon that says this sort of data control is necessary if you want to make money off of your digital thing. How you get paid for it is an open question: some sort of sliding scale, microtransactions, heck, just take your age, multiply by 2 and send me that many dollars, if you like, but if you don't just want to give it away for free and hope people pay for it, there must be some form of control.
I hope they make a really good one, someday.
The general topic is already being discussed.
Your title is apt!