Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[dizzyelk]

-long ass post-

And that's what's wrong with the model. If I buy a disc, I should own the disc and be able to do whatever I want with it. If I want to nuke it and make a fancy crack pattern on it, then I'm free to do so, if I want to play it everyday forever, then I'm free to do so, if I want to sell it to a friend because the game is crap, then I should be free to do so. I'm not talking about downloads here, it makes sense to restrict those, but an actual, physical copy of the software on disc? That should be a physical sale, since I am, in fact, getting a physical product. If the developer offers it, it would be great to give up these rights by my own choice to be able to download the software at a later date should the disc break. Or, to keep my rights and if the disc breaks I'm screwed and have to buy another copy. That way, I could sell the crap, and get at least a little of my money back, or have a copy for life of the good stuff. After all the really good games get played forever. I played through Ultima V a few weeks ago, I've recently restarted Fallout 1, I'm thinking its been too long since I played X-COM. The good stuff's worth $60-$70. But the problem is that so much AAA games are nothing more than overpriced fancified shovelware.

[runlvlzero]

Then you have people like me. I use to buy every new game that I liked. That was before I wised up and became old and miserly.

Now Gamestop is smart, they get to sell the same games 2x at least. They still make profit on the original sale and the 2cnd.

All my games are used. The game companies all get royalty for each first sale. But I'm pretty sure no one is obligated to pay royalties on 're-sale'. Its the way books are too. The book industry is doing just fine. But there's tons of used book stores. This notion of controlling re-sale and deserving royalties for it didn't happen until it became easy to pirate the games (software). Which hurts big companies, but actually benefits indies and small companies, or people like Toady who give them away for free, they get more exposure and more donations. So the big coprs try to push ever so hard to try and regain market control...

Anyway big 'evil' corporations just want to push their means of controlling the market in every sector. Its natural and encouraged by our f'd up laws and market (wall street). But it is not moral or ethical.

Surprisingly even car sales companies are 'leasing' vehicles. This means you don't actually own the car, and they DO get it back. The very rich power elite want to turn our entire world economy into the ultimate rental/disposable society. This might be 'cheep' for the short term but if people don't wise up, their gonna find themselves totally enslaved with no room to survive or move upwards in society.

I think its mostly done on a subconscious level too... either because people don't want to produce their own stuff, or are lazy, or can be manipulated easily by others... but what were seeing with piracy, and people simply refusing to buy stuff new off the shelves is the natural push back...

Eventually the wave pattern will reset and we might see some big companies based off of Toady's model (Red Hat, Fedora...) (they have their 'free products, but still sell support and full systems), if people get desperate enough and the laws don't crush us all. I.e. the very idea of a video game becomes permanently under 1 corporations control (I don't see anyone putting up with some BS like this).

So ya... durrr just save your pocket change, play old copies of ADnD (its still fun yo) and donate to Toady... Eventually the better model for software and IP in general (give it away for free, sell premium services, like F2P MMO's, further development of the engine...) will take over the majority and you won't ave to worry about draconian rich old misers trying to make betamax illegal to own anymore... (this shit has been going on for a looong time....)

[NW_Kohaku]

TED speech on what is wrong with copyright law.

I'll also quote this bit with TinyPirate quoting Douglas Adams, since it reinforces the point:

I think we all enjoy a variety of games but what is particularly fun is that it is a make-it-yourself experience.

Douglas Adams wrote a really interesting piece about the internet many years ago and it was as right then as it is now.

This subjective view plays odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, ‘interactivity’ is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’

Modern notions of Intellectual Property were formed at a time when the average person was not capable of actually changing the content they received in a meaningful way. 

Consider how modern sports broadcasts tell you at the start of the broadcast how you're allowed to watch a sports match, but that you aren't allowed to record it.  Even if you did, you aren't allowed to change it in any way.

Modding is, under current copyright law, basically illegal use of a wholly-owned product of a corporation.

The intellectual property law that exists today is the product of a movie and recording industry that do not have the best interests of society at heart, and they fail to even understand how their own industries work, at that, or they would see it would be of greater benefit to themselves to allow for the free recreation of existing works.

This is why the movie and recording industries come out with the likes of SOPA and PIPA (and ACTA for Europe) - they fundamentally hate the whole notion of an interactive medium and world where the public has a democratic free voice, and want to return to a time when all content could be corporately controlled.

People should not just get to "rent" a license, they should own their license - and have the right to rewrite the contents of a book they buy, as their version of the story is theirs to change.  This is why modding is allowed even though it is technically illegal - most developers of games understand that an interactive medium only benefits when you allow other people to functionally expand the features of your own product at basically no cost to you. 

[runlvlzero]

Interestingly. The supreme court ruled at some point that "game rules" specifically are not copy writable... You can make clones of DnD for this very reason. As long as you don't call your elves "Drow" and use "Drizzit", you can make "Obsidian Elves" and call him Haazzack. Although there is some grey area with character portrayal, you usually need to do a little more then change the name.

People have been using that to create and publish adventures, or campaigns for quite awhile. This is one of the big reasons WOTC went towards the D20 system and their online content system. Because core mechanics are not really copy writable even. Just what you call them to some degree. By core mechanics I mean, you roll a D20, and determine your stats... to hit rolls etc... I'm pretty sure you might not be able to call something "Armor Class", but you might get away with "Defense Rating" just to avoid WOTC lawyers =) In essence this probably would work for software too if you could prove the means of executing the rules did not infringe on the original writers code. Perfectly legal to create a game that simulates combat in the same way as Toady's for example.

And god you don't want to even get into a court room over software patents... Look at Sun vs IBM, Redhat et al... their still going at it.

[Cruxador]

Seriously though, if you're still buying consoles in the year of our Lord 2012, the silly bullshit that happens to you is your own fault. Why would you want to spend your money on a weak box with hardware that's out of date at launch just to get more restrictive system architecture?

Because the console costs less than a netbook and will play every game ever made for it in the past six years without having to deal with system configuration, while the PC costs four to ten times as much, and needs to be replaced every two years.  That's the primary reason to play games on a console.

Your math is wrong. Consoles cost 250-600 at launch in the last generation, and we can expect the upcoming generation to draw nearer to a $400 price point. Meanwhile, a PC capable of running all games that come out will run you $700-$900 depending on whether you just want to be able to run games at lowest settings and get graphics about on par with the upcoming console generation, or if you want to have some slightly more advanced capabilities. This means PCs are roughly double the price of consoles. Of course, even this price difference is pretty quickly balanced out when you consider that every console game is $60, while most PC games genres tend to price in the $20-$40 range and some price in the <$15 vicinity. Although all PC games can be free if you choose to pirate.

As a side note, you can play any PC game on PC, and only those from more than a few OSes ago (roughly equivalent to console generations for the purpose of comparison) require any particular "system configuration". And of course, substantially more games are released for PC than consoles ever year, usually at least three times as many even not counting indie titles like (for example) Dwarf Fortress.

[Jacob/Lee]

Although all PC games can be free if you choose to pirate.

You can pirate console games, too. You need a modded console to do it, though, and I'm not sure what is modded when it happens.

[runlvlzero]

At best, I think the OP and most people are just wising up and not wanting new shiny things every 6 months to a year in the electronics industry...

The big 'Sony' knows this, and fears it general, but at worst they'll file for some government subsidy and lay off 70% of their labor force and rename their company. While the top 1% of people who own everything physical in the company will walk away and never have to work again.

Although I still have family members who buy a new iPhone each year =/... so that's the way it is till everything looses momentum. Personally I was super happy that 3-4 years after release there was a surplus on the market. I got my PS3 for $200 with plenty of extra's. Instead of $600 or (more if you were crazy enough to buy it from someone on ebay).

Its actually an easy life style to live if you disconnect from T.V. and needing new shit all the time, get some creative hobbies of your own. Dedicating myself to an MMO for a few years helped lol =)

P.S. Become obsessive and consecutively post the same ideas paraphrased in a thread on an indie game forum over and over (that helps too)

[hermes]

I'll also quote this bit with TinyPirate quoting Douglas Adams, since it reinforces the point:

+1 for Douglas Adams quote, that's an interesting observation.

Wide scale piracy has been around for decades now, this whole thing is rather a reaction to people being able to pay for things online; competition for consumer money has become dominated by low cost impulse purchasing.  XBL, Steam, Battle.net et al have pioneered online sales on a massive scale, and these content providers love to harp on about how secure their systems are, how easy it is to make your fortune, how developers should use their distribution.

But.. wait... oh no!  Minecraft sells millions!  Quick, buy it Microsoft!

Anybody remember Palladium?  Supposedly that was going to lock down your computer for good and give Intel a 24h feed on your grandma's measurements.  Nowhere to be seen now.  This is all just smoke and mirrors designed to excite shareholders at the end of the financial year.  When companies get into trouble they start talking a lot about how many great things they're going to make next year.  Sony?  Not a good year.

The DRM trend will continue as long as people buy locked goods.  Apple popularized DRM sales by compensating with a great "meta-experience" (walled garden), other companies are trying to follow suit.  I think, like MMORPGs and other things, the initial fad has passed and consumers 5 or 10 years from now are going to have far more choice as the tech-bubble-monopolies slowly break down.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm not so sure the "fad" of MMOs has gone away so much, people still look at WoW sitting atop its giant mountain of skulls and its throne made of the bones of its feeble so-called-competition, and say "Wow! They're making so much money that they must use $100 bills for toilet paper!  Let's go compete against THAT!"

There's also an absurd number of MMOs coming out of places like South Korea or else things that are for casual gamers like Farmville.  Basically, the less like WoW it is, the more likely it is not to have to surrender their investor's first-born children to Blizzard in abject submission. 

There's also the fact that every shooter in the past 5 years has had to have multiplayer as well...

Still, when it comes to things like iPhone, it'll get better the more that companies like Google compete against Apple.  The reason that Apple got its ass kicked by Microsoft in the first place was because Apple tried to clamp down on all the software that people could use and Windows was (ironically enough) the system that let users have a much wider range of hardware and software.  Then people were somehow fooled into thinking that the company that failed for trying to control every aspect of their users was somehow the company for "thinking different". 

It's just the way it works - the more open a system is, the more they let you innovate upon it, the more the system will grow.  The reason the N64 did so poorly was because basically nobody but Nintendo and Rare were doing anything with the system.  You basically can't do any reasonable modding on current consoles, and Microsoft basically bans any attempts at modding on the XBox.  (Yet for some odd reason, people still buy more copies of Skyrim on the XBox than PC...  I just don't understand.  What's the point in buying Bethesda if you aren't going to mod the game until it works properly?)

[runlvlzero]

To be fair. Skyrim is way more playable then oblivion ever was, and its worst bugs have been patched. Oblivion un-modded was entirely playable.

I am one of those people who modded oblivion on the PC to kingdom come after beating it at least once on the Xbox 360 (Wrye bashing mods toghether...). Morrowind is something I played on the PC after I got done with oblivion.

I agree that Oblivion was a piece of crap, especially after modding it and playing Morrowind.

Skyrim is about 500% better then oblivion ever was though. It is rather enjoyable un-modded. Skyrim was heavily influenced by the team that did Fallout, and fallout was somewhat better then Oblivion, yet I didn't much like it enough to get New Vegas.

Hermes has it more or less right on the money as far as the stupidity of DRM as a Corporate strategy.

MMO's like EQ have gone F2P now, they might start rebuilding their user base and being competitive with WoW. WoW is the facebook of MMO's and its only cool because its "Easy" to play (has a simple UI, the game itself has just enough depth). Now you have all kinds of F2P's popping up, The Battlestar Galactica MMO, EQ2, It doesn't make sense to release a MMO without a microtransaction version.

I actually like what EQ did with their F2P system it makes a ton of sense for an aging game engine, SoE will get some money rather then none, enough to keep the lights on, and push out new expansions at a profit to a growing user base. Die hard players will still spend as much on the game as a monthly subscription and keep the newbs around and give them something to aspire too. Not to mention is free advertisement for the big franchise they own as far as EQ lore.

[NW_Kohaku]

World of Warcraft is popular because it's already popular.  There are only so many people who play MMORPGs, and those people all have played WoW already, and their friends all play WoW.  It doesn't even matter if the new MMORPG that comes out is a better game than WoW, because it won't have the playerbase of WoW, and that's why people will stay with WoW.  It's a self-perpetuating cycle. 

As for Skyrim, maybe they patched some things I didn't look at since I haven't been paying attention for the past couple months, but basically, out of the box, every skill besides the armor skills were utterly broken from a game balance perspective (Hey guys, look at me kill a bonus boss in one swing with my 10,000 attack power weapon!) (Hey guys, watch my stealth skills as I sit on the head of a guard in broad daylight without being seen and pickpocket him naked!) and many of the game features were placeholders at best.

Congratulations on getting married to a random personalityless NPC.  Enjoy your three lines of totally generic spouse text repeated forever and daily pie.

Yay for the new "endless quests" I can get from the thieves guild that involves breaking into the shack of a peasant who apparently either made their furniture themselves when they were drunk or stole it from the "failures" heap of a real carpenter, and have nothing more to their name than some rags for clothing, wooden spoons, and a single loaf of bread, but somehow suddenly have golden candelabras for you to steal.  They will be completely unguarded and provide absolutely zero challenge for you even if you don't bother stealthing at all.

But don't worry, there's the scripted quests that you will probably accidentally complete when you randomly wander into a cavern and pick up some random bauble and have no idea why you're suddenly on a new quest, only to find out you've just completely skipped all the good parts of the quest that provide any meaning or context, and just have to report in that bauble to the lost-and-found. 

Plus those other caves are basically linear dungeon crawls that essentially involve a set of enemies that are too weak to be even proper punching bags leading up to an arbitrary boss fight that, if those punching bags before provided any challenge, will now be basically impossible to fight "fair" against, meaning that you have a choice between being bored through 90% of most dungeons, or exploiting glitches to survive the bosses, and being bored the rest of the time.

Yeah, there's room for improvement, here.

I'd also point out that basically everything that was done between Oblivion and Fallout 3 and Skyrim was basically "just try to add as much of the fixes that modders did to Oblivion into the vanilla game as possible."  In fact, remember Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul?  Yeah, after that, they just plain hired Oscuro to work for Bethesda.  That's not really a complaint, if they can't do anything better, that's at least something, but one would think that having at their disposal total artistic control would have led to something better than the utter placeholder that was, for example, the marriage system.  But oh no, they just HAD to release on the utterly arbitrary 11-11-11 release date instead of actually shipping a finished game. 

[Urist McDwarfFortress]

Congratulations on getting married to a random personalityless NPC.  Enjoy your three lines of totally generic spouse text repeated forever and daily pie.

DAILY PIE!!!  I don't get where the problem is, this sounds like the perfect relationship!

[Shinotsa]

Funny enough Blizzard has my complete and total respect because they ONLY release finished games. Sure they still have problems, but they're the kind of problems you miss with a small beta test.

Things have only gone downhill for Bethesda after Morrowind. Oblivion was god awful, Fallout 3 was better, New Vegas was basically a Fallout 3 mod that despite adding everything players wanted in Fallout 3 managed to be worse than it, and Skyrim was close but they paid no attention to the new leveling up system, and completely forsook magic. Sure, it used to be overpowered, but now it's utter rubbish. I had two characters in Skyrim, a mage and a warrior. I played the mage and had severe difficulty late game because the spells cap at a certain point, skill gain is so slow for magic, and putting points into magic just seems to give you mana rather than spell damage. I got fed up and created a big guy who's philosophy toward everything was hitting it with a hammer. After an in game week of making iron daggers I went out and beat the game with my hammer. Mudcrab? Hammer. Giant? Hammer. Dragon? Hammer. End boss? Hammer. I had some problems when the enemies would "level up" and I'd be against a new type all of a sudden, but all in all it was much easier than a mage. Apparently my friend played a stealthy character and bugged the game out when he one-shotted the end boss before he was done with his animation.

I will say though that I played the entire game on a console and never ran into any significant bugs. Balance issues galore, but never bugs.

Oh, and if you want to see something hilarious put an ice spike in each hand (don't combine them) and shoot them at an upward angle into a dragon skeleton. Hours of enjoyment!


I am suprised that no one mentioned a merge between PC and console games. I think it would be interesting to buy a license to Skyrim from a Bethesda website or an online vendor, and have access to it (along with any save games/mods) through my computer and my console. It'll be a while before this even becomes a possibility, but I enjoy the system steam has right now where you own the games on an account, and I wouldn't object if used game sales got replaced with a steam sale.

[Urist McDwarfFortress]

Skyrim was close but they ... completely forsook magic. Sure, it used to be overpowered, but now it's utter rubbish. I had two characters in Skyrim, a mage and a warrior. I played the mage and had severe difficulty late game because the spells cap at a certain point, skill gain is so slow for magic, and putting points into magic just seems to give you mana rather than spell damage.

Really?  My experience was the complete opposite.  I found magic to be hilariously overpowered in Skyrim.  Once you get the Stagger perk for destruction, then you can easily beat anyone in the game with 2nd level spells; usually without ever being touched.  If you get bored of fighting someone, just become ethereal and Lightning Storm them into dust.  Nothing in the game seems more overpowered than lighting storming an ancient dragon (what should be the hardest enemy in the game) for 10 seconds and watching it literally dissolve into a pile of dust at your feet!

Not that the "Me smash puny dragon with giant hammer!" approach was particularly difficult either, but at least you're not going to brush aside the most powerful enemies in the game as if they were a gnat.

[Ghills]

Your math is wrong. Consoles cost 250-600 at launch in the last generation, and we can expect the upcoming generation to draw nearer to a $400 price point. Meanwhile, a PC capable of running all games that come out will run you $700-$900 depending on whether you just want to be able to run games at lowest settings and get graphics about on par with the upcoming console generation, or if you want to have some slightly more advanced capabilities.

I bought my computer years ago for $550 and it still runs just everything I want (until I moved to Vista, at least). 

If you buy a computer for $900 now, you should be able to play games for at least the next 5 years.  I mean, Dell recently had an i7 2600 w/ 8 GB RAM on sale for $800, that's ridiculous specs for the money. Admittedly, it's Dell, but they aren't any worse than other big sellers.

Things have only gone downhill for Bethesda after Morrowind.

I am suprised that no one mentioned a merge between PC and console games. I think it would be interesting to buy a license to Skyrim from a Bethesda website or an online vendor, and have access to it (along with any save games/mods) through my computer and my console. It'll be a while before this even becomes a possibility, but I enjoy the system steam has right now where you own the games on an account, and I wouldn't object if used game sales got replaced with a steam sale.

Can't argue with you there.  I'm ecstatic about OpenMW and Crystal Scrolls projects - maybe we can keep Morrowind alive and well for years to come.

And people *have* been talking about cross-platform licenses. Not in a consumer-friendly or useful way, though. It's pretty frightening, really, the amount of control people think they ought to have over other people's stuff.