Angthoron said:
Could you give some examples, please? I'm afraid I'm not aware of anyone else but Sony, and the DRMs it provided, plus the StarForce issues that a couple of corporations ended up cancelling deals with because it was plain bugged and incompatible with a lot of hardware (plus the enormous whine the communities rose because of it). I'm not following it much so I may have missed much of the happenings.
Well, at the very top of the forum as I wrote this was a company advertising their "DRM-free"-ness. Ubisoft has dumped the entire DRM thing on that Prince of Persia thing. Several lawsuits are allegedly in practice over EA's DRM. Things are obviously MOVING, regardless if the direction is presently meaningful.
Angthoron said:
Also - if the "Political Piracy" is as influential, why is it permitted to continue?
You say "permitted to continue" as if it was something that companies are empowered to stop. They've tried: They slap ever more restrictive DRM measures, set spies to catch pirates, and for all their efforts, all they manage to attain from this is bad publicity, because the success rate in identifying and stopping pirates still makes piracy a safer activity than crossing the street, and those prosecuted become yet another albatross around the company's neck as they wind up going after some 12 year old kid or a person who is now homeless. The fact of the matter is that these companies simply don't know how to deal with this, much like a cumbersome government army attempting to stamp out a guerrilla insurgency.
Angthoron said:
Whenever in real life there is a faction that tries to oppose the money-making or the power-mongering, there is generally retribution coming to them once they become influential enough. Why do we not see this happening?
We do. For the most part, the efforts are pitiful failures that serve only to create further outrage. The fact of the matter is that any penalty the company can hope to impose will appear grossly disproportionate and thus simply inflame the public against them.
Angthoron said:
Well, this has actually been fixed since the introduction of specially scaled prices in several Eastern Europe countries.
Which is certainly one method that has been used to reduce this sort of activity and gain sales, but it is not universally implemented.
Angthoron said:
And... Well. We're using teh intranets here, so using a phrase like "foreigners" in it is odd - this isn't national space of US or anything.
Well, it's a subjective term for a subjective phenomenon. When an American can't purchase a game because it's not sold in the US, he's a foreigner now. When a non-American can't purchase a game because the company will only sell in the US (most common case), he ends up with the "foreigner" problem. Bafflingly, the condition often afflicts people despite the fact that the item in question may be a digital download and payment methods include Paypal, which, of course, is pure foolishness and can only result in losses for the company.
aries202 said:
More piracy on the internet towards PC-games will make EA (and other publishers) drop the PC as a gaming platform in an instant. I wouldn't want that at all :!: Neither would any of you, I think...
Maybe you don't. I'm fine with that. We survived before EA, and we will continue without them. If publishers drop the PC and flee to consoles, their problems will follow them, and the void will be filled by a newer, smarter, and more market-saavy breed of independents, which will in turn merge to form the new out-of-touch conglomerate, and history will repeat itself over time again.
aries202 said:
You do know that amazon.com and other internet sites also 'spies' on what you do when you search the site? I also get the 'recommended for you' option when I visit amazon's site. Google makes recommendations, too, based on your internet habits. I have no problems with this.
I'm familiar with the level of spyware embedded on the Internet, yes: Adblock and noscript, never leave home without it. Just because the problem is endemic doesn't mean it's right, and the ability to track your browsing habits is nowhere equivalent to being able to directly scan the contents of your computer, just as the ability to read your mail and tap your phone is not the same as being able to read your brain.
aries202 said:
Isn't there an option in Steam where you can choose to not 'auto-update' your games bought on Steam.
If it exists it's not universal, and does nothing to address the other issues.
Witchblade said:
I think PC lovers are very much between a rock and a hard place here. When I started my impulsive little rant, I think I had forgotten to what an extent consoles had taken our leverage away.
Meh. I don't buy it. Consoles are trash, and the games for them are similarly trash. It's not about leverage, it's about clearing the stench of the decomposing corpse of the corporate behemoth.
Witchblade said:
Of course, hopefully we'll still have strategy games on PC at least, but gone are the days of things like the text-adventure that ensures the PC an undeniable place as a platform.
You say gone, I say they are just smothered beneath the stench of the corporate conglomerates, and merely await its removal to make a return to the free skies.
Witchblade said:
Perhaps the politicking should take another form then; that of encouraging gamers to support the industry that they draw pleasure from, with their wallets. On the other hand, I wish the publishers will likewise compromise and acknowledge that there will always be a base market for piracy; - those that for some reason or another, simply cannot afford the games, or who are blocked due to geographical locality.
The "base" market for piracy is, however, not necessarily intrinsically harmful. The "base" market of piracy are those who would always pirate, simply because they can. As such, they were never customers and eliminating them does nothing: If you have a selling market of 100K copies and 900K base pirates, you have a million users. If you eliminate the pirates, you will gain no more sales but lose 900K users Clearly, there is no profit in eliminating pirates, and the attempt may actually end up reducing your sales: The "base" pirate still represents a source of positive advertising: They recommend the game, but their motivations for pirating the game are unattractive at best and do not inspire emulation, nor do they typically encourage the emulation of their behavior. The base pirate is, at best, indifferent as to how YOU conduct yourself. The politically motivated pirate, on the other hand, wants to convert YOU to being a pirate, because he wants to hurt the company.
Witchblade said:
I think there is another genre of pirate that has arisen lately, not the "I steal because I am hungry, and have no money for food kind"; not even the politically aroused angry kind that I started the thread off as; but those that pirate because of the culture of easy entitlement that the internet has bred. These are the : "I take because I can" pirates.
Nah, this is just base piracy. Base piracy has existed since the earliest days of copyrighted work, and runs back over a hundred of years. The phenomenon isn't new, and its growth is purely due to failure to properly leverage the new medium. It is not even entirely clear that this is really harmful, as the growth of the userbase depends in part on the size of the userbase, and base pirates don't buy your stuff merely because they can't pirate it. There are basically 3 kinds of pirates: Base, Disenfranchised, and Political. The base pirate will always pirate. The disenfranchised pirate because they simply cannot buy the item, and making it available or affordable will convert them. Neither of these two really hurt a company, it is only the political that do it, because the activities of the political tend to increase "base" piracy (users often don't know HOW, and once they learn HOW to be pirates, they will become base pirates) as well as political piracy. I have witnessed this behavior firsthand: On a forum I've run for 3.5 years, there has always been an element of "base" piracy, but this never really expanded or exploded into the open (it was simply understood that such matters were not really talked about in detail, as base pirates have no particular reason to encourage emulation), until the entire EA DRM thing, at which point many users became political, and this has resulted in more pirates being created out of what were formerly paying customers. It's a fact that this happens. The EXTENT may be unknown, but it DOES happen, and like the saying goes, "once you start down the path of the Dark Side, forever will it dominate your destiny": Once a user becomes a pirate, they tend not to turn back.
Witchblade said:
Sure, you take what you can and get away with it, but someone spent a lot of time and effort and hard work creating the product that you are not compensating them for. Devs and producers also need to eat and pay bills. They are not magically sustained by the fact that thousands of people enjoy the products they created.
By and large, most people, even pirates, are sympathetic to the needs of developers. Publishers, on the other hand, are greeted with somewhat less sympathy, often ranging to outright hostility. While many claim they would be happy to support the developers, and there is evidence that this is true, a goodly number view publishers as a blight on the system, and the fact that they suck up MOST of any money paid into the sales system tends to cast a damper on the entire "buying things to support them" idea.
Witchblade said:
The other worrying scenario fits in with that one. I suppose it is understandable that if the industry eventually receives no more income from PC game sales, it simply will not be viable for them to continue.
On the other hand, is the death of commercialized gaming really a bad thing? The PC has always hosted a core of those who produce games as art. Arguably these games are actually better and more innovative, if not as glitzy with high production values. Will it really be a loss if commercialized gaming is put to death?
Witchblade said:
I suspect their piracy nightmare will follow them, though. I know many, many people who have "chipped" consoles, and who make use of pirated console games.
It amazes me that the industry has not caught on to the fact that piracy is rife amongst console gamers too.
I suspect they will have to start using better anti-piracy technology on console machines and games, which will push up the price of these items, perhaps giving the PC a foot in the door again...
And history will repeat itself. Like I said, the industry is frequently badly out of touch: Piracy has always existed. People pirated things before electronic media even existed. And they will continue to pirate things no matter what you do: The 'base' piracy cannot be eliminated, it always exists and effectively serves as a measure of success in and of itself: Things are pirated because they are popular. Things which suck need no DRM.