Game News PS: T Available on GoG

[Antihero]

Actually it was re-released on DVD quite recently. And I don't think it was ever on any abandonware sites. Wasn't it also available before on some other digital distribution service like GameTap or something?

Don't think it's been available for digital download before. Nor was it published on DVD everywhere in the world, as it is available now. Both are the case because Atari/Hasbro is really hard to negotiate with, and presumably GOG worked at it until they got them to agree to DRM-free digital download on their significantly-smaller-than-other-DD-services service.

That's actually quite impressive.

You could once play it as part of some subscription to GameTap/Metaboli, but never to keep permanently. They had lost it from their catalogue last I knew, though.

If you wanted the DVD re-release in Canada, I think you were forced to get it off eBay from the US or through other indirect channels - not sure exactly who got it but the US, the UK, and wherever else (or if people in EU countries could just get software shipped from Amazon.co.uk if needs be).

 

[GuideBot]

As Brother None said, the rerelease didn't come everywhere. It wasn't available in Australia, for instance. There was a crappy fold out cardboard digipack version about 6 years ago that I saw a single copy of ever, but that's been it.

 

[SCO]

You do not understand the outrage: they sell free content! The publishers do not count because they are greedy jews and the devs do not exist anymore. It's bad enough that old games are getting a second life and allowed to reaffirm their strong popularity, but Poles are making money out of it!

I know right? I was at the Van Gogh museum not to long ago, went into the giftshop, picked up a few posters and walked out. Bitch at the teller was all "sir, you have to pay for those" and I was all "You greedy Jewish whore, it's not like van Gogh gets any money from these sales"

Do you think this is funny?

 

[Lomm Cuz]

So what you're saying is that if you ignore everything I said and instead just repeat the same tired excuses that are oh-so attractive because they justify getting shit for free, then that proves me wrong?
Wow, that's absolutely fascinating.

Ok, you want to mean that we should pay for the games because that will prove to the distributors that them are, in fact, making money and therefore that maybe urges a change in the selling or, at least, developing model, right?

Well, what I want to mean is that: very few distributors is actually doing real deep market investigations in relation with the quality of their games, I mean, their researchs proves that the teenagers and the Average Joe is buying mindless crap, and they are developing for this particular niche, the one that gives greatest earnings... why are they going to look for marginals groups of people claiming for real good games?

Honestly, I can't believe in the utopia of thinking that feeding a fat pig will refine his tastes.
Also, I understand what you say about the distributors investing their money for the future gainings. But I can (or I want) believe in the utopia of a videogame industry with almost all the gained money going to the creators of the stuff.

Well, maybe all that crap is only attractive excuses for taking shit for free... but I feel really confortable with them, anyway.

Blah,blah, blah...
It's pieces of shit like you with entitlement issues and no concept of reality that give PC gamers the reputation of being idiot pirates.

You forgot the reputation of being pederasts, vicious sodomite comunist and, of course, atheist.

Edit: Also, Lomm Cuz, bro, you're not a very smart fella'.

Well, let's not start sucking each other's dicks quite yet.

 

[Antihero]

^ When you were downloading your warez, did you notice a banner on GOG's site that said dead game storage?

Well, maybe all that crap is only attractive excuses for taking shit for free... but I feel really confortable with them, anyway.

I don't know where you were getting this having to pay for free shit from earlier, but you make it sound like GOG stole it out of the public domain. And it's not like people didn't start seeding torrents of the PS:T GOG release the very same day it came out, right? I don't really see what you're bitching about.

 

[Zeus]

The point of the 'abandonware' movement was that publishers stopped selling their old games. GOG has found a way to convince them to start selling them again, albeit through DRM-free digital distribution.

So will this lead to Planescape: Torment 2? Probably not.

But it *might* lead to the Goldbox or Ultima or <insert favorite OOP RPG series here> being put back on the market where it belongs.

 

[GuideBot]

I don't think anyone is dumb enough to believe that paying GoG for Planescape Torment is going to result in a grand revival of non-shit RPGs. The only companies getting the money will be CDP and Hasbro, neither of whom are in the business of creating decent RPGs (yeah, the Witcher blew). I bought Torment purely because I wanted to play Torment and $10 was worth less to me than screwing around with mounting drives and finding torrents and burning CDs and getting the thing working on XP.

Blah,blah, blah...
It's pieces of shit like you with entitlement issues and no concept of reality that give PC gamers the reputation of being idiot pirates.

You forgot the reputation of being pederasts, vicious sodomite comunist and, of course, atheist.

What?? Atheist??? The Codex truly is a degenerate pit of apostasy. I demand the moderators ban your heresiarch ass and turn the RPG Codex back to the "Rating Paintings of God Codex" our Renaissance forefathers envisioned (a really long time) before the decline.

 

[Darth Roxor]

This thread:

 

[waywardOne]

suck my priveleged dick, shill. copyright was originally a social compact giving right of initial profit to the artist/creator. just because you spread your cheeks now that they've turned it into a way to generate income for eternity doesn't make it ethical, only legal.

 

[SCO]

I'm most amazed at the way some people don't see how it's all been perverted (not that it wasn't before, but now it's systemic).
Gog should give the money got from selling games to the original people who made them, not to rich cocksuckers that bought a company in a fire sale after it went down and fired all employees. This is not hard to see as a capitalist flaw.

Or better expressed: publishers shouldn't exist.

 

[SCO]

If there is going to be cashflow in eternity for all products ever made until the next copyright extension amen, it MIGHT AS WELL GO TO WHO MADE IT RIGHT!!!!

 

[FeelTheRads]

I'm most amazed at the way some people don't see how it's all been perverted

I see it very well. But publishers own the games, not the developers. Unfortunately, that's how it is.

Or better expressed: publishers shouldn't exist.

Again, unfortunately, most games probably wouldn't exist (and certainly not in the form they are) without publishers.

 

[markec]

I'm most amazed at the way some people don't see how it's all been perverted (not that it wasn't before, but now it's systemic).
Gog should give the money got from selling games to the original people who made them, not to rich cocksuckers that bought a company in a fire sale after it went down and fired all employees. This is not hard to see as a capitalist flaw.

Or better expressed: publishers shouldn't exist.

While I agree that there is a major flaw in how today gaming publishers work I dont think that they should not exist.

Like in music or movie business small developers often need support of a strong publishers, if that was not the case then they really would not exist.

Its simple economics, third party invests money for you to create product after which you need to share the profit.

Problem is if the product does not provide sufficient profit the publisher in many cases pulls support and leaves the developer out dry.

Sometimes publishers instead of simply investing in product they invest in developer by purchasing their studio and rights for their products. All too often it results in closing or "rearranging manpower" which basically means that those developers cease to exist in its original form.

But lately I have seen some incline in business of some publishers like EA who, in the past, had an awful track record of dealings with its newly acquired studios and major decline in some (Activision).

While publishers can be consider evil they are necessarily evil.




Also why should GoG give money to the original developers, they are a business who does what it does for profit not charity. They are providing service that costs them money, time and manpower so its logical for them to want to earn something instead of working with loss.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Does it mean that now that PST is available for buying, they will invest in making another Planescape: Torment?

No. At least, not right now.

The industry has a structural problem with long sellers. This has as much to do with the domination of consoles (which kills longsellers every time a generation cycles) as it does with "appealing to masses".

Screaming about it won't actually change it. Showing the viability of long-sellers through GOG and Steam, but also through console's Live services, shows the viability of a niche. I don't see EA or Activision Vivendi jump all over it, but it is en economic truism that when you clearly show a niche to exist, someone will look to fill it sooner or later.
You can't change shit by sitting around on a forum and circle-jerking. You shouldn't expect miracles from the longseller market either. But an improved situation is, uh, a good thing. I have my doubts about the kinds of RPGs you and I masturbate to making it as short-sellers. But long-sellers? There's a chance.

Here's a problem with long-sellers - these games sell for so long because they are good and because they aren't very expensive. So, practically anyone who heard good things about them can buy them for a price of a cinema ticket. But it also means that unlike short-sellers, whose most of sales are going to be 40-80$, most of sales of long-sellers are going to be 5-10$.
Long sellers on GoG and Steam are good business for the publishers because they already exist.
Sorry, but I doubt a possibility of another Fallout of Planescape: Torment being ever funded by the mainstream publishers.

So, as someone said, there's only way we can get the games that we want nowadays - work on making them.

Anyway, I wonder what would happen if they would start doing full priced full re-editions and collector editions of classic games like in 80s.

Then can you explain me why, for example in Poland, whole epic movie business disappeared in favour of generic romance comedies?
12 years ago, Polish cinema was able to do epic movies like By Fire and Sword with great costumes and special effects and now all we get is romantic comedies or other stupid comedies. It looks like someone here figured out that one can earn a lot of money without investing into costumes and special effects.

How is the movie production financed? Do they get partial or full support by the ministry of culture and/or other government organizations? If so, then it's obvious: they get similar budgets, yet they don't have to spend them on costumes, effects and all that, enabling them to pocket more money for doing less.

I don't know. Still, I haven't heard anyone complaining that these lower budget crap movies have poor graphics.

 

[SCO]

I'm most amazed at the way some people don't see how it's all been perverted (not that it wasn't before, but now it's systemic).
Gog should give the money got from selling games to the original people who made them, not to rich cocksuckers that bought a company in a fire sale after it went down and fired all employees. This is not hard to see as a capitalist flaw.

Or better expressed: publishers shouldn't exist.

While I agree that there is a major flaw in how today gaming publishers work I dont think that they should not exist.

Like in music or movie business small developers often need support of a strong publishers, if that was not the case then they really would not exist.

Its simple economics, third party invests money for you to create product after which you need to share the profit.

Problem is if the product does not provide sufficient profit the publisher in many cases pulls support and leaves the developer out dry.

Sometimes publishers instead of simply investing in product they invest in developer by purchasing their studio and rights for their products. All too often it results in closing or "rearranging manpower" which basically means that those developers cease to exist in its original form.

But lately I have seen some incline in business of some publishers like EA who, in the past, had an awful track record of dealings with its newly acquired studios and major decline in some (Activision).

While publishers can be consider evil they are necessarily evil.




Also why should GoG give money to the original developers, they are a business who does what it does for profit not charity. They are providing service that costs them money, time and manpower so its logical for them to want to earn something instead of working with loss.

That's what banks are for. Loans it's called i heard.
Anyway i'm more raging about the contracts than the existence of publishers. Hell the initial publishers grew out of dev houses, like paradox is doing today in their niche.

I would like a better granularity on contracts. Instead of profits from IP going to a company and THEN being parceled out to the employees, the employees themselves (each) should get a contract with relative percentage gross on profits of the product they worked on (real ones), adjusted for time of employment and importance. If the company still does profit selling stuff the employee worked on the contract still applies to that, regardless if he was fired. While in the mortar-and-stone age this would encourage rapid product turnover, with digital "publishing", there is no great incentive not to "publish" and at least egregious injustice is not perpetrated.

The dev houses could even make it a cooperative company founded especially for that purpose. Steam is tending in that direction, but is not nearly radical enough.

 

[someone else]

While eating french fries at the local Burger King, I raged that the Latvian potato-pickers are not getting a percentage of my money I paid to BK. We live in the 21st century, surely we are able to come up with an accounting system that pays Latvian potato-pickers their fare share of the french fries I'm eating?
Those Latvian potato-pickers should gang up and demand that they are paid by the amount of potatoes consumed.

 

[markec]

That's what banks are for. Loans it's called i heard.
Anyway i'm more raging about the contracts than the existence of publishers.

There is a big difference between loans and publisher support and a good reason why you dont hear developers taking loans to fund their project.

If you take a loan and a pretty big one that will allow you to work on a game for a year or two, pay few employees and live of that loan for the production time you need to put a big collateral like your house, car and pretty much everything you own, so if you fail to pay the rates the bank will take it all. The thing is although the bank will give you initial postponed time like one year to start paying off your debt there is no guarantee that the game will be finished in that time or that it will sell that good.
Publishers invest money in your project but if it fails they dont ask for return of invested money but unlike the bank that just wants it money with interest the publisher wants a share of the profit because they also are taking a risk.

 

[Brother None]

Well, what I want to mean is that: very few distributors is actually doing real deep market investigations in relation with the quality of their games

What? Yes they are.

Where are you getting this from?

But I can (or I want) believe in the utopia of a videogame industry with almost all the gained money going to the creators of the stuff.

How's your wish working out for you? Your method of attaining it by pirating games and screaming angrily on forums working well, is it?

The dev houses could even make it a cooperative company founded especially for that purpose.

Yeah awesome, by devs for devs

All your guys' theories would be so awesome if they were even remotely realistic. They're not. But have fun making up pipe dreams and then using them as an excuse to pirate.

Tell me, do you think these developers you're so bravely fighting for are thankful for you pirating their games?

I don't think anyone is dumb enough to believe that paying GoG for Planescape Torment is going to result in a grand revival of non-shit RPGs.

No, but it will begin to point publishers towards the viability of mid-budget titles as long sellers. Don't forget, Fallout 1 and Planescape: Torment were both B-reel titles Interplay had no real interest in. Interplay's old attitude is not coming back, but right now B-reel/mid-budget titles are underrepresented in the gaming industry. Independent games aren't the answer to that.
Will there be random (smaller, not EA/Activision-Vivendi) publishers who think to pick up small projects in Europe, or fund a semi-indie project, or help distribute smaller indie projects? Well, the deal certainly becomes more attractive when they realize this is a long-term investment rather than a short one. That's the whole point of the exercise.

By comparison, pirating the games doesn't help anyone but yourself. It doesn't express a principled standpoint. It only makes publishers go further away from the PC platform. Hell, it even hurts indies, significantly. Yet is is a pretty attractive viewpoint to defend. Why? Well, who doesn't like free shit?

...

I hope you guys do realize I'm not buying your anarcho/anti-capitalist fight for the artist for one second, right? I mean, few companies were smacked down as hard by piracy as small PC developers. The big console companies thrive on the exodus from PC. You're self-serving, and that's fine, but are all the lies really necessary? Just admit you're stealing out of laziness or self-interest and be done with it.
You don't need to convince me either way. You can't, not with such blatant ignorance of basic economic law (and I'm hardly an expert, I've followed only a handful of economic courses). I guess you can convince each other, tho'? Wallow in your decadent ignorance.

 

[spekkio]

Finally... GOG, this is a wonderful day. Thank you so much for making this classic availlable again.

PST was not available?
Also: 9:99? You can have better and less wordy game from their catalogue for this price...

It's worth 50 you goddamn cuntbucket.

ORLY?

It's the best dialogue tree browser evar, that's for sure.
But does it make a game worth 50$?



I don't want to sound like Alexandros, but PST is the most overrated game on Codex, IMO.
Good characters and good setting don't automatically make a great game.
How about some replayability for example?



Don't mind me actually, PST is of course teh best and teh deepest gaem evar.

 

[SCO]

While eating french fries at the local Burger King, I raged that the Latvian potato-pickers are not getting a percentage of my money I paid to BK. We live in the 21st century, surely we are able to come up with an accounting system that pays Latvian potato-pickers their fare share of the french fries I'm eating?
Those Latvian potato-pickers should gang up and demand that they are paid by the amount of potatoes consumed.

 

[FeelTheRads]

How about some replayability for example?

Played it three times, looks like it had replayability for me.

 

[spekkio]

But you have shitty taste in games, man.

Non-animu = good. Animu = shit.

So I don't think your point is valid.
But if you post an elaborate essay about PST replayability, I may (let me repeat: MAY) reconsider...

Next!

 

[SCO]

What pirating you stupid cunt?
I bought PS:T on the original 4 disc version in 1999.

 

[FeelTheRads]

But you have shitty taste in games, man.

I like JRPGs

HOHOHO, I can do it too.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

While eating french fries at the local Burger King, I raged that the Latvian potato-pickers are not getting a percentage of my money I paid to BK. We live in the 21st century, surely we are able to come up with an accounting system that pays Latvian potato-pickers their fare share of the french fries I'm eating?
Those Latvian potato-pickers should gang up and demand that they are paid by the amount of potatoes consumed.

I think that it has something to do with self-justifications used by some of those who buy copies of games instead of torrenting them.
If they justify buying games with a feeling of gratitude towards those who made them and wish to support them, then it kills their justification.