Stardock Evaluates DRM Complaints, Updates Gamer's Bill of Rights 279
Earlier this year, we discussed the Gamer's Bill of Rights, a document put forth by Stardock CEO Brad Wardell to address what he felt were the unacceptable characteristics of the gaming industry. ShackNews reports that Wardell has taken feedback from gamers, developers, and publishers, and updated the document accordingly. One particular area on which he focused was DRM. Stardock also published a customer report that examines the issue in greater detail (PDF). MTV's Multiplayer Blog fans the flames of the debate by asking if anyone is embarrassed about pirating video games.
Embarrassed? (Score:3, Informative)
Embarrassed? No. I know that I will gladly purchase a game that I feel deserves my money, but I have a great appreciation of piracy for allowing me to preview a product freely in advance. Developers are not losing any money on Piracy from me. I truly wish that were the case for everyone, and we probably wouldn't be in this predicament.
But who can honestly say those who pirate rampantly are going to buy the damn games anyway? Most of them I assume are kids who don't even have an income in the first place.
Regardless, though I'm certainly not embarrassed by that, I am increasingly afraid of losing my job, or suffering some other form of corporate backlash. I WORK in the damn game industry. Pretty much everyone I know downloads games, and buys the ones they like. But in the last few years it's gone from something that "everyone does", to something "everyone does unofficially".
Something that still confuses me are the kids nowadays that come in chanting copyright slogans and poo-pooing on people who bit torrent stuff. That grade-school brainwashing really does work wonders...
I want my Halo 3-on-C64 port (Score:4, Informative)
Not a bad idea, but needs a rethink.
Re:So... (Score:3, Informative)
Stardock started not as a game publisher but as a Windows Application publisher. They have some desktop productivity products or something... but have become more famous for their consumer-friendly approach to PC gaming. Brad Wardell is taking advantage of the anti-DRM hype going on post-spore to build up a lot of respect for himself in the hardcore gamer community.
I suspect that this heiritage of developing for Windows only, as well as their relatively small scale as a publisher, leads them to a.) keep the people they have hired already and b.) not want to hire more people if at all possible. These two concerns definitely lead to publishing only for Windows in the foreseeable future.
Though I would argue that it's getting sillier and sillier to stick to one platform, especially with the addition of discrete graphics cards to entry level Macbooks as well as the Pros and the proliferation of Apple marketshare. Put simply, people who are writing apps from the ground up should be doing it in an environment where porting between Mac, PC, and Linux is easy, or they're not being responsible to their duty to maximize returns on their investment, especially given the relative dirth of good game titles on Mac and native Linux.
Re:So... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
No, Stardock started as an OS/2 game publisher in 1993, they didn't touch Windows until 1998. See: http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html [stardock.com]
I stray into off-topic land (Score:3, Informative)
There's nothing normal about refusing to pay your staff a reasonable rate and then demanding the customer get involved in compensating them.
I can only quote you in the name of truth. The moment the UK government found out that was happening here they started taking steps to make it illegal [guardian.co.uk], as it damn well should be.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Embarrassed? - probably astroturf (Score:1, Informative)
Be warned people - there's a lot of lying astroturfers [wikipedia.org] on stories like these. They've flooded movie theatres with their propaganda, and they're doing the same on popular online forums like slashdot. Usually mysteriously mod'ed up, probably by sock puppets [wikipedia.org].
They're trying to manipulate you with their content-free paid propaganda by fraudulently pretending to be a citizen "just like you" so you don't discount the completely bigoted, one-sided view they represent.
They usually have some token point of agreement (e.g. "I certainly understand that not every copy is a lost sale"), usually immediately negated (e.g. "but piracy does hurt real people") because if they didn't their propaganda would be completely unbelievable. They like to do the "ignore the messenger, look at the message" line because they pretend that the messenger isn't an important part of the message (if it wasn't important why do they feel the need to engage in fraud?). They've gotten more sophisticated recently but it's still the same nonsense endlessly repeated with no actual facts.
Lying scum the lot of them.
A lot of people on slashdot, particularly the young and the naive, don't realize just how much astroturf is going on these days on many different sites, both in the "stories" (which are often just content free marketing drivel - they spam the editors until one gets through) and in the comments (where frauds pretend to be ordinary people rather than the paid scum they are).
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
Re:I want my Halo 3-on-C64 port (Score:3, Informative)
Nintendo should be forced to license their IPs out to their arch-nemeses? (I mean, aside from Sega ;) Companies should be forced to release ports even for systems that can't handle the load?
I think he already addressed that when he said PC and not console.