Microsoft and Nvidia Abandon PC Gaming Alliance 195
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from PC Authority:
"Ever since Microsoft turned its back on Windows gaming in favor of the closed Xbox ecosystem, the platform has been crying out for a champion. The company occasionally gives nods toward a revived focus upon PC gaming, most recently with yet another relaunch on Games for Windows Live and a trio of upcoming PC games, but when it comes to throwing cash around the Xbox is the beneficiary. What can definitely be said is that the one group that should be championing the PC, the PC Gaming Alliance, is going backwards. In 2009 the group lost the biggest PC game developer/publisher, Activision-Blizzard, and now it seems that both Microsoft and Nvidia have bid the alliance farewell."
No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
the alliance doesn't seem to have done anything. Good idea, non-existant execution. The PC gaming alliance is called Steam, Gamersgate, Impulse, Direct2Drive, and for better or worse, The Pirate Bay.
Steam, with it's billion dollars a year in sales knows what's causing problems, what you're playing (and how much), what you're buying, and has a fairly good sense of what developers should be building for. That doesn't mean steams data is applicable to every single user, or every scenario, or even that it is necessarily the best service out there, especially without WoW or starcraft the data isn't perfect. But it's more likely to be successful to have people motivated by support costs and sales than a hodgepodge alliance of people who mean well, but have no real money or clear direction to back up their goals.
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Well because it's opt in for non steam games you're skewing your data. Like I say, it's not perfect. That's not the same as useless, but it's not perfect. The handly little chart of how many people are logged in seems to peak around 3 million on steam. I'm sure there are a lot more PC gamers out there than 3 million, but that gives a pretty good average of what their computers are, how much they play etc.
My suspicion is that there's a lot of stuff on steam that's bought, and never played. I know I have
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Or they have a "complete Collection" for some publisher at a ridiculous discount, but not any of the games individually discounted, so you grab "everything ever made by XXX" despite already having 4 of them and only wanting 2 of them, because the collection of 42 games was cheaper than buying those two at full price, and the extra 36 games you don't care about may end up having some gems in it. =p
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Why would I want to launch non-steam games from the steam client? I don't even launch it unless I want to play HL2 (the only steam game I was dumb enough to buy.) The Steam client is horribly abusive. It has an agonizingly long startup and refuses to remember that I don't want to see adverts on launch.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
Why would anyone make an effort to launch a non-Steam game under Steam? Not being sarcastic, just never used it.
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Digital distribution, with easy and non-intrusive copy protection -- you need an internet connection to install, but that's it unless the publisher (e.g. Ubisoft) insists on more.
Last time I checked you absolutely had to login to the Steam application before you could play any games. Even if you start the game directly from its own executable (as opposed to the desktop shortcuts that launch the game via the Steam application) you still get the Steam application starting and prompting for username/password details before you can start to play. If there's particular games that don't do this I'd like to know which.
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Virtually any game can be played in offline mode provided that 1) it has been launched with an active Internet application and 2) your Steam client is updated.
The login prompt should not appear for games that cannot be played offline--instead, you should receive the message "This Game Cannot Be Started in Offline Mode." What it sounds like is happening to you is that Steam is not running before you start a game. The option to launch Steam in offline mode only appears after login has failed.
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It may be possible to play most games in Steam offline. If it requires a voodoo incantation to get it to work, that's a problem. Offline games should just work. Period.
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Digital distribution, with easy and non-intrusive copy protection -- you need an internet connection to install, but that's it unless the publisher (e.g. Ubisoft) insists on more.
Last time I checked you absolutely had to login to the Steam application before you could play any games. Even if you start the game directly from its own executable (as opposed to the desktop shortcuts that launch the game via the Steam application) you still get the Steam application starting and prompting for username/password details before you can start to play. If there's particular games that don't do this I'd like to know which.
Simply click "Go offline" and this problem goes away.
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I don't think you read the comment.
He meant "why would you add a game not installed via Steam to your Steam Library?", such as sticking a "link" to World of Warcraft in Steam, next to all your Steam purchases.
I do, but mostly because Steam games don't play well with Windows Start Menu (they never pop up in the most opened program list, since they aren't real shortcuts). All my games should be somewhere, the Start Menu is where they should be, but barring that Steam works. Its annoying, they used to work,
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With Windows 7 (and probably Vista) start menu, there is a little arrow to the right of the Steam client in the most-opened program list.
And when I click or hover on that arrow, a menu of frequently-played Steam titles folds out, right there in the start menu. Launching Fallout:NV with Steam takes exactly two clicks for me using this method.
I can also pin the Steam client to the taskbar, and then right-click on it to bring up the same thing.
I guess this isn't technically playing nice with the start menu, t
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Also, if you link a non-Steam game in Steam, it will also work with the Steam overlay, on the offchance you use Steam's IM client.
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Having short cuts to all your games in one place.
Access to the Steam Overlay. Let's you press shift-tab in a game to overlay your friends list, any messages from said friends, and a webkit browser over the game being played.
It announces to your friends what you are playing or what you want them to think you are playing. When adding a shortcut to a non-steam game you get to name it whatever you want. So when I run WoW through Steam my friends see "Dudeman is playing non-Steam game 'Nick has full blown AIDS'
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Well in Windows 7 the "Games" folder auto-detects games and adds icons, so you simply open the Games folder and *bam* all of your game shortcuts. Or if you're Amish and still using XP, you can always just make a folder with all your game shortcuts yourself.
Really, using that as a benefit to using Steam is like complaining about having to put the disc in. Is it a nice bonus to not need a disk? Sure, which is why I registered my Blizzard games so I can use the no-disk downloads, but it's not something to c
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You've never met a collector then.
Completely wrong about VAC (Score:3)
Valve also doesn't take a "Talk to the hand" approach to VAC false positives, even the VAC Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] lists four instances where VAC has made mistakes. All instances were rescinded.
That page lists only two instances of "benign cheats" causing irreversible VAC bans. Both those cases clearly contravened VAC policy.
Finally, only 56 games are VAC ena
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the alliance doesn't seem to have done anything.
Exactly. If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they would produce a new XBOX with an x64 processor in it. The 360 is six years old now anyway. And using the same processors as are used in PCs would make porting easier for developers who optimize for specific processor architectures. Right now the major consoles are PowerPC with weird SPEs that take special attention, which is just an invitation to write architecture-specific code and ignore the PC.
I suspect if they went and talked to AMD t
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I'd venture that if microsoft sold something that could be reasonably described as a PC they'd be in legal trouble, fast. PS3 was almost certainly intentionally engineered to be hard to code for. Sony assumed they would dominate again, and wanted to make it hard to port their code to other systems. IMO they could have accomplished that by putting 1 gig of ram in their machine for a lot less headache. But I've done enough with the Cell (astrophysics cluster at and I taught game engines last year) I can a
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I think the only solution is to move more of the game online. Publishers seem to agree as seen by all the MMOs that are being funded.
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Problem is that games without DRM get pirated just as bad.
How is that an argument for DRM? You basically said
The guys who aren't wasting money pissing off their customers in the name of preventing piracy also have problems with piracy!
Well duh, but they have happier customers, which can't be a bad thing.
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Problem is that games without DRM get pirated just as bad. The main motivation for pirates is to avoid payment. I think the only solution is to move more of the game online. Publishers seem to agree as seen by all the MMOs that are being funded.
Single player games are still essentially always cracked, even with an online component. Developers need to add a value in connecting to the server that makes it much less entertaining to play without, otherwise you end up pissing off your customers by making it harder for them to play than the pirates.
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There are always ways around anything. If there is really want for it, even MMOs can have emulator servers built with the same or similar mechanics as the original game.
Granted, this is something more on the edges as opposed to mainstream use, but if single player games start having their content dribbled to users level by level, someone will cache it, and then make a server emulator so people can play without having to have 24/7 access to the "mother ship".
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PS3 was almost certainly intentionally engineered to be hard to code for. Sony assumed they would dominate again, and wanted to make it hard to port their code to other systems.
I disagree.
The PS3 is the result of the history of the console as a platform. Every console would have a different CPU architecture and that was considered "normal."
The only reason why it got easy was because of the original Xbox. it was an x86 CPU that ran a variant of DirectX making ports pretty dead simple. IIRC, the Xbox 360's SDK is pretty similar, even though it's running on a different CPU architecture.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they would produce a new XBOX with an x64 processor in it.
If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they wouldn't be trying to move people onto consoles.
Their problem is that they've been successful enough at doing so to reduce most people's need for a new Windows PC -- gaming is about the only thing Joe Sixpack does which could stress a modern system -- without making any money from consoles.
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Actually, I think that you may have missed the point. Because it seems to me that there is stagnation in CPU & graphics requirements now. Instead of truly pushing the capabilities of modern hardware, graphics are stuck at this meh level. Why aren't monitors pushing beyond 1920x1080/1200? Because of HDTV standardization (I know 30inch monitors are higher res, but work with me). The reason that a 2year old GPU can handle modern games is because the modern games don't push the envelope. Why? Because the co
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OK, by mentioning screen resolutions I totally threw you off the track. However, games are not incorporating significantly higher complexity than in the past. Why don't games have massively deformable terrain? Why not have deep physics emulation? AI has improved, but I haven't seen any improvement that scales with CPU improvements over the last few years. Why not load up 4 cores for AI? There are 6 core CPUs now available, and still games don't really need more than 2 cores, even though quad cores have been
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with steam, gamersgate, direct2drive and big fish (my wife favorite game store) pc gaming never been better. I don't why you says it is dying but there were never as many fun games available for sale as now. With episodic titles like sam and max, back to the future and cie the adventure genre is fully back. With games like ARES, BladeKitten and BionicCommando Rearmed the plat-former genre is back in full glory. You have a boatload of strategy game like c,and the total war series.
I could go on and on but I t
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Gaming on a PC is becoming more cumbersome every day with useless DRM, and less relevant every day with half-ass console ports. The gaming industry has always been a niche market, and PC gaming is even a smaller niche. While some companies have been very successful in this market, the future of it is dead.
Insightful, but not quite right. It is true as you say that Microsoft's PC gaming hegemony has no future, however Microsoft has inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of a viable open content creation industry. See my upcoming talk [socallinuxexpo.org] at Scale 9x, and see Sintel [sintel.org].
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You're sighting exceptions to the norm. sintel took over $3 million to create and didn't use open content creation until after it was released. While I'm sure more content will come about this way, it's not enough to keep an entire market segment that is swaying to mobile and dedicated devices at a rapid pace.
I am citing what will become the new norm, just as the new norm in embedded operating systems is open source Linux. Sintel was created with an open toolchain and much of the content is open, as is the end product. By the way, could you please provide a pointer to the $3 million figure. If it really was that much (which I doubt) that would just be a convincing testament to the power of the open model.
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If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they would produce a new XBOX with an x64 processor in it.
If Microsoft truly wanted to improve the status of PC gaming it would just go away and die immediately. Of course Microsoft has no intention of doing that so its dead hand on the gaming industry will continue to hold things back for some time yet. Fortunately, there is no longer anything Microsoft can do to prevent the emergence of an independent content creation industry on platforms it does not control. See my upcoming talk at Scale 9x [socallinuxexpo.org]
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A fusion of amd and x64
Umm are you sure about that? AMD procs were x64 compliant before Intel's were IIRC.
What I think you mean is a fusion of PowerPC and x64, which are two completely different architectures. You'll never see it.
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Not what he's talking about. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion [wikipedia.org] for more information.
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That's not what hes talking about.. why would he suggest this?
maybe some 3rd party group could pull it off by making their own motherboards with one possessor from each
That quote makes no sense if he was talking about a cpd/gpu combo. He is obviously talking about two different processors on the same motherboard.
If it was what he was talking about, he should have at least capitalized the name "Fusion".
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I mis-read how the comments were nested. The original poster who mentioned Fusion said
I suspect if they went and talked to AMD they could come up with some kind of Fusion-based console
I thought you responded to him. However, the person you responded to has never heard of Fusion and thought he was talking about a hybrid PowerPC / x64 system.
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No, I think he meant AMD(ATI) FUSION GPU on CPU.
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See my reply to the other commenter, I dont think thats what he was talking about at all.
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but i would agree that a "fusion" of amd and x64 would be nice and probably work wonders
I'm assuming you haven't kept up with AMD's tech. Fusion is the actual name of a new line of AMD processors that are a combination of CPU and GPU on one chip (hence the Fusion name). So far I've only seen one system using them (they just came out recently) and it was a laptop that not only blew away benchmark numbers, but also had incredible battery life as well. I agree with the GP, if they made an XBOX-720 with an AMD Fusion processor, they could probably have an incredible system where games could be
Its (Score:2)
"Steam, with it's billion dollars a year in sales ..."
No apostrophe. :)
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*worsened
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I'm torn on putting GoG on that list. I like their stuff, and i certainly use it a lot. They're either the most important, or the least important company to something like the gaming alliance. And I'm not really sure which.
On one hand they are the ones who've been dealing with trying to fix all the messed up lack of standards crap that we had for years. That makes games as art hard because well, you need specialized programmers to fix any 5 year old title up enough that it will run on a modern system.
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that's ok, you fall into the 'the pirate bay' as your gaming alliance representative group.
Though to be fair, you're missing out. There are lots of great DRM free games being released every year (the Witcher for example) that are AAA full price games, and those guys deserve money for the work they do.
Champion (Score:4, Interesting)
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Steam is merely a distribution system, however. It doesn't resolve the issues with developers attitudes toward PC gaming. I recently saw an interview with a developer who is creating a new engine who said that graphics are no longer important (nor AI or anything else, presumably, since the following is the only item he stressed importance of) -- only the ease of use of the development tools was. His reasoning was that we've basically reached the limits of the current console generation.
It used to be that P
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a developer who is creating a new engine who said that graphics are no longer important (nor AI or anything else, presumably, since the following is the only item he stressed importance of) -- only the ease of use of the development tools was.
No, that was over years ago, even before Doom III and it's look how pretty I can make Doom I gameplay mechanics engine. The PC gaming industry has shown that shoving more crap into the same or lower average framerate does not a more fun game make.
only the ease of use of the development tools was
That's very biased and developer centric. If the technology is not really a concern, then what's next is designing good, fun, balanced gameplay. Go find a developer who will tell you that's in the bag.
*gasp*a filmmaker says his prime concern is doing awesome stu
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I have a perfect example for you in why PC gaming is superior, won't die, and frankly, we can't let die:
Online multiplayer.
I don't own a PS3. I have a 360. And the problem is that there is no one to play on-line multiplayer. The whole draw of XBL is the online component. And something like BF:BC2, MoH, or CoD:BO are all about the multplayer. Except there is no one on! I own all three on both the PC and console. Example:
360:
BF:BC2: 0 (people online during off-peak hours) / 0 (during peak hours)
PC: 50,000 (of
Re:Champion (Score:4, Informative)
Steam is fantastic.
"Bombardment with ads!" - Go into the settins and set your favorite window to "Library". You will never see another ad.
"Some games require steam" - Because they use it as a multiplayer lobby (it beats GFWL and GameSpy) or because they use it as copy protection (it beats SafeDisc/Starforce/whatever else is around these days)
"Always running" - File > Settings > Interface > Run Steam when my computer starts. Uncheck it if it bothers you that much. Lots of programs do the same thing.
"Centrally owned" - If you refuse to use any software that's owned by a private organization, you're gonna have some trouble playing games.
"Why not just use the internet?" - Because, as I mentioned above, Steam supplies multiplayer functions and copy protection. Plus they probably don't want to make it support IE6.
Steam also syncs saved games and settings across platforms, provides in game text & voice chat, a very helpful friends list through which you can jump directly into a friends server, and tons of other nice features. Yes, you could get the same functionality by combining Direct2Drive, SafeDisc, Ventrilo, AIM, Games for Windows Live, and probably a few other programs. But that doesn't make Steam redundant. It makes all those other programs redundant.
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I remember DOS gaming and half the fun of installing it was getting the right combination of conventional, EMS, XMS, DPMI, OMG, etc memory, along with various driver incompatibilities. My MS-DOS 6.22 config.sys and autoexec.bat files contained about 20 options for various required states for the various games and applications I had installed - and I only had 180MB of HDD space! Some hated certain drivers (such as sound card, CDROM, zip drive guest, mouse, packet drivers) installed, others required those dri
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"Bombardment with ads!" - Go into the settins and set your favorite window to "Library". You will never see another ad.
Why would I want that? That is not value-add, and the fact that I can fix it doesn't mean that they're selling something I want. I don't want to opt-out. I want you to opt-in to ads.
"Some games require steam" - Because they use it as a multiplayer lobby
And I can't tell the difference easily ahead of time. This makes the whole thing suspicious, and more effort. Tales of bizarre and intrusive 'anti-cheat' programs do not help this; I call that spyware---perhaps mainly benign, at this point anyway, but I do not trust that to remain that way, and I do not want to give up cont
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"Bombardment with ads!" - Go into the settins and set your favorite window to "Library". You will never see another ad.
Doesn't work here; Steam often forgets which window I want to start with. Further, I get the "game updates" which are really ads every day I launch Steam.
"Some games require steam" - Because they use it as a multiplayer lobby (it beats GFWL and GameSpy) or because they use it as copy protection (it beats SafeDisc/Starforce/whatever else is around these days)
False dichotomy, you can simply not use DRM. DRM has never been shown to help prevent piracy, and it has been shown to piss off potential customers.
"Always running" - File > Settings > Interface > Run Steam when my computer starts. Uncheck it if it bothers you that much. Lots of programs do the same thing.
it's also always running when I run a steam-powered game, which means that when it decides to unpause an update for no apparent reason (which it has done to me repeatedly) it starts downloading even when I'm pl
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I won't even install steam because I can't stand ads on a piece of software I own. I find the practice repugnant and because I stand on my principles I can't^H^H^H^Hwon't play some games.
Wow, do people still believe that they own software they didn't write? When they download it for free and blithely accept the clickwrap? That's so 2006.
You're conveniently ignoring the features Steam has beyond being a sales platform: an IM and friends list client, quick links to support forums, community groups, cloud saves, distributed downloader/preloader/autopatcher, all of which are huge conveniences compared to 10-15 years ago. Much of the last 60 years of civilization is predicated around paying for
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You're conveniently ignoring the features Steam has beyond being a sales platform:
You also forgot the features of Valve having ability to delete games without compensation and that if they go out of business, they're not obligated to provide you with non-Steam versions of your games. I for one know that I always love the feature of being robbed of my money / property!
Note: The last part was a joke. The rest wasn't, you can look it up in Steam's TOS if you don't believe me.
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So, in other words it's a specifically stated intended goal that should Steam go out of business that they will provide you access to a no-authentication-required version of your game library, however they can't promise to do that in perpetuity (since this would only come up in event of them going out of business) and for some particularly catastrophic versions of "out of business" they may not be able to do so at all, so the ToS only states that they *may* do so, without promising that they *will* do so.
I'
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It's been like a year since I read it, but they explicitly state that if they ever remove a game from the store (for whatever reason) they MIGHT give you a refund or they MIGHT give you a non-Steam copy, but that'll be determined by them at the time. The same as how they MIGHT give you a non-Steam version if Steam ever shuts down. Nowhere did they ever say "We plan to do this, but we just might not be able to" like you're claiming.
But hey, apparently living in your mom's basement means she buys all your g
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Wow lots of Steam fanboys here. I'm not.
It really made it hard for me not having a fixed internet connection, for all those updates, and to decrypt game data.
I payed you money, Steam, for a game I only played once. Thanks, but I'd rather buy DRM-free and non platform-locked Indie games now.
My gift to you, Steam, is popularizing your competitors. :-)
And... (Score:3, Interesting)
Can 13 year olds please stop pirating pc games? (Score:2, Informative)
PC gaming piracy has gotten out of control. Not for casual stuff like Farmville and The Sims but games that require an aftermarket gpu. It's the 'hardcore' pirates that have made the situation go from bad to downright embarrassing.
http://www.binplay.com/2011/01/pc-gamers-and-their-lame-excuses-for.html [binplay.com]
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The only excuse from that article you linked which I buy is the "There was no demo" excuse. I have a 2 year old system and I'm not positive that "Bulletstorm" is going to run well enough to justify a purchase, and we all know that min/recommended specs are usually bullshit. Do I pirate it and then buy it if it runs well and is fun? I think I'm just not going to play it at all because I don't want it that bad, but that is a contributing factor.
I think that the truth of the matter is we won't get serious supp
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That would be the always on, online connection. Or similar. You're logged into steam, you can play anything on steam sort of thing (that's not how steam works, I'm just giving an example). I'm not a huge fan of that, but if you move your save games onto the cloud, and require an always on internet connection to play, with serial keys tied to an account it's a lot easier to deal with piracy. Then it's a matter of generating good keys, and regular ole network security. The key there will be to provide va
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The problem is every time they try the persistent internet connection stuff someone eventually cracks it and then the only way to play if you have a connection that likes to crash on you is via the pirate version.
I have no idea how this could actually work. Maybe a USB key-card? Or a authenticator like MMOs are using now? The problem is that these solutions would probably eventually get cracked as well and then you've wasted a much bigger investment.
We need a giant leap forward in DRM before PC gaming can r
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> I think that the truth of the matter is we won't get serious support until someone comes up with a form of DRM that actually works.
I can tell you how to make a 'good enough' DRM.... but you won't like it.
Step one, USB dongle. With non-trivial stuff going on in it. Knock secret knock and it gives out key pieces of the executable or key data tables at various times during game play. If the dongle isn't there, no problem you get a demo version.
Step two, dongle is there but not right (i.e. cloned or emu
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There's a lot of debate about pirates not doing it for the money, blah bla
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it's not in the game industry interest to crack down on teens piracy too hard either. They are dirt poor now so you can't expect getting any money from them, but one day they will get a work and will have a disposable income. It's better not to take the risk of teens finding other hobbies in life and leaving gaming population permanently. Fueling addiction is important because once teens find out they can do perfectly well without games there will be no money to be made ever again.
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When I was a teenager I afforded a "premium" (meaning sufficient for the current generation of gaming at that time) PC by buying comparatively cheap "used" parts (usually only 1-2 steps behind actual top of the line) from a schoolmate who was constantly upgrading his machine. I only found out after the fact (well after the fact, as in a couple of years later) that my source of cheap used but still good enough to be "premium" parts was, in fact, a fairly skilled thief who was selling off his previously stol
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When it you get right down to it its just regular old stealing.
It may not be legal, or morally, good; but it is not "just regular old stealing". Language fails here, it seems. If every pirated copy was a lost sale, or lead directly to lost revenue, then it would be closer to stealing (or rather theft of service). Right now it is just like "regular old intellectual property infringement".
I'm not going into a moralistic argument about piracy, nor will I argue here about its effects; it just isn't, semantically, like stealing. Conflating it as such isn't good, nor wou
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tsk tsk tsk tsk tsk, you're talking bull**** that was talked about already in '86, in '93 and in '99 and in '05 - between those years there was a tenfold increase in market and sales.
and you know something about all those great developers? they're getting paid better than they ever imagined.
it's just that now there's a bunch of people who have been educated to create mediocre games and they expect that it's a right for them that someone buys their mediocre games which interest nobody.
has gotten out of contr
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There has always been a lot of piracy in games. I remember people trading games with tapes, back in the 8 bits. If you don't want to pay for the games you play, you can, and this is true since 1981 and back.
Steam sells millions games every day. The whole PC market is a 14 billions business. But apparently is invisible to the likes of you, because the PC is evolving to something different to what you know and understand to become more.
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13 year olds aren't buying their own games anyway. So piracy isn't costing anyone anything. In fact, getting kids to pirate games today turns them into gamers. When they grow up, and get a job, they'll see that $40-60 for a game isn't really so much money. And now you have paying customers.
The ones that don't, were never paying customers anyway. Also, if you sue too many of them you'll turn them away from gaming entirely.
The only thing more immature than a 13 year old pirate is a game exec whining abou
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I haven't pirated a game in ages, but I haven't bought one, either. If I were illegally downloading and playing these games I would have precisely the same effect on the market. HTH, HAND.
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Agreed, plus the PS3 is designed to play BluRays so you can pirate those alongside your games while you're at it ;)
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Most 'hardcore' pc gamers are not paying for the games, period. We should be past the point of calling anyone a troll for pointing out how bad the situation has become.
Citation Needed.
Really.
Browsing through some torrents, looking at their seed/leach rates, I have a very hard time buying that. Unless only a few thousand people play any given game. And somehow we should also completely ignore Steam, and the ungodly amount of money they make. I have an odd feeling that if you could deduce the total amount of unique seeders and leachers on Pirate Bay, pirating games, and compare that to the total number of unique Steam Users (much less World of Warcraft's 11 million activ
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But you had no evidence to back your claim. I have some to back mine, albeit extremely weak evidence. I posted mostly to highlight the lack of evidence.
I don't see why "hardcore" games would have higher rates of piracy. People who are hardcore are willing to shell out big money on the experience (I need a new processor, two new ultra-expensive GPUs crossfired, DDR3 with cooling fins, a 10 million jiggawatt power supply... etc...), so what would lead you to conclude that they would not pay for the games?
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I've actually been the opposite. I despise pirating and never pirated games as a kid - I always bought them (I've had a job since I was 10). However, in the last year I've started pirating games, but only if they have DRM. Why? Because the DRM bullshit has gotten way out of hand and I refuse to pay to be punished by a company. They're not getting my money one way or another if there is DRM in the game, so there's no reason NOT to pirate it.
I still hate pirating games, but I won't buy any game with DRM.
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So one can't simply look at TPB raw data and get any real feel for the situation.
Agreed. I was basically showing that I could poke some holes in the parents baseless argument by spending less than a minute on Pirate Bay. Things fracture beyond that, as you state.
I'm not sure what the parent meant by "hardcore" anymore. I view hardcore gamers as those who spend tons of money for the most cutting edge machine, meaning they have a fair amount of extra cash sitting around. Depending on how cutting edge we're talking, far more cash than I have on hand. Most of these gamers have no probl
What was it for? (Score:3)
I never understoof, WTF it was about. Was it to make hardware manufacturers in some way change its design or pricing (ex: abandon OpenGL, sell more low-end devices subsidized by Microsoft)? Was it to make Microsoft somehow assist them in making their hardware more compatible with Windows games? Was it to somehow hurt competitors (who are right there in the same "alliance")?
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It seems MS is expecting that we replace out PCs by Xboxes on every activity we currently have. It seems like their management is thinking "Our Xbox division is actualy creative, they have a future, let's bet on them", despite it not making a lot of sense.
And, yet, they didn't release Office for the Xbox. Maybe it is on the pipeline, or it is just the right hand not knowing what the brain is doing.
Odd given their busness model.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I will NEVER buy an X-Box to game on, so they will not be getting money from me for that.
I DO buy windows products for 2 reasons 1) play games on, 2) keep up with current version so I can make money fixing other peoples PC's.
if they are no longer supporting gaming why would people buy their operating system? To do office work? Linux does that quite well. To do development? Linux does that even better.
Apparently their new business model will be leasing out cloud servers to run legacy OS to businesses that we
Another M$ "partnership" bites the dust (Score:4, Insightful)
Nokia, you're next.
PC gaming has changed (Score:2)
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More steam behind steam (Score:2)
PCGA is among other things working to develop marketing for PC games, combat piracy, developing new business models beyond retail sales, and establishing minimum hardware requirements for PC games, along with guidelines for developers to make games work for those requirements. According to president Randy Stude, the PC Gaming Alliance is to "help make certain that the PC game industry had a public voice and a pulpit for accurately communicating the size, growth and overall popularity of the single largest gaming platform worldwide." They will also perform market research for their members and the public.
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
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Makes sense that they would throw more money at the Xbox. They get a fee for every game sold on the Xbox whereas they get absolutely nothing for almost everything sold on the PC.
But, uh, they lose money on consoles and make money on almost every PC sold. If Joe Sixpack buys an iPad and an Xbox, Microsoft's profit streams just disappear.
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The PC is going away. Home users with desktop machines will be a tiny minority within a decade. It's going to be STBs (including PVRs and game consoles) and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Desktop machines will be all but restricted to 3D, CAD, Video, and the like. The next wave of tablets tend to have 1080p Mini-HDMI output, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, and USB 2.0 OTG. With that feature set there is no reason for the average user to have even a laptop, let alone a desktop.
It's not like the commodity pa
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Come back here in ten years so we can ridicule you for your dumbfuck prediction.
I will probably still be here in ten years if slashdot is. If you had testicles enough to log in (or ovaries, as applicable) I would put a dollar on it.
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Re:PC = Windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
Game Developers are more than capable of developing cross platform. But they have to go where the money is and what the Managers say, games cost an awful lot to develop. and while developing the code to be cross platform may or may not impact much on development time , it certainly impacts on QA - you are at least tripling your playtesting time as you now have to support 3 platforms. Look at the market share of Linux and Mac and its obvious that while its possible to develop crossplatform - the additional cost of supporting those platforms becomes a real problem. Not to mention Linux having a million different distributions and questionable graphics driver support.
Unless someone finds a disruptive technology that solves this problem.
One way may be to develop some sort of Virtual Machine that runs on all 3 major platforms and have games target that - this would then allow developers to target one "virtual" platform.
By the way -Porting CryEngine or Unreal Engine to QT is a preposterous suggestion - they are in no way similar frameworks , QT is for building desktop / moble applications - the other is for building 3D games. As far as I am aware Unreal Engine is already crossplatform in its own right.
N.
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They develop on special development hardware (Score:2)
Thus it doesn't ever run on a stock PC. There are exceptions to this like anything made in XNA. Also I understand that early versions of the Xbox360 dev hardware were just Mac computers running emulation software, but the code ran at something