Blues, No. If they're in group A, then yes, group A means they're similar to Sifright where they're going to try it out as a type of extended demo. There's a few games that I feel are not worth their respective high or low scores (FFX - Tidus is still whiny, but he does get tolerable. Wasn't worth a 10 but didn't mar the experience too much) but let's remember: A review is only a person's opinion. That's it. Maybe they liked the game, maybe they didn't. Did they complete it? Did they only play 30 minutes? Did they try to break the game? Was the game already broken? All of this can't be determined when you only have 30 days with games, more games being made monthly, and too many high profile games clamoring for our dollars.

Personally, if a game's good, be it in Japanese or English, I want it. I don't buy a lot of games but the ones I do are something tailored to my eccentric tastes. Disgaea, Valkyrie Profile, FFTA, Live A Live, or even the Advance Wars series. Guess which one I had to work to get?

Mainly, I'm arguing that your view here is discounting quite a few things that could be going on with A group, simply to say we're criminals that only want something because it's free. That is forgetting the nostalgic crowd, the retro crowd and quite a few people who only want to be able to play a game regardless of laws that impede this progress. Anyway, that's too much of a divergence, I'm stopping here.

I can roll with this, but the limiting that most companies do is just stupid of them. But hey, it's not the coders that do it. It's the guys that have no connection to the Customer Service desk that make these retarded decisions that end up hurting the gaming industry as a whole.

So what you mean to say is you can't be arsed to read more than one review? Come on. This is the Internet. If you can't find a person who hates something on the web, you're either not trying hard enough or the game disk is made of solid gold, causes diamonds to shoot out of your console every time you put it in, and contains a game that sucks you through the screen into a dimension of infinite rapture. And even THEN some ass would bitch about what a mess the diamonds made.

What I'm saying is less that people are looking for an excuse and more that they buy the game to try and end up playing and beating it, then sit back and twiddle their thumbs feeling silly and end up not buying a copy. It's not intentional, but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Some might buy it anyway, but others might not. It's equivalent to going to a comic shop and fingerprinting up the pages of Wolverine #589478 before putting it back on the shelf full of smudges because you already read it now. Sure, it's not intentional that you somehow managed to smear all the text into profanity and descriptions of kinky sexual acts, but it's still going to not get sold because of it.

On top of that, I'm all for nostalgia, but that STILL doesn't justify what you admit is breaking the law because of it. I'm nostalgic that I used to have a #1 issue of Bucky O' Hare, but I'm not going to break into a comic shop to get another one because my mom was an idiot and threw mine out without telling me. That thing would be worth like $14k now, last I checked. They'd throw me in jail so fast my head would spin.

I'm all for changing the law when it comes to old games, be it to make companies release or support them, because there are a lot of gems out of legal reach at the moment, but that doesn't make it anyone's right to just go and take them.

You know my mom and I still have bad blood over me uninstalling a game from the old 3.1 boat anchor years ago? You know why? The "game" was Discoveries of the Deep, a terrible DOS program that did its damnedest to give you the full experience of being a marine biologist by forcing you to do true-to-life navigation to set a course and fuck around for literal DAYS ON END while you hopefully got there, assuming you never turned off the computer. I uninstalled it to make room for Lands of Lore, an actual game. She got pissed because the DotD floppy was only good for three installs, and she'd used up all of them to get the thing on there due to being computer retarded. After that, the floppy was overwritten to halt the game just as you pulled out of the harbor.

Three.

I think FIFTEEN is a bit more forgiving than that. Five times more, not even counting the fact you can just call in to get more.

I'll admit DRM needs some fixing, but that particular example isn't too bad.

That said, you're right. DRM is a business measure, and I don't think most coders are nearly as avid about it as the businessmen.

Let's remember, it WAS 3. So you put it on your laptop, your desktop and maybe your mom's computer. But once you get that new 4500? Yeah, you're done. The outcry was so huge on it that 2K backed off from a punch in the balls to a punch in the gut. It's still limiting but at least it's more tolerable.

Actually, I'm saying you shouldn't put much stock in other's opinions. A game might be better or worse by your standards than the standards of the industry. Psychonauts and BG&E anyone?

That's part of the risk of doing business. Not everything gets sold. Your collector's edition may get a scratch. You might be just like Mr Glass in Unbreakable who cares for the rarity of comics as an art form. But if you can keep your customers coming to you and liking your version of DRM (Steam) then maybe, just maybe, you can make it as a gamer/developer/publisher. The problem is when people are treated as if they're stupid or that the games they play are lifetime endeavors, not merely entertainment.

-Edit- In other news, Ubisoft is still being retarded About their DRM

Well, even BS1 had five, which is pretty bad, but not so bad you could use it up in one retarded go. Five installs will go a long way assuming you're actually only putting it on one computer like you're supposed to. It's still enough to run into a wall, to be sure. Fifteen is likely more than most people will need in quite some time, unless they plan on playing it sometime in the future when the standard input is a brain jack.

That's why you read a bunch of different reviews. Game quality is not and will never be objective. Unless my eleven-tier system sees widespread use (you can ask Nonsie about it), but even that's based on a subjective experience. To put it this way, a good review doesn't tell you a game is good or bad; it tells you WHY a game is good or bad. Find a shining review and see if it catches your interest. Then look for a review that throws the game to the dogs and see if you still feel that way. Once you have your good and bad points, you can average them into your own initial opinion of whether to go further.

I'll agree with most of this, but I'll have to disagree that piracy is comparable to a disk broken in transit. Namely because the game is still finding its way into use. You're putting nearly the entire burden on developers in this, which I disagree with just as much as Tycho's assertion that it's totally the public's fault. There's a culture of piracy here that needs to be fixed, and while the devs are ultimately the ones with the keys to the physical solution to trying to change that culture, there are frankly a lot of entitled assholes on the Internet, too, and it may not be easy no matter WHAT the devs try. The public holds the keys to the mental/emotional side of the solution, and it's going to take a while for the collective body to force them into their side of the door.

Also, I dunno about you, but I consider games entertainment. If I'm buying a "lifetime endeavor," I damn well be able to see significant monetary returns on it.

We're agreeing on the same points so I won't expand on this.
???

That seems to have come out wrong. What I'm focusing on is the belief that once you buy a game, you shouldn't be allowed to like other games as EA is privy to do. I can understand if they want us to have DLC on a game, or even liking a game and enjoying it. But eventually a game gets old. It's still entertainment, you will have the game for a long time. But what I believe a lot of publishers aren't doing is giving added incentive to consumers to enjoy a game beyond its shelf life.

What the SecuROM and DRM signifies is exactly what I'm thinking about. No true benefit comes to people that enjoy games from these "secure" devices. Rather, it's a way for these fat cats to artificially (and temporarily) boost their profit. If someone actually played a game with SecuROM in mind, if they went through all of the hassle and just before the game ended, their computer crashed... These are the type of scenarios that would cause a person to truly look at these obstacles as artificial.

As I pointed out, Shamus Young has followed DRM for a while. I liked the article where he pointed out that you can use it, just use the stuff in creative ways.

Ex. Batman has it where you can't complete the game because it's a hacked version. Hell, don't even try to stop them at the front gate. Let the pirates get a Pyrrhic victory, by beating the DRM at the front gate but if it IS a hack, then it stops the freeloaders from completing it. Those are the type of things that persuade people to change their minds. I wouldn't want to spend 3-5 years of my life, slaving away on a game, then going back into the game to add something as little and arbitrary as DRM which can basically mean more bug testing. Then the testing leads to more, then when the game comes out, it's buggy or glitchy because oh, hey! There's that little snafu that your DRM caused. That would surely piss me off as a developer on ANY level.

I'm going to explain this from a software development perspective, so bear with me.

Simply put, most software is based on pre-existing software packages. A game uses an engine used by other games in the genre, or even of different genres, for a good few years. Maybe the engine gets a few tweaks and upgrades, but at the base, you are re-using the same foundation to build your games over and over. The same goes for DRM. They're not writing it from the ground up every time. They write a system once, test it to make sure it does what it's designed to and doesn't have any glaring bugs, and then re-use the crap out of it. Unless there are bugs they missed, they can keep putting the exact same code in their programs until the sun burns out, no problem. Once it's written, they're golden, attach it to the program, done.


I'm not arguing there aren't issues with current DRM and software support and such. I made a thread to ask ways people might suggest solving them. It's something that needs to be fixed by finding a balance between security and usability.

The best way is to focus on the game. The coding is always going to be hacked so as some of my articles expand on, allow for that. The good customers will pay you for your services and more than likely they'll commit to your next game, no problem. Hell, if Crimson Echoes, Cave Story or the Touhou series are any indication, it's the fact that people like to play unique games regardless of their origins. I don't think any of the big boys really need "security" in their games. Giving people incentives to play their game versus the myriad already out there, that's the issue at stake.

Especially on the PC market. I kinda like what EA is doing to incentivize people to play their games new. More DLC, downloadable codes, and you get to make a choice between that or a used copy that may already be registered. Acceptable choice and they're not tying you to an arbitrary server that you may not always have access to.

And here's the problem. Hackers can break it the same way so it really doesn't solve anything. Save for the Batman example, and a few other small ones where people are using their heads to mess with the pirates, it's really better to do something different in each game, rather than a pre packaged deal that surely spells defeat and gives a pirate/hacker a superior product.

I don't think you're understanding how this works. The idea is that they WRITE a new package and use it for whatever games they're coming out with at the time. Do you have any idea how time-consuming it would be to write new DRM for every game? Not only does it add a ton of cost and time to the project to come up with a new system, but the process WOULD result in a ton of bugs as you previously mentioned. By writing a new package every once in a while, you get the stability of well-tested code along with, in theory, a means of protecting the software that's not outdated.

Cracking DRM isn't just cracking a package. It's a team of people poring through the code trying to find what makes it tick, without the benefit of the comments the devs put in for each other, likely a good deal of code that looks like it, but actually never does anything, and thousands upon thousands of lines of code to sort through just looking for that. Once the DRM is cracked, all they have is knowing what to look for the next time. It's not like they can script-kiddie it after the initial crack. Or if they do, it involves writing their own program to aid in their work, because computers being stupid (and yes, they are), a program isn't going to be able to fully automate the process.



Now, you can argue the superior product thing with certain types of DRM, including the one in question. On the other hand, some aren't so bad. The Batman example is something that's really a pretty revolutionary idea. Maybe people will pick up on it, maybe not, depending on the cost and how easy it is.

Mostly what I'm saying is life isn't so simple. Any DRM is going to be cracked eventually, but it's not going to be done by casual hackers. The key is, again, in finding a balance between usability and security.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ne...ked-on-day-one

Blimey. That was quick.

Rebuttal: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ub...m-hack-rumours

"Not complete" huh. If that was true they'd probably have some details as to how exactly the game they released, which would be the same game that has been cracked, is "not complete". I imagine they're scrambling to throw out a nominal content patch to give buyers something extra. And I imagine that too will be cracked within a day. Someone seem to be heavily invested in giving Ubisoft a nice big finger.

It's nice to see their DRM scheme turn out completely ineffective. Warms my heart.