…followed by a mass of broad and debatable assumptions. But hey an equation at the end.
There is seriously no justification for this kind of copy protection. None. Even if it’s totally unbreakable and prevents this game from ever being pirated it is totally ridiculous, offensive and unworkable. The fact that it will prove to be breakable and that pirated copies will actually be a superior product just adds that extra edge of perversity to it.
My last post probably sounded snippier then I meant it to be. Sorry about that.
Anyway I would like to add there’s no way this is aimed at causal copying. One time online activation does that. Steam does that. Causal copying is very weak and useless compared to groups that crack and post to torrent sites. I wouldn’t even know how to crack a game, I don’t have any friends that could crack a game but I can find torrents if I cared to.
Once again i believe the entire purpose of DRM is to destroy the perfectly legal resell market of PC games rather than to stop pirating. If you wanted to sell your copy of assassin’s creed 2 you would have to include whatever login you use for their online check, which is probably tied to your email account, this makes this game unsellable. Take Bioshock, the last game i bought outside of Steam or MMOs without knowing what kind of DRM it had, the game has a LIMITED NUMBER OF INSTALLS. How are you ever going to sell a game you can only install three times? that’s ridiculous. When my brother finishes a game on his PS3 he goes to the store and gets 20 bucks for it which he then uses towards his next purchase, and if the game he wants has a used copy for sale he buys that instead. Game companies hate that because they see none of that profit, that’s a much bigger loss than broke college students downloading every new game that comes out on a whim.
This is a bizarre line of thought. You admit to buying games through services like Steam and MMOs. AC2 and most PC games are trying to become services too as opposed to products to stem the secondary market. You can’t resell games purchased on Steam either, you can’t resell your WoW account, why aren’t you pissing and moaning there?
Go ahead and buy AC2 on Steam and quit freaking out. I’m betting Ubisoft and the like would love to see every PC game sold through services like Steam (or even better their own services) in order to limit the secondary market. I’m not sure why people are so eager to protect the secondary market. The secondary market makes the primary market far more expensive. If PC game makers eliminated the secondary game market by shifting the entire sales process to Steam or similar services and claimed 100% of the entertainment experiences they are selling then everyone who plays the game would be paying the same price, as opposed to you paying $50 for the new version and some cheapskate paying $20 to Gamestop for it. The net cost will be lower to people who want to play the game on day one and it might save PC gaming.
People have some attachment to the secondary game market yet they turn around and rant against high game prices without noticing the correlation.
You aren’t buying a DVD with a game on it. You’re buying a game license. You can buy one license on Steam that’s limited to one user, just like a Windows 7 license. You can buy a DRMed disc with 3 install licenses for a different price, just like Windows 7. Just because it’s legal for you to sell a DVD with a game on it, there’s nothing that means the developers have to keep providing DVD versions.
If you really want the PC gaming market to thrive you should buy your games via services like Steam and maintain an account. Fighting the DRM on a disc is doing just as much to kill PC gaming as the hacking.
If i buy a game through steam it’s because the price is a minuscule fraction of what they originally asked for, if they wanna continue charging me 20 bucks for a 15 game pack then i’ll gladly put up with any DRM they want.
They don’t want your money though. That’s what you need to come to grips with. Nowadays any company that ports a game from console to PC is essentially just doing PC gamers a “favor”. The number of PC sales of a top tier game compared to it’s console parents is beneath noise level for these guys. Once you give up on them they can stop wasting money porting these games to a dead platform where more people play pirated copies of their games than do purchased copies.
The only company that seems to be able to handle PC game development is Blizzard and you know if they released D3 or SC2 on consoles they would probably double or triple their profits. Why they don’t is a mystery to me.
Well, for one, do you realize how laughably stupid SC2 would be as a console game? D3… maybe, eh.
Anyway, you aren’t really making sense. Why do these companies that hate us do us a “favor” by releasing the games for us? It’s profitable for them. The thing is… the things are developed on a PC for directX code, so whatever they come out with the xbox 360 is very close to being working on the PC. It doesn’t take that much effort to make a shitty port for PC.
I think you underestimate the market share that PCs have. The publications that release sales data are for retail stores only, and who buys PC games retail anymore? Not only that, but publishers get a bigger cut of PC games, even retail, because they don’t have to pay royalty and development fees to the console makers. And they make a much larger edge on digital sales, where the only cost of distribution is a little bandwidth. And digital sales come with good DRM too - Steam’s DRM is almost completely transparent.
And actually… with the way steam has been raking in massive cash by discounting games heavily in recent months, it may be a new boom in PC sales. Sure, companies may not be selling that many $50 brand new games, but I know people buy an assload of the same game if they’re discounted to $15. Better to have 5 times as many people buy your game at $15. They couldn’t do this for retail or console games, because the console royalty fees alone would exceed that before you even get into the production/distribution/shelf space costs.
If we could get more game makers to make good advanced games for PC, showing how ridiculously behind the times 2004 consoles are, combined with high quality digital distribution services that happen to also be cheaper to the consumer, we should see a big resurgence in PC gaming. And it wouldn’t be reflected in those retail sales charts that people like to use to declare how dead pc gaming is.
And I think you, and most other PC gaming enthusiasts, over estimate the market share that PCs have.
For several years now we always hear “Well, the sales figures don’t track digital downloads so you can’t see that PC gaming is really thriving”. Well, pretty soon we will be seeing those numbers and then PC gamers will finally have to come to grips with the fact that they are niche and not a valuable target audience anymore for these companies.
I believe, based purely on quality and not pirating etc…, that people left PC gaming behind when the HD consoles came out and they could sit on their couch with a wireless controller and play amazing looking games from the comfort of their couch with a beer in one hand and a controller in the other.
Console games CAN look as good as PC games when done right. Go play Uncharted 2 on PS3 if you don’t believe me.
No major corporation undergoes this effort for just “noise”. There are good margins for the extra development on another platform, else they would not do it. That’s how corporations make decisions, not to do anyone a favor.
I don’t believe you, but I don’t have access to a PS3. Uncharted runs at what, 720p? Maybe under that. How could something rendered at 720p at 6+ feet away possible look that good, just from a purely resolution perspective before you even add in all the other massive differences. I’m sure it looks good for a console game, but I doubt it even compares to Crysis, which is 3 years old now. I’m sure it looks good, but “as good”? No, it’s just not technically feasible - consoles are like 8 generations behind now. It’s too bad they didn’t make a PC version of the game to compare.
This is going to be even more evident now that DX11 games are taking hold. It’s a pretty substantial technological leap, and with no replacements for consoles in sight, in 2 or 3 years we’re going to be talking about decade-old computer hardware (which was low to mid end even at the time) compared to things that are literally dozens of times more powerful and with more capabilities too.
As I said, the consoles are just little shitty 7 year old PCs now, which means the actual code that they’re using is easily ported. So even if PC sales only make up 10 or 15% of the market on a certain game, the little effort in making a shitty port justifies it. Making a high quality port (like mass effect, dirt 2 graphically, etc) takes a lot more work because you’re not just giving us the same crappy console game but improving it, but just going multiplatform is cheap.
You’ve basically outlined the future business model I think. The salvation of PC gaming will be cheaper versions sold as services. They’ll continue making console games to sell for $50 and port them to PC sold via Steam or a similar digital service with online validation via persistent account and sell them for what is basically the cost minus the console royalty fees, say $35. How many people would switch to the PC version of a game (with DRM and without the ability to share/sell secondhand) for a 25-40% savings over the Xbox/PS3 version? It’s an ideal avenue for game developers. It would marginalize the need for developing games across many consoles. It would limit the console makers control over the product. It would give them an avenue to claim 100% of the profits for their games. It would cut the casual pirates off at the knees.
All it’s going to take is a high profile game developer to abandon the lure of selling a PC game box and CD and going 100% service model for the PC. If the game is hot enough it’ll sell and people will get used to the idea. They’ll lose money the first few games they do this with, but before long it’ll become the norm and they’ll make out like bandits in the long run.
The game DVD is just as dead as the music CD is now and the video DVD will be soon.
You have a myopic definition of what “looks good”. Looking good is about way more than pixels and frame rate. What really looks good is my Xbox 360 on my 43" Plasma in 720P from my leather couch with full 6.1 surround sound. Sure it might just be 720P or even 480P on some games, but when you’re 6-10 feet away and the screen is 43" it doesn’t matter a lick. My PC may be able to render Crysis at max frame rates at 1080P resolution but it will never overcome the fact that my PC is, and will probably always be, stationed at a desk with a annoying computer chair and a 19" monitor and stereo sound. I can’t and probably won’t out fit my PC with a monitor big enough to compete with my plasma. I’m not going to arrange my home around a surround system for my computer. Even the most expensive computer desk/chair combo sucks compared to my couch.
Console gaming will continue to pummel PC gaming, even with ancient hardware, so long as the PC and the home theater are disparate entities. Convergence has been talked about for 10 years and it’s still largely fiction. Things like Hulu are bringing it closer but it’s just not that close and frankly Xbox and PS3 are closer to becoming the hub of a converged media/PC/TV living room than a PC is. And so long as Microsoft is in control of both the PC experience and the Xbox experience that will remain the same unless they decide to merge the two technologies in an attempt to kill Sony and Apple.
This is a non-sequitor. It doesn’t attempt to address what I said. Someone says console games can look “as good”, I point out that it’s not even technically in the realm of possibility, so you say “yeah but my couch and speakers look good! so you’re wrong!” And then you bring up the fact that you can’t see that much detail at 10 feet away anyway as if it were somehow an advantage in looking good. A 43" plasma sounds impressive, but a decent 24" monitor at 2 feet away will look better than a 43" TV across the room in every way.
The rest is anecdote. So what if your computer chair sucks? That’s not inherent to the process of PC gaming. The recliner I sit in at my computer is the most comfortable seat in my house - I guess PC gaming is more comfortable!
Anyway, if those things matter to you so much, you could use the same TV and same couch and same home theater plugged into your computer instead of you console.
This is your own implementation. Lots of people run home theater PCs that they also game on. Because you haven’t bothered to set it up is not proof it can’t be done.
It’s reality. PC gamers love to rave about superior frame rates and resolution, they love to talk about rendering engines and 3D graphics processors. Those are all nifty, but it doesn’t reflect what’s apparent in the market.
BluRay is a good counter example. When the shift to HDTV happened people were blown away by 720P/1080i screen resolutions and 16:9 resolutions. Adoption was great. Then they came out with 1080P TVs and most people went “meh”. They came out with BluRay after a protracted standards battle and when a winner was declared the buying public went “meh”. Tech blogs have pretty complex debates on the value of 1080P and tight dot pitch, but the one trump card that always squashes the debate is that the human eye is only so sensitive and you get diminishing returns very quickly at the high end.
This applies to the console versus PC gaming debate. Yes, it’s factually true that PCs can deliver better images. However the market has made it abundantly clear that this isn’t important to the vast majority of game buyers. Most people either can’t tell the difference or don’t care about the difference enough to invest in changing their current gaming layout. A PC gamer raving about image quality is like an audiophile raving about the advantages of FLAC over MP3, but those improvements simply don’t matter to the vast majority of users.
What does matter is the aspects I mentioned. The supposedly superfluous stuff matters in the market.
It’s an anecdote and it’s one that mirrors the vast majority of households in America. It’s the prototypical example of what’s killed PC gaming. People, since the advent of the PC, have laid out their lives around the idea that the PC is a tool for work and the TV is a tool for play. The PC has gone to great lengths to delve into the leisure world, but it hasn’t changed it’s footprint. It’s still living on laps or on desks, not on walls and entertainment centers. A few extra pixels and a nifty frame rate bump isn’t going to drive people to change any time soon. PC games are better technically than console games in most respects, but the console game lives in an average American’s favorite room. Clearly “technically better” doesn’t outweigh practically more convenient and comfortable.
No, “lots of people” don’t. Home theater PCs spectacularly failed in the market and most PC makers have abandoned the concept or at least buried it. For all practical purposes PCs and TVs are still divergent. The vast majority of people who share content between their TV and PC do so via a Xbox or another console or a specialized Linux based media extender. The number of people investing the kind of money that a gaming PC requires in order to attach it to a home theater is minuscule. The vast majority of PC gamers are like you, with a big comfy chair and a big PC monitor and a clunky PC surround system hidden in an office or spare room. The fact that a 43" plasma is good for gaming doesn’t make it a good pairing for a PC generally, using a PC on a screen that size makes word processing, emailing, web browsing and 95% of the other things PCs do extremely cumbersome. So, unless the average American has 2 PCs the odds of one getting married to a big screen TV in front of a couch is unlikely.
PCs are versatile tools. Unfortunately the software tends to be way more flexible than the heuristics and that hurts PC gaming more than you seem willing to accept.
I wasn’t even attempting to make a general pc vs console post. He said that console games can look as good, and I objected to that idea. We’ve done this whole argument before.
That’s actually not a bad comparison/analogy. Although yeah, it’s hard to notice extra detail at 10 feet away from a TV because everything looks pretty crappy. There are a huge amount of people who say they can’t even tell the difference between SDTV and HD - this isn’t proof that HD is barely noticibly superior. But that only addresses the resolution issue - movies in 720p aren’t worse than 1080p in content. It’s not like the current situation where the number of objects in the world, or the degree of physics detail, etc. are held back by limited console computing power.
Or they don’t know the difference. Console advocates lie constantly, with their “you need $5000 to build a gaming PC!” or “you have to upgrade every 6 months” nonsense. Most younger people don’t even really understand that PCs are capable gaming systems at all, let alone the most capable. They grew up when the primary form of gaming is console.
I suspect that if people could see the difference (and not just graphics, but using any control system you want, being able to modify the game to your taste, lots of free user created content, massively better multiplayer systems, etc) and they found out that turning the PC you already have into a gaming machine is actually very cheap, they’d be a lot more interested.
Argumentum ad populum doesn’t really sway me anyway. People love shit. Arrested development and Firefly died early deaths, and Survivor and The Bachelor are in their 12th seasons probably. I suffer in my TV watching because there are maybe a handful of shows that are actually good because the public gobbles up garbage, and recently my gaming has suffered a similar fate.
The difference is far more substantial than that.
No, I get it. That’s the way it is. But it’s not the way it has to be. I’m just saying you can’t really, as a savvy, competant individual say “consoles are superior because they’re on my couch”, because you’d know how to set up a computer that way if you wanted to. We agree that the general public wants the simpler, easier, and inferior option.
Could we please not have the console vs PC debate? The simple fact is the numbers are currently screwy as hell (usually the whole console market against vs just the PC and usually hardware sales are included in the console numbers). Without the digital retail numbers and seeing how it compares to individual console sales we just don’t have a good idea of the real numbers.
Even if after all that it shows consoles far ahead the PC market is still around a billion dollar market. It’s not some niche forgotten platform. If it was they wouldn’t even be bothering with these silly DRM schemes that cost money to develop and never work. They just would never port at all. It’s not that they’re doing PC gamers a favor by developing for the market it’s the fact they’re in a tizzy about piracy. Not that they shouldn’t be upset people are stealing their work.
Any rate can we please stop this console vs PC crap? It never goes anywhere and is pointless.
I saw this image the other day, and it really rings true. It relates to movies, not games, but the substance is very similar. Someone should do one for gaming.
Senorbeef if you haven’t seen Uncharted 2 on a nice 1080p tv you can’t compare them. It really is stunning.
Most of what O said is the truth. For better or for worse.
The 1080p part is irrelevant. It’s an upscaled image, so no useful visual data is added over viewing it on a 720p TV.
He said console games can look as good. I was simply emphasizing that “look as good” amounts to more than graphics engine power. Personally I think 720P on a big plasma at 8 feet looks better than 1080P on a 21" monitor at 2 feet. I am fully aware that there’s more information in that PC image, but that’s not how I define “looks good”. I’m merely disagreeing with your presumption that looking good solely relates to processing and graphics power, looking good relates to field of view, eye strain, seating position, and a bunch of other things.
Hell, I think plasma TVs look better than LCD TVs and LED TVs, on paper they all have the same specs, but plasma is more pleasant to my eyes. Since they have the same specs can I not say that something “looks better or as good”?
This is a arrogant presumption and it’s a bit of a cop out. You keep dismissing every advantage of console gaming out of hand, claiming they are fiction or delusion. This is nonsense. Console gaming has many inherent advantages, PC gaming has it’s own inherent advantages. Both are equally valid and the market is showing that the consoles advantages are the more persuasive for most people. This doesn’t make them dumb, it means they don’t value the same things you do.
Yes you can. Consoles can be superior because they are on the couch, superior doesn’t equal faster/higher def/mouse controlled. They can be superior because most people have everything they need to be a console gamer already. They don’t need to set anything up at all, they are already there. What makes one system superior to one person may not be at all persuasive to another person. The entire concept of superior is subjective. PC gamers proclivity to absolutism and condescension really doesn’t help their argument at all.
The public wants simpler, easier and cheaper. They want to play at the couch as opposed to at the desk and chair they have now. They don’t want inferior, they want what they prefer. They just don’t give a rats ass about those PC benefits you mention.
One example, I play a ton of Civ IV. Civ is well known for it’s customizability and user created mods. It perhaps supports your case as much as any game, but I’ve never once felt the desire to mod my game or play online. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of players are the same as me. It’s one example where the “superiority” you cite is completely meaningless.
Anyways, to end the hijack and roll this distraction back into the OP: The arguments against DRM are valid and the current implementations aren’t very good. However PC gamers are cutting off their nose to spite their face by fighting them so vehemently. Without workable DRM and without limiting casual piracy and casual copying PC gaming will continue to lag. But, don’t blame DRM for the death of PC gaming. The death of PC gaming has an order of magnitude more to do with the rise of console gaming and it’s inherent advantages than it does DRM. PC gaming and console gaming will need to learn to live along side each other and like it or not DRM will actually help achieve that goal.
The new world order of content distribution will have 2 paradigms. One in which the hardware is locked and the software products are durable and one in which the hardware is open and the software takes the form of a non-transferable service. If PC gamers continue to fight that paradigm they’ll succeed in squashing what remains of the PC gaming market and finish the job that consoles started.
