"has a negative impact on legitimate consumers,"

Let's be honest. It has a negative impact on SOME legitimate consumers. A very small number of them, in fact.

Most people install the game and, assuming the DRM works correctly, never notice it. They play the game and when they are done or want to move on, they uninstall it and never look back.

The average consumer isn't reinstalling old games 5 years after the fact and trying to get that game to run and cursing their loss of the CD case and all the other stuff that gets thrown up in these threads.

For the vast majority of people, DRM is a non-issue. They don't even know it's there. 

Heh - for once ;)

I must admit though that I had a copy of HL2 which I installed (with a serial no) about 2 or 3 years ago. I then had to format my HDD and had since lost the serial no. So I thought that was it - no HL2. I must admit that at this stage I was only blaming myself (if you lose something then its your own fault, right?)

I was very happy when I realised that because it had been registered on steam I could just re-install it! And the AI in the installer knew that because I had steam up and running with HL2 as one of my registered games it could then install the game from the disk (rather than downloading it all)!

Hats off to steam/Valve!

GTA4 is crazy, you get Rockstar Social club and GFWLIVE accounts up and running to play the game and use all of its features. But to be fair its a seriously resource hungry game anyway (7800GTX minimum!) and I wasnt that bothered.

Far Cry 2 - I dont think it required online registration (it came with a good ole' serial in the box) but if you are online it has an "autopatch" feature which I thought was quite nice.

Games usually say on the back of the box "requires online registration", so if you havent got the internet then you cant play the game. You wouldnt complain if your computer wasnt powerful enough to play a game, you would just upgrade or not buy the game, right? You wouldnt complain if your Wii games wont run in your XBox/PS3?

Or maybe you would........ 

I posted on here because I deluded myself that it would be a good place to sound off with some ranting because you guys are smarter and maturer than the average Blues News / Shack (I assume, I no longer visit) / Amazon smegging whinebags.

Obviously I was terribly, horribly mistaken.

ANYWAY...

Nonentity: well you just go ahead and do that and make your big badass point to the game companies. In the meantime, I'll actually be playing the games and enjoying them. Which is the whole point of gaming IIRC.


Frib: yes the battle has been fought and lost. The whiners have lost because DRM is still on games these days. Oh and this just one of my sporadic moments of contemptuous gaming community misanthropy. The point being, I don't really care about DRM nor being for nor against it. And obviously that being my opinion, it is FACTUALLY CORRECT, so other people shouldn't care about it. Or, if for some deranged reason, they really have to care about something that ensures you only install a game 3 or 5 times that 99% of people including their dimwitted selves will only install once, could they at least do so in private. Cheers. Sham xxx. 

love is all you need... all you need is love 

A little dose of love makes the hate taste so much sweeter in comparison... 

I say no, You ask why? I say I dont knooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwww!

Oh nooo nooo ! 

Trachea crushing, eyeball gouging rage and shoulder massaging, breakfast bringing tenderness in there and you've got a cornucopia of emotion. 

In the meantime, I'll actually be playing the games and enjoying them.

I have a console, which I find to be a more immediate, better supplied platform and more social platform. All things that add to my enjoyment...

Which is the whole point of gaming IIRC.


(nb: I no way mean to distract you from your vitriol, just defending myself from random flames... speaking of which; http://www.ripten.com/2009/01/29/gears-of-war-pc-digital-certificate-expires-kills-the-game/ ) 

...platform games... 

Although I believe they have since patched it.

Thing is though if you tried to play an unpatched version and you didnt know about this problem you would be pretty confused/pissed off.

TBH I get more pissed off with games like STALKER which are good games that weren't finished! So many bad bugs and CTDs and BSODs that you cant play the game even if you get it running. Which is a crime really because its a beautiful game and a lot of art, work and scripting just got wasted!

I do think its a bit sad to say "I will only buy games from steam" though. A lot of games arent on steam and are good, and a lot of games are on steam and are shite.

But I can see the benefits too, I just think that its a bit narrow minded to only buy games from steam. 

If there was a game I wanted not on Steam then I'd get hold of it some other way.

For example, they removed Bioshock for some reason, so instead I'm going to borrow it from a friend. Yes, old fashioned piracy.

What's the Valve concept about Russia - a major European pirate center - "once we distributed games there they stopped pirating so much". Refreshing opinion and completely inverse to the rest of the industry.

Being nice to your customers seems an alien concept to the execs who dream up this crap. Typically they're overpaid and bored when they do. 

Scumpie: So there you go, QED, it doesn't affect you but you'll whine about anyway - AND shoot yourself in the ass by not buying games on principle. Well done. Deny yourself fun and entertainment. I like that puritanical streak, it shows that fanaticism is overtaking common sense.

The only things that really bugged me and affected me was anything that lowered my conveinence of using my 'fun entertainment'. Install limits are included in that... I game at home and work (that's to working in the hyper cool games industry), and have reinstalled Comapany of Heroes and Team Fortress 2 several times... Games that don't have an install limit... if they had, it would have pissed me off that I'd blown my limit, thus my opinion that they're worthless bullshit.

I seem to recall a time when you were fanatical that installing Half-Life or one of it's patches also included Team Fortress Classic and thus you wouldn't get it due to the 'worthless shite' included... How is it any different that some people don't want 'worthless shite' on their system? So get fucked you hypocritical faglord.
http://teamshambler.telefragged.com/tfc.txt 

 

"Hypocritical_Faglord" would be an awesome XBox Live account name. I wonder how I could get that through... 

I got that really upset was, when that Gremlin took my gun. 

I agree with Scampbell.




:O 

So get fucked you hypocritical faglord.

You may have a point there....although back in those days (probably on a 56k there still!!) downloading a much larger file would be a definitely, and pricier, inconvenience. Also, at least I wasn't spamming Amazon with my nonsense... 

...was that you're annoyed by idiots on Amazon? That's like being annoyed with retarded comments on Youtube. 

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/33959/Pirate-Bay-team-lose-court-case

Best quote - "Really, it's a bit LOL. It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release."

fucking legend, just given a year in prison and he responds with this! 

or more like just how much of a dick some people can be........ 

I had a lot more sympathy for the piratebay guys before I discovered they were funded by a neo-nazi tbh.

While the verdict is very worrying for net neutrality and shows a lack of understanding of the protocols, the people in questions openly mocked the entertainment industry and happily admitted that there was a large amount copyright infringing material tracked by their site. Not exactly helping their case or helping demonstrate the uses of p2p beyond mere theft (a la the Mininova admins, a much more progressive site).

But hey, the immature attitude and projection of self deluded invincibility have won them millions of fans, something I'm sure will keep them warm in jail...


(Net neutrality is too important to be represent by nazi idiots ;) 

Before anyone says "Stardock did not include DRM in Demigod and now see what's happened!" I want to say that the game apparently connected to their server(s) for updates and some community things even if the authentication was wrong. So there were not so many people playing, but the server got hammered anyways. That is stupid.

That's what I heard. If in fact they did not include any form of simple authentication for the multiplayer part (ie CD-Key), they are plain morons. 

Fuck TPB. They can laugh all they want. We'll see who's laughing when their appeals fail. They only get two. 

Anyone have or know where to get the "jump" skybox by Stecki? (I think he made it, anyway).

I had the files a long time ago but can't find them anywhere now. 

They're not morons mate, they have a fairly clear idea what is going on.

As with past Stardock releases, the game shipped without any on-disc copy protection, as the company is strongly opposed to invasive DRM that hurts actual customers.

"It's not that we don't think piracy is massive," Wardell wrote in a forum post on Monday. "We just aren't convinced that it results in that many lost sales. Or more to the point, we don't think intrusive, obnoxious copy protection will result in more sales than we lose from people who don't want to mess with it."

From http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/58213