alanschu

Never played Shadows of the Empire unfortunately. Though the best thing I heard about it was the land speeder mission (which were missions I did enjoy in Rogue Squadron).

The disappointing thing is that, as schedules seem to be tight enough as it is, it seems we now are also holding development studios accountable for spending even more resources to have proper error responses to those that pirate the game. The thing about Mamoulian's link (which was an interesting read), was that setting up that copy/crack protection scheme wasn't just the flip of a switch. It posed serious complications for the project.

I couldn't find the PC sales for Fallout 3, just that as of November 6 it had shipped 4.7 million units on both XBOX 360 and PC. As for the Tweak Guide you refer to, Spore is downloaded more than Fallout 3. Though from what I can tell, Spore is a very popular PC game, in spite of the evil draconian DRM that came with the game. It blasted to 2 million sales (PC only) in just 3 weeks. I have a feeling this is more than the PC sales of Fallout 3. Probably by a significant margin. The sad thing is that the Pirate's Bay was encouraging people that it was the "right thing to do" to download the torrent. So, they profited off the ad revenue of those that wanted to "stick it" to Electronic Arts by visiting their site. And in that tweak guide, Bethesda comments about how significant chunks of their tech support go towards those that couldn't be bothered to purchase the game, with problems that are isolated to pirated copies of the game. Errr, in my example, neither company made a profit. One lost less money, but I guarantee that one of those companies is going to do a lot better from an investment standpoint than the other company, and it's not going to be the company that posted $0 in revenue. There's a reason why companies don't just post profits/losses in their quarterly reports, and it's not because they just want to make themselves look better. I read it too. Here's a quote from their most recent quarterly report: "The Company ended the quarter with cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments of $1.8 billion." Electronic Arts is a publicly traded company, it is exceptionally risky for them to be deceitful about this sort of information. What was the deal with Electronic Arts? It's anecdotal, but the thing that pissed me off about SS2 was just how commonly pirated it was in my experience. At University one of my friends ran a Warez site and SS2 was his most popular download for several months, even beating out Half-Life on occasion.

If it's just greed, and KOTOR 3 is such a sure thing, why wasn't it made?

It's kind of moot though if BioWare is looking to do something different, isn't it? If BioWare were looking to make a new KOTOR, I'm sure it'd be done. But they were looking to make an MMO (something they hadn't done before).

The bad thing about Rogue Squadron was the entire time, I considered digging out my copy of X-Wing or TIE Fighter. Rogue Squadron was a fun game, but it just didn't capture me the same.

I see it has coop That might entice me! If you can say, how do preorder perks get determined?

Oooooooooooooooo! What's Space Siege? >.> EDIT: Ignoring the fact I can find out on my own really easily ...

Which game? Clearly revenue itself is irrelevant. That's why public companies mention it (in addition to profits/losses). Which company do you think is in better financial shape, one that has a net loss of $2 million, and $1 billion in revenues, or one that has a net loss of $1 million, and $0 in revenues. With the sharp drop in the economy, as well as some capital gains, yeah there was some big losses posted. Some of the numbers are deceiving though, as some times people only post the GAAP losses for instance. Fortunately for EA, they're sitting on roughly $2 billion in liquid or near-liquid assets at the moment. As for EA going bankrupt, I still figure they'll cease PC development long before they're a genuine threat to go bankrupt. As for Looking Glass Studios, it was more a reference to the fact that PC only development houses either make shifts to consoles, or go under. As for the success of their games, I'm not privy to a lot of their numbers unfortunately. I can't comment if System Shock 2 sold "solidly" or not, outside of the post-mortem that anticipated that System Shock 2 should break even or make a profit in the long term (Ref). As the post-mortem says, the industry is exceptionally volatile.

You can't absolve Obsidian of all the blame for KOTOR 2. We don't know the details of what happened precisely, so it's not really fair to either company to say who is or is not responsible. Easy to say. Would it still be the case now? Lets make it more nebulous, if you were to ask every KOTOR fan if they had to choose between SWTOR or nothing, would the majority still choose nothing? KOTOR 2 came out four and half years ago. I stand my by assertion that, by this time, the majority of KOTOR fans have moved on. Would they like a KOTOR 3? Sure, who wouldn't? But you'll probably find just as many that are interested in SWTOR as there are those that feel as though they've been cheated out of KOTOR 3. It helps to put things in perspective. KOTOR 3 was canceled a long time ago. Most signs indicate that it was canceled to allow for Force Unleashed. BioWare has wanted to make an MMO, and were able to procure the license to make one in the SW Universe. I've seen no inclination that BioWare was interested in making a KOTOR 3.

So do you just download pirated copies of EA games to boost the download stats and "stick it" to EA? Because that just seems like a silly venture to me.

There's less of it because the market has expanded and now includes many non-tech savvy people. Ubisoft can make a ton of money on the Petz and Babiez games because the are cheap to make and hardly anyone pirates them, but the sales are still good. Frankly, I don't see the benefit of making any games for the "hardcore" from a financial point of view. I agree. I don't know if the miniature giant space hamster would agree, but a large amount of the growth of video games has been because of the inclusion of the mainstream market. However, two things are for certain. The cost of making games has skyrocketed, and the cost of buying games has remained relatively static (adjusted for inflation, it's actually gone down). This means that economies of scale must come into play for games to be profitable. This means that games will tend to be more conservative and less risky in their design. I don't think that the games industry is choking itself due to sequelitis or uninspired gameplay. I think it's just sitting at statusquo, which is actually still pretty good growth (things may be different with the "Tough Economic Times" going on right now).

Then why we have so much publishers whining about piracy ? The same reason why joe blow worker complains that he doesn't get paid enough for work. I don't blame developers and publishers for getting upset at people using their software without compensation. Why should those people get to enjoy the fruits of your labour for free? So not a single game of theirs is good in any way? And all the people that disagree with you are just wrong and simpletons?

That doesn't seem to be anything more than a more generic trailer.

Tell that to the anti-EA people. Or Looking Glass Studios. I actually think that piracy, especially in the western world, is significantly less than what it was back in the 80s. It might be higher on consoles now than in the past, but when I was growing up piracy was ridiculously rampant. While growing up using the Applie ][ the only game I can actually confirm was a legit copy of the all my favourite games was Black Cauldron. I know on a persona level, a large "anti-piracy" measure was simply using CDs. They were big, held lots of data, and made copying diskettes somewhat, unwieldy. Given that warez copies of games typically had a lot of the fun parts of it (like sound, videos) ripped out of it, piracy at that time was a bum wrap. Though CD-Burners became more common, so that was the end of that.

It's the same assumption as the assumption that all the people who complained about Titan Quest bugginess were pirates No, it's not. Especially when the developer can go in and specifically verify precisely why the application is crashing.

Doesn't matter, they need Lucas' blessing to make it...and odds are they probably won't get it. As has been clearly documented they have one directive at Lucas- To make as much money as possible fueling George's empire, that's what he wants. It's been no secret that BioWare has wanted to make an MMO for a long time. It's hardly Lucas going "**** KOTOR 3, lets make an MMO because it's where all the bling bling is!" Please don't speak on behalf of others. I have seen no indication that the "majority" of anyone wants to see a KOTOR III. I know a fair bit of people that were pissed at KOTOR 2 due to bugs and how incomplete the ending of the game was. I wouldn't be surprised if KOTOR 2 didn't sell nearly as well as the first KOTOR. The fact that significant time has passed since KOTOR 2, has significant impact on whether or not KOTOR 3 is even on people's minds at all now. I'd suspect that rather than the majority hoping for KOTOR 3, the majority has just moved on.

If it had said that, people would have understood that it was because of their pirated copy and not gone to the official forum to bitch about it en masse. Instead they would have waited for it to get cracked as well. I call complete and utter bull****. Blaming this on THQ is a classic case of blaming the victim. Given the unpredictable nature of cracking, and the possible side effects associated with it, it'd be impossible to make a system robust enough to satisfy this demand. Mamoulian War, I'm well aware of instances where stuff like that happens. Ironically, people like you still seem to get pissed off about it, except in this case. That's strange. I mean, how do you know that that person isn't a legit owner of Spyro that just got screwed over!? My favourite one was Earthbound's that restarted the game and deleted all of your saved games just close to the end of the game. Ultima VII's nonsense blathering fools was also hilarious (actually it was rife with all sorts of copy protection schemes that used the map or game manual), as people would walk around saying "Oink" and other random ****. I have a feeling though that you really aren't THAT supportive of developers booby trapping their game, are you? However, I'm not going to blame the developer for not spending time on putting in game easter eggs that account for software piracy. It's too unpredictable.

.... You have GOT to be kidding me. What would the pop up say, "Sorry Mr. Pirate, you didn't quite get it right, you should go back and keep trying!" Inviting a PR disaster because they didn't give proper support for people pirating their game!? Furthermore, even if they did have said popups, there'd be no guarantee that the cracking of the game would preserve it, or a host of other issues that they may not have anticipated.

Here's the quote from a blog quoting Michael Fitch, Director of Creative Management at THQ: I know, I read the article. So when pirated copies fail their DRM check because the DRM has been circumvented, that's the DRM's fault? EDIT: Regarding entitlement, that's clearly it. When people mention they pirate games because they find the cost prohibitive, then it's clearly a sense of entitlement.

It appeals to your common sense in the first place. If that isnt enough then get this: games have come from garage based projects to multi million dollar affairs in just two decades with the pirates there from day one. Its obvious their impact is vastly exaggerated, therefore all the moaning over piracy serves nothing but to support a corporate policy. A senseless corporate policy at that, whose only trait is that it damages legitimate users. Games have become multi-million dollar affairs. All while the price of games (which people complain so much about) has remained relatively static. Economies of scale have become so much more important to the software development industry, and with all the money comes much more risk. There's also heavy duty concerns about sequelitis and a lack of innovation in the industry. By Electronic Arts own sales metrics (provided at a talk given at my University by John Buchanan, then EA's University Liason), PC game sales are relatively static and constant over a decade's worth of time. The bulk of the growth in the video game sales has come from the console side (where games are actually even more expensive). At least for Electronic Arts. As for commonsense, it's been proven wrong way too many times in history for me to simply rely on that.

Actually it was some hidden drm that caused the game to crash after a while. The pirates didn't release a broken game. It was pretty Iron Lore's own lack of foresight. I have not heard anything of that sort. Given I can verify that my roommate could not play the pirated version on his computer due to issues mentioned specifically by Michael Fitch, yet when he removed it, and tried installing my legitimate copy of the game, it worked. Was the hidden DRM actually the problem, or was circumventing it the real problem? It'd hardly be the first time.

It's a completely unsubstantiated argument unfortunately. You can't definitively state that piracy is or is not responsible. As for 90% of pirates wouldn't buy the game anyways, well, 95% of all statistics are just made up. Having said that, there most definitely are instances where piracy does lead to very bad results. Titan Quest developers had to deal with the backlash of people accusing them of releasing a broken game, when some of the big issues surrounding the game at release only happened to people that had pirated copies of the game. Unfortunately, the news of a buggy broken game had already proliferated throughout the internet, and you'd have to be naive to think that people don't check the internet for game reviews and impressions. Potential sales lost because people were reporting bad information. Too bad Iron Lore is out of business now, and all those that enjoy the types of games that Iron Lore would make are now **** out of luck. Who wins because of the piracy in this case? Valve had to deal with, and spend money investigating, bugs in Half-Life: Opposing Forces that only existed as a result of circumventing the copy protection. I can only imagine how pissed off a developer would be spending man hours and lots of money investigating issues in good faith for "customers" that couldn't even have bothered paying $20 for the bloody expansion. Pirates continue to get their free ride, leeching off those that actually support the developers and help finance the games the pirates like to play.

You know... the reason why they do it, is beacuse the company can see how many people downloaded their games by torrents, so pirates make them cry even more, and they come up with even more retarded DRM which pisses off many many more legitimate users, which starts boycotting them aswell, which can in the end lead to bankrupcy of the said company, which would make many many many gamers very very happy Then the pirates are continuing to be an even bigger disservice to legitimate gamers. EA seeing how many people downloaded their game doesn't make them squirm in their seats. This is a total rationalization for actions, and is quite frankly an absurd reason for doing it. I call bull**** on anyone that downloads an EA game simply to pad the download stats, and without any intention of playing it. Electronic Arts continues to post billion dollar revenues, even as their DRM gets more restrictive. It's delusions of grandeur to think that pirating games from EA is going to make them go bankrupt. It's far more likely that they will just stop financing PC games altogether, and go console exclusive. Trust me, if you're a PC Gamer, you don't want to the biggest publisher in the world deciding outright that they don't want to make PC Games anymore. Then the PC Game development houses, like Looking Glass Studios, end up going out of business.

You must realy heate the publishers then At what point do publishers not provide remuneration to the original creators? I'm not aware of any piracy groups sending cheques to software developers for games that they like.