alanschu

No easily available local copy? I picked mine up for $20. Though I got sidetracked with Space Rangers 2 and Sin Emergence

Only if it's Atari spending the money on patching in the DM Client. I figure it's still part of Atari's initial investment to have a DM Client. Anything past the deadline then Obsidian is footing the bill. As for TOEE, was Atari counting on it to be an unquestionably huge smash success in order to simply survive? Since we're all just speculating, I speculate that the DM Client patch was, is, and always will be Obsidian's doing, not Atari's.

There's probably no outcry because it's be nothing but outcry. To the point where it doesn't even seem like outcry anymore, but just normal. Perhaps this IS us outcrying.

If Atari is banking on this game for their financial future, then I doubt they'd hold up a patch that could potentially make them more money. Unless Atari is the ones patching in the DM Client, I doubt they'd really have any bearing on it aside from giving a rubber stamp of approval and praying to the game gods that it helps them sell more copies.

If Atari is out of the picture, then Obsidian could probably patch it in without having to worry about Atari's approval. If anything, I would think it would be easier to patch it in if Atari was gone.

Probably the mod is done then; and the creator can either 1) stop modding 2) create new original content Or god forbid, it's getting time consuming. For people that don't want to pay it's no different than if the mod was just finished. It couldn't possibly be that the additional resources allow an author to dedicate more of his time to it. Like I said, for people that don't want to pay, it is exactly the same as if the mod had just been finished. The only way it's NOT the same, is if you're jealous and bitter because you don't want to pay for it and just want it for free. Or you're grasping at straws because you're against DD. I don't play Garry's Mod either. Though it's entirely possible to play both Half-Life 2 and Garry's Mod without using Digital Distribution whatsoever. But hey, if you'd like to just ignore all those boxed copies of Half-Life 2 because it's convenient, have at it. Exactly! But wait...he's just doing it because he wants to milk his creation. Such opportunities such as working with the full Source Engine and whatnot mean nothing to a hobbyist programmer such as himself

Hahaha

Fair enough. I feel it goes beyond what is necessary as well, but see it as probably being a necessary evil. On a final note, you cite your Dad as an example of how he's not too restricted. Could it just be that he is more open to you? My friends at Bioware are likely under NDAs, but they're pretty open around me.

You're right, DD provides much more opportunity for people. Without DD though, you'd have zero guarantee that you'd see the next version of a mod anyways. All this because some guy that made a high quality mod feels that, with the original license holder, following the terms of the EULA, is able to sell the game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html http://www.fallacyfiles.org/slipslop.html http://www.cuyamaca.net/bruce.thompson/fal...es/slippery.asp Just sounds like you're pissed that a game you enjoyed playing for free that won't be getting any more updates unless you pay for it. But please, keep posting. I'm hoping for some more gold like those EULA posts. I love it though. Original author's "milking" their own work. Keep it up! Have a nice day!

Hahaha.

What a crock of ****. Garry has Valve's permission to sell his mod. It's essentially become an expansion pack (you know, those things that cost money but aren't stand alone, and require the original game). Valve isn't breaking its own EULA, because it can do whatever the heck wants to do with its own intellectual property since it is the Licensor stated in the EULA. Unless you want to claim that Valve making expansion packs some how violates the EULA they have with themselves. Since you've apparently "read" the license agreement, I figured you would have read this important part of it: But I'm sure they didn't bother doing anything like that. I mean, what control does Valve really have over its self-funded, self-made intellectual properity?

You're confusing two issues, both of which are an advantage of DD. From a developer perspective, DD is nice because it requires less capital to self fund a game. This one you seem to have down fine, as it is a way around a publisher (it removes the costs and infrastructure of distributing a game). But if a publisher is still required (and I agree with Spider that publishers aren't just going to disappear), it will be possible for them to fund a game that doesn't need to sell a million copies in order to make a profit. It's not a guarantee that it will be funded, but if a publisher feels that there is no chance of profit, it will not get funded unless they are feeling particularly charitable that day.

So you basically want developers to admit that they lack to competance to do what they wanted to do? I know that this perspective is rather harsh, but it is one that will be taken by people. I suggest avoiding a career in marketting "

Hahahahahaahahaha. Wow, what an argument. It's short for MODification. Based on what? You still can't without approval from the makers of the game. So Garry is "milking" his own hard work? Classic! Milking of "previously free material?" Hahahaha. Guess what, Garry's mod 9.04 is still free. And according to Garry, it always will be free. There's no guarantee that Garry's mod would have even seen past 9.04 if he hadn't decided to sell it for $10. And since he's not charging for the older stuff, the "previously free material" is still free. Also, this will result in an increase in free mods as well. The way Valve handled Counterstrike had mod makers everywhere drooling that, if they could make a high quality professional mod, they could make money too. So you'll get more people making mods because there's a greater chance that they could possibly get monetary reward out of it. Heck, it's the same thing as if they decided to stop making the mod. Finally, the fact that this is becoming more and more possible is a hit in favour of digital distribution as a distribution process. This certainly clears up a lot though. Now you just sound like you're bitter because you wanted to play a free mod, and now that you're not willing (for whatever reason) to pay for it, you can't take part in the new updates and whatnot for it. Well guess what, you're never guaranteed you're going to get those updates anyways. I suppose this is why you were pissed at Red Orchestra, since you own UT2K4 and won't be getting any new updates for your version. Too bad you can't complain, because you never paid them for Red Orchestra, and the only "cost" you had to incur was the time to download the thing. It's not too surprising though, given that the mod was entered in a contest where first place won a free license to the Unreal engine!. Not too surprisingly, with that license they eventually went retail with that game. Shocking But hey, you had no problems leeching off another guy's hardwork without any intentions of rewarding him for it. I can understand why you'd be angry . God forbid the guy wouldn't mind making some money off of it. Your just a cheap ass that is pissed off because the only way he can continue to get updates on his previously free (as in no cost to him ever) mod is to pay for it now. Assuming of course that another free version would have ever come out. Never mind the fact that, outside of an expensive time commitment it would take to make the mod in the first place, but all the people that now have requests (demands even) about what should be changed for the essentially free game that they are playing. But hey, why should you care about the stresses they have. You want your next version of the game, and you'll be damned if you have to pay for it. I'm almost expecting you to say something along the lines that the mod makers should thank their fans since they got famous or something goofy like that because of the mod.

"Who wouldn't kill to get their hands on these babies?" <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It's funny, because back in the day it was much more about manly men with their manly chest hair. Now it's all about shaved bodies. What is the world coming to??

Don't blame Garry for wanting to make money off of his mod. You're not entitled to free material. If Garry didn't want to charge for it, he wouldn't have to. It's not like Valve has forced him to do anything about it. Not sure how you can "milk free material" when the person that makes the free material is the one that has decided to put a price tag on it.

Okay. If a game via retail needs 1 million sales to turn a profit, but a game at direct download only need 100,000 sales, it's less risky (assuming equal exposure yadda yadda. This isn't the case at the moment because DD is still in its infancy). It has nothing to do with different sources of funding (when I said outside investor, I was talking about the publisher). A game like Torment won't be funded because Torment didn't have very good ROI (though it did eventually turn a profit). This is because it didn't sell enough. But if it didn't need to sell as well to make a profit, then it could become more viable. Let's say they make $5 off of every retail sale, and $50 off of every DD sale (I'm picking these numbers arbitrarily, since they are easy to work with my example up above). In both cases, the 1 million sales in retail and the 100k sales in DD have generated the same amount of income ($5 million). Now, let's say sales for the DD game are better than expected, and they sell 150k. In order for the retail game to match this ROI, they'd have to increase their sales by 500k. Now, you will still get some investors (aka the publishers) choosing to only fund game types that expect to get 1 million in sales. But, under the current retail model, you will not get funding to make a game (of similar budget naturally) that is only expected to sell 100k units. If the game costs $4 million to make, in both cases the publisher/developer have generated $1 million in profit. But there's no way a project that would only sell 100k units retail would be approved with a $4 million budget, since at best you'd make 500k in revenue, and lose $3.5 million. Business decisions like that put people out of business. What? Not at all. In fact, the arrangement I was suggesting still adhered to the developer/publisher paradigm, just with the retail middlemen eliminated.

So you're saying I should play it on Easy?

Outside of our collision course with the Andromedia galaxy, I suspect that the exceptionally cold dust of nebulae and whatnot are rather insignificant. Uh, come again? The Earth is a black body emitter, particularly in the low infrared (which happens to be the range the CO2 absorbs). If the CO2 starts blocking it, and it's not absorbed by it because it's reached its threshold, it's not escaping into space, unless it converts to a different wavelength (which would result in something absorbing or giving that photon energy). How can it get into space if it can't get past the CO2 wall? Hence why I mentioned reflected energy, because the energy emitted from the Earth would be reflected off of the atmosphere as it tried to escape Earth, back down to Earth. This I won't dispute as I agree with it wholeheartedly. Though I'm enjoying the discussion about the plausibility of a runaway greenhouse.

A prefer the EX Omega Gamma to the square root of Epsilon version

As much as it sucks for owners of NWN (which would be me), I think it's a smart business decision to prevent rideable horses for NWN. As for Witch's Wake 2, that died a looooooooooooooooooooooong time ago. I know people have been itching for it, but unless you heard anything from Rob Bartel (and only Rob Bartel), it was a pipe dream. Considering he didn't mention it at all when I chatted with him about the original Witch's Wake, he's either an absolute dynamo at keeping a secret, or he wasn't working on it. And the PM's can be played if you just worked up the nerve to download them. If you don't want to play it because it is not available at all at retail, then I guess you don't want to play it enough. Unless you're stuck on a 56k modem (though my 28.8k connection never stopped me, even from downloading 1GB+ files of stuff I really wanted).

You know, gonna bankruptcy... no money. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's what I figured. I just haven't heard it called that before. It would be for me. Especially if the game turns out to be longer than expected. The best thing I remember about Deus Ex (aside from the fact that it's an all round excellent game anyways) was that there was about 2 or 3 different areas where I figured I was at the end game, only to find out that I wasn't and there was more game to be played. Well, X relevant NPCs would be bad, as I wouldn't help but be able to keep count. Y word dialogues would be fine, and around Z sidequests would be a wash. Though I don't typically see X or Z on the back of the box, but sometimes Y (which I can live with). As for my purchasing decisions, I do still follow the game a bit. NWN2 is a game I'm likely going to buy anyways, so I'll just listen to the general hub bub about it. If it's a game I'm uncertain about, I'll look into it a bit further. Feature sets interest me, as well as gameplay mechanics. I do read the back of the box, but I've yet to really find anything that indicates X or Z. If I do, it's typically so vague that it's "hundreds of sidequests." Never anything like "About 50 sidequests." At least not that I can remember. The only time I could imagine seeing it would be if it was a really high number, to the point where I'd likely just be skeptical as to what they call a sidequest. It might have something to do with the time I read the back of Star Ocean 2 (I game I actually didn't mind) and saw that it said it had 80 different endings. I guess if you look at all the permutations of Character X was not in party, Character X was in party, Character X liked you but you didn't like her back, Character X loves you and you love Character X, then I guess yeah. I did my reading up about the toolset (which was important in my decision) as well as the basic plot of the game to get an idea of what the story will be like. At this point I have decided I'm going to get the game, so rather than risk spoiling parts of it, I haven't been really following it all that much at all. But I'm a guy that turns the channel immediately when the credits of 24 come on so that I don't accidentally see the "Next week on 24," and I close my eyes and go "lalalala" (with my roommate ) when a commercial of it comes on. I think a lot of it has to do with my HL2 experience as well. I played Half-Life knowing virtually nothing about the game, so it was cool as everything was new. Being a huge Half-Life fanboy, I followed Half-Life 2 and got every tidbit of information I could on the game. As a result, seeing things like the Striders and Gravity Gun were less novel than they could have been. Especially considering they wouldn't have affected my decision to purchase the game. And believe it or not, I tend to agree with review scores, particularly metascores. I downloaded the Shadowgrounds demo becomes Steam told me it had a metascore of 81. I really enjoyed it. Though probably not enough to buy it. I also play demos of games that I have never heard of or haven't really followed. If I enjoy the demo, I'll buy the game. This can be spoilerish, although demos tend to be the beginning of most games anyways, so it's more of a moot point. It's also less relevant because I'm still experiencing the situation while playing the game, so the effect is the same as if I had purchased the game. I'm a big fan of demos. They also give me the all to important "how does the game play" answer. Trespasser was an unbelievably nice looking game....thank god I never bought it and played it (though reading reviews of it was quite entertaining).

I didn't mind the overused little girl. I enjoyed the game and it's atmosphere. I'm the target audience for the game because most times I saw the little girl (especially the one time I was in the security room and we were both staring each other down...and she wasn't leaving until I left the room) I got the willies. When she appeared at the top of the ladder it spooked me good.

Haha I noticed. Figured I'd be all "hardcore." Turns out I just die. I make it to the carrier, but usually by that time I'm ripped to shreds with low health (after dying about 10 times anyways). Maybe I'll be a bit more modest with my skills

Well, browsers and paint aren't exactly monster memory hogs to run in the background It is nice to pretty much instaswitch when alt-tabbing though As for games I'm playing...I just played through Sin: Emergence. Which had me admiring the Source Engine...so I played some Shadowgrounds (and speaking of Shadows, they do an excellent job!). When I finished off the action romp that was that demo, I started playing HL2 while I reinstalled Space Rangers 2. Got to Ravenholm, and said "screw it, it's too damn dark out and I'm too much of a pansy to play that at the moment, let's see if SR2 is done."