skuld1

Geralt - Take these flowers. Woman - Oh yesss, f**k me now!!! That just screams 'mature gameplay' to me...

Is that pic from the unmodded game? I don't recall seeing that... but then again I haven't played in a real long time so I may have forgotten.

Suikoden III does this fairly well (imo).

If it was plainly obvious that DRM resulted in a net loss of sales, no publisher would use it. Corporations do not actively engage in money losing propositions when they can very easily make a small change to undo that condition. In any case, from this story : (bold added) "Fixing The Holes - The Results Below are the results of Reflexive.com sales and downloads immediately following each update: Fix 1

Nonsense! Don't you know that small, rabid fan groups are the main factor in determining whether a game succeeds or fails? I mean, look how well sites like NMA and DAC did with Fallout 3... err, wait a minute...

And yet AFAIK after all these years no one can run a simple test like the one I outlined earlier in the thread to prove that Starforce burns up drives. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if such a test was run but the results were never released as the desired result was not attained...

The anti-DRM crowd is full of bold claims but extremely light on actual studies, papers, etc. For instance the claim that Starforce burns up drives would be fairly easy to demonstrate: Buy 200 identical DVD drives: have 100 of them running starforce protected games non-stop and have 100 running non-starforce games non-stop... there should be a statistically significant difference in drive life if starforce does burn up drives as claimed. Apparently, every single anti-DRM person in the world is poor and cannot afford to bankroll such a study... I just have to listen to anecdotal stories on how Starforce ruined someone's drive edit: I am in no way endorsing Starforce... I think it's a crappy form of DRM. But in the same way I don't assume a defendant with a crappy background is guilty of murder I don't assume these hardware destruction stories are true because of the crappiness of their DRM scheme. Show the proof

You can purchase additional items (furniture, clothing, hairstyle etc) from the online store, which requires you register your game, but otherwise the only DRM is apparently a DVD check. This sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

wrong answer. i think FO3 is a great game. it's just not a great Fallout game. it's a horrible Fallout game. and this is where the "if x = Fallout then let x = a, b, and c" arguments come from. Actually, I think it's a great Fallout game. Clearly, you don't. Who's right? Now, this is where you reveal your super special credentials that make your opinion far more relevant than mine, right?

The thing is, I can objectively measure the fuel efficiency of a vehicle or the fat content of a hamburger. Do you know of some magical way to objectively measure the fun level or 'goodness' of a game like we measure the fuel efficiency of a car? I think FO3 is a great game... you don't. Who's "right?" Sales are one of the few things we can objectively measure.

So what you are saying is all those people at NMA are totally in the wrong when they point to FO: BOS and its low sales and deem it a failure. Thanks for clearing that up

There are no exact sales figures for any of the FO games, but if you use generally accepted estimates FO3 has actually sold about three times as many copies as all the other FO titles combined.

I'm not sure what version of FO3 you've played, but you cannot carry an 'endless supply' of guns or armor around with you. "Realistic" inventory has never been a staple of any FO game... go ahead and load up one of your FO2 save games (or I can do it). Pop Quiz: How much ammo could you store in the car trunk in FO2?

I'm trying to understand the love for Witcher dice poker... the AI was completely brain dead and would throw away winning rolls for no apparent reason.

I have no idea what your problem is here... tell me, how many fights could you get into and how much stuff could you collect in FO2 if you just continually wandered the wastes?

Not enough studies have been done/released... but I did find this one from Reflexive interesting. Apparently they had a rather large boost in sales after implementing some anti-keygen/crack measures. ...I think I hear footsteps... probably the anti-drm folks coming to dismiss or discredit this article

Heh, isnt that par for the course now? NWN, NWN2, Oblivion, FO3, Gothis, etc, etc.... Its almost a business model now, lol. Just chug it out the door and let the customers fix it. And Vampire: Bloodlines, Temple of Elemental Evil, FO2, Arcanum...

Sorry, that answer can't possibly be right... no references to how evil, corrupt, moronic, etc. Bethesda is. This thread is like being back at the Beth forums. I fully expect Gatt9 to roll in in a few days and continuously exclaim that FO3 was a failure because it only sold 3.67+ million units.

Well what do you know, that whole 'choices & consequences' thing applies in real life too.

I don't think anyone here has a problem with reasonable anti-DRM folks, which you seem to be (maybe aside from saying you get a guaranteed trojan from EA ) . Nowadays, all companies disclose what sort of DRM scheme is used with their products. If anti-DRM folks (not referring specifically to you, referring to the lame pirates) disagree with the policies that the company uses, don't buy their product. However, the fact that the companies use a scheme that anti-DRM folks don't like does not give pirates a right to commit copyright infringement. There have even been a few regular posters here who have admitted to piracy due to DRM (though I believe their most explicit posts to that effect were deleted by mods). The way I see it is pretty simple: Pirates don't magically get the right to commit copyright infringement because some company uses a DRM scheme you don't like. Anyone that suggests that they gain the right to commit copyright infringement because of a DRM scheme is lame and pathetic.

In other news, the lack of DRM in Demigod is causing serious issues for paying customers as there have been some extreme server issue at release. From this 1UP Story: (bold added by me)

I am not hating sports, i for example loved High Heat Baseball series untill they ****ed it up with making PC version looking the same as PC version Yes, the PC version should look the same as the PC version...

Low if a big dev/publisher tried for it and hyped it up appropriately... Zero if it's from a small dev/indie project.

I found it quite interesting that they did this. Looking at it from one perspective, Ubisoft basically called the bluff of many pirates ("We only pirate because of the eeeeevil DRM")... and judging from a few torrent tracker sites I looked at, the pirates were basically proven to be full of sh*t. Actually, according to a number of posts/indications on the Ubisoft website, the piracy rate for the Prince of Persia has been unusually low. Sources that provides some figures? Posts from borderline trolls like Sblade saying things like "Ubi won't release information, that must mean removing DRM was a complete success!!!!11!!oneone" are basically worthless.