Zoraptor

Well, that would require a final approval clause or similar, if DRM wasn't spelt out. That is still both something that should have been mentioned and something where they should have sought clarification before making their offer. No one forced them to say 'DRM free', they chose to do it. I wouldn't call it malice by MS, they could have sat on the licence and they're within their rights to make whatever stipulations they like when licensing. That's true for anyone- if Valve were to licence Half Life or one of their other properties I'd fully expect them to write steam integration into the contract, even if it were for a KS. That is an inherent factor when it comes to using licensed properties, and there is no evidence that MS is being unreasonable here, quite the opposite given that their policy has been waived at least partly. OTOH I find it very difficult to envisage a situation where Harebrained are not either incompetent (not reading their contract properly) or malicious (reading it properly but not being upfront about it). Neither alternative is very edifying.

I do find the parallels between the mines in the 80's and the banks today rather amusing. The Tories have nationalised- effectively or literally- a bunch of banks, so in 30 years and with all their ideological shouting all they've really done is go from subsidising loss making mines to subsidising loss making banks, and those banks held the government to ransom every bit as much as the NUM did in its heyday, and the Tories baulk at anything which can hurt them just as much as pre 79 parties baulked at taking on the unions. Plus ça change... We had almost exactly the same process happen here from 1984 on. It was nowhere near as confrontational, probably because most of it was done by the Labour Party and there was a general acceptance that things Had To Change even amongst those effected.

Hah! One of the biggest news stories over here in the last week is this about tender Danish sensibilities being offended by large erect phalluses in poor provincial Nyoo Zillund. Which is a wonderful place to visit for a summer holiday, even if our summer has just finished and we aren't in Europe.

Other way around, I would think. Else there's no point for MS in licensing it and it might as well stay in the IP vault or be sold outright. I agree- I don't like steam, but I didn't complain about something like Carmaggedon when it was steam key only; nor PE, except for saying I wouldn't contribute to a steam only project. Because both were honest about it. This requirement* is clearly something that was written into their contract and they were- or should have been- aware of at the time of the KS but told nobody about. Had they done so the issue would not have come up at all, in some ways this explanation is actually worse than the alternative. Not to mention what would have happened had they not got onto steam. *Which is interesting in itself, I guess it explains why AOE2HD won't be on GOG and makes it unlikely that any MS stuff ever will be.

Reading the Dailyfail- even just one article- gives you more than the WHO approved amount of outrage for a whole month, let alone a day.

"Frankly, they give the impression of having burned through their money and being in a bit of a panic about it" sums it up, pretty much. The most charitable take on it is that they bit off more than they can chew and are now trying to offload as much work and responsibility on others as possible and do everything with absolute minimum effort and cost. I'd tend to think that their save game statements also illustrate this, making save games is hard!!!- who would have guessed? As such having a system which is basically "Looks like you want to do dlc? We can help with that! Looks like you want to patch? We can help with that! :)" is something they would leap at. Nevertheless, they went into the KS promising DRM free and got a lot more than they asked for too, as such I have no sympathy for them whatsoever. I can speculate on Valve's own approach to things and provide evidence for why I think that way if you wish, but that would probably be better in the Steam Sux/Roxxor! thread.

I never got an email about it, but saw the survey at their forums. The response was a perfect storm of a not particularly well received game, people who think GOG == Good Old Games and a pretty underwhelming dlc for the cost of a standard GOG game. I don't have any problems with it personally, doesn't effect me and it isn't being imposed by fiat on anyone. In any case it's a world away from collecting money from people on the understanding of a game being DRM free then springing surprise! DRM on them if they want a functional game at the end. ... Origin and Uplay are marketplaces too, so's GOG etc etc. Steam being a marketplace is irrelevant. 90% of the costs of such a system are associated with setting it up, which they already have. If you have the DB already it's- literally- adding lines to the records to say which dlc is purchased, and if you have a preorder system that already generates records then you have something that can generate dlc records as well. This is basic DB functionality, the sort of thing every online business has to do- and you know what? Even getting it outsourced is cheaper than Valve's 30% cut is. Claiming it cannot be done without help from Uncle Gabe is rubbish, plain and simple. Shonky reasoning made shonkier by their 'pound of flesh' lawyerism; and sadly there's unlikely to be a 'haha, no blood stipulated- sucka!' moment in this story. Frankly, they give the impression of having burned through their money and being in a bit of a panic about it. God knows what their state would be if they'd only scraped over their target.

I'd say the main reason is that she was utterly unapologetic about the impact of her policies and seemed to bask and take pride in the damage she did to lives. To some of course that means strong leadership in the face of the consequences of necessary policies; to others it means that she celebrated making them unemployed and- literally- ruining their lives. Gutting a town and instantly making half or more of its population unemployed, then going on the telly to pat yourself on the back for doing so is not going to endear her to those in that town, and they will remember. And there are other specific issues too, like her shameful handling of Hillsborough though she was far from alone in that clusterasterisk of incompetence and malfeasance.

Well yeah, completely unreasonable that having dlc, MP, mods and patches patches patches stuck behind a drm wall for something advertised from the start as 'drm free' upsets people. They're so unreasonable what with expecting not to receive a gimped, potentially permanently broken and always second string version having contributed in some cases large amounts. ... And yet, freeware- freeware- somehow manages to distribute updates without Uncle Gabe leaning over their shoulder, and mods have been distributed without Steam doing a Clippy impersonation for, well, as long as they've been around. I'm fairly sure Thief didn't use steam in 1998, for example. It's a complete bullasterisk justification that doesn't stand so much a smidgeon of critical examination. Ye gods I've never been so glad* I didn't contribute a cent to these sophist shylocks. *slight exaggeration, maybe

Augusto Pinochet. PW Botha. Saddam Hussein. What do I win? (And I don't even agree that Thatcher would have supported Hitler/ Musso. Churchill, who was outright fascist in many respects like gassing Iraqi's, white man's burden, exploitation etc was stridently anti-fascist after all and did not believe in banding together with Uncle A to fight Uncle J. But Thatcher was an absolutely typical western hypocrite 'democrat', totalitarianism was AOK, fine, brilliant even, so long as it was her friends doing the murder, torture and suppression rather than her enemies.)

I mainly just find their method of arguing objectionable. If you're going to characterise everyone who disagrees with you as- essentially- not being in good faith disagreement, which is what Walker did, then you have crossed the line from simply arguing, or putting forward a position, to pontificating, lecturing and demonising your opponents. "Shut up you sexist trolling ignoramuses" is not materially better than "shut up you white knighting impression seeking mangina", which is basically what he accuses those who disagree with him of saying. That is an exceptionally bad approach to take if you're actually trying to convince people of something as opposed to just shouting at people from the top of a soapbox. Frankly though I think that RPS have done an exceptionally good job at trivialising the issue. The wage gaps in gaming issue is worthy of discussion as people should, fundamentally, get equal pay for the same job no matter their sex/ colour/ creed/ whatever. But something like going off the deep end at TWitcher 2's prologue boobies is nothing but trivialisation, if Aryan is alive he gets tortured instead and it is, contextually, appropriate anyway. It's like complaining that having rapine in Game of Thrones is sexist, it isn't, it happened historically and still happens in the real world, burying that under a politically correct blanket is not something that should happen because some middle class bleeding hearts from Chipping Norton get upset at it, if anything it illuminates the mistreatment of women.

I think the reaction that Anita received to her video is another attempt to do something like this I'd agree with that, certainly. I wouldn't have found her project worth funding personally, but trying to bully her out of it was utterly disgraceful let alone the manner in which some tried to do it, and certainly an attempt at censorship and discouragement of others. On RPS though, I'm about as liberal as they come and if they're managing to alienate me on something like this they must be doing something very very wrong indeed. I think Mr Walker needs to take a look at himself and his website rather more as to why the effect has been so divisive.

I think you're ignoring the issue of self censorship, where the pressure of an issue is sufficient to ensure censorship without there being any formal process involved. Something like depicting Mohammed is perfectly legal in most western countries but happens very rarely even when it would be contextually fine- in Crusader Kings 2 you can go back to see Mohammed's portrait and it is the only one in the whole game that is obscured, the issue of South Park/ Comedy Central censoring similarly against the wishes of the people making the program etc. There doesn't have to be or be an attempt to create legislation or other regulation to impose censorship if you can make people impose it- voluntarily or involuntarily- on themselves.

There's little point in speculating on what a Maggie less world would be like- she's far too polarising. You'd just have a dichotomy between "we'd be communists and Westminster Abbey would have been renamed the Arthur Scargill Memorial Mine Worker's Emporium" and "we wouldn't have shifted from subsidising miners at $20k a pop in 1979 to subsidising bankers at 400k a pop in 2013". Neo-liberal/ laissez-faire types always love her, the more left leaning will always hate her. And yeah, the person who deserves most credit for the 'defeat' of the USSR is one Mikael Gorbachev*- the guy who did all the heavy lifting and made all the concessions- not either Thatcher or Reagan. *Or maybe Brezhnev and the general ossification of the soviet leadership

I suspect a lot of those who agree wholeheartedly with Walker/ RPS on this issue would list, say, a religious group objecting to EA/ Bioware wrt homosexuality as being attempted censorship though, even when they use the same tactics. The thing which really got me, apart from their lack of evangelism and inconsistency on other non directly gaming topics, was their historical bee-in-bonnet obsession with CDPR's sexism. Yeah, the booby cards were ridiculous, pretty much everyone (probably including CDPR, now) would agree to that. Turning much of the initial discussion of TWitcher2 and Cyberpunk into a treatise on sexism though, and ignoring any context? That Alec Meer saw a woman being tortured in a medieval world being included to lead to, er, titillation says more about him than about CDPR. And the complaints about the Cyberpunk trailer were just cringe making and the worst sort of issue nannying.

I'd have somewhat more sympathy for RPS' stand on the subject (or rather their approach to the subject, since I broadly agree with much of what they are saying) if they were quite as gung ho about things that could potentially blow back on them and where it could potentially hurt them/ cause them difficulty if they actually made a big deal about it; Doritogate- where one of their own contributors got the shaft from their ad provider- got a delayed, tepid response on the main site because it did not pertain directly to games, to whit: If they were consistent it would be fine, but apparently gaming metacommentary like sex biased wage gaps in the industry is relevant to RPS, but for some reason whether or not gaming journalists are getting bungs isn't relevant. It's easy for them to characterise those who criticise them as cave men or whatever, and assert they aren't just doing to for the page impressions or to get their legs over with Feminist Studies majors but- by their own words- things like the wage gap are not things that RPS ought to be covering. As such, they invited questioning of their motivations.

tritto. I actually came close to cancelling to to put the cash towards the Divinity KS, but I know I'll end up buying Torment anyway so meh, might as well do it now.

Yeah, let's get back to our regularly scheduled discussion of how EA sucks... (Don't care about SI much, it's stupid but meh, ignorable stupid is ignorable. A zombie apocalypse would have been better though)

Uh what? XP has DirectX 9. It isn't very surprising, given what happened with Bioshock (1). "A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys" and all the metacommentary about railroading in gaming and the last few levels were every bit as much 'you must obey the voice in your head' as it was when it was Fontlas saying your command phrase.

Yep. I would have killed the Force in Kotor 2 and pulled down the Wall in MotB for exactly those reasons, had they been options.

The price varies depending on how many (D&D) games you own or are purchasing- it's $12 if you own no other D&D games on GOG down to $4 if you own all the other titles.

One of the big things about SW EU, as opposed to the Star Trek one for example, was that it counted and was as much a part of canon as the movies, so long as they were compatible with the movies. Having that removed would remove a lot of the 'point' of them. It wouldn't make them any worse quality wise in an absolute sense- the equivalent would be to something like Han Greedo Both Shot Simultaneously Shot First. You can still try and imagine that Han Shot First, and maybe enjoy the original if you've got laserdisks or whatever, but officially the ridiculous looking CGI mess from the DVDs etc is what actually happened.

Would have been better than Sunset Invasion.

I agree the timing could have been better, but the response has still been pretty good. They're already 76% of the way to their funding goal, they'll reach it easily, and both TToN ans SotA end this week. Hopefully this means that they'll have good steady funding throughout the next couple of weeks and a great big surge for their final few days, assuming no other big time project launches around that time to take attention away from them. I still think they can double their funding goal. We can only speculate as to what they could have gotten had their timing been perfect. I'm guessing 1.25 million-ish. I find it rather adorable why they launched early- I cannot imagine there's anyone else who'd treat RPGWatch as if it were GameInformer/ Gamespot/ IGN/ Kotaku, but it would have been far more sensible to just wait the two weeks until SotA and Torment were out of the way. You should aim for a different billing/ pay cycle and they have been a bit swamped PR wise as well. I actually think they are doing well under the circumstances, but they deserve to do better given the quality of their pitch. They got my money anyway, but they were always (well, barring steam exclusive) going to get that. I suspect they'll end up with a million+ and have a relatively larger kick at the end but I think given the quality of their offering ought to get 2 million+. I agree with Lady Crimson that its approach of being more of a straight 'pre-order with bonuses' rather than 'fund us so we can make it at all' is likely to limit things, and Larian does not have the cachet of Obsidian or KS pedigree of inXile- but to balance that they have a huge amount more to actually show and demonstrate than either of those did.

It's the playtester effect. If you don't tell people they can/ should do it they will presume they can't- see the feedback on Dishono(u)red and Bioshock's playtesters. And sexism.