Zoraptor

Pirates are not competition. It's simply a question of not offering for sale a product that is worse than a pirate copy/ punishing legitimate customers relative to pirates. If you want to take a TWitcher2 approach and offer a bunch of extra stuff that's even better, but not really necessary. More extended: they have to live in the world that exists, not the one they'd like to- fortunate really, as I'm sure most publishers would love to have persistent monitoring systems coupled to automatic monthly/ instant debits and 'Trusted Computing' style big brotherism; and for just about everything. What determines whether you are a profitable company is how many copies you sell, not how many copies are pirated, so if you take measures that cut into the number of people willing to buy you are hurting yourself. If pirates offer a free, less restricted and more convenient/stable experience you should at least try to tackle the two elements you can control rather than waving your arms and wishing real hard for a world in which piracy does not exist while coming up with ever more elaborate Rube-Goldstein schemes which just further worsen the other two factors. Ironically, one of the later ACs had just a disc check on retail. One of the more pernicious effects of DRM schemes is that all your products get tainted with it even if they aren't actually using it. Oh, that's definite, can be seen from their annual/ quarterly reports. Their revenue from PC more than halved.

May not be for sale though, since it seems that the shut down was not for 'standard' reasons like going bankrupt/ running out of money. The Stalkers sold 4 million+, with GSC self-publishing most of those, so it is highly unlikely to be direct funding issues.

I don't know why anyone would pirate something which is rubbish- but that's irrelevant anyway, as I was talking about their sales on PC and their belief that they are entitled to a certain amount. If you sell a crap product you cannot expect it to sell well irrespective of piracy- it didn't sell because it was crap. So if it's a wonder anyone would pirate it, it's far, far more so that anyone would pay for it. Blaming pirates rather than yourself when your crap product, marketed crappily with crap DRM to people you describe as being pirates even if they have bought the game fails to sell, is, well, a load of crap. Neither Ubisoft nor anyone else is entitled to sales or anyone's money simply because they release a product. But that is clearly how they feel.

It's pretty much entirely the banks'/ financial institutions or at a pinch the regulators fault. An ordinary person is definitively not supposed to be an expert on matters financial and if told that they can pay back a loan will inherently believe the expert. Banks definitely are supposed to be experts, as is the government. If a bank is willing to issue a loan there is an implication (or obligation, if you have anti predatory loan legislation) that the loan should be able to be repaid in the vast majority of cases- traditionally foreclosure is an extremely poor outcome for all involved, including the bank. If you as a financial institution are deliberately designing loans in the knowledge that a high proportion will not be repaid and an even higher proportion won't if the economy worsens then you should shoulder the vast majority of blame as you have (1) designed the agreement (2) designed the implementation (3) have the requisite expert knowledge for things like asking and modelling what happens if house prices start dropping instead of increasing. Much as our banks here are a bunch of vile piratical Australian interlopers determined to gouge as much cash as possible they're infinitely better than those elsewhere for the simple reason that they didn't loan money stupidly and stayed well away from the snake oil derivative market.

Ah, the good old entitlement argument, I knew you'd show up eventually. Both sides have entitlement issues- Ubisoft feels entitled to sales despite shoddy ports, hopelessly annoying DRM and a horrendous attitude, for example, and appears entirely unable to examine their own actions' role in the face of their imploding PC sales. They're selling an entirely voluntary luxury form of entertainment with hundreds of alternatives available yet believe that they ought, by right, to have better sales no matter what and no matter how they treat their customers.

I'd tend to think the better point of comparison would be the movie(s, if you include ImaginationLand/ TA:WP) which had context in current events but whose overall 'message' was not directly tied to those events. I really can't agree- you can say much the same about 'story' too and it works well in an RPG setting. In order to have a compelling story you 'need' it to be a tightly controlled progression where characters and plot points are introduced and fleshed out which runs counter to being able to choose how the story unfolds- this is how books, movies, TV series and even traditional oral storytelling work, the experience is wholly linear and (theoretically at least) repeatably identical. It doesn't have to be that way in games and you can- and should, really- adapt to the strengths of the medium. One of those strengths is more flexibility than traditional methods. I can't think of a good reason why that flexibility can be a strength for storytelling but not made to work with humour as well, and certainly not in the more facile storytelling sense (Bioware style basically, choose branch A: Cartman abuses Kyle hahaha; choose branch B: Cartman abuses Kanadians hahaha; choose branch C: Cartman abuses poor people/ Cenny hahaha). Obviously I can't say that it will work, but I think writing it off is certainly premature, and there's no inherent reason it can't work.

Any 3d engine can do 2d- almost all UI elements are 2d for example, but in any case all you need to do to get 2d from 3d is set dimension 3 to zero. That's kind of fundamental to geometry. You can even build environments in 3d then turn them into 2d if you want, as was done for the Infinity Engine games. Else none of the minigames in System Shock 2 could exist- they're 2d games in a 3d engine, after all.

Nothing to be offended about. Fart jokes and making fun of everyone and everything is what goes on in the show. Apparently this equals a right-wing show. There's a bit of an authoritarian streak in the left which is frequently combined with statements espousing choice and equality. That's one of the show's biggest targets as they hate both authoritarianism and hypocricy, but it really gets under some people's skins that their views can be ridiculed. As such it's easier to just label things because, well, they're right wing hence wrong, biased, stupid and ill informed by definition. I pretty much always end up as anarchist in the political compass type things- ie about as left wing and real meaning liberal as it's possible to get- and I can't remember ever having a problem with South Park's political slant. They may have gay/ black/ left/ right/ male/ female characters who are horrendous d-bags (if we get SP forums will they have relaxed **** generating algorthyms?) but they're d-bags because they're self-important/ hypocritical/ obnoxious, not because they're gay/ black/ left/ right/ male/ female. Overall it's rather like the more balanced news outlets. If the left thinks they're right wing yet the right thinks they're left wing then they're probably pretty balanced in reality.

It's not so much the strong/ weak currency dichotomy or keeping it at various levels longer term that is important (stability is usually the best approach long term), but the ability to have it be flexible and responsive to your unique circumstances as a country. Something that the current Euro set up lacks. If you're in an economic bind one of the best immediate responses is to drop the currency as it makes you 'instantly' more competitive. If you're lucky enough to have your debt in your own denomination you can also inflate away/ print money to pay your debts by having a lower value currency, something Greece et alia would love to do at this point, and that the US is actually doing to an extent. If you don't then you want a sufficiently low currency to keep you competitive, but sufficiently high that you can still pay down debt, all without turning into Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic. You can also make a bit of extra money and influence the valuation by buying/ selling your own currency, so long as you don't get into a speculation war you can't win (UK and the ERM, for example. Bet there are a few people retrospectively glad that happened)

I think you doubled HAWX2's PC sales there. So few people cared about it that it never got "patched" even as a matter of pride. As I said elsewhere, Ubisoft are bipolar. They make particular types of games on PC that pretty much every other large publisher has abandoned as not having a large enough market, but at the same time have some ludicrous and- worse, since it taints even those titles with more reasonable implementations- wildly inconsistent DRM schemes while their personnel flip between Five Minute Hates and bemoaning their PC sales having halved. They've used no DRM, SecuROM, Steam, plain disk check and various different iterations and implementations of Uplay in the past three years and I have no idea which used which without checking.

With the Fed lending to banks at basically zero interest for the past 3 years that's hardly surprising. It's also rather... questionable as to whether that is significantly different from an outright bailout in anything other than the method in which it is delivered. It has at least illustrated why the US is so keen to keep its global reserve currency status, since that sort of action and quantitative easing ("printing money") would have far more severe effects if there wasn't a built in reason to hold onto US dollars.

Ubisoft is bipolar, on one hand it spews a lot of PC hate and piracy BS, on the other hand it's one of the few major publishers that still releases PC exclusives that aren't MMOs. Anno2070, if it were a EA/ Acti release would be multiplatform most likely never even considered due to not appealing to the right focus groups or if it were considered would be turned into Anno Post-Modern Warfare or similar.

I'd call it a failure due to its sales, though mainly because its predecessor did so well. Losing nearly 50% of your sales from the previous title doesn't usually spell success. I think that's conflation- Bioware Montreal is the one doing the new IP and this is being done by a different (pre-existing but rebadged) studio with us previously knowing nothing about it?

It isn't creative accountancy and it isn't an outright dismissal, it's just that SE gets its money 'now', based on shipments rather than actual sales, and that can come back to bite them if they overship- burying unsold copies of Daikatana in landfills, as an extreme example. Frankly, all companies spin statements, often in the same manner as, well, me being happy with the weather today. It's dull, cool and overcast rather than bright, warm and sunny; but hey! it ain't cold, windy and rainy so I'm happy with it.

Nope, to the pure part at least. It is based as much as possible on real numbers from the publishers and NPD, along with some comparison with similar titles. But yes, any discussion of this sort will be rife with conjecture as we don't have all the facts available. You should, of course, feel free to disagree with the conclusions drawn since it's unprovable as it stands, I was just presenting the case for DXHR being below expectations sales wise. I think it's reasonably convincing or I wouldn't have done it. YMMV.

I'd expect that is where Pidesco got the impression from. I'll still stand by the statement that it didn't sell to expectations*- more so considering how well received critically it was- no matter what Squeenix say. They are not a disinterested party and a lot of the investment made into the franchise, and the impetus from the good reviews, would be lost if they discontinued it now or labelled it an underperformer. To be fair, any game that makes money is a success in an industry where the vast majority of titles are cancelled or outright lose money, but I would have thought their expectation would be 2 million+ sold through by now. I'd put the dev team size, expectations, costings etc in roughly the Bioware class. As a comparison, ME2 sold about as much in 5 days as DXHR sold in 5 weeks, on 360 alone, and with an initial shipping size less than DXHR, while DXHR had a dev time not that much less than Dragon Age Original (2007-2011 vs 2004-2009). And it may well not even reach the sales of Baldur's Gate. Overall, there's simply no way I can see that DXHR was a cheap game to make unless the comparison is relative to something like GTA/ COD/ GoW. Comparing the 820k for DS3 vs 2.2 mill for DXHR is fine since they're both shipped figures from the publisher so it's comparing like with like, but they are shipped figures and thus of limited usefulness. Good lord it's depressing seeing how many 'games journalists' still don't know the difference and just say sold. *The main caveat now is the regional breakdown, since they apparently shipped 800k to NA and 1.3M to Europe. If they sold 75% of their shipped total it would be around 1.7M, edging towards their expectation. I'm not convinced though, not least because DS3 supposedly sold through a higher proportion than DXHR.

I never had any real problem getting any of the old LGS games running until recently, and that was completely unrelated to the game itself. Then again I don't think I've actually reinstalled them since 2000 and just copy the folders over all the time so the various accumulated fixes were done piecemeal and didn't need redoing.

They are going to release more newer games, apparently, at a slightly higher price point, but given SRt3 uses steamworks it won't ever get there. Because the Dark engine is crap and wouldn't want to run properly on XP/Vista/7. It's already available on other services and is easier to get to run than a lot of DOS games were out of the box. You should check out TTLG some time, apparently people there can tell you how to get it running.

Battlelog hasn't been cracked, iirc- I presume if a key is banned Battlelog itself will block access to MP. If so he would be limited to the rather underwhelming SP experience by a ban even if using the crack. Having forum and game accounts be the same is potentially pretty dumb and should be avoided for security reasons in any case. Even if EA takes very good precautions security wise lots of people are pretty blas

It's ironic that RPS has complained about not getting responses to its queries from EA when they've been big on the whole "Origin will upload your HD!!!" bandwagon. Due to EA's privacy policy- the one RPS apparently never bothered reading during the Origin EULA debacle- EA cannot comment on specific cases to 3rd parties like RPS, even if the complainers are actively lying about the reasons for their bans, because that would inevitably disclose personal information. For all we actually know the accusers could have all been using hax or the no-Origin crack.

I'm not sure people who think "12345" or "password" is the height of security really deserve to be saved from themselves, though I'm sure they'd find some way for it to be EA's fault if they got hacked.

ME3 box disclaimer, bolded part as there was some discussion about what if anything Origin would be needed for. Actually the full EULA is apparently already available, if anyone feels like being bored by legalese.

IIRC it's been in development for a long time and has had a spotty development record- IG Aus were working on it prior to the release (and well prior) of the first Bioshock, it got suspended/ backburnered/ reimagined while they did Bioshock 1&2, then got reanimated once the Firaxis project got cancelled in favour of... CivRev, I think. So it's potentially already been active in one form or another for something like 5+ years even if it has not been in full development for all that time. At some point someone is just going to decide to push release, or cut their losses. Delaying allows burying the writedown in a nice high turnover quarter when few Questions Will Be Asked; and many of the senior IG Aus people have already gone which suggests a fair amount of unhappiness either in the ranks, or among management with the ranks. I don't think the negativity is unwarranted, but there are ways it could still work out OK and the delay could be a good thing. If they were to rebrand or parabrand to Bioshock it could be released after Infinite, they could rework some of the more unnecessary changes to try and get a bit more traction from the traditional fans and more interest from newcomers. X-COM: Futuristic Warfare, or BioshoX-COM, maybe. [edit: decided that sounded a bit too definite at the beginning as I don't think anyone at 2k/ IG ever confirmed that directly]

I think they could have used x-com successfully, either through the more traditional Firaxis project that got canned, or by piggy backing Bioshock. Most of what has been seen of the fps xcom would fit fine with Bioshock- right era, similar(ish) art style, potentially reasonably similar enemies- and it actually seemed to have as much in common with Bioshock as Bioshock Infinite does. Have it as an origin story, whatever. As it stood though everything was done wrong. No Ken Levine equivalent to get publicity, rather underwhelming videos and screenshots, zero buzz and an all pervading sense of negativity brought about by shoehorning the xcom name onto something that had little to do with the original.

X-COM reboot has been delayed to fiscal 2012. Would not be surprised if it is quietly shelved, permanently, a lot of the senior people at IG Australia (pft, 2k Marin Australia) have left recently and its reception has been at best... mixed. They should have used Bioshock branding, really, else it's the perfect storm of old fans hating it and new prospective fans never having heard of it.