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Major Copyright Judgement

Wildy said:
So you honestly believe that single player games require a constant internet connection?

So in other words you've just pulled some numbers out of your arse.

Are you accusing me of being a pirate, or did you just write that out wrong?
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Wow, touchy are we? I'll come back later when you're in a better mood. :rolleyes:

Seriously, if you're just going to throw around crazy crap, you can't expect anyone to take you seriously.

P.S. About 80% of Americans 18-34 have a high speed internet connection on their PC. I'll leave it up to you to guess the horsepower of the remaining 20%, and how often they play $50 games.
 
It is not about having any access at all, which most of the video game market does have, it is about having access when you want to play video games.

As someone who has personally been in the situation of sitting for 12 hours at work in the cafeteria playing games on my laptop, and knowing the situation will crop up again, I will be tempered in future purchases of single player video games that require constant online access. Which even though I do have online internet browsing there, I cannot hook up my laptop to this connection nor can I play a game on the internet enabled computers. I have options. I do not think the companies should be forced by law or some such to not use DRM, but this is a real enough situation for me that I may purchase a PSP video game instead of a PC video game. I know others in a more constant situation that it affects them. When a company is having issue with bootleg copies, closing off part of your demographic in a way that does not prevent the bootlegging is not considered "effective business management."
 
AvalonXQ said:
Your average PC game has a much smaller market base than the average movie. How many people saw the last really big movie, and how many people bought the last really big video game? If the costs are equivalent but the consumer base is 1/10 the size, then each consumer would have to pay 10x the price to equalize it.
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And movies offer revenue streams that aren't available to games. As a previous poster said, you can watch a movie in the cinema, rent it on DVD and buy it to own (he could've added 'or for the TV syndication'). PC games only enjoy sell-through revenue. And then there's promotional opportunities, where blockbuster movies do tie-in deals, selling movie-branded merchandising, licensing the rights to spin-off products like novellas and (ahem!) videogames, etc.

Comparing movies to videogames in this way just doesn't work. Their business models are too different.
 
GreyICE said:
About 80% of Americans 18-34 have a high speed internet connection on their PC. I'll leave it up to you to guess the horsepower of the remaining 20%, and how often they play $50 games.
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Not everybody is American, and as has been mentioned before, what about gamers who want to play on their laptops in circumstances where they have no internet connection at all?
 
GreyICE said:
Wow, touchy are we? I'll come back later when you're in a better mood. :rolleyes:
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You're right. I shouldn't be getting annoyed at someone who is too daft to see the problem at hand.

P.S. About 80% of Americans 18-34 have a high speed internet connection on their PC. I'll leave it up to you to guess the horsepower of the remaining 20%, and how often they play $50 games.
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Thank you. And what about those of us who are not in the US?
 
Wildy's point is good -- what effect will this sort of strategy have on foreign markets, where internet saturation might be different? Those markets are important because, well, they're markets. They have money too.
 
AvalonXQ said:
Your average PC game has a much smaller market base than the average movie.
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It doesn't have to be and movie purchases, music purchases, and game purchases all come out of the "entertainment" bit of peoples budgets. How many people who regularly go to the movies have a PC thats capable of running most of the games available?

Ian Osborne said:
PC games only enjoy sell-through revenue.
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Therein lies one of the problems in the PC games market. Console games are availble to punters at a fraction of the RRP via rental shops or the pre-owned games market. A lot of the "early adopters" rush out and buy games to put into the pre-owned market as they know that in 2 months when they are done playing it they can get a good portion of the cost back again.

Blizzard makes a ton of money from WOW because of the business model they use.
 
Cynic said:
Wildy's point is good -- what effect will this sort of strategy have on foreign markets, where internet saturation might be different? Those markets are important because, well, they're markets. They have money too.
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Like, um... where? Piracy in China/India/developing nations is so rampant that no one cares about them as a market.

Australia has a higher broadband usage rate than the US. Europe is similar, depending on the country.
 
GreyICE said:
Okay, there's two sides to this.

The first is that I don't really like piracy. At all. It's been killing the video game industry for years, and has almost entirely resulted in the death of large-scale PC only video games that are NOT MMORPGs.
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Consoles are killing PC games. The GFX card arms race is killing PC games. The fact the eveyone wants to play MMORPGs is killing PC games. DRM restrictions are killing PC games.

Piracy is not killing video games.

GreyICE said:
The flip side is ISPs should not look at customers data. Period. I'd prefer it if they deleted that instantly. They have a huge position of power, and to demand that they abuse it is crazy.

So yeah. Basically, the judgment is right, but pirates should still be kicked in the balls.
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chulbert said:
In general all DRM is horrible. While it is intended to inhibit pirates - which it does to a degree
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That degree being zero. Literally. DRM or not, zero day exploits abound.
chulbert said:
it also annoys your paying customers. Whether or not it creates more sales than it costs is a hotly debated topic. Some are beginning to say that we need to essentially ignore the pirates and create software for the markets that actually exist and not the ones we wish existed.
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Fine, evidence?

period

Definition: (1) A punctuation mark ( . ) indicating a full stop, placed at the end of declarative sentences and other statements thought to be complete, and after many abbreviations.
(2) A sentence of several carefully balanced clauses in formal writing. See periodic sentence.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "circuit, way round"

http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/periodterm.htm


This is why I place it at the end of my sentences.
 
GreyICE said:
P.S. About 80% of Americans 18-34 have a high speed internet connection on their PC. I'll leave it up to you to guess the horsepower of the remaining 20%, and how often they play $50 games.
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Are you being deliberately obtuse? How many of those 80% (another number out of your ass, I assume) have laptops? You know, that newfangled device that let's you take your computer with you, even to places where you might not be hooked up to the internet?
 
GreyICE said:
Fine, evidence?

period

Definition: (1) A punctuation mark ( . ) indicating a full stop, placed at the end of declarative sentences and other statements thought to be complete, and after many abbreviations.
(2) A sentence of several carefully balanced clauses in formal writing. See periodic sentence.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "circuit, way round"

http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/periodterm.htm


This is why I place it at the end of my sentences.
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Your attitude in this thread seems to indicate this definition, instead:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period_(feminine).
 
Wildy said:
And it has one of the slowest broadband speeds.
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I don't think speeds are the issue for DRM - the game only needs to ping the server. It's stopping people playing the game away from their internerd connection that's the problem.
 
The discussion of home access and speeds is really irrelevant to the situation. The requirement is a barrier to paying customers in many situations, even if they have fast reliable service at home. In my experience, people can understand and are not heavily bothered by computer specific online registration (such as that done by major utility softwares). Spore was a specific blip in this because it did not follow the standard such model and worried a number of users. The Steam software in contrast has been seen as a successful and customer friendly approach. Constant online access is a situation a class of the users will worry about if it is an unnessecary connection that creates another security risk, and becomes a barrier to usage in many situations unless you are willing to circumvent DRM laws.
 
Speaking only for myself, and making no claims what so ever as to how many people are in my same situation with my same reaction …

There are around 150-ish games (some as old as the original Doom) installed on my main gaming machine and every single one was purchased as a legitimate new sale through regular channels. I have fast, reliable internet access wherever I am that I might want to game, across all the machines (2 desktops and 1 laptop) that I’d potentially use to game.

That said, I steadfastly refuse to purchase any game that requires me to have an internet connection to play single player only (this obviously doesn't include MMOs and other on-line multiplayer titles). I’ve passed on several games which looked quite interesting solely because of the ‘must be connected to play’ requirement.

I also tend to spread my gaming time across 2-5 different games at a time. So one day I’ll log into WoW for a couple of hours, the next I’ll re-play BioShock, F.E.A.R., or Thief: Deadly Shadows for a bit. As a result what I’ll do in many cases is go to a couple of trusted sources for cracked .EXE files for the single player games, so I don’t have to sort through my game discs to make sure I’ve got the correct one in the drive each time I get a whim to play something. And this is for games I own, have never let a friend ‘borrow’, and for which I still possess the full retail package. If that's not an option and I have to have the disc each time I want to play I'll still purchase, but it annoys me and I wish it weren't the case. 'Must be connected' is different, and that's where I draw the line.

I don’t like having to prove I’m not a pirate each and every time I want to hop into a game and relax. I don’t want to have to worry that some day the online service I have to connect to to play a single player only game might start pushing out ads (even non obtrusive ones), delivering content I didn’t ask for, or doing anything else that takes up any of my bandwidth or computing power that isn’t needed for the game itself.

Does the ‘must be connected to play’ requirement stave off piracy to the point where it’s a net benefit to the game designers? Don’t know. Is it the best overall way for them to deal with sluggish sales? Don’t know. Am I just a single, irrational voice in the wilderness over-reacting to evolving software models? Don’t know, and what’s more, don’t care.

I do know that there is at least one person (me) who refuses to purchase something for my entertainment which will dictate the way I will enjoy it and also gives me a set of requirements to prove I’m not a thief each time I feel like enjoying it.

My $0.02.
 
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