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Bill Roper: "PC games are on the verge of a major market shift" (Steam haters cry)
- Thread starter ManaByte
- Start date
It's the next logical step IMO.
This will cut piracy in 90%. Add a constant on-line authorization (every 5 minutes of your play, even single-player) that takes 0.1% of CPU usage (and it does, not more) and you've pretty much eliminated all those warez fucks that didn't pay a dime for your game. HL2 went there but not to the extreme like I explained. No off-line mode, every time you have to authorize on the server. If done right it would take 3-5 secs. If done wrong it will majorly fuck up people's experience with PC games.
Of course this sucks for people w/o any form of internet connection, because they won't be able to play that game.
Microsoft will be offering lots of its older PC games (Mechwarrior, Crimson Skies etc.) this way. There was an announcement a few days ago.
If you don't want to put with that kind of shit (which could be painful and unnecessary for LEGAL buyers) stick to consoles. Plug & play. No worries. No authorizations.
This will cut piracy in 90%. Add a constant on-line authorization (every 5 minutes of your play, even single-player) that takes 0.1% of CPU usage (and it does, not more) and you've pretty much eliminated all those warez fucks that didn't pay a dime for your game. HL2 went there but not to the extreme like I explained. No off-line mode, every time you have to authorize on the server. If done right it would take 3-5 secs. If done wrong it will majorly fuck up people's experience with PC games.
Of course this sucks for people w/o any form of internet connection, because they won't be able to play that game.
Microsoft will be offering lots of its older PC games (Mechwarrior, Crimson Skies etc.) this way. There was an announcement a few days ago.
If you don't want to put with that kind of shit (which could be painful and unnecessary for LEGAL buyers) stick to consoles. Plug & play. No worries. No authorizations.
Wafflecopter
Banned
Steam hasn't been working for me for over 2 months.
Agent Icebeezy
Welcome beautful toddler, Madison Elizabeth, to the horde!
Wafflecopter said:
I keep getting an error for my steam as well. I'm not booting it up again until Lost Coast comes out though.
Particle Physicist
between a quark and a baryon
its been working just fine for me. in fact. i just finished using it.
Until broadband is every where, and I mean every where, I don't see this even being a remote possibility. I'm still on 56K, but even if I did have broadband, I wasn't going to dl HL2 using STEAM. I'm the type of guy who prefers packaging(game disc, manual, box + extras with nice art) as opposed to 1's and 0's.
I don't know hwy. Maybe it's because I like to collect PC games.
I don't know hwy. Maybe it's because I like to collect PC games.
Suburban Cowboy
Member
this is retarded imo
i dont want to be required to have an internet connection to play a single player game. You know when im most likely to play a single player game on my computer? When my internet's down! Not to mention this complicates playing games on a laptop while on the bus or in class.
I dont blame them for wanting to cut back on piracy but this plan fucks over too many users.
i dont want to be required to have an internet connection to play a single player game. You know when im most likely to play a single player game on my computer? When my internet's down! Not to mention this complicates playing games on a laptop while on the bus or in class.
I dont blame them for wanting to cut back on piracy but this plan fucks over too many users.
Don't be surprised if you see console games requiring a live connection this gen. At some point, the amount of sales you gain by containing piracy will exceed what you lose to buyers without online connectivity.Borys said:
All next-gen consoles will come with free basic connectivity, so the basic requirements will be there.
Rhindle said:
I'm not seeing this until generation beyond 360 and PS3. Yes it will happen (because it's the evolution of software distribution system) but not now (I think).
Simple stuff like requiring authorization (or live connection like you said) for MP games (that is already common in PC MP games like UT, DoW, BF2 etc.) sure but not for single-player oriented experiences i.e. Oblivion or FF13.
Somewhere down the road - yes it's inevitable. But for now legal sales are much, much bigger than piracy on the console front.
Besides PC games are STILL coming on CDs and downloading 3 CD isos takes 3-23 hours, fast, then mount them with Daemon and you are set.
Downloading a 25 gig Blu-Ray iso won't be worth it.
ToyMachine228
Member
I really don't mind Steam. In fact I like being able to download all my games, and the fact that the games update automatically. It's better than finding a suitable download speed for the latest patch and whatnot in my opinion.
AtomicShroom
Member
Borys said:
Watch as hackers either:
1) Hack away the program and effectively remove the check.
2) Build an emulator that simulates a check server that returns exactly what the game wants to hear.
There is *no* way whatsoever that a network check can't be removed from a software that has a single player part. Of course you'd need to sign on to play online with other people... but if you're playing on your own, any server check can be countered.
Late Stage Marxist
Member
I like my fucking box and manuals thank you very much.
If there's anything good to come from this it would be the demise of cd checks.
If there's anything good to come from this it would be the demise of cd checks.
Agent Icebeezy
Welcome beautful toddler, Madison Elizabeth, to the horde!
ToyMachine228 said:
I don't keep games on my system like that though. I have HL2, BF2, Chessmaster 10 and Monopoly 3 on my PC as far as games. Those are my constants, anything else can get shuffled in and out of the hard drive
Rhindle said:
As a consumer, that's not my fucking problem. As a consumer, I shouldn't be required to have a live internet connection in order to play single-player games on a PC or console. Considering how many press releases I've read about videogames outgrossing major motion pictures, it hardly seems like the console game market's in danger of tanking due to rampant piracy, either.
To be honest, I suspect companies would very much like such an arrangement because it would allow them to track player usage and make it a snap to stream in-game advertising (a la SWAT 4). If single-player console games start requiring live connections to play, I think that'll be the real reason, though you'll probably see the companies involved fall back to the 'protecting ourselves from piracy' line when questioned about it.fiddlestick
Banned
im all for steam
Even Netflix is wising up and realizing that the days of distributing content via crude plastic discs are numbered. It'll save publishers money in terms of packaging, shelf space, etc (or eliminate the need for publishers altogether), but I doubt it'll do much to prevent piracy. Such online checks will quickly by circumvented by the swashbucklers.
COCKLES said:
Not gonna happen, man. Online distribution may become a major alternate distribution route in the future, but it's never going to replace the brick-and-mortars. I think you're underestimating peoples' desire to own tangible things - if they spend their money on something, they want to be able to hold it in their hands and say, 'this is mine', and you just can't do that with a download. Even if it's all the same from a practical perspective, it feels less substantial. Then you have the more practical concerns, like not wanting to worry about how much free real estate you have left on your HD and whether or not buying a new game will mean deleting an old one and having to re-download it again later - with discs, you can just dig the game out of the closet and reinstall it again later, without having to worry about network congestion or how long this huge download's going to be tying up your connection or what have you. Expecting a system like that to replace games on traditional media is like expecting those cable 'movies on demand' systems to put DVD outlets and rental shops out of business, and I don't see that happening anytime soon, either.
The attachment to physical media is still party of the consumer mindset today, but it won't be for too much longer. People said they'd never give up their beautiful LP covers, and they got over it eventually. Teh kids these days could care less about physical media.Tellaerin said:
Games could actually take a longer time to make the transition than music or movies, simply because you can't stream stuff in real time due to latency. But I don't expect that the next gen of consoles will come with a media drive.
Rhindle said:
I think you're mistaken, if for no other reason than the fact that you're going to have people screaming bloody murder the first time they have a hard drive failure - not only will they be forced to purchase another, but then they'll face the joyous prospect of redownloading all their games. Microsoft's been quietly pushing a similar vision of the future for the PC market for awhile now, and I don't think that people are going to embrace it there, either. Sometimes what's best for big corporations isn't what's best (or most desirable) for consumers, and there comes a point where they need to stop trying to sell the public on their vision and start looking at what the market actually desires, even if it's not as convenient for them.
Mr_Furious
Member
Good thing I don't play PC games much any more. Whenever the console market adopts the same bullshit content delivery system as shit steam, that'll be the day I go retro only.
Fuck "Big Brother".
Fuck "Big Brother".
I don't mind Steam because it makes anyone playing games like CS:S update so they have to get new maps to play.
When I was playing Enemy Territory custom map servers were few and far between and what servers there were, were not heavily used.
Majority were slack bastards couldn't be bothered dling a few new maps. >_<
When I was playing Enemy Territory custom map servers were few and far between and what servers there were, were not heavily used.
Majority were slack bastards couldn't be bothered dling a few new maps. >_<
ratcliffja
Member
I've had every comptuer problem in the book but I have never once had a problem with Steam. I have no idea what all the complaining is about.
Naked Shuriken said:
You know, the implication that anyone who doesn't want their lives to be an open book to every nosy corporate goon and ad department hack out there must be a 'closet warez hound' is fucking offensive. Maybe you're one hundred percent fine with bullshit like Vivendi tracking your playing habits to better serve up those targeted ads in SWAT 4, including which of their paid-advertising posters you're looking at, from how far away and at what angle, and for how long, but I think it's intrusive bullshit. Companies don't fucking need to know when, where, and for how long I play my games. If they want that kind of information from their customers, it should be on a competely voluntary basis, and the person providing the data should be made aware in no uncertain terms of what it will and won't be used for.
You're right, I really don't think it's any of EA's fucking business when I want to play Burnout 5, especially when it means that they'll be using that info to decide the best times to stick particular ads on the billboards in the game.
If you don't have a problem with some company remotely tracking every little fart of yours whenever you play their games, that's your business, but those of us who don't share that view should always have the option to opt out, and not have to listen to some jackass snidely accuse us of wrongdoing because anyone who cares about their privacy must be hiding something. Mr_Furious
Member
Tellaerin is my hero of this thread.
I can't see how anyone would willingly give up their right to privacy, regardless.
I can't see how anyone would willingly give up their right to privacy, regardless.
Don't worry, you're not important at all for them in a gigantic survey. They won't steal your credit card numbers.
I always find hilarious that the same idiots (I am not aiming that at you, but in general) who preach and cry about privacy don't realise they have nothing of importance; and on 80% of the time, are running unpatched versions of windows XP, filled with spywares or running rootkits with keyloggers emailing data to Russians
Big Companies don't give a fuck about your credit card numbers. They don't have any need to store the amount of time you play this and this game. other than for marketing purposes. IF people are that afraid of having that kind of data collected about them, you may as well disconnect from the net right now, because it's already happening. The popup banners you see while reading my posts are adapted to the keywords mentionned in the thread.
The same people who cry about ads in videogames are probably teh same fruitcakes who browse preview of videogames, which, in the gaming industry, are non-official publicities since no damn journalist nowadays has the balls to say that a certain's big dev game just blows chunks. They only trash the low-grade, no financial backing, no webads buying devs.
Please send us gold copies mr Marketing! We promise we wont shit on your licensed game in our previews!
But this is for another day.
It's already happening folks. I've been running steam forever, and I never had any problem. I bought hl2 (the silver package) and 5 minutes after midnight, I was playing (i'm sure you guys remember the various screenshots I took when it came out)
I'd buy all my games using a system like that If it was possible. I dont really care about game boxes anymore, as they just tend to take too much space now that I have so many.
Last time I formatted my computer, I downloaded the 250kb steam client and it asked me what game on my account I wanted to download. That's pretty damn cool. No need to carry cds around, no bs. Just a login and a pass
I love technology
I always find hilarious that the same idiots (I am not aiming that at you, but in general) who preach and cry about privacy don't realise they have nothing of importance; and on 80% of the time, are running unpatched versions of windows XP, filled with spywares or running rootkits with keyloggers emailing data to Russians
Big Companies don't give a fuck about your credit card numbers. They don't have any need to store the amount of time you play this and this game. other than for marketing purposes. IF people are that afraid of having that kind of data collected about them, you may as well disconnect from the net right now, because it's already happening. The popup banners you see while reading my posts are adapted to the keywords mentionned in the thread.
The same people who cry about ads in videogames are probably teh same fruitcakes who browse preview of videogames, which, in the gaming industry, are non-official publicities since no damn journalist nowadays has the balls to say that a certain's big dev game just blows chunks. They only trash the low-grade, no financial backing, no webads buying devs.
Please send us gold copies mr Marketing! We promise we wont shit on your licensed game in our previews!
But this is for another day.
It's already happening folks. I've been running steam forever, and I never had any problem. I bought hl2 (the silver package) and 5 minutes after midnight, I was playing (i'm sure you guys remember the various screenshots I took when it came out)
I'd buy all my games using a system like that If it was possible. I dont really care about game boxes anymore, as they just tend to take too much space now that I have so many.
Last time I formatted my computer, I downloaded the 250kb steam client and it asked me what game on my account I wanted to download. That's pretty damn cool. No need to carry cds around, no bs. Just a login and a pass
I love technology
Mr_Furious
Member
So the people who care about their privacy are self important preachy idiotic crying fruitcakes while the ones that submit to not caring about losing their privacy are the smart ones? Yeah, makes perfect sense.
The Faceless Master
Member
bah in psx/dc days, many people downloaded games on dialup, taking up to two days... taking 18 hours to download a blu-ray disk won't stop people... hell, with 10mbit OOL, it would take ~6hrsBorys said:
It doesn't matter if you like it or not. It doesn't matter what is or is not best for consumers. It is the publisher that controls how their content is released, and the only thing that matters to a publisher is how they can best protect their revenues. If piracy remains as massively rampant as it is today, and if live account links remain the only semi-viable antitheft mechanism, games WILL move to Steam-like systems.Tellaerin said:I think you're mistaken, if for no other reason than the fact that you're going to have people screaming bloody murder the first time they have a hard drive failure - not only will they be forced to purchase another, but then they'll face the joyous prospect of redownloading all their games. Microsoft's been quietly pushing a similar vision of the future for the PC market for awhile now, and I don't think that people are going to embrace it there, either. Sometimes what's best for big corporations isn't what's best (or most desirable) for consumers, and there comes a point where they need to stop trying to sell the public on their vision and start looking at what the market actually desires, even if it's not as convenient for them.
I don't mean to dog you, I'm not happy about it either (as a consumer). At the same time, I'm not happy about PC gaming dying a slow death, and I can see console gaming headed in the same direction.
Rhindle said:
I think you're overstating the loss of revenues companies suffer through piracy, but then again, I feel companies have been doing the same thing for years. Publishers total up the estimated amount of pirated copies of their titles out there and say, 'Look at all the potential sales that piracy is costing us!' The operative word there is potential, though this always seems to get shoved under the rug - I honestly don't believe that most of the pirates out there would actually start buying most of the shit they download at retail if piracy stopped being an option for them. However, waving around a balance sheet and shouting about 'billions of dollars in potential profit - lost!' is the kind of dramatic posturing that allows publishers to justify things like requiring the user to remain connected to the net while playing, which I think is of more benefit to ad departments than as an anti-piracy measure. 'Professional bootleggers' cranking out low-cost copies and selling them to undercut the legitimate manufacturers are a real problem and deserve to be shut down post haste, but I don't think that console gaming is (or will be) 'dying a slow death' because of them, or that draconian measures that inconvenience legitimate users and potentially violate their privacy are valid answers.
And yes, it does matter whether I like it or not. Consumers aren't just a herd of sheep to be led around by the nose and fucked over at will by companies looking to make a quick buck. If companies want to keep getting our money, they'll take into account what we want from their products, not just churn out whatever the hell they want and tell us that we'd better buy it because we've got no other choice.
It's kind of sad that consumers seem to be increasingly conditioned to treat anything large corporations set out to do as inevitable, especially when it's ultimately us who determine whether they sink or swim.Here's what I don't get about that authentification stuff. If they need you to be online to play the game, even if it is single player, what happens 25 years down the road when the company could give a care less about that game? Wouldn't your money be completely wasted as you couldn't authenticate the game anymore. Or the company goes out of business and you can't authenticate the game anymore.
When I buy something I like to own it. And that's the biggest concern I have about this online craze going on, whether its digital music downloads or movies or games.
When I buy something I like to own it. And that's the biggest concern I have about this online craze going on, whether its digital music downloads or movies or games.
Wow, some people are so fucking cynical. The move to download-based PC gaming from CD-based gaming isn't so that big scary corporations can watch you while you're sleeping, it isn't because they want to screw you out of even more money, and it isn't even due to the fact that they can cutom-tailor in-game ads for you (which they could do right now if they wanted to, btw), it's because online distibution is so much fucking cheaper. The idea of buying a physical CD or DVD from a bricks-and-mortar shop with your game on it is filled with a hundred completely redundant expenses, from the physical cost of the disc and packaging to the huge number of people that have to be payed to ship this item around the world and hand it to you when you give them your money. Online distribution removes all of these, resulting in much cheaper games for you, and more profits for the developers. That's right, I said developers, not "large corporations", because the extremely low cost of online sales (with bittorrent-style downloads) means that the developers themselves now have an opportunity that they haven't in many years, and that is to self-publish at very low cost and very low risk. Aside from handling advertising, it makes large publishers pretty much obsolete which means that, for the developer, each sale is nearly 100% profit. This results in lots of games that would have been deemed "too risky" to publish in years gone by actually seeing the light of day, with developers being able to subsist on a smaller userbase if needs be, which will in no small part contribute to the creative, as well as the economic growth of PC gaming.
And to those complaining about the need to connect to the internet to play a single-player game, we're talking about this sort of thing phasing in over the next few years, not tomorrow, by which time every computer will be connected to the internet at all times, for all intents and purposes. Broadband speeds will also grow faster than the size of disc-based storage media, meaning that in not too long, having to re-download old games you've wiped from your hard-drive won't be a problem, in fact, it'll become quicker than finding the CD and manually installing it. In fact, I can't find one reasonable problem with the move to online-distribution (and no, to be honest, I don't consider people's fears over privacy to be reasonable [or founded in any sort of sanity]), and, as far as I'm concerned, the sooner the better.
And to those complaining about the need to connect to the internet to play a single-player game, we're talking about this sort of thing phasing in over the next few years, not tomorrow, by which time every computer will be connected to the internet at all times, for all intents and purposes. Broadband speeds will also grow faster than the size of disc-based storage media, meaning that in not too long, having to re-download old games you've wiped from your hard-drive won't be a problem, in fact, it'll become quicker than finding the CD and manually installing it. In fact, I can't find one reasonable problem with the move to online-distribution (and no, to be honest, I don't consider people's fears over privacy to be reasonable [or founded in any sort of sanity]), and, as far as I'm concerned, the sooner the better.
Late Stage Marxist
Member
This kind of pacifist indifference is the same reason gas prices continue to soar. Or is it sadomasochism?
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