Don't believe for a second that MS and Sony don't have plans for XBox Live and PSN to "evolve" within the next two years.

And the future of gaming doesn't look too bright, either, if publishers have their way - from the customers' point of view. I fear that coming generation consoles will only be "terminals" in a cloud-computing-like environment. You no longer buy and own your games, you will log on to the publishers's servers, and play the games completely online, on their servers...like fancy browser games.

They'll probably charge you some basic "membership fee" to play the more casual games, and might additionally charge "pay per play" for the high-end titles.

Modern distribution methods that cut out the middle man is what scares the big publishers. Moderately affluent software developers like BIS and DCS (who make their money with military contracts) really don't need any retailers anymore. So from their point of view, the Ubisofts and EAs of this world actually are no longer needed.

The gaming market is in a process of consolidation right now (Ubisoft lost 200 million bucks last year, EA didn't do much better I suppose). Let's see if alienating their customers even more is a smart choice.

+1 so many great games without any DRM found at gog.com. maybe not good enough for graphic-whores (and I am one to an extent), but the gameplay on many is first-rate!


anyway...shame on EA if they go with the "persistent internet connection required" route!

I thought this passage was quite funny. I took it from ShadowOfNoc's user review of C&C4 at gamespot.



It would be quite cool if someone could independently corroborate this lol.

Regarding game publishers move toward online requirements, the consumer is in the driver's seat. To paraphrase a former first lady's slogan, when it comes to objectionable DRM, "Just say 'No'". You say it by not buying their product. What could be simpler? You hanging onto your $50 may not cause the publisher to rethink their business model, but done collectively it will.

Also, it's not all about piracy. It's also about publishers wanting to kill the used game market. I am continually amazed by the people who've "drank the piracy kool-aid argument" as being the true, real justification behind increasingly oppressive DRM schemes. Keep buying it and you'll be paying more and more for less and less.

This is not just a "software issue" at heart, but a consumer rights issue. Are you just that happy to give away personal freedom and privacy to big multinational companies? Then at least stop patronizing those who DO care about keeping their rights.

Name me one customer advantage we get out of the new deal? If you can't you are defending something out of principle that does not benefit us who we are posting here. In that case I would have to wonder if you are working for UBI or EA since they are the only ones profiting.

But go ahead, tell us te benefits for the people posting here and prove me wrong in saying those new systems are bad. But stop making clever one liners with no argument unless you want to be labeled a troll.

From a business standpoint something has to be done. Games/Movies/Music all are available free, why wouldn't the companies be looking out for themselves ? Piracy IS the reason for DRM, it can be spun into the used game angle, but that is week IMO.
Face it, theres a lot of dishonest people who want whatever they can get for free. The internet and PTP sharing has crippled legitimate businesses.

For all those opposed to DRM, what is a solution that does not just work for YOU, but one that is fair for the manufacturers? Or is free stuff = personal freedom ?

Hi,


" ... Piracy IS the reason for DRM, ..."

No. The reason for this kind of DRM is introducing pay-per-play in small steps.
"Piracy" is the justification of companies to screw up their customers and charge them more, for less service.


" ... it can be spun into the used game angle, but that is week IMO. ..."

Ah, so you think customers should be forbidden to sell their once-bought games ? So this would be piracy, too ?
Makes perfect sense, bind your name, adress, account etc. to a game, and you will not be able to sell it when used - just like UBI and others currently try.
But then they should also say that you indeed lease the game, you do not "buy" it at all, it is not yours.
But don't you think this is somehow violating existing law, and especially common sense ?
And then, only imagine: "It does not even work properly !!"


" ... Face it, theres a lot of dishonest people who want whatever they can get for free. ..."

Yes there are. Some of them are sitting in the companies .
"A lot" of people crack games, well - it is mostly young bored nerds who do this to show they can, but the people who like certain sims will buy them anyway. A nerd who just tries out what he can download from pirate sites would not have bought the sim anyway.
So the "downloaded pirate copies" equals "lost sales" is not true.
Additionally lots of people meanwhile download cracked versions of games they bought, only to be able to play them at all due to those "DRM measures". I could have been such a case. I tried three weeks to run SH V in Germany, with a decent DSL connection. It did not work and i complained, so UBI sent me an eMail with some crap like "did you plug in your DSL cable ?". Boy i tell you if some UBI manager would have shown up here after that, he would have found this plug somewhere south of his back.

The thing is that this kind of DRM is overdone, leads to more fighting instead of understanding, and generally hurts the customer more, than the pirate.

" ... For all those opposed to DRM, what is a solution that does not just work for YOU, but one that is fair for the manufacturers? Or is free stuff = personal freedom ? ..."

Yes, lots of possibilities, some of them demonstrated at subsim. Guess what, the companies are not interested, because only an online requirement will be able to charge you for every second of gameplay, in the future.
I returned the sim, so i guess it does not matter anymore for me.

Greetings,
catfish

That's an interesting perspective.
Steam activated games have required a internet activation, which bound the games to your account, therefore making them unsellable.
If customers are expected to pay to play games offline I can understand the outrage. But if companies decide to go the pay to play Multiplayer route, it's not that difficult to understand really.

UBISofts DRM has been cracked in the first week. So why aren't they promising to patch it out for legitimate customers after six months?

Why do they keep something expensive running that doesn't prevent piracy but helps them control their legitimate customers? Don't you agree if preventing piracy was the object they have failed and should stop annoying people who paid 50USD with server outages?

I agree that piracy is part of the problem, but ever more draconian DRM that does not prevent piracy yet is used to restrict customer rights is not a legitimate answer.

Pay to play is not bad value for money outright. It works in MMO games because you get persistent worlds and huge amounts of content, a lot of it for free, special constests with unique prizes and so on.

However, pay to play for a single player campaign (aka stuff that's already in the game disc i bought) in a combat sim is bad value for money.

Also, let's be honest here and say that it's also a case of us wanting more bang for our buck. Nothing wrong with it, the customer demands and whoever can cover the demand at a good price is the one who makes the sales.

The notion that companies have free reign to do whatever they want in order to stay in business is absurd, not because we like pirates but because many companies don't deserve it with the amount of half-finished games they shove out the door prematurely.
I can understand the concerns from members of a niche genre such as ours, namely the "who will make this kind of sim if company X closes down?", but in my mind if a company has nothing to offer they shouldn't be rewarded by blaming it on pirates to justify other means to stay in business. It's better for us if they close down and whatever talented designers and developers get absorbed by another studio.

I'm not waiting for UBI to satisfy my simulator fix. There's loads of talented people who sell everything you can imagine, their work gets pirated like hell and they still manage to stay in business. You know why? Because they don't handicap the ones who buy their products in an inefficient effort to stop those who won't. If UBI discontinues the silent hunter franchise, the developers will be absorbed by another studio. We can bash microsoft all day long for various reasons and in many cases rightly so, but what they did with their MSFS series was the most any sim developer ever pulled off. There's a huge industry around that title, MS has pulled the plug on it and you can still find probably a dozen new payware add-ons per month.

I say roll on Oleg's storm of war engine, pull all the guys who are primarily hobbyists out of those big dinosaurs (EA,UBI,etc), have them work on that and publish their work through smaller companies like Aerosoft and such, wether it is small add-ons or an entire new game on a licensed engine. We need to cut the big boys out of the loop, because their way of doing business doesn't work well with sims. Niche developers and distribution for a niche genre, simple as that.

The developers will suffer for a short time during the transition, but in the end its win-win for both us and them. They will be able to code and release on their own time and have actual say on their product, as well as a more direct line to the consumer that will give them a bigger profit per sale. Advertising is not as necessary for sims as for other games, we all dig around enough to know what's good, so a sim developer doesn't really need to be tied to a megacorp for promotion. These guys are mostly hobbyists turned pros, they'll come here to tell us about their new toys and we'll go out and buy them.

As for piracy and sales, i can honestly say that there's a few games i would never have bought without piracy. Some because they didn't work right out of the box and needed cracking, others because i didn't know about them. However, when browsing pirate sites to crack my legally bought games i would sometimes stumble on something interesting and download it to try it for a couple of hours. When it was good enough i would think "let's support these guys" and go out and buy it, otherwise it would get uninstalled within hours. People can call me a pirate for that, or they can realize that publishers need to actually release a decent demo for me to preview, because it sure is not my obligation to make down-payement on things that don't cut the mustard. Ever wonder why there's no more decent demos lately? Exactly, many games are so half-baked on release that they don't want you to know they're in a crappy state. Give me a real demo that adequately showcases what's good about the title (and it's possible to also see what's bad) and i won't have to pirate anything to try your game out, it's not rocket science

I think this is an effort to change the publishing/distribution model for intellectual property in general. In the future you will 'rent' everything, from games to movies to books etc. In general I dont mind if they are upfront about it. I do mind the back door way its being done.

IMHO a bunch of the arguments are BS. Piracy being one of them. Simple measures prevent the majority of users from playing illegal content since most users can barely play and modify the games they buy anyway.

As for modders being the issue: who cares. I buy a book, I can scribble in it tear it up sell it to a frined or give it away I bought it its mine. If somebody wants to turn their copy of Need For Speed into a bumper car sim, who cares. I cant go around and put my name on it sell it and claim I wrote it however. If that was the problem, WoW being sold as something else then I would take the piracy argument seriously.

Years ago I saw an interview with Steve Ellison founder of Oracle a giant database company. He was very critical of Microsoft's control over the PC market,claiming that you did not own a computer you owned a "Microsoft" and he argued that it was "better" to have an appliance with which you can download all of your software when you need it and store all of your data on servers. Obviating the need for most of the hardware in a PC. It also gives database firms like Oracle huge amounts of power and control. This was way back in the mid 90s. And it is coming to pass.

Ten years from now you wont be able to do anything mediawise without an data tether. And nobody born after 1999 will know any different.

In general I agree with you, but we both know the way UBI or EA would handle it would mean more costs for same or less value. I'm also not adverse to good sims selling at 120USD like SPB2 Pro - I'm not cheap, but I want a product that matches the price.

PtP might be interesting for example on the latest "rail shooter" title if you can just "give it back" after the 12 hours included gameplay and it only costs you 25 instead of 50USD to play it once. For Combat Sims and Simulations in general it would be very expensive to keep them as long as we do now.

I think if would be sweet if some devs had the balls to self-publish sims at a 100USD price tag. I mean, look at Thirdwire's stuff - TK himself codes most of it, for 20USD one-term payment you get pretty awesome sims (all on the same engine, that's why it works for that price). Now if he was willing to charge 60USD he could hire two more coders and deliver three times the features he already has, and those sims would beat most other stuff on the market with that amount of detail.

Yup, that's exactly what i was mean

Word from Jeff Green, editor-in-chief of EA.com:


http://twitter.com/Greenspeak/status/10779486078

Though he isn't a decision maker, but has a better chance at getting them to work on a more useful solution.

This is really important, folks, because it has more than a little truth to it.

The major distributors aren't really in the simulations business any more. SH5 is a sort of in-house deal, but watch for it to be sold off.

Black Shark comes straight from ED. Rise of Flight from Neoqb with distribution in NA by 777. WoP is direct sales and via Steam. SoW: BoB will be direct sales and (hopefully) 777 and Steam.



JESC, think back to Internet speeds back then. It was less of a PITA to just go buy it!

IMHO, there are three reasons for the big "always on" connections:

1) Piracy mitigation.
2) Paid downloadable content. It drives UBI and EA nuts to watch the walled garden of Blizzard plunking in the cash, and they want to get at those dollars. C&C4 isn't an MMORPG, but they know how to make expansions for it, and they want players to buy them in advance.
3) Resale market death. I think this is the last, though, as PC games have pretty much dried up as a secondary market - its the Consoles that are the problem (as companies see it).

Why slap this on everything they put out? Because they can! It's all just another object to put into the big code, and we've all gone past the concerns of keeping code small and tight; might as well make it a blanket policy.

I won't be getting C&C4, though I had planned on it; not out of some sort of political statement, but because it's far too soon with UBI's server situation. They have got to find a way to defeat the DOS attacks (along with the other problems).

I didn't have too much a problem with RoF's requirement because I knew it was a niche product that would have fairly small demands on the servers needed. That and I understood that they had all their corporate eggs in one WWI basket and were simply desperate that every customer was a paying customer. I also predicted they'd loosen the requirement down the road, which they did.

I can't agree more wholeheartedly. Sure, there will be titles that come up with this type of DRM that I wish I could buy, but there still lots of games around, new and old, that I can play and enjoy without needing to support any company who chooses to go this route with their software.

re Cambion and tahoman - 100 % agreed.

Vote with your wallet - if the big companies like EA and UBIsoft think they better exclusively support the 60 % online console and arcade market, they will lose us 40 percent alright.

Maybe there will be a short time, but then some smaller companies will hopefully fill the gap, developers themselves marketing their stuff, and not take the path of those bigger publishers. Here is indeed a chance for thoruoghly-developed and realistic simulations. Let them cost 100 Dollars, but make sure there is no unnecessary hazzle, and no unwanted online requirement violating common sense.

Greetings,
Catfish

Think back about ten years when EA had Janes WWII Fighters, Microprose had EAW and Microsoft had Combat Flight Simulator, most of gaming news predicted the demise of PC games as console games became dominant. The WWII genre, in particular, was saturated at that point and the end was predicted. Then, a heretofore unknown developer out of Russia slipped into the spotlight with amazing screen shots of a work in progress to be called IL-2 Sturmovik. The rest is history. EA did not renew the Janes franchise, Microprose went away and Microsoft shut down their simulation development group. Such is the rise and fall of free markets and entrepreneurship. Then as now, the major distributors weren't in the simulation business, but somebody else with good ideas, talent, and without the encumbrance of top heavy corporate structure filled the void.

Piracy mitigation is but one factor and an easy one to blame without having to provide proof of why sales aren't materializing. I'd welcome such a vaporous scapegoat on which to blame my failures if I were in the shoes of some of these publishing houses. Frankly, it's becoming the boy that cried wolf to justify really stupid marketing decisions IMHO.

I will vote with my money and will refuse to buy into a marketing scheme that I find personally objectionable. For me, life goes on if I never buy another single game. Can Ubi and EA make such a prediction?

C&C died the day Total Annihilation was released. 10 years later they're still playing catch-up.

So it looks like the C&C series just died for a second time. No great loss.

Cheers

The companies simply don't want and won't accept the fact that after you paid $50 or 50 EUR they won't get any more money from you.

Where we are now, online requirement for playing SP games are just a field test. Mark my words but in couple of years you will pay zero bucks for AAA games but per hour you play them. And i mean Singleplayer.

The movement in the gaming industry towards this business is there. I don't think this can be changed because of majority of people buying games aren't the ones boycotting such games, despite there might be the feeling that we can change it.

My personal credo on this is simple: Don't buy it, but also don't pirate it.