*spin-off* Always on/connected... stuff

no worries Cjail, I'm quite certain you know more about the USA and the rest of the world than most Americans know about any one country outside of NA.

 

Without delving too much into politics, look at some of the people who've held office in the US.

Do you see visionaries like JFK? Or if one did propose progress, he'd be accused of trying to be like a Socialist European.

 

I am one of them, sadly, because I didn't like the game at all. And I can tell you that it doesn't hold up to Diablo 2, which is one of the best games ever made.

I bought Diablo 3 because of Diablo 2 but I am not thinking about buying Diablo 4, whenever it comes out.

On a different note, PC Magazine wrote an article titled "Always On is Always Wrong".

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417699,00.asp

EDIT: no joke, and I have a feeling some people won't believe me because I am like the fable The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf when it comes to this subject that I've beaten to death, but I can't connect to Xbox Live at this very moment, and as you can see my connection is working flawlessly.

 

Thank you guys for the comprehension but a mistake is a mistake.

Now to go back on topic I would just like to say that SimCity and Diablo 3 debacles pales compared to the PSN outage and yet Sony didn't step back, didn't abandon online nor we on PS3 abandoned Sony en masse.

 

I'm going to focus on the above both as to why an always online future is inevitable as most people I suspect think as you do, and as to why I normally never bother debating anything piracy related on forums. If you can't see the above as theft, namely denying someone money they are due, then I have nothing more to say.

 

The reason why you can discuss the theft vs no theft forever is that you are both right and wrong. If someone decides to copy 1000 games, 1000 movies and 1000 CD's without owning as much as a single dollar he may be denying you money, but when there is no way he could have paid you the money it was actually never money you could get.

You may be right that it's just a question of time before odrm is the way to go, i can see why. Searching for a savegames folder location for farcry 3 gave me a bunch of results that didn't really seem right, i simply didn't have that folder. Apparently a "non uplay version" used that exact location, which as far as i could understand could indicate a cracked version. Trying to get confirmation if that really was trued ended up having me on a website with cracks for games. It's just so damn easy.

But as a paying customer i will reduce my shopping to a minimum and spend my money somewhere else, i don't want to be punished for paying. If they want me to accept ODRM they have to do something like suggest by 3dilettante

It's actually strange they haven't bothered to sit down and hammer out a joint EULA that would make their customers feel safe about spending money on a service.

I wonder, in your business is there any technology like always on that could be successful (no pun intended), i would expect privacy to make it a real challenge?

 

Well it might be 51 states soon, since Puerto Rico voted last year to finally become a state. It'll really screw with whoever does the star design on the flag...

 

Just wanted to let everyone know that, with the camera angle mod, cities xl is both fun and playable on trans oceanic flights (as is CivV) so don't waste your cash on always on Simcity.

Seriously, some of you may travel internationally (I can't be the only one). This always online bullshit is going to force me to watch edited for airplanes movies or something else detestable. Also, for me at least (and yes, I've been told I should not game any longer), these flights are my best time to game uninterrupted.

Please ditch always on and go periodic phone home. Think of the children.

 

This point may be an irreconcilable difference between our positions.
I believe both commercial and non-commercial infringement violate a creator or publisher's rights to determine the distribution of a digital work and receive compensation for it.
That is the loss of a legally granted monopoly over the product, and it increases the difficulty of profiting from that same product.
Morally, it follows that the provider's investment in time and risk be given the chance to provide returns.

It's contravening of a commercial right, but the content creator has not lost the ability to sell the product, and they still have control over their copy. The problem is that someone else also has control over a copy.
Something probably should have been paid, and every further copy is a transaction that could have, maybe, in some form, been done with the rights holder.

There injury is indirect, and in the alternate world where the infringement did not occur, there is no guarantee that the provider would have been one sale at full price richer in the same time window as the violation.
The infringer should have entered into a contractual relationship with the provider, but did not.
There should have been an instant where a portion of the budget of the buyer changes control from the buyer and shifts to the provider. If someone had hopped in and taken the money, that would be theft, since someone has take control of the unique set of money away from the interested parties.

To call infringement theft implies a lot more control for one party over everyone--including honest buyers--than I would deem appropriate.
Does it have to look like the content industry thinks the world is composed solely of potential thieves, and that it stares covetously at every wallet that goes past?

I mean, people could try to re-sell their game. They could decide to wait until it's in the bargain bin a few years from now. They could return a game that doesn't work, or demand a refund for bad service. They could just keep playing RoboSmash4 instead of going out and buying RoboSmash5.
Why are those choices in the crosshairs as well?

Someone chose not to pay by claiming rights they do not have.
I do not believe the remedy is to automatically give the possibly aggrieved rights they should never have and waive obligations they refuse to acknowledge.
They didn't get paid, but they're still not the boss of me.

If the business model cannot be sustained without declaring war on the right to choose where one's disposable income goes and surrender to whatever negligence is most convenient, I would suggest that developers change careers to an industry where billions of revenue can somehow be used to not go out of business that makes a product that can actually be stolen.


The likes of EA and friends will probably keep marching down this path. I'm holding no illusions in that regard.
I merely dream that they march far afield with their "product as service + service obligations nonexistent + we've owned you before you said hello + consumer grievances are nothing" strategy, and then something changes the service provider obligation and consumer rights modifiers from x0 to some non-zero value.

If the PS3 were an obligate-online console, the PSN outage would have bricked tens of millions of PS3s worldwide.
That would have been an event that would have reverberated for years. We might not have any rumor threads about the PS4 today, if that had come to pass.

I would wonder aloud whether infringement is really their only concern.
The vitriol for used games, and the choice of discontinuing services to compromise older inventory share a common target with the corporations and politicians who declare infringement theft.

Infringement, used games, and competition from prior generations of work are all forms of personal choice that can lead to a publisher or developer losing revenue, on a continuum of legal and ethical justifiability.
Obligate-online control of digital works strangles the one common thing between illegal copying, personal resale, and just deciding that the prior game looks more fun than its sequel: the choice of the consumer to not spend their money or run their life in a manner that optimizes the return for the publisher/developer.

The assertion of infringement as theft, along with the insistence that the problem is impossible to characterize and universal, means that all wallets everywhere are all could be and must be treated as the property of the content generators that covet them. Even further, these put-upon providers must be able to decide the timing of your use and the way you use their product, and they should be free to prevent you from disagreeing and all mediation should be done as they choose.

To add an additional point of debate:
If personal choice in spending weren't the actual target, why the incredibly incestuous control over reviewers who might convince buyers a game shouldn't be bought at full price, the fake hype-generating betas, going after people who badmouth products, and threatening customers with the loss of their game library for any infraction or dispute the company chooses?

In the fields I'm familiar with, there have been actual services with real service agreements and contractual obligations and penalties concerning the quality of the product and service.
There have been incentives for providing what was promised, and very real risks in not doing so.

There are different sorts of customers that have much more legal recourse than the infinitely fungible and rights-free consumer.
Conversely, I have also seen what service providers do (or more frequently do not do) in the absence of such things.

 

Yeah, some pages ago I said that another PSN outage with always online would be catastrophic.
My point is simply that PS3 suffered a tremendous blow and yet Sony is going forward.

Now I said already that for me it's too soon for always connected/online, even if I am already always connected, but there is indeed a whole new generation of kids growing up always online/connected and in one way or anther we are already always connected to a network of some kind.
No console requires us to be always online now but millions of players are already always connected so there is audience already for this model.

 

This... There are many individual cases like yours that people sometimes don't seem to realize. I think the best option is the most universally fair option.

I lived 5 months in the south of Portugal with a workmate and we had to rent a house. The owners were very nice people and kind to us, and so we were to them. It was an old married couple, they didn't have Internet -besides that, this was back in 2005-.

I had a laptop where I played Half Life 2 and some other games to pass time at night. If those were online only games I couldn't enjoy what I had paid for.

Additionally, I stopped purchasing indie games for the Xbox 360 because they can only be played if you are online.

I didn't know this at first, and I bought quite a few. One that joker454 recommended in the forum, another one (Antigrav Racing Championship) which was similar to F-Zero and quite a few others.

Time ago when a router fried at home I wanted to play one of those and I found out that I couldn't because I wasn't online. I had religiously paid for those games, it isn't fair at all.

It felt like the games weren't mine.

I have purchased more than 200 games if you count retail + Arcade + indie, not counting some DLC. I have been a very active customer.

So yes, give us legal owners of those games some freedom instead of forcing people to follow the dictates of the companies that don't seem to see the realities of life.

EDIT: Thanks god yesterday I could play Darkstalker 3 and Night Warriors -the new Arcade game/s by Capcom, both games are included in the same pack- because you are allowed to play them offline, given the fact that Xbox Live was down for a few hours.

 

Jim enlightens us with his wisdom - NSFW
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vid...Always-On-DRM-Console-Would-Be-Dumb-Dumb-Dumb

 

More allways on news

Now you probably thinking theres only a couple of hundred users so you cant blame e.a but these games have over 1 million users with the sims social having 5 million users.
5 million users not enough to sustain a game and this is a game with a revenue stream (in game currency bought with real cash) and btw they will not refund unused in game currency.

 

That's a discussion about pricing models more than always on. We know 'always-on' (as envisaged as the fear of online validation needed for solo player gaming) could potentially end a game eventually, but 'always-on' also means Google, and Google's not going anywhere. Do we believe MS will one day switch off their Live/Xbox/MSNet service and bow out of the computing industry, any more than Google will switch off YouTube? Online potentially provides permanence beyond any physical product, because the wear and tear is mitigate by ongoing hardware refreshes. Could be that MS's online game network is allowing you to play content in 50 years' time.

As ever, if the business makes enough money (Live subscriptions versus sporadic in-game purchases of a free-to-play game), it'll be kept going.

 

Only a very small percentage of users actually spend any money on the games though.

I know the point you're trying to make, that online-only games are ephemeral - at the mercy of the servers staying up - but I think it's far too early to jump to any conclusions about what an always online console may entail.

 

It really depends on which of Google's services you've decided to rely upon.

LIVE for the original Xbox didn't make it to the half-century mark.
It had a decent run, but there are consoles and games that predate the Xbox that are still playing.

I would not count on Microsoft being the same 50 years from now, if it exists.

 

I don't disagree. I'm just saying it's a variable, not a forgone conclusion, and there's potential for online activation to be robust and long lived to the year 2212, just as there's potential for all your games to become inaccessible in 2021 when MS switch off the old XBox service.

 

If you can't play a game you bought; on a console you also bought, without being REQUIRED to be connected to another service via internet...you don't truly own that product imho. My mind will be ****ing blown if they really do this.

I can't see anything that could come from this that is positive(for the consumer)...Seems like it would bring hackers in droves too.

 

More studio execs jumping on the always on bandwagon:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/...audience-is-ready-for-always-online-consoles/

 

If you don't have the hardware to run a game then you just can't run it but it doesn't mean you don't own it.
The real question is: why would you buy something you know you can't use?