Quote:
Originally Posted by billswagger
The world isn't perfect and things do go wrong on occasions, but your connection is still three times faster than mine and i have no troubles.
Much of what you described could happen to anyone i suppose, but the likelihood is rare. Your real problem sounds like your utility company, not the gaming companies.
The internet and computers is like shoes and socks, it doesn't make much sense to have one with out the other. When you mention cracks, and such, its precisely why this sort of thing is being done. I remember when online registration got you a key code for most games, but even that is not good enough anymore with the advent of torrents and such cracks.
Really all i hear is a bunch of nay saying and complaints, which might be justified, but you should recognize you are the minority on this one. Most people who play games just go along with whats required and seldom ever poke their kilobytes into a forum discussion.
I can understand why people are put off by change. I think of it as a sign of the times.
There are many other services offered through an internet connection. Banking, billpay, ebay, etc etc.
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Small correction, my connection is 3 times faster than yours when it works. The bandwidth is there, but the delay in getting anything to start transmitting is such that i can't do much more than browse websites. Servers i used to fly on in Hypperlobby are totally out of reach because i might have enough bandwidth to transmit the needed data, but it lags as much as 2 seconds behind what is actually happening at that time, result is ping-kick.
In such a case, how would i be able to play a game that not only authenticates (which is a minimal amount of data), but also streams a good chunk of data back and forth? In Ubi's new deal they say that even the saved games are stored remotely and in new games, these could be anything from a few KB to quite a few MB in size. In Dragon Age origins for example, saves are close to 10MB each.
Now let's move away from my personal example and take a look at the big picture, geographically large countries like Australia, Canada and even the US, where a big part of the population lives in areas that broadband is not yet feasible or too expensive. I was surprised to read it, but someone pointed out that 30% of internet users in the US are still on dial-up.
I don't know, but i think that these measures have a good change of losing them more sales due to the inability of willing customers to meet the requirements, than they would lose if they used something that's easier to pirate but also easier to live with if you are a legitimate buyer.
I think the people who object to this are far from the minority, especially among the flight sim crowd. Look at Rise of Flight, how many copies do you think they have sold and why are they now lifting the online requirement? I don't know exactly myself, but i have a suspicion. Maybe it's because their protection system turned away so many people that they had sold a measly 40000 copies a full 6 months after game release (deduced from a survey they e-mailed to their customers, registered users on their forums and demo users, that's where the number comes from).
People who just go along with everything they are servred without questioning the internal workings of the deal are usually late-comers to the PC gaming scene, they belong to a different gaming background like consoles, or they came to the PC from consoles. To this part of the gamer demographic tweaking and configuring is respectively unknown because they are late adopters, not needed and impossible because they play on consoles, or unkown because they come from consoles and didn't need or even couldn't take a look under the hood up till now.
On the other hand, people who have for a couple of decades been given the option to tweak things on their own and are interested in the technical side of things will always question what goes on under the hood. I think that someone with a keen interest in aircraft is more likely to belong to this second category and not the first one, so the sales will be shaped accordingly.
The proof is right before our eyes again. If simmers didn't question and dislike such measures, why would RoF not surpass the 50k mark in sales a full 6 months after release? Don't tell me it's an niche-within-a-niche product, it is, but IL2 expansions sold like crazy, the original IL2 also sold well and it was a niche-within-a-niche product too.
Had anyone ever done anything about the eastern front up till then? Nah, but there had been previous titles dealing with WWI. In a sense, what Maddox and company risked and managed to pull off with their choice of theater was even harder than what RoF does. WWI is not as popular as WWII for a sim setting, but it's definitely more popular than eastern front WWII.
In any case, voting is done with the wallet mainly and as long as we are strong-willed enough to stay away from games that punish you for buying them, it will start becoming very costly for the companies to keep producing, maintaining and bundlig a bunch of artificial fiery loopholes along with the real piece of software. The only 100% sure defence against piracy is a happy, dedicated and enthusiastic customer that respects your work, the rest is just wishful thinking and money-sinks that fail to stem the tide of piracy while aggravating the legitimate customers.