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| IL-2 Sturmovik The famous combat flight simulator. |
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#31
06-11-2010, 08:04 AM
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How your spare time connects & is relevant with what DRM the game uses i've no idea but sure whatever.. lol. Last edited by zauii; 06-11-2010 at 08:15 AM. 
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#33
06-11-2010, 08:08 AM
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Also for someone connected 24/7 please update your sig? Rise of flight and Arma 2 were released ages ago 
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#34
06-11-2010, 08:12 AM
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 Anyway yes i am aware of my Sig state lol, been mentioned before just haven't got around to changing it.  No btw i don't belive SoW will have any DRM that requires a constant stream, we were just discussing possible DRM's of the future, but we'll see eventually.
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#35
06-11-2010, 08:18 AM
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#36
06-11-2010, 09:45 AM
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Alienating a huuge chunk of your costumer base (50% is not a unresenble figure going by debates on internet about this) makes no buissnes sence what so ever.
Personally, i would fire the dude that came up with the idea, strickly looking from a buisness stand point (no personal oppinion involved). Or bring him up on charges of sabotaging my company
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#37
06-11-2010, 10:08 AM
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Works just fine for tons of games out there. True the simulation market has a lot of offline only customers, but eventually that will have to change as well, just as anything technology progresses and time moves on and everything can't stay the same forever.
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#38
06-11-2010, 10:39 AM
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Moving to online play is not necessarily progress any more than most game publishers moving to the console platform is progress. Online dogfight servers tend to be full of immature people out to inflate their ego's and the online chats are rife with trolling and schoolboy bully tactics. Further some even think they are the "elite" of the sim community and can demand all sorts of things from publishers based on their online activity. I haven't played online since 2004 and even then I mainly played squad co-ops and virtual wars. My squad were great guys but their were too many idiots out there. To be truly successful online a simulation would need to stop being a simulation and become much more a game. To appeal to a broader market you would need to "dumb things down" a bit as your average punter does not appreciate a big learning curve and wants to be instantly a "awesome uber 1337 hero". You also would need to forget historical accuracy and adjust opposing aircraft and weapons to achieve fair game balance. You would also need to reward people for persistently logging in and also for spending money. In short you would need to throw out the ideal of being a "simulation" as unachievable and create what is basically a realistic looking aerial version of Halo It would probably be fun and make lots of money, but not my cup of tea.
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#39
06-11-2010, 11:20 AM
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Four of five times a year we (our squadron, with 12 pilots) have great LAN-parties with IL-2. It is always nice to meet the pilots personally with enough time to chat and fly. And on these occasions we always throw tons of meat on the grill and drink some beers.
During these events nothing bothers us - no phonecalls, no want-to-go-shopping-girls, no neighbours that need help etc. - only pilots and their machines. I'm always looking forward to those event. They are just cool and relaxing.I hope these LAN-Parties are not doomed to die (for SoW BOB) due to necessary connection to the internet... (Oleg, please don't let this happen) Last edited by Wolkenbeisser; 06-11-2010 at 11:24 AM.
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#40
06-11-2010, 06:12 PM
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This is a brilliant solution. A person who's not interested in receiving updates is obviously not a big fan of the title. That means no matter how hard the DRM is, this is the kind of person that would never ever buy the game. So, even if he pirates it, he will probably play a few missions and uninstall it. This is not a lost sale. A lost sale is a person who uses an illegal copy but is also interested enough to keep playing the game, a person who wants updates and multiplayer. This is the kind of person that you can "force" to buy the game. How do you do that? You tie the added value features of the game that he wants to a valid cd-key. I think that's the best compromise, creating an account and then using it to log in to the verification service only once. After the installation for example, you need to go online ONCE, enter your cd-key and create an account. One key can be used to create only one account, but that account can be transferred among PCs. So, if you switch PCs you just log in with your account username and password that is already activated. This means that the cd-key and the account are separate things. The cd-key enables creation of the account, but the account is "roaming", ie can be used on a separate system. So, how do we prevent a situation where one could log in with a validated account on all his friends's PCs so that they can play the game without buying it? Again, tie only the online features to the online service. Every time there is an update you will have to go online to download it anyway. Every time you want to do multiplayer, you will have to go online. So, everytime the player wants to go online, check his account. Instead of forcing the buyer to be online all the time, you can just check his installed copy for authenticity whenever he WANTS to go online. That's it, no constant connectivity, no limited activations/deactivations. Sure, you'll have some people who are playing single player without having bought the game, it's just that they are non-interested guys who are playing version 1.1 when the game is at 2.3, because you'd need to login with your account that you created with your cd-key whenever you wanted to apply a patch. This is a small price to pay, considering they wouldn't buy it no matter what, because it keeps the important guys happy...the ones who DO in fact buy the game. So, what's smart business sense? To cater to the customer, or to annoy the customer in order to spite someone who will never give you money? As for DRM in general, i agree that it's mostly an effort to limit the 2nd hand market. Too bad, because it's borderline illegal. The EULAs that you click "i agree" before playing the game? They don't stand a chance against consumer law in most of Europe. So what if i click that? I bought something, i need it to work and it's mine to give away or resell. Why should software publishers be different than the manufacturers of other high-tech products? Could you imagine a Hi-Fi system that tells you "to use this system you will only play this list of artists on it"? Would you do it, or would you say "yes, i agree" and then go ahead to play the music that you prefer? What if the maker of said Hi-Fi forced you to connect it to your router, so that it can check what kind of music you play? What if it checked if you replaced the speakers with a set from a competing company? What if it prevented you from using it from a different IP, so that you couldn't sell or donate it to someone else? And finally, what if you did one or more of the above and the Hi-Fi system decided "no more music for you"? What would happen next? Well, a riot outside the company's office most likely. Games where the online component works well and is a good compromise are ironically the pay-to-play MMO style games. Why? Because the persistent world, the massive content and the large amount of players to compete with is actually a good trade-off for the monthly subscription and the risk of network downtime. In plain words, the online component is not simply added restriction at worst or added value at best, it is the game itself. This obviously doesn't fly for games with a single player component. Finally, DRM kills impulse buying and this might mean your game will miss the train to mass appeal. Example, RoF. I wanted to get it, i got p*ssed off by their initial stubborness about the DRM and i didn't buy it. The price was dropping, special offers came up, but i still didn't buy it even when i could buy a digital download copy for a mere 18 Euros, thanks to favorable exchange rates. Why? Because buying it would be like i'm saying "it's ok to screw me, your customer, over with excessively restrictive DRM". So, each week i'd spend that money on a few extra beers. After quite some months they removed it (close to a year, was it?). I still don't have RoF, because while waiting for them to remove that stupid system i lost all of my excitement. The fact that all of the title's shortcomings were getting aired in the meantime also didn't help. If RoF didn't have that DRM at launch, i would have bought it because i didn't know about the rest of the things that would annouy me. However, by checking various forums to see if they were going to change their DRM i came across other kinds of discussions that highlighted other problems, like the "empty" battlefields and the limited visibility/rendering bubble, things that seemed like hasty optimizations for a physics engine that had trouble managing more than a handful of units. It's been what, more than a year since the release of RoF and it hasn't properly got into geat yet because of this thing, killing the potential buyer's impulse. Imagine if more people had picked it up on impulse. The whinning about the title's flaws would be even bigger, but the company would have the extra money to hire a few extra people and work on them...the game would get better at a faster rate, they would sell even more copies and everyone would be at a better position. I'd hazzard a guess that the amount of people flying IL2 exclusively is still greater than the amount of people who fly RoF exclusively. That doesn't mean it's bad, or that it hasn't improved or that people shouldn't enjoy it. It just means it's a small, isolated "gentlemen's little club" that missed it's timing due to bad marketing decisions. Their window of opportunity was from the end of IL2's life to the release of SoW, they p*ssed off a lot of their fans with their DRM and as a result it remained a low circulation title. In fact, SH5's case was something similar, with a customer rights union in one of the Scandinavian countries threatening to take the case to court because Ubi couldn't guarantee the uptime of their validation servers. Thing is, DRM like that only works well for shooters or other games that either a) have a short story arc b) have limited replay value or c) both of the above Why? Because most people don't care if Modern Warfare 2 will be playable in 5 years, in that time span they will have gone through an equal amount of Moden Warfare sequels, plus a bunch more from different series. That's why their boycott didn't work and they all rushed out and bought it despite saying otherwise. They don't lose too much by accepting the poor state of a game that takes 3-4 evenings to beat and will occupy you for a couple of months in multi. However, in games that have a high replay value and newer game engines take longer to develop, people are interested about long term viability and functionality.
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