I think most people will be satisfied with all three of those things.

Optimization would be great however I just don't see it happening as it would limit the games audience.

Optimization would be great however I just don't see it happening as it would limit the games audience.

Thanks for the link, it was a very interesting article and it makes some very good points. I was aware of the day zero piracy issue, but didn't consider casual piracy of sharing the game with friends.



This part of it though just reifnorces my confidence in my suggestion. They can use any DRM they want at release as long as they relase a version that requires no more than a simple disc check a month or two afterwards.

I'm pretty sure he means that the game should be optimized for each system not just make a "console" game and port it to the PC. In essence: Optimize the game for the PS, Box and PC

Just remebered, here's an article which pretty much established my view points of Steam and why I refuse to use it:

1. http://www.thealexandrian.net/archive/archive2010-06.html#20100601 <- online activation in general

2. http://www.thealexandrian.net/archive/archive2010-09.html#20100930 <- Steam specific

While all those are valid points, as steam is one centralised service, it going down does not mean being unable to play your games. Primarily, if it can't contact its activation servers you can go into offline mode, but also as it has been repeatedly stated that should steam collapse and shut down, they will release a patch for the client disabling the security. Even if they don't, there are existing cracks that perform the same task. You're not going to lose access to your steam games, ever. Online games using steamworks will likely lose their server browsers, but that's about it.

I didn't say there's little chance of Skyrim getting "Steam'd". Of course there's a good chance of it. I was just saying that we can't assume it'd be Steam only, or things like that.

You're quite welcome! As for your suggestion, I agree completely, with one small difference: They should release the no-DRM patch (at most) a few days after the game is officially hacked. I sometimes wonder why the vast majority of game companies don't do this while those who do only do so months or years afterwards. This also makes me think of Ubisoft's latest overkill DRM; I specifically remember them mentioning that they would do exactly what I suggested. However, it has now been almost half a year since the DRM was hacked in AC2 yet I haven't seen a no-DRM patch for that game (besides the illegal ones).

Then again, there was the case where Irrational Games was heavily criticised for using SecuROM in Bioshock. Then they were criticised again when they finally patched out the DRM (people made comments such as: "See! Even they admit that SecuROM doesn't work!"). Then there's the case where one of the people involved with StarForce said this about DRM:
http://www.glop.org/starforce/images/starforce-official-words.png (if anyone is interested in what the whole topic says, you may find it http://web.archive.org/web/20060315053154/http://www.star-force.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=670)
The Boycott StarForce website then uses this statement to reply:
As well as spreading a large number of other hoaxes and falsehoods about StarForce (NOTE: I am not defending StarForce or saying that it is a good thing, I'm merely stating that BSF has a lot of inaccurate rumours about it).



For that first article, I suspect that both Frank Pierce and the article writer don't know the whole story about DRM. This revelation would put to rest most (if not all) the issues brought up in that article. In this regard, I think the article writer would do well to read the article I have been mentioning in this topic. As for DIVX: According to Wikipedia, DIVX was never meant to compete with DVDs. Rather, it was meant to be an alternative to renting a video.

As for the second question, I have just one question: WHY IS HE STILL USING WINDOWS 2000? Surely, by now, the VAST majority of PC users would have migrated to at least Win XP by now. According to http://www.thealexandrian.net/archive/archive2010-09.html#20100930, Win 2000 would fit somewhere in the 6.32% not accounted for in that median. Anyway, I'm also not surprised that Valve would end support, since Microsoft ended support one-and-a-half months before them. I suspect that Valve doesn't want to potentially help expose their users to vulnerabilities that MS was no longer going to patch while also reducing their costs.



First of all, let me remind you that what you are replying to is a clearly-labeled incomplete post. What you've basically done is the eqivalent of someone talking a bit about a topic, pauses for a while before they continue, then you swoop in and make comments about what has been said while the person has paused and before they have said the rest. In short, that behavior is rude and it breaks the flow of the conversation. If I were in your position, I would have waited for the other person (me) to finish before making a reply.

As for your reply itself, it seems that you have missed the point of what I am saying (partly helped by the fact that you didn't let me finish my post). Basically:
1. My comment has nothing to do with the author inflating or defalting their statistics. What I am saying that the author is not correct in saying that one statistic that applies to the entire iPhone user demographic equally applies to one section of the iPhone demographic (the gamers). In short: 10% of all iPhones are jailbroken, therefore 10% of all iPhone gamers have a jailbroken phone. This is equivalent to stating that: "There are 1000 litres of water in this pond and 1000 tadpoles in it. Therefore, if I scoop out 1 liter of water, there will be 1 tadpole in that litre." Unfortunately for the article writer, making that assumption means that everything noted in the "iPhone piracy" section is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division.

2, 3 and 4.
You have completely missed the point. Let me try explain it again:
1. Some iPhone users don't want apps on their phone. Users that don't want apps accounts for some of the normal phones and none of the jailbroken.
2. Of the users that want apps, some will find all they need on the iPhone's app store. Therefore, they don't need a jailbroken phone. Users that find everything they need on the app store accounts for some of the normal iPhones and none of the jailbroken. It also accounts for most of the legit gamers.
3. (BTW, Wikipedia confirms that there are free apps on the iPhone store) What I am trying to say is that if you need an application to do a certain task, it is very likely that someone has already designed a program that does this and released it for free. In the case of PCs, you could spend some money on a disc burner like Alcohol 120% or Nero OR you could find a program that does exactly the same thing for free (such as http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-cd-dvd-burning-software.htm). It is only really niche products that don't have free alternatives. This means that if you need an app that adds specific functionality to your iPhone, you will almost always find what you need for free on the app store, which means that you won't need a jailbroken phone to download a pirated app.
4. Okay, I'll admit that when I made this point, I was thinking more about the PC than the iPhone and was in a bit of a rush.

Now that I have replied to your post, I will finish off my previous post:

So basically, I am not arguing whether or not "80% of all paid-for games are pirated" is accurate, I'm saying that there are so many variables to consider which the author has not included that there is not enough information available in the article to prove that the people reporting 80% are liars or misinformed. And until there is enough information to prove this, the iPhone piracy section is basically a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division.

As for the "PC game piracy" section, game pirates might download a new game every few days is complete speculation and probably nowhere near accurate for most pirates. Next, piracy is secretive and dishonest behavior. Therefore, it doesn't surprise me that only 4% of PC gamers would admit piracy, especially when this figure is reported as being similar to Xbox 360 piracy, even though it is a known fact that piracy on the consoles is more difficult than the PC. What this does tell me is that most pirates are liars, even if their answers are gathered anonomously, and http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html explains why this would be so:

The article then goes on to show a number of statistics for piracy, including a graph showing piracy rates that are much larger than the piracy rates the Wolfire article calculated. Then there are the torrent download figures the Tweakguides article collects which show the top 6 Fallout 3 torrents being downloaded 271,563 times for the PC version in a one month period after it was released, 19,988 times for the Xbox 360 version and 0 times for the PS3 version. Finally, the piracy rates posted by the Wolfire website don't explain why Pete Hines (Vice President of Development in Bethesda Softworks) complained 2 years ago that the solution to a large portion of their support calls was to ditch the pirated copy the "customer" was using and that other companies had mentioned that piracy accounts for a third to half of their costs (and that's only the cases where the support department manages to work out that the game is pirated; support is usually reluctant to call anyone out). Also note that Bethesda does not use piracy as a motivation to use intrusive DRM or anything for that matter. So before you accuse Mr. Hines of being a liar, ask yourself why. What reason would he have to lie about their support costs?

As for the section "Why are PC games really losing sales?", it is concluded that few gamers are pirates. However, when you consider the information I have noted above, the accuracy of this statement becomes very questionable. It's easier for these developers to point their fingers at pirates than to face the real problem, just as easily as it is for people not in the commercial gaming industry to point their fingers at anything except piracy than to face the real problem. Did they ever stop to consider that maybe the reason we have an abundance of bad console ports is because of piracy? I mean really, what logical reason can they cook up for game companies suddenly starting to create bad PC ports, if not piracy? Also, I've already mentioned that game companies don't actually like using DRM so why do they continue using it if piracy isn't a major problem?

Why does Blizzard succeed where everyone else fails? It's because Blizzard's games are almost, if not as, moddable as any of Bethesda's games. For example, Warcraft 3's most popular map (DOTA) changes the game from an RTS into something that more closely resembles an Action/Adventure game. Since we can see the popularity modding adds to a game's success by looking at Bethesda's releases, this easily explains why Blizzard games are very popular. As for their Humble Indie bundle, which they greatly laud as a sucess with a total income of $1,273,613, I see it as a bit of a failure when compared to commercial releases. If we take Modern Warfare 2's worst-case scenario sales of 200,000 in it's first two months and multiply it by $40 per game (remember, these are actual sales, not theoretical or calculated figures), we get a total income of $8 million. This means that MW2, in it's first two months, did almost 6 times better than the entire HIB did in it's entire lifetime. If we take each game in the Humble Bundle and split the income equally between the five, we see that MW2 did 31.41 times better than each game in the bundle.


As for the second article, it looks more like a rant than a neutral, educated and sourced anolysis of the issue. Basically, the writer implies ignorance from the very first paragraph when he tries to say that porting a game between console and PC is extremely easy. It is not! The two platforms use diffrent operating systems, different hardware and different control schemes. Basically, it would be easier to port a Windows game over to the Mac or Linux than to port a game between console and PC. In that case however, Mac and Linux OSs aren't popular whereas Windows and the consoles are, therefore the income from a PC/console port justifies the costs of creating it.

Also, it is highly obvious that the writer either intentionally or accidentally doesn't give the whole story concerning DRM and piracy. On the issue of piracy, I think this whole subject is just a media talking point because there wasn't another cute blond Caucasian girl abducted today for them to scare people over. Why can't it be because piracy is a serious problem?

The next three paragraph then degrade into unsourced speculation. If you want to hack a speam account, you need to acquire someone's password, which requires either installing a keylogger on their PC or making them reveal it to you. As for Windows, it is easier to hack because all the information the hacker needs is on the installation disc. It's just a question of reverse-engineering the essential files then modifying them appropriately. That's also why Ubisoft's DRM took so long to crack, not all of the files required to play the game were stored on the user's PC.

Next two paragraghs are, again, unsourced speculation that research easily disproves. Ubisoft used exactly the DRM the writer suggests and we see exactly how far that got them. His expensive hardware anology is also wrong. Take almost any game released after 2006 and plug it into a computer using a Pentium D with 2GB of RAM and a Geforce 8600 or ATI's equivalent and I can almost guarantee that you will be able to play the game (not necessarily on highest settings). I had a PC with a P4, 2GB RAM and GeForce 7950 and it ran Fallout 3 with the same FPS as Oblivion (oh, and Crysis is extremely playable on this PC as well).

Then I move on to his medicine example. He fails to give the whole story yet again. What he conveniently fails to mention is that before a pharmaceutical company can sell even a single pill, they have to discover the medicine by spending billions on researching it first (after all, you can't sell something that doesn't exist). After the medicine is researched, it has to pass a series of stringent tests before it can be marketed. So basically, the $580 initial price was what Pharma thought would be the price required to recouperate their research costs (and did I mention that current medical laws only give the company 5 years, IIRC, to make back their costs before their research becomes public domain). It might sound cruel to charge these kinds of prices for medicine but the fact of the matter is that if pharmaceutical companies didn't risk billions of dollars on researching these medicines, there would be no medicine, period. The Brazilian goverment could afford to make the drug for 65c each, because first, it is a goverment and second, they weren't required to spend billions on R&D. If the brazilian goverment was not so interested in believing lies, a better solution would have been that they use some of their fat oil cheque to subsidise the medicine. Unfortunately, if organisations make a habit of undercutting the medical companies' recovery operations, it will eventually lead to these medical companies closing down their R&D departments and then we'll never see a new medicine get invented by them.

True, it's hard to have sympathy for greed vs. life. However, there is no greed here, only ignorance vs. life. It's also correct that this example can be applied to game companies as well (with the whole story, of course). Game companies spend millions of dollars on R&D for their games, and their initial prices are targeted at recouperating these expenses. If piracy regularly undercuts these attempts (which is exactly what is happening right now), companies will either close down, charge higher prices or move development onto platforms that are less prone to piracy (again, exactly what is happening right now).

There is also a flaw in the writer's anology that all games shold be sold for $10; has he stopped to consider that maybe this isn't a realistic starting price? For example, Crysis cost Crytek $22 million to make. If Crysis were only sold for $10, that means they would have to make 2.2 million sales just to recover their cost of development, let alone marketing and distribution. Also, this doesn't explain why the creaters of World of Goo and Machinarium (which both sold for $20 each (3x less than the average game at the time) and had no intrusive DRM) both found piracy rates of 90 - 95%. In fact, it got so bad that the creaters of Machinarium have had to host a "pirate redemption sale" and place their game in the second Humble Indie Bundle.


So to summarise, I can't see either of these articles contributing anything meaningful to the argument of whether piracy is a problem. At the end of the day, http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html from my first post here is, by far, the most reliable and informative article I have found so far dealing with the issues of piracy and DRM. So in summary, if we want the issues of high prices, DRM and most bad PC ports to end, some effort in reducing or eliminating piracy has to be made. If not, we'll only see current problems get worse.

Forge world was on optimized level "putting together" tool, with many very nice options, and one of the better ones available on consoles. The Construction Set we saw for past Beth games was a complex program designed to run on PC (don't think there was ever a Mac version...), and had many buttons and things that required a mouse and keyboard to be properly functional. I can forsee the next set of tools being more powerful, but equally as complex in that they would be extremely difficult to port and then make usable on a console. Just what comes to mind.

The sole patching bug with GFWL in FO3 is if you did not have a GFWL account and had not realized you needed to patch GFWL before patching FO3. It would have been nice if Bethesda had highlighted that fact on their FO3 patches d/l page, and had the major d/l mirror sites also carry the same warning.
That said, FO3 style GFWL integration would be tolerable. But forced use of Steam just to install or initially run the game.... that for me would be a no sale scenario. It would make TES V the first TES game I would have absolutely no intention of ever getting.

Jenifur Charne

Yah for a single player game like Tes games are using steam is overkill. I dont see how any one could argue that to play a game out of the box, I would have to get online, install steam (huge update), create an account, and have it running in background while I play, all this just to play my single player game is not an unnecessary intrusive hassle. If you want to get retail box game and still use steam fine but make it on option thats all im saying dont force it on hard copy users.

If you call Steam's 1.5MB installer a huge update, what do you call an update for a modern game (eg: updating Crysis to v1.2 requires a ~350MB file)?


Lol, if you're worried about Steam slowing down your computer, I'm worried about the computer you're trying to use to play the game. Seriously, Steam uses <1% CPU power and 20MB RAM while running in the background so your FPS loss will be, Hmm, <1. You would have better results by complaining that your anti-virus shouldn't run in the background.

Reading your post, I get the impression that you hate Steam on principle rather than for factual reasons that make sense. Fortunately, people like you are in the minority.


@JeniSkunk
I would also like to hear why you hate Steam so much.

As far as DRM goes, Steam is really the lesser of many evils, so as long as I can buy a physical copy of the game, I am okay with it launching from Steam. I just want my collectors edition!

As for the game itself, I'm hoping they don't do anything to make it sub-par to the console version. As long as that happens and we get a Construction Set, I don't think there is any other PC specific concerns I have. I'm buying a new desktop for Skyrim because my laptop can barely run Oblivion as it is, so I'm not too worried about the system requirements or anything like that.

PS: I know I registered awhile ago, but I think this is my first post here. Hello, fellow fans!

I got New Vegas for PS3 because at that time I didn't want to bother with Steam, and I like playing Fallout 3 (Although I ended up buying F3 for PC later on) and New Vegas on the consoles. However, I'll never play TES on a console, so if Skyrim uses Steam, I'm just gonna have to roll with it.

If you have ever used the Construction set you would know that just isn't possible. Forge is doing changes on a premade map, and very simple. The CS involves Scripting, building maps from scratch, and a lot of other advanced features.

Welcome to the boards then and have a http://images.uesp.net//c/c4/Fishystick.jpg