baeuchlein on 2/11/2008 at 14:00
Quote Posted by Shakey-Lo
I'm not a big believer in 'voting with your wallet' either. I wasn't the one that brought it up.
Correct. I recognized I mixed up your point of view with the one from the person mentioning the "vote with wallet" idea, and redefined my post a bit, but got interrupted and could not proof-read it once more. However, I found it important to mention the flaws of this idea.
Quote Posted by Shakey-Lo
I just thought that if you
did consider yourself to be voting with your wallet - that your purchase could have a real tangible effect on the industry - surely there'd be more important factors to vote on.
That depends on a lot of things: what
you consider important, what the
industry people consider important - and what they
think about why you "voted" the way you did, as you expressed earlier. It's likely they don't connect your "vote" to the copy protection scheme used, but rather to the game's look and feel as well as the game's content.
Quote Posted by Shakey-Lo
If you actually hope to cause financial failure to games that have strict DRM and success to those that don't, then I think you're a little misguided because your message will be completely lost on publishers looking over abstract sales figures.
True. And that's a good example why "voting with the wallet" does not work the way some people think it does: The only message you sent to the game's publisher is "I don't buy that", but you do not tell the publisher
why you didn't buy it. And then the publisher has to make a decision based on what
he thinks is the reason for you not buying the game, but he has insufficient information to find out why you didn't buy the game. So, he'll likely make a
wrong decision.
Quote Posted by Shakey-Lo
This line of thought was spurred by a comment in another thread [...]. The basic gist was that some game, can't remember which, had heavy DRM, while Bethesda "deserved our support" (ie. money) for having more lenient DRM. I'd have thought the publisher most deserving of our support was the one making the best games.
My opinion is a bit different, as you might have recognized from my earlier, novel-sized post. At least once the game's copy protection seriously harms my playing experience, I take that into consideration as well - among other factors, of course.
catbarf on 2/11/2008 at 14:02
Quote Posted by EvaUnit02
WTF? Have you got a link?
Well, from Direct2Drive:
Quote:
Far Cry® 2 Download File Size
3.7 GB
Version
1.00
Publisher
Ubisoft
This video game is protected by Securom digital rights management software which installs additional components required for copy protection on the user's computer and limits the number of installations of the game. During the installation and/or the first launch, an online connection is required to unlock the game.
The full game is 12 gigs, you only download 3.7 and then need to unlock the rest. It might be just the download version, but people on torrent sites are going ballistic because apparently it seems to be the same with DVD rips.
redrain85 on 3/11/2008 at 03:27
Quote Posted by catbarf
The full game is 12 gigs, you only download 3.7 and then need to unlock the rest. It might be just the download version, but people on torrent sites are going ballistic because apparently it seems to be the same with DVD rips.
I have trouble believing that. If what you're saying is true, that would mean the game would have to download 8 gigs before you'd be allowed to continue past the first few missions. And I'd think we'd be hearing about that, if it were the case. You can't not notice that the game suddenly wants an outbound connection, and then ties up your connection with a large, sustained download.
Either the 3.6 gigs on the disc (or from Steam/D2D) is highly compressed and gets uncompressed when you install/run, or the game procedurally generates textures.
There WAS apparently some kind of review copy with only 4 missions. But the one released by a certain well-known cracking group appears to be fully legit. Not to mention, that group would have to be incompetent to release the game without noticing most of the missions were missing.
Talgor on 4/11/2008 at 15:13
I was the one who said "voting with my wallet", and I seem to think it means somewhat different things than you lot...
I'm a part of a minority within a minority, I'm not expecting it to have an effect. Of course it won't, because most people don't care about copy protection. The vast majority of the people who buy games these days probably don't even know it exists, because they do what they're told, don't understand the hows and whys and wouldn't care even if they did.
But I'm not wasting my money on things that I may not be able to play, or giving money to publishers that consider me guilty unless proven innocent. This is about me and my money, not the publishers' sales consultants.
baeuchlein on 13/11/2008 at 18:35
Quote Posted by Talgor
I was the one who said "voting with my wallet", and I seem to think it means somewhat different things than you lot...
Apparently, yes. Here in Germany, "voting with the wallet" almost exclusively means that the consumer
does influence the producer's or vendor's decision by buying or not buying something. And my opinion about that should be clear from my earlier post, I think.
Quote Posted by Talgor
I'm not wasting my money on things that I may not be able to play, or giving money to publishers that consider me guilty unless proven innocent. This is about me and my money, not the publishers' sales consultants.
And I think along the same lines, in general.
