Sep
4
Spore and WAR
It’s going to be a confusing week next week for two reasons:
1) WAR Open beta
2) SPORE
About the WAR Open beta. I don’t want to participate due to the phenomena I like to call “The LOTRO Beta Effect”. It’s when Darren plays and tests out a game so much that every shred of will for playing it at launch is stripped away from him. Don’t want this to happen again. So…tonight and tomorrow are probably the last times I’ll play as I’m pretty much sold on playing the Bright Wizard of pain, death and general kick-ass awesomeness.
SPORE. I’ll be getting that. Long have I heard legends that this game was eventually going to make it into our hands and it looks like I was totally wrong that this will turn into vaporware. My reasons for thinking this was that, for a while at least, that there would be no game in this game. Much like The Sims…
….ahem….
SPORE is here soon and it looks like a lot of fun…in a galactic domination kind of way. Once again though, the DRM issue seems to come up with this thing:
SecuROM, bless it’s flawed little heart, represents one of the fallacies of modern thinking about information properties – that producing a security layer for software will in some way curb enough piracy to offset the negative attention it receives. On the consumer side, opinions are strongly negative. In the front office, apparently, the opinion is positive enough that they keep using the product. As a game designer, my job is not affected either positively or negatively, but I have to admit a strong negative reaction to the paper tiger SecuROM represents.
And a paper tiger it is! Spore, released on Monday in Australia, was reported cracked within a couple hours, and is now pretty well distributed on the torrent circuit. Note that the game hasn’t been officially released yet!
/golf clap
Bravo. Thanks for assuming I’m a criminal and doing nothing about pirating your game.
I’m tellin ya. If I see Brad Wardell at AGC, I’m going to shake his hand, buy him a beer and then beg him for a job. From the same link above, here’s what Brad said about the logic behind Sins of a Solar Empire (…awesome RTS….) NOT having any DRM at all:
“Now, I don’t like piracy at all. It really bugs me when I see my game up on some torrent site just on the principle of the matter. And piracy certainly does cost sales. But arguing that piracy is the primary factor in lower sales of well made games? I don’t think so. People who never buy software aren’t lost sales.”
“The reason why we don’t put CD copy protection on our games isn’t because we’re nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don’t like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor – we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry.”
“Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes. When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.”
This is the reason why I buy anything remotely interesting that comes out of Stardock. I pre-ordered DemiGod from them because they treat me like a partner…and I support that atmosphere 100%.
Not much more to say on the MMO front. Business as usual it seems. Looks like everyone is just waiting for The Day.
…oh yeah….did I say how excited I am about AGC?
D out.
damn….thanks for the heads up
