291–300 of 395 posts
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> They were playing the game, getting immersed into it, trying to win, and they got stuck. Stuck without any reason. Looks like shitty experience to me.
Exactly. Why would I buy this game if all I read is reports of people getting stuck after 1 day?
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Out of interest, why do you think that is? Is it due to convenience , availability of cheap games in sales , extra features in steam or did a rise in your disposable income just happen to coincide with the launch of steam? For me it was mainly 2 and 4.
All of the above. I buy from Steam because I don't have to worry about DRM, I don't have to worry about losing the disks or if they get scratched. I don't have to worry about remembering another password for another site. (Fuck you Origin) I buy from steam because I don't have to deal with any of this bullshit. It's stress free and easy to use. It's the same reason I buy from iTunes. The only computer game I bought t…
When I think about how Valve built their brand, at least in my eyes, it was a two-step process. First, make a few great games (and no high-profile duds). That's your foundation. Then add all the Steam stuff, and be careful to never ever screw me over. EA isn't good enough at step 1, and while they haven't screwed ME over, there are too many people crying and screaming for me to ignore it.
Who else could diversify the digital-distro ecosystem? Maybe Blizzard? Except now it's Blizzard/Activision, and Activision seems sketchy this era.
Maybe ZeniMax? (I dunno what Zenimax is like as a corporate overlord, but if you sum up the brand credibility of all their subsidiaries, that's a lot of credibility! I might not enjoy playing id games any more, but I respect the hell out of them, and open-sourcing all your engines is exactly the kind of trust-builder that an overlord needs.)
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> People arguing that piracy is ruining gamedev routinely ignore the fact that those who pirate don't necessarily have the means to buy many games And people who defend pirates routinely ignore that pirated products are also pirated by people who will take what they want for free if they can, because they can. Don't pretend to a higher level of intellectual honesty or moral strength. Your position can lay claim to ne…
People who defend copyright take copyright for given, as that would be the normal state which can not be questioned. Don't pretend to a higher level of intellectual honesty or moral strength. Your position can lay claim to neither. Culture, creativity and art have existed long before copyright and will continue to do so after it has been abandoned.
Personally, "I get other people's work for free" is outweighed by "I get other people's work that I actually want to play." Skyrim doesn't come out of a Kickstarter.
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There may be some kind of relationship, but it's almost certainly not a linear one. I don't think I could summarize the research on the subject (there is a lot, and it's not my area), but it seems to strongly depend on the business, stickiness of various quantities, the specific tax rates, and other factors. Part of the problem is that economies are basically nonlinear dynamical systems, and nonlinear systems tend to…
That sounds like a complicated way of explaining the broken window fallacy. "Maybe the economy will be better off if the glazier has the money because he will spend it better than the butcher whose window was broken." In specific circumstances that can really be true, but in general there is no reason to expect it to be, and unless you somehow know that it is, breaking the window is more likely to cause a net loss th…
I remember seeing lessons from an economics class in Germany where the first lessons include conflict between capitalists and labor and the negative effects of income inequality. In America, we start with basic supply and demand models.
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This is how analytics applications work. Almost every website you visit has Google Analytics installed, which sends your data to their servers so that the developer gets a better understanding of their users. Apps aren't an exception, you'll find it in almost all of them. When you install the app it should notify you what is does or doesn't have access to, so things like your phone book and call history are not acces…
no. Applications are an exception. Servers can do what they want, they have that freedom as far as I'm concerned, but the client is me. It's my computer. It does what I want. Applications should never be antagonistic to me.
Developers use the information to make the product better. They use crash reports to fix bugs without you having to report them and they can determine what operating system and screen resolution you're using so the next time you open up the app, it's been optimised so those ugly black borders have been taken care of.
Granted, they could ask your permission to do this, as some applications do. However, are you really going to spend time integrating an extra layer of complexity between your game, when you're on a limited development budget and the priority should be on making the game more fun?
I believe having this stated in the privacy policy, together with the privacy rules agreed to at installation is more than adequate enough for this level of application, anything more would be overkill on the developers part.
"""The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail… Slowly their in-game funds dwindle, and new games they create have a high chance to be pirated until their virtual game development company goes bankrupt."""
I haven't played the pamphlet, but it sounds like it's implemented by substracting money from player's in-game funds. This means whenever someone pirates a game in this pamphlet, player loses money. In other words, theft as opposed to a loss of a sale. How cute!
I remember a case where someone wrote a script to automatically download a pirated piece of software or a music album. It was linked to a website with a counter. The website owner wanted the developer/musician to bankrupt. The idea was that by downloading the thing enough times, he could make the copyright owner go bankrupt.
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That's a ridiculous claim, but even if it were true, it would still not detract from the point. Quite the opposite, in fact.
It's a reference to a famous quote by Sweden's trade minister in 1999, who said "Norway is the last Soviet State"
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I would be interested to hear more detail on this as well. Keeping in mind we are talking about taxation on the municipal level, doesn't it make sense that a tiny, not-so-special town will have difficulty getting away with higher taxes? You say "it was nothing like what I knew from Norway." Does that mean in Norway you can have one crappy town charging 20% municipal taxes next to another crappy town charging only 10%…
As far as I remember (SimCity 3000), you start out with taxes at like 7%, and you can get away with 9% when your city is small, but when you grow, you have to /lower/ taxes (down to 1-2%, eventually) to keep things stable. Which makes sense from a game design perspective (there are enough hard things when you're starting out, without having to deal with obscenely low taxes), but doesn't have much to do with real life…
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> They were playing the game, getting immersed into it, trying to win, and they got stuck. Stuck without any reason. Looks like shitty experience to me.
By that definition, any game you play that you can't master on day one is a shitty experience. That's an exceedingly hard customer expectation to meet: a customer who doesn't like difficult challenges or learning curves.
The difference here is the developer makes the game a shitty experience by design. That's the definition of shooting himself in the foot.
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I would be interested to hear more detail on this as well. Keeping in mind we are talking about taxation on the municipal level, doesn't it make sense that a tiny, not-so-special town will have difficulty getting away with higher taxes? You say "it was nothing like what I knew from Norway." Does that mean in Norway you can have one crappy town charging 20% municipal taxes next to another crappy town charging only 10%…
As far as I remember (SimCity 3000), you start out with taxes at like 7%, and you can get away with 9% when your city is small, but when you grow, you have to /lower/ taxes (down to 1-2%, eventually) to keep things stable. Which makes sense from a game design perspective (there are enough hard things when you're starting out, without having to deal with obscenely low taxes), but doesn't have much to do with real life…