DRM and you

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Chaos-Shaman
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Re: DRM and you

Post by Chaos-Shaman »

CALL to arms before any attention grabbing events bro
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Re: DRM and you

Post by oh_brother »

Yes, I hate the whole "have to be online to play" model. Really annoys me when I cannot play single player in a game I bought because servers are down.

And I still find the whole idea of trying to block second hand sales in order to boost company profits incredibly surprising. It really is just trying to artificially increase the profits of video game companies, with that cost transferred directly to the consumer. Regardless of your feelings for GameStop, preventing people from selling something they legally own is quite audacious. But admittedly this will become less important as more and more games are purchased as digital copies.

Finally, pirates must take a large amount of responsibility for what is happening. DRM is a direct, though admittedly clumsy, response to a real problem (nicely highlighted in the deliberately leaked GameDevTycoon).
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Re: DRM and you

Post by Chaos-Shaman »

there is no great solution on this either really. i bought DM 2 after i dloaded and was nearly finished the pirate version, only to give it away a bit later. one thing about pirate stuff is it gives the chance for others to try something they'd normally would never have played. i found the original Heroes that way, actually most games that i enjoyed they were pirated first, i didn't even know what they were. i ran a BBS before the net was born, i was lucky to check out all the games, taught me what i liked and what i did not. it turns out i bought any game afterwards that i enjoyed because i wanted the makers to produce another game. when i got a coin with DM, at first i thought, what the heck is this for, but now i understand its value and it is this kind of thing that makes a copy and the original stand appart. what has to come with games is other stuff, maps and trinkets that only you can get if you buy it.
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Re: DRM and you

Post by beowuuf »

I heard a rumour someone found some code in a recent Steam update that might hint lending out games are in the future? A 'you cannot use this game right now as % is still borrowing it' line somewhere currently not used?
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Re: DRM and you

Post by Chaos-Shaman »

i would imagine that homeland security has hired programmers to come up with games that can be used to collect data, this i have no doubt they are already doing. it's a sneaky world now, nobody can be believed anymore. i was never a believer in anything that says FREE, it never is.
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Re: DRM and you

Post by Zyx »

On a side-note, some online-games for youngsters are psychometric tests on the populations. This one was pointed to me:
http://www.juegosdeniñas.com/juegos/315 ... ocina.html
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Re: DRM and you

Post by cowsmanaut »

Just a note about the practices of companies of late. My wife plays the Sims, and she's noticed that it's asked to grab the latest upgrade and it's running around asking for her Facebook ID so it can post on her page.. yet this wasn't a "feature" before.. I've noticed that for the PS3 already there are updates which have removed features from us, things that some people purchased the device for in the first place, and they say "it's ok, you don't have to upgrade, but that game that used to work before, now asks you to get the latest update (despite it working before) or you can not continue to play it. Oh, you want to use netflix which you pay a monthly fee to? fine.. install the update or the answer is no.. They claim you have a choice, but it's not one once the device ceases to work. And this is something I'm seeing as another potential loophole they've managed.. there is nothing around to enforce them to leave the rights and uses intact in software or hardware.. even if you play in offline mode so it can never know about an update, you can find that some games will have it requested, because they are aware of the most current update and the fact it's not installed.. heck I had that happen with a bluray movie that asked me to update... which in itself also scares me about their future plans there. Registering a Movie to play only one one device for example..

So, you could be saying, hey I won't buy something I don't agree with.. and they say ok, we'll do this.. but in the very long legal text they still reserve the right to change that agreement without notice.. and that thing you agreed to is now changed.. and there is no recourse.. as it was when they removed linux support from the PS3. People yelled, and screamed, they even hacked Sony.. the only response was to offer people some free games (though these were games most people already had) ..

Oh, and that reminds me of another feature.. digital payments that require block sums of money to be transferred. Why? because if you've got a buck or two left on your account, you're likely to feel it's a waste.. so they force you to upload in blocks of $10 or $20 and then leave left overs again.. It's digital payments.. it's not required to work that way.. there is nothing that prevents us from paying the exact amount. Just another way they mess with us.. and we all accept it..
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Re: DRM and you

Post by Sophia »

oh_brother wrote:Finally, pirates must take a large amount of responsibility for what is happening. DRM is a direct, though admittedly clumsy, response to a real problem (nicely highlighted in the deliberately leaked GameDevTycoon).
While piracy is undoubtedly a problem, one of the main reasons piracy thrives has nothing to do with cost, but rather, the fact that pirates can and do completely ignore the terms of any sort of licensing and simply deliver the product the consumers want. In other words, pirates win not because they deliver a product for free, but because they deliver a product conveniently.

Legitimate businesses aren't so lucky that they can just trample all over legalities, but legitimate distribution has a lot of advantages in its favor, too... like, you know, being legitimate. When they deliver a product at a reasonable price relatively free of encumbrances and stupid hoops, people are eager to grab it. DRM, contrary to what it's supposed to do, actually just creates stupid hoops and inconveniences consumers and hence works against its stated objective.

I'd also just like to point out the fallacy in assuming that 100% (or anything close to it) of pirated copies out there are lost sales. It's tempting to assume that, and makes developers really feel good about their sales potential and think that piracy is a monumentally horrific problem-- but I don't see any real basis in this assumption. I think a lot of those pirates would have just gone on never even having heard of his game...
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Re: DRM and you

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we don't exept it cows... we have no choice. what the spies won't be able to deal with is when people no longer speak truthfully, i do this myself, just little changes here and there just to mess the dats up, it also catches some of the scams. don't count on facebook or any public program to give out hard core stats from me, i stopped that before it started. is that my name, rank and number, maybe. i have been looking at high heeled shoes for years, guess what, that's the ads i get. i learned the method from deoxy. deoxy showed me how they could steal my information, control my computer way back 2000. they hacked me to teach me, something i loved them for. showed me what they can do. i was like a baby amongst giants, at the time deoxians were studying onliners, psychology experiments looking for shamans. i do not know if the government was involved with their studies. i would think that security would like to give you a game and control you with it at no cost. a game like WoW, give it away with hidden code. it would be worth it for them to buy out the game and hand it away to spy on us. so now they force us to connect to the interent, you'd think it was for piracy but don't count on that notion. disinformation is the new kid on the block, it's coming.
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Re: DRM and you

Post by oh_brother »

Sophia wrote:While piracy is undoubtedly a problem, one of the main reasons piracy thrives has nothing to do with cost, but rather, the fact that pirates can and do completely ignore the terms of any sort of licensing and simply deliver the product the consumers want. In other words, pirates win not because they deliver a product for free, but because they deliver a product conveniently.
Sure, DRM increases the motivation to pirate. But it also reduces the opportunity. I don't know on balance whether it has a positive or negative impact on piracy overall. But it is more than just convenience that pirates offer, otherwise there would have been no need for DRM in the first place. And music, films, tv shows, etc. mostly lack DRM, but are regularly pirated.

Anyway, reading back over that it looks like I am arguing in favour of DRM, which was certainly not my intention when I posted here. Ugh. I need to go shower.
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Re: DRM and you

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yeah, oh man, i'm not for any kind of control.. yeah, i'm straight today, i can spell , hehehe, it was a drunken fest for me last week, have to behave this week and get some Dungeon work done. i think that young people will not give a damn about anything as long as they can play and interact with their friends. i think older people buy what they want, especially if they've played the game title before. it's not about us old kooks, we don't play games much anymore. there are 1000s of titles out there, youngsters can't afford them. i need a shower too!
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Re: DRM and you

Post by Sophia »

oh_brother wrote:But it is more than just convenience that pirates offer, otherwise there would have been no need for DRM in the first place.
That's making the rather large (and, in my opinion, incorrect) assumption that nothing legitimate consumers do would create a "need" for DRM in the minds of the companies releasing the products-- they might also want to prevent reselling or lending, implement some sort of region locking, or add to the general climate of "artificial scarcity" that many publishers try to create with digitally distributed products. DRM isn't just about keeping products out of the hands of pirates; it's also about content producers wanting to get to decide what customers do with products they've legitimately bought.
oh_brother wrote:And music, films, tv shows, etc. mostly lack DRM
Wait, what? Pretty much everything digitally distributed nowadays has some sort of DRM. Any sort of film or tv show delivered via digital cable has DRM, and so do DVD and Blu-Ray discs. Even cables like DVI and HDMI can have DRM built right into the standard. It's everywhere. Most DRM schemes are cracked so quickly they don't even matter and don't actually keep people from doing anything-- but they still exist.
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Re: DRM and you

Post by oh_brother »

^ Ok, I was thinking about "always on" DRM when I wrote that.

And, too sum up, I don't support DRM. My point is that piracy increases the amount and heavy-handedness of DRM. And I can understand a need to prevent this, even if I disapprove of the methods. At the very least piracy gives companies an excuse to put obtrusive and annoying blocks on software. You may be right that there are other motivations, but they would be much harder to justify without it.
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Re: DRM and you

Post by Seriously Unserious »

Chaos-Shaman wrote:are you done playing Serious Unserious
Hey, I'm always Serious...


Except when I'm not... :P
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Re: DRM and you

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Chaos-Shaman wrote:yeah, oh man, i'm not for any kind of control.. yeah, i'm straight today, i can spell , hehehe, it was a drunken fest for me last week, have to behave this week and get some Dungeon work done. i think that young people will not give a damn about anything as long as they can play and interact with their friends. i think older people buy what they want, especially if they've played the game title before. it's not about us old kooks, we don't play games much anymore. there are 1000s of titles out there, youngsters can't afford them. i need a shower too!
I am not for excessive control, but no kind of control whatsoever? that would be pure anarchy, and our cozy, civilized way of life, with our comfortable cities, and farms producing food, factories producing products we need/want, would all come crashing to a halt. Cities would become smoking ruins, war zones, not fit for anyone to live in. No, there do need to be reasonable controls to give the members of a society some sort of guidelines as to what that society deems exceptable behavior and what is not.

To me, reasonable in the case of DRM means, just enough to prevent casual piracy (ie anyone who buys a copy from making illegal copies and giving or selling them to others), the pros will find a way to make pirated copies no matter what DRM is in place. There is no such thing as foolproof security of any sort.

Excessive DRM will not do anything but encourage piracy by increasing the market for pirated copies. Who wants to play a single player game that requires you to have a disk in the tray, be logged onto an online account and enter some sort of password/product key every 30 minutes when you can just get a cracked copy with all that crap removed? Add to that the fact that the cracked version will cost you little or nothing, except the need to have beefed up security software running to deal with the increased risk of malware from the pirates.

When it comes to spying, yes governments will spy on people if they think they can get away with it. Yes big, legitimate businesses will spy on people if they think they can get away with it, and yes, pirates selling cracked software will spy on people if they think they can get away with it. The main difference is the goals of the spying. Governments want to look for anyone who seems subversive to that government, businesses what to see what you're doing and target their ads to what you seem interested in, pirates what to gain access to your passwords, personal info and financial info, for various crimes they plan on committing with this info (eg identity theft, hacking an account to steal money or hijack it for their own uses, etc).

All you can do is be aware of this, take reasonable precautions against this, and live by your ethics. If you maintain a high standard of ethics, governments/blackmailers won't have any dirt to use against you. The info will be harder to get, as the malware used to get it is more likely to be found and removed. In short, be hard to spy on, and me so squeaky-clean that it wouldn't matter anyways, even if someone did manage.
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Re: DRM and you

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yup, that's why they still try and sell me high heeled shoes, lipstick, panties, bras and others i used in search engines years and years ago. the list has been infected.
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Re: DRM and you

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What I did about that was installed AVG internet security on my computers, firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-adware, that'll shut that crap down that sends you those crappy ads in a hurry, along with any other threats that may have been hanging around your computer.
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Re: DRM and you

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well, most ends up in spam folder from emails, but where i see the ads is going from site to site, you know, the right side of the screen. they can be removed but it often will slow a page from loading if that is turned off. to me it's an indicator of what they know about the end user. you do a search on sea cucumbers for a month, once everyday and you'll sea what i meancumber. in other words they think they can target me with ads, hahahaha, not a chance, i've messed it up good. when i go out to bingo with the ladies we love to talk about the handsome man calling out the numbers.
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Re: DRM and you

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oh_brother wrote:Sure, DRM increases the motivation to pirate. But it also reduces the opportunity. .
Honestly, I don't see any reduction here. Many of those who pirate things do it for the challenge.. much the same as a race of any other sort, there are many working towards a common end goal and who ever first get's bragging rights. The reality is there are millions of hackers around the world trying to hack their way past their next challenge.. each with their own focused area. Seems like a lot of the time, many of them are doing it because it's a challenge.. and by increasing the difficulty of that challenge it ALSO motivates more pirates to swarm it. The more you claim it's unhackable.. the more likely you are to have a million hackers try to prove you wrong. So reduced opportunity.. not so much ;)

What Sophia wrote is 100% correct, it's about control of what you do with your purchased media. I think more so than it is to get around pirates. I know a LOT of software devs who state, like me, know that the more they push copy protection, the more pirates focus on trying to hack it. They all know none of it is safe.. so this is more about controlling those who can be controlled.. which is the legit consumer, and the second hand vendor.

Nothing more.. nothing less.. they like to point and blame the pirates.. but this is not about that. You know why? because they all know that purely DIGITAL copy protection protects NOTHING.. hardware based protection is the way to go. A slight alteration to the format of the disc, and the reading equipment means that anyone who wishes to hack or copy that material will need to reproduce that.. it's expensive and difficult .. This is where you take millions of hackers and break that down to mere hundreds capable of doing that. They know this, yet that's not the direction they are going.. So it's NOT about piracy.. it's about second hand sales cutting into their profit... something that has always existed but now they see the cash flow on their side and greedy little minds are at work.. That once again, to sell or gift your copy of that game, you would have had to get around their copy protection which they've made against the law.. once again, as I've already said, circumvention of your legal rights through a loophole.
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Re: DRM and you

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saying no, and don't touch, does seem inviting. it is what happens when one tries to control something as fluent as language, it's not possible.
i feel sorry for programmers, for it is another programmer who cracks their program, so they are at war with each other, complete chaos. and why would that be........ money and possesion
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Re: DRM and you

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how about greed and insanity? from those that are causing these problems that is.

programming is, by and large, a creative process, hacking and excessive DRM are both destructive processes. One destroys another's hard work, and right to make a living off of it, the other destroys the honest user's access to a programmer's hard work.

This just starts a process of either dissuading end users from using a product, and dissuading programmers from creating more in the future.
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Re: DRM and you

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but it's human nature. it is easy to test, just leave a 100 dollar bill on the ground and see who keeps it, most of the time they will, they know it is not theirs, but they will wait until noone is looking and then take it. same with programmes. the worst thing a programmer can do is state that they have an unbreakable copy protection, it just brings in those who love the challenge, they don't care. programmers are not looking after each other, they're ripping each other off. nothing can be done about this and why is that, because it's fluent language. i do not see any way this can be solved because of the nature of language, it's impossible, i still feel sorry for programmers though, it's a tough way to make a living, and always feeling like someone is going to take your work all the time, fighting amongst each other for rights and all that. i see no way that this can change.
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Re: DRM and you

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Ok, just to play devil's advocate: DRM could at least delay the release of a cracked version. Sales in the first week are hugely important for games companies, especially for AAA games with huge advertising budgets.
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Re: DRM and you

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and, as I've said before, and probably others, DRM also does stop the casual, amateur cracker from pirating a game by just copying it. That narrows it down to only the pros. That's why I'm willing to tolerate a little bit of sensible and non intrusive DRM, but not DRM that dictates what I can do with my one single license to use the software, where I can use it, or in any way gets interferes with normal use of the software.
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Re: DRM and you

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Oh Brother, realistically, in terms of a console.. first week, second week, and even first month sales will not be impacted by the lack of DRM. As for computer games, I don't think it will either.

Take a moment and think about it, the person who is planning to get a hacked version, can wait a week, month, year.. either because they feel that games companies already got their money, or because they are going to stick it to the man, or perhaps they legitimately can't afford games due to low income. The people who want the game will run out and buy it, most EBgamers (or whatever company in any country that sells games) are filled with pre-orders. Comapnies have added art books, statuettes, t-shirts, etc to encourage the early purchase. I myself had a T-shirt for shadow of the beast back in the day :D and have numerous other nick-nacks from others. However, I support the industry in which I work too.. either way.. there are a lot of incentives to buy the game rather than hack it.

My wife and father won't purchase a game until it's come down in price.. as low as they suspect it will go within an acceptable amount of time (ie a year or a little more) .. Nothing will change their mind, and they won't get the cracked version anyway..

If there is one thing we've learned.. it's that copy protection doesn't really work.. not in the days of dungeon master, and not now.. even hardware hacks have been gotten around by people doing hardware mods at their local games store, those with questionable ethics.. they are everywhere and have always existed, my friend had a hacked SNES so he could easily play games from any region , games stored on floppy disk! there was a device called the "UFO" because you "landed" it on your SNES and it took floppy disks.. existed for the NES too apparently..

That said, hardware protection is the most likely to deal with the little pirates.. because it cost's money.. usually more than your game.. the idea is long term savings, but downloading an 8 gb game is bothersome..
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Re: DRM and you

Post by Sophia »

Hardware protection is sort of untenable nowadays with the standardization of media. Like, if you're going to release games, you're probably going to put them on DVDs or Blu-Rays or whatever-- you don't want to have to come up with some kind of specialized disc, because then you have to R&D that and make that. It'd end up costing a lot more, probably more than you'd save.
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Re: DRM and you

Post by beowuuf »

I hadn't heard about this until now:
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Darksp ... 57157.html


I still remember the fun of discovering my very cheap first stand alone DVD player was so cheap it actually ignored region encoding! I didn't realise inconvenience was a feature one paid for!
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Re: DRM and you

Post by Seriously Unserious »

I think the region encoding was something added later. IMO region encoding is stupid. It makes no business sense. Why would the producers, manufacturers and distributors of CDs/DVDs/Blue-Rays want to limit their potential customers? That is sheer insanity. As a business student I was always taught to maximize your potential customers.

As for EAs DRM scams? Well if people keep throwing millions of dollars at them, whine when they get screwed and then the next big EA game that comes out are right back there throwing more millions of dollars at EA again, only to whine when they get screwed again, but when EA comes out with their next game throw... and on and on it goes. Unless someone breaks the cycle it will just continue. And how likely is a company that's gained the reputation of EA's to be the ones to break this cycle? Fat chance I'd say. So it's up to us consumers to break the cycle by not throwing money at companies like EA. If they spend millions and millions of dollars developing their next overpriced DRM scam game and only see a few hundred thousand dollars coming their way, and then the same thing happens on the next game, and the one after that, and so on, eventually one of 2 things will happen, either companies like EA will get the message and back off on their DRM scams, and get back to producing quality games that are actually worth buying and playing, or they'll start going bankrupt and dissolving. Freeing up talent, money and market share for other companies that do make quality games to move in and take over.

Sooner or later that's bound to happen. I foresee another Big Video Game Crash like what happened in 1983 coming as many companies just won't get it, even when the whining starts to turn to anger, as it already is now, and then to action, to not buying games, and many companies will fall, just like in 1983. The 1983 crash killed many game developers, and console and computer manufacturers fell. One such victim was the Electronics division of Matel, the makers of the IntelliVision console system from 1980 to 1984. For those who aren't familiar with the industry from this time frame, the IntelliVision, Atari 2600 and CollecoVision were the 3 main competitors in the console market of the early 1980's. The Atari 2600 is regarded as the father of all console systems as it was the first to popularize the whole concept of detachable game cartridges.

In fact the Atari 2600 was so successful that it not only survived the 1983 crash but even successfully competed with next gen consoles like the NES and Sega Master System for another 5 years before being retired for good in the early 1990s.

I am definitely seeing too much DRM in games mainly by the biggest developers, like EA and Microsoft Game Studios, and a great many flops and a great deal of anger and backlash starting up over this. A flood of poor quality games is what caused the last big game crash in 1983 and it looks like the gaming industry has learned nothing from that crash, and is now setting themselves up to have history repeat itself. The big companies that are causing this will get no sympathy from me, but I do feel for the small companies and indie developers who will likely suffer first as they just don't have the financial cushion that companies like EA and M$ do.

The thing is the giants do fall, and fall hard. The best and most popular computer of the 1980s was the Commodore 64, and by about 1994 Commodore went bankrupt. The other giant of the era was IBM, and although they survived a bit longer as a computer hardware manufacturer flooded competition from the "IBM clones" eventually drove them out of that business and now all that's left are the "IBM clones" which is what we use today and call "PCs".

Even Atari, makers of the famous Atari 2600, and the Atari ST, as well as consoles like the Atari 5200 and the Atari 7800 among other systems is now either defunct or at least reduce to a shell of the glory they once had in the 1980s.

For those like Ameeda, Beo, etc who live in the UK, another giant that would once day fall, was the makers of the ZX Spectrum, Sinclair, who were a giant in the high tech industry in the UK, in fact Sinclair's ZX Spectrum (1982-1992) is regarded as the founders of UK's high tech and electronics industry, due to software, and hardware companies that sprang up to make software and peripherals for the Spectrum.

So if these sort of industry giants can fall, so to can EA, Microsoft, Apple, and any of the others in that class of companies. Like Enron these companies seem to think their immortal and impervious to bankruptcy and failure, and so unfortunately keep making the same mistakes again and again.
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Re: DRM and you

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i loved Shadow of the Beast beowuuf, kids loved it too but it was a little hard for them. yeah, the T-Shirt and coins and maps and trinkets are what make the original better than a pirate copy. the copy thing will never stop. Sophia has a good point, if the file size is too large, or too may discs, it makes it hard to copy. i think that is the best way to go. it cost money to dload large files. my first CD player cost me more than 500 bucks, hooked up to my soundblaster with special cable. now you can buy them for a few dollars.
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Re: DRM and you

Post by ebeneezergude »

Back in the (Amiga) day I remember actually being able to buy a piece of software, called X-Copy, sold in the shops, that would allow copying of supposedly copy-protected disks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mvVYCfBUw8

I was young and I didn't know it was bad to buy this, I'm not condoning it at all, it's just what we all used to do, 'we' being me and about 150 other kids at school. I was about 12. I'd say 60% of amiga games I ever played were cracked, just traded and circulated around by kids at school. I always used to have a 3.5 inch diskette in my school uniform blazer at any one point of any given school day.

To this day I don't know where these things actually came from - I always assumed it was someone's 'Older Brother' - the apparent source of all wisdom and knowledge. This was pre-internet, pre-mobile phones, pre-email - it must've been all word of mouth. But so many games were available by copying off a mate at school (and they all had awesome cracktro amiga music...)

I used to buy games also, I should add - there was nothing quite like a nice new big cardboard Amiga game box with a new game inside - chunky manuals, multiple disks, a copy protection wheel / hologram / colour card, the smell of frehsly printed box and paper, a cellophane bag for the manuals if it was a properly serious game, etc .... even a coin in some of them ;-)

I've never played a pirated game on any system other than the Amiga, I might add.
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