@jambarama – lol true. Hmmm… I think there is a WoW client for Apple.. I think. Other than that, you could probably run some games via parallels.

@Mckenzie – hey, I hope you didn’t run away. The fact that we don’t agree doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy your comments. ;) It’s nice to have people with different points of view around here.

Hey guys don’t be so rough on MacKenzie. The reason he’s so down on PC gaming is clear – look at what platform he’s on. There is what, 1 decent game released for Macs each year? :)

PS – yeah I’ve got an XP box for gaming. I’m not proud of it, but it does scratch the itch…

I don’t believe that buying a game/song/movie can be equated to a normal object that you buy per se. This is because it isn’t subjected to normal wear-and-tear due to prolonged use. Unlike tangible objects, data is not subjected to elements which can cause it to become dis-functional.

If you buy a tangible object, a chair or dvd for example, you cannot realistically expect it to work 50 years from now. No matter how good you take care of it, the materials will undoubtedly fail, due to normal stresses and wear-and-tear. This has to be expected even if you use it normally.

However, with data, you can expect it to work 50 years from now. It is not subjected to stresses. It does not get weathered from use. I can make a copy in case a freak accident wipes it from the harddrive. You can’t do that with objects that you can buy from the store. The same rules don’t apply. Making a copy doesn’t mean you are pirating it. It just means that you are protecting your purchase.

Mackenzie, you say you don’t care about making a backup. But what if that disc which you store the data get scratched, get mouldy? It will lead to data corruption, rendering the game useless. But it’s not your game that is corrupted, it’s the media, a container which holds the game, that makes your game corrupted. The data cannot magically make itself unreadable.

And one thing to note, there doesn’t seem to be any warranty period when you buy a game/software/music/movies. If your disc becomes unplayable 7 months after you buy it, that’s too bad.

Thus, i don’t believe that the rules of buying tangible objects apply to that of buying data. I respect intellectual property and the artists that create them. But the industry needs to learn that you cannot treat purchasing data with purchasing tangible objects.

Wow, Mackenzie, words fail me. How can you be wrong about so many things? I mean, Luke got in on a good swag of things, but some other points:

1) “Good” DRM? No, good DRM is exactly what Muhammed pointed out – something that rewards you for doing the right thing. DRM cannot be good if it limits you as a valid customer in any way – if product + drm < product alone, the DRM cannot be good

2) PC gaming sucks? No, PC gaming is different to console gaming. I recently had an argument with a console ‘tard who lambasted PC gaming as being useless. I then listed the 70+ games I have on my PC (including legacy ones) and only 20 were also on console. Of those 20, a maximum of 8 were on any single given console.

Windows games and console games are very different beasts. If you don’t like PC gaming, that’s fine, but PC games give you a lot more variety than consoles do. Don’t try to disguise your dislike for windows games behind a screen of calling others mousecontrol fanboys.

3) Starforce didn’t intend to destroy optical drives. I don’t know how you figured this was their intention. And it wasn’t the ubergeek crackers that got their drives destroyed.

4) You don’t care about patching? Funny, I thought patching improved the original product. If you can’t patch, you can’t improve. I can understand the lack of care about backups – most people are lazy, myself included – but to suggest patching is not worthwhile is inane.

5) Running games off the optical disc is bad. Bad for your disc, bad for your optical drive. If your game needs constant access to the disk (or even just to start up), that’s more handling of the optical disk, which is far more prone to failure than a hard drive. Handling includes you manually swapping out disks to play another game.

6) How do you reconcile your argument of “I’m paying for the disc not the data” with things like XBox live where you can pay to download stuff to your drive without using an optical disc?

7) Luke did a better job of it but I think it needs to be repeated: if you can’t find XBox games for download on the intart00bs, you must be blind.

@Mackenzie – ok, there is couple of things here that should be addressed.

First – every Xbox or PS user is also a PC user. Therefore every Xbox and PS user has access to easily downloadable and burnable pirated games for their platform.

Second, like Muhammad said, a games without any copy protection are successful and turn out profit. Why? Because DRM is an illusion of security. It is supposed to stop Joe Average who has no computer from ripping the game and uploading it on the torrent site. Unfortunately, statistically speaking while Joe Average hits torrent sites every day, he is usually a leach who never fucking seeds.

Joe Average is not going to rip the game – Bob “The Warez Dude” will, and he has both the knowledge and the tools to circumvent the DRM.

In effect, whether the game has copyright protection or not, it still ends up on the torrent site. So whoever wants to download the game will download it, DRM or not.

You don’t believe me? Show me one game or a movie that cannot be found on a torrent site or Usenet because of the strong DRM?

Third:

[quote post=”2244″]What do you expect if you want too buy software that costs insane amounts too develop, for a platform which can send it pinging worldwide in a matter of seconds?[/quote]

Once again, cracking and distributing an Xbox or PS game is not much different from cracking and distributing a PC game. Btw, you do realize that most of the development for these platforms is actually done on PC’s right?

Hell, I can even download and seed a Xbox game from my PC despite the fact that I don’t actually own an Xbox.

The fear that the PC release of the game will get cracked and pirated more easily is unfounded.

Yes- This is “Good” DRM. Unobtrusive, functional DRM right into the hardware. This is because a console is Something You Buy too Play Games On. But a PC is a Personal Computer, with all sorts of interesting things like a GUI and CD burner and such- Basically, a means towards piracy. A console is not, playing games is what its intended for, not playing games, multimedia, running buisness clients, browsers, CD burning, chopping up and hacking software, rah rah rah.

A manufacturer would never sell a game that made the PS3 burn itself out after one use, because there’s no need too, and the backlash would be massive. But a manufacturer making Starforce that affects a coupla geeks uberdrives too prevent them using their PC’s too bittorrent their game all over the interwebs, a game that’s had thousands of manhours and millions of bucks poured into it? Sounds fair too me. End users PC problems isn’t a problem for them. The game getting massively distributed for free is.

The thing is

I don’t care about making a backup. Or patching it. Or whatever. I pay my 40 quid, I get a hardcopy of gamedata. That game is henceforth my responsibility as an OBJECT, not data. PC gaming, for the fanboys screaming about mousecontrol, isn’t worth it. Running games on a PC is virtual suicide, in terms of rootkits, security protection, etc. What do you expect if you want too buy software that costs insane amounts too develop, for a platform which can send it pinging worldwide in a matter of seconds?

@ Mackenzie:

I think your “console-over-PC” argument is a bit flawed. With consoles, the protection is already built into the hardware. You can’t use the same machine, which you play the game on, to make a backup and store it in the console’s HDD. Nor can you play a backup of the game you purchased, as Luke had mentioned.

Moreover, a game like Galactic Civilizations 2 (for the PC) has somehow proven that a game with no copy protection whatsoever, can actually be successful. Instead of punishing the end user from buying the game, it rewards them for it, by providing free additional content and the ability to re-download the full version if your physical media ever got scratched, which won’t be too much of a problem, as you do not need the media to be in your optical drive to play.

Now, I just hope that Spore won’t be subjected to the same protection hassle. But since it’s an EA game….

I think most consoles do have some built in DRM though – it’s just that most people don’t notice the same way you don’t notice the CSS encryption that is built into your DVD player appliance.

Note that you probably won’t be able to simply copy an Xbox 360 game by burning the original media.

Besides Xbox and PS3 have hard drives and an actual mini OS which can be used to host DRM software that is much more annoying than the simple hardware based encryption lockdown.

Oh, and it doesn’t work either since last time I checked torrent sites had all the latest X-Box titles available for download :)

“When you work with DRM you want to send messages between Bob and Alice while protecting them from… Alice.”

Word. Total fuckin’ idiocy. This is why I’ll never choose a PC over a console. With console, it’s futureproofed and you can actaully play the game without online registry, patches and various other bull, because the copy protection comes from the fact it’s on a console platform, and can’t be played on a PC without a massive emulation unit that crops up 2 or 3 generations later when noone cares anymore. If you play on PC, your gonna be buying contaminated software because they can’t trust that their customers won’t hack and distribute a game, because PC is a means towards that, but it’s impossible on a Nintentoid or XboxGeneration(360xn) where n is the number of console generations since original Xbox.

Heh, you got to love DMCA. It’s a law created to protect the DRM systems precisely because of what I just wrote about. They are all flawed by design. Let’s face it – most of the good cryptographic algorithms used right now have been around for years, and given sufficient key sizes they still remain unbreakable. DRM usually gets cracked in days if not hours from release. If it worked we would not need DMCA,

This law really just ends up hindering security research in this country. :(