Jayel

BUY games? what are you, stupid?

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I think he's never heard of demos.... :shifty:

You can try before you buy even if it's and XBox game...

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I don't understand. Why don't people in the US at least rent video games? You don't go watching every movie in the theatre now do you? So why not also rent the mediocre video games that you would never buy. Renting is fairly cheap and it ranges between 15-20 dollars a month for unlimited rentals, AND IT IS LEGAL.

I usually only buy games that I like, and except for a few exceptions, they always end up good. I think the only game I felt really ripped off was DOOM 3 and POP: The bad one (I bought that one solely for its predecessor's legacy) :shifty: I bought that piece of crap for 55 bucks and I am yet to finish it.

Also whoever says that games are 50 bucks is BS'ing. If you wait a few months, games go down half in price. How old is GTA:SA on the PS2? like 8 months? I sold it on ebay for 18 bucks, that's it.

And this question is to everyone defending piracy for the sole reason that they wouldn't buy the game regardless. Let's say you burnt Beyond good and evil, and you expected it to be a piece of turd, but then you fell in love with it. Do you go back and buy it? How many times did you just say, "well I already have the game, maybe some other time".

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I honestly have never in my life had any problems making reasonable and informed decisions about the products I buy based on reviews, conversations, common sense, and so on, and I don't think I'm a psychic or anything.
Help? I have read gamespot, watched gamespot videoreviews, read PC Gamer mag and other game mags. Gamespot videoreviews is the best for me, since I can actually see the gameplay and the guy explaine how the game works, what features it has and etc, but there is still too much focus on the wrong things. I dont want the review to be a mini game guide, telling about all the small details. I want a quick overall judgement of a game, what games it can be compared to, so you know if you like those games you will like this one also. So a 1-15 word review is more my style of review. Demos are great, if they excist. A thick xbox mag with a demodisc cost 15 bucks here, so no thx. Perhaps you are more intelligent and is more patient than me Chris, and there for read more and make better decitions that make you happy with your games, so that is good for you. I invest a certain amount of time for each game I am planning on buying and if 3-5 sites fail to give me the info I want, I skip the game and go to next game in my list of games I have gotten interest in from ads, buzz of forums and, other kind of hype. A game is just a game, and the score 10/10 from one guy can be 2/10 for another, so game comparisons should be used more often. Renting service only exist in the biggest cities here in Sweden and on mail. And the mailservices have a mediocre game selection.

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(Ah if you're in Sweden, then CDs probably do often cost $25, as they do in most of Europe. It's one of those things that's different between Europe and the US.)

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(Oh yeah, I also forgot how motherf**king expensive Europe is. I always look at America and marvel at how cheap you can get your stuff there.)

I'm with Chris. I buy a handful of games each year that I know will be awesome. Nowadays I don't even pirate anymore, because I've got so little time to game that I have enough superb quality games lying for me to occupy myself all the time.

Also, I was just thinking about BG&E again a few days ago and pondering about how that game was one of the best I ever played and that I poop on all the gamemags and """"journalists"""" that said that it was an average Zelda clone. How could they be so blind to the abundance of love poured in it? How did they not understand that BG&E succeeded where Zelda ever failed: narrative depth? Idiots.

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In response to some of the points made in previous posts:

Publishers are evil

It depends on the publisher: I've worked with one who I heard allegedly never pays small developers without legal action, yet has been up for various business awards. This is not atypical for the industry, and some of the business practices are terrible.

Developers should just worry about making good games

Development is a business, and the developers should be concerned with making money. This is not a bad thing, contrary to some of the postings in this thread.

Developers should sell their games direct

This is a risky strategy. I'm not sure how much AAA titles cost to make these days, but I'd estimate £5 million to £10 million. Assuming that the return is £20 per copy (probably on the high side), then the developer would have to ship 250K to 500K to break even.

As has already been mentioned, about 10% of games break even. The publisher's role is to manage risk, and that's why they take a big chunk of the earnings. There are other business models for sharing the risk - theatrical shows will often rely on a network of investors to buy shares in the production - which could work.

Downloading hurts publishers, not developers

Most developers never see any royalties, and in a lot of cases are running projects at a loss. (The publisher will fund the game to completion, not the initial prototyping phase.) So lost sales are not likely to impact them directly.

However, if the publisher isn't making money then they won't be funding developers, who probably won't survive. And risky (i.e. original, third party) projects will be the first to go.

And, Spaff, I don't know if you're still working for that Hove based outsourcing company, but traditionally external and contract work is the first to go in bad times. If you are, then going for warez could put yourself out of work.

Professional software is too expensive

Try the open source alternatives. Some are very good (Eclipse as an IDE, OpenOffice), and can compete with their commercial counterparts. Others are a bit rough around the edges, but work.

Graeme

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Try the open source alternatives. Some are very good (Eclipse as an IDE, OpenOffice), and can compete with their commercial counterparts. Others are a bit rough around the edges, but work.

Yay! I switched to OpenOffice recently (2.0 Beta) and I hardly notice any difference between it and MS Office.

And Eclipse almost gives me a hard on. I've become obsessed with it and read related blogs'n'stuff daily. Too bad I can't use the Java Developement Tools at work yet, because the Web Tools part of it isn't quite mature enough yet. If they fix the bugs I've experienced in the 0.7 release I'll try to switch. I have already started using BIRT in one of our projects where we needed a report engine quickly.

And recently I took a look at some of the Eclipse-related research projects (under the Technology project) -- they have some totally awesome things going on.

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Eclipse is cool. It takes way too much memory when it's running, though.

Anyways, on the thread's subject:

I think that if you're putting all these principles behind pirating stuff, then you're thinking too much. We all do pirating because: 1) We are low on cash 2) We spent the cash on booze 3) We're not able to get it 4) Nobody cares.

1 & 2 are related in a sense that if you rather spend all your money on something else, then you're not really a gamer. You would save your money to buy games, that's what being a gamer is all about. Companies don't make games for people who are going to steal them.

In the past 4 years, my friend the gamer has spent all his scholarship refunds on upgrading his computer so that he could play games, and buying games for his gamecube, gba, and xbox. The sad part is that he's playing WOW non-stop, and yet he goes to the store and still buys games for his consoles. It doesn't mean that he opens the games or plays them more than 5 minutes.

3 & 4 apply to countries under development. Back home, I couldn't find a single legal XBOX, PC and PS2 title, and back in the day I guess I could find SNES and Genesis games, but PC games came out of somebody's disc copying abilities. Everything that was sold was h4x0red and packacked in crappy CDs. The only one that ends up winning is Nintendo Gamecube because no one (or not many) can rip their games from tiny discs.

Usually, I've relied on 1 and 3. I started with 3, then I moved in to 1, and not necessarily on games. Best example is Monkey Island, when I finally got a copy 6 years after the game came out because it wasn't available legally anywhere, ever.

I'd rather have the original stuff, though, because I like nice packaging and other bullshit like that.

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Eclipse is cool. It takes way too much memory when it's running, though.
Indeed, but so does any IDE that has features comparable to Eclipse. I haven't tested, but supposedly the new 3.1 stream versions take less memory (at least they certainly load times faster). I sometimes do wish Eclipse had a lightweight version that could work as a "simple" text editor a'la EditPlus 2, though.

Ok, back to pirating: I have almost given it up, maybe mainly because I don't have time to try out as many games as I used to. And it seems too much of a hussle to download them if I'm not going to play them a lot. I've started instead buying the few games that I know I will like and play a lot (GTA: SA for PS2, Half-Life 2 recently). Current plans include buying GTA: SA for PC, and possibly Psychonauts and Knights of Honor (which I've already played actually), but I haven't seen them in local stores yet (except KoH).

Sometimes I still download some crappier games though, like Prince of Persia: The Bad One. Simply had to because it was the sequel to Sands of Time. I'm probably going to download and play Prince of Persia: The Really Bad One, too, for the same reason.

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I'm totally late to this thread (and being lazy, I can't be bothered to read the whole damn thing) but I'll weigh in anyway... :oldman:

As I work at a publisher, my stance on piracy should be pretty obvious. I'll skip that part.

As for buying games: I do it all the time. I buy lots of games because I play lots of games. I work at a publisher, so I get games for free, but those are my games, and who wants to play those? (Ignore that I just said that...I have worked and continue to work on many fine products). Thankfully I can trade with everyone else in this industry, so I get a lot of other games for free too. But of course, that's still not enough.

I've never had a problem with buying games. If I couldn't afford them, I'd rent them (but I always preferred to buy anyway). These days, I tend to buy a lot of used console games, or at least, games that are really really cheap on sale. That's because it takes me so long to finish games, that by the time I do, I can usually get 'em pretty cheap (this is especially the case with PC games). Even though I'm not really giving any money to developers when I buy used games, it's better than warezing and I sleep fine at night.

But then, I also pay for shareware a lot too. I'm a mac user, and there are so many small shareware developers doing great work on that platform that I'd feel really guilty if I didn't. I can't imagine life without some of those programs, and they only cost $10 - $20 each.

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As a kid I never bought any games at all, not even those games by developers I wanted to support (I hadn't even thought of that). I just got the games on DAT tapes that were sent around in piracy rings along with long matrix printed contents lists, and I just streamed off what sounded interesting. That's how I discovered Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. I used my allowance money to buy LEGO, not games. I guess it was too hard for me to acquire LEGO illegally.

Now things are different. I make plenty of money, so I get virtually all my games legally, which is the right way to go and is also infinitely easier. Occasionally I sell used games to buy other new ones. That said, I wish games cost around the same amount as a DVD, as that would surely lead to more impulse shopping. I sometimes buy a whole bunch of DVDs just because I feel like it, but I usually only buy one well-researched game title at a time.

Piracy to me was always about the money, never about principles or lazyness.

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I buy my consoles ages after their release, so i get a fairly good deal. Most of the good release games have then come out at budget prices.

At the moment a place called Gamestation in England are flogging four Xbox games for twenty quid(thirty odd US dollars), none of them are amazing games but thoroughly enjoyable for the pitance I paid for them.

I'll continue to buy Xbox games when the 360 comes out as loads of places will have clearance sales on the titles so I'm going to have plenty to play until the 360 becomes affordable and the cycle will continue...

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It must be nice to live in a country that isn't regularly given the shaft by publishers.

Seriously, how many japanese rpgs were released on the psx?

How many were released in europe?

I will buy a game if I can actually buy the game; in which case I generally do.

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