Grieferbastard

Grieferbastard

16p

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13 years ago @ GreyWardens.Com - Drag... - Opinion: Piracy, DRM a... · 0 replies · +1 points

I'm not disagreeing with that at all, though I would say it's more effective than you give it credit for. Compare pirating games with little/no DRM to games with heavy DRM and you'll probably find it a few percentage points off. Those percentage points are their money though. Also, as soon as you say 'well, it's just not effective so why bother' you lend de facto permission to stealing that work.

They just want paid for the work they do. That's it. It's not unreasonable. Some people don't like to pay for stuff. Reducing piracy is less about DRM than it is social permission. Take a look at the responses on this forum; majority of people pretty much shrug it off and if someone says 'yeah, I pirate stuff sometimes' it's not considered a big deal. If it was your money being stolen or your efforts being devalued it would probably matter a lot more.

I'm not trying to get all judgmental but ANY crime is as much a matter of willingness to do it than about prevention. What stops people from stealing anything? It's the social stigma as much or more than security measures. Tougher DRM, like window bars and visible security cameras, is as much about making a statement of 'this is a big problem for us and we really, really don't want people stealing from us' than it is about physically stopping folks. Both only make a real difference in effort of a few percentage points. The social impact reaches further.

13 years ago @ GreyWardens.Com - Drag... - Opinion: Piracy, DRM a... · 2 replies · +1 points

It's worth mentioning though that this isn't a little bit of money we're talking about getting stolen. That is what game piracy is, it's stealing. It also negatively impacts the value of the PC game market all together - there are tons of games that were never made for the PC because the profit margin wouldn't cut it due to piracy.

Suppose DRM was 100% successful. That if you didn't buy it, you didn't get to play it. Are you saying that game sales would be 100% the same? People who pirate games absolutely wouldn't buy them if they had no choice? I buy a meal at a restaurant, I see it and I decide it's worth buying and eating. I eat it, don't like it as much, do I get my money back? If I steal it, eat it, and really like it, what's the odds that I'm going to go in and pay for it because it's so good?

Honestly? I feel like justifying piracy is just that - justifying a bad thing. It's like 'I only hit her because she makes me mad.' There is no good side to pirating games. Is it convenient for the consumer? Absolutely - in fact the best thing for the consumer would be if everything was free and you only paid for something what you thought it was worth, or could afford to pay. You get a business model to work that way and have the people making the product actually get something commensurate to their effort out of it and you'll be world famous. Everyone wants to see that.

Is DRM inconvenient? Often, yes. So is having to view jewelry through a glass case, or having to have an insurance auditor come look at my burned down house before they write me a check. I'll never begrudge someone wanting to get paid for their work though.

13 years ago @ GreyWardens.Com - Drag... - Opinion: Stop Recycling · 0 replies · +1 points

It bugs me in the same way the release of the other sets of the tabletop RPG have bugged me. I know you guys are familiar with Green Ronins amazing work on a pen and paper version of the game. The system they created was amazing - the 'we'll release it in 4 sets, each covering only 5 levels of advancement, over 2 years' approach was bad. Then it getting held up for about a year after set 1? They couldn't have sabotaged themselves any more if they'd lined their consumers up and shot them in the head. In a few years if there's a compendium set released with tons of additional content I'll probably pick it up but for now I'm not sure anyone who has the first set hasn't already house-ruled out the rest of the game based off the Dragon Age Wiki, or just moved on.

In a way I could see that DA:O was a large investment because it blew a new franchise onto the scene and created a market for itself. I'm not sure I agree with how that market has been leveraged, so to speak. I feel like I'm standing here, money in my hand, eager to spend it - I want to give BioWare my money, I really do - yet I'm being told 'Sorry, we're all sold out of that. Twinkie while you wait?' Armchair QB aside, my hope is that something big and amazing is on the way. I just can't believe the response to DA2 is just going to get blown off. It's a great game idea. There are some plot and story devices in it that are just incredible and deserved to have been praised in reviews all over the web. Instead they just get overlooked as having been what kept it afloat.

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13 years ago @ GreyWardens.Com - Drag... - Opinion: Stop Recycling · 0 replies · +1 points

Absolutely fair enough, I should have noted that I have every faith that BioWare wants to create an amazing game that everyone is going to love for its own sake. Yet from a financial perspective you've got to make the money before you can create the game. The financial situation in the industry, EA included, changed from the start of DA:Os development cycle to the end of it. You've got to have X revenue in the bank before you can start to spend it on a new game. A catastrophic mistake would be, say, starting DA3 with a grand budget and design only to find that you're short on cash. A very common review of DA2 has been that it felt 'rushed' or 'cut corners'. Reasoning for that is typically lack of funds for longer development cycle and/or needing more funds for a near future project. Cashing in on consumer goodwill, releasing a product that's below your typical standard but that you know people will buy because it's got your name on it is not something confined to the gaming industry. It's also not unreasonable to say that most people will totally forget any hard feelings when ME3/DA3/whatever top quality goody BioWare comes out with next.

Continuing to put out low quality goods is a horrible idea. Dialing one product back to hit fiscal guidance for your next 2 or 3 projects is something businesses deny in public but discuss daily behind closed doors.

Again, all my speculation. I'd rather this though than my biggest fear - everyone in BioWare looked at DA2 and said 'This? This is exactly what we wanted! This is the best we can do, this is 100% my best effort. Lets put it on the shelf!' I don't think that's the case. I have a lot of respect for BioWares quality control. While people always complain about bugs, etc. I'd say that 99% of the BioWare games I've owned came out of the box at a higher quality than most industrial software.

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13 years ago @ GreyWardens.Com - Drag... - Opinion: Stop Recycling · 2 replies · +2 points

A lot of this raises some questions in how business sees the development of products vs how a consumer sees it. At a fundamental level there's this big divide:

The business asks, "How much money can I get in return for creating X product?"

The consumer asks, "How much product can I get for X money?"

It's a simple way of putting it but the difference in expectations is huge. A business is always, inherently, going to be motivated to look for the least expensive way to reach that magic point where the consumer is willing to put down that X dollar amount for their product. The consumer, conversely, is always looking for the biggest and best possible product for their X dollars.

Very few people I suspect are going to say that DA2 was even close to the game that DA:O was - yet they had the same sticker price. If their sales numbers were even close to similar EA/BioWare is strongly motivated to continue to create games at the investment level that DA2 represents and not DA:O. We, as consumers, create this behavior. If there's a negative trend in the market for game development it's because we are creating it. Developers (well, more realistically, Publishers) are just going to do whatever keeps their kids fed.

13 years ago @ GreyWardens.Com - Drag... - Opinion: Stop Recycling · 0 replies · +2 points

My concern here is the 'one or the other' feel. It's not one or the other, you can take 20 games off the shelf that indeed have multiple quests in multiple locations. DA:O being a good example. The real issue here is that *for the time and money they had to spend on it* they could only do X quests or Y locations. 27 hours of game play....

Bah. My intent is not to bash, truly it's not. Honestly I don't expect answers to the questions I have about why DA2 came out in the manner it did, BioWare certainly doesn't owe me any answers. For me and some others (I don't call myself the majority by any stretch) DA2 does not compel enough to purchase it. I'm just curious as to what led to this line of development and is this a sign of what's to come or just a one-off situation?

13 years ago @ GreyWardens.Com - Drag... - Dragon Age 2 Review: I... · 0 replies · +2 points

You know, I'm going to challenge that 'necessary evil' concept. The problem is what sort of plot you want to create. A big challenge to DA2 in comparison to DA:O was the narrow scope of the plot. It pretty much required one very specific character; it was the tale of one very specific character moving from one predetermined origin to one predetermined outcome through a series of predetermined events. There never was room for a player-driven character and events in it, not really.

What if, for example, you'd played the game as Hawkes best friend? Where you came from, how you kept him alive through it all, the adventures you went on, that in truth behind it all YOU were the hero and he was just the front-man who ended up in the limelight.... just as an example mind you, but still. What if it was all you talking to the Seeker about Hawke? You could play as any character you wanted, played it however you wanted, had ten times the freedom. This sort of narrow game scope has a lot to recommend it from a storytellers perspective and very little to recommend it from a players - in my opinion anyhow.

13 years ago @ GreyWardens.Com - Drag... - Opinion: Stop Recycling · 0 replies · +2 points

It's worth mentioning that all personal opinions aside, you can look at EAs 10-Q and later on their 10-K (financial reports released to the SEC about performance, money made/lost, etc) that give a pretty good feel for how they did and are doing. They look like they were short on money and expect to need to spend more pretty soon. Lends credence to the idea of it being simple financial considerations - not enough on the books to support a longer development cycle and investment, needing a faster turnaround for in production/upcoming activities.

BioWare, as a subsidiary, doesn't show up independently and doesn't file anything.

I just don't know and never will I guess. What I admit I really want to know the most was this just a critical miss-judge or intentional?

13 years ago @ GreyWardens.Com - Drag... - Opinion: Stop Recycling · 3 replies · +3 points

That's not a far-off observation. If 100 ducats and 2 years gets you 120 ducats return on your investment, but 50 ducats and 1 year gets you 75, you're still way ahead in the long run.

Does it not pay as well to make a game of Origins or BG2 caliber? Was Origins worth the expense because it established the IP, now it's more profitable to go quick and dirty?

A frightening idea and one that's purely speculation. I just struggle to believe that when DA2 went to ship everyone truly went 'Yep. That's it. That's EXACTLY what I wanted to make, this is going to do as good or better than Origins!' If the answer is no, that's not what everyone thought... then why? Economics? A need to generate enough revenue to make ME3 bigger and better?

Meh. I don't know.

13 years ago @ GreyWardens.Com - Drag... - Opinion: Stop Recycling · 0 replies · +2 points

Money, of course, always comes into it. In any design process you start out with ideas and concepts and as you move along and the budget develops (read: gets eaten) you start making command decisions about how many budgeted hours of work are going to generate how much benefit. Then you have to look at what you're qualifying as benefit - voice acting, skills, optimizing memory footprint, models, objects, it's a big list.

Based on some of the big 'cutbacks' in DA2 perhaps modeling was a big expense in the engine they had and people available? The inability to put more gear on more people is as easily based in not wanting to invest in re-modeling for all your companions. Perhaps it has to do with how the cut-scenes were done?

It's all speculation but it's pretty clear that resources were not spent there. The story... the concept of how it was told still strikes me as the best idea in game design in the last decade. If it had been done for, say, ME3 it would have been heralded as the best thing for computers since ones and zeros. To have it lost in this execution really grieves me.