PCGA Assemble!! PC Gaming to be rescued?!?

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006520.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20080220/tc_infoworld/95440_2

Industry giants Dell, AMD, Nvidia and others have joined to to form the PC gaming alliance. Their goal is to bring pc gaming back to its former glory. Their initial objectives are to eliminate piracy and promote general hardware requirements.

Ok so I know Dell is Superman in this league while Nvidia is Green Lantern so does that make AMD a not needed Wonder Woman?

 

lmaoooooooooooo @ eliminating piracy
ima college student most of the people i know with expensive gaming rigs or gamers invest $7 on rapidshare account or have some other means

 

That doesn't mean that anti-piracy measures shouldn't be taken. It's people like them that force companies to implement all sorts of anti-piracy measures and disk security.

 

best way would be that you had to be online to play games because today almost every PC is connected to internet. Then it would be impossible to piracy because you can piracy CS or WOW

 

I don't want to have to be connected to the internet in order to play a game. I wouldn't want to have to verify the game every single time I play it.

 

yeah...Valve, Relic, or Blizzard has yet to join up. I dunno what they're going to do, Microsoft is going to be like "hay guiz srsly make xbox 360 games", and Epic is going to agree.

 

I think the whole "lets stop piracy" thing is a joke, if the games companies didn't charge so much for so little (games being v short mostly these days) they wouldn't have to put up with people ripping off their games.

And making online checks and other protection measures only increases the piracy and stops people buying the games in the first place, it's detrimental to their coffers imo.

I've stopped playing CoH OF purely because I either need to be online or have the disk in, yes I could go to certain websites and get a fixed exe but then I can't play online. And given the fact I paid £30 for the game I don't see why they should stop me playing if I don't want to be online, and having the dvd in the drive all the time leads to scratches and I'll end up having to shell out even more £/$ which isn't good for me

 

well look at HL2 how many have bought thanks to steam and CSS? Everyone buys it i think all games should be like that and i think they beg for games to be pirated as long as they dont produce games in that way

 

how bout hardware companies stop charging so much for parts...the money saved from building a desktop/laptop could be used on software/games

 

That makes the assumption any of the other participants are needed or wanted even by gamers.

Pointless hand-ringing IMO. Do they suddenly think they are now going to 'get serious about this'?

Temptest in a tea cup, and the market will correct itself.

While you make DELL out to be superman, what influence do they have in the industry's direction, very little. Devs will listen to AMD and nV who they have development ties with for both the PC and the Desktop, and intel because they are the supreme being of all things computational, however, why would Epic, Valve or any Dev care what DELL wanted as long as their games played fine on eveyone else's hardware too?

DELL and Acer's primary role at that table is to be an observer and listen to what everyone else's solutions are and then at the end say "now how do we adjust our product line to maximize profits and fit what these other guys decided on and will be producing".

 

Both could be pirated, you just wouldn't have public servers. It would be like tricking the original Xbox into thinking your media hub was 'Xbox Live' so you could play head to head on some games. Nothing is totally secure. IT's mainly a question of whether the effort required to circumvent the protection schemes is lower than the hassle of their existence to begin with.

The thing they don't seem to get it that the people who will never buy games will still never buy games. And then they forgo other models which could make them more money on the PC. Like Ravenmorpheous said, make the restrictions intrusive and you will alienate that segment of PC gamers that do buy games.

The annoying part is that media companies don't focus on the number of games they do sell they focus on the number of 'lost sales' they perceive to be missing out on despite those gamers potentially being in the 3rd world not being able to afford the game with a month's salary anyways.

 

Hardware companies don't sell games.

 

Well that's all fine and dandy if you like HL2 and CS, me personally I don't want to be buying games which in general can only be played online because the single player mode is either rubbish or too short.

I don't think anything will come of this because pirating of games has been happening since the dawn of time - when games were on tapes...

 

It was a simple joke. I didn't mean anything buy it. Frankly I find this idea laughible.

Actually intel has more influence then you think. Intel is entering the dedicated gpu market soon enough and statistically they are still the biggest gpu manufacturer.

Processors are still a big factor especially since alot of the r&D is going to how to offload more of the load from the gpu to the cpu.

 

Except Ageia/nV.

 

nVidia sells games....


http://www.nzone.com/page/home.html

Darn, you beat me to it.

 

Oh I know they are.
I thought I gave them high praise calling them the Supreme being. Could've called them the Alpha and the Omega or 800 lb Gorilla/Chipzilla if it would help.

I agree, and just wait for Larabee and Fusion to push the whole concept further forward. However I do still think that is also a bad thing in the homogenization of the PC, but that was a discussion for another thread.

 

Nah, I was talking about the PPU and their use of PhysX titles to push it.

That nice link is all yours, and a great little example, probably more applicable than mine as to truely 'selling games'.

 

obviously..........

 

A little off topic but PC gaming doesn't need to be rescued. Developers need to realize that its a smaller market than consoles and every PC title isn't as likely to sell millions of copies. And also they need to implement stricter anti-priracy measures in their products. Heck if this PCGA wants to accomplish SOMETHING they should come up with the perfect anti-piracy solution!

They should also realize that if PC gaming was gone the market for pirating console games would rocket. Especially if they think they can get away with charging $70US for a dvd...

 

I dont even know about that. Most of people with 360s that I Know have games downloaded on them.

 

I was speaking generally. There will always be exceptions.

 

Yeah seriously, make the restrictions on piracy harder on PCs than on Consoles guess where the pirates are going to focus their attentions next?Then we have another of the conferences with Sony and Nintendo at the table instead of Acer and Dell?

C'mon, it's a pointless battle, music already figured that out and the motion pictures is finally figuring it out. Do PC games really need to go through the whole 'only pi$$ing-off the people who buy it in the first place' routine to learn the same lesson?

Those that don't want to pay X amount of dollars for games will never pay for games unless you make them cheap enough.

Simple economics, maximize pricing so that the effort of piracy isn't worth it for a larger number of people (you will never get everyone unless it's free and like Radiohead proved even then there's still some level of piracy).

How many people would still bother downloading or ripping DVDs if you could buy them for $5? What's the magic price for games?

IMO, Anti-piracy is a waste of time, money & talent that these people could be better using bringing me improved hardware, drivers and gameplay.

 

now wait a minute. lazyness has just reashed new dizzy hights here. you need to have the disk in?????? oh dear, poor diddums putting the disk in would require you to eat so much more that its not worth it. you have to be so increadibly lazy that you won't play a game becasue you need a disk. heck, most of the games i play i put the disk in becasue i can't be bothered dl a no cd crack.

 

A no cd crack is allowed if you own your own serial key raven.

 

that means you can't play online though. just put the cd in..................heck.

 

Hey Jeff, when my disk gets scratched, can I come to you for a replacement? And would you like to carry them around for me on my next business trip? What's wrong with ease of use?

The first thing I do with titles I BUY is to see if there's a no-CD/DVD crack usually quicker in the long run than ejecting and storing the media even once.

What's the point of a fraction of a terabyte harddrive if you need to keep using optical media all the time for every app you wanna use?

Thank god M$ & Apple doen't use the same copy protection scheme, needing to have the OSX/XP/Vista disk in all the time would be too reminiscent of my original PET/Apple/PC days.

 

what do you use your cds/dvds for? coasters? i keep the ones i use often in a cd case in my laptop bag. i carry them with me everyday to work, it would weigh all of 300 grams.

for the games i play often i dl a no cd crack, but for some of my older games that i don't play much anymore, i keep them in their case in my cd stack on my desk.

i have no problems with the cd's/dvd's that i have.

 

If games like Battlefield Heroes and Runescape (over 6 million players) are any indicator, piracy may no longer be an issue in the years to come. Games will be free to play, and they will be tastefully ad supported.

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3165532

Game piracy in its current form really bothers me. If someone pirates a game, and later buys a copy as a result of trying it, it is not so bad. More often though, people don't feel they are getting enough for their money, so they get the game for "free". These are the people who complain the most about games being crap, so the developers don't deserve any money. These are also the people who will whine and complain when ad supported games pop up, negating piracy altogether. They'll moan about the annoying logo at the top of a login page and how much better things used to be. I'm sure they will even try to boycott such practices because they feel so wronged.

Is it the younger generation of gamers or just people in general? Do people really feel that EVERYTHING made of 1s and 0s should be free? But they complain about ads and other methods of retaining revenue... I don't know about you guys, but I start to look at many of my fellow gamers as impudent little brats who feel the world should hand them anything and everything they want on a silver .torrent.

Years ago I used the old P2P services just like anyone else, amazed at how easy and relatively 'safe' it felt. But really, after services like the iTunes store, Yahoo Music store, Netflix, and Steam came about, my excuses for downloading on P2P (hard to find content) disappeared. Nobody has a pseudo-legit reason to pirate content anymore. I am still bothered by the draconian MPAA and RIAA, but through the years I have begun to understand where they are coming from, even if their motives are quite selfish.

Anyway, here's to hoping services like Steam/GameTap/Battlefield Heroes result in lower piracy rates, not because of more nefarious DRM, but because of smarter marketing and development.

 

@StormEffect:
I believe it is the fundamental belief of people that's the problem: they do not wish to pay for something that they can get for free.

 

Of course, you are right. That is the root of the problem, which is why I put all the more support behind 'free' ad-supported games. If anything is going to fix the issue, it is going to need to be cheap and easy to deploy.