So we shouldn’t compare different types of entertainment? We should only discuss videogames in a vacuum? Is precedent something that only lawyers get to reference?
You think price point somehow makes videogames unique, but I’d invite you to take a look at the price of the average PC game, and then check out the price of boardgames or Blu Ray discs. Oops, you just looked at paradigms in other industries!
Good question. Maybe the developers and publishers who tacitly encourage it can help you with that issue. No telling what us filthy pirates are liable to do to support our preconceived viewpoints.
-Tom
Perhaps the question should be rephrased: Why have spawn copies disappeared from feature lists? Why is the ability to spawn a LAN copy not something a publisher can make advertisement with? Did someone in the back stages really do the calculations and came up that the additional cost for developing that has not chance of bringing in an appropriate amount of additional income? How would they measure that anyway? Perhaps someone would even assume lost sales instead of additional sales due to spawn copies?
On the other hand, when I meet with friends for LAN, I tend to have that many more games than they have, but all those non-LAN MP games are out of the equation from the get-go, and instead those games we end up playing using more or less legal spawn copies (like Borderlands recently) get later bought by those friends so that we can also play over the 'net. Of course, those games that end up being no fun don’t get bought.
My secret hypothesis is that this is one of the many widely agreed upon “facts” that no one ever had a chance even remotely measuring.
It seems pretty clear to me that there isn’t more widespread official LAN support for three simple reasons:
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It’s too easily exploited by traditional piracy (Although I maintain that there’s a huge difference between Bleed the Freak trying to play Civ5 with his son and someone download a Civ5 torrent. People like Rywill and Blackadar are being either dense or disingenuous to claim there isn’t a difference).
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It’s too small a segment of the market to make it worth funneling resources from other aspects of development. Remember Hellgate: London’s “Who the fuck cares?” when asked about LAN support. That community manager wasn’t the first to think that. He was just the first to be oblivious enough to say it out loud.
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Publishers want as much money as they can get from us. And who can blame them? Former spawn-friendly Blizzard abandoned local LAN play entirely probably because of how much money they missed out in South Korea with Starcraft.
-Tom
Rywill
4184
But my point is that we can both do that. Books and DVDs work one way. Games and movies work another. I could even argue that DVDs don’t work the way you say they do – you can both watch the DVD on one TV, but you can’t watch it on multiple TVs without two copies. My wife and I play Fantasy General together by jointly deciding how to move our guys each turn, which is within the confines of the license. But if we wanted to play on two machines at once, each having our own individual game experience, we’d have to buy two. Similarly, when you and your son play L4D2 together, you’re not each having the same experience (as you would if you both watched Avatar). He’s having Coach’s experience and you’re having Nick’s. You are each enjoying individualized game experiences, which is different and better than both enjoying the same experience.
But all of that is sort of beside the point, because what matters is “Are you within the rights that you bought, or have you gone outside of them?” The “But other industries work differently” argument doesn’t help much here, because (a) other industries have fundamental differences from the videogame industry and (b) in any event, other industries are split on how they approach this topic anyway. None of which you’ve really discussed, because you’re spending most of your time on sarcastic quips or OMG UR A LAWYER.
Good question. Maybe the developers and publishers who tacitly encourage it can help you with that issue.
How about you help me with it, since I asked you and you’re the one in a tizzy supporting that viewpoint, rather than punting the ball? Also: the fact that a developer undermines a publisher by secretly leaving in a workaround that the publisher doesn’t want, doesn’t make it OK. Here’s what’s OK: if a developer and publisher decide, in an up-front and honest agreement, that they want to provide free LAN play for their games. I’m all for that. I am also for free DLC! But I understand that a lot of times (although not all the time), companies charge money for multiplayer copies and for DLC, and when they do I can either buy that stuff or not. But I can’t just say “Well, DLC should be free,” and find some way to get myself a free copy of the content the owners are trying to sell to me. Again, though, you’re not really addressing any of those points.
I agree that there is a huge difference. Claiming that someone who tries to just play a round of a properly bought game with a friend/son/spouse (and thus actually doing advertisement for that game for free) as being the same as a guy who didn’t pay anything and cynically just torrents stuff is something that doesn’t even need to be discussed. Though I’m not sure about the exploitability by piracy. Technically a spawn copy has the same security as a proper copy, as long as not some perma-online copy protection is used.
In this respect I hope the Witcher 2 DRM-free experiment works out.
But this is precisely what I meant: Who knows how small that market really is? And, even more difficult but important: Who can gauge the word-of-mouth effect LAN play has on the success of a game? Here Blizzards decision is very solid, of course. They don’t need word-of-mouth anymore. There are the most famous game company anyway. Some small RTS, say, R.U.S.E. really would need something like this though. I guess, their extensive beta program was supposed to be something like this. Except, unfortunately, the masses didn’t like hidden complexity and surface simplicity of this game, which more than any other RTS compares to chess, in my opinion.
Can someone please help me with some legalese?
What does “non-exclusive license” mean?
This is all true, and I agree that publishers are within their rights to restrict LAN play in whatever manner they choose, and everyone is free to buy their games or not if they don’t like the terms. It’s still unfortunate, though, and there’s no need to look at other industries to see how it could be better, because the PC game industry itself used to be a lot more generous about LAN play. When Tom talks about developers and publishers “tacitly encouraging it,” he’s not talking about secret workarounds that developers sneak into the game. LAN spawning used to be a bullet point on the game box with Blizzard games, and many others as well.
I don’t think that anyone is arguing that it’s not a game publisher’s right to decide that they would rather restrict LAN spawning and monetize the extra copies that people run locally. I think it’s lame–both for gamers, and the companies, who are really making a penny-wise/pound-foolish decision by being so stingy about LAN play, IMHO. But it’s certainly their right. And it’s my right to lament how game companies keep whittling away what they offer for your money. I also lament how you can no longer play UbiSoft games in single-player without an always-on Internet connection. Is UbiSoft’s right to do that? Sure. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t point out how much it sucks.
Er, that’s not what he said at all. In addition, it directly contradicts the TOS for Civ 4 (and yes, I went back and looked). It appears that Firaxis made it easy to get around the copy protection to encourage LAN play and everyone just kind of turned their heads at it. But according to the Terms of Service (and therefore legally), this was and remains a clear act of software piracy. As does the offline Steam trick.
There is absolutely no difference. None whatsoever. You can try to justify it away all you want, but in the end there’s just the simple fact both examples end up with someone running an unpurchased, unlicensed version of the software.
Frankly, I don’t give a damn whether someone pirates games or not. I truly don’t. Given that I was copying floppies waaay back in the early 80s (I had dual floppy drives just for this purpose), it’s not like my hands are clean. But I’m really enjoying the justifications mentioned by you and others in this thread. So the next time someone bitches about piracy for “not having the money” or “I try before I buy”, it’ll be easy to point them back here as we establish that piracy is fine for some reasons on Qt3.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that Kotick & co. only see potential revenue lost when they look at the South Korean Starcraft phenomenon. OTOH, one has to wonder if Starcraft would have ever taken off to the extent that it did in South Korea without Blizzard’s generous support for LAN play. Personally, I suspect not. Starcraft 2 certainly isn’t selling a lot of copies there, and Actiblizzard’s tight-fisted approach to LAN and tournament play is almost certainly to blame.
At one time, this was a thread about Civ V. I miss those days. :-(
Me too, but I have been learning a lot by using my google-fu skills.
Do you know, for instance, that a lot of people (not here, I found this on various forums elsewhere) believe you legally can’t allow a friend or family member to play a Steam game that’s on your account? That’s why I asked what a non-exclusive license is on the last page. I looked it up in several locations, and from what I can tell that’s exactly what a non-exclusive license is for: allowing a friend or family member to essentially temporarily hold the license so they can play while you aren’t. Steam licenses are all non-exclusive. (the previous post not being germane to the conversation that’s been going on, because the conflict is apparently between stating it’s also a limited license vs. software instructions indicating that you can play LAN without using the Steam servers)
No, “non-exclusive license” means that the license owner reserves the right to license the same game he just licensed to you to any number of other people as well. So it’s not related to your use of the game.
The copyright issues really should have split off into their own thread long ago.
I’m a fairly shrill opponent of piracy, but anyone that worries about the legal repercussions of letting another person sit down at your PC and play a game that you purchased on Steam is, in a word, nutty.
Rywill
4195
Actually, that is exactly what people are arguing. They are saying that no matter what a publisher decides about LAN play, they want to hack around it to get extra copies of the game for free so they can play on their LAN, and that that’s totally cool and definitely nothing like software piracy. What people like me and Blackadar are saying is that that seems pretty close to piracy to me. You can say there are “better” and “worse” sorts of piracy – pirating an extra copy for Shoot Club is probably not as bad as pirating the only copy of the game you own, and pirating the game for yourself is probably not as bad as sending out pirated copies to all your friends. But those things are still all bad and all piracy. Seeing someone drop their wallet and picking it up and keeping it is bad, but it’s even worse to pick the wallet out of someone’s pocket. And taking someone’s wallet at gunpoint is worse than either of those two. But all three of those things are bad.
The thing that really sticks out for me, though, is the crazy hypocrisy of saying “I hate piracy and will ban you for discussing it here” and then turning around and saying “Well but making illegal copies of a game for your LAN party is OK, because that’s something that I personally do. Paying for extra copies of games blows! In fact, I will give you instructions on how to get free copies and try to get a discussion going where we trade tips on how to do that.” I mean, wow.
I think it’s lame–both for gamers, and the companies, who are really making a penny-wise/pound-foolish decision by being so stingy about LAN play, IMHO. But it’s certainly their right. And it’s my right to lament how game companies keep whittling away what they offer for your money.
Sure. I don’t think anyone has any issue with that. If you want to talk about how lame you think that is, or how it’s a bad long-term business decision, that’s cool. It’s like talking about how you used to get free food on airplanes and now you have to pay them to check a second bag. But there’s a difference between saying “I miss the old days” and saying “Hey, here’s a way to steal some of the airline’s food and sneak an extra bag onto the conveyor without paying for it. Because that stuff used to be free, and I liked getting it for free, amirite?” Especially if you had just the other day gone off about this website is totally against stealing and won’t allow people to talk about stealing around here.
True (again, afaik) - a limited non-exclusive license was what I should have said, but I was trying to save up the limited part for later in the post.
Agreed. I don’t know whether I was more surprised that people “out in the wilds” thought that way or that I had overestimated the general public’s knowledge on the matter.
Have not been following this thread too closely but noticed these patch note changes from 2K Games, quoted below. Specifically, these:
Aside from reining in maritime city-states, which everyone here seems to agree were overpowered, new changes also finally (hopefully) prevent horsemen from being ancient-era superpower they have been since ship. Lower attack power and city attack penalty presumably make them poor choices for siege and presumably requiring players to bring mixed forces, such as swordsmen/catapults. As opposed to current situation of 5-6 horsemen capable of everything, including all field battles and all sieging.
Plains 33% penalty reduced is good news in general, but specifically good to keep horsemen in check, since their high mobility (up to 5 hexes per turn) gives them more opportunities to maneuver/bait enemies onto plains while also setting up flanks for +15% bonus (or +30%, if you have honor track unlocked). Currently, using just a little setup beforehand can often get horsemen +50%, +65%, even +100% against spearmen or pikemen.
No longer letting units sandbag promotions means no holding on to wounded horsemen (or any others) and instantly healing whenever you prefer.
Good adjustments overall, should hopefully open up ancient-era play considerably. Though iron should still also revealed with completed research of mining, just as horses revealed on map with research of animal husbandry.
100% agree. Those are excellent and much needed balancing changes.
Miramon
4199
Yeah, presumably these changes make iron more important, and while it’s often fairly common, on occasion, for no apparent reason, an entire continent may only have one or two iron spots. So during that period in which you are building your early cities, you wouldn’t want to miss it by just not knowing yet where it is. My routine is to build the great library to get iron working anyway but that doesn’t always work out.
Yeah, I often hold back on expansion until “the big reveal” of iron. I’d agree it should ideally show up earlier, but I guess it gives weaker civs a chance to catch up should they happen to get lucky.
