Cav's Place

Such things really piss me off! Yeah, try to figure out ways to make all games playable well on consoles and then focus on that market because you have better sales, then blame the low sales for the PC market on piracy.
Let’s get some things straight: Firstly, you can also pirate on (most) consoles. It might be harder, but it’s not impossible. Secondly, console gamers and PC gamers are different crowds, with PC gamers being more demanding and, if I may, more mature. So stop comparing apples and oranges!
If you put less money into developing PC games, they’ll end up being of lower quality, making less people want to buy them. Fewer copies also mean higher price per copy, reducing the potential number of buyers even more. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and they’re the ones to blame.
How about, instead of caring mainly about reaping massive profits, you put time and effort into improving the quality of PC games, seeing what gamers really want, getting rid of bugs before the initial release and making it easier (and more affordable) to purchase them legally for a change? Long-term profits are a result of high quality products, after all.
But I’ve already expressed my views on piracy a while back… Still, whenever I see such shortsighted greed I get angry. All a product needs to do is earn back the money spent to develop and produce it and ensure decent pay for those who made that happen, so stop aiming for billions of Euros (or dollars) in profits!

Stumbled upon this test, so here you go:

Fair enough. Certainly the order of the results is the right one, but I think the difference between quality time and acts of service might be a little too small and perhaps the one between physical touch and quality time too great. But that comes from some of the hard choices in the test, places where I’d want both… Or neither… Plus that perhaps a single point in “words of affirmation” would suffice, if the top three things are working well.
Let’s look at it for a moment… There are 30 either-or questions, making for a total of 60 options. Since there are five categories, it means there are 12 options for each one. It also means that each category is paired with each of the others three times. That means I chose the “physical touch” option every time it was available, though it was a hard choice in two or three places, and only chose the “words of affirmation” option when I had to choose between it and the “receiving gifts” option, which makes perfect sense since I hate getting gifts. It also means that I chose the “quality time” and “acts of service” options whenever there was a choice between one of them and one of the bottom two and that I chose “quality time” over “acts of service” two out of the three times. And I know exactly where I chose the “acts of service” option over the “quality time” option: There is a choice between extended trips together and getting help on daily tasks, and I don’t like trips.

Why can’t I cry? Why can’t I cry when alone, of course, as I’m quite sure I could still cry if a person I feel close to would be with me. But there is nobody that could be with me, not even anybody I could talk to now. Even when I do happen to talk to somebody, they don’t understand. Can’t, won’t, I don’t know, I just know that they don’t. I mean to pour my heart out and it feels like so many words thrown into the wind.
I know it won’t help for more than one night, but I could at least let some of it out for a moment, have a couple of hours now and then without feeling like all this pain is tearing me up from inside. I feel like I’m going to explode all the time and it doesn’t seem to be happening. I said once that maybe the best way for me to tell somebody how I’m feeling would be to peel off the skin from my face with my bare hands and then send them a picture of the results.
Whenever something like this happens, my eyes get moist, I feel tears coming and then… Nothing. It’s like needing just one more touch to reach orgasm but being denied it time and time again, held there for so long you’ve forgotten how anything else feels like. You just want it to be over, don’t even care how anymore. No pleasure, just release and then sweet oblivion because you’re so exhausted from waiting for it for so long.
Or it could be fury instead of tears. Screaming, kicking, destroying things… But I can’t do that either, at least one of them is here almost always, and certainly every time I feel like doing this. But I doubt I would do much even if I were alone, there is still something holding me back from such acts, not to mention that there isn’t really anything I could destroy, anything I can call mine and be able to do without.
The only thing that could ever fix this, fix me, would be being with her again. I don’t care at what cost, I don’t care what would happen as long as she’ll be by my side, as long as I’ll be able to look into her eyes again, caress her face, hold her hands in mine, go to bed and wake up next to her, bury my face in her hair and whisper “I love you” after she falls asleep… But nobody understands that. And even if someone would, they couldn’t help. Couldn’t even be here with me in such moments, much less do anything to really help…
Nobody can help. Or… Yes, somebody could, but that won’t happen… No rapture in my future, no release and not even oblivion soon enough. All my future holds are such whimpers in the night… All alone in a crowd…

I actually lasted a lot longer than I thought I would, nearly two months. But of course the inevitable had to happen, me cracking again while talking to her because it hurts so much that she’s hiding so many things from me… Hurts even more when she says there’s no need to say sorry after such moments because she doesn’t take me seriously.
But I can deal with me being unhappy, more or less, I just wish I’ll never do anything to make her sad or upset. I wish nothing would ever happen to make her sad or upset. I wish I could transform into this layer of energy that would wrap itself around her, so I will be gone along with all the pain I carry inside and she’ll always be happy and safe.
These moments, and the things she’s not saying, make me realize even more how many things she was missing out on while being with me, and how inadequate I was and still am. I know I would do anything and give everything to be a person she’d want to have by her side, but I don’t think it’d be enough. I’m too worthless and I won’t be able to “create” enough “quality” even if I’d give up on everything I want, put every effort into doing what she wants and not care if it’d make me unhappy.
But first I have to find a way to stop doing these things and appreciate that she’s at least talking to me now, even if it’s usually only about superficial things.

I saw an interesting idea in an interview about Spore and the future of gaming (link goes directly to the page that answer is on). This seems to take my idea of paying only for the right to use software even further and I’m surprised that it’s coming from such a person. Of course, it’s possible I understood it wrong and his idea would mean something unpleasant for the user, but when Will Wright mentioned selling the parts inside a game, so a game like Spore would be free in itself but then you’ll pay a few cents for every part used while playing, I imagined a rather nice scenario.

For one, simply having the installation kit for a certain program wouldn’t require any kind of purchase. After all, you’re not using it if it’s not installed, you just keep it around in case you might want to use it at some point. You obviously won’t be allowed to sell copies of said kit to make a profit, but offering it for free via file-sharing would be completely legal. The license fee would only need to be paid after you install and actually start using the program, and not all at once. This could also work for other types of software, but now I mean only to talk about games.
I have problems with that idea of paying a couple of cents for each item in a game like Spore where you use thousands of them, but they could have activation codes (or patches) for each part of the game. Still talking about Spore, since it’s practically five games rolled up into one, each of the parts could cost a fifth of the price of the full game to activate, payable the first time you get to that part of the game. If you start over, everything that has already been activated will stay active, of course. If you uninstall and then reinstall the game, then you still have the codes and will be able to immediately reactivate the parts that were activated when you uninstalled. This could also work very well for RPGs that are split into “chapters”, strategy games that are split into campaigns and scenarios and so on. But don’t confuse this with what we already have, namely episodic content, that’s completely different and I think it’s a really bad idea.
Of course that won’t be a problem for pirates, they’ll just figure out valid codes and players will be able to activate everything without paying. But I think it will curb piracy because it is a fairer method of payment. You’re no longer forced to pay for something you’re not using, and you don’t need to pay for all of it if you decide to stop playing at a certain point. If you decide to start again later, you’ll simply need to pay the rest at that time. This will also encourage developers to create games that keep gamers interested from start to end, so they won’t abandon them for good at some point and therefore never pay the full fee.
The issue I foresee is privacy, as companies will try to install (pointless) anti-piracy measures which will make games “call home” to report a player’s progress and compare with the amount paid. If electronic payment will be used, as it certainly will be at least in some countries, they’ll naturally claim that it’s a way to make it easier for the players, the money being deducted from their credit card as they reach the next phase of the game, so they won’t need to quit the game, pay, get the code, enter the code and then resume playing. But that could easily be solved by a pre-pay scheme and activation codes. The player pays a certain amount for a certain amount of parts, or even for the whole game, they get activation codes for each part and then once they reach that part all they have to do is enter the code and keep playing.

Thinking about it like that, and also about how it tends to favor smaller publishers and developers, it sounds like something that’s too good for the consumer to have a chance of being accepted by the industry. But who knows, could it be that piracy will pressure them into being fair, seeing that their attempts of reducing it by using harsh methods are doomed to fail?