insomniac84
join:2002-01-03
Schererville, IN
| Why punish paying customers?
Why would any company guarantee they won't damage a customer's computer physically? It first of suggests that it could actually happen. Second, it just punishes your paying customers. If you buy it from us you get a bunch of drm, crappy spyware, possibly a broken cd drive, etc. If you download it for free, you just get the product, without any of the horrible extras.
You can do things to try to validate the disc when the game runs, but you shouldn't be installing drivers or checking to see if you have a program like daemon tools installed. My friend bought a game that wouldn't run without uninstalling daemon tools, it was ridiculous. Where does a game company get off telling the end user what programs they are allowed to have on their own computer. |
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Doctor Four
My other vehicle is a TARDIS
Premium
join:2000-09-05
Dallas, TX
 ·AT&T U-Verse
| said by insomniac84  :Why would any company guarantee they won't damage a customer's computer physically? It first of suggests that it could actually happen. Second, it just punishes your paying customers. If you buy it from us you get a bunch of drm, crappy spyware, possibly a broken cd drive, etc. If you download it for free, you just get the product, without any of the horrible extras. This is why I never understood the rationale behind
such draconian DRM/copy protection schemes. It turns
paying customers into potential copyright infringers,
and pisses them off. Far from discouraging "piracy",
such schemes end up having the opposite effect. Treat
your customers as potential criminals right from the
get go, and they'll either turn to illegal means to
get what they want or avoid your company's products
entirely.
--
"Kayura or Badamon, whichever you are, you should know that I will never give up this battle. By the will of the Ancient, I shall succeed!" - Shuten (Anubis) from the Ronin Warriors. Taking the 'L' out of Play: the Big Music/Hollywood Mantra |
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averagedude
join:2002-01-30
Mesa, AZ
 ·Cox HSI
| reply to insomniac84
said by insomniac84 :... Second, it just punishes your paying customers. If you buy it from us you get a bunch of drm, crappy spyware, possibly a broken cd drive, etc. If you download it for free, you just get the product, without any of the horrible extras. Exactly |
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KeepOnRockin
Music Lover Forever
Premium
join:2002-11-08
Beaverton, OR
·Comcast
| reply to insomniac84
said by insomniac84 :Why would any company guarantee they won't damage a customer's computer physically? It first of suggests that it could actually happen. Second, it just punishes your paying customers. If you buy it from us you get a bunch of drm, crappy spyware, possibly a broken cd drive, etc. If you download it for free, you just get the product, without any of the horrible extras. I agree. I bought Valve's HL2 and I wish I didn't. Not only was it available on 6 CDs, I had to set up the game through "Steam" and it required me to use an internet connection.
I still could not play the game the day it was released due to Valve's server problems, though I legally bought the game that very morning.
Sure I could have paid extra for the HL2 "collector's edition" to get a DVD copy (instead of the multiple CDs), but I did not want to pay the extra $15.
I'm glad the HL2 DVD edition was cracked so no Steam account
is needed to play the game.
Though I'm sure pirates got to play the game before some paying customers did (since, IIRC, the leaked version of the DVD came out before the actual game release). I could be wrong about that fact, however.
Either way, if I had known about Valve's whole "Steam" setup , I probably wouldn't have plunked down my $60 for HL2. |
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spaterson
Premium
join:2001-09-02
Gloucester, ON
·Rogers Hi-Speed
| reply to insomniac84
said by insomniac84 :Why would any company guarantee they won't damage a customer's computer physically? It first of suggests that it could actually happen. No, it doesn't. Just because they're trying to squash any rumours that it does, doesn't mean that it could happen.
As someone else mentioned, it's a PR move.
I think it's great to see a company put up an offer like this, despite how unlikely it is that someone will actually take them up on it. It's a "Put OUR money where your mouth is" challenge.
Maybe I don't see why it's such a big deal because of the 8-9 years I spent in tech support for a software company, listening to the occasional complaint that our software smoked something on their system, when in reality it's a PEBKAC. 
Scott |
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Hi Mom
@209.79.x.x
| reply to insomniac84
quote:
You can do things to try to validate the disc when the game runs, but you shouldn't be installing drivers or checking to see if you have a program like daemon tools installed. My friend bought a game that wouldn't run without uninstalling daemon tools, it was ridiculous. Where does a game company get off telling the end user what programs they are allowed to have on their own computer.
Well said!!!
I recently bought a game and had to uninstall Clone CD and Alcohol 120% in order to get the damn thing to install. AND I didn't know that was the fix until only after I visited there forum and read other people's gripes and fixes in regards to the same problem.
I feel bad for the poor kid who buys SF protected games with his hard earned money and it wont install. Without internet access or techie friends to count on he is pretty much SOL. And you know the retailer wont take the game back because it has been opened. |
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devicenull
Premium
join:2002-12-01
Clifton, NJ
| reply to KeepOnRockin
I can honestly say that despite the inital problems, steam has become a pretty nice platform. It's nice not having to track down updates for my games. It's also nice that I can back the entire thing up to a dvd, and install it to anyones computer, where they can use their username and password, and be running pretty quickly.
I'll take steam over something like PB any day. |
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Fatal Vector
join:2005-11-26
| reply to Hi Mom
Just a thought...
I'm not a gamer, so I cant be absolutely sure, but it strikes me that these games probably are looking specifically in the program files folder for things like Daemon tools, etc.
Human nature being what it is, I doubt they run a full scan of the machine, which makes it likely that one can just move these programs files to some other directory and re point any shortcuts to them, since windows doesn't care where the files are, or, you can just change a letter in the name of the program and change the shortcut, computers being the literal beasts they are.
Amazing. The more things "change" the more they seem to stay the same. |
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Techman21
join:2005-04-14
Richmond, VA
| reply to KeepOnRockin
Re: Why punish paying customers?
No. You are incorrect in that they were able to play before the release on steam.
Every single one of the release groups had to wait until the release of HL2 on steam because of some weird code that Valve needed to run in order to open the flood gates.
Once this was done the release teams were able to get what they needed, since they had preloaded HL2 before hand.
They then took that extra piece of code and spent the next 24-48 hours developing a workaround for the steam initialization part. Eventually a work around involving removing your cat5 cable during a "checking" phase with Steam was used to get through the "authentication" part. Valve vowed to shut down any steam accounts that had tried this (seeing as you can have a steam account with the old games before buying HL2). Although I know a few people who did this and faced no reproductions. Then later (about a week almost) the release groups started to trickle out different patch fixes that didn't require that funky workaround. It showed how long it took them to go through all the code to come up with their own little piece of code to fake the steam authentication. But this allowed the player to play offline rather than on steam.
On a different note. MMORPG's like WOW have had issues with people pirating that game and playing on private servers. Honestly I could care less about such actions because they aren't a content filled server with thousands of people. And if they did get thousands, they still are missing the content. So cracking down on them is sort of moot. I mean if they want to waste money on an empty worthless server let 'em. Some people just want to role play in small groups I see no harm in that. Now if it were on the scale of say the WOW customer base I could see where that would be an issue, but that would mean everyone pirated wow. Which is just ridiculous and would never happen. |
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