And you wonder why developers 'hate' PC gamers ...

[Ail]

Zkuq said:

Ail said:

World of Warcraft

simple easy,

make ppl connect online every time they play and do not include the whole game in what you ship...

And before you argue that it's different because it's an MMORPG, Blizzard actually considered seriously using the same model for Starcraft 2 ( make it so you coudn't play singleplayer without a battlenet connection). In the end they decided against it but we don't know yet what they will decide for Diablo 3...

It's not that hard really, only ship half of the game and host the other half...

Even if somehow pirates can find a way to duplicate your servers, it's not practical for them to host for free competiting servers from an economical point of view ( and shutting down competiting servers isn't that hard, Blizzard has done that numerous times..)

 

That's what the cloud is all about.

Business software are starting to embrace heavilly this, video games developers will be next. It has the advantage of removing some of the pesky hardware requirements most PC games have too...

It isn't that practical for small developers but big publishers can recoup their investments going that way...

And personally I think it would be kind of funny if suddenly the only games you could pirate were the indie ones..

I don't think players would really accept such a thing if it were not necessarily. Of course games like Starcraft could be exceptions, but not the others. It won't work with any single-player component. Also, WoW has lots of free 'private servers'. Did you know that most PC games' servers are hosted by players, completely free of charge? Yes, it does actually work.

i think software companies in general are pretty pissed at people that keep modifying/hacking their software all the time.

And it does offer opportunities to try new business models( if you host and can cut access to the game at any time you could theoretically decide to offer a free preview of a few hours and then make people decide between a flat fee for the game or a weekly fee, it makes integrating DLCs a lot easier too as you can manage purchase of those from straight within the game....).

And it does remove the huge pain of the having to manage the customer hardware....

And hosting and bandwidth costs have come down enough that financially it is doable now ( Netflix pays 3cents/Gig).