I think all the other PC developers will eventually follow blizzard's route on DRM.

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..

And? Sony gave people a choice. Pay for a demo, or play the full game for free. Logic says free will win no matter how wrong the decision is to play the free full version. Release date doesn't matter, its the fact that they charged for something thats supposed to be free before releasing the free version. If they would have just released the demos freely, you would see many people not downloading the full game to try the game.

With the addition of demos in PS Plus, Sony is asking for their leaked titles to be downloaded instead of people paying for PS Plus to play a demo. It is a bad business decision. Leave PS Plus to giving away discounts, some rentals of games, Qore, etc.

No it doesn't. There are servers which allow users to play for free. Blizzard can't get revenue when people host their own private game servers and never pay Blizzard for their tiime playing. I know several people who still host these servers so their friends can play for free.

And how widespread is this compared to regular piracy ?

Not at all and each time one of those servers started to get more popular, Blizzard quashed them..

Not mentionning that it tooks months for the first of those servers to appear after the original release of Wow so it only happens on very popular games that stays up for a very long time.

If the choice is pay now to play KZ3 on release or wait 6 months and hope some guys reverse engineer the servers and start hosting their own in 6 months from now , most people will not wait that time ( heck 6 months from now KZ3 won't even be the game people want to play anymore...)

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).

Yeah, I think we agree about what the publishers want. The thing is, if they could, they would have done so already. Obviously they don't think they can do that so quickly.

umm... the private WoW servers aren't supposed to be "popular." They typically are LAN based servers ie not on the internet. So there are thousands of them.

And no one hosts console servers... thats pointless since most "servers" are P2P or dedicated anyways. Only game which allows you to host your own servers on console is Warhawk, which did it very well.

PC is different. We are given the tools to host servers for most games or have the option to rent one cheaply, monthly. WoW and certain titles are out of the norm and typically get hacked to support private servers.

Actually your wrong, the issue with the person playing on an SD monitor is that the monitor is to freaking massive to actually play a game losing visual quality, shooters to be exact, in SD. If the person was using an 19" TV versus the HD player using a 55" TV it would be about even as the SD gamer has clearer visuals.

In most PC games, textures get smaller and more refined the higher the resolution. Since PC monitors are usually 19 - 24 inches, massive screen issues do not exist. Typically any gamer playing a shooter at 800 x 600 will easily beat a gamer runing at 1080p simply because the enemies are larger targets and easier to hit.