IceCold

You're trying to compare digital intellectual property to a physical product? I don't really think that's a good comparison.

I also don't think it matters how cheap you make software, there will still be people that try to steal it.

I also don't think that piracy always hurts a software company. And I'll use Adobe PhotoShop as an example. Whether it's a graphics program with no equals is beside the point, the fact is that PhotoShop, through piracy, has become THE graphics program to have. 90% of all graphics tutorials on the web are for PhotoShop. The majority of digital graphics classes in colleges and art schools are for PhotoShop. PhotoShop rules its market and I'll argue that it's in part due to piracy. "But Adobe isn't making money off any of those pirated versions!" But they wouldn't have made any money off 99% of those users anyway... Until someone becomes serious about using PhotoShop, they wouldn't even consider paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars for a personal-use program. Businesses (most, anyway) and schools don't use pirated software. So, all those people that never would've payed hundreds of dollars for PhotoShop have now contributed to the market dominance of the product merely through breeding popularity and familiarity with their product.

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munchkin

I believe the first MMORTS was a game by the name of Shattered Galaxy.

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Eternaly_Lost

No it is not. MMORTS are defined as a large number of people in the online game at one. This is relevive to the current size of the market.

Netrek has a development history beginning as far back as 1972 and was released soon after that. It a open source software cross platform multiplayer hybrid third person shooter and real time strategy game for up to 16 players, back in 1972. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek) So tell me, how many computer games at that time had 16 players at once? Adn netrek was not the first it was build on xtrek. These games were extremely massave for the time.

Does this make Netrek a MMOTRTS? By todays standards no, but then it was not many games that you could play with 15 other people. After all, who here knows what computers were like back then?

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Current game name : |TG| Lost the Phantom Thief

Apophis

Netrek and Alto Trek were different games. Alto Trek was not a 16 player "MMORTS" in 1972.

By the 1980's, there were games out that supported multiple people like Moria or Tradewars. But they were not called or even considered MMORTS. They were just multiplayer games.

Keep in mind, many of us were ALIVE back then.

The prefix MMO is relatively recent and was created because we needed a term that denoted the massive volume of players that would exist within a single game universe. "Mass Multiplayer" was a perfect fit for a game that pushed 10,000 people together in the same world.

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Diplomacy is the art of saying "good doggie" while looking for a bigger stick.

Apophis

I agree with you, I didn't know how to address the original poster so I just left it alone.

The concept that people wouldn't steal software if it was cheaper is simply rediculous. People pirate a $12 CD or a $9 movie and both of those are MUCH cheaper than your average game.

If you want companies to produce higher quality products, paying less for those products isn't going to achieve your goal. In most cases it's not the developers people should be screaming at anyway, it's the publishers.

But alas, some people will squalk and have no real concept of how the software industry works as long as they can't buy the latest copy of Half-Life 3 for $15.

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Diplomacy is the art of saying "good doggie" while looking for a bigger stick.

Eternaly_Lost

I
have no problem paying top dollar, for a top product. The problem is that most games are sold at high price, and are nothing more that a impuse effect.

BF2 was a great example of this. Released very buggy. And on the very same day, a patch, that caused more problems, cauing people to have to reinstall the game to fix it.

Normaly i buy my games after about 6 months had gone by, unless I know that it will be good, as it from a good company (Very few are today). After learning HL2 was delayed for a whole year, as it was not ready, I knew that it would be good.

When was the last time you heard of a high profile game like HL2 being delayed a whole year just because it not good enough?
There are lots of titles outhere that are not worth the Cd they are pressed on.

Another part that I did not commont much on is the price:use factor. A book that can be bought for around 6 dollars can give you hours of enjoyment. Lets say that a book has about a 1 hour enjoyment per every dollar spent. How many computer games have you bought, that excluing time spent online you have managed to get this amount of time from it? Now add local play, say with a friend at your house, coop, vs, whatever. How much more time? Now add online play. Now what are you up to?

I figure that the biggest jump is from online play, why? Is it because the game is made to be played online, or is it the fact that everything that is so great about these new games is their ablity to play online? I have nothing with buying a game to play only one, but that is what BF2 should have been sold as, no single play. HL2 was to be a great single player game and it made it with no problems, this is why they did not have a mutiplayer that was HL2 based at first. It was all about the single player. The best game i have bought so far was HOMM3. I got this as a random tiltle quite a while ago. Everytime one of my friends comes over we play this game in hot seat for hours. Some of the best hours in my life.

Too many games fall short of the worse previews. Very few games have been as good as the preview says. How would you feel if you hear of a new car. They boost that it can self upgrade to give you better gas mileage, more fetures, what ever. So you get it the day it comes out, as every store has 30 of them, and thier is atleast 100 at the bigger stores. Having Bought it you go to drive it. You put the key in, You turn it on, a screen popups. A new update is ready for the car. Would you like to install? [Yes] [Yes] For some reason their is not a no button, so you hit the right yes. The screen changes, downloading update, Here are some of the changes. Here a few off the list. 1. Bug fix to make it so the car can turn. 2. Adds the missing No button to the update, clicking no will disable your car untill you say yes. How would you like it? You buy a car to be a complete car. You should buy a game to be complete as it is sold, or at the very least able to run correctly, with all the features included. To often do I find out about games that need patching from day one, and they still do not work right. The Gold realse is to be bug free, not a beta test for the masses.

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Current game name : |TG| Lost the Phantom Thief

IceCold

Again you're trying to compare intellectual property to physical property.

If it takes you 20 hours to read a book, you've got bigger problems than the cost of the book... And I haven't purchased a game that I didn't get at least 50 hours of enjoyment from...

So... What's your point?

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Wintermute

Good point. there are no illegally copied books in the west where they are cheap, but it does happen in poorer countries where they are relatively more expensive compared to earnings.

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Wintermute

Play EVE online. It's like being an accounting addict in space.

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