Runic Games disagrees - they treat pirated games as free marketing and building a larger audience in the long term, fostering customer loyalty - relying on people's (pirates especially) goodwill. It's paid off quite well for them, with many many thousands of people buying the game after pirating it, and then buying the sequel too, as well as being on-board for a torchlight MMO if one gets released in the future; I know me pirating the 1st one initially has netted them at least 7 sales each of both the 1st and 2nd game, that's 14 sales gained by 1 particular person pirating it initially and liking it enough to recommend it to(/force it upon :D) others - I'm sure there's plenty of people that never bought it after pirating it too, but those people would more than likely not have considered buying it if they couldn't try it beforehand anyway. The 1st game had a fairly big modding community that was also embraced by the developers, and that modding community has been quite happy to spread the games name in positive light and move on to modding the sequel when it came out. The game was also reduced to a very low price not all that long after release, which probably helped edge pirates that enjoyed the game to buy it, if only to avoid the nuisances that come with pirating such as a lack of easy updating etc.
Now companies like EA don't get that - they're almost universally hated at this point, so DRM might be the best method for them, however they're already a huge company and I really couldn't care less about how much it cuts into their profits, especially after the amount of times they've bought up a potentially brilliant series/company and then ruined it. New companies need to be supported yes, but it's not like everyone that pirates a game is a heartless money grubber, and frankly if I had to buy some games before trying them I'd feel ripped off, especially with the amount of rehashed game sequels with minuscule changes that some companies regularly dish out. Ultimately the people that both have the money, enjoy the game, and are willing to support the company are likely to buy it, and those that don't won't, excessive DRM merely encourages piracy because it can often make it so that the pirated game is better in that it doesn't have that wall every time you want to play.
Valve has a somewhat different approach - steam - it provides a simple, fast, non-intrusive check that acts as a sort of DRM and provides easy access and fast service that massively reduces the amount of pirating (it's easier to use steam than it is to pirate it, and the prices are often fairly low - with regular 50%-75+% off sales), there's occasionally service outages, but they rarely last any real length of time..of course some steam (versions of) games are pirated too, but to a much lesser degree than most other games. The super low prices and almost instant access to games often encourages people to buy games that they may never play as well, without having to feel massively ripped off. To the point that Valve (one of the biggest distributors of PC games thanks to steam, as well as a games developer) consider piracy to be a 'non-issue' in fact. Being digital of course cuts out a great deal of the cost of physical media/delivery/etc, saving the company a great deal of money at the same as improving the delivery service. Better yet, steam will happily host indie games and other companies games for a small share of the profits, so even new companies can make use of it.
More specific to this one - while it's a rather amusing way of getting back at pirates, the numbers used by the game seem exaggerated; a new company simply isn't going to see a every games copy over 100k being a pirated one when expected sales is 1m+....and you've got to remember that piracy rates do not equal sales lost either, a fairly good amount of pirates will in fact buy the game at a later date and/or recommend it to friends if they enjoy it, which actually generates more sales, there's no hard evidence that these extra sales were caused by people pirating the game (mainly because people don't tend to go out of their way to say "yeah I pirated this, this, this and this"), but a good amount of them will be nonetheless.
I suppose it was just a quick/easy limit to prevent progress though - effectively turning the game into a demo, which isn't a bad idea from a marketing perspective, as it means that people want to continue playing the game, they'd have to buy it, effectively turning pirated copies into demos, which a lot of people tend to use such games as anyway - there's a fine line between cutting it short such that people just drop the game and leaving it too late that people are just irritated that they can't play the last tiny bit and won't pay full price for it. That isn't an issue for games with lots of re-playability though.
"If you wake up years later and there are no games any-more like that, then it's your own fault because you didn't support the developers."
That one just makes me laugh - if no games like that remain years from now it's because too little of the market wanted them, pirated or otherwise. Generally speaking the more sales of a game there is the more pirated copies there will be as well, the only way a game is going to sell badly yet have an insane amount of pirated copies is if the game is priced far too high, lacks lifetime/re-playability and/or has ridiculously excessive DRM/is attached to other things that turn people off (here's an example from EA: Origin). If that's the case then it's the fault of the developer/publisher for not understanding how the market works nowadays.
Now, I'm sure piracy puts companies off taking risks with completely new ideas and the like - which is quite a problem, though the big games companies seem to be happy with this stagnation of innovation and reply on the hardware devs to tell them how to do it, but really piracy alone is far from killing the industry, and it's not that hard to communicate and appeal to the goodwill of people as a smaller company to ensure you make a profit, provided the game released is of an appropriate quality/enjoyability.
@LarkAnderson which is the main reason I haven't bothered to suggest things like puu.sh/puush.me - they're almost exclusively for quick pictures in posts rather than avatars/banners/etc. Unfortunately, we'll still get the odd malware warning complaint due to google chrome as a result of allowing all images in the main body of posts, but it should be a great deal rarer at least.
@Kunakai It's run by livefyre now so I don't think it's as simple as just disabling them..though even if it was, it wouldn't make much difference - people would just move the bulk of it to the forums instead; and there's honestly nothing stopping people from ignoring the comments to begin with. Not posting the article at all would be the only reliable way to avoid these sorts of posts/comments unfortunately, and it's kind of GS's job to post about just about everything related to the gaming industry, even if fairly loosely connected like this one.
I will agree that a great deal of comments seem deluded in their own beliefs though. It honestly wouldn't be far-fetched to just say that EA are doing this because they're against unwarranted discrimination, as frankly most people should be.
It just happens to relate to the LGBT sort of thing with the specific discrimination in this case being allowed for so many years, like many other types of discrimination that have since been weeded out..ironically enough, religion is perhaps the biggest cause of such discrimination these days, despite teachings in just about every religion to "love your neighbour as yourself" which effectively means don't discriminate against others (unless you think you yourself should be discriminated against - and I doubt anyone thinks that) and treat them well.
Is there some PR involved to try and improve their reputation? Probably, but who really cares about that? It's not nearly enough to change their reputation as a gaming company on the whole.
@Falru Imageshack in particular can host an image from URL without you even needing to sign up :P I believe imgur is the same, though I don't use it personally.
Still, a bigger selection wouldn't hurt, and if lots of people are using a perfectly valid image hosting site (rather than just using one straight from any random site) they shouldn't all need to switch to another one just for this site - it's easier overall if the extra site is just added to the whitelist, several I personally use at times aren't on there (such as puu.sh), though conveniently enough for me my images on this particular site are already on imageshack.
@6orange6 A: Well, Google are aiming for world domination, they've got to start somewhere! No, but really - it's that or users have to regularly put up with these warnings if they use certain parts of the forums because several sites that a lot of people use avatars&signature images from are blacklisted by Google (and therefore blocked by default by chrome) now. The whitelist certainly could do with being bigger though, there's quite a lot of image/file hosting sites that people regularly use for things like this that aren't listed..
B: Actually, we've had icons like that for many many years now - several (if not all the remaining ones at this point) of them are even made by users and then permanently hosted by GS for selection by all users, it's a tiny bit hidden I guess, but it is there - click on settings to open up the preferences (in a new window), select the images tab, and then select a category from the drop-down box under 'user icon' - upon selecting one the avatars in that (game) category will appear to the right of the window in a list under 'choose an icon', click on the one you want and it'll put the URL in the appropriate box, at which point you just have to press 'apply changes'..many have been removed at this point as well, but there's still quite a good selection if you don't want to find an avatar yourself.
@RealKilla_789 Seems it's (your one, anyway: me, 2ndWonder and fend_oblivion still have them) disappeared :o I guess it's not just the forum versions of the tags that wander away now and then lol
@Daian @ALPHAHXCORE @BenderUnit22 I'd have to say that's partially a result of a large mix of players in DOTA2 tbh - some people have been playing the game it pretty much replicates for many years, while many others are literally just picking it up, LoL rebalanced everything and as a result everyone had to get used to that different balance, so there's not nearly as huge a gap in experience, the learning curve is also less steep, probably to avoid driving people away from it.
Dota is very much a game of strategy, teamwork, and counters in the end, and even the 'basics' like last hitting/denying aren't immediately obvious to new players.
That said, dota2 is still in beta and a lot of things are still being moved into it and little fixes done where it doesn't function quite as intended, so there's also a few temporary balance issues here and there as a result.
If you can't get into the beta but really want to play I would strongly recommend getting WC3 cheap and trying out the current version on WC3 in the meantime - it's not as pretty/observer friendly, a few underlying mechanics (WC3 engine limitations) are different, and some interfaces are less convenient, but all the same basic content is there, so you'll be prepared to much greater extent when you do get to play DOTA2, I suspect both will be getting the same balance patches over time once DOTA2 is complete as well.
I'd have to say Valve made a good choice to bring them into eSports though, DotA has been more popular than wc3 ladder has for years now, and wc3 was a eSport game to begin with, so DotA clearly had plenty of potential.
It's unfortunate that other developers don't follow this sort of business model - the industry as a whole is definitely going the wrong way about things, charging a decent amount for random bits of DLC, often things that should've been on the disc to start with; add in DLC that you have to pay for and gives you an in-game advantage in multiplayer games and things start to become pay-to-win; which as far as I'm concerned ruins a game, and is a terrible business model that the vast majority of real gamers hate.
Honestly, I don't even mind paying for a good size expansion pack, provided the price is fair; but paying £1-2 for tiny things for which the right price point would be literally 1-2pennies/cent is out of the question, such things should be free, especially if they could potentially damage game balance.
Sadly, exploiting gamers really is the right word at this point - game prices themselves might be fine, but they're plagued with DLC/microtransaction style things that effectively rise the price so far that it's not even worth buying any more.
As much as people like Jack Thompson would disagree, gamers still have morals and we're intelligent enough to realise that we're getting ripped off on many things - sure many will buy them anyway, for a variety of mostly not-so-sensible reasons - but it damages the public opinion of the company when there's other smaller companies like CDPR (many things, such as noted in the article) and Runic games (actually allowed piracy of their game openly at the start, did nothing to stop it, and then many people went and bought the game after trying out pirated versions and game updates coming out - most the people pirating games are the ones that wouldn't buy it anyway if they couldn't get it for free, while others try out a pirated version as a sort of demo, either way, if the game is good it hugely increases positive word of mouth for the game, and in turn raises the amount of sales, with even many of the people originally pirating the game buying it in the end when it went on sale) that have gone away from the grain and profited as a result.
Honestly, it seems as though many of the larger companies aren't really in touch with gaming at all, and are just in it for the money and nothing else nowadays, which is disgraceful, and is slowly taking the industry in a terrible direction.
Yeah..still early on day 2 e3 local time yet day 3 emblem has been handed out instead, hopefully it's just a mix up and people will get the day 2 emblem tomorrow, but even if not it should be sorted out fairly soon
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