BioShock 2's DLC is on the Disc

The "games are a service" thing is a new direction game companies are trying to go to try and justify DLC and DRM. I used to buy complete games that had no extra content to buy, and the sales from the game covered running the servers for online play. Companies like Valve release DLC for free as a way of showing thanks for purchasing their games, not to nickel and dime us.

It is really nothing like the Broadband Internet analogy at all.

myk said:

Companies are treating games like services, not like "content" you acquire as property.

Which is fucking bullshit. I bought the goddamned game already, why should I pay AGAIN? It is MY PROPERTY. I've only paid once for every other game I've ever bought, which I've been doing since 1996!

Since 'content' based games are an easier target for cracking, this will probably end up being the predominant trend. You don't really see people breaking into MMO games, which I'd consider the final form of 'service' based gaming.

Piracy is enough of a reason for the companies to implement DRM so I don't think they'll be looking for any other justification. Despite that, it doesn't look like they're taking DRM development too seriously, which is why we end up with such half-assed solutions as in Assassin's Creed 2 instead of another SC: Chaos Theory.

Mr. Freeze said:
It is MY PROPERTY.

You wish, commie! All you buy is the ability to keep the copy for personal use and only certain permissions on the copyrighted materials written into it. Note also that the extra charge granting you permission to use the "downloadable content" is linked to using their servers.

Remember that game called DOOM? It allowed some limited multiplayer connectivity, but if you wanted to join a larger community to play online you had to pay extra on that included DWANGO service.

"OMG, I paid for DWANGO already, it's in the DOOM folder, what the hell are you charging me for!!"

For a while, developers added multiplayer yet let users handle much of the specifics in a developing Internet environment, but the ease of distributing and downloading data over the net has grown with the spread of broadband connections, which gives space for providing services while it makes any data produced "devalue" quickly if left unprotected... and don't forget the increasing production costs of making a state-of-the art game nowadays, either.

caco_killer said:

The "games are a service" thing is a new direction game companies are trying to go to try and justify DLC and DRM. I used to buy complete games that had no extra content to buy

Except the mission packs.

(nb: Not a defence of the current trend for gaming BS)

myk said:

commie

I do not think you know what that word means. If I was a communist, I'd probably be supporting this because communism is inherently anti-property.

Mr. Freeze said:
anti-property.

The reason you can't use the contents in the way you'd like is because they are the intellectual property of a corporation and copyrights don't use the same rules as physical property. Communists generally restrict the effects of "intellectual property" and would tend to agree that if you own a document or work you can do a good deal of things with it that might not be allowed in a capitalist culture. Just like you can't appropriate capital, they'd argue you can't appropriate ideas.

By the way, communism isn't necessarily against private property, especially when it is also personal property or for one's own work. It is critical when private property becomes a way to own and control the means by which others work. To communists, work itself is an entitlement, as opposed to a claim over resulting capital accumulated by a select group of managers.

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It's not that what theyr'e doing is illegal, it's just really [i]dickish[/i]. I mean, really, making people pay again for data on a disc they bought -- it just seems like puppy-throwing, kitty-heel-stomping tactics that demands some sort of moral outrage that proclaims, "hey, 2K, you are DICKS."


And they are. they are an acre of dicks.

Buying a game and then having to pay to unlock more content later? Unpossible!

You don't have to pay $60 for shareware.

Catoptromancy said:

Buying a game and then having to pay to unlock more content later? Unpossible!

This is a very good point. Id actually did this quite often. I think my copy of deathkings contains the Ultimate Doom, Doom 2, Heretic, Hexen, and Wolfenstein 3D but they are all locked. You would have to order the games from id where they would send a one time use unlock key.

Personally I have no problems with companies locking extra products on a disc. What I'm more concerned about is that the key is not a physical reusable product.

Blzut3 said:

What I'm more concerned about is that the key is not a physical reusable product.

Yes, that is another case where people should definitely complain more about the implementation instead of the method itself.

Just look at the Assassin's Creed 2 thread. People are surprised that after all of the bitching about Starforce and Securom someone's come up with a new solution and just mindlessly bash it like they did with it's predecessors (Securom is a rootkit/spyware/malware!!!11). Regardless of the robustness issues showcased by the idiots who DDoS'd the authentication servers, the bigger problem is that the instakick on connection loss is just a stupid way to do it. It would work much better with, say, a warning along the lines of 'if your connection isn't reestablished in 15 (20, 30) minutes the game will end, save your progress now'.

They think Securom is bad, but they would really flip if they had to use Pirates Buster with their games. With that software, you have to install a decoder program. The executable is encrypted, and this program has to unlock it every single time you run the game. When you run a game, Pirates Buster will shut down programs you have running that it doesn't like.

Technically even if your purchase of the software was on a physical medium, you are only buying (a) license(s) to use it it.

Beyond the fact that the game was distributed through physical means to use on your system, you have no rights to the game content itself.

Again... only a license to use it.

I can envision a day in the future where video games are an online distribution only. Where you don't "own" the games, but have a "subscription" to them.

Csonicgo said:

It's not that what theyr'e doing is illegal, it's just really dickish. I mean, really, making people pay again for data on a disc they bought

Well, Windows Vista and 7 also contain all possible editions on the same disc and all discs are functionally identical, only a software-activated key will determine whether you'll "get" Home, Basic, Ultimate etc.

I know, it sounds outrageous to be locked out of something that you PHYSICALLY OWN and somehow being told that yeah, there's more than meets the eye in there but you are not supposed to unlock it lest getting the whole fucking DMCA and RIAA on your ass, but it's part of the future marketing model, get used to it.

Pretty much like you're not supposed to get rid of UOPs and regional lockouts on DVD, or unlock the disabled pipelines on your GPU or overclock your Pentium 166 CPU that is actually just the same at the 200 model, but it's yet another thing that's done for the manufacturers' and distributors' convenience, not the final users'. And it's something that has become a frequent reality only with the advent of digital technology, where the physical production costs between a budget, a mediocre and a superb product are virtually eliminated and only the "spirit" or software, makes a difference anymore.

An extreme example of this would be selling a car range that includes city car and supercar class-performance models, with major differences in pricing, yet mechanically all being exactly the same under the hood, with only software differences: sooner or later everybody and the cat would like to "unlock" or "unfuck" it. The only thing the manufacturer can do is to build in some extreme tamper resistance, resort to "intellectual property" laws, or both.

The same thing had happened with the first-gen Pentiums: they were exactly the same chip, process and design across a frequency range than spawned 100-233 MHz and price ratios of upwards to 5:1 between high-end and low-end. Naturally, certain folk got a bit mad when they learned that ALL Pentiums came from the same "assembly line" and furthermore than lower-frequency ones were actually "less than perfect" higher-frequency ones.

E.J. said:

I can envision a day in the future where video games are an online distribution only. Where you don't "own" the games, but have a "subscription" to them.

That's what happened in arcades for decades, and that's what services like OnLive try to accomplish: effective gamer/user and hardware/software separation and once you stop playing, there's nothing left of the game except for what you can remember of it.

E.J. said:

Technically even if your purchase of the software was on a physical medium, you are only buying (a) license(s) to use it it.

Beyond the fact that the game was distributed through physical means to use on your system, you have no rights to the game content itself.

Again... only a license to use it.

I can envision a day in the future where video games are an online distribution only. Where you don't "own" the games, but have a "subscription" to them.

It's simple.

We kill the industry.

Mr. Freeze said:

We kill the industry.

For something they have been doing for years under your nose? Let alone that this approach is dictated by industry's "best practice" guidelines: the resources and build should be shared and common, and everything is glued together with scripts, configuration files (preferably in XML) and DRM. It's called ENTERPRISE PROGRAMMING, baby.

This also explains the other "degrading demos" thing. Once again, one build, one data, and all the magic is in the XML. Think ENTERPRISE!!!

Mr. Freeze said in a Joker voice:


It's simple.

We kill the indus-try.

fixed

Anyway, I object to it being called Down.Loadable.Content when it is only the latter 2. At least call it what it is and don't bastardize DLC and it's value added on titles later. This is simply a tier of Loadable Content like Vista Home or Ultimate and I don't know that we will see the price difference for the core game with/without LC as we do for the Vista/7 tiers. LC and DLC will continue to be abused and content withheld and we will go along with it but why make it easy on them if Bs2 is sold (now incomplete) for $70? Unless Bs2 is sold for $50 and the LC is unlocked for only another $10 to $20 will I feel they were adding something by allowing the single players to only pay for the portion with which they were interested.

HackNeyed said:

fixed

Anyway, I object to it being called Down.Loadable.Content when it is only the latter 2.

Yeah, technically it's a fraud. Legally, it's not. It's like giving a boy a bar of chocolate and asking him to eat only half of it, with only the fear of punishment to hold him back.

DRM, licenses and the EULAs and laws enforcing them are considered as effective and legit as omitting or including part of the content, like it or not.

In the field of custom made software, it was very common to sell the same product to different clients, with only subtle configuration changes. Other products that vary a lot depending on the key/license you enter: Matlab, Nero, Texas Instruments LabView etc. did that for years and none ever complained.

Come to think about it, a lot of the functionality that you're denied by crippleware actually resides in third party libraries which have nothing to do with the EULA you've tacitly agreed to, and which you could otherwise use as you saw fit.

This is a moot point, really. They aren't doing anything new, nor particularly bad, given the context.

YOU'RE NOT BUYING BITS

YOU'RE BUYING THE RIGHT TO PLAY A GAME