'The hypocrisy of PC gamers'

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If you buy a burger, and after the first bite realize that your mouth is filled with shit, you can probably get a refund.

Try getting a refund for a shitty game. Fuck, those days you don't even own your copy of the game.

Never mind the fact that the burger costs you $5 and the game $50.

Come on, you can easily recognize a shit game (= shit for you) without playing it.

Try harder, Morkar.

One moron gets born every second.

Anyway....

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/201...enue-is-from-digital-distribution/#more-93200

95% Of Paradox’s Revenue Is From Digital Distribution

My own experience of digital distribution is that we made 1.5 percent of our revenue from digital distribution in 2006, while the digital number in 2011 was over 95%.

One of the reasons for this growth is that we have made a big push for digital, but the other reason is that customers always strive for more convenient forms to consume entertainment. My own personal view is that one of the major reasons that piracy ran rampant in the early 2000’s was the inherent conservatism on big portions of the music industry that refused to look at new distribution models. Many companies say customers are conservative and do not like change — my experience is quite the opposite. Companies are typically conservative and like the old ways of working and making money, basically because it is more convenient for them, while customers always strive for the easiest and most convenient way to consume their products.

That was poetry. I can't brofist with firefox&noscript, so oldschool it is.

Yeah, like you can easily recognize that a can of soda is filled with soda and not piss, right?

There is absolutely no safe way to verify the quality of a game beforehand. Reviews are full of shit, metacritic and other similar sites are distorted by marketing drones and there is no way to try the product before buying. And even if you do get a demo, there is no guarantee that the rest of the product is of the same quality.

The only way is to simply wait a few months and rely on peer reviews with people whom you can trust and know to have similar taste.

I can't think of any other product with such a premium price, where the customers rights are still neglected to such a degree.

Actually it's quite easy if you pay a little attention. Just try it for yourself. You could even say it's piss easy :lol yeah and all that:

I'm wondering how I managed to form an opinion about an product without "testing" it all the years. Instead of just looking at the shittiest reviews available you look at reviews from reviewers you know how they review (I really like that sentence, maybe I'm getting a professional writer?). It's not even necessary that you share his preferences. Or just look at the presentation or even the marketing vids.

Dragon Age wasn't my cup of tea and I knew it right from the start. Even reading VDs generous review couldn't convince me from the opposite. Same with Witcher 1 (not saying that DA and Witcher are on the same level). But VD was perfectly able to show me if I could enjoy these games. AND I EVEN HAVEN'T PLAYED THESE GAMES!!!! And this are games that aren't even considered as shit...

But let's take some less obvious game: Arcanum. Here you have a point. But the reviews I read were very spot on about the game. And I don't like it because of its flaws. And I really tried. To be honest I only tried it because of codex hivemind despite knowing that the flaws will be too overwhelming for me.

You can't be 100% sure. But that's true for most of life, my son.

Sorry, can't come up with more enthusiasm. I'm already pretty done with the topic. Time will tell and I predict if pirates don't start buying games once in a while you will not like the tale.

I agree with this Morkar guy.

You can usually get a good idea from peer reviews. When I need to know if I'll like a game or not I check what they say here, and more importantly, who says what. Then, from comparing their tastes with yours, you can always tell if you'll like it or not. I can tell I wouldn't like Witcher, Dragon Age, Oblivion without having to try them out just from reading the news about them. Doesn't matter what reviews it gets.


I don't know, are you really arguing this? You can't tell if Mass Effect 2 will be fun for you without playing it first? Come ON! There's videos, reviews, everything. It doesn't matter what SCORE the game gets, all that matters is what they wrote about it. You can instantly tell if the reviewer is a popamole slave or an astute gentlepeer and from there derive an almost accurate impression on if that game will be worth your time or not. It really just sounds like reaching for excuses. Don't. Just admit it and stop trying to argue that it's fine. You don't have to do things that are "right". You don't even have to agree on what's right and wrong. But that it's so important to people to always defend their habits to the death says a lot about how they feel about them deep down.

This is dumb, you can always trade the game in for a better one. Yes, it's usually against the store policy, but at every single Best Buy and Gamestop I have ever been to (and I have been to a couple) I still managed to get a refund for brand new, opened games as long as I asked to talk to the manager, who is always more interested in making customers happy than following the rules to the letter.

Edit: I just don't get this hostility. You're all popamole for being too lazy to research what you'll enjoy or not. In fact, your tastes ought to be developed enough that you can (mostly) tell in advance. The whole reasoned I registered here was to find RPGs I'd like because it seemed most people here had good taste.

Boy, you guys are puritanical dumbfucks. Torrenting a game in order to try it out isn't some unspeakable act of evil that will damn your eternal soul.
And if that's what it takes for a particular person to get a feel for a game and see if it's good or not, then he should do it.

Torrenting a game and playing it for 100 hours = bad
Torrenting a game and playing it for 1 hour = okay

When I was around 16 years old I did exactly that with Everquest. I somehow became interested in this unique game and I starting reading dozens of Gamespot user reviews to get a picture. 80% of reviews were above 8 but I noticed a ton of reviews were very low, there was nothing in the middle. The reviews at the low end of the score were more fleshed out and described a game with extreme grind and other idiocies and I was able to make an informed decision not to buy EQ. It's not even a matter of age or experience, you just gotta do it. If you buy shit games or can't tell hype from a good game, it's your problem.

I don't think many people do that. Why would you bother downloading that huge file only to then go out and buy it when you already have it? Maybe some people would, to show their support, but I can't imagine them to be more than a sliver of the demography which torrents.

Edit: You were 16, not old enough to make informed decisions.


Edit 2: Just forget it. You'll always think I'm retarded - and maybe I am - and I'll never agree with your side. This topic will come up again and again and it'll never be any different. Let's just post pictures of naked women or something else that appeals to you instead of debating it in any fashion anymore; we're both only wasting our time.

Maybe so, but that's an argument against the very existence of torrent sites.

Given that torrent sites do exist, if somebody really does use them only to sample games, then what's wrong with that?

There'd be nothing wrong with that- except that he, while downloading, is (with most torrents by default) also uploading the game to people with more malicious intent, thereby facilitating piracy, voluntarily or not. In any case, this is a dumb topic and I don't know why I feel the pathological need to bore you with my one-dimensional opinions every time it crops up.

Edit: I wish there were no torrent sites, no edonkey, no corrupt politicans, no nasty people, no violent minorities, no malice, no hate for religion OR atheism (and no internet debates about them), no more talk about gay people (who cares?), no furries that make me look bad (even worse than I manage myself, that is), and so on and so on, but that's just me living in my delusional dreamworld, obfuscating my words with self-loathing babble, as usual. Best to ignore.

Oh come on, don't be such a baby.

Personally, I manage with reviews etc just fine. But maybe not everybody has time for that. You do have a point about the collaborative nature of torrents being problematic.

What kind of logic is that? A game isn't produced at next to no cost. Have you ever programmed before? What about during crunch-time? It's soul-draining work. Are you seriously implying that they shouldn't get some kind of reward for working so hard for your enjoyment?

And if you can't afford something you shouldn't have it. This sense of entitlement is just wrong. Where do you get off thinking you deserve all this entertainment for free? Have artists not busted their asses off to make this? Sure, you might pay the publisher more than the artist himself when you buy something, but that still ensures that they'll keep the developers in a job.

I don't get it. When I can't afford a nice car that doesn't mean I steal it. So you're saying that because pressing a CD costs only .50$, that's how much the thousands of hours of work and stress making a game take are worth? Your arguments hold no water and you know it.

Edit: I can't get over how retarded this sentence is.

"If something can be produced at next to no cost."

How can you even say this? Have you ever considered how much work making a game is? How many millions and millions of dollars it costs? How can you be so delusional? I don't believe it. And people even agree with this. It's just frustrating.

Edit 2: It's like you really haven't spent a minute to think about this. Just because hosting the files of some game on some direct download website server might be kind of cheap that doesn't mean making it was.

In general nothing. The problem is it doesn't happen this way. For me it's like "full market transparency". Maybe it happens once in a while but it's not significant. They download the game, play it for some hours, enjoyed it. But of course not enough to justify to buy it. To find a game that is that good enough that they spend money for it is at around a 2% chance. I'm not pulling this out of my ass, I even have friends who are like this. And like I already said somewhere else; the amiga history is a good example how piracy makes problems worse. It's not piracy in general, it's the amount of piracy. And this amount may be too much.

Skyway syndrome. Played the piece of shit 7 times, hated every minute.

Fuck you developer. I only pay for games with amazing artwork, 100 hours of gameplay, and are totally original. Like WoW, or minecraft. And it's not because you are forced to pay for wow and minecraft that I am paying for wow and minecraft.

That's the absolute opposite of what it should be. Anyone who can't afford it should have it for free, as there is no cost to provide it to them. There also isn't even the pretend lost money from them not be able to buy it because they couldn't buy it anyway, so not providing it just makes you an


The ideal system for entertainment would be to have it supported through a mandatory percentage of everyone's income tax, to be distributed to the entertainment creator of the taxpayer's choice, in return for 100% freely available media. Unfortunately that will never happen in the foreseeable future because of the industry backlash and ohnoes communism.

How about micropayment installment plans? Pay 5 bucks a month for a year for each game.

Isn't that pretty much how culture works in civilized countries? With all the inherent problems of that system of course.

Oh I can't wait for that. You see a mudcrab. It tells you why men having sex with wymyn is degrading, but wymyn having sex with hundreds of men (especially underprivileged black men) is empowering. You try to fight, but the mudcrab persuades you it's better to sit on the dole playing free games. Now the looniness of GD makes more sense, brainwashed with political correctness since birth.

The end result is pretty close. You would aim to set the tax % to be close to the amount the average person spent before. The difference is that consumers pay after the fact to the product that was the best, rather than before the fact to the product that was the shiniest of shiny turds. Also the only way to "pirate" is tax evasion.