Forest Dweller
Smoking Dicks
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2008
- Messages
- 12,210
I noticed this game on Steam. Supposed to be a first-person puzzle game a la Portal, but with heavy philosophical influences. Looks interesting. Anyone played it?
First Painkiller's creators made Vanishing of Ethan Carther and now this. Interesting.The Talos Principle is a philosophical first-person puzzle game from Croteam, the creators of the legendary Serious Sam series
That's like a bank robber complaining about exploding dye packs.So developers still use the most retarded type of copyprotection ever conceived? Giving players of cracked copies bugs and errors without warning and without telling them why it happens?
This is so ridiculously fucking dumb.
Except the regular bank client wouldn't have ink sprayed over his face due to unexpected bugs introduced by said protection.That's like a bank robber complaining about exploding dye packs.
That's like a bank robber complaining about exploding dye packs.
I'm always amused to watch elaborate, creative methods of discouraging piracy evolve. It's such a candid admission that the game in question is first an ideological tool organized to extract complete and total submission to capitalist orthodoxy, and secondly a dispositional play-object in which encounters gestate enjoyment. It basically amounts to an act of self-loathing by the creator. Plenty of independent devs are happy to renounce capitalist motive (and the attendant, involuted drama). It should always be an article of mockery to see a game developer grasping for such a craven form of entitlement.
It will be interesting to see whether the publicity of Croteam's latest effort at incorporating non-DRM antipiracy draw the attention of more adept crackers. If so, they will simply have made the narrative (and actual) dominion of piracy more elaborate.
Prime bundle fodder
definitely a successful counter-piracy measure
So developers still use the most retarded type of copyprotection ever conceived?
lol. definitely a successful counter-piracy measure going by the enormous butthurt I am seeing in this thread. seriously video game pirates have to be some of the most whiny self-righteous people ever, right there with SJW. I love seeing pirates to do insane mental gymnastics in some attempt to discredit the developers for wanting to fuck over the people who didn't pay for their game.
lololol butthurt pirates
I don't even really care about this game, it's just a dumb move because it can cause bad rep for the game.
I faintly remember a case where the cracked version of a game, don't remember which, might have been Titan Quest (?), had this "give random errors to pirates" type of DRM. Since many people pirated it, rumours spread throughout the internet that the game is a buggy fucking mess... because nothing in the game told the pirates that it's DRM that does this, they thought the game was just really fucking buggy.
And once such a reputation has spread, it can negatively impact sales because people who don't do much research on the issue and just read lots of people complaining how the game is a buggy mess... well, yeah, it's a really dumb fucking marketing move. It's a shot in the devs' own foot. They're not fucking over the pirates, because at some point the cracker release groups will fix the issue, but they're fucking over themselves by creating the potential of ruining the game's reputation.
In Croteam's case, I don't think they introduce bugs or degrading features a la BIS' FADE system, they just lock the (pirate) player somewhere or throw an invincible enemy at them. The real point of this is not to seriously punish pirates, since as you pointed out, these things get patched eventually by competent release groups; the real goal in my opinion is to generate controversy and ultimately get people and media to talk about the game, and Croteam succeeded at this twice in a row now. And in any case 'bad' publicity will always generate more sales than no publicity.
So, game developers are in the business of fucking people over, and deserve credibility for it . Pay Money Or I Will Laugh At You Says Acolyte of Capital
The 'mental gymnastics' are all on the part of Croteam. Recall that they embed intricate punitive systems in games for no other purpose than to instill and verify orthodox corporate behavior. At this point the measure of counter-piracy is not ensuring sales, or regaining them; it's obviously an unviable practice in any long-term respect. It's whether or the DRM in question satisfied the developer's taste for ideological spite. And it's easy to recognize this impulse as a basically juvenile unwillingness to relinquish corporate tools and methods, but to choose instead to search for increasingly meaningless and elaborate ways to enact capitalism.