Yantelope V2

Yes, I always thought it was wail as well.

So one thing I think it should be okay for you to do is bypass DRM for personal use. I don't think I agree with that part of the DMCA. If I bought a copy of the game and paid money for the license I should be able to strip the DRM out or even use a NO CD crack. I'd be okay with providing that sort of protection to consumers.

Loopholes and effective rates and other such things aside, I find it stupid that there are different % brackets. If 10% if fair then it's fair across the board. The whole point of making taxes a % of income is that rich people pay way more money than poor people in terms of actual money. I'm not against havinga poverty line where you don't pay any tax (although 40% of america is certainly not in poverty) but saying it's fair for one person to pay 10% while another person pays 25% defeats the whole purpose of paying taxes based on percentage in the first place.

From the Mass Effect thread. Not to pick on WaS, cause I know I'm taking this comment completely out of context, but it just made me think of the attitude that I think is a huge problem in American politics; people act like the majority should be catered to at the expense of all others. Tyranny by majority is still tyranny, and the whole reason we have things like the first amendment is to protect the minority from the majority. Just because most people like one thing doesn't mean we should force it down the throats of everyone else. Again, specific comment taken entirely out of context, so don't take this as me attacking you WaS. Yeah, the fact that the founding fathers wanted to protect people from an "excess of democracy" was one of the more brilliant parts of the constitution. Now what was it about the rich paying "their fair share"?

Scratch that, lending library doesn't work with my android.

Hunger games is on amazon prime? I need to check that shiz out I guess. I pay for prime simply because I'm an amazon mom and it actually saves me more than the $80/year in diapers and other baby related things.

TN has a point that people automatically assume evil intentions from the standpoint of developers and publishers. We ask for rewarding purchasers but we complain about harming the used game market or something else. I'm as guilty as anyone for assigning evil intentions to game publishers/developers but perhaps we sometimes don't give them enough credit. I don't know.

Oh the internet is just a new frontier. It'll probably be tamed eventually.

It's an overgeneraliztion in that it's like saying shoplifting is a competitor to walmart. Well, shoplifting is a problem, one that will never truly be gone and something that has to be handled delicately so that you're not punishing paying customers. People generally don't say "shoplifting is always going to be there so just deal with it". You certainly couldn't beat a problem like shoplifting with better service.

I dunno, even cheap games get pirated like crazy.

Meh, I think that's kind of a silly over generalization. Since you can't really eliminate piracy then companies mostly work on making piracy as inconvenient as posisble. If you can make it a huge pain to pirate something (which usually isn't possible) then maybe you can discourage people from pirating it. I don't think that in and of itself is a problem. What is a problem is that they manage to inconvenience paying customers. It seems to me you should be doing everything possible to reward paying customers and hurting them is going to outweigh whatever minor gains you get from fighting piracy. A good example of inconvenienceing customers is DVD menus. Companies really need to learn to not punish paying customers. If it's easier to pirate something than it is to buy it then you're really shooting yourself in the foot.

Hahaha, IGN has gone all TrollOLOL on this rumor now. Apparently buying used games is a "fundamental human right" and their calling this idea a "Crime Against Consumers" http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/121/1217310p1.html

Total value, $845. Total actually spent: $362. I'm actually a little surprised that I've spent that much. (forgot about the retail purchase of Supreme Comamnder 2) (edit 2: it didn't count the $60 I put into Half Life 2 back before launch).

Keep in mind that the % of the general population is not really indicitive of the % of the gaming population and I'd wager that the % of the gaming population with internet access is actually a lot higher than even 77%. Additionally, I bet a lot of those consoles aren't connected to XBL just because it's not really necessary, especially if those are being used for small kids or something. The point I'm making is that even if 1/3 don't have accounts that doesn't mean the don't have access or can't get accounts if they wanted to or were made to. Yes, you'll lose some customers by requiring internet access but I doubt it'd actually restrict any significant number of people from getting one.

I dunno, supposedly 77% of Americans have internet access. I think you may be overestimating how many people would not be able to use an online only console.

If cutting out 25% of their users generates more than 25% more sales by eliminating used game sales then they'd do it in a heartbeat.

They already do this on Xbox with XBLA games. Your content is tied to your console and your ID so once you've downloaded it you can keep playing it offline. You can't keep playing offline on another console though since it's going to check which console the license is tied to everytime you download or copy it to another system. With a disc based system it would have to have some sort of online activation though, there's no way around that. What I don't understand though is that if there is for sure an online requirement then why bother with the optical discs at all?

While I agree in theory, MS is the only one that charges for online play and it's actually helped their bottom line quite a bit.

I always get suckered into buying good games regardless of how crapy the makers are being. See Battlefield 3.