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Eurogamer’ Rob Fahey posted a grat examination of DRM, with a bit of critics over the recent Riccitiello’s outing about it

Remember? The PC videogame market has to be dumped in favor of consoles, where piracy is way less extensive (that’s not true, just check your favourite torrent site).

Despite what publishers says, Activision is recurring to extreme measures against pirates that, apparently, aren’t profiting around PC titles (odd, isn’t it?):

• Shawn Guse of Federal Way, Washington. Guse, unrepresented by counsel, agreed to pay Activision $100,000 (CoD 3 Wii, CoD 3 Xbox 360) to settle the case. Read the Guse settlement.
• Chris Hyman of Abbeville, South Carolina. Hyman, also unrepresented, agreed to pay Activision $25,000 to settle the case. (CoD3 Wii, Tony Hawk’s Project 8, Xbox 360). Read the Hyman settlement.
• George Laflin of New Jersey. Laflin, apparently the only defendant who had an attorney, agreed to pay Activision $100,000 (CoD 3 Xbox 360). Read the Laflin settlement.
• Maryanne Leach of Northome, Minnesota. Leach, with no attorney, agreed to pay Activision $1,000. Read the Leach settlement.
• Kenneth Madden of York, South Carolina agreed to pay Activision $100,000 (CoD 3 Wii, Cod 2 The Big Red One PS2, Tony Hawk’s Project 8, Xbox 360). He too was unrepresented. Read the Madden settlement.
• James R. Strickland, aka Ryan Strickland of New York State; case is still active (CoD3 Xbox 360). Read the Strickland complaint.

Please publishers, drop the ridicolous PC-is-piracy bluff and just admit that you want to drive the retail only on console because games will be sold for more!

If Braben, whose latest game pre-dates the modern gaming era, is preoccupied about the sales of pre-owned games we all should, isn’t it? His reasons are debateable: if a single player game is not worth keeping after it is finished, the culprit is on the pre-owned sales, that allows people to get rid of a short and costly entertainment media before its price will drop to even 5 times lower in the bargain bins. Probably most pre-owned buyers will never buy the title at full price, and games, while great, are something most can live without, otherwise titles will not have that other problem, too: selling only while the marketing is running. In addition, most console games just disappear after first printing. Make them unable to sell as pre-owneds and say goodbye to a lot of longstanding IPs.

Pre-owned retailers have their share of shame, btw. Take every game retail chain and look at their pre-sale logic: inflate prices for new games and price pre-owned at almost the retail price asked everywhere else. Hell, I was able to find new games in other stores that cost less than the pre-owned counterparts at GameStop!

The pre-owned market is a price/value war, mostly: just retail new titles at a better, affordable prices so that the resale of pre-owned is not convenient anymore to retailers or stop making games with no real appeal aside the initial viral marketing push.

Since some days ago he realized that the free to play model is really working, he’s so excited by his own deductive genius (he will ask for a mere 20% of your incomes to let you use it!) that now he decided that the PS3 is an unrecoverable failure (citing made-up wrong data and ignoring that there are public-disclosed Sony forecasts that disprove his assumptions, despite he’s a self-professed Games Industry super-consultant). I wonder what he will say once he’ll discover that the Xbox line forecasted passive balances for almost ten years? Rewrite the rules of finance itself?

BTW check his own corporate site. It’s as much pretentious as hilarious!

Look here.

Well, this one really adds up to the virtual whipping I did several weeks ago about the useless hyping of EVE, giving its current, sad state of the art.

To be honest I didn’t expect CCP to be so amateur to start banning all the IP ranges from the BT download logs, they ended with lots of users angry because they were banned without committing anything unusual (you know, most of the ISPs use dynamic IP allocation for private internet access!). They may be a garage studio, but they should know how the Internet is working since they’re making money out of it.

The case really underlines most of the issues that brought me away from EVE after years: it’s mostly a collection of broken toys due to a very superficial and inaccurate feature planning (that leaves big chunks of gameplay in an unifinished state for months, if not years), aimed mostly to please the user base of control freaks and wannabe-slaves that plague the game and are the most constant source of revenues.

We may argue that the CCP financial stability is granted mostly by the biggest alliances (counted by the thousands): for the younger players the game today is mostly unplayable due to the skill power gap, broken features and the continued harassing of deep space founded splinter corps whose role it’s only to avoid the rise of new, organized power groups in the safe space.

The exploitable use of reporting linked in the cited chatlog is a real problem, too. Lots of people are banned for botting or bad behaviours just because they were so stupid to disagree with the wrong alliance in a public chat channel, just to receive a lot of forged reports for abuses on the Terms of Service.

I was one of those unlucky lads that was framed by an hostile corp for bad mouthing and personal harassing, and I had to fight for weeks to make the customer service verify that the chatlog submitted was a simple Notepad forgery…

I wonder if, aside for smug, CCP planned the game in this way. Sure, they were a PK guild on the first days of Ultima Online, and they declared to be still enamored for the original mafia-like, unplayable, castrating and bad designed PVP system that British himself ditched after a while to free players from griefers. So much for a player driven economy when you’re able to gain more than 100M ISK in an hour just shooting NPC ships in a 0.0 system (and the enemy is 20 jumps away because you are in the bowel of an alliance territory) and there’s no restriction on how those moneys are exchanged within the game. Several players hosts an alt in secure space to control inflation on entire regions, fueled by farm-bots (or farm-slaves) in deep 0.0. Every alliance economy is based on that strategy. There’s no way to match that money output (and there ere organized groups that are able to make a lot more than just 100M in an hour), making almost anything else in the game a waste of time and money. This outrageous state of the game was the result of a mission and bounty hunting revamp that never got finished and broken the economy so much to become a feature. If you plan to compete with any other 0.0 corp (even not in an alliance) your only viable option is to farm 24/7 to keep up with the war expenses. Any other mean is not only impractical and slow but also terribly stupid. And good luck if you plan to qualify for a researched Blueprint, too! Chances are that some big corp or alliance is so hogged with research points that the eventuality that someone else would obtain anything are less than nihil, and all the technological advancements will just finish in the same hands that still enjoy Aurora or other “ph4t l00t” events by the game designers.

That’s what you get when you tailor a game out of a very specific user base (or game designers simply don’t know what they’re doing). That’s why your user base can’t grow significantly even if every superficial reviewer in the world is ready to swear that the game is a masterpiece, mostly because he wasn’t able to understand anything from it.

Call it a Lynch syndrome, if you wish.

When I read this post on QJ.NET, I coldn’t stop laughing for a while. And it’s a good thing, since when I consider gaming prices I usually turn green and start shattering things.

According to the post, a blogger, probably the smarter in the galaxy, or probably the only one bar me not paid by a huge corporate driven gaming blog community, discovered that the price structure of Playstation Store is not the same on every country. To be more precise, he discovered that South Africans pay more for the same game.

Now I will share a secret with all of you: there’s a continent that is paying a lot more for games and gaming hardware since decades and it’s called Europe. Actually gaming manufacturers are selling their goods here at a beefy +50% markup, compared to US and Japanese prices!

Microsoft confirmed our worst fears: they won’t embed Blu-Ray tech in their newest models, despite previous announcements and the tenets of the 360 marketing since launch: “We will adopt the standard that wins”.

The choice is understandable: adopting Blu-Ray would mean paying royalties to Sony, bolstering its definite reprise in the home theater and entertainment segment. In addition, Microsoft is going to champion movie streaming  and having a set-top-box able to play any rentable mass-market HD movies may be less than ideal to improve digital revenues.

I still question the wide adoption of Blu-Ray as a non-gaming format. Given that most of Next Gen consoles are not used in HD mode, why movie playback may be different, if it’s targeted to a still less sophisticated market segment?

Still, to be able to play Lost Odissey in a single media is not a such bad idea!

Let’s hope at least for a future “install to HD” option…

Apparently, MS is trying to get out from the very hole they created: to have a 20GB hardware baseline (no I won’t consider Arcade/Core systems, just like MS don’t consider users who bougth them) when they plan to sell a lot of movies and other very huge DLCs.

The solution? Simple: make 20GB consoles obsolete and let a new 60GB model be the new reference system to develop games and deploy services. The space won’t still be enough, but MS will be able to brag that their console is more roomy than Sony’s and they will be able to sell yet more overpriced hard drives to perplexed customers.

Sony users who really care about penis length will just go out at the nearest shop and buy a cheap, standard 250GB SATA drive for a lot less the price of the MS upgrade and will continue to live happily, without the need to transfer or re-buy old downloadable contents that were locked to the old drive. Wonder why PS3 is still menacing the X360?

The announcement is still an unsubstantial rumor but it was partially confirmed by MS itself. Probably the outing won’t be so soon, since on March 14, the X360 will get a €50 discount here on Europe, presumably to get out all those old 20GB X360 that are still in most of the European Malls, not to mention to cope out with an unsuspecting PS3 reprise (it should be wort to note that Sony started selling back when they basically dropped the multiple-version nonsense, pushing only the cheaper 40GB model).

Considering that most of European malls and shops still have to get rid of all those pre-HDMI boxes and bundles, draining stocks could be a huge, PSP-sized feat by itself.

CCP is convinced that they can run EVE for half a century. While it’s teoretically possible, we must admit that the strategy of “building on top of it”, as Reynir Hadarson said, it’s a bit streteched up, because software become obsolete and sources become an unmanageable tangle if you just “build on top of it”. Most decade old MMOG out there are managed by battle-scarred skilled professionals (not just once UO playerkillers become self-made programmers who state the impossible :P) and are almost all ended in a state where it’s safer to touch the code as less as possible. If not for code quality it’s because in a decade the team has shuffled so many times that some part of the sources don’t have a direct maintainer anymore and knowledge is becoming fuzzy.

I would’ve been more positive about the statement of CCP if they didn’t managed to break every single release date they announced, in some cases with delays that spanned multiple years (if that’s not navigating on sight and improvising development). Come on I’m still waiting for the full Revelation feature set deployed as initially announced, hyped and broken almost 2 years ago!

In addition, EVE is not so rose colored when it comes to gameplay, no mattes how CCP and the superficial reviewers who spent a couple of days in the game may describe the state of things: the combat system has been radically revised at least 5 times, the economy needs huge manual supervision and the introduction of more costly products to keep inflation stable and the radical (not to mention biased) PVP view of the game is becoming more and more grim for people that aim to have a social life. Research and development often is a joke since new items are allocated manually and you may wait for months before you’re granted a chance to get a breakthrought. As said before, PVP is so masterfully balanced towards big, pointless fleet battles that bounty hunting was made completely useless since the changes of two years ago (made to promote what they call “factional warfare”, a feature that still today exists only on the designers heads but that broke a lot of more player-friendly features) and the only role for mercenary and rogue fleets is to increase the ship numbers in battle to statistically drop the employing corp losses. In other hand, if you plan to have small battles for money, just farm 100K NPCs every minute in a cheap battleship instead of spending days to catch that 5M bounty around the galaxy.

If EVE won’t manage to make fleet combat interesting (at the moment, unless you have personally offended someone, in a 100 vs 100 battle, the fact you will come alive or dead is a matter of pure luck due to lag and the shortcoming of the interface), create better ways to manage territorial control (granting a patrol made of real people up 24/7 feels like a job to me) and keep griefers away from newbie corporations, the game may stop way before its first decade: its player count is not so stellar and the number of people who run away scared from the game (and the community) unfriendliness is worrying. Accounts are counted by the millions but the active ones are by the tens of thousands (and a good portion of them are alts purchased with a discont!).

Remember, these critics doesn’t come from a green-horned gamer but from a veteran with more of 30M (almost 40 to be precise) of skillpoints behind his back, months of services in 0.0 under several major alliances and more bounties collected than anyone can imagine. I (as many other disgruntled veterans) feel a bit silly that people we pay for a service carry on tasks and development in such a chaotic way, just like they’re still working on guild tasks in their basement and still manage to be so bluntly full of nonsense when it comes to take responsibility.

What EVE needs is a professional vision and direction, the ability to grant a baseline of experience that won’t require to sell your soul to the game itself or relearn the game completely every six months. It needs a manual that isn’t years behind development and a and designer who didn’t focus only on what a minority of the playerbase wants because is that minority of hardcore gamers and the way the game is built around them that are scaring new players away!

The idea of a free, completely player driven PVP is so ‘90ish, it’s not completely bad but steps has to be taken to grant new players the time and peace needed to adjust to such a complex game. What they have today is constant griefing, mugging and menaces until they join one of the bigger corporations, because the game, in the last two years, only fullfilled the demands and expectations of a fistfull of CEOs, who practically control almost all the EVE active userbase and are the finances that back up the game.