You don't need a closed platform to deal with wallhackers and aimbots.
Steam is not a closed platform? What bothers me more with steam than a console is that it has the privilege to mess with everything on my computer, even though it is not even remotely related to gaming.
I guess it depends on the volume of the sales.
Yes! This is what matters. Make sure your product is worth buying, and make it easy to try out for free.
We are members of IMSTA, which I think has a good policy towards piracy.
By word of mouth, do you mean the number of p2p sites your cracked software is distributed on? Thus, the more p2p. The more popular?
I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but people using our software are musicians, and they tend to collaborate with other musicians and talk about what tools they use, both online and offline.
Actually, I don't know why someone hasn't started putting in kill switch's in their software. If someone rips it off, and the developer finds out, the program deletes it self(was going to say delete critical windows file).
Because you will not turn these guys into paying customers, but you will spend time developing said switch, and make people talk bad about your brand as a bonus?
BTW, we are "indies". Completely owned by the founders, without external investors.
You are a slave to these people. And it's easy to see how. If people are going to pirate and not pay, your company is going to drop the product and you will no longer be paid. You will end up out of a job. So you are a slave to these people that feel your work is not worthy of payment, just worthy of them using it.
Well, no, I'm actually more of a slave to my employer and my paying customers. The pirates have no say in what I do. They are not our customers! We have an estimated 80% piracy rate on our top selling product. We know by experience that only a few of those pirates would buy the product if they were unable to copy it. It would be extremely naive to think that we could get even half of the pirates to buy it. And even though it feels weird, we would not be as big without the pirates spreading our name and brand to new potentially buying customers.
We try to encourage people to buy the software they use by offering extra content, a great community, and other stuff for registered users. This works quite well! People will in the end pay what they think it is worth.
I work as a software developer, and I do not consider myself a slave to those who pirate the software I develop.
I don't think people pirating our software are thieves.
Why?
Some people are cheap and some are just poor. If they like what we do but don't want or can pay for it, go ahead, use it anyway. If they like it, they might tell someone about it who is ready to pay for it. If they don't like it, then we should probably make a better product.
I get paid regardless, for my actual hours spent doing what I do!
If no one bought our software, but pirated it instead, our company would go bankrupt and I would have to look for another job. But no matter how you look at it, it is not slavery. It is the market telling us that it is not prepared to pay for what we do. Would it be sad? Probably, but I don't find that it is my right to get paid for whatever i choose to spend my life on doing. I would probably continue developing just for fun on my spare time.
Bondage Midgets in Space(TM)? I like your way of thinking...
I admit it is really scary that the average user just want computers and gadets that works together well without the need to have any technical knowledege at all
This is not scary. This is how computers were supposed to work all along! The fact that there are so many computer geeks is a biproduct of the usability failure of the computer industry.
I am trying to say that, probably, if you as an advertiser are trying to get people who have discretionary income to burn to see your ads, you'd be much smarter to put your ad in front of someone who just bought an iPad than some random person you know nothing about.
But how can they possibly make an advertisment that catches the interest of the consumer without using flash? They didn't think about that now, did they?
Since all Swedish internet traffic that crosses our borders is nowadays monitored by FRA (roughly NSA to you Americans), this could give companies an option to route traffic from Sweden directly to Swedish servers, without needing a redirect from the foreign servers. Of course, FRA could still see the request from the local DNS to the authorative DNS, but assuming this traffic is encrypted, it would make the FRA law look increasingly stupid and ineffective.
The page could include a message which tells them to call their ISP support for further assistance, on the telephone number found on the latest bill...
I remember buying the three first chapters to support the idéa. I didn't read them though, since it didn't feel comfortable to read a pdf book on my monitor at that time, and if I printed them I might as well have bought the book instead.
I'm on a macbook! All my buttons are white!
...shouldn't they have bought US Ethernet Innovations instead?
As a swede, I must say they're not
Actually, one of the bad things about Vista was that GDI acceleration was removed when introducing Aero. Vista windows draws into a system memory buffer, which is later copied to video memory, thus removing the possibility for GDI acceleration and increasing the memory footprint.
The only hardware accelleration in Vista was for the 3D effects.
This was fixed a bit in Windows 7, by removing at least one of the system memory buffers and reintroducing hardware accellerated GDI.
The road to hell is paved with NAND gates. -- J. Gooding
