The pattern says to me "buy these games on the PC, avoid the not-user-patchable console versions."

A big problem is the revenue model for these games. After release, bug fixing is considered non-revenue-generating, and won't get much attention. Of course, that's from the bean counter's perspective and doesn't take into account pissed off users and sales of future products. Of course, that gets into a bigger problem with the world today with respect to short-term thinking, short-term profits, and nobody caring about the future.

Maybe not like this, but NWN certainly had its fair share of bugs. Just look at how many patches were released. Some of them were game breakers too. Bioware was pretty good for patching though.

I don't really fault either of these companies much though. These are big, big, complex games. There's just so much that you can do, and in all kinds of different orders that need to be anticipated.

They've done studies, you know. 48% of the time, it works every time.

Someone please mod this guy up.

I swear, the higher the price of the software is, the more upper management just drools all over it, and the bigger the piece of shit it is. Millions of dollars spent per year licensing some of the biggest turds I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with. Just so management can say that some big vendor is behind it and will "have our backs when it fails".

Guess what, the support is awful too. The vendor never has your back. You'll be left languishing with downtime while they leave you hanging. They don't care because they're so much bigger than your company, and the "license agreement" you signed means you can't hold them responsible for shit. You'd be so much better using some open source software that does pretty much the same thing, and paying some other company to support it on a per-case basis. Take the bags of money you save and hire some devs to code in the missing functionality you need.

I make my doors 35% narrower than most. That way, the fat crooks can't get in. Security through Obesity.

So what about old people? You think that 70 year old has the reaction times of a 25 year old? The 25 year old with a bit of alcohol in them probably still has better reaction times than the average 70 year old. What's that say?

If they care so much about safety, why isn't MADD clamoring for periodic retesting of the elderly? Sure, it's easy to garner support for laws to be changed in favour of hunting down drunks. Now try it for a more politically difficult target. That is, if you really care about making the roads safer.

These days you might be better off with the murder charge than the copyright charge, what with purchased laws and such.

Why can't he just pay a "settlement" that amounts to a small fraction of the money he made from this? I mean, if that works for Standard Charter and the State of New York, why not for him? His crime wasn't anything near as severe as laundering $250B for a blacklisted country.

I'm tired of hearing this "crappy slow" line about the green drives. Sure, they're not as fast as the regular 7200 performance line, but 1MB/sec?? Come on, the problem is obviously NOT the drives.

I have a number of these drives, and individually they can read between 60-80MB/sec when copying video files off them. In Linux software RAID with 4 drives, I've seen writing of 140MB/sec on a crappy Silicon Image controller.

I've seen frequent complaints about the Drobo units being slow (in the 20-40MB/sec range), probably due to a slow CPU in the thing, but 1MB/sec there's something really wrong there.

So what happens if you decline the new TOS? Do they disable your games and refund your money? Do they keep your money, but untie the steam leash from the games you bought?

No, wait, let me guess... They just cancel your account and you lose all the games you "purchased" with no refund of any money?

As long as it's financially beneficial for them to ignore you and pander to corporations, they will continue to do so.

The money needs to be taken out of politics. "Politician" should be a temporary job, not a career.

I disagree due to the fact that people can reverse engineer almost anything, making most trade secrets useless. If someone figures out your trade secret, you're hooped, that's all. If you have a patent though, even if someone else doesn't know about it and comes up with their implementation on their own, you still get to sue them. The patent lottery continues.

Have you read a recent patent? It's a joke. Deliberately unreadably-lawyeresque writing style, extremely vague so that they can sue anybody who implements anything even remotely similar (ie. patenting an idea, which is something you're specifically NOT supposed to be able to do), and becoming frequently more and more obvious within the realm the cover. Slip your patent in, then sue anybody who becomes profitable using a similar idea in a product. If you're lucky, they'll setting for millions and you won't even have to go to court.

Fuck this broken system. It's been gamed to death by filthy, parasitic scum. I seriously hope these patent trolls get crushed hard. I doubt it though. The system is so bought off and corrupt, real justice is as rare as rocking-horse shit.

What makes this worse is when they drop LAN and private-server options (I think they already did this a while back?), then combine that with dropping the official MP servers as soon as the next release of the game is out. Check out any of the online sports titles like Madden. Madden 13 is out? Cue shutting off the Madden 12 servers in 3..2..1..

These Call of Duty style games are all about the multi-player monies. The single player campaign in them is maybe 6 or 7 hours if you're lucky. So yeah, better wait till it's a $10-$15 game to make that worthwhile, because by that time, MP is long gone.

You'll get to ride in the sidecar, while the computer drives the motorcycle for you.

No, it doesn't have to be. Maybe once YOU grow up, you'll understand that there are options. Not every game has to be some 300+ person endeavor that involves millions of dollars in voice actors alone. The indie market is making a big comeback, with some very low budget games making some big headlines.