i dont know about you guys but i live in Argentina and our president LOVES... LOOOOOVEEEEEES to use official communication hijacking to talk about nonsense and personal political agendas (as an example she used one to say that "Pork improves sex life"
sooooo making expensive blockbuster games that need to be in the top 10 to break even causing them to play it safe remaking the same game again and again *cough* NWN * cough* is making the industry stagnate and might not be a good idea... no objection here, i agree completely
but then "BioWare is experimenting with smaller scale MMO development", really ? adding the 12309742377th MMO to the ones in the making is not causing stagnation ?
how many mmos can a gamer play at the same time ? i doubt its more than 1, development
are they really any different from each other ? they are all the freaking same game
server maintenance and troubleshooting staff for that are cheap ?
the constant postrelease development required to stop players from running away to a new game (and many will leave anyway) is cheap ?
a few stupid mistakes coupled with arrogance and your investment is down the drain just look at APB, it seems to me this path will erode the consumer base much faster than the older one.
Bioware, what the hell ?
if you read the forum post that supposedly "ended" this "feature" youll notice that they didnt completely rule out doing it again in the future, they just understood they were going too fast and need to slow down/sweeten things a little, you WILL see this thing again eventually, mark my words
i also think most of you guys are missing the big picture here, moderation might be a good reason to *give out to the public* for this but it really makes little sense to roll out this kind of system for just that, too much cost, testing and backlash just for a "chance" to calm down trolls that have been there since ever
a more probable reason for this is to prepare the road for integration with other services (many of which require real names), never forget that bnet is turning into a store with starcraft2's release and as such it wants to be THE store, imagine being able to use facebook/twitter, pay your taxes and order your pizza without closing the bnet window, all while leaving activision-blizzard a nice cut of the transaction
They dont really have to go out of business to screw you over
Microsoft never went under yet they closed, what, 3 digital stores already ? screwing over everyone ?
Even too much success might put your steam games in danger, say for example someone like MS, EA, Ubisoft or Activision-Blizzard give up in their attempts of pushing their own digital stores and just buy Valve then merge it with their system closing steam and making steam2 or something
or maybe Valve decides to upgrade their servers and take down the oldest games for whatever reason (this happened to a lot of digital stores)
or the owner of a game license enters a legal battle with someone else and is forced to take down their catalog from steam, or just takes it down to sell them in their own digital store abortion exclusively
hell, what if say you bought something like GTA/BloodyMurder885/Rapelay in steam and then it gets banned in your country and Valve is forced to take it down without giving you any choice on the matter even you don't happen to live in that country but the servers are based there or the other way around (if it sounds far fetched, ask Australians about their game banning streaks)
what if one day someone like that fruity Apple dude or that creepy Activision dude becomes CEO of Valve and decides to start charging a fee to "keep your account working/services" meaning that theyll start holding your games for ransom ?
there is just so much that could happen because a physical copy of the game is not in your hands, you can dismiss the risk as low and i would understand that but never think its not there, not even for a second
as far as im aware you are forced to login to keep offline mode working every few weeks
so ? if they think it would be in their best interest they would make public all those naughty pictures retards post as "private" too
FB is not and has never been a safe box, they are not paying the storage and bandwidth out of the kindness of their hearts you know, nor should you expect them too, they will do whatever they think its the best move to make money/benefit themselves in some way just like any corporation
People need to understand once something hits the internet its out there, no privacy promise by a huge corporation (that probably owns the data once it hits its servers and gave it self the right to change policy whenever they want in the wall of text) is going to protect it.
The Cloud sound nice and all but the hype often forgets (intentionally ?) to make the dumb user aware of the consequences and dangers of putting something in a hard drive they cannot control
the PS3 remains "unhackable" not because of Karmic justice or amazing copy protection but because of 3 simple facts:
-the Xbox360 was released a year before the ps3, so it had 1 more year to be hacked and 1 more year to make its game library more appealing (increasing interest in hacking it)
-the PS3 had a pretty uninteresting game library up until about a year ago, the install base was also pretty low compared to the other consoles until recently
-the Blu-Ray is a pretty good anti-piracy tool, pirating a ps3 game means a huge download and needing an expensive BR burner with very expensive BR blank discs. Pirating a ps3 game costs... what... maybe 40~60 times more than pirating a xbox360 game ?
at least the last 2 facts mean lower demand which leads to lower supply, as the cost of pirating ps3 games gets lower demand will rise and hacks will appear
THEGODDESSOFTHENETHASTWISTINGFINGERSANDHERVOICEISLIKEAJAVELININTHENIGHTDUDE
