Angry Robot

Criminal Behaviour?

I mean, pirates make the goods and services gamers want easier to access and use, so why can’t big companies simply do the exact same thing and charge a fee? For someone like me, a lazy person who simply wants to trans_act_ with some cash and make the content appear before my eyes, this would be perfect.

The most frustrating from both an environmental point of view and a consumer one is the DS issue. It is god awful stupid that users need to buy individual cartridges for games. That’s stupid, stupid, stupid. But for those who don’t want to pirate the games the only option is a sack full of little chips. Why can’t I have a DS hub where I can download my games into for storage and then load some onto one cartridge? I say hub and not my computer because I’m trying to play Devil’s Advocate for the big boys, at least the can sell some sort of additional crap analog garbage. But no! We have to buy dozens and dozens of oversized plastic boxes for tiny little games that you can lose quite easily. And if anyone says the box size is due to the manual you can suck it because manuals, for a DS game, are ridiculous. Do not tell me you can’t have the manual available within the game itself. It’s a pdf for goodness sake.

and also kind of a slut...

I know alternatives exist to the above, but I’m not one for that. I just don’t want to do it. So I’m stuck with what will eventually become my new set of poker chips.

Fahey makes good points on the future of gaming piracy, which he believes is tied to the future of game release and availability. For the MMOs of the world the future is clear – no playing without access to server, no fake access possible! Sweet. Single player games, on the other hand, are way more difficult to regulate. How can you deny someone a single player experience when they can’t connect to Big Brother to let him know they are using playtime legally? Concondrum.

I think one of the things that angers me the most about this tug of war of content at suitable prices is simply this: the illusion of profit. When companies make games that don’t just want to break a little over even, they want to make a cash cow they can milk for the foreseeable future. This is troubling. Why can’t game makers, and others in society as well, simply make something, sell it to cover costs and make a modest income to continue making things, and just leave it at that? Why does everything always have to be about mega super huge profit? Why can’t the pirate philosophy carry over into capitalism just a little bit? Content that’s easy to access and transfer and use with a solid front up cost and, if need me for servers and the life, a modest monthly fee. Why the stupid costs of production and promotion when all you need is digital love?

Fahey explains the many mistakes of the music industry and how they are fixing those mistakes now, slowly but surely, and that the game industry can learn from that. We’ll have to see though, for cutting edge entertainment we sure seem to be stuck in the dark ages. A flint knife may be as sharp as a scapel, but just let me buy the damned scapel would you? I don’t need to spend hours hammering out flint for the same result.