The whole social networking thing-I’m GREATLY over it. I think it’s gotten to the point where everyone figured “Okay, had my fun and put my name out there, enough with the online frenzy” I HOPE. I real reason I’ve been hearing lately is that if these networking sites weren’t so darn handy for keeping in contact with one another accounts would be canceling left and right.

I’ve browsed through some interesting profiles and seen the types of lifestyles people live and think “Wow, that is so exciting! That’s how I wanna live my life!!” then you realize that they could be BS’ing the whole thing. The only reason I browse around now is for web tricks and designs.

I think that’s why people continue to watch others profiles-they haven’t come to realization that it could be fake/exaggerated and if not it’s hard to look at ourselves from another perspective. I’d hate to look at myself and say “What a loser, she wastes her day browsing myspace profiles”. I also remind myself that I don’t want to be a creepy stalker hiding in the shadows afraid to let anyone know I’m watching. Thank goodness for the ability to make profiles PRIVATE.

My two cents, end.

The true solution to video game piracy is probably systems like Steam, or Stardock Central. These systems don’t prevent the piracy directly, but they do reward the players who purchace the games legally. I saw a crack once to run Counter Strike Source, but it required completely removing Steam from your system, and running some separate removal tool, followed by a crack, and you could then play over the network. This is great. By making the public servers require authentication, you are rewarding the players who have the Steam connection, which, when you connect to the server, verifies your game (which you already likely won’t have access to through steam without having purchased it. The people who would go through the trouble of pirating it would have done so anyways, and you are keeping them out of the public servers while giving them a taste of the game, which could lead to them purchasing it, just to play online when there isn’t a LAN game going on.

The music industry has the right idea. Kind of like shareware programs (man, thats an old term), giving the users a free taste of it, and allowing them to understand that the content they can pay for is so much better seems like it is the way to go. Understandably, video games can’t really ‘go on tour’, but this shouldn’t stop them from making the paid content harder to steal (the equivalent of sneaking past security into a concert), and more rewarding.

Congrats on your impending graduation!

“At the end of the day, the people who “do stuff” will always have the advantage over the people who “don’t do stuff”. Pirates are slowly motivating ever increasing levels of DRM and in time, I hate to say it, DRM is going to win. That’s because the people motivated to make the DRM work (the people who do stuff) greatly outnumber the motivation of the people who don’t do stuff.

One can easily picture a future in 5 years in which the telecoms, the PC makers, the OS makers, and the software makers have teamed up (and you only need any two of them to do so) to eliminate unauthorized usage of a given piece of IP. If you don’t think it can be done, then you probably don’t have much experience in writing software. The DRM and copy protection of today is piddly 1-party solutions.

The DRM of tomorrow will involve DRM parternships where one piece of protect IP can key itself off another. Thus, if even one item on your system is pirated (whether it be cracked or not) it will get foiled as long as there is one item in the system that you use that isn’t cracked (whether it be the OS or something in your hardware or whatever). It will, as a practical matter, make piracy virtually impossible.

Computer games and video will likely be the first two targets because piracy of them is so rampant. A pirated copy of something doesn’t mean it’s a lost sale. But piracy does cause lost sales. Moreover, it’s just incredibly frustrating to see people using the fruits of your labor as if they were somehow entitled to it.

I have long been and continue to be a big proponent of alternative ways to increase sales. I don’t like piracy being blamed for the failure of a game because it tends to obscure more relevant issues which prevent us, as an industry, from improving what we do. But at the same time, I don’t like pirates trying to rationalize away their behavior because they do cost sales. I’ve seen people in our forums over the years boldly admit they’re pirating our game but that they are willing to buy it if we add X or Y to it — as if it’s a negotiation.

I don’t like DRM. But the pirates are ensuring that our future is going to be full of it because at the end of the day, the people who make stuff are going to protect themselves. It’s only a question of when and how intensive the DRM will get. And that’s something only the pirates can change — if you’re using a pirated piece of software, either stop using it or buy it.”