quote:Original post by Fastjack
Abandonware- Am i mistaken in believing that is legal?
Yes. Copyright is automatic. It must be explicitly waived by the copyright holder for the work to be considered Public Domain.
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Sean Timarco Baggaley
Pirating and AbandonWare
Yes. Copyright is automatic. It must be explicitly waived by the copyright holder for the work to be considered Public Domain.
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Sean Timarco Baggaley
quote:If tons of people start pirating a given piece of software, what do you think will happen? It''s surely not going to drop prices if high price concerns is what you have.
Prove it! A comparison between PC and console game prices clearly show that the platform with the most illegal copying has the cheapest prices.
quote:Original post by HenryApequote:If tons of people start pirating a given piece of software, what do you think will happen? It''s surely not going to drop prices if high price concerns is what you have.
Prove it! A comparison between PC and console game prices clearly show that the platform with the most illegal copying has the cheapest prices.
Wrong. The PC market has more prospective buyers, which means that the demand will most likely be higher. If the demand is higher, they won''t have to have as high prices to meet their quota.
--SuperRoy
[ Author:: Linux GameDev Articles ] [ Programmer:: WhitespaceUnlimited ] [ Webdesigner:: CTH3.com Webdesign ]
quote:Original post by SuperRoy
Wrong. The PC market has more prospective buyers, which means that the demand will most likely be higher. If the demand is higher, they won''t have to have as high prices to meet their quota.
Actually this isn''t correct. There are many more PCs than consoles but most industry research shows that only a % of those PCs are used for gaming (and many of those are limited to the odd game of minesweeper.
Consoles on the otherhand have only one purpose - playing games (ignoring the 100 or so that people may be using to try and hack together dev systems or the like).
Regardless of the above the prices are not set due to the levels of piracy (despite what publishers may claim). Console prices are higher because the games cost $8.00 more per unit to make and because the publishers believe that the current price is the optimum price to make the most profit from their investment.
Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions
Game Development & Design consultant
quote:(ignoring the 100 or so that people may be using to try and hack together dev systems or the like).
A more serious problem are the people who just buy a PS2 to watch DVDs. Sony was complaining about that in some article a while ago.
quote:Regardless of the above the prices are not set due to the levels of piracy ... because the publishers believe that the current price is the optimum price to make the most profit from their investment.
Surely the amount of illegal copying affects price-profit estimation.
Anyway, console game prices are probably also pushed up by consoles being like VCRs that only play movies from one publisher. I wonder how the XBox would have done against the PS2 if Microsoft had created an open console, a "VCR that could play movies from any publisher", and not relied so much on the profit from games to subsidize the console.
Considering how much money they have been willing to lose on the Xbox this far, I''m sure they could have taken the risk if they wanted to. The console may have cost a bit more, but it would at least have had a serious differentiating quality.
With Microsoft''s deal for their controlled network service, they are making Sony look like the ''open'' alternative though.
With Microsoft''s deal for their controlled network service, they are making Sony look like the ''open'' alternative though.
quote:Original post by HenryApe
Anyway, console game prices are probably also pushed up by consoles being like VCRs that only play movies from one publisher. I wonder how the XBox would have done against the PS2 if Microsoft had created an open console, a "VCR that could play movies from any publisher", and not relied so much on the profit from games to subsidize the console.
It would have crashed and burned. Just like the previous attempts at an "open" console have: the 3DO and the later M2. (The latter, which was intended to be "3DO Mk. 2", never even reached market.)
All it takes is one manufacturer to choose the current approach and the masses will come flocking.
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Sean Timarco Baggaley
With the losses that the Xbox have had, it would probably have crashed and burnt for any other company than Microsoft too.
Microsoft is in the unique position to base its console on Windows and DirectX to allow for easy portability from PCs, and they have shown that they have enough raw power in the market to push even a badly differentiated product into an entrenched market.
Heck, even if an open Xbox had become a premium console, like the 3DO, Microsoft could possibly still have been able to achieve its current 10% market share and would have made a lot more money in the process.
Maybe some big movie company should try it for home video then... (or maybe they have, but I haven''t heard of it?)
Microsoft is in the unique position to base its console on Windows and DirectX to allow for easy portability from PCs, and they have shown that they have enough raw power in the market to push even a badly differentiated product into an entrenched market.
Heck, even if an open Xbox had become a premium console, like the 3DO, Microsoft could possibly still have been able to achieve its current 10% market share and would have made a lot more money in the process.
quote:All it takes is one manufacturer to choose the current approach and the masses will come flocking.
Maybe some big movie company should try it for home video then... (or maybe they have, but I haven''t heard of it?)
Interestingly, it seems as if piracy technology is advancing faster than security technology. I think its inevitable that big wigs in the buisness will finally find a way that its nearly impossible (or perhaps just more likely to get caught) to pirate software. ITs gonna be something really annoying, like MS''s activation scheme, but then again, we cooked our own goose (this is the collective "we" as in the general public). Maybe that will be the point at which people start switching to other operating systems.... just conjecture...
Maybe we will discover a different pardigm of profit, where it matters little if people pirate software. Now that would be interesting.
Maybe we will discover a different pardigm of profit, where it matters little if people pirate software. Now that would be interesting.
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