Games not broken on release?

I think he does understand, he's just saying that he disagrees with it on a fundamental level.

alexender000 said:

They are not HIS in the first place.

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Especially this part, about having a license instead of a copy. I agree with him.

To tell you the truth, I do agree with you on the DRM issues, what I read, and I might have mis-judged or mis-read, is that he felt that the company were acting illegally by enforcing their EULA with WoW or limited intalls or other DRM when in fact they are not. You could make a contract for just about anything, like a contract saying: "If you buy my game, I own your House" and it would be legal if the moron sign it.

That being said the current contract does suck and I agree about that with you 100% but they ARE legal as soon as you sign it.

The argument about IP is crap anyways. IP is just the unique piece that only that supplier knows.

Coca Cola has IP over their Cola recipe. But you don't see them telling you how you can drink it.
Johnson & Johnson has IP over their washing powder recipe. But you don't see them telling you what brand washing machine you must use.
Ford has IP over the design of their cars. But you don't see them telling you that you can only drive it on three different roads, and then to access those roads you need to contact Ford to get authority to drive on those roads.

Digital media is the only market where the companies believe it is their right to dictate how you use the product (coke, washing detergent, car). All products come from a mold (car design, recipe, software code) yet digital media is the only time we get told how to use it. We bought the end product, not the mold!

And that, ladies & gentlemen, is the argument against DRM etc.

alexender000 said:

All of this being said, piracy IS illegal, whether it is actually damaging the companies, to what extend and whether it is actually wrong to pirate is another matter entirely.

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This is not true. If the value of the copyrighted item in question is not over 1000 dollars, then you can not be legally prosecuted. That is the USA Copyright law, called NET Act, google it.

alexender000 said:

P.P.S.: Any EULA you see when installing a game is a contract over a contract. I.e.: The laws still applies, but the EULA contract applies over them and are overrides meaning that in case where they disagree, the EULA has predominance. Also you DO sign that contract by clicking the "I Agree" button and actually installing the game. If you don't you can't install the game and should return it.

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Wow, also not true. Contracts require specific criteria to be binding, and the clicking of a button in a computer game does not meet these grounds.

alexender000 said:

That might be true for you but other like Jeckel for exemple don't seem to understand the concept when he talk about doing whatever he please with his games.

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O, I understand copyright law. You keep saying the way you think things work, so post some laws that support your argument. Google Copyright Laws or NET Act or Department of Justice Home Page. You'll find that no where in USA law is there a clause that gives the Gaming Industry the godly right to impose their personal will upon their customers.

alexender000 said:

To tell you the truth, I do agree with you on the DRM issues, what I read, and I might have mis-judged or mis-read, is that he felt that the company were acting illegally by enforcing their EULA with WoW

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I don't think EULAs are illegal, but they most certainly are NOT legally binding contracts.

alexender000 said:

or limited intalls or other DRM when in fact they are not.

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If the DRM leaves anything on your computer after it is uninstalled, then yes, it is illegal. There is a class action lawsuit pending on this matter as we speak.

alexender000 said:

You could make a contract for just about anything, like a contract saying: "If you buy my game, I own your House" and it would be legal if the moron sign it.

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Right, and if I had signed my signiture to any thing, it would be a contract. Clicking an "I Agree" button is no where near the same.

alexender000 said:

That being said the current contract does suck and I agree about that with you 100% but they ARE legal as soon as you sign it.

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Show me a single law that says clicking a button makes a binding contract.

Dale said:

The argument about IP is crap anyways. IP is just the unique piece that only that supplier knows.

Coca Cola has IP over their Cola recipe. But you don't see them telling you how you can drink it.
Johnson & Johnson has IP over their washing powder recipe. But you don't see them telling you what brand washing machine you must use.
Ford has IP over the design of their cars. But you don't see them telling you that you can only drive it on three different roads, and then to access those roads you need to contact Ford to get authority to drive on those roads.

Digital media is the only market where the companies believe it is their right to dictate how you use the product (coke, washing detergent, car). All products come from a mold (car design, recipe, software code) yet digital media is the only time we get told how to use it. We bought the end product, not the mold!

And that, ladies & gentlemen, is the argument against DRM etc.

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Exactly.

I have found to page in 30s that confirm that pushing the "I agree" is a legally binding contract. Now, I DO think this is unfair, I DO agree with Dale's post completely, I do agree with your arguments.

Does that stop the MPAA and RIAA form suing everyone left and right? Not so much.

Again, I'm not agreeing with the practice, I just wanted to confirm some points.

Here's my links:

http://www.legalserviceindia.com/articles/econtracts.htm
http://lfpress.ca/cgi-bin/publish.cgi?p=174328&s=shopping
http://www.around.com/agree.html

Before you argue, I know the sites are not American, but the legal philosophy on the matter should be global (or at very least it appear to be) and if it's not, why does nobody is challenging the EULAs? They are challenging the DRMs and the spyware, but not the validity of the EULA itself. At least not that I am aware of.

It really is sad that a small game company could in 1994 release an approximately 5MB game with almost no bugs, but in 2008 a massive game company like Firaxis releases a game in as poor shape as this one is.

The standards game companies put themselves to nowadays is really pathetic. Post-release patches are both a blessing and a curse to games I think.

The problem is the legality of EULAs hasn't been addressed in many court cases and the ones that have addressed it don't speak on EULAs in general, but instead to specific uses and applying specific clauses to certain parties.

Here is a quote I found while googling the topic.

For the license to take legal effect, the licenser must be able to present proof that the presumed licensee has been willing to sign away the copy owner rights granted under copyright: The international copyright treaty, Article 4, equates computer programs with literary works. Thus, computer programs are automatically placed under copyright, which grants the copy owner normal rights use, and others fair use of the computer material. The signing away of one's legal rights can normally only be done by a properly signed paper contract, or under some circumstances, orally if supported by witnesses or recordings, or, in even more restricted use, via electronic signatures issued by the local government, as a person charged with violating a license agreement otherwise can merely claim not to know who opened the box or clicked the agreement box in the install software, and it is not possible for the licenser to provide proof of who is the purported licencee, nor has a person accused of breaching a license agreement any obligation to provide such proof. In addition, legal rights can only be signed away if local law permits it; so a properly signed paper contract may not be enough to abrogate copy owners' rights, unless there are special legal provisions admitting it.

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Basicly, if you don't understand what you are agreeing to or there is no way to conclusivily verify who clicked the little "I Agree" button, then the contract can not be held as valid.

Getting back on topic....

Kamamura said:

Do you remember any from recent times? Seriously, I can't. Paradox games need at least 6 month to be patched out of the most serious flaws. Total War games are released and left quite broken (Rome and Medieval 2 were disasters). Colonization 2 is a wreck.

What is the world coming to?

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Very true.

It just dawned on me that Civ 4 Complete (++) implies that the previous releases of Civ 4 were incomplete a.k.a. unfinished

@ DrSpock: 5 MB?
Heck there have been some earlier classics (which are still played today on mobile phones and whatnot, if those would be counted in a regular way by number of users they might very well be the most successful games ever made if perhaps not commercially.) which weren't bigger than 5 KByte and still! play nicely today... (though most of the more complicated of those games back then quite suffered from interface issues which made them hard to play. And the vast majority is just simple in the extreme. Not detracting from their fun gameplay though) and plenty of games in the 3-digit KByte range which can be described as nothing less than great classics. No need to get out the MB baton for that argument.

But give developers memory... (still one can't deny some hefty improvements in smooth gameplay and improved interface + non-eye-destroying visuals though...)

I remember Dynablaster's 1,5 MB to Bomberman's 50 MB (or later 100+MB?) and its still basically the same game... (oh and Dynablaster had an extensive single-player-mode + a basic but fun multiplayer one.
Bomberman just had extended multiplayer... Talking of dumbing down...)
Both not the best games or greatest classics but its very telling...

And the most beautiful thing about small games and less resources is that devs needed to be much less "wasteful" + possibilities for errors / oversights was much lower leading to polished games even without much extra-time spent in testing and tweaking.

If the real classics are played today (and i mean games which don't suffer badly from having those old graphics. Things like tetris + clones, elite + various spinnoffs, civ + various followups.) it proves that graphics alone just don't help in making a game good (because a lot of them still play out in a great way. At least if their graphics are not totally eye-destroying and the interface doesn't make the game unplayable.) and that lack of those needn't make a game bad + that the mind is quite capable of imagining things without the game depicting anything for it.
Its all down to gameplay / fun in the end. (and the size of some of those games (in game) is just mind-boggling (compared to the space they take on a hard-drive.) Say: Elite... Bigger gameworld than many of its offspring. Which literally are sometimes millions! of times bigger in terms of drive-space needed.)



The most important improvements though have been in the areas of multiplayer and quite lately casual-gaming / party gaming.
One can complain about OOs and the likes all day but serial cable has been a disease as have dial-up modems and Internet-play without things like game-finding apps (like gamespy, battlenet and the likes.).

And one can't deny the success and necessity of multiplayer / casual + that they would not really have been possible in the old times to that extent.
If only the quality of the the old games could have been preserved. (and some of them needn't have been lost in the process which makes it even sadder. This part is especially true for Civ4:Col if it wouldn't have been rushed all that hard and unfinished to fit the EtoA. Which makes the whole thing more or less impossible anyways...)

As special note goes to modding which might have been possible back then, but the scope has been taken to a whole new level in comparison due to the possibilities of the net. (That requires a company/publisher which allows it though (unless you want to stray to darker paths...). But Firaxis / Take 2 and a few others are decent in that regard.)

Sadly really outstanding AI (which work out in a fun way. Not those unbeatable cess-AIs) is still rather hard to come by. But difficulty-levels and handicaps are at least some kind of adequate compensation for that and the reasons are understandable...

Blackmantle said:

which weren't bigger than 5 KByte and still! play nicely today...

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This reminds me of the lecture Cranky Kong gives in Donkey Kong Country for SNES, and the old man was absolutely right: when it comes to games, nothing should come before gameplay.
Graphics and sound are nice and all, but a game would have to have some pretty dismal graphics [and sound can be muted, if worse comes to worse] for it to take away from the experience for me; any serious bugs in gameplay [I honestly don't think Col2 is quite as bad as some others do, though a couple features are poorly implemented, I'm bound to say] can kill the enjoyability of a game pretty quickly for me.

I think one of the problems facing games today is the size of the team required to make a game that will be considered 'up to snuff', while something like Col1 or Doom was mainly programmed [I'm not counting things like art and music, even though they're important, because that's not where you find bugs in games] by what, 3 or 4 guys?

Dale said:

The argument about IP is crap anyways. IP is just the unique piece that only that supplier knows.

Coca Cola has IP over their Cola recipe. But you don't see them telling you how you can drink it.
Johnson & Johnson has IP over their washing powder recipe. But you don't see them telling you what brand washing machine you must use.
Ford has IP over the design of their cars. But you don't see them telling you that you can only drive it on three different roads, and then to access those roads you need to contact Ford to get authority to drive on those roads.

Digital media is the only market where the companies believe it is their right to dictate how you use the product (coke, washing detergent, car). All products come from a mold (car design, recipe, software code) yet digital media is the only time we get told how to use it. We bought the end product, not the mold!

And that, ladies & gentlemen, is the argument against DRM etc.

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Dale, you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what Intellectual Property is. Intellectual Property is a broad legal term that covers basically any type of control over a non-tangible asset. It includes Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks, and similar things. Secret recipes (trade secrets) are just one aspect of it.

Digital media relies heavily on IP laws to maintain any kind of profitability. Coca-Cola and Ford don't really compare in that they don't sell their trade secrets per se, they just sell the products that result. If I sell you a Coke, you can't go home to your computer and copy it a hundred times and sell the copies. If you did reverse engineer the recipe and use it to make your own coke, they would be very much able to prosecute you. Without IP laws, you're basically saying that any piece of media becomes free for all once its published, which of course means the end of the for-profit games industry.

Now, its true that the games/music industry has probably been heavy-handed in how its handled DRM issues, and has hurt itself by not understanding and working with modern internet culture, but it is every bit their right to decide how their code is used. When you buy a CD or game, you're buying the sound it makes or the things it puts on the screen. The code itself is still very much owned by the company, and every time you approve a EULA, you legally accept this. Without control of the code, they have no way of making money from it.

Thundercracker said:

Dale, you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what Intellectual Property is. Intellectual Property is a broad legal term that covers basically any type of control over a non-tangible asset. It includes Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks, and similar things. Secret recipes (trade secrets) are just one aspect of it.

Digital media relies heavily on IP laws to maintain any kind of profitability. Coca-Cola and Ford don't really compare in that they don't sell their trade secrets per se, they just sell the products that result. If I sell you a Coke, you can't go home to your computer and copy it a hundred times and sell the copies. If you did reverse engineer the recipe and use it to make your own coke, they would be very much able to prosecute you. Without IP laws, you're basically saying that any piece of media becomes free for all once its published, which of course means the end of the for-profit games industry.

Now, its true that the games/music industry has probably been heavy-handed in how its handled DRM issues, and has hurt itself by not understanding and working with modern internet culture, but it is every bit their right to decide how their code is used. When you buy a CD or game, you're buying the sound it makes or the things it puts on the screen. The code itself is still very much owned by the company, and every time you approve a EULA, you legally accept this. Without control of the code, they have no way of making money from it.

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You basically summed up the argument I was going to make. Because Coke is a physical product, the consumer can't reproduce it like you can with digital content.

The only thing I would add is that I do understand where a number of people on the other side are coming from... as I've said elsewhere, consumer property rights are inherently at odds with IP. This was even true before digital media. The patent/copyright system offered protections to inventors and creators by ensuring that they would be able to make a profit off of their product. This created tremendous incentive to innovate and led to a technological boom, but it came at the price that people couldn't freely improve upon someone else's design. In an age where the product itself is the blueprint/recipe for its duplication (as is the case with digital media), that tension has become even more acute.

Tip too far in favor of one, and there's no incentive to create anything because you'll have no way to make a living from it. Tip too far in favor of the other, and consumers are not entitled to actually have anything they can consider their own, and they essentially become feudal peasants that can be robbed at the whim of the corporate lords.

Some countries have managed to disregard the rights of both groups (in favor of the right of the State or "society"), others (like my home country of Brazil) have fallen short on IP rights and enforcement. I don't know of too many that have driven to the other extreme, but that doesn't stop the RIAA from trying... But many governments have found a relatively good balance between the two and are only in need of some tweaking here and there.

Thundercracker said:

Digital media relies heavily on IP laws to maintain any kind of profitability for distributors, investors, and other middlemen, which have been rendered obsolete by advances in communications technology too numerous to list here.

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Fixed.

Without IP laws, you're basically saying that any piece of media becomes free for all once its published, which of course means the end of the for-profit games industry.

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Firstly, no. Secondly, this is a bad thing? Let me explain. I remember a time when I could go to the store and pick up a long sheet of shareware CDs in cheap plastic holders for $5. Remember those? That's how I first picked up Doom. I got the entire first episode of Doom with no crazy limitations for a week's allowance. And I got a bunch of other cool games! Nifty! A year or two later I shelled out the $20 for the other three episodes of Doom. Let me reiterate my point in bold letters: I paid $5 for a demo that was more complete and gave me more hours of enjoyment than any game that has come out this year.

There never used to be a gaming 'industry.' There were programmers who did what they did because they enjoyed it and they got a bit of compensation for their trouble if they did a particularly good job. Now that we have enough middlemen to justify calling it an industry the programmers get paid just as poorly, the quality of games has gone down, and new programmers and studios find it much more difficult to get face time with gamers because the industry's marketing machine has them constantly occupied with carptastic games such as Spore and Simcity Societies. How is this good for anyone except the middlemen?

Maybe the gaming 'industry' has to die so the leeches fall off and we can get back to a stable gaming community. Neither the programmers and artists nor the gamers will go away. They might get pared down, but at this point that's a good thing too.

I would have gladly paid $5 for Colonization II as it is right now and then paid another $20 when the full game was released whether or not IP laws were invoked. If the price is low enough it's nice to have an official copy of the game and get all the nifty doodads that come with it (box, art, manual). It's also nice being able to support a worthwhile endeavor as long as it's not unreasonably pricey. How many people would donate to charity if the minimum buy-in was $60? Warm fuzzies are not worth that much.

When you buy a CD or game, you're buying the sound it makes or the things it puts on the screen. The code itself is still very much owned by the company, and every time you approve a EULA, you legally accept this. Without control of the code, they have no way of making money from it.

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Not to beat a dead horse, but carrying this into other media what am I buying when I buy a book? The images invoked in my head by the words on the paper? The physical paper and binding materials, but not the words? What if the book is electronic? Now it seems a lot more like a program and I think I'm buying a copy of that program. There are many like it, but this one is mine. Same goes for a car, or a book, or a can of Coke, or a potato. Just because it happens to be easier to make yet another copy of my copy of a program than it is to make a copy of a can of Coke is the publisher's problem, not mine. There's no need to resort to legal voodoo here, just make a product that people find worthwhile. If I plant and grow potatoes am I pirating agriculture? Either way it doesn't matter. I buy my potatoes at the store because I find it more worthwhile to buy ready-grown potatoes than to copy them myself. There is no need to stamp an EULA on every individual potato to convince me to pay for it.

Any of your arguments about the game license are completely bunk... LOL @

To tell you the truth, I do agree with you on the DRM issues, what I read, and I might have mis-judged or mis-read, is that he felt that the company were acting illegally by enforcing their EULA with WoW or limited intalls or other DRM when in fact they are not. You could make a contract for just about anything, like a contract saying: "If you buy my game, I own your House" and it would be legal if the moron sign it.

That being said the current contract does suck and I agree about that with you 100% but they ARE legal as soon as you sign it.

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if you signed a contract such as "If you buy my game, I own your house", I, with 100% certainty will guarantee that such contracts would never be held up in court, at least not here in the U.S.A..... you really think our judges are that stupid? Even if such morons would agree to such a thing, our government still protects you from such idiocy.

just wanted to get that out....

oh and BTW Colonization 2 is without a doubt the WORST game I've purchased since SuperPower2 (about 5 years).... very disappointing.... it took me about 20 minutes to realize it was complete and utter garbage, considering on the map provided, you always start near brazil, and you cannot build a mine on iron. enough said. Sid Meir and the develpment team have apparently grown ******ed with age.

Do us all a favor and stop making games.... other developers are creating much better games as of late... Not to mention, user created mods are clearly much more creative and fun the the crap fireaxis keeps rolling out.

If I plant and grow potatoes am I pirating agriculture? Either way it doesn't matter. I buy my potatoes at the store because I find it more worthwhile to buy ready-grown potatoes than to copy them myself. There is no need to stamp an EULA on every individual potato to convince me to pay for it.

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Monsanto and the US legislative and judicial branches seem to think so..... see the US implemented policy for farming in Iraq and that awful law suit from IIRC 2002 where a farmer was sued by Monsanto for using genetically modified plants that had grown in his farm that came of seeds brought by the wind from a Monsanto farm ( BTW Monsanto won ). Even in that field the copyright issues are starting to make damage......

I agree that companies should have as much control over the code of the game as they like, but I haven't been talking about hacking the source code or anything like that. I'm talking about a consumers right to own the property they pay for in the store. With a game that is the box, manual, the cd the game comes on, and the files on the cd. Those are bought and payed for, so they are yours.

That doesn't mean you can sell copies of the game or reverse engineer the code of the game, these are what Copyright and such laws are all about. EULAs, DRMs, ect are just ways the Industry trys to limit the usefulness of a single product so that consumers are forced to buy more of the product.

And I have to agree with the above poster, the Gaming Industry is so not nessesary for games to be made. Games were around long before the Industry and will be around long after.

Well, if you want to look at it that way, Jeckel, nobody's going to come take your CD away... that's yours to use as you like. What's on the CD however...