Bugger it, I'm bored since Civ crashed when I traded for the world map so I'll bite and wade into this. machete's a good name. straight and pointless.
We dun needa worry about these issues here in Australia. EB stores are everywhere and offer 7 day refund no questions asked on all PC games. At christmas they give you 6 weeks to return it. Seriously, even if you just simply don't like it is your reason. All 100% legal. I still take it further though, no-cding about 1 in 5 that aren't value for money.
I buy tonnes of games from EB. I return about 2/3rds of em. Used to be 1/3rd but unfinished games and devs with their hand out for begging for charity has become something of the norm. If they are good, I am happy to keep em and they can keep my money. If they are playable in doses, but not worth the 100 bucks we have to pay for games in Aus (78$US) I chuck on a no-cd patch and exchange em.
Civ4 I expected to keep cos it was likely to be good, and comes with an actual manual. Useful manuals often factor in whether it's worth payin for (read: keeping). It runs like silk on mine, but if I was crashing like many I'd have put on a no-cd or burnt it for blue-moon play only, cos that's all it'd be good for.
Small developers can sometimes be factored into decision (minor factor). I kept Warlords Battlecry III because it's from a small developer here in Aus, even though it was barely different from II and I, and as such really should've been sold as x-pacs not full price games. Decent x-pac, but that's all it was, maybe 10 hours play out of it.
I could care less for Machete's style of concerns about the poor individual who is supposedly not to be held accountable for the crappy games their company produces. No time for excuses. There are plenty of companies who produce good games that are value for money despite being on small teams on small budgets. It doesn't have to have state of the art graphics. It just has to work, and work 'as advertised' without the falsehoods. Like every business, some manage despite odds and some fall into the 9 out of 10 of all businesses that fail due to poor management and lack of foresight.
These so-called individual downtrodden employees with their starving families have the option to show the integrity to not work for a team who releases sub-par crap expecting charity from me to foot the bills. Even if fired from economic redundancy, they still have the experiences gained, experience many people would do anything for, and can use this to next time find work for a group with more vision, more talent, and more integrity. Or alternatively, maybe they are part of the fault in the crappy release and shouldn't be working in the industry anyway. There's a lot of that crowd in gaming, that's for damn sure. Always plenty of cleaners jobs floating about, no matter where you live in the world.
Any game with the bodgy types of secure-rom's that cause hours of headaches to get a game installed, playing or the like, always get burnt and returned as protest vote.
Regarding downloading - Releasing games staggered is a factor for many people including myself. RTS style games for serious MP gamers especially where if you don't start with the community from the beginning, your skill starts waaaay behind and after missing the boat on the forming communities private games where the real action happens, it never truly catches up. Most games are 6 weeks to months after US here in AUS. I d/led one RTS and it's x-pac that I played a lot for a whole year. I would've preferred to have bought it, but if it means starting late I don't bother cos the experience for this particlar goal is cheapened and not worth it. I don't expect my single protest vote in such cases to make the difference, but I wish it would.
Respecting the law just for it's own sake is not a frame of mind I can relate to and I leave it to the sheep. Some laws are good laws that everyone who is moral respects, and some laws are self-evidently unfair. When the door swings both ways, only a small minority will break a given law. When a company can misrepresent their product, screw you in any of a hundred ways and that's supposed to be okay because it's expected, and meanwhile you have no recourse, and conversly instead you can go to jail for protecting yourself, then it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that it is not just a minority who doesn't respect the law.
It's always been this way. Laws that no-one follows are not fair laws and never have worked and never will work.
Only thing I agree with from machete style argument here is that it's not moral to actually make money off their work, selling pirated copies or the like. Being the moral element, it's naturally the one most people agree with.
In case you misunderstood me, I meant a good example against piracy.
