Digital Dave

Well, raising a Siberian Husky can definitely be an adventure. Huskies have a tendency to bore very easily. Which, makes sense due to their work ethic as sled dogs. Well, Calix is getting big enough to annoy the living heck out of me when he is bored. So, I decided to take him for a walk/sprint journey tonight… *listens… to… nothing*

Yup, he’s zonked the heck out. Problem solved (for tonight, anyway)

In other news… I’ve updated the development page with my projects. I have yet to include the majority of the downloads and source code, but it’ll be there soon. I reformatted my laptop, and my desktop just recently, so finding all of the files that I need and re-installing all of my libraries might take a while.

Game Development Lesson:
Don’t overburden, loyal, devoted, paying customers, just because Piracy exists.

I ended up getting 2K’s Bioshock demo downloaded today. Great game. Visually stimulating, and incredibly creepy (especially if you turn the lights out). Awesome storyline with some outstanding game mechanics to back it up. I want more… But one big problem is stopping me from buying this game. For whatever reason, the developers decided to use such harsh protection on the game, which only allows the user to install the game twice. If you want to install it on another PC, you’ve got to uninstall it on one of your other 2 computers first. Or if you format your drive, you’ve got to uninstall it first. If your computer crashes and you reformat, guess your out of luck. Well, not entirely, but you’ll be burdened with making phone calls.

Game development companies can not escape a pirate. All of this protection is an action provoked by a studio to ‘slow’ the cracking cycle for a pirate. But, face it, no studio can out wit some of the brightest individuals that are roaming this net, unemployed, with a tremendous amount of free time. In the mean time, while j0Hkr07 is busy releasing the cracked version of the game, the loyal fan base that has never pirated anything in their life are burdened by this protection feature that has absolutely no benefit for themselves. Instead, they are stuck with trying to maneuver past this issue, and ultimately may be led to a decision where pirating a game is easier than buying the thing.

I’m not saying that game development companies should, all of a sudden, stop protecting their software. What I am saying is that they don’t need to be doing it in such a way that causes substantial harm to their loyal fan base, which in turn, just loses customers. How many times have you pulled out an old classic, popped it into your computer and played it? 10 years from now, I don’t want to be trying to install Bioshock receiving an error: “You’ve exceeded your installation amount, please call so-and-so.” Newsflash: So-and-so is out of business, and your out of luck. Thanks, sucker.