Hey Ubi, consider this...

janh · 04-18-10, 03:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kylania

Plausible or not, it's what they'd like you to believe.

Nice summary of the GAO article. Hopefully time for alledgements is passing an industries start to take a closer look at what they are doing. For most of them sales have dramatically increased in the last 5 years (with exception of the economic downturn year 2009), also Ubisofts. Technically they don't have anything to complain, except if they'd want to rip of customer even worse than now.

I agree that if they want(ed) to fare better (and see piracy decrease), then they should start delivering valuable products again. No "beta releases" with serious patching already expected in the first month, add manuals that are interesting, informative and even educative again, and add some nice gimmicks like a good KM-Map. Add new features to your software, instead of just polishing the graphics and thereby remove older features that people are used to from predecessors (such as other sub types, 43-45, etc). Advancement means to deliver more, not less! Or why could you expect anyone to buy a new edition of a book that lost half the original chapters???

I think software industry is whining on a very high (success) level, and it is doing so because in the past decade it hasn't be questioned, criticized or "shaken up". They have experiments with a lot of "nasty" things on customers, and they have gotten through with it. So, they learned that they can go even further...

PS. What really annoys me is actually not that they keep delivering "sub par" quality software for a quality software price. That's their problem, and they can do so as long as they can find someone to buy it. I won't, but enough people will fall for it. But if their sales suffer from that, then they ought to attribute it to the right reason (themselves), and not just point fingers at some easily attackable entity ("pirates", "used sellers",...). And then even have the loyal customers suffer this nonsense.

And I really hope we'll soon see a "2nd SHV release date" -- the no-DRM release...