SES Jutland preview at Armchair General

[jdkbph]

Originally Posted by CaptHawkeye

Look, i've got no love for Microsoft and their balsa wood Xbox 360s. Frankly the "WOW LOOK HOW I CAN WRITE MICRO$OFT LOL" thing is sooooo old.

Well, I'm old.... and that's what you get when that happens.

I just won't care. Honestly who doesn't just crack everything they own these days? I've cracked every game I own and i've bought every one of them legally. It turns out i'm not a trained monkey, and think dev's and their CD identification bull can go to hell.

I hear you. But unless you're good enough to be able to crack it yourself, that might not work in this case. Believe me, after the second time I got locked out of a game I bought and paid good money for, you think I didn't think about that? Sure, I investigated the alternatives. And I did find a crack. The problem is the crack does not permit the auto-update feature to function. And as you may know, SES updates this game on a regular basis. I think the current revision is like the 30th update since the game was released. I think the crack has also been updated, but it doesn't happen on a regular or consistent basis.

If were a true pirate who did not pay for the game I could live with that. But I'm not.... I paid for it, and I want those patches.

My guess as to the reason the crack is not kept current is because, unlike the popular FPS shooters and RTS type games, there just isn't enough interest in a hard core naval wargame - free or otherwise - to make it worth their while. Which begs the question, why does SES bother wasting time and money on a super sophisticated DRM - time and money that could be spent making the game better - when all it really does is annoy legitimate customers to the point where they're out there b|tch|ng about it all over the internet!

It's just that to them, the number of sales saved by DRM in the short term are worth it. Especially since most sales HAPPEN on or not long after release.

Well, if by sales you mean total revenue generated by a product or product line, I'd have to say yes and no. And this brings me to another aspect of SES' business model that I find... curious.

Consider Silent Hunter III. The game still sells 5+ years after it was released. Harpoon in all it's various flavors, all based on a pair of game engines 8+ years old, still sells. Why? Modders. Continuous development leading to enhancement and expansion of a product far beyond what a publisher would allow or a developer trying to make a living could afford to do on their own.

These afore-mentioned games - like many non-console type PC games these days - were released in a marginal (at best) state with regard to quality, accuracy, feature functionality, etc.. Yet they didn't just wither and die like so many others over the years. By leaving the data and the game engine configurations accessible, they left the door open for the user community to come in and clean up much of the mess for them. Whether this was foresight or dumb luck, the results speak for themselves. Not only have these games enjoyed a much longer shelf life that you would otherwise expect, but the interest level has been kept high enough that add-ons and sequels are (apparently) profitable as well.

In other words, the development effort that went into these games was still reaping reward for the publisher (or whoever held the rights) far beyond what might otherwise be expected because of mods and modders.

Contrast this with what SES is doing. They encrypt their data and configuration files. You cannot so much as change the text description of a gun from metric to imperial. I tried. The text file exists but it doesn't do anything. The real files are locked down.

They claim that they do this to preserve the integrity of MP. There are however, other more sensible ways to do this. And again, one might ask why even bother? As with the DRM argument, you're dealing with a different crowd here. These aren't a bunch of Mario Cart kiddies trying to score Xbox Achievements.

I suspect the real reason this was done was to specifically discourage modding. Based on some of the conversations we've had on this subject with the SES folks, you don't have to strain too hard reading between the lines to figure out they see modding as a possible threat to potential revenue streams.

The irony is they never did release any add-ons for DG... although the potential to expand and improve the game is certianly there. So again, all they've really accomplished here is to waste development time and money on another way to annoy their customers.

And now they're about to release Jutland...

Santayana might as well have been talking about these guys when he wrote Reason in Common Sense a hundred years ago.



JD