i get it. looking at your other posts . . . i found out you use meedio. you should check out media portal (http://www.team-mediaportal.com/) . . . i never had a problem with it. especially considering meedio is no longer sold or supported.
So now I know what the torrent you said you found before the one I alerted you too (if they were different) was about. Haha, boy, am I extremely happy I didn't download a pirated S&M. Paying 35 bucks for the full season and no gay porn was definitely a great deal.
Maybe they could make that an option when you download each episode! "Click here if you would like 800MB of gay porn with your download." Just, you know, in case anybody was interested.
i don't get it . . . there's difference between a no cd 'patch' and a crack . . . anything you're using to patch sam and max is quite different from a no cd patch, in that the loader would most likely fill your registry with random product registration info, which would also be sent to telltale. if telltale ever pooled those registrations, and block them in, say, the version, you could well find that you're waiting for a crack to apply to that version so you can play it again. which, in actual fact, despite you owning the game, is still piracy of sorts.
I suppose. But the companies force me to pirate what I officially own.
For example, I own TVtool, but because I tend to change my e-mail often, I never get the updated keys for new versions. It was easier for me to find a key generator and update versions that way, then waiting weeks for a response for a new key.
Or when I had to crack the floppy versions of Sam & Max and DOTT to get rid of the annoying copy protection, until I bought the 'Talkie' CDs that did not have protection. And so on, and so on....
As a paying customer, I should not be annoyed more then people who just pirate it without paying.
Hopefully Telltale will forgive me for using the cracked version of Sam & Max instead of the version I bought. Otherwise they can credit my Visa back.
i get it. looking at your other posts . . . i found out you use meedio. you should check out media portal (http://www.team-mediaportal.com/) . . . i never had a problem with it. especially considering meedio is no longer sold or supported.
Yeah I will have to try that out one day.
Meedio is another program I pirated for 6-8 months (30 day trial was way to short to properly evalute) before I had it working to a state that I thought it was worth paying cash for. Then 3 months later Yahoo bought them out, making it a waste of my money. Oh well...
I suppose. But the companies force me to pirate what I officially own.
[...]
As a paying customer, I should not be annoyed more then people who just pirate it without paying.
Hopefully Telltale will forgive me for using the cracked version of Sam & Max instead of the version I bought.
As much as I'm pretty anti-piracy, I have to admit that it aggrivates me to no end when the copy protection shafts paying customers really badly. For example, I really hate it when I buy a game, devote multiple gigabytes of disk space to doing a full install and then have to have the first (or xth) CD inserted every time I want to play it. I have a laptop and it completely sucks to have to carry around the CDs for all my games just in case I feel like playing any of them. Even when I had a desktop, it was annoying to have to have a stack of discs sitting at the ready for every game I wanted to play regularly -- I like to put my CDs away safely in a folder once I've installed the app.
There have been several ocasions where I've been annoyed enough by it to download a no-CD crack for the game. I definitely downloaded cracks for several games that I legitimately purchased back in the days of code wheels and star charts and all those shenanigans. Similarly, I can't stand all the DRM on music from the iTunes Music Store, so I just don't purchase there in general. However, there was one time when I desperately wanted a song but didn't want to buy the whole album because I already had every other track on the disc on various other discs by the band. I ended up purchasing that one track on the iTMS and then, after buying it, going on the peer-to-peer networks and downloading a non-DRMed version of the song.
The other time that I've used pirated software has been for professional music applications that have no demo and nowhere near enough information to make a purchasing decision on their website. I don't mind taking a chance on a game, and most games do come with demos. However, when I'm spending several hundred dollars or in some cases over a thousand dollars and there's no trial or demo ... it's too much of a risk. On the few occasions it's come up, I've set myself a particular limit -- a time frame or a specific project, like, "I'll try it out for two months," or, "I'll use it for this particular track I'm working on." At the end of that, if the tool seems useful, I'll buy it. If it's not useful, I delete it completely. I've only felt the need to do that a few times, but I just find it ridiculous that some of these companies expect you to fork out the money they're asking without any more evidence than half a text page talking about how awesome the product is. I mean, some of them cost more than my bike did, and I certainly wouldn't have bought the bike if they'd told me I couldn't test-ride it first.
Piracy has good and bad to it. Sometimes you need to see if a game will even RUN on your system, especially if the game doesn't have a demo (and even when it does, it doesn't mean the full game will have the same requirements). I, for one, have a very finicky computer, and what SHOULD work doesn't always work. Hence, I tend to download a cracked copy first, and then purchase the legal copy. That way, I know I'm not being gypped, and the developers still get their well-deserved money.
BUT
I'm glad I didn't pirate Sam and Max though, for some reason, the transitions from one area to another can take up to 5 or 6 minutes on here, despite my exceeding the requirements. If I had illegally downloaded the game, the loading times would have put me off, (since I wouldn't have had the commitment to it that one has with purchased games) and I wouldn't have purchased the full game, thus I would have missed out on the first great point-and-click in years.
*disclaimer: There is no excuse for piracy, don't do it, etc.*
Ok here's my two cents on the whole pirating issue. Alas this has a rather sad tale to it:
Having always enjoyed BioWare games to that point (Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 + expansions) I had the impression that this was a very good company with a great team making, to that point awesome games. So when I saw Knights of the Old Republic in the store for $20 I pounced on the purchase . Sure I could pirate it, but this was a Bioware game and the people responsible deserve their hard-earned cash for the title.
So I took it home, installed it and proceeded to play it. About a half-hour into the game it completely crashed on me. It quit, gave me some obscure error and dumped me back to Windows. Ok...So I tried playing it again and this time about 20 minutes in I decided to save. Saving went good but once done it crashed AGAIN! So I go onto their website and download a patch only to find it went up to 1.03. Well that's strange, because for a game like KOTOR to be $20 it has to have been out for quite some time, years in some cases and in also in this case. So I was rather surprised to see so little cleanup work done to this title. But no matter. Installed the patch and kept playing.
Still, even after the patch this problem did not disappear. And so I went back to the website and checked out the forums. It was there I found a sticky posted saying, in a nutshell, that if you have an ATI videocard then it's not our fault, it's ATI's fault. Uhm...it says on the box that my ATI card is supported. I have better than all the system specs listed but it mentions that my card is supported! What gives. So I follow their advice on fixing the issue and *downgrade* my graphics drivers! This worked considerably better as I now only saw maybe three crashes in a night of playing. But then, I hit the major twist in the game, if you've played it then you know what I'm talking about. Got through the cinematic, and then it crashed! Unlike the previous ones however I could not get by this one for anything! Mind you I'm a network admin and PC Tech support guy full time so believe me I tried just about everything. Finally, dejected and defeated I gave up. While I still kept the game installed I decided to put it on hold until, hopefully, a day would come when this issue would get resolved. About *2 YEARS* later, ATI released a patch for their videocard that got me past this point in the game and I was able to complete it.
Needless to say this left a very bad taste in my mouth. Why did I bother to pay $20 of my hard-earned cash for a game that was essentially broken for 2 years? Why didn't they have a little sticker on the box or put a little piece of paper explaining the problem? With piracy issues being much more mainstream once you open the game you can't return it for anything!
I honestly can't bring myself to buy another BioWare game again. Should I really have to check the game dev's tech-support forum's just to ensure that a game will work with my PC? That's a lot of work for just one game.
So that's my one point for piracy. If I can't return it once I open the package, and it doesn't work what do I do? Just eat the money and leave it at that?
However I do feel that game developers should get paid for their work. To that end, I feel there are a couple ways to go about the piracy issue. One is to completely forego all piracy counter-measures. Clearly people are going to crack the game whether you like to or not and so why pour money into something that is ultimately going be undone in a matter of days?
Second, the only other way I've thought of, and I"m sure it's flawed, is to have a program created that would be used for all game dev's to publish their games that wanted some form of copy protection. This program would have the game register with its server to ensure its legitimacy before the gamer is allowed to play. No server reg? No play. Steam I guess is an implementation of such a strategy but one that I ultimately feel is flawed. Besides the issues people have had with it I feel that its biggest flaw is that Steam is owned and operated by one company. Imagine if the biggest names in game publishing all decided to follow suit and release their own Steam clone offering their own games? I could see a future where we're running nearly a half-dozen if not more Steam clones in order to play all the games we want. This would bog down system resources and probably make for a bit more of an unstable computing environment. Having a neutral body to publish all games could be done with one client on the end user's system to handle this. Furhtermore it would free up maint. costs from those companies and allow them to focus more on creating games.
So that's my $5.
If you've read this far thanks for hearing me out!
I know this is my first post but I've just bought Sam and Max and the only reason I did was because I found a pirated copy of Sam and Max Hit the Road, one of the few adventure games I never played when I was a kid.
I think an easy way for game companies to reduce piracy a little would be if they weren't so precious over their back catalgoue, especially as it seems a vast majority of games these days are sequels. Take Gothic 3 for example... a month or two before its release I'd downloaded a copy of gothic 2 (a game that I had no interest in on its original release to buy OR download). On the back of that I ended up buying Gothic 2 of amazon AND buying Gothic 3 on its launch day. I'm sure that if maybe game companies released the previous game for download it would help a little to discouraged piracy (I'm thinking CivIII -> CIV or Rome TW -> Medieval 2 TW or UT2005 -> UT2006 etc.).
It might not irradicate piracy but it might help retreive some revenues for developers...
II'm sure that if maybe game companies released the previous game for download it would help a little to discouraged piracy
Either that, or most rational people would just hold off purchases for a years time, so that they could download them for free instead. I know I wouldn't mind not playing the most recent games, if all others were readily available for free download.
Heck some companies have actually done it . A good example or two would be the Grand Theft Auto series. Both GTA 1 and 2 are freely available to the masses and right off their own site no less .
There are many other games that have also since gone freeware from the companies that produced them. Check out this site for a more complete list (as well as download links) the site does keep tabs on itself so if something they post turns out to be non-freeware they immediately take it down. Anyway, happy retro-gaming
I just found out exactly yesterday that this game existed, and my reaction was: "FUCK YEAH!". I have been a fan of graphic adventures ever since The Secret of Monkey Island, I own every single SCUMM engine based Lucasarts adventure games and many Sierra games too. Ever since the flop of Escape from Monkey Island, Lucasarts decided to kill their graphic adventures which is understandable based on the type of company that they are and their market strategies, so although I felt betrayed they decided to discontinue production of Sam & Max: Freelance Police and Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels, I somehow accepted the decision and resigned to the possible fact that graphic adventures were dead.
After I found that S&M2 and FT2 were canceled I didn't imagine either of them would be picked up by any company, so I didn't bother to do any research and since most gaming updates I get from sites like ebgames/gamestop I didn't even know this company existed. I have been aching to have a sequel to either Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, or/and Full Throttle. So the story goes like this... Yesterday out of nostalgia I was looking up on bittorrent to download the old Lucasarts games and replay them, since I no longer have the CD's, and to my surprise when I did a search for Sam & Max I saw this torrent "Episode I Culture Shock", I thought it may be some comic book or some TV episode, but when I read the reviews they were speaking about the new game, and I was like: NO FUCKING WAY?
So I looked it up and to my surprise, voila, it was true, an independent developer had made a 3D version of Sam & Max to honor the saga, I kept digging in and I read they were composed mostly of former Lucasarts employees who worked on the original project and Steve Purcell was working with them, so I cannot express the feelings of joy that just came over me.
So you see, piracy is not necessarily a 'bad thing', if it had not been because of the torrent, I wouldn't have found out about the existence of this company for a LONG time. So I downloaded the torrent with the crack and played the demo, and I must say it is pretty awesome and really funny, it truly captivates the essence of Sam & Max.
I liked it so much that as soon as I do a transfer to Paypal I'm gonna buy the whole season and I'm probably gonna get the Bone games too (which seem like they can be cool also), so I can support this company.
[In regards to the game, the developer, and game distribution]
I must say that the download approach is very good, the costs for distribution to a first/third party retailer will be considerably high for a small company like this one, so if they did that, they would have to increase the price for the product, besides the fact that most gamers nowadays don't care about graphic adventures so it would be a lot of waste in effort. Instead they offer us a direct download link for $9 or the full season for $35 (far less than any full new release), which focuses on the correct market which is us, graphic adventure gamers. I must say I totally LOVE the episodic approach, you guys give us a taste of the pie while you keep developing and releasing new episodes ASAP. I haven't played the full game yet (just the demo), but from user accounts it seems like the game can be finished by a seasoned gamer in about 3 hours, if that's so the game is still totally WORTH it, if you guys don't remember the original Sam & Max Hit the Road wasn't that long either, it could be finished in a couple of hours. Hell I remember I finished Full Throttle in like 3 - 4 hours. And Monkey Island 1 can be finished in 1 - 2 hours. Also a very cool game from Sierra, Gabriel Knight could be finished relatively fast, about 6 hours. I finished Curse of Monkey Island in a few hours also. Graphic Adventures are not great because of how long they are but because of their witty dialogue sequences, the sometimes hard puzzles, and the overall interactive experience that even RPG's lack.
In regards to the 2D artwork vs 3D CGI, I must say that even though I love the classics, its time to move on as technology evolves. We all loved those point & click 2D sprites with beautifully hand-drawn backgrounds that ran on the old SCUMM engines, but at this time with MK4 & Grim Fandango we have learned that graphic adventures can be fully 3D and be as much or even more fun. Oh and the voice acting is pretty cool. It is definitely a whole new generation for Sam & Max and graphic adventure gaming, so I am really looking forward to Telltale Games future projects.
Anyhow congratulations to Telltale Games, you guys did an excellent job, also its very cool that you guys read the posts in the forum and interact with us, it gives us confidence that the developer cares about its fans. And don't be discouraged by the fact that there are pirated versions running about, all the real fans will buy the games anyhow and the pirated copies just help make the game more famous and give it promotion, which is good.
Anyhow congratulations to Telltale Games, you guys did an excellent job, also its very cool that you guys read the posts in the forum and interact with us, it gives us confidence that the developer cares about its fans.
Thank you. I'm glad you found us!
FYI, PayPal isn't working with the season set right now, but it will hopefully be up and running later this week.
those bastards who decide to pirate tell tale games....
i shall hunt them down, every last one of them, the bastards.
at least pirate EA. they don't even pay who they employ overtime, and they make unoriginal crap on the perpetual state to make games more and more overly realistic each year with no hopes for creativity, art, just alot of things that look good blowing up.
hell who would even want to pirate ea, cause i know it'd be a waste of time, cds, and disk space. but you can't just rip off a company that makes it's games outta love. You can't cause, it's like Katamari Damacy, a game with alot of love.
if only everyone else saw things that way. *combine jesse jame's hand with mind control device* it didn't want to do it.
I;m not going to lie, I do pirate games. However I pirate games from massive companys who I see as robots, I would never pirate this game, infact S&M has become the 3rd legal game I have downloaded! Heh. I am the same with music, I would never pirate from a small time band, infact someone I am listening to now gives me rights to share his music after I paid the dollar for the song.
I don't play a lot of games, and therefore I'm not that involved with all this piracy-stuff that's going on. I am, however, quite interested in music, and I make it a principle to not download music. I always purchase the CDs, and that makes the purchase all the more worthwhile, considering that I've never heard most of the songs on the album. And even though a lack of funds somehow keeps me from buying too many CDs, I really appreciate those CDs that I do buy. Music, books, movies and games are all pieces of art, and I believe the creators should get paid for the hard work they have put into it. Okay, I do download some television shows, but only the ones I know I'm eventually going to buy on DVD when they are released. The reason is merely because several of the shows I love aren't even shown on TV in Norway, so it's my only option.
Anyway, I do pay for the Sam & Max-games, because I believe the work being done by Telltale Games is absolutely marvellous. You people deserve to get paid for what you do, because you obviously put a lot of hard work and effort into it. And... well... the games rock, and that's a pretty good reason to buy them instead of downloading them illegally.
I have a similar stance to Orenji except that I don't pirate things for two distinct reasons.
1. If I want something then I make the exchange for it, I do have socialistic leanings so I only tend to support small companies and make payments when I feel it's worth it.
2. There's just too much risk involved, I feel that anyone who chooses to pirate anything of their own volition is frankly not the brightest of spherical glass illumination devices. I have respect for my property, I believe that downloading anything from a source that isn't 100 per cent trustworthy or where I can read and compile the source for myself just isn't worth it. A suitable metaphor would be to say that piracy is rather like playing ping-pong with the fine china, which is great if one could afford to do that.
In other words, more well-off people are likely to pirate than poor people, it just goes to show that the more money you have, the more depraved you are but I won't prattle on about that at the moment.
I'm not well off, in fact I fall into the 'poor' bracket, I'm definitely worker class, I'm the kind of person who supports a World where wage-slavery and heirarchy really wouldn't be nessscary so I feel that exploitation and just taking advantage of people is wrong.
I accept the World I live in so I'm willing to bridge my beliefs over a bit in an effort of open understanding and acceptance and therein I will freely buy certain things but there are items which I believe are "just for laughs".
An OS that costs £200? A piece of software that costs £600? No thanks, that's just taking the piss. Even games which decide to price themselves up around the £50-£60 price mark are crossing the line in my opinion because I feel that it's never justified and it's simply pulling on a genrés fans to line some fat-cat's pocket.
However, when it comes to a piece of quality entertainment that only costs £6 (be it Sam & Max or Gibbage, to toss the frothingly desperate Dan Marshall a bone), which is the same price as a PC games magazine these days, I'll happily pay for both my own entertainment (which is a luxury, not a necessity) and to support the company in question.
Not only that but GameTap doesn't cost much more on a per month basis, what it provides is a better deal than similarly priced services which charge the same (such as MMOs) but more, it's cheaper than almost every MMO out there and it has its own MMO as part of the bargain which makes it a great deal for people who don't have a lot of money to splash around.
I wouldn't say that it's just or desperate for anyone to nick £6 from a company like Telltale because it is a luxury, not a necessity and that's a point I'll keep making. It really is quite simply depraved and to be honest, I don't think the people who'd steal like that are any better than the thieves who'd charge £600 for a piece of software.
Therefore I doubt any jokes within the game could reach or even shame them because there'd be nothing left to reach.
Just my two pence.
I hope Telltale doesn't let these piracy efforts go to heart and that they continue to develop, thanks to GameTap funding that shouldn't be a worry for a bit but both if the climate for releasing games were better (less exploitive publishers) and the people were more trustworthy, GameTap wouldn't even be needed.
(Edit: Cleaned up ambiguity ... and I'm VERY not used to this forum software.)
Well, if people can afford a computer they can afford any game. So, being poor is not an excuse because poor people don´t play.
I don´t pirate games that much, the reason though is that most of the games released today are shit and I rather read Dostojevsky than waste my time on some stupid FPS. Oh, but sometimes I am "forced" to download some games. The reason for this behaviour is that I can´t find those games anywhere or that I couldn´t bother to search for a game, give money to some random guy who happens to own a game and just waste time on a searching process when there´s absolutely no sensible reason to do that.
However, I am totally in support of supporting smaller companies that make stuff that bigger companies don´t want to. And if you absolutely have to pirate some games to save money, don´t save it on these ones. Actually you probably should show a support if you enjoy the game, perhaps we will get more of them.
The 'I can't afford it' excuse for pirating is an incredibly poor excuse! As has already been said in this thread, if you can afford a computer - and the electricity to run the thing - I'm sure you can afford to pay for your games. It's not as if Sam & Max was even expensive either. I've paid £30-£40 (or more for a 360 game ) to play some terrible games, so I was more than happy to subscribe for the whole season of Sam & Max when I had the chance.
And sure, Culture Shock isn't a 30 hour game but I enjoyed playing it much more than most games I've bought over the past few years. I'll agree that there are plenty of games out there that really aren't worth buying, but Sam & Max is (and hopefully always will be) worth every penny.
I'm not going to take any stance on piracy here, as convincing those who don't find it to be wrong, is fruitless labour. What I will do, however, is outline how a game is cracked, and why some of the measures that have been suggested won't work.
First off, to crack a game, you have to buy it. No way around it. A game is cracked by comparing the opcodes between the functioning product and the non-functioning product. Then the neccessary opcodes are changed in the non-functioning product, in order to make it act like the original product. Usually, a single jump command will need to be changed per call, but it really varies between the various copy protection schemes.
Anyway, my point here wasn't to tell people how to crack games, but to tell them that having seperate demo and full versions are pointless, because whoever wishes to crack it will have to buy the full version at any rate.
I disagree with the "if you can afford a computer" arguement. Some recieve computers as gifts, some win computers via contests, some may make less money since buying the computer.... you get the idea. Being near-homeless myself, and having a computer I recieved as a gift, I can honestly say that some truly cannot afford games.
I disagree with the "if you can afford a computer" arguement. Some recieve computers as gifts, some win computers via contests, some may make less money since buying the computer.... you get the idea. Being near-homeless myself, and having a computer I recieved as a gift, I can honestly say that some truly cannot afford games.
As long as you aren´t homeless, you can afford a game. And if you are nearly homeless, why don´t you sell your computer?
Well, the episode format should make a game more affordable for those who can't/wan't to invest the amount of a full price game in one step - like Charles Dickens once did.
I also disagree with Kunkku's statement as i easily can imagine that there are people around who have to take care of each dollar/euro they have and who aren't able to just buy a game whilst they do own a computer.
But beside of downloading a pirated game there do exist also legal alternatives for gaming as a) you can play one of the games which are available for free, b) loan a game from a library (if available), c) exchanging your game with others, d) get a game for cheap as a budget/compilation title, e) buy a game on the second hand market, f) write your own game and so on.
So i think it should be possible to get into some gaming also without investing too much money or money at all...
Many people loan games from friends, or buy them second hand. In either case, the developer doesn't get any money from this potential customer, so if (s)he pirated the game instead, it'd make no difference. Except in court, perhaps
People that won't pay for things will always crack DRM. Always. DRM doesn't stop anyone that wants to break it. The only thing DRM does is hinder people like me.
For example, I buy DVDs. I want to put them on my iPod, but doing so is not only a rigmarole, but also illegal. It is a shame that the studios and the MPAA do everything in their power to cripple piracy, but only end up killing fair use.
Luckily, the copy protection on Culture Shock was transparent. I understand why it sounds like such a good idea on paper, but it only hurts legitimate users like myself. Pirates will always find away around it. Locked doors don't stop thieves; they just keep honest people "honest." DRM, on the whole, is turning honest users into "crackers" just so they can utilize fair use. I think that is a crying shame.
People that won't pay for things will always crack DRM. Always. DRM doesn't stop anyone that wants to break it. The only thing DRM does is hinder people like me.
Luckily, the copy protection on Culture Shock was transparent. I understand why it sounds like such a good idea on paper, but it only hurts legitimate users like myself. Pirates will always find away around it. Locked doors don't stop thieves; they just keep honest people "honest." DRM, on the whole, is turning honest users into "crackers" just so they can utilize fair use. I think that is a crying shame.
Brunner: Well I think it does prevent what many of us did do as kids, just letting your friends "borrow" a copy (meaning copying it to their hard drive and/or making copies of the floppies).
Back then, we would just wait for one kid in school to get the game, and then seemingly everybody would eventually have it installed on their computer if they wanted to. Nowadays, I imagine kids would say "come to my house to check out this cool game" or "this game is cool, you should ask your mom to get it for you." But DRM makes it so that a lot of the "borrowing" of the past doesn't work--you'll always need the original CD to replay it and/or digital distribution limits where the game can go.
Yes, there are probably some kids that know how to visit pirate sites, but my only point was that DRM does counter some of the piracy that occurred in the past.
As long as you aren´t homeless, you can afford a game. And if you are nearly homeless, why don´t you sell your computer?
I am sorry, but I disagree.
Why don't I sell my computer? Hmm, let's see. I need my computer to work, for one. Also, it's deemed bad taste to sell a gift, and seeing as how this was built by a family member from parts it took him quite a long time to accumulate, I wouldn't sell it for anything. And I didn't mean "I'm on the verge of becoming homeless", I meant "I have a very small income". Games usually cost around $60. Thus, I only buy games when I can spare the cash. Other times, I'm stuck with freeware and abandonware titles.
Until you've picked yourself up from the gutter after realizing you can't spend another night paying crackheads so you can sleep in their apartments, and you are making your way back up the social ladder, don't tell me what I can and cannot afford, please.
Just to note, I agree with brunner as far as DRM is concerned.
Eventually, companies will wean themselves off it plain and simple because to paraphrase Cory Doctorow; "If you have to alienate your userbase in order to sell a product, then it's not an internet ready business model." Some companies are already realising this and either removing DRM from their peddled wares (certain labels are doing this on Yahoo, right now) or scaling it back and making it as transparent as possible.
Now the systems I have the least problems with are, to be honest, Steam and GameTap. With Steam I can (with people I do 100 per cent trust) share the account details around and we can all play and have fun. GameTap allows unlimited subaccounts, two people to play on one account simultaneously (yay, free Uru Live!) and the sharing of the master account, like Steam. In fact, if Steam and GameTap were combined, taking Steam's open file-structure and GameTap's subaccounts and liberal dual-user usage, then one would likely have one of the friendliest DRM systems out there and it'd be future-proofed well until the inevitable point where DRM is abolished for good.
From what I've seen, the Telltale system is transparent on one computer but if it's limited beyond that then I agree they do need to rework their base system to allow for fair-use and make it more friendly to the average person, it only makes the company providing the entertainment more popular in the end.
I think that Telltale definitely have it right as far as their pricing system goes, I find that to be very reasonable and I congratulate them for it. It's a bloody good system. However, if their DRM system is less friendly then they might have to rework it a bit eventually. Though seeing that the Telltale folks do tend to have open eyes, ears and minds I wouldn't count them out entirely even if the DRM does prove to be unfriendly to too many people.
I can't say for myself yet though because I have only tried it on one PC. Still, I'd trust Telltale to do the right thing in this area.
I'm more than happy to pay for games! I can't see why others arent?
The quality and playability is so superb with TTG and my few pounds I pay are quite deserving! I get a great game, they get finance for the next. Theres always going to be a few idiots out there who don't think like that! 'All for one' is their motto!
I really think that some PC games are much too expensive - so I do understand some people downloading stuff - but THIS is cheap, quality and definately worth the money. I cannot wait to afford Episode 2. It's a good product and every adventure fan should spend the money for it. To save Sam + Max and to save good adventures.
Well, piracy cannot be avoided. Although it's kind of an evil compliment to get one's software pirated, since the game has to be good to get pirated this fast. But I really do not like the fact that a game with this quality, subject and price is being pirated.
The average gamer lacks real morale. That's what I'd say.
Well, I really feel a shame. When I was young I didn't know what pirated copy mean and what harm it does. Now I fully understand. And some how, friends of mine who keep complaining why Lucas unplugged the adventure games never actually bought any original adventure game from them. And even now, I keep telling them to look for new telltale episodes and others, eventually they download it for FREE!
The complain about the dying adventure games, they think about doing their own gaming business, and when someone listens to the cries, they want it for FREE!
See, I'd like to emphasize something elsenator said...
This is very true. The book Free Culture, as I recall, lists at least three (maybe four, but I only remember three of them) reasons people illegally "pirate" software. In fact, only one of them is strictly detrimental.
1. People download a piece of software INSTEAD of buying it. This is bad, beacuse it deprives the developer of money.
2. People download a piece of software, but wouldn't have bought it if they couldn't have downloaded it. It is neutral, because downloading hasn't deprived the developer of anything, because they wouldn't have bought it if they couldn't have gotten it free.
3. People download a piece of software, to try it out. They like it, and then buy it. This is good, because they wouldn't have bought it unless they knew they'd like it, which they determined via downloading it.
However, it must be emphasized that ALL THREE are illegal. No ifs, ands, or buts. All three are always illegal.
Personally, if there is something I can obtained easily by purchasing, like Telltale's Sam and Max game, I would buy it in an instant. However, like some of you guys here, I too was introduced to adventure games through a bootleg copy. But once I got older( my teens), I started buying my adventure games thanks to a local computer show at the time, which had all the sierra adventure games made.
I buy my games since my older brother and I like to have a legit copy, with all the paperwork and such. Heck, other than adventure games (including Sam and Max,) World of Warcraft, Sims 2, and maybe the Castlevania games, I rarely play games. Guess I have lost interest in games. However, I still buy the o rest just to collect like Final Fantasy XII collector's edition.
How do I feel about pirating Sam and Max? It hurts the company. What l learn from a beta tester who beta tested Prey that sales of the game via retail doesn't hurt game developers since they have already sold their stock to a store for them to sell. In other words, Walmart, for example, buys x amount of stock from a publisher and then sells it to retail. However, I am not sure if this is correct since I am a toy collector and this doesn't work for toys. For toys, whenever something goes on clearance, the toy developer has to buy back their stock so that a store like Toys R us can sel it via clearance. This is why a lot of toy companies are going goin out of business.
As for the case of online games, I am sure it hurts the company since Telltale is sellin their game online, where they get the money from the consumers and not some big corperation. True, gametap gave them money, but i think the money used is primary for the development of the game
Well, piracy cannot be avoided. Although it's kind of an evil compliment to get one's software pirated, since the game has to be good to get pirated this fast. But I really do not like the fact that a game with this quality, subject and price is being pirated.
The average gamer lacks real morale. That's what I'd say.
I can't wait to see my game appear on BitTorrent! I might even put it there myself!
Comments
viva la open source!
Maybe they could make that an option when you download each episode! "Click here if you would like 800MB of gay porn with your download." Just, you know, in case anybody was interested.
I suppose. But the companies force me to pirate what I officially own.
For example, I own TVtool, but because I tend to change my e-mail often, I never get the updated keys for new versions. It was easier for me to find a key generator and update versions that way, then waiting weeks for a response for a new key.
Or when I had to crack the floppy versions of Sam & Max and DOTT to get rid of the annoying copy protection, until I bought the 'Talkie' CDs that did not have protection. And so on, and so on....
As a paying customer, I should not be annoyed more then people who just pirate it without paying.
Hopefully Telltale will forgive me for using the cracked version of Sam & Max instead of the version I bought. Otherwise they can credit my Visa back.
Yeah I will have to try that out one day.
Meedio is another program I pirated for 6-8 months (30 day trial was way to short to properly evalute) before I had it working to a state that I thought it was worth paying cash for. Then 3 months later Yahoo bought them out, making it a waste of my money. Oh well...
D.
As much as I'm pretty anti-piracy, I have to admit that it aggrivates me to no end when the copy protection shafts paying customers really badly. For example, I really hate it when I buy a game, devote multiple gigabytes of disk space to doing a full install and then have to have the first (or xth) CD inserted every time I want to play it. I have a laptop and it completely sucks to have to carry around the CDs for all my games just in case I feel like playing any of them. Even when I had a desktop, it was annoying to have to have a stack of discs sitting at the ready for every game I wanted to play regularly -- I like to put my CDs away safely in a folder once I've installed the app.
There have been several ocasions where I've been annoyed enough by it to download a no-CD crack for the game. I definitely downloaded cracks for several games that I legitimately purchased back in the days of code wheels and star charts and all those shenanigans. Similarly, I can't stand all the DRM on music from the iTunes Music Store, so I just don't purchase there in general. However, there was one time when I desperately wanted a song but didn't want to buy the whole album because I already had every other track on the disc on various other discs by the band. I ended up purchasing that one track on the iTMS and then, after buying it, going on the peer-to-peer networks and downloading a non-DRMed version of the song.
The other time that I've used pirated software has been for professional music applications that have no demo and nowhere near enough information to make a purchasing decision on their website. I don't mind taking a chance on a game, and most games do come with demos. However, when I'm spending several hundred dollars or in some cases over a thousand dollars and there's no trial or demo ... it's too much of a risk. On the few occasions it's come up, I've set myself a particular limit -- a time frame or a specific project, like, "I'll try it out for two months," or, "I'll use it for this particular track I'm working on." At the end of that, if the tool seems useful, I'll buy it. If it's not useful, I delete it completely. I've only felt the need to do that a few times, but I just find it ridiculous that some of these companies expect you to fork out the money they're asking without any more evidence than half a text page talking about how awesome the product is. I mean, some of them cost more than my bike did, and I certainly wouldn't have bought the bike if they'd told me I couldn't test-ride it first.
BUT
I'm glad I didn't pirate Sam and Max though, for some reason, the transitions from one area to another can take up to 5 or 6 minutes on here, despite my exceeding the requirements. If I had illegally downloaded the game, the loading times would have put me off, (since I wouldn't have had the commitment to it that one has with purchased games) and I wouldn't have purchased the full game, thus I would have missed out on the first great point-and-click in years.
*disclaimer: There is no excuse for piracy, don't do it, etc.*
Ok here's my two cents on the whole pirating issue. Alas this has a rather sad tale to it:
Having always enjoyed BioWare games to that point (Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 + expansions) I had the impression that this was a very good company with a great team making, to that point awesome games. So when I saw Knights of the Old Republic in the store for $20 I pounced on the purchase
So I took it home, installed it and proceeded to play it. About a half-hour into the game it completely crashed on me. It quit, gave me some obscure error and dumped me back to Windows. Ok...So I tried playing it again and this time about 20 minutes in I decided to save. Saving went good but once done it crashed AGAIN! So I go onto their website and download a patch only to find it went up to 1.03. Well that's strange, because for a game like KOTOR to be $20 it has to have been out for quite some time, years in some cases and in also in this case. So I was rather surprised to see so little cleanup work done to this title. But no matter. Installed the patch and kept playing.
Still, even after the patch this problem did not disappear. And so I went back to the website and checked out the forums. It was there I found a sticky posted saying, in a nutshell, that if you have an ATI videocard then it's not our fault, it's ATI's fault. Uhm...it says on the box that my ATI card is supported. I have better than all the system specs listed but it mentions that my card is supported! What gives. So I follow their advice on fixing the issue and *downgrade* my graphics drivers! This worked considerably better as I now only saw maybe three crashes in a night of playing. But then, I hit the major twist in the game, if you've played it then you know what I'm talking about. Got through the cinematic, and then it crashed! Unlike the previous ones however I could not get by this one for anything! Mind you I'm a network admin and PC Tech support guy full time so believe me I tried just about everything. Finally, dejected and defeated I gave up. While I still kept the game installed I decided to put it on hold until, hopefully, a day would come when this issue would get resolved. About *2 YEARS* later, ATI released a patch for their videocard that got me past this point in the game and I was able to complete it.
Needless to say this left a very bad taste in my mouth. Why did I bother to pay $20 of my hard-earned cash for a game that was essentially broken for 2 years? Why didn't they have a little sticker on the box or put a little piece of paper explaining the problem? With piracy issues being much more mainstream once you open the game you can't return it for anything!
I honestly can't bring myself to buy another BioWare game again. Should I really have to check the game dev's tech-support forum's just to ensure that a game will work with my PC? That's a lot of work for just one game.
So that's my one point for piracy. If I can't return it once I open the package, and it doesn't work what do I do? Just eat the money and leave it at that?
However I do feel that game developers should get paid for their work. To that end, I feel there are a couple ways to go about the piracy issue. One is to completely forego all piracy counter-measures. Clearly people are going to crack the game whether you like to or not and so why pour money into something that is ultimately going be undone in a matter of days?
Second, the only other way I've thought of, and I"m sure it's flawed, is to have a program created that would be used for all game dev's to publish their games that wanted some form of copy protection. This program would have the game register with its server to ensure its legitimacy before the gamer is allowed to play. No server reg? No play. Steam I guess is an implementation of such a strategy but one that I ultimately feel is flawed. Besides the issues people have had with it I feel that its biggest flaw is that Steam is owned and operated by one company. Imagine if the biggest names in game publishing all decided to follow suit and release their own Steam clone offering their own games? I could see a future where we're running nearly a half-dozen if not more Steam clones in order to play all the games we want. This would bog down system resources and probably make for a bit more of an unstable computing environment. Having a neutral body to publish all games could be done with one client on the end user's system to handle this. Furhtermore it would free up maint. costs from those companies and allow them to focus more on creating games.
So that's my $5.
If you've read this far thanks for hearing me out!
JFresh
Sure thing.
haha please dont remind me
I think an easy way for game companies to reduce piracy a little would be if they weren't so precious over their back catalgoue, especially as it seems a vast majority of games these days are sequels. Take Gothic 3 for example... a month or two before its release I'd downloaded a copy of gothic 2 (a game that I had no interest in on its original release to buy OR download). On the back of that I ended up buying Gothic 2 of amazon AND buying Gothic 3 on its launch day. I'm sure that if maybe game companies released the previous game for download it would help a little to discouraged piracy (I'm thinking CivIII -> CIV or Rome TW -> Medieval 2 TW or UT2005 -> UT2006 etc.).
It might not irradicate piracy but it might help retreive some revenues for developers...
Either that, or most rational people would just hold off purchases for a years time, so that they could download them for free instead. I know I wouldn't mind not playing the most recent games, if all others were readily available for free download.
And LucasArts just plain doesn't care about adventures.
There are many other games that have also since gone freeware from the companies that produced them. Check out this site for a more complete list (as well as download links) the site does keep tabs on itself so if something they post turns out to be non-freeware they immediately take it down. Anyway, happy retro-gaming
www.liberatedgames.com
After I found that S&M2 and FT2 were canceled I didn't imagine either of them would be picked up by any company, so I didn't bother to do any research and since most gaming updates I get from sites like ebgames/gamestop I didn't even know this company existed. I have been aching to have a sequel to either Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, or/and Full Throttle. So the story goes like this... Yesterday out of nostalgia I was looking up on bittorrent to download the old Lucasarts games and replay them, since I no longer have the CD's, and to my surprise when I did a search for Sam & Max I saw this torrent "Episode I Culture Shock", I thought it may be some comic book or some TV episode, but when I read the reviews they were speaking about the new game, and I was like: NO FUCKING WAY?
So I looked it up and to my surprise, voila, it was true, an independent developer had made a 3D version of Sam & Max to honor the saga, I kept digging in and I read they were composed mostly of former Lucasarts employees who worked on the original project and Steve Purcell was working with them, so I cannot express the feelings of joy that just came over me.
So you see, piracy is not necessarily a 'bad thing', if it had not been because of the torrent, I wouldn't have found out about the existence of this company for a LONG time. So I downloaded the torrent with the crack and played the demo, and I must say it is pretty awesome and really funny, it truly captivates the essence of Sam & Max.
I liked it so much that as soon as I do a transfer to Paypal I'm gonna buy the whole season and I'm probably gonna get the Bone games too (which seem like they can be cool also), so I can support this company.
[In regards to the game, the developer, and game distribution]
I must say that the download approach is very good, the costs for distribution to a first/third party retailer will be considerably high for a small company like this one, so if they did that, they would have to increase the price for the product, besides the fact that most gamers nowadays don't care about graphic adventures so it would be a lot of waste in effort. Instead they offer us a direct download link for $9 or the full season for $35 (far less than any full new release), which focuses on the correct market which is us, graphic adventure gamers. I must say I totally LOVE the episodic approach, you guys give us a taste of the pie while you keep developing and releasing new episodes ASAP. I haven't played the full game yet (just the demo), but from user accounts it seems like the game can be finished by a seasoned gamer in about 3 hours, if that's so the game is still totally WORTH it, if you guys don't remember the original Sam & Max Hit the Road wasn't that long either, it could be finished in a couple of hours. Hell I remember I finished Full Throttle in like 3 - 4 hours. And Monkey Island 1 can be finished in 1 - 2 hours. Also a very cool game from Sierra, Gabriel Knight could be finished relatively fast, about 6 hours. I finished Curse of Monkey Island in a few hours also. Graphic Adventures are not great because of how long they are but because of their witty dialogue sequences, the sometimes hard puzzles, and the overall interactive experience that even RPG's lack.
In regards to the 2D artwork vs 3D CGI, I must say that even though I love the classics, its time to move on as technology evolves. We all loved those point & click 2D sprites with beautifully hand-drawn backgrounds that ran on the old SCUMM engines, but at this time with MK4 & Grim Fandango we have learned that graphic adventures can be fully 3D and be as much or even more fun. Oh and the voice acting is pretty cool. It is definitely a whole new generation for Sam & Max and graphic adventure gaming, so I am really looking forward to Telltale Games future projects.
Anyhow congratulations to Telltale Games, you guys did an excellent job, also its very cool that you guys read the posts in the forum and interact with us, it gives us confidence that the developer cares about its fans. And don't be discouraged by the fact that there are pirated versions running about, all the real fans will buy the games anyhow and the pirated copies just help make the game more famous and give it promotion, which is good.
Thank you. I'm glad you found us!
FYI, PayPal isn't working with the season set right now, but it will hopefully be up and running later this week.
i shall hunt them down, every last one of them, the bastards.
at least pirate EA. they don't even pay who they employ overtime, and they make unoriginal crap on the perpetual state to make games more and more overly realistic each year with no hopes for creativity, art, just alot of things that look good blowing up.
hell who would even want to pirate ea, cause i know it'd be a waste of time, cds, and disk space. but you can't just rip off a company that makes it's games outta love. You can't cause, it's like Katamari Damacy, a game with alot of love.
if only everyone else saw things that way. *combine jesse jame's hand with mind control device* it didn't want to do it.
Anyway, I do pay for the Sam & Max-games, because I believe the work being done by Telltale Games is absolutely marvellous. You people deserve to get paid for what you do, because you obviously put a lot of hard work and effort into it. And... well... the games rock, and that's a pretty good reason to buy them instead of downloading them illegally.
1. If I want something then I make the exchange for it, I do have socialistic leanings so I only tend to support small companies and make payments when I feel it's worth it.
2. There's just too much risk involved, I feel that anyone who chooses to pirate anything of their own volition is frankly not the brightest of spherical glass illumination devices. I have respect for my property, I believe that downloading anything from a source that isn't 100 per cent trustworthy or where I can read and compile the source for myself just isn't worth it. A suitable metaphor would be to say that piracy is rather like playing ping-pong with the fine china, which is great if one could afford to do that.
In other words, more well-off people are likely to pirate than poor people, it just goes to show that the more money you have, the more depraved you are but I won't prattle on about that at the moment.
I'm not well off, in fact I fall into the 'poor' bracket, I'm definitely worker class, I'm the kind of person who supports a World where wage-slavery and heirarchy really wouldn't be nessscary so I feel that exploitation and just taking advantage of people is wrong.
I accept the World I live in so I'm willing to bridge my beliefs over a bit in an effort of open understanding and acceptance and therein I will freely buy certain things but there are items which I believe are "just for laughs".
An OS that costs £200? A piece of software that costs £600? No thanks, that's just taking the piss. Even games which decide to price themselves up around the £50-£60 price mark are crossing the line in my opinion because I feel that it's never justified and it's simply pulling on a genrés fans to line some fat-cat's pocket.
However, when it comes to a piece of quality entertainment that only costs £6 (be it Sam & Max or Gibbage, to toss the frothingly desperate Dan Marshall a bone), which is the same price as a PC games magazine these days, I'll happily pay for both my own entertainment (which is a luxury, not a necessity) and to support the company in question.
Not only that but GameTap doesn't cost much more on a per month basis, what it provides is a better deal than similarly priced services which charge the same (such as MMOs) but more, it's cheaper than almost every MMO out there and it has its own MMO as part of the bargain which makes it a great deal for people who don't have a lot of money to splash around.
I wouldn't say that it's just or desperate for anyone to nick £6 from a company like Telltale because it is a luxury, not a necessity and that's a point I'll keep making. It really is quite simply depraved and to be honest, I don't think the people who'd steal like that are any better than the thieves who'd charge £600 for a piece of software.
Therefore I doubt any jokes within the game could reach or even shame them because there'd be nothing left to reach.
Just my two pence.
I hope Telltale doesn't let these piracy efforts go to heart and that they continue to develop, thanks to GameTap funding that shouldn't be a worry for a bit but both if the climate for releasing games were better (less exploitive publishers) and the people were more trustworthy, GameTap wouldn't even be needed.
(Edit: Cleaned up ambiguity ... and I'm VERY not used to this forum software.)
It's hardly as though it's expensive - and the entertainment value is all there IMO!
If you can afford a net connection, you can afford this game - no excuses!
I don´t pirate games that much, the reason though is that most of the games released today are shit and I rather read Dostojevsky than waste my time on some stupid FPS. Oh, but sometimes I am "forced" to download some games. The reason for this behaviour is that I can´t find those games anywhere or that I couldn´t bother to search for a game, give money to some random guy who happens to own a game and just waste time on a searching process when there´s absolutely no sensible reason to do that.
However, I am totally in support of supporting smaller companies that make stuff that bigger companies don´t want to. And if you absolutely have to pirate some games to save money, don´t save it on these ones. Actually you probably should show a support if you enjoy the game, perhaps we will get more of them.
And sure, Culture Shock isn't a 30 hour game but I enjoyed playing it much more than most games I've bought over the past few years. I'll agree that there are plenty of games out there that really aren't worth buying, but Sam & Max is (and hopefully always will be) worth every penny.
First off, to crack a game, you have to buy it. No way around it. A game is cracked by comparing the opcodes between the functioning product and the non-functioning product. Then the neccessary opcodes are changed in the non-functioning product, in order to make it act like the original product. Usually, a single jump command will need to be changed per call, but it really varies between the various copy protection schemes.
Anyway, my point here wasn't to tell people how to crack games, but to tell them that having seperate demo and full versions are pointless, because whoever wishes to crack it will have to buy the full version at any rate.
As long as you aren´t homeless, you can afford a game. And if you are nearly homeless, why don´t you sell your computer?
I am sorry, but I disagree.
I also disagree with Kunkku's statement as i easily can imagine that there are people around who have to take care of each dollar/euro they have and who aren't able to just buy a game whilst they do own a computer.
But beside of downloading a pirated game there do exist also legal alternatives for gaming as a) you can play one of the games which are available for free, b) loan a game from a library (if available), c) exchanging your game with others, d) get a game for cheap as a budget/compilation title, e) buy a game on the second hand market, f) write your own game and so on.
So i think it should be possible to get into some gaming also without investing too much money or money at all...
--Erwin
People that won't pay for things will always crack DRM. Always. DRM doesn't stop anyone that wants to break it. The only thing DRM does is hinder people like me.
For example, I buy DVDs. I want to put them on my iPod, but doing so is not only a rigmarole, but also illegal. It is a shame that the studios and the MPAA do everything in their power to cripple piracy, but only end up killing fair use.
Luckily, the copy protection on Culture Shock was transparent. I understand why it sounds like such a good idea on paper, but it only hurts legitimate users like myself. Pirates will always find away around it. Locked doors don't stop thieves; they just keep honest people "honest." DRM, on the whole, is turning honest users into "crackers" just so they can utilize fair use. I think that is a crying shame.
Brunner: Well I think it does prevent what many of us did do as kids, just letting your friends "borrow" a copy (meaning copying it to their hard drive and/or making copies of the floppies).
Back then, we would just wait for one kid in school to get the game, and then seemingly everybody would eventually have it installed on their computer if they wanted to. Nowadays, I imagine kids would say "come to my house to check out this cool game" or "this game is cool, you should ask your mom to get it for you." But DRM makes it so that a lot of the "borrowing" of the past doesn't work--you'll always need the original CD to replay it and/or digital distribution limits where the game can go.
Yes, there are probably some kids that know how to visit pirate sites, but my only point was that DRM does counter some of the piracy that occurred in the past.
Why don't I sell my computer? Hmm, let's see. I need my computer to work, for one. Also, it's deemed bad taste to sell a gift, and seeing as how this was built by a family member from parts it took him quite a long time to accumulate, I wouldn't sell it for anything. And I didn't mean "I'm on the verge of becoming homeless", I meant "I have a very small income". Games usually cost around $60. Thus, I only buy games when I can spare the cash. Other times, I'm stuck with freeware and abandonware titles.
Until you've picked yourself up from the gutter after realizing you can't spend another night paying crackheads so you can sleep in their apartments, and you are making your way back up the social ladder, don't tell me what I can and cannot afford, please.
Eventually, companies will wean themselves off it plain and simple because to paraphrase Cory Doctorow; "If you have to alienate your userbase in order to sell a product, then it's not an internet ready business model." Some companies are already realising this and either removing DRM from their peddled wares (certain labels are doing this on Yahoo, right now) or scaling it back and making it as transparent as possible.
Now the systems I have the least problems with are, to be honest, Steam and GameTap. With Steam I can (with people I do 100 per cent trust) share the account details around and we can all play and have fun. GameTap allows unlimited subaccounts, two people to play on one account simultaneously (yay, free Uru Live!) and the sharing of the master account, like Steam. In fact, if Steam and GameTap were combined, taking Steam's open file-structure and GameTap's subaccounts and liberal dual-user usage, then one would likely have one of the friendliest DRM systems out there and it'd be future-proofed well until the inevitable point where DRM is abolished for good.
From what I've seen, the Telltale system is transparent on one computer but if it's limited beyond that then I agree they do need to rework their base system to allow for fair-use and make it more friendly to the average person, it only makes the company providing the entertainment more popular in the end.
I think that Telltale definitely have it right as far as their pricing system goes, I find that to be very reasonable and I congratulate them for it. It's a bloody good system. However, if their DRM system is less friendly then they might have to rework it a bit eventually. Though seeing that the Telltale folks do tend to have open eyes, ears and minds I wouldn't count them out entirely even if the DRM does prove to be unfriendly to too many people.
I can't say for myself yet though because I have only tried it on one PC. Still, I'd trust Telltale to do the right thing in this area.
The quality and playability is so superb with TTG and my few pounds I pay are quite deserving! I get a great game, they get finance for the next. Theres always going to be a few idiots out there who don't think like that! 'All for one' is their motto!
Thank you Telltale for these great games!
The average gamer lacks real morale. That's what I'd say.
The complain about the dying adventure games, they think about doing their own gaming business, and when someone listens to the cries, they want it for FREE!
But cheer up telltale, we are right behind you
Personally, if there is something I can obtained easily by purchasing, like Telltale's Sam and Max game, I would buy it in an instant. However, like some of you guys here, I too was introduced to adventure games through a bootleg copy. But once I got older( my teens), I started buying my adventure games thanks to a local computer show at the time, which had all the sierra adventure games made.
I buy my games since my older brother and I like to have a legit copy, with all the paperwork and such. Heck, other than adventure games (including Sam and Max,) World of Warcraft, Sims 2, and maybe the Castlevania games, I rarely play games. Guess I have lost interest in games. However, I still buy the o rest just to collect like Final Fantasy XII collector's edition.
How do I feel about pirating Sam and Max? It hurts the company. What l learn from a beta tester who beta tested Prey that sales of the game via retail doesn't hurt game developers since they have already sold their stock to a store for them to sell. In other words, Walmart, for example, buys x amount of stock from a publisher and then sells it to retail. However, I am not sure if this is correct since I am a toy collector and this doesn't work for toys. For toys, whenever something goes on clearance, the toy developer has to buy back their stock so that a store like Toys R us can sel it via clearance. This is why a lot of toy companies are going goin out of business.
As for the case of online games, I am sure it hurts the company since Telltale is sellin their game online, where they get the money from the consumers and not some big corperation. True, gametap gave them money, but i think the money used is primary for the development of the game
I can't wait to see my game appear on BitTorrent! I might even put it there myself!
--Erwin