20th June 2013, 6:50 PM
(This post was last modified: 20th June 2013, 7:11 PM by Dark Jaguar.)
So, you could basically share a timed demo with friends and family?
We didn't lose a thing. NOT A THING!
I heard someone complain about how we now "have to put in the disc to play, and that sucks". Well, that's not that big a deal on a home system. Secondly, and more importantly, if you wanted a digital future, nothing for you has changed! Just buy your game digitally and you never have to insert a disc again! Celebrate, we complainers have done nothing but improve your digital experience because you no longer have a 24 hour check in requirement!
I WANT a digital future. I am NOT the enemy of the "digital future". However, it seems that "digital future" has become such a catch-all "good thing" to some singularity worshiping people that they are all too willing to sacrifice any and all of their rights to obtain it. These are the people that would wonder why ANYONE would willingly reject Borg assimilation. Listen, NOTHING about a digital future NECESSITATES us losing our consumer rights. What we complainers are doing isn't saying digital is somehow bad, we WANT that future as much as you do. What we are doing is saying "hold on just a second, let us disarm this trap first, THEN we can continue to the digital future". What we're trying to do is slow down only JUST long enough to make sure the digital future is done RIGHT.
Because, fact is, we didn't do a number of things right getting THIS far. When the phone system - and later the internet protocols - were being developed, a lot of care was taken to make it a standard. It COULD have been different. It COULD have been set up so you could only ever call people on the same telephone network you were on. Early on, this was the case. It was "busted" in a case that probably won't see its like again in the future unless we push for it hard enough. Now, it is simply unthinkable that you would be unable to call someone on Verizon from an AT&T phone. (It is, surprisingly, still acceptable that a phone can be "locked" to a carrier though. That's another issue we somehow allowed ourselves to get into.)
Why is it that all of us in our "digital future" are split across 3 networks? No matter how much you might want to imagine it, discless installs weren't ever going to address the fact that Microsoft and Microsoft alone determined what games you could get on that piece of hardware, that there are fully 3 formats of video game hardware competing with each other. Video and music could never survive such a battle, but gaming has done quite well by it. It is a bizarre situation and we accept it. I mean look at the VCR. That HAD to have ONE winner. The consumer wouldn't stand for the confusion and exclusivity caused by an ongoing competition between VHS and Betamax. Between Bluray and HDDVD, only ONE could win. Video games are a bit of a different animal, but all the same, committees of companies could form that agree upon a standard that a video game console HAS to meet, and thus a promise that ANY game produced would be playable no matter which company you bought your video games from. This standard would be replaced or updated every 6 years or so, about a generation's life span, and everyone would build towards the updated standard from then out. What matches this? Networking standards. They go through exactly the process I just outlined every few years and new standards get ratified all the time. The wifi coalition recently finalized the AC standard and new routers will be getting built towards that standard very soon. Granted, having diversity in hardware and software ecosystems is desirable for other reasons, I'm just pointing out the contradiction when someone claims that they "dream of a future where the hardware is ephemeral and only the software matters", yet fail to address the simple reality that hardware DOES matter, and so long as there is no standard, there can never BE a point where it doesn't matter.
My point is, your digital goods are PERMANENTLY tied to very specific hardware, no matter how much you might want to pretend that's not the case. It gets worse when you consider the networks themselves. There is ONE store available on each console. None of them overlap. There is ONE network on each console, and none of them overlap. XBox players can never play online with Playstation players, because the two networks refuse to communicate with each other. When it comes to this, a standard is absolutely needed to solve the problem. A digital future needs an online gaming communication standard. However complicated or simple the standard will turn out to be, it must also allow for "plugging in" extra nonspecific data, a sort of module system, to allow for innovations that different game developers may bring to the field. The standard would also allow users to substitute any ol' server for the game developer's own servers, naturally as it would be a standard method of communication. Persistent data would be trickier, and likely require custom coding to handle it from game to game as it does now, but in principle the standard at least would cover all matchmaking and communication. It would be able to piggyback with telephony as well. Why go through all the hassles involved with things like Teamspeak when we already have a very powerful communication tool called the telephone? Can't we just USE that infrastructure for communicating in games and meetings? Let's upgrade telephony with the needed hooks for an online gaming standard and make "conference calling" a standard feature (and also upgrade the voice quality while we are at it), then we need not worry about which voice protocol is superior.
Frankly, for all the talk people are making about the "digital future", I am amazed that these problems aren't even being brought up. They're rather big deals in the long run and need to be handled.
We didn't lose a thing. NOT A THING!
I heard someone complain about how we now "have to put in the disc to play, and that sucks". Well, that's not that big a deal on a home system. Secondly, and more importantly, if you wanted a digital future, nothing for you has changed! Just buy your game digitally and you never have to insert a disc again! Celebrate, we complainers have done nothing but improve your digital experience because you no longer have a 24 hour check in requirement!
I WANT a digital future. I am NOT the enemy of the "digital future". However, it seems that "digital future" has become such a catch-all "good thing" to some singularity worshiping people that they are all too willing to sacrifice any and all of their rights to obtain it. These are the people that would wonder why ANYONE would willingly reject Borg assimilation. Listen, NOTHING about a digital future NECESSITATES us losing our consumer rights. What we complainers are doing isn't saying digital is somehow bad, we WANT that future as much as you do. What we are doing is saying "hold on just a second, let us disarm this trap first, THEN we can continue to the digital future". What we're trying to do is slow down only JUST long enough to make sure the digital future is done RIGHT.
Because, fact is, we didn't do a number of things right getting THIS far. When the phone system - and later the internet protocols - were being developed, a lot of care was taken to make it a standard. It COULD have been different. It COULD have been set up so you could only ever call people on the same telephone network you were on. Early on, this was the case. It was "busted" in a case that probably won't see its like again in the future unless we push for it hard enough. Now, it is simply unthinkable that you would be unable to call someone on Verizon from an AT&T phone. (It is, surprisingly, still acceptable that a phone can be "locked" to a carrier though. That's another issue we somehow allowed ourselves to get into.)
Why is it that all of us in our "digital future" are split across 3 networks? No matter how much you might want to imagine it, discless installs weren't ever going to address the fact that Microsoft and Microsoft alone determined what games you could get on that piece of hardware, that there are fully 3 formats of video game hardware competing with each other. Video and music could never survive such a battle, but gaming has done quite well by it. It is a bizarre situation and we accept it. I mean look at the VCR. That HAD to have ONE winner. The consumer wouldn't stand for the confusion and exclusivity caused by an ongoing competition between VHS and Betamax. Between Bluray and HDDVD, only ONE could win. Video games are a bit of a different animal, but all the same, committees of companies could form that agree upon a standard that a video game console HAS to meet, and thus a promise that ANY game produced would be playable no matter which company you bought your video games from. This standard would be replaced or updated every 6 years or so, about a generation's life span, and everyone would build towards the updated standard from then out. What matches this? Networking standards. They go through exactly the process I just outlined every few years and new standards get ratified all the time. The wifi coalition recently finalized the AC standard and new routers will be getting built towards that standard very soon. Granted, having diversity in hardware and software ecosystems is desirable for other reasons, I'm just pointing out the contradiction when someone claims that they "dream of a future where the hardware is ephemeral and only the software matters", yet fail to address the simple reality that hardware DOES matter, and so long as there is no standard, there can never BE a point where it doesn't matter.
My point is, your digital goods are PERMANENTLY tied to very specific hardware, no matter how much you might want to pretend that's not the case. It gets worse when you consider the networks themselves. There is ONE store available on each console. None of them overlap. There is ONE network on each console, and none of them overlap. XBox players can never play online with Playstation players, because the two networks refuse to communicate with each other. When it comes to this, a standard is absolutely needed to solve the problem. A digital future needs an online gaming communication standard. However complicated or simple the standard will turn out to be, it must also allow for "plugging in" extra nonspecific data, a sort of module system, to allow for innovations that different game developers may bring to the field. The standard would also allow users to substitute any ol' server for the game developer's own servers, naturally as it would be a standard method of communication. Persistent data would be trickier, and likely require custom coding to handle it from game to game as it does now, but in principle the standard at least would cover all matchmaking and communication. It would be able to piggyback with telephony as well. Why go through all the hassles involved with things like Teamspeak when we already have a very powerful communication tool called the telephone? Can't we just USE that infrastructure for communicating in games and meetings? Let's upgrade telephony with the needed hooks for an online gaming standard and make "conference calling" a standard feature (and also upgrade the voice quality while we are at it), then we need not worry about which voice protocol is superior.
Frankly, for all the talk people are making about the "digital future", I am amazed that these problems aren't even being brought up. They're rather big deals in the long run and need to be handled.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)