Yes, I’m still playing Team Fortress 2 quite often.

After the idiocy involved with Mass Effect’s DRM, I’ll say Spore is the perfect game to pirate to hell and back. Someday maybe, just maybe, the idiots that publish AAA games will get it.

I saw an article on Sins of a Solar Empire the other day that said it’s sold half a million copies. It seems apparent that PC gamers are willing to shell out $40 for a DRM-free game. Just imagine how many copies Spore would sell if it didn’t treat its buyers like criminals — Sins is an niche game in comparison and still managed very respectable sales. D:

Yet they aren’t irate about this, if anything they seem less upset about this then they would be with pure-technical glitches. And this is a highly technical audience, not the folks who confuse technical limitations manufacture imposition. Apple just seems to have the magic touch.

Artificial life a game? Back in the day, yo, I had a lot of fun disassembling successful critters in Tierra simulations and determining how they functioned. The spontaneous and unanticipated evolution of viruses and the multitude of counter measures (including what is effectively sexual reproduction) in Tierra are utterly facilitating and are very compelling counter-evidence to those who claim that evolution can’t work. Neat stuff, though I never considered it a game. :) The Wikipedia article on Tierra is kinda sparse and doesn’t really do justice to that remarkable research. This page does a little better, though the really good stuff is in the various scientific papers which do not appear to be freely available online.

Re. Spore, the reviews seem to be in line with my expectations from the old demo a few years back — it’s a fantastic simulator, but not so much of a game, like many “artificial life” games tend to be. I’m disappointed to hear that the procedurally generated life didn’t live up to its promises, as this was its best selling point to me.

On the subject of DRM: One of the problems with organized responses is that they make it impossible to gauge the actual backlash. They’re important parts in creating a real backlash, but you need to be careful not to mistake the process for the product and declare victory prematurely. The reviews mostly look like carbon copies. While I’m sure it’s raising awareness, I seriously doubt the DRM complaints are costing them a significant number of sales: It’s not like there is some other perfectly equivalent product that lacks the DRM problem. Spore is spore.

I’ve still yet to see backlash from the general public over DRM *in general*, it’s almost always over extremely overbearing, poorly executed, gratuitously incompatible, or otherwise buggy DRM. Much of the DRM out there meets one or more of those criteria, but there is no reason that it will be so forever.

Eventually some companies will really work out a DRM which is only ‘minimally invasive’, where “minimally invasive” means enough to maximize their control over you yet stopping short of being noticeable to most of the public. This will undermine the current campaigns against DRM which focus so heavily on the immediate inconvenience of DRM rather than the long term risks or the fundamentally perverse nature of your property obeying some other master.