"Stop with the obnoxious DRM. If people are going to pirate your game, they're going to pirate it. Reward the people who buy your games. Make it more convenient to be a customer than to be a thief."
Agreed. DRM inconveniences legit customers a lot more than pirates, especially when the DRM breaks because it's relying on some archaic, undocumented behavior that only some machines have, which in turn breaks the game for the user even though the user may have never copied a single byte of the game.
Copying the game is never prevented because the hackers have already cracked nearly all forms of DRM, and regular use is broken for many users. How in the world anybody confuses "DRM" with "copy protection" is beyond any logic. As far as I'm concerned, DRM hasn't prevented any copying.
"Don't release games until they're finished. People will forgive you for moving a date back for quality, they don't forgive you for rushing out an unfinished game."
Agreed, and many games have proven that. We whimper, whine, and complain all the time about dates - but the truth is, if the game is good we forget all about how long it took to release it when we play it
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"Don't forget that not everyone has brand-new hardware. Make sure your games will work on the hardware that people have today."
Yes and no. Some games like Crysis can get away with it because they're pushing the bleeding edge, and it's sorta expected not to run on older stuff. If the game isn't pushing the bleeding edge, though, it had better run on nearly everything to get the widest possible audience.
"Fun trumps graphics. Nintendo is doing well because they remember that games are supposed to be fun. The latest blood spatter particle effect won't beat out a fun game."
And don't forget everybody still plays and stores still stock WoW and Starcraft, despite the very dated graphics of those games. And the Orange Box was no Crysis in the graphics department, but still sold (and is selling) plenty of copies.
And oh, yeah - can't forget GalCiv 2 and its expansions! GREAT game!
Maybe some more shaders would be nice to add to GalCiv, though . . . I, for one, would like to see lights light up the entire sides of my ships.
Fun is #1 in any successful game. People can argue about graphics and gameplay until they are blue in the face - but a game simply isn't good if it isn't fun. I don't play pretty games, or games with good gameplay - I play FUN games
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"Expansion packs should not be glorified patches. This is like #2. If your game does have bugs, fix them in an update, don't charge for them in the form of an expansion pack."
Agreed agreed agreed! And to extend that idea: Don't release a patch just for the expansion if the core game is affected also. All too often I see patches that fix what's wrong with the expansion but the core game still has the bug.
Also: Keep support for the game around for a while. I've seen a lot of games, even (and often especially) popular games keep supporting and patching games for a couple months while the game is popular - but once it has passed its peak, it dies and dies quickly. Often it's not even a single year and the game has pretty much lost all support with no new patches.
This is especially true for a lot of big game publishers - they support a game only as long as necessary to keep it alive until they release another new game. And with the biggest publishers, new games are created very frequently.
I have several games that really aren't that old - but as far as the publisher is concerned, it's completely off the radar
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"Help Jack Thompson find a real hobby."
I'm sorta in between on this - on one hand, maybe he's gone too far - but on the other hand, there's games I simply won't play because I have strong moral convictions. The Grand Theft games (breaking the law), and Bioshock (killing girls) come to mind. I'm a lot more forgiving than other people I know (I play some shooters and other violent games), but sometimes I just get to the point where I ask "do I really want to play this?"
So I do have some mixed feelings about this.
"Please make a sequel to Planetscape: Torment."
Hey, you guys *do* write games, right
? Get started, slaves!
Not much of an RPG person, though.
And I think you mean "planescape"?
"Make better user manuals."
Apply that to the whole computer industry. Pretty much everything has skimpy documentation these days. Anybody remember the manuals for Flight sims like Falcon 4.0 (the first one, not the recent AA one)? Now that was a manual.
"We don't need every movie to have a game tie-in."
Agreed! Geez, does every movie have to have some sort of game made for it???? Most of the games based off movies are just horrible. They just exist to get fans of the movie to buy more stuff - only to throw it out after five minutes of playing it.
"Don't make me be on-line to play your game if it's a single player game."
I think you're referring to Steam here, and their history of having a poor offline game mode. It has improved recently (you can force it into offline mode from the GUI), but it's still a pain and a poor experience (requires restarting Steam).
Stardock Central is a lot better here. The distinction between being online and offline is a lot more transparent, and doesn't require restarting it.
And oh, yeah, while we're at it: Don't tie the download with the install - download everything first, then install the patches when everything is downloaded, allowing it to be offline for the install. The absolute worst thing about Steam is that a half-downloaded game is an unplayable game. Even with the gazillion patches to Steam, downloading patches for games in Steam is still very buggy and still very annoying.
GalCiv2 Forums
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? Get started, slaves!
