Qualtality

Blizzard’s response to WoW account theft

It comes in the form of the Blizzard Authenticator.

Every idiot developer loves to mouth off about how MMOs are the only way to be free of piracy, yet here we are with account security being strengthened with what is, ultimately, a dongle — one of the lamer ideas in the field of DRM.

Did i mention it costs you, the player, $6.50? To make your account more secure they apparently need to charge you that amount on top of the industry-high $15/mo subscription fee and the box fee you paid for the privilege to pay that subscription fee. Because as we all know, WoW has done poorly and is running on a shoestring budget. How can an underdog like Blizzard afford to pay for the security of the account for which you’re already paying a monthly premium?

Basically the answer to people pirating games is to include DRM that adversely affects the legitimate customer, and the answer to people stealing paid accounts is… to charge the legitimate customer more.

Yeah, Blizzard is totally a competent developer like everyone says. After the airtight server security of Battle.net with Diablo, Diablo 2, and the *Craft series, who could’ve seen this coming? And it’s not like they could take the meager earnings of their past 9 titles to hire some fucking infrastructure programmers that weren’t utterly worthless.

Posted by Jon R. under Games | Comments (1)

Piracy

I got sick of people citing piracy as huge source of the PC game industry’s woes. So I decided to look at a few things, including the size and contents of demos, and the prices of games in Europe.

Here’s that.

Posted by Jon R. under By User, Jon, Updates | Comments (0)

Lame shit devs get away with, Pt.1 in a long series

[This happened a while ago, but i didn’t have much of a platform to address it then. It’s here because now i do, and because pretty much no one picked up on this. But hey, Free Gerstmann or what-the-fuck-ever.]

So there’s this dev house called Bizarre Creations. You might know them as the makers of Project Gotham Racing 2, PGR 3, and Geometry Wars. You might also know about the freeware PC game Grid Wars 2, which Bizarre bullied its creator into not hosting anymore.

Let’s start right there.

Grid Wars 2 was taken down, voluntarily, from its author’s site at the request of Bizarre Creations. The exact quote leading to this was:

“We’re beginning to feel the effects of the Geometry Wars clones on our sales via Microsoft now and are beginning a process to begin to more robustly protect our copyright and intellectual property.

I hope you understand and are able to do this without us having to take further steps.”

Now, this is all bullshit. Surely most of you can recognize limp-dick C&D bullying like this from a mile away. But let’s just see how much bullshit it is, step by step, for no other reason than because an indie dev got pushed around by a bunch of loser prima donnas posing as professionals.
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Posted by Jon R. under By User, Games, Jon | Comments (1)

Korean games and rootkits

Crash course for Korean dev practices:

1) Create game that’s low on substance, high on style (paradoxical gameworld that’s populated by females with huge tits and males who clearly have no interest in such things)

2) Realize that no one’s actually going to pay for this grindy bullshit except for retards with nothing better to do and Koreans (retards with nothing better to do)

(This part isn’t a joke. This really was on the official site’s front page.)

3) Do not make a game that’s fun. Instead, create a revenue model that specifically caters to retards with nothing better to do by monetizing useless fuckball items that didn’t make the integral design phase (initial session of artists working through their boners)

4) Utilize an utterly bizarre source tree that requires each localization of the game to get feature updates separately, often months or years after the Korean version (holy shit)

5) Compensate for the quality coding that naturally comes with these practices by employing an anti-cheat device that acts as a rootkit (only rational way to keep people from using client-side cheats to affect things like the RNG. Or invincibility. Or the position of mobs.)

And let’s be honest, that’s what INCA’s nProtect Gameguard is. It elevates its own status, injects itself into every running process (or renders the game useless if you prevent it from doing so), makes kernel hooks, hides itself from the task manager’s list of processes, and the driver lingers after the game itself has been closed or even uninstalled. It also phones home with information about every process that’s running alongside the game, because apparently only the Korean company making the fucker deserves to have a clear picture of what’s running on your machine. By the way, since your machine is essentially compromised now, you should look into buying their very own personal security solution. But if you’re running another security program like Process Guard, Gameguard will barf on it and you’ll be asked to disable it in the interests of security.
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Posted by Jon R. under By User, Games, Jon | Comments (0)

Status

Posted by Jon R. under Uncategorized | Comments (0)