General Discussions

...discourage piracy.

Link

In other news, Congress told that Dihydrogen Monoxide can kill people, as a result, water is banned across the nation.

Actually what data caps discourage is use of the internet for... anything, really. Pandora is about 500kbps. Pandora 24/7 would use up about 95% of my monthly bandwidth allowance, if I did not youtube, check my email, download anything, or play any games online.

[Edited by AdmiralThrawn, 3/15/2011 10:43:48 PM]

Internet Data caps are something that no society should have to deal with. We pay for our connection, we expect unlimited access to what we pay for. It's like saying "Oh, sorry, you used all ten gallons of water for this month, you have to go without or buy bottled water for your stuff until next month".

It's barbaric.

If anything discourages piracy, it's software and games worth paying for where you don't have to, say, rely on reviews alone to get a feel for the game. Demos? Yeah, those help. Putting as much or more effort into the longevity and playability of modern games (Deus Ex comes to mind. Ten years later and people still play and mod it) rather than making quick throwaway FPS and fighting games for a lot of cash in the short term.

Funny you should mention that. A report was recently published by Social Studies Research Council suggested that the reason piracy is so prevalent, if it actually is, is because publishers charge a crap-ton of money for crap games.

Link

Well it's true, the developer's ask too much for video games, as for digital distribution the game's there should be a lot cheaper then in retail store, for example 60$ or 50$, just to download a game.....that's expensive for digital distribution, now If every game was 20$ or 30$ the rate of piracy would fall and then the would make there money with DLC packages.....I think that this is a great idea

Wouldn't matter if it was $5, people will steal thief the software. That is fact.

They stole it back in the 80's when games were on cassette tape at £5, even the budget range at £2-3 got hit also.

And the games pricing increased because publishers had been forced to use methods like lenslok and speedlok (yes that was how they were spelled) to protect their investments, so increase in costs to the customer.

That is when it started, and how it will continue.

That sounds a little naive. The internet here sucks compared to USA, Australia, UK etc but piracy is alive and kicking.

The real answer is that the US doesn't have the infrastructure to have a functioning communications network without caps discouraging the causal user.

Its all to do with the fact Phorm failed big time, so the next step they could do was make ISP's limit connections to discourage P2P etc.

VirginMedia in the UK does it, Limit cap between 9am-9pm (2 different times), and also a widespread limit on NNTP etc from 5pm-Midnight Mon-Fri, and 12am-Midnight Sat-Sun.