Concerning the “merchandise”, I want one of those pillow cover with something made by Tony Taka 
Ah! A body pillow?
Of course you just can’t get ONE body pillow. Oh no. If she’s keeping your right side of the bed comfy, what about the left? If she’s keeping your tummy warm, what’s keeping your back warm?
Nope. One won’t do. You’ll need two. Identical. I repeat: IDENTICAL. Nature loves symmetry after all. No ulterior motive on my part. None whatsoever. 
Heh heh. Not really, no. I try to operate on the philosophy that if you don’t start none, won’t be none. They are the ones who decided to bring it, not me.
Of course, if this really DOES come from the Japanese licensors … well, they will learn. Eventually. Or they’ll go broke trying to ram the Japanese way of running the market down the foreign market’s throat. I’d very much dislike that second outcome, but at the same time … well, I stand by what I posted. DRM is an insult. They programmed the game to self-destruct.
When I buy a utility – a fork is a fork, a zip utility is a zip utility. I’m OK buying disposable utilities, like plastic forks and paper plates and even shoes that wear out quick. But games are different, games are unique. If I want to play Bioshock, then only Bioshock will do. Metal Gear Solid 4 is not a substitute. If in 10 years, I want to play Bioshock, and I own a copy – I damn well am going to play Bioshock, not a to-be-released Bioshock Clone, or Bioshock 2, or anything else. If DRM would prevent this, then I am almost certain to skip the game altogether. If a game isn’t good enough I might want to play it twice, I probably don’t need to play it once.
Will they? I’m just fine with limited activation. I expect a great many other people are too. More and more western publishers are moving towards that too, and while some have them have increased the number of reactivations, it’s still how they’re doing it. Personally, I’ve been of the opinion all along that even though my bytes came on a disk, I was in fact buying the non-transferable license to use said bytes, not the disk itself. Resale of said disk has always struck me as immoral, whether or not it may happen to be legal.
With download purchases becomeing more and more prevalent, I find it highly likely you’ll cave (or go full pirate) before the publishers cave, once most/all games have some sort of activation policy.
Oh, and curious about the quote from the mangagamer rep saying it’s just for the beta testers, real version won’t be as full of errors… maybe it’s just my cynical self speaking, but I got the feeling he was talking about the actual website, and not neccessarily the games. I wouldn’t hold my breath that the games will be miraculously free of grammatical errors.
Well, first of all, I completely disagree with your interpretation of what happens when you buy something. But this isn’t the place for deep philosophical debate over that, and now is not a good time.
My statement that the Japanese companies will have to learn to play in the overseas market was not only in regards to the activation limit. Such things has a very bad precedent, but I wasn’t speaking only to that. I see more problems with what they have set up.
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I was ALSO referring to the complete lack of any option to buy a disc. This is unprecedented, and many have speculated that a large portion of the public WANTS a disc. Myself included. Download-only locks out people without broadband, or with crappy broadband, or who just won’t buy downloadable games.
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AND I was referring to their pricing “scheme” (which so far as I can tell is ‘charge whatever the Japanese licensors are used to charging’). It’s just not going to fly, the exact same way it didn’t fly when Bandai tried to force it down the anime market’s throat. People are not going to spend 40 euros on a bishoujo game when they can get PP’s titles or any H-ova for much less. Especially when they factor in how much less it’s worth (see points 1 and 2).
… I can’t imagine this quote being posted on any board anywhere without someone immediately accusing you of being a plant spouting those lines because you’ve been paid to. So I’ll save other people the trouble and make vague insinuations right away. 
I don’t believe for a moment that ANYONE, when computer games first started being sold in stores, thought “Aha! I will buy myself a non-transferable license to play a game!” No. They thought they were buying a game.
Obviously, plenty of people realise that it’s immoral to install the game and then sell the disc while you still keep the game, but that’s not the same thing.
That, or I started playing games back in the day when EULA’s were only a paragraph or two, and I actually read them, and “non-transferable blah blah” was pretty much the entirety of what they said, and It made sense to me. (and still does)
I’ll admit though, WAY back in the day before games actually had installs or EULA’s, I didn’t really think of it one way or the other when dad came home with games for our Apple ][.
And, I also don’t expect to be able to sell my movie ticket to somebody else after I’ve seen the movie, even if I did pay $10 for that piece of paper.
Ummm, you’re paying for a performance. Your ticket is essentially “renting” your seat in the movie theatre for the duration of the show. Back to the gaming scenario, a movie ticket is the equivalent of dropping a quarter (or several, nowadays) into an arcade game. And, there’s a reason that there aren’t so many arcade places anymore…
The analogy of buying a game is like buying a movie on DVD. If I bought a DVD of a movie from XYZ studios, I’d be a little perturbed if the DVD suddenly stopped working forever if:
(1) I tried playing it in a DVD player that wasn’t the first (or fourth) DVD player I played it in,
(2) XYZ studios went out of business,
(3) my Internet connection was down.
I’m not shooting down your entire argument, but the movie ticket analogy is a bit dodgy. I can understand putting in place a system that attempts to prevent piracy, but really, “number of activations” is so twentieth century. Steam (arguably the largest download gaming distributor) doesn’t use this model (account-based / Internet accessed), nor does iTunes (authorized computers). “Number of activations” is simply a lazy way of DRM, and very good at burning the legit customers while the pirates just crack and go.
ok i just like to say to nen
i like how your view is one-sided. its they’re game, they made it. and they are giving rights to a company to translate it. the company has to follow it or guess what we have no game. so why do they have to learn to play by our rules? this is only earning them a little bit more money. not tons and tons like they get in japan. they relized that western people would like to play it so they said fine. but you will abide by our rules.
so you don’t want to play by theirs and they’re not gonna play by ours. they don’t need to play like ours. its that simple. so just be happy that we are getting a chance to play their games in english and uncensored. they didn’t have to do this.
and as far as unprsidented goes you do know that in main stream gaming there are talks about it soon becoming completely download service. these guys are just taking the steps.
and no i do not work for them. nor do i get paid buy them.
I can’t help but laugh at the mentality some people take in society anymore… They’re more then happy to lick the underside of any company’s boot and take anything they’re offered thinking they should be ‘thankful’ for it. A company does not make it’s customers, the customers make or break that company. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
DRM is a punishment to their paying customers, and a means to hope they get repeat business on the same titles when their activations run up. It doesn’t stop pirates, it doesn’t hinder them, and let’s face it, it doesn’t even slow them down. When a company turns to methods like this, they’re doing nothing but shooting themselves in the foot and driving more and more of their paying customer base to turn to piracy for cracks/hacks, just so they can enjoy what they’ve rightfully paid for. Or worse, that customer turns straight to the illegal version to save themselves the hassle and hoops the company would force them to jump through, just to enjoy what their money paid for.
Eroge is serious business.
ok let me see you make a computer program product and not enforce a type of drm on it garentee you’ll get a few sales but then you’ll go broke because every one who has bought it has the power to upload it, lets say 100 people bought it that means a 100 people can upload it. now with a drm in place maybe only 20 of them know how to hack. guess what that saves you time to get more sales even if its by a little.
its not meant to stop piracy its meant to make it harder to do. thats all.
because you know what all video games do have a drm. dvds, cds, blu-ray, internet downloads, all have a type of drm. but they have all been hacked, but they’re still there for a reason. they want to gain as much sales as humanly possible before the hacks get widely known.
and by my understanding they didn’t even need to release these games to america. they could be like illusion and never bring over any of their games. they could be like namco bandai make a game but not bring it over either. we are a much smaller market here in america then in japan for bishojo games, so why do they need to follow us when their main demograph is in japan where they are at. they gave rights to a company, with a contract that stated they had to do it or no game.
so be happy that your even getting the game. you don’t have to buy it. you can buy pp orders only. but im going for both they have some interesting titles. and a drm doesn’t really bother me.
when you grow up and learn contracts you’ll understand why they are forced into doing this. if they brak the contract, they lose the game(s), the current and future companies, and then get sued. so cut them some slack for even wanting to bring games over from japan and abiding buy the original devs set of rules.
That’s not how it works. It only takes one person to crack and seed a game. One or one hundred, the results are the same with p2p software like bittorrent. Not everyone that buys a legal download is going to upload it, either, so your starting point of 100 is off the mark. :roll:
http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/14383
Good games sell. Bad games don’t sell. DRM doesn’t protect products when a game that has no copy protection sells 200,000 copies in the first month.
http://blogs.ign.com/Stardock_Games/2008/01/29/78711/
And there’s the rub. Give the customer a reason to want to buy your game, and they won’t steal it. The hardcore pirates aren’t going to pay for your game anyways, so how is a DRM going to get them to buy your game? But piss off enough legit gamers with crazy DRM schemes and you can be sure they won’t be back again…
But I fully acknowledge this statement. If the company had no choice but to acquiesce to the demands of the Japanese manufacturers, then they’re in that “rock and a hard place” situation. Because you’re right: contractually, they are bound to enforce some sort of DRM scheme on the products they release. So, they’re not likely to release anything without DRM attached-- they simply can’t.
So, it all boils down to what the customer wants to do. Some feel that, on principal, they can’t in good faith buy a product that has DRM attached, particularly not this sort of “broken after X times” deal. I can respect that. Others feel that the fact that a company is bringing over more eroge titles in a pretty slim market is an opportunity and that should be rewarded over the issues of DRM. I can respect that too.
And of course, this being the Internet and all, neither side will be able to convince the other side to switch sides. In the end, both sides are making the right decision for what they believe in, and hey, that’s cool. In the end, you’re the customer and it’s your dough.
Me, I’m still holding out to see if the quality of the product is going to be up to par before I even consider whether to buy into the DRM scheme or not.
While I can understand the debate about prices and quality, the debate about DRM is a wrong one. First, it’s about activation, not replay; you can replay the game as many times as you want, you just cannot reinstall it without a need for activation. As far as games are concerned, it’s a myth that most people uninstall and reinstall whatever game they’ll know they could replay; nowadays, people just stack games on the harddrive, never uninstall and just add more storage place. It’s also a myth that people want a physical storage media; more and more softwares can be bought from the Web with no mean to get a physical disk and no one cares about the matter. People just keep/burn the downloaded install program. Also, it’s a myth that people replay their old games, even more erogames that are not made for such a purpose (such as general audience Japanese RPGs, really); people just play a game until they beat it, then move on.
At last, there’s a perfectly legal way to not need reinstalling, one that people d/l erogames from d/l sites use: VMWare and the like. Install your game on a virtual machine, activate it, burn the image. You’re done.
There’s something called “demand and offer”, though. In a nutshell, western non-Japanese speaking fans are starving, yet they don’t want to make any kind of concessions in order to satiate their hunger for erogames. It’s not about accepting everything and be thankful for it, it’s accepting compromises in an emerging, niche, market. Quality and prices are important, primordial even, to break through, and even then, a compromise should be made; comparing the prices and quality with general audience games is not understanding that the erogames market is still in its infancy and therefore its products would more expensive. “Any price” isn’t right, but “same price as the games that are sold by the millions” isn’t either.
OTOH, DRM is just an idiotic debate.
I have.
BZZT! Wrong.
Actually, from personal experience, DRM causes more piracy, not less. Piracy on my titles was quite low as long as I had separate demo/full versions. When I made arrangements with a publisher who insists on putting out time-limited demos which upgrade to the full version with a license code (and are therefore hackable), piracy went way, way, way, way up.
Didn’t stop people buying the game, but vastly increased the number of pirate copies floating around the web.
BZZT! Wrong.
I’m perfectly capable of understanding contracts, and I don’t blame MG for doing this if they’re contractually obligated. I still think it’s stupid, but the fault is not MG’s.
Now, onto OLF…
Be careful with the use of the word ‘myth’. The things you’re saying here are both true and untrue, and they vary depending on the exact game audience and size of game you’re talking about.
With most casual games, which are under 100MB in size, you’re correct that most people don’t uninstall them, ever. You’re also correct that a large number of people don’t care if there are physical media offerings. HOWEVER, casual games do still try to get retail distribution, because there are also a large number of people who DO care about having the physical disk.
As the size of the game increases, things alter. People who would leave a 100MB game installed on their computer forever even after they’re not playing it anymore are much less likely to leave a 10GB game installed. Even with big game subscription systems that allow you to redownload the software whenever you want, most people aren’t happy at the idea of downloading something HUGE multiple times (or even once, if their connection is flaky). Adventure games are the one breed of independently-developed game that tends to sell CDs direct on their website instead of just downloads. Because the games are huge and the customer base wants to buy it in physical form. They kick up an enormous stink about download-only titles.
Also, as far as “just add more storage space” - personally I don’t want more than two hard drives inside my tower, so when I need more space I copy all the data off the old small drive into a new big one. Which would probably mean OOPS FILE MOVED and trigger another activation, no?
Now that sounds useful, although I doubt the sellers entirely appreciate it.
Erogames and their so-called fans?
Not if you use proper file/disk data moving softwares, such as PartitionMagic.
It’s legal, therefore there’s not much about what they can complain. Other than that, really, it should stop all complaints about activation systems, need for a physical storage support, etc. but I bet it won’t.
My only beef with DRM is the inevitable support expiration that renders everything inert. Not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when. Happened to a lot of my major league baseball footage that I bought from the official site. Now I have a thousand dollars worth of video files that are totally useless to me ¬ñ was told to REBUY them from the new source. There’s nothing else to say for it: I got seriously fucked sideways. Had I gotten the DVD’s, I could still watch 'em. True nothing lasts forever - CD/DVD discs break after all - but then there are people who own decades old records that still play in perfect condition. I’ve experienced similar things with digital music, when iTunes put several rivals out of business.
Another factor that bothers me: several of the Japanese versions of these games don’t have protection. I know it’s not their intention (or is it?), but it seems to paint the West as a bunch of pirates. Naturally eroge piracy runs rampant here ¬ñ for a ton of reasons that’s too long to go into - but fact of the matter, Western pirate sites often get their ISO from Japanese pirate sites. Overlooking that is easy of course, but the point I’m getting at is: the hacked version of their games weren’t cracked by l337 programmers ¬ñ they just swapped certain files in the English version from the Japanese version (which I’m sure they also pirated).
I support what OLF is saying - piracy needs to be stopped - but online activation DRM with limited installs can’t be answer. Not for these prices (maybe if it was $25 each or something). One doesn’t buy an Italian super car at full price, with the contract stating you can drive as many times and as far as you like, but limited to a lifetime of six full gas tanks - which can ONLY be bought from Gas Station Alpha. If Gas Station Alpha goes away before you get six full tanks, then you can’t buy gas anymore PERIOD. Not. Gonna. Happen. If you sold a disposable car for $500 or something, maybe it might fly (with gas prices now, six full tanks might be half that already). 
Meh… their decision has already been made, so we’re really beating a dead horse. MG claims it’s not something they wanted: it’s something their Japanese source providers wanted. So you can do one of two things - buy their games and enjoy it, or boycott and don’t buy them. It’s your money that will REALLY do all the talking… and it will be talking in about 24 hours or so.
But it also implies that several are. A quick search on DLSite.com tells you it doesn’t depend on the game but rather on the brand/maker? What you’re implying is that the games MangaGamers releases are games you’d be able to get on a Japanese site without activation, while I’m rather of the opinion that if the games were offered on a (Japanese) download site, they’d have an activation the same. In a nutshell, you’re complaining at DLsite.com for putting out d/l games with an activation system.
You also didn’t address my (easy, free and legal) solution of a VMWare image.
Not complaining at DLsite protection, complaining about the double standards which allow pirate versions WITHOUT the DRM. I’m also at heavy odds with playing such high prices for a product, without the insurance of a hard copy (ideally serial key protection - not online activation).
Actually this can tread in dangerous waters, depending on where you’re standing. Certain versions of VMWare are cost free, but Windows OS are not. If I own only one copy of Windows, I can only have that copy installed on ONE physical machine or ONE virtual machine - NOT one physical and one virtual - that’s illegal according to MS terms of agreement (there are loop holes, but this is still gray as hell). I can’t use the same Windows serial over and over across different machines or virtual machines, unless I have multiple licenses of that serial key. So you have to buy another OS (or license, which costs as much anyways) - which could run you between $50 to $200 dollars on average (depending where you shop and what version). I run a TechNet and MSDN account, so I kinda keep on top of oddities like this.
So it’s clearly not free unless you have spare a OS lying around. Some of us do; but many do not. Also when you consider that there are people out there who have troubles INSTALLING these games on their hard drives (as seen in the help forum) - having these people configure and working VMWare isn’t all that simple. 