How many people did Oblivion lose because it didn’t work on anything less than shader model 3?

That said for some games their only distinguishing feature is their graphics – they have little other choice

Draginol has an interesting way of approaching the problem of piracy there – instead of considering PC gamers as a whole you cut it down to “PC gamers who would buy a game given incentive of it being a game they like”.

He then elaborates based on the assumption that there’s a marked difference in the games that appeal to PC gamers in general as opposed to PC gamers that don’t pirate games. Might not be an entirely bad assumption that but it’s an assumption until it’s tested.

I’m trying to think of a good analogy but I guess you could couch it as: You have a magazine, some people buy the magazine, other people just read it in the shop. When you’re deciding which editorials to run you base it just on the opinion of the people buying it (which will not necessarily be the opinions of all the people reading it – an editorial on how great it is to buy newspapers won’t appeal to the “read on the shelf” part of that demographic)

i used to play at lan cafes in indonesia, and the games installed were all pirated copies… of course most of them were glitchy as f***, usually because our swashbuckling privateer did a poor job of cracking the thing.

but at the end of the day, it cost 50X more to buy a PC game, than it is to buy a plate of REALLY good fried rice and chicken satay! the marketing and promotion of any media entertainment in indonesia is tailored for a western market… too many people in indonesia are too poor to buy a music CD, so they buy an MP3 cd off some scummy mug who downloaded all the songs of the net and burnt them… too many people are too poor to buy DVD’s so they buy a pirate copy (its like a lucky dip with DVD’s you either get a really good copy, complete with special features, or a shot-in-the-cinema-from-a-poor-seating-position-with-a-poor-camera copy)… and in all fairness why should they pay a hefty amount (1/3 of a months wages for some) when they can get it for 5%-10% of the original price tag?

i think the entertainment industry needs to realise that in order to get more people buying legit copies, it needs to realise that 3rd world/developing countries still have massive economic instability…. and a hum, or ha, followed by an ‘oh well’ + shrug of the shoulders as a reply to this issue isnt gonna cut it, simply because, it works both ways…