Hands up everyone who played with QBASIC themselves when they were younger! ^_^

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It is interesting to see xerenas claim I am too young to understand how the game industry works, as xerenas himself seems to be the one ignorant of past events himself. DRM free gaming did not start as a reaction to DRM, but rather it was the norm for most of the industries history (just as Indie gaming was once the norm, especially when PC gaming was dominated by shareware). DRM free advocates are very much like free software advocates in that they are actually a reaction to unwelcome changes to the industry, rather than people who are actually trying to force a new separate change on it. His claim that DRM free gaming never truly existed is simply laughable.

Second, this has nothing to do with "open source" or the Linux Game Tome. The Linux Game Tome is not a DRM free site; in fact it's hosting was supplied by a company that extensively uses DRM in it's products. What about it's unfortunate closure has any bearing on this debate at all? Same thing with the debate about hobbyist gaming versus professional - that has nothing to do with this discussion. Saying I want to support DRM free gaming is not akin to saying I do not believe in professional game development. By claiming I am you are doing a disservice to your argument and biting off way more than you can chew when it comes to the discussion.

There is no solid evidence that DRM improves sales, or that it prevents piracy. You do not need it to earn a living. Professional game developers worked quite happily without it for decades before it's great rise about eight/nine years ago. We are not proposing something that is pie in the sky or even never attempted - we just want the industry to be like it was before game publishers decided to start persecuting their own customers.

Third, let us discuss the morality of it, especially with regards to the Humble Bundle. It is simply a joke to suggest their was no moral component in it, or at the very least the suggestion that it was all done for a good and ethical cause. That is why that example hurts the most, as they aspired to loftier goals and then soured on them right when they were milking in the true fruits of their success.

Finally, there may or may not be morality in "business", but there certainly is in human endeavour, whether business types wish to see it or not. Just because you are running a business does not give you the right view yourself as being above your obligations to society, it does not give you the right to treat others any worse than any other member of society, and it does not give you the right to spy on your customers and abuse their own rights and freedoms in the name of illusory profits.

In more philosophical terms, businessmen are bound by their social contracts to society just as much as anyone else is. This is true of anyone who works in a society, benefits from a society, and is protected by a society. The fact that we live in a world where people are convinced that they are somehow outside and above it goes to show why we have so much problems in this world, which go far beyond DRM.

In short, you can support what you want, but please, never accuse me of being too young or too ignorant. I know of what I speak and flailing your arms about and attacking strawman with cliches is not going to change that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Well, I in fact do "still use tux racer" if by that you mean keep playing and buying non-DRM games (it has admittedly been awhile since I have played Tux Racer itself though). 

The real problem here though with regards to the main topic of discussion is that the Humble brand used to stand for more, and back in the day they sold it as such, which is part of the reason why it initially got so much support. Now their message is meaningless since they themselves are not really willing to follow it and are seemingly willing to ignore what they stood for on the merest of whims. They used to be taking a stand for something, and now whenever they do something akin to their past principles it seems more like a half-hearted attempt to keep people like us buying their bundles.

The other problem for me is that Linux used to be a bastion for progressive DRM free gaming (which actually used to be the norm, but sadly that is no longer the case, mostly due to people like you who are willing to accept it) and now that is far from being the case. A lot of people promoted the arrival of Steam to people like us by saying that we would get other non-direct benefits from it, but so far it seems like we received a whole bunch of games we can not play unless we bend our principles,  which has actually caused a lot of people to do just that, including game developers, which is the greatest shame.

If you really think that is the best choice you can make by all means do it, play your Steam games and buy from these sales, but do not begrudge us mourning what once was and trying our best to maintain a gaming climate we can still ethically feel we can support.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: IvancilloWhat an obscure future for DRM Free gaming on Linux since Steam started on it.

My greatest hope there is Kickstarter since most games there specify that they are going to be DRM free (alongside Steam releases.)

But yes, it does have to be said that while Steam has brought a lot more games to Linux and a lot more attention to it, it has been damaging the DRM free cause, especially now that the Humble Bundle is a lot less reliable when it comes to that point (most of their main bundles will still be DRM free, but that means a lot less now than it used to.) :(

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Actually, I was writing that before you posted. I just took longer. ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

YOU sir? :huh:

Anyways, these are Gambas generated packages, and I am not going to go to more trouble than that as Gambas should take care of most problems. Worse comes to worse you can just use the Autotools package or load up the Gambas project in the IDE, so I somehow doubt this is a huge problem.

And when it comes to multiple distros, I just built these on Arch and Fedora. You just need the RPM or deb build tools installed to make the packages from Gambas. The real problem is that far too few distros actually offer glc packages.

Bumadar, I have now re-uploaded the OpenSUSE RPM with the correct "glcapture" dependency. Thanks for the heads up. :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The reason is that the Humble sales always promoted a moral message which was against DRM and promoted cross-platform release. This is like a chemical company supporting environmental charities while at the same time dumping their products into the nearest river (although obviously considerably less egregious than that).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I hardly think putting in a bunch of Steamworks games is that much of an improvement. What ever happened to DRM free? To me this seems worse than being platform specific... :(

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: JeremyI'm not a graphics pro, or really even an amateur, but why isn't there a top-notch open source graphics engine published under the BSD license?  I think that that scares more game developers off than anything.  If they use a GPL engine, then they can't make the money they want.  The only thing that will draw them in is money.  They either have to save it, or make it.

Not trying to bite the new user, but seeing this misunderstanding again and again is becoming especially tiring. I will thank Berarma for beating me to actually explaining why though.

EDIT: By the way Jeremy, you do kind of have what you want - Ogre3D is under the MIT license and has been used by commercial studios such as Runic Games and Deck13.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I do not think you need to be so defensive about it there Nicodemus, as no one was really attacking this game or even any game developer in particular. And yes, I get the appeal of retro graphics as I did grow up playing some classic 16-bit games, many of them platformers, and yes, I understand the constraints that are placed on independent game developers, and yes, any game coming to Linux should still be highly valued.

However, for me what the problem stems from is the fact that the Indie community recently seems to have stuck itself in a bit of a rut. To me they were passed the torch from the old Shareware game industry of yore (the real golden age if you ask me), and maybe I am missing something, but in many ways they are failing to push past much of what was already achieved by their forebears in terms of innovation and original ideas, even though they have similar budgets and team sizes as those classic teams did. Something that should be a bastion of creativity is beginning to seem as repetitive as the AAA industry that many of them deride.

That is not to say there are no gems or exceptions to this, or even that there is anything wrong with platformers or going out and making a new platformer even with the old tried and true ideas, but it would be nice if some people realize that Braid and Cave Story were already released quite awhile ago and that many of us now want something a bit more fresh, or at the very least different, from the industry that is so often self-proclaimed to be the home of creative minds.

View this comment - View article - View full comments