Long ago, a new games platform launched, the Humble Bundle. Founded by Wolfire Games, this new service sold bundles of indie games on a pay what you want scale with proceeds split between developers and charity. Purchasers of the bundles could choose to give all the sale price to the charities, or split the cost between the charities and developers, or anything in between. this novel sales approach lead to a huge success of the Humble Bundle and helped raise millions for charity.
Leave a CommentTag: DRM
On June 26th, the Ouya servers were finally shut down. After that day, there is no more store, no more updates, and no more games that rely on DRM in order to play. Razer in its announcement said it was up to the developers to decide how the games were going to be treated after the shutdown, and they had until that day to push out an update to fix any DRM issues.
But like any DRM that relies on a server check, some games on the Ouya store are no longer playable. I hopped on my Ouya yesterday to see what the state of the machine was. I wanted to see if any of the games I had were still playable. What I found was a huge mixed bag.
Leave a CommentBecause that’s a far better name than “Pocket Camp.”
9:41 – EA and demands for high Metacritic scores
28:54 – Xbox One’s backwards compatibility would have arrived sooner if Microsoft didn’t have to spend a bunch of time and resources removing its ill-advised always-on DRM
39:46- Nintendo details Animal Crossing for mobile devices
Leave a CommentWhile Andrew was unable to join me on the Molehill Mountain Podcast this past Saturday, he still had something to say about our signature topic…
1 CommentAndrew is away for the next two weeks, so you lucky ducks get to spend some quality time with EZK. This week, we enjoy some DRM chat. Nintendo’s Super Mario Run for iPhone is reported to require a constant data connection to play and several game developers have decided Denuvo, the supposed unhackable DRM, is not for them and have patched it out of their games.
It may be all EZK, all the time in this episode but Andrew does make an appearance in the chat, which we’ve transcribed below. Next week, he’ll be on a plane where he can’t watch the podcast or play Super Mario Run.
2 CommentsDigital distribution service GOG continues to be awesome!* This week the purveyor of DRM-free games and movies announced GOG Connect, a new service that connects to your Steam library and adds any eligible games to your GOG library so that you can play them DRM-free.
Yep, buying the game once was enough. If you own one of 23 eligible titles including FTL, Braid, Twine, The Witcher, and Bit.Trip Runner on Steam, you can add them to your GOG library free-of-charge.
Leave a CommentOn this week’s show (episode 169) hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight discuss recent Nintendo patents(10:30 mark), the possibility of “Rare Replay” coming to the Wii U (34:42), Xenoblade Chronicles having crappy DRM (37:41), the French government’s plan to ban Tor and public wi-Fi in light of terror attacks (48:39), and a former FCC commissioner invoking the name of terror group ISIS while talking about net neutrality (54:58).
Leave a CommentSince when is fair use something we must beg for on a triennial basis? I guess the answer is since 1998 when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was signed into law. This law not only extended copyright terms by an additional 20 years, it created a section of law that basically told the public that we do not own the media and computing devices we buy. No, the companies that produced that media and those computing devices own it as long as those companies put DRM on the products to lock out uses they don’t approve of.
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