Oh man, you guys are not going to believe this. I went out to movie theatre, right? And at the front of the theatre I was going to, there was a guy checking my ticket! What the shit? Like I was just going to walk in without a ticket, then go out and watch seven other movies later. Then I went to Best Buy to pick up some movies and stuff, and I’ll be damned, they had little scanners at the front door! Like I was going to stuff electronics in my pants and just walk off with them and sell them for drug money! Who does that? Weirder yet, they even had cameras set up to make sure I didn’t. I have no privacy or trust! So then I got my mail and saw that I got my new debit card. I tried using it, but it wasn’t activated yet. I had to call my bank to have them turn it on. Like I was just rifling through everyone’s mail and decided to take anything that looked like a debit card and use it to buy a new plasma screen TV. No, idiots, this is my debit card, I shouldn’t have to talk to your service to use something I purchased. And you know the real kicker? After I activated it, every time I use it I have to enter my PIN to prove it was really me and not just a total stranger. After all that I needed a drink so I went to the bar where I had to provide my driver’s license before they would let me order a drink. It was soooooo dumb you guys.



I swear, everyone today just thinks I’m some kind of thief, out to screw them out of their money. Let’s protest electronic stores, grocery stores, movie theatres, banks, airlines, and anyone else who treats me like a criminal for trying to use their goods or service. Seriously, what rights do these assholes have to try and make sure that people aren’t taking advantage of their service or products! It’s not like people shoplift, steal, swindle, or scam! Every single person is a good upstanding citizen, and business has no right to say otherwise!

This game started as a thought experiment I had one day while I was bored out of my mind at work. The question started: How can you take a bad or annoying mechanic and turn it into a benefit? I think that you could come up with dozens of games by using this concept as a springboard, but the one that this turned into is a project that makes me want to learn how to code games just so I can make it. The gameplay mechanic I wanted to go with was: What if death wasn’t annoying? This is what I came up with...


The Concept
Each level of the game has two sides, one side showing the world at sunrise, the other at sunset (not noon and night, because that is overdone). Every time something get’s exhausted in one world, it gets replenished in the other. To start simply, every time that the player character dies he would flip into the other world with full health. Every time that you kill an enemy in Sunrise, it will be waiting in Sunset. To continue with this theme, I figured a shooter would add an interesting twist (probably third person, although a shmup style would fit well). Every time you fire a bullet from your gun the bullet falls through the floor to the other side, exactly where you leave it. Ammo drops and powerups? Take it here, it becomes available there. I’m not 100% sold on the shooter though, because that does limit a lot of what you can do with the enemy design. It could work like an Action/Platformer, or even something like Dark Souls, maybe?

Why is this awesome? When you first reach the level, the difficulty is medium. If you can make it through with no problems, you don’t see the other side. But as soon as you mess up in one world, the second world is waiting. And it now has up to double the resistance of the last level, but also, double the resources. Do you want this shit yet? When I thought of that, I was so excited, but trust me - it only gets better.

Enemy Design
So what would the world contain? The first thing I knew what that the game needed a Ticker from Gear of War - the enemy kills itself to take out a chunk of your life, and is then immediately waiting for you on the other side. You would have to have your basic cannon fodder, but I would like to have some kind of non human be in this role, but probably something with a head or other obvious weak spot for a one hit kill. You would have your typical charging brutes, and sort of gimmicky enemies with a weak spot on their backs or something like that. I really want to capture the feeling from Dark Souls on the enemies though, where every enemy is a legitimate threat. A larger enemy poses a greater challenge, and there is no such thing as an easy fight. I have gone back on forth with enemies that wouldn’t leave their spawned world, or ones that permanently died, but at the end of the day I don’t think it is worth it.

Level Design
As mentioned before, all levels would contain a set of items that, when exhausted, move to the other world. Every level would start out symmetrical, but in a matter of seconds it would be thrown out of balance. Starting small, this would be extra ammo, powerups, maybe sub weapons. You could also have environmental hazards, like exploding barrels, levels that release traps (setting them on the other side), maybe even one time use shortcuts. I think there is a lot of potential with the hazards of setting all the traps in one world, killing yourself, then being able to chain an entire level in one shot. Theoretically, this could be done as puzzle solving, but two world puzzle solving is terribly trite, so I would never want something like that to be mandatory. Given that these resources are finite, the player character would have no ‘free’ attacks such as punches or swords.

As far as level progression goes, I think that the start would give the player plenty of resources, but would still have enough challenge to leave the player rewarded for not dying. After a few of those I think it would be fair to start introducing some moderately cheap shots. Something like the tickers above that wreck your health in one shot, and will continue to do so until you figure out the best practice of dealing with them, after multiple deaths in both worlds. This would be the introduction of an arcade feel: The levels should not be handed to you. You should have to have multiple runs through a level to know all the tricks and secrets, and the first time you complete the game, you will suck at it. The end game would take this to the extreme: imagine a level with 5 enemies on each side that could only be killed by a headshot (or similarly skilled feat). The player enters the level with 7 bullets. There is zero room for error if you want to complete the level without flipping over, and it becomes easier if you give in a little, and kill off a few enemies, then just die twice, hoarding your resources. This gives the player a chance to progress without giving them a high five. The player should know that they weren’t good enough to fight the level head on, and that they took a cheap way out. I have a better balance for this other than shaming the player, but I think this game needs to keep a score. Completing a level without dying rewards an enormous bonus, and each death would remove a significant, but not obscene, amount of points. Even still, this isn’t quite enough. The game needed one more touch to balance it out...


Boss Design
Once a side is cleared of enemies, the boss door would open/unlock/appear/macguffin. Each boss would be grandiose in scale, using design similar to some of the bosses from Devil May Cry/Ninja Gaiden. I think that it would be interesting to have a boss have a Sunrise Tendency and Sunset Tendency giving them a different appearance, moveset, weakpoint, or hell, maybe a completely different boss. The different boss wouldn’t be a big issue with switching worlds, because when you die...you go back to the level spawn. Where every. Single. Enemy. Is waiting. Death against the boss means that the level is now the hardest it will ever be. Unless of course you kill yourself on purpose, then there are zero enemies, and you are right back at the boss. This would require a balancing mechanic, which I am really fond of: Every enemy you kill before reaching the boss makes the boss easier. If that boss is impossible to kill, you just have to get really good at beating the level with all of the enemies, and then you can progress. If the level is too much, you can say “screw it” and go to the boss...who now has seven heads instead of two, each one moving at 150% speed - all because you cheesed the level. In the event of a shmup, this could be done as with a change in the bullet pattern (more layers, increase complexity, etc). This offers 3 ways to play through any level (hard boss, normal boss, easy boss, vice versa for the level), forcing the player to consider how they want to approach based on their strengths and weaknesses in that level. It also opens up the game for XXX-Hardcore-MLG boss runs with a boss rush mode almost built in, and removes the need for a difficulty selection. Bam. Elegant. As. Shit.

Finishing Touches
I know I would like to have the death animation very short, something where the player falls through the ground (maybe leaving ripples, or cracking the ‘pane’ of the world) and using the momentum from the fall to get to his feet in the new world. This would leave you in the same spot where you left off, which may mean you start the new world in imminent danger. This means a death would have a few seconds of invincibility to get you to a safe spot. If the game used the shoot em up format, then I think that the levels would still have to be free and flowing. At the start of the level the camera should be able to zoom in onto something that is like a tabletop or board game, showing mostly the sunrise portion, but a glimpse of the sunset. I think this game would be either an XBLA title or a budget release. Before any kind of release though, there would have to be an enormous amount of playtesting to ensure that the game is that perfect level of difficult that gives you a sense of defeating a powerful foe, but never feeling (overly) cheap.

I know it was a lot to read, so thanks for sticking though! Writing this ignited my desire to learn how to code it (I know I can write in other languages, with more...corporate applications), and hopefully it sounds like something you all would enjoy as well.

Again, I just don’t feel like sugar coating this rant. No pictures, moderate censoring (I’m such a nice guy), and pure, unadulterated hatred towards some of the comments this community has given. Please rate the following, on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 is strongly disagree, 10 is strongy agree): Game of the Year editions are the work of the Devil, and are the results of dirty publishers trying to squeeze the coinage out of your veins. If you said anything above a 5, congratulations, you suck.

The main injustice most people seem to have suffered is that they aren’t getting the value from their money, because if they waited the game would have been cheaper. There are two things fundamentally wrong with this argument.

1. The game will always be cheaper later
Remember Fallout: New Vegas? MRSP $60, went down to forty in a month, and by the time I got around to it twenty. What feels like 6 months later, a game of the year edition is released. Now if all this Mass Effect drama has taught me anything it’s that the main value of a game is apparently buying it right away so dickheads don’t spoil the game. It’s part of the meta game of the market, really. At least to me, games have more value when they first come out because you can discuss your experiences with communities online and your friends, and they are all just as excited as you are about it. You are spending money on the entire experience of the game, and you miss out on that if you buy the game when it comes out later in a GOTY form. By the time it releases as a game of the year edition it is out of the spotlight, and isn’t trying to reinvent gaming, or provide you with the latest or greatest. But then what is it but a basic cash grab? That is covered by the next points....

2. How much content do you need?
Don’t take this the wrong way. If someone sells you an 8 hour campaign and tacks on another 12 as DLC GOTY LOL WTF BBQ edition, yes, feel pissed. But what games have received this honor: Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, GTA4, Red Dead Redemption, Street Fighter 4, Marvel vs Capcom, Oblivion, Borderlands....Do any of those games not have enough enough content for you? A 30 hour campaign/online competition wasn’t worth your 60 (or 40, or 20) dollars? If you ever tell me that you feel like it wasn’t your purchase just stop playing video games because no amount of content short of WoW will satiate your videogame bloodlust. Kind of on topic, kind of off: If you look at Street Fighter x Tekken, however many hours of content you could get out of the fighter are totally invalidated because someone else, at a later point, for a different cost, might get more. What if there were no DLC on disc and you played the game for 80 hours (which I imagine is possible if it was a AAA fighting game, I don’t know if it is, but apparently it is a BFD). Were you robbed of content? Are you not entertained!?!? The answer to both is clearly no. If someone else has a better toy, yours is crap. And its all the fault of greedy publishers because it was a cash grab, right?

3. GOTY isn’t a last hope cash grab (the DLC in SF x Tekken totally is though, oh my yes).
So let’s say that content wasn’t an issue for you. This is clearly a cash grab by greedy publishers, how dare they want to sell you a game! That line of logic aside, do you know what this costs them to make? I’ll give you a hint: all the work is done. The reason that these are typically in the 40 dollar range is because no one had to come up with a new idea, new assets, new storyline, new art, and new golden thrones for the developers. All that is accounted for. All they have to do is combine and distribute. My gut says (which is a fancy way of saying “I think, but didn’t want to research, piss off it’s my rant) that most of the sales for a game come from the first few weeks, so most of the money is already made on this game, so they aren’t trying to screw you over. This is a service to you, after everything is said and done, after all the releases, all of the marketing, all of the bullshit. Yes, this means there is more potential profit on this edition, but it is tied to the same company, and they are probably a fraction of the sales when the game first came out. They are providing another SKU for the game, perhaps for late adopters, maybe for all you stingy folk, or maybe....

4. Not everyone has internet, you insensitive moron!
I’m going to do it, right here, right now. As a community we are all hypocrites. Ohhh, game of the year edition is baaaaaad because I have to spend less money for moooore content, baawww. Why would they release a collection of material in a disc format, previously only available for purchase online, from which the content may eventually disappear completely because I don’t have a physical copy? Those jerks! What I’m saying is: some people don’t have the internet. They cannot get to this content any other way. And you will defend the shit out of them in every other situation but this one, because this one actually affects you. Same story for online content disappearing. You dick.


(Thanks for reading, all! Probably some contradictions and flaws in my logic here, but this is how I feel, for the most part. I appreciate your thoughts below!)

I feel kind of bad, honestly I do. I never write anything just to say hello, ask you guys how it’s going, instead I don’t do anything until a topic gets underneath my skin, and I have to put out a blog about it. I guess I might as well get to the elephant in the room: Publishers aren’t obsolete, and if they think you are, I think less of you. Most of the time I read people ripping on publishers, complaining about copyright law, I think of some unwashed hippy at the OWS event thinking he is fighting “the man”, and like, totally rebelling against the system. There, I said it.

Stick with me here for a moment, if you would: Businesses are trying to make money. You know what happen when a business doesn’t make money? It cuts the fat until it does make money, can make money in the future, or is no longer in business. Much like in the animal kingdom there is survival of the fittest, but in business that is called Best Practices. So when you see everyone with a really, really successful game has a publisher, clearly something must be up with having a publisher. If companies could get by without one they wouldn’t waste the time or the money.

So this raises one of two questions: Tater, why are you retarded is the first one, because I have realistic expectations of people’s emotions online. The better question is what does the publisher do that causes the game to be successful? So first, in general, what does a publisher do? They a. fund the game, b. oversee the development, c. market the game, and d. publish the game. In the case of a in house studio, step b turns into ‘make the game’.

So let’s say you have a kickass idea for a new game. All you need to turn your game into reality is no less than 10 positions paid full time for 2 years at an average of 55k a year. That’s only a million dollars. In debt. Before any profit. For 2 years. Good thing everyone can afford to pay that on a risk that their game is good! Oh yeah, and once it’s done you still have to market it, which is probably pretty cheap, especially if you want to do it globally. Then you just have to print millions of copies, and convince retailers to buy it. Piece of cake. DoubleFine managed to convince people to raise something around that amount for a point and click adventure game, which as everyone knows are the most expensive to produce. I think you get my point here, so moving on to what this means.

Publisher enable risk. If every single person who wanted to make a game had to convince the entire team to take out mortgages on their homes to make a video game, do you know what we would see year after year? The exact same, risk free, drivel. What do you get with a publisher backing you? Probably ¾ risk free drivel, but ¼ innovation. You have your cash cows that generate more capital to invest in riskier IPs.

Wait, what was that word? Invest. That’s right. The publisher is buying the right to the IP in exchange for assuming all of the risk with the game, which is what I feel to be the exact center of what people are missing. If the game fails, the developer has ZERO tangible loss, all monetary losses are with the publisher. If the game succeeds the developer gets ALL the credit and additional profits. Holy. Shit. From a developer standpoint, that seems like the best case scenario for avoiding risk. So now as a publisher, you stand to lose almost all the money you invested in the game so that some dudes are guaranteed to break even. What does the publisher get out of that? If the game is wildly successful and fans are demanding a sequel, the publisher has everything contractually lined up with the same group. So it boils down to “I will sell your product, risk free to you, if you agree to continue to work with me if it goes well.” And that is apparently the most evil thing in the world. Consider if that didn’t exist: Hey, I funded your entire game, marketed it, and made it so that your vision was a hit success, out of the goodness of my heart. But that wasn’t good enough, and you think you can make more money with some other dude? Cool. Cool.

As long as I am here, and on a rant, funding games through Kickstarter would be a horrible idea. What is the incentive to make a good game if you already have all of the money? Oh, there isn’t one? And for that matter, what is the reward for buying a game before anyone has written a line of code? There are so many people that follow the gaming cycle of grief: Hype, hype, anticipation, disappointment, release, review, purchase, sadness. I’m pretty sure that is every Sonic game lately.

No pictures. Too ranty. Anyway, I know you all probably wont care too much for this, and in all honesty, I accept it is probably riddled with contradictions and false assumptions, but I had to post it. Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about 9-11. Thank you for your time and good night.

I've been hearing about this SOPA thing, and wanted to throw in my two cents. I started by trying to read the bill itself, but cannot pull myself through the legal jargon. So I decided to do what any former college student would do, and looked up Wikipdia articles, and other such things to educate myself. After all that I have read, I cannot say that I support the bill, but I can see where corporations and legislators might.

The bill seems to have a few definitions, depending on who you ask or when, so I am basing this of what I read most recently. I had some thoughts on what I was reading, why there might be support for it, and why it isn't the end of the world.

1. Stopping Online Piracy is Good


This kind of piracy is totally OK though. Just sayin'.

This bill is being introduced in DC. It should come as no surprise, then, that this is grounded in politics. From the point of view of stakeholders, stockholders, and politicians, the intent of this bill is right up there with the motion that puppies are adorable. But if you do not support the bill, someone is going to use the contrapositive argument: If you are against this bill, you are against stopping piracy. So now imagine you are the CEO of a company. Do you side with the people providing you capital and support on Wall Street, or do you side with the end consumer? In my opinion, both moves have their merit. Taking a public stand for or against SOPA is a ballsy move that will upset one of these crowds, but there is one larger problem in the form of the ESA. These companies belong to this Association, which provides them benefits like E3, stats and figures, and are (from what I can tell) a liaison between the game company and the government. By standing against them, you may be risking those benefits, which will no doubt have a negative impact on your business. If the bill actually does stop piracy, there may be increased revenue (which is difficult to qualify, as it is somewhere between 0 and several million dollars...they won't lose money if the bill stops piracy is what I am driving at here.)

2. The Red Tape

Paraphrasing what I read while researching, the bill allows the copyright holders of an intellectual property or the Department of Justice to go to court to see if they can remove the offending material from the website. Just typing that sentence was work. Because of the time and money this is going to require trivial infringements will be impractical to go after. In addition, there is a threshold of times the site has to offend in order to be brought to court, so this will only target large case copyright infringement. Finally, the result of this is that the website has to remove the infringing material within a reasonable time frame, and until then only that material will be blocked from search engines and other sites. How often do you want to bet the site will voluntarily resolve the conflict out of court? My guess is the very high ninety percent range.

3. Free advertising



One of the largest complaints is that companies (Read: EA/Activision) can stop user generated content, such as streams of their games and YouTube. My question to that is why would they want to? If you can get a large audience, for free, to watch someone play and enjoy your game, that is called advertising. That will lead to people buying your games(/music/watching your sitcom whatever) which leads to money. There is no reason why a company would go through the hassle of courts to take away a free revenue stream. In addition, sicking the dogs on someone who is posting user generated content will create a PR nightmare which could stop future revenue streams, which again is BAD.

4. The Internet Isn't Free

But dammit, Taterchimp, the internet is a bastion of freedom and hope! It doesn't belong to the government, and we aren't commie dogs like China! Oh wait, we are, never mind. I don't know where this idea that the internet has no right to be regulated comes from. Case in point: upload some child pornography, and see how free the internet is then. Or you know, look at it, and tell me you don't think you are going to get a phone call. The internet has to have certain regulations on it (and if you don't think so, you are a pedophile....see point #1 )

5. Censorship is already happening

So wait, companies are going to have the ability to remove content from a website if they have a copyright to that material? Then the corporations have power (don't get me started on why corporations are sooooo evil lolololidk my bff Jill). This has been happening for years on YouTube, specifically with Viacom, and generally with the entire music industry. All of them have the ability to remove user generated content from the site (often creating the worst audio/video match ever). But this is different, because LOGIC! Yet I haven't seen this trend with video game streams or let's play videos. Maybe video game companies don't care enough to pursue it, so it wouldn't be an issue if the bill passed anyway....


Better judgement said: don't Google image search pedophilia.

6. The Bill Could Assassinate the President

Almost every article I have read has mentioned things that SOPA could do, and very few mention what it will do. SOPA could disable the next YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, it could prevent people from streaming, it could slap my mother and piss on my great grandfather's grave. Many of these claims come off as fairly baseless. I can't say that these won't happen, but you can't tell me that they absolutely will, so until it is set in stone that this bill is going to take away your first born, let's take a stop back, alright?

7. Pirates Will Find Another Way

Oh they will? The fuck it, let's not even waste our time trying to stop them. Expanding that to the nth degree, we shouldn't stop murderers, rapists, and dictators, because they will just keep doing it anyway. What I am trying to say is that because they may (read: will) find another way, that doesn't mean we shouldn't stop what they are doing now.


Again, I am not sure that this bill is the best course of action. I honestly do not have the background and the patience to understand every single implications that this bill has. That being said, I can see it having some merit, and I get the feeling it has been a tad bit sensationalized. If any of my facts are incorrect, I did not do so intentionally, and I am genuinely interested in why I was wrong (with supporting evidence pleeeease). At the end of the day, I cannot see myself boycotting a company if they do support this bill, and on the other side of the coin, a company that stands against it hasn't really won me over.

Before I get into it, this is where I am coming from: I have a background in businessy things,and every once in a while, people post business things, either as a story, in the comments. Most of the time, these are harmless enough, but every once in a while, it is just flat out wrong. When people say that games should be sold at half price, that companies should take a major hit in sales to improve PR, it kind of sets me off. I mean no disrespect by this, but most of the people on Destructoid are not my most trusted resources when it comes to business practices, and maybe the companies who operate as a business actually know what they are doing. I will admit I am not to be the most trusted resource either, but I wanted to give my two cents, and today I want to focus on used games. My recommendation for listening for this post: Sympathy for the Devil of course.

Argument number one: games are too expensive, so of course people will trade them in! Sixty dollars is pretty steep for a game, and when multiple games come out, that is a hassle right? I remember back in the day when Super Mario RPG cost...wait, sixty dollars still? All SNES games cost me sisxy back then, and NES games started at fifty as well. I don't want to seem all crotchedy and remembering the 'good ol days' back when you could get coffee for a nickel, but inflation is clearly working in our favor here. Today's money is worth less, and the price stayed the same, so a game should be cheaper now than it was before. Actually, there are places online where you can view/apply the cpi to get an approximate value (ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt has the full tables). Long story short, Super Mario RPG would now 'cost' around 42 dollars. Please keep in mind too that today's game cost to develop is probably higher right now, and compared to NES games, you are getting a crazy amount of content.


I seriously googled inflation, and this was the first thing that came up. Awesome.

Argument number two: people leverage used games to buy new games, and support the market. For who? I know that people will say that a used game sale is not a lost sale, and the same argument goes for piracy. In the eyes of the business who produces the games it is at very least a potential sale. So let's say you trade in three games to buy a new game, and for the sake of simplicity, all 3 games were made by the same publisher. They just lost 3 games worth of potential revenue, and gained one games worth. Not such a good deal. Without revenue, developers will close, without developers, we don't get games. I recall many posts saying this kind of thinking is 'short sighted', and I tend to agree....

A lot of people bring up argument 2.5: Other industries deal with used sales all the time, but they don't seem to suffer because of it. Which industry? Lets start high: car industry. That's a big one, and you don't hear complaints, right? That's because a car will automatically devalue itself until someone who had the car has to buy another one. Natural degradation of the product leads to another purchase, and it doesn't matter who the end user of that product was (insert easy Xbox joke from 2006\7 here). I should suggest that companies start doing that! Oh wait, Capcom has tried and there was crazy backlash (Resident Evil 3d, and Pac Man/Galaga). Maybe it isn't the right way to go, but the logic they are applying is easy to understand, and from a business perspective, I sympathize with them (even though it is a dick move, even though I buy new). While then, video games aren't cars, they are more like movies or music. iTunes has such insane DRM and other restrictions that it makes what gamers put up with look like a joke. Hey, you just bought a song! A SONG! And it won't play on anything that doesn't have m4a support, and it is locked to your account which you can only have on five computers and you have to sync it to your registered iProduct and fuck this, I buy mp3s free of DRM from amazon! Think what Microsoft does with timed exclusives is bad? Movie to DVD transitions typically take four months (source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/03/6497.ars) and depending on the box office success can take even longer. Can you imagine if there was literally [b]no way[b] for you to play a used video game for half a year until after it was released? So we gamers, we have it easy.


I really, really hate Apple, so it makes me happy to see that 'drm' on google returns Apple hate. Or you know, I would feel that way if I were petty (which I'm not...honest).

Argument 3: The sequel sells better because of the original. How many games do you think get a sequel? The game industry is crazy cut throat today. What we have seen, is that if your title isn't a hit, You (Kaos) Lose(Visceral) Your (Pandemic) Job (Codemasters). The fact is that if a majority of a studios sales come from used games, I argue they are more likely to close down than they are to make a sequel (and Kaos isn't taking Homefront 2, so another company gets to celebrate the boon from used games. Go system!). As an aside, even if you buy an old game new, there is a chance that the publisher wont see any money anyway, if the game store doesn't restock the game. The only advantage to buying new is to stick it to Game Stop (or whoever) and that might be totally worth it anyway. So what makes a sequel sell better than the original? If you had a chance to do something twice, and hear all of the feedback from the original, what might you do? Fixing the problems would be rather high on the list for me. Maybe sequels sell better because they are better games (Castlenvania for the NES, of course, being the exception).

This originally wasn't meant to ride the latest Jimquisition, but I want to talk to one of his points: disrespecting gamers time. Here's what I want you to do: Load this video.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMMcd6-D4x8
(or this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utsvltzxtm4 )

Watch it. It is 13 minutes long. Around ten minutes of names, scrolling. Every single one of those people worked on Deus Ex. Some of them may have worked on this game for years. How many people do you think that was? How many man hours do you think they spent creating this product for you? Take five minutes. Close your eyes. Think of every person you talked to in the last six months. How do you think that list and the list of people in the credits compare. Imagine every one of your relatives who can work. I can come up with maybe thirty. In the first minute of Deus Ex's credits, there are about 40 people mentioned. For many their main source of income is from the game you just played. By buying it used you say that you appreciate what they did, but not enough for them to make some money off of it. And we are wasting their time? (This sentiment goes double for piracy, even though the math isn't quite the same). Buying used is going to restaurant and not leaving a tip. It's being able to afford a night out on the town, but bringing along your shitty kid, because you can't hire a baby sitter. The last thing I wanted to say is on the humanity topic is I hate when people say it is greedy for a business to try to stay in business. They have to pay their employees, they have to maintain a facility, get food, take care of families, and we get to enjoy the fruits of their labors and support them.

To be realistic for a bit, I know some people can't always afford to buy a new game. It is unrealistic to expect everyone to spend money to support the people who made the game, and in many cases it is too late to make a difference anyway. All I'm saying is maybe you can take the time to enter a code to play online. Maybe you can spend money on used game passes to support people who made them. Maybe instead of complaining about how games aren't free, and you can't plug them in and go instantly, you can have fun, you know, enjoy playing the game.


This is a very good place to start having fun (on a budget!)