If there is one thing I hate it is to buy sub-quality games that simply don’t work as advertised. You can’t return them for a refund, all you can do is swap them for like. If one won’t work, a copy isn’t going to have a better result.

Poorly designed games is another big peeve of mine. If a game isn’t worth a hoot, why should I pay for what I don’t like? I don’t mind shelling out the money but I want to know before I do that I am getting my money’s worth. I would hate to tell you the games I have bought only to find out they were trash. There are not that many games I really like. My requirements for a game is that it has replay value; again and again. Most games fall seriously short in this department and I am not interested in them.

There are games I love. For instance, I have purchased every game in the Civilization series. Not once but most more than once. So I will buy. My standards are high when it comes to replay value and it is a must to have. I won’t shell out the money for fancy cover art. Nor will a blurb about it making it sound like something it is not, entice me to buy. I’ve been stung far too many times already going that route and I refuse to continue to do so.

Make quality games that fit my needs and I will be a repeat customer. Make trash and you’ll not see a dime of my money. That’s the way it is. Make it to where I can’t pretest those I would buy and I will buy none.

Deal with it.

Not “why would they,” but “why did they?”

Because modern consumers don’t hold the same outdated mindset that you do. We all tire of corporate greed telling us how we can and cannot use the material we pay for. I never engaged in peer to peer file sharing prior to the Napster fiasco and rarely do it today (I prefer to pay for independent music than download studio crap), but that’s what got me into boycotting the RIAA.

Nothing disgusts me more than some cigar-chomping pig threatening a teenage girl from a middle-income household because he claims she utilized a p2p program to trade music files.

I currently pay for videogames, but if they start treating their fans like criminals, I’ll boycott the gaming industry as well.

Unfortunately, better ideas are two a penny. The problem is in implementing them, and to do that you need money, invariably from people who don’t like risking it. The other problem is that no-one ever got fired for doubling the size of their IP litigation budget.

Here’s a ‘better idea’: The Bedroom Coder’s Business Model.

Some of the reasons that the music industry are so hated are that they over charge, they provide inferior products and that they treat ALL their customers like criminals – including those that do not pirate anything! Look at the recent news about them failing to reach an agreement with ISP’s in Spain where they wanted EVERYBODY to pay a piracy charge for example.

The games industry has a few aces up their sleeves though – in that they can fairly easily offer online content and other features that other industries cannot! However – one of the main reasons that people pirate PC games is because they use restrictive DRM that introduces bugs, performance issues and security issues on PC’s – whilst at the same time being completely useless and pointless in the fight against piracy – most games are cracked within hours! Like the music and film industries need to make their content worth buying, games companies need to focus their efforts on providing software that works out of the box, offers real value for money and encourages people to support them. A further form of revenue in games these days is in game advertising – especially when played online – look at games such as TrackMania Nations for an example of how “free” games can be profitable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fravia&oldid=287935442

Fravia was a pseudonym/handle for a European software reverse engineer (his real name, according to his autobiography, was Fjalar Ravia, but other names have been suggested) who is probably best known for his web archive of reverse engineering techniques and papers. Mirrors of the old web site (fravia.org) still exist (see, e.g., Internet Archive), though Fravia has publicly requested their removal in favor of his new web-searching-centric sites.

He led people from being ‘crackers’ to ‘reversers’, both in the sense of software reverse engineering, and as an ideology. He was strongly against advertisements, software user-restrictions, and what he claimed to be needless software protectionism. He was interested in written history, language, information theory, and was known to speak Finnish, German, English, Italian, Spanish and French.

His principal interests were most recently advanced web searching techniques, including how to write search bots, how to “cut through the web” to your target using special search strings (webbits), and how to find anything digitized, including unknown music pieces and rare books and images without knowing their names.

His anti-commercial attitude is well known, and there is not a single banner or advertisement on his sites. Similarly, his writings and workshops always underline and demonstrate his belief that the very structure of the web was made for sharing, not hoarding or selling.

In October 2000, Fravia got in touch with Richard Stallman at a LinuxDay event in Milan to which they were invited by a common friend. This meeting induced Fravia to start exploring and helping free software and free culture. He was also a friend of reverse engineering legends like _Mammon (creator of bastard, a linux disassembler[1]), Razzia (a visual basic disassembler), Zero aka Dr. Thorsten Schneider, and Woodman.

As of September 9th 2008, Fravia had stopped updating his site and holding conferences after being diagnosed and receiving treatment for a Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the tonsil, that metastasized[2]. His site was frozen for half a year but was then updated as Fravia slowly recovered, announcing that “experimental cures seem to work and seem to have stopped the nastier metastasis, even slightly reduced them”. He then focused on GNU/Linux.[3]

Fravia died on May 3rd, 2009.

Goodbye Fravia! (via Reddit)