There's not enough bitching

[Dracos]

Realizing in reorganizing changelists to prepare for checking in, some critical files got reverted.  Luckily I had backup from earlier, but bleh.

[Anastasia]

Sick and feverish enough to have delusions. Fucking bullshit.

[Dracos]

THIS DAY.

I have 4 project teams shouting for my attention.  Apparently nobody else can solve problems today, including code leads.  This is crazy.

[Dracos]

The Tsunami is readied.

The Tsunami is released.

The Tsunami is readied.

The Tsunami is released.

[Brian]

That kind of day, huh?  How about sushi with a gap youkai?

Taunting miko optional.

[Dracos]

Hum.  This is a new experience.

Apparently Tomb Raider is popular enough to be mass pirated before release.  Now I suppose I can say I've been on the other side, corporate drone watching our product get pirated instead of customer watching it happen. :P  Definitely can see more appeal into the 'cutting out non-digital distribution' since either that or review copies would've been the source.  Not that pirates really are necessarily paying customers, but it's a shame real folks have to wait for the street date while folks swiping it are broadcasting it all over the place.  Certainly gives a clearer view on the kind of exec insanity that leads to ridiculous anti-piracy schemes.

[Brian]

Yeah, but actual revenue loss vs. projected/claimed revenue loss. :\

Plus, I would bet Shami's entire share of sushi from the next Higuma trip that it was a reviewer leaking it vs. a hack of a digital distro -- and the anti-piracy measures wouldn't help a whole lot vs. that, methinks.  (Jerkwards gonna jerkward.)

It's not great, but it could be much worse.  From what I've been hearing, it'll still be successful anyway, and the big money-maker is console over PC anyway, right?

[Dracos]

Oh, I don't think it was anything digital.  I bet either jerkwad reviewer or jerkwad gamestore employee.  But I understand how these events can lead to insane exec screamin' anti-piracy bullshit.  It is actually the console version that's being pirated, comically enough.

To me the new perspective really is sort of the sadness: "Man, there's all those cool folks paying for this, and the jerkwads get to play it first.  That's lame."

And also how with moves toward pure digital distribution, there just wouldn't have been as much room for it.  When the street date is "Click button on steam" instead of "Manufacturing several million boxes and discs and send them to like seventy countries around the world, hope that no one in that chain is a jerk", there just will be a lot less room for BS to happen.

[Brian]

Ah, yeah.

There's a whole culture of the pride of being the first to pirate a triple AAA target.  Don't get it myself. :\

When I did pirate, it wasn't out of spite, but lack of money.

[alethiophile]

A big chunk of the pride-in-first-to-pirate thing is tech types competing to see who can break the DRM first. Which takes the ordinary drive of a tech type to solve computer problems, not a force to be underestimated, and mixes it with probable ideological opposition to copyright in general and/or DRM in particular, alongside game fanboyism. Can see why it happens so quick now. :P

[Dracos]

I'm pretty sure aside from the standard 'compiled for an xbox 360' we don't have DRM.  There's nothing to break that isn't there for every 360 game (specifically: faking the system).  I say this as the guy who wrote what little DRM is there and also what compiles it out of the final product, since it was just meant for control and tracking of demos.  I mean, I suppose there might be some in some part of the codebase I'm not aware of...but not really likely at all.

I mean, I suspect we might have steamguard turned on for the PC specifically, just since we do have steam integration anyway.  But I don't recall that either.  Either way, I don't think that was all the way out the door anyway yet.

The first-to-pirate thing has nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with Provider Cred.  "Yo, Yo, my supply got the cool shit already~."  Sure, there's an educational side for a handful of folks, but the vast majority of copy protection schemes are break once, repeat the break on all other products that use it.  It's a more childish and primitive thing than any such ideological struggle.

[alethiophile]

Hmm. I'm unfamiliar with how the console games really work; I've only ever somewhat interacted with that scene as it regards PC games, which usually do come with DRM of some form or another (even if it's just CD keys or checking if the disc is mounted). Not actually sure how you would go about pirating a console game. Is it a matter of physically copying the discs?

[Dracos]

Truthfully, I'm not the most familiar with how modern console's do it, but I'm sure there's something to check that it's a valid disc and not just a blank cd with the data on it.   It's usually a pain to deal with, but if you've dealt with it for one, you've dealt with it for all.  Usual way is hardware modification to bypass the checking or emulation.

Either way, has nothing disc-side to bother with.  Folks doing it are just sticking the disc in their machine and ripping it with a basic copier.  I mean it's a dvd, there's nothing that stops that.

[Brian]

Attended the engineering brown bag weekly meeting that I'd always otherwise ignored.

Special, this week only:

It was all marketing info.

[Brian]

My opinion on [UNNAMED DRIVE VENDOR]'s quality of support and the intelligence of the tech who's been screwing us up for the last six months almost made the dev who's been coming to me for help for about that length of time cry.

I feel like a jerk. =_=