View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0012964 | Bionic Dues | Suggestion | Nov 1, 2013 11:01 pm | Nov 9, 2013 11:59 am | |
| Reporter | acid burn | Assigned To | keith.lamothe | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Summary | 0012964: availability | ||||
| Description | to quote Christoper M Park "i don't believe that drm works anyway, were not about to treat our paying customers like thieves just to thwart the inevitable pirates." Well I'm fearful that this may be going away. arcen has started toward the dark side, to use their newest game Bionic Dues you are forced to allow Steam on your computer! the good old days of not having to worry about big brother looking over your shoulder are over. let me state i have never and will never allow steam on my computer!!!. So my expectations of downloading the demo and paying for the game key are too high? let me also say that i love their former stance on drm and availability i have bought every game arcengames has produced on principle alone, because i was so glad that a quality maker of computer games felt the way i feel about drm and availability. i have not even had the time to play all those games yet, but i wanted to support the good morals and practices that arcen was upholding. i want to be able to pay for a game and download it directly from a site (or any site) as long as you don't have to install anything to enable this download. (just a simple download) weather i have to pay first or get the demo and pay for the serial, i don't care witch. but in its current form i am unable to get the game! if this trend continues arcengames will lose a valued customer that has been with them since the beginning in 2009. i sincerely hope arcen will realize the error of their ways and allow me to purchase their game and download it directly. (i don't care if i have to pay more for the direct download, i would be worth it to me.) | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | New | ||||
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Our stance on DRM has not changed, and Bionic itself has less DRM than AI War. AIW requires a license key to run in full mode, Bionic does not. My main question is: what's more important to you, not having to install steam, or not having to install windows? Steam distribution is basically what made a linux version feasible for us in the first place because it lets us do updates on that platform (our current method for other games only works on windows and mac, and that took days to figure out and weeks to iron out all the bugs). Personally I think giving our customers the choice of playing our game on a free OS is way more important than whether or not they have to download the game through steam. A another point of clarification: You don't have to run steam to play the game, just to download it for the first time, and copy the BionicDues folder from inside steam to wherever you like. It will even run off a jump drive. Steam does not have to be running. If you want it to stop even trying to link up to steam, delete the steam_api.dll file in the directory. Does any of the above change your opinion? |
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i appreciate the quick response. your customer service has always been top notch. but the way its available now leaves me no way of downloading the game. let me explain why. I'm opposed to steam in general. the only one thing i want to install is the game. i don't like having to install non essentials just to get the game. weather steam is available in Linux or only in windows. i realize that you only need to do it once, but its once too many. I've been playing ai war, tidilas and awww from a thumb drive portably for years. that one of the major reasons i LOVE arcen. playability on a thumb drive, our unique stance on drm, and our love of awesom computer games. also the only system i allow to even touch the Internet is Linux. windows has never touched the net before because of lack of anti virus software. its just easier to never let windows touch the net. that way i never have to deal with the issues that come along with it. i realize that my stance on windows touching the Internet may be extreme to some, but to me its essential. thats yet another reason that i love arcen so much. i hope this helps clarify my concern. i hope I'm not the only one in this situation. so to answer your final question, the response does not change my opinion because i still have to way to get the game. i would even pay you extra if you burned it on a dvd-r and sent it to me. i just want to be able to play yet another awesome arcen creation. |
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I'm not trying to be a difficult customer, so i hope i don't come off that way. your company has done such awesome and unique things like being able to play portably, work in all three main operations systems, run the windows version inside wine in Linux, run without registry involvement, being able to take a save file from one computer to another!!! (or one platform to another!!!), back up saved games, update automatically or manually! i even have the option of downloading the update.zip and putting the files in the directory directly!!!, that way i can archive each individual version and be able to play any i want at will!!!. and most importantly (to me anyway) easily accessibility. everything you have designed has been so awesome and user friendly. it really saddens me to think that any of these things might go away!!!. sincerely one of your biggest fans. |
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I understand where it interferes with your use case, and I'm sorry for the inconvenience. To be honest, though, if you take such an idealistic stance on things there will be doors that are closed to you, and you are the one that closed those doors. Is it really so bad to have a throwaway VM that you install linux on, install steam on, download the game, copy the game out to your thumbdrive, and then blow away the VM? I mean, yea, that's a big hassle, but it's one you've imposed on yourself more than we've imposed it on you. It's not fundamentally different from someone saying "I refuse to use the internet, and your game is only distributed online". That said, if you send me an email at [email protected] I think I can sort out a solution that will work for you specifically :) |
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I appreciate the world class customer service. with no other company could I get such personalised service. in response to your last response I guess it could be said that I close some doors on myself. however that being said, having to use steam verses direct download is an extra hoop that everyone has to jump through. I'm really leery when company's make you start jumping through hoops because before you know it, its not just one hoop that you have to jump through 1,2,3, and so on. a good example is a game called "sins of a solar empire" the original release was awesome because you bought the game from a store and once you installed the game you didn't need the disk to play and there was no online activation or drm, (if you wanted to play online there was a serial that you had to enter but that's all, and you still didn't need the disk to play). and in the manual they even said that they were okay with the customer imaging the disk as long as you only utilise that image yourself. awesome awesome stance!!! .... then they started making you jump through hoops to get the updates, at first it wasn't too bad, but it kept getting worse until for there newest game (sins of a solar empire rebellion) they required access to your computer to make sure that the former version (sins trinity) was installed and then and only then did they allow direct installation of the game to your hard drive. so what they effectively did you take away my ability to install the game on my own. I no longer had a way to archive the game and later on I would not be able to install it without their online activation assistance, so even though I paid for the game its possible that in the future that I would have to resort to piracy to be able to play the game that I purchased. that is a future possibility for bionic dues. that is at the heart of my concern. I still don't have a way to play sins rebellion. that's why I'm such a fan of arcen games. in an article I once read about Christopher Park he said that he still plays game from ten years ago or so. and that was what he wanted people to be able to do with his games ten years down the road. (without having to resort to hacking or piracy.) finally I thought to myself a computer game company that gets it. I just want to continue to get awesome computer game from arcen that meet all the former regulations. if that former tread continues I will continue to be a very happy customer. sincerely acid burn |
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Ok, I think we've sorted this out :) |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 1, 2013 11:01 pm | acid burn | New Issue | |
| Nov 2, 2013 10:15 am | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0034667 | |
| Nov 2, 2013 10:15 am | keith.lamothe | Assigned To | => keith.lamothe |
| Nov 2, 2013 10:15 am | keith.lamothe | Status | new => feedback |
| Nov 2, 2013 1:38 pm | acid burn | Note Added: 0034668 | |
| Nov 2, 2013 1:38 pm | acid burn | Status | feedback => assigned |
| Nov 2, 2013 1:56 pm | acid burn | Note Added: 0034669 | |
| Nov 3, 2013 11:56 am | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0034670 | |
| Nov 4, 2013 2:00 am | acid burn | Note Added: 0034671 | |
| Nov 9, 2013 11:59 am | keith.lamothe | Internal Weight | => New |
| Nov 9, 2013 11:59 am | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0034675 | |
| Nov 9, 2013 11:59 am | keith.lamothe | Status | assigned => closed |
| Nov 9, 2013 11:59 am | keith.lamothe | Resolution | open => fixed |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:28 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - General Idea => Suggestion - General |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - General => Suggestion |
