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Atrocities said:
Well SE IV Deluxe is already making its rounds on the BT sites so I would suspect that SE V will be joining it soon enough.  Its not until one of your games is on the network that you begin to see the importance of copy right protection and anti piracy technology. Not that any one here has anything to do with pirated software. If I cannot buy it, I do without until I can get it cheap or I can aford it.
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I joined, after lurking at SE sites for years, just to try to defend P2P as a not-entirely-evil way of trying some things before you buy it. I purchased this past weekend SE4 (after years of, ahem, trying it) as part of Steams SciFi pack.. Was thrilled to be able to buy it, 'cause I'd never, ever, seen SE4 on shelves. Actually seen 'Stars!' on shelves (anybody know 'Stars!'? All 4X fans are born somewhere..). I was going to make it a bright example, but after trying to phrase it in a way that really sounded noble for half an hour, couldn't do it.
You're right, piracy takes money off the dinner table of the guy who gives us this great series.. and other indy developers just like him. P2P helps spread the game to those that otherwise never would've heard of it, but the net harm is probably larger than the net benefit. The worst part is, there's no counter to it at all; Even Starforce, which was so powerful it did as much harm to customers as it did pirates, has fallen.
My only hope is that when SEV hits the BT sites a ton of the people that end up DLing it end up making their way to a store or Steam (All games should be offered on Steam -- hardcopys seem so 20th century
) and pay for it.. sort of like I did.. except with the whole several-year delay. Even though I paid for it, I still feel ashamed!
Regarding the original issue though.. I'm with dejavu. But I think its almost the same as with people who don't see why to upgrade to Vista upon release. "It's the same!" Sure its the same, the same as 95 was 3.1, 98 was 95, 2000 was 98, and XP was 2000.. if you want to look at it in a backward fashion, sure. But Vista is rebuilt from the ground up, more efficient network stack, coded with the age of virus's and malware in mind, new driver model for stability and performance, and even in beta builds has been benchmarked to be more responsive and less of a CPU hog. Likewise, SEV is all the same sort of things; rebuilt, bigger and better than ever before in all ways. I think if you really like the game then die-hard fans dont even need to explain it. If one is more of a fairweather or part-time fan, well then, $50 suddenly seems like a lot.
I for one will be eating up Steam's bandwidth on Sept 12th, though.
Last second idea: You know, SiN Episodes found a ton of pirates out by updating through Steam exclusively. If Malfador does the same thing then patches would be more of a pain to distribute. We legitimate customers wouldn't even know a patch occured because it'd happen automagically next time we ran Steam. Pirates on the other hand would flood the message boards revealing themselves all complaining about the bug that was just patched, as happened with SiN. Don't know if thats feasible, random idea though. They want new features and patches, then pay up!