SEV: What am I REALY getting for my money?

[Draxis]

Your right Sivran, I'm out of touch, I used to play around with that stuff a lot though I never looked at the SHA1 but after a little reading it has me interested. Hate having to go to a job all day, I cant play with numbers!

[frightlever]

SE4 (and earlier) was probably pirated massively long before the deluxe(!) version. I seem to recall a Q&A with Aaron where he said as much.

Copy protection definitely stops games getting into the hands of casual pirates. I'm a bit more sceptical whether it actually encourages sales. I think people willing to pay will pay and those who can't, or won't, won't pay no matter what. I don't buy the idea of a pirate furiously exhausting his options for ripping off a game and then as a final resort reluctantly trudging to the game store with a bunch of grubby bank notes in his hands and a tear in his eye.

The Boycott Starforce (never had a problem with Starforce) proved that harsh copy-protection discouraged people from buying games. Stardock had a top-selling game (at Walmart!) with no copy protection.

I would say it's a cert that come what may SE5 will have copy protection, either through Steam or through a CD-in-drive disk checker. I couldn't tell you where my SE4 disk is (bought for about a $80.00 off a specialist import shop in the UK! Best value for money ever.) so I'll miss just starting up a game whenever I want but I suppose that's progress.

Getting back to the original reason behind the thread though - I'm still not convinced that these real time land battles and wotnot are going to do the released game any favours. As a straight 2D turn based war game SE4 fit into a comfortable, if no longer mainstream, sterotype. A reviewer seeing a lacklustre attempt at a RTS is going to tear it a new one in the review.

Look at the RTS battles in Space Rangers - pretty much universally put down by reviewers (though forgiven because of the strength of that game as a whole) and from what I've seen the SR RTS battles look a lot better than the SE5 ones. If they played like Warhammer 40K Dawn Of War then fair enough...