Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!peter_alau@playstation.sony.com From: "J. Pretorius" Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Licensed Developer Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 20:45:36 -0800 Organization: @Home Network Lines: 32 Message-ID: <36F9BF70.60C7C512@home.net> References: <36F896FE.D1C01655@home.net> <36F8CD4B.30E447B5@reading.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.64.199.168.bc.wave.home.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.02 [en]C-AtHome0402 (Win95; U) Mark Green wrote: > > If there were too many developers, they'd be swamped. Also, the other > risk is that development kits frequently are capable of pirating > software, and they don't want the risk that their devkits will go to > professional pirates. I don't think they'd be swamped if there were many developers. After all, the developers pay for the support they receive; it's not a free service. Pirating is not an issue. How many people are going to pay $20,000 just so that they can copy $60 games? In any case, the development libraries and tools don't provide special insight into how to pirate games on non development systems. The current system of limiting the distribution of development systems has done nothing to prevent piracy - just look at how easy it is to copy games today. > > My real thought on this is the "sheep factor". I mean, we know that > lots of games we see suck, but there's two sides to the market: the very > clueful who know exactly what they're buying, the slightly clueful area > who tend to read up a bit more on their games and the sheep who will buy > anything that looks like it'll appeal to them. It's important to the > image of the console that if somebody just buys a random game off the > shelf, that it displays good graphics, good sound and good use of the > technology. Even if it's actually a bad game, it doesn't matter, it > just has to look like a bad game *that is running on a good console*. Unfortunately some of the sheep are 7 and 8 year old kids, or parents, who fall prey to commercials and propoganda. But I've seen plently of games with bad graphics, sound and gameplay that make the console look like a piece of junk like shockwave assault, gunship, and revolution-x to name a couple off the top of my head.