Another view of game piracy
May 6th, 2010
We've been hearing a lot about game piracy recently, with big developers inflicting draconian online-only DRM systems on their users, and blaming their declining PC game sales entirely on piracy. I'm not questioning that piracy is common, since even honest, DRM-free, indie developers like 2DBoy[1] report a 90% piracy rate. I am, however, questioning what this means ...
Internet DRM and the changing online world
March 29th, 2010
In the old days, it was pretty easy to identify DRM. When a game secretly installed dubious device drivers to make sure that you have the CD installed, that was clearly DRM. However, due to the recent internet DRM controversies I've noticed that the line between what is and isn't DRM seems to be getting a little blurry ...
Where does DRM come from?
March 4th, 2010
The DRM issue has been argued to death. I think at this point, pretty much everyone is in agreement that DRM is braindead -- game developers most of all. However, even though it is widely accepted that onerous DRM is a liability rather than an asset, publicly traded corporations continue to dream up more and more restrictive forms of it. It ...
Organic Indie Preorder Pack Postmortem
January 25th, 2010
In addition to John dyeing his beard pink, we promised that we would write a postmortem report on our recent "Organic Indie Preorder Pack" promotion. Here it is! To recap, a couple of weeks ago, we ran a promotion with fellow San Francisco developer, Unknown Worlds, bundling preorders of our two upcoming games together, Overgrowth and Natural Selection 2, for ...
Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX
January 8th, 2010
Often, when we meet other game developers and say that we use OpenGL for our game Overgrowth, we're met with stares of disbelief -- why would anyone use OpenGL? DirectX is the future. When we tell graphics card representatives that we use OpenGL, the temperature of the room drops by ten degrees. This baffles us. It's common geek wisdom ...
The Organic Indie Preorder Pack
January 6th, 2010
Introducing The Organic Indie Preorder Pack! While hanging out with fellow San Francisco indie developer, Unknown Worlds, we had a crazy idea. Steam, Direct2Drive, and other distributors often have extremely popular game bundles... why not try that ourselves? Here's our first crack at it! As of today, Wolfire and Unknown Worlds are bundling our upcoming games: Overgrowth and Natural ...
Bay Area Meetings: AMD, NVIDIA, and Havok
December 26th, 2009
Two weeks ago, John and I came back from our scholarship-sponsored trip to Game Connection in Lyon. Several of the companies we met in France are located here in the Bay Area and they were eager to have a more in-depth meeting. Among those were AMD, NVIDIA, and Havok. AMD ATI / AMD headquarters. Photography was prohibited, but I found this ...