id cant afford a shredder, go through the bins of id HQ on the way home from the pub, and finger the ip`s n shit, for each config that comes with the game, they probaly use the same name as a login to ftp or mailserver so they can work at home

config names are dev team usernames

I don't think monthly/annual subscriptions will catch on with PC gaming. Aside from people wanting a sense of ownership, subscription based games usually lead to a lack of modding support, followed by a monopoly of dedicated servers which can kind of hurt players in asia/australia.

Example: Global Agenda. Playing the game offered little enjoyment and at release it had very little content. It used to be available at a retail price of $60 along with a subscription requirement, the subs was removed and the game went down to a steam price $20 dollars (it can be even cheaper if you have the right coupon code on their site). An announcement was made a few weeks ago that it was becoming an F2P game with perks.

If you are talking about PC gaming moving to a platform like the browser, then I also believe that's less likely. A big reason that quakelive had a majority of followers during beta was because it was being promoted across the web before the game was even in open beta. If you compare success with relatively underground projects like instantaction, you can see that quake live reached out to both quake and new players.

"I don't think monthly/annual subscriptions will catch on with PC gaming."

lol

edit: I'm sorry, that came across more rudely than I intended it. I just literally did laugh when I read that line.

EVE online and World of Warcraft would like to have a word with you.

you dont pay for the game with those, you pay to keep the 4000 servers and nodes up and active, wow cost $1 or 2 million a month

normal subscription games with servers that are not linked with relay nodes like quakelive wont catch on, there might be a small market, but it will be 20 years until most games are content active from a web server

that would just be like connecting to a UT or quake server, with a quick check of crc pak files when you load up the game, and download any new or updated paks with patch manifest files from a master update server

starcraft2?

more money from fools who want to play a shit game all weekend

I was making the point that subscription based models is more conducive to MMO's like WoW, EVE online and even planetside. The OP was talking about PC gaming in general, that the solution to pirating is running a subscription model like QL on the browser platform.

In an FPS game for example, instances are predominant over persistent worlds. There isn't any large scale battles or leveling offered, so there isn't any incentive to buy into a subscription based model when people can just play virtually any other game with each other.

The content offered for the service has to warrant a subscription, not like QL where id rebrand's 2 maps every other month.

Oh there's a way to hack it.

Yep

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/695057/how...fy-packets