• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Please see the most recent updates in the "Where did the .com name go?" thread. Posts number 16 and 17.

    Post 16 Update

    Post 17 Warning

Why was the Nemeth / Piracy thread locked ?

Francois said:
The 'nice' thing about Facebook is that you can choose who to see and who NOT to see ;-)
Click to expand...

Setting the wife, girlfriend, mother-in-law on "ignore" must be kind of fun... *Chuckle*



Francois said:
I don't think it will be worth the trouble, personally. Also, as much as we all love this hobby, consumers and developers alike, there is very little 'unity' in our ranks and I would be really intrigued to see who would be able to unite enough developers under any one 'organization'. Almost ALL of the groups have hidden agendas or other interests that are not always as obvious as one might think.

The larger outfits such as Aerosoft have their own solution. So smaller devs can join them (AE would love that I am sure). In the end, NO solution is really available with the exception of including a continuous on-line check into the software. Something that is VERY difficult to do in FSX add-ons and something most customers are fiercely against!

Personally, I am in the camp of those who believe that the majority of 'free downloaders' are not our real customers anyway and the ones that ARE will pay for their products by and large.

Texts such as Nemeth posted are just out of frustration, but really not very realistic. Anyone thinking he can make a living out of just designing add-ons for FS, missed a turn somewhere to begin with. Those - the vast majority - who do it for pleasure with a nice additional pocket money coming in, are not hurt by those pirates in any significant way.

And yes, I DO understand the frustration of seeing your hard work on a dozen piracy sites and forums, but getting all upset about it is only wrecking ones own life, and never theirs.
Click to expand...

Quoted for absolute truth.
 
Back when I was a working stiff, about six years ago and I had more money than brains. I bought about everything that was advertised. Just as long as it hung a propeller. Then I quit working and went on Social Security. About that time my hard drive froze up, I also changed my e-mail address (it was stolen from me) plus I changed my Charge Card account.
I got me a new hard drive and tried to get my aircraft back. I had 12 of them from Alpha but because he didn’t recognize my name or my e-mail address we got into a real peeing contest and I didn’t get my aircraft back.
Then there was a Russian outfit that sold me Moscow Airport and had a password that was 400 characters long. They didn’t recognize me.
I then took on Fight One. They had 22 airplanes that I had purchased. It took them a year. But God bless them, they at least made good.
Caranado was quite different. They refused to even acknowledge I ever existed. Even though I had bought 12 airplanes from them. I fought with them for a month and finally gave up. There were others that I bought one or two from with the same negative results. So there’s countless 100 of dollars down the drain, without a thank you. Or any airplanes that I had paid for.
Now I’m living on Social Security and I’m looking at Spendware airplanes that are selling for $35. About what FSX originally cost me, come to think about it. Now I don’t care how nice it s, I can’t afford to throw away that kind of money with no guarantee that I can get it back when everything turns brown.
Now if my kid brother, in Alabama, sends me a nice airplane - than that makes me a pirate. But under my current circumstances, I just can’t afford to be ripped off any longer.
 
Down where we do our skiing, people over 65 get a discount for the lifts (used to be 60). Maybe we should do something like that for old-age pensioners in the FSX industry too.

About half of our customers would fall into that category I'd say. :)
 
The Senior Pilots are an outstanding part of the hobby , and make up the majority of folks who turn out to Sim related conferences as well, gentlemen one and all.

Myself and other Developers know that they as a group have fixed incomes , having left the workforce they need be careful with expenses and in cases when that income is spoken for we understand completely that they cannot purchase whatever hits the market , i have given away a great many free copies of products and most Dev's if asked would gladly provide free aircraft to those gentlemen who cannot afford them, they participate in the hobby in ways that are impossible to replace with their experiences and whit in the telling. <o:p></o:p>
 
Indeed, we too give away products for free or at a big discount to flightsimmers less fortunate than some. But it is not something we advertise, nor is there some 'structure' in that. Maybe a good idea to DO bring some structure into this practice, as I know many companies WILL honour them and their limitations.
 
Francois said:
Down where we do our skiing, people over 65 get a discount for the lifts (used to be 60). Maybe we should do something like that for old-age pensioners in the FSX industry too.

About half of our customers would fall into that category I'd say. :)
Click to expand...


I'm 67 and a [several times over] paying customer. Bring it on Francois :applause:

M.
 
I'd need some 'proof' of course, and have no access to the Social Security system of the US..... or any other country for that matter. Help me think this over, folks :)
 
Back when we (Plane Design) released our Spitfire for FS9, it was pirated before it was released. One of the planes we handed out for a pre-review was the culprit, but we were only really able to narrow it down to two or three people and not much we could do about it at the time. It was disheartening, but the aircraft still sold well. Ed was trying to make a living off of it, but development just takes too long to do that.

If the rumors we've heard about MS Flight are true, maybe they'll be able to take care of the piracy issues. Ed and I like the way RoF does it's releases, but of course, that is a much less open ended system than FSX. I do hope Flight is backwards compatible, as I've bought a lot of ORBX add-ons, not mention aircraft, that I hope are able to transfer into the sim.

It is a shame about Nemeth, as I have a couple of their products and they are very good. I wish them luck at whatever they choose to do in the future.
 
Nemeth is not shutting it's doors. They are merely on suspension while an anti-piracy method is found.

We are both working concurrently on finding something that works and is non-invasive for the end-user and that also leaves us with a profit margin that is livable.
 
Sundog said:
If the rumors we've heard about MS Flight are true, maybe they'll be able to take care of the piracy issues. Ed and I like the way RoF does it's releases, but of course, that is a much less open ended system than FSX. I do hope Flight is backwards compatible, as I've bought a lot of ORBX add-ons, not mention aircraft, that I hope are able to transfer into the sim.
Click to expand...

From what MS has said about Flight, it's going to be using a completely new engine, and likely won't be compatible with anything from FSX.

Personally, if that means they'll actually make a simulator that runs well on hardware available when it's released (that isn't "bleeding edge"), and gets rid of some of the glaring issues with the current engine (like the multi-engine and turboprop problems), I'm all for moving on.
 
I too do NOT think it will be compatible. They wouldn't have fired the entire old team if they had planned on that ;-)
But we won't have any conformation until some of the secrecy is lifted. The occasional screenshot is not helping us any.
 
Krazycolin, I think that given the flightsim community's acute awareness of the damage piracy is doing to our hobby, we'd be prepared to accept some degree of invasive measures, if thats what it took to protect developers profits.
 
Most programs (games) I know these days use on-line 'checking', i.e. you cannot play them unless you are 'connected'. Especially the ones using the Steam engine, same for many others.

The FS community is one of the oldest and probably most old-fashioned in that regard. Fact remains that quite a large percentage of our known customer base has something 'against' being connected for license issues.

As a publisher or developer spending extra money on such licensing schemes means one has to be fully convinced that it will actually bring in a higher turnover, otherwise it will just cost more than publishing already does.
 
Edit: deleted contents due to double post.
Admin's, i seem to have trouble with posting. Every initial posting comes up with a window that looks different then usual, and the cursor/enter button do not seem to work. The only way i can type text normally, as i used to do, is in the editting window after posting.

I run Firefox as browser in a Vista OS.

If i need to upload some examples or screenshots, please let me know.

Are there other people who encounter the same issues?
 
Did not know this discussion was still going on, and i'm happy the issue of "steam engine" and other anti-piracy mechanisms have been brought up. I understand and agree mechanisms should be developed to prevent piracy, but the "you have to be online in order to play the game you purchased" method is not preferrable IMHO. Me, for example, am not always situated in environments blessed with internet connection. Yet, games on my own laptop might be my only chance of entertainment and relaxation in certain situations (yes, i'm in the military, and yes, i'm deployed on occasion). With the anti-piracy safety such as Steam, i was and am unable to play a lot of games on my computer once in situations like described above. Yet, i payed for them.......I can think of a lot of other people with similar reasons not to have an internet connection at certain times. I also encountered problems where i did have internet connection, but the connection was too weak or unstabile. I was kicked out of the game so much times it became unplayable.

So, though outdated, FSX on my laptop is the only thing playable when out of internet, of with just a weak connection.

Not a very good option for a $50+ game, is it!?
 
I used to give away free commercial aircraft I developed, to people who had helped in some small way, until I was told to stop, beta tester could buy their own finished product I was told!, I didn't listen and still gave away free copies, now that developer owes me $4500 and I'm unlikely to see it (dont ever anyone tell me all pirates are consumers!), so I'm glad I gave all those free planes away, sometimes there is justice in this world, all be it small and brief, bloody expensive mind, but hey, its only money :).
 
Well, didn't I miss the boat on this one, :). Thank you to everyone who has posted in support in both this and another thread. I didn't post here as I didn't want to be spewing my frustration entirely across the web. I guess it was picked up an posted by a concerned user.

The best part about this situation if there is indeed a silver lining, is the chorus of support from people you don't usually hear from. To all this people we thank you.

I can't possibly touch on all the subjects people have mentioned and I don't want to get to specific as a thread on another forum degenerated into some serious insulting that was totally unwarranted but yes frustration was the root cause of the original thread.

I myself do not make a living from development, but 2 of the other developers do, and it is possible, maybe not here in the USA, but if you live somewhere where the cost of living is a 10th of what we pay it is more than possible.

I am really thankful for the majority of postings here about this subject as they have been constructive, helpful and supportive. We will be back but after a lot of work figuring out an anti piracy solution that as Colin said, protects our investment and does not alienate the existing customer base.

Thanks all :)


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top