Equal Opportunity Dork

@Scuffles Or you could not buy the PC version, altogether, which is really the smartest move for most of the titles Ubisoft publishes. Their PC ports tend to be plagued with issues, from what I remember.

Sony, you put out a console that the average consumer couldn't afford and wouldn't buy, your sales were crap for the first year of the PS3's life and third parties rightly stopped relying on Playstation sales for their games and went multi-platform. That's why so many publishers are willing to "dumb down" their content so that they can release it on as many systems as possible. Of course, by "dumb down", I mean they didn't fill a Blu Ray with bullshit cut scenes that add nothing to the actual gameplay.

Put out games people want to play. People will buy them. It's really not a difficult sentiment to grasp. When a game like Call of Duty comes out that everyone loves (talking massive critical praise and fans drooling all over it) and then doesn't sell well, I will listen to arguments about how much piracy hurts sales.

That said, if you like a game, pay for it. If the DRM pisses you off, crack it to get rid of it, but pirating games as some kind of idiotic "protest" against DRM only proves their point. In the case of Driver, Ill just get it on 360. I figure it was built for consoles and ported to PC, which usually does not end well.

@slickie You are assuming that they'll even sell out of whatever artificial number they've decided to start with. I am willing to bet that you'll still be able to buy a retail copy well into the first month of release for this game. Personally, I will wait until it inevitably goes F2P.

I get the anti-DRM people hating on Steam. I do. However, prior to Steam, I had completely given up on PC games. Even after Steam had been around awhile, I refused to deal with it because of the DRM horror stories and the fact that it was PC gaming. Then they put Half-Life on sale for 1.99 and I had to jump on that. A couple of games later and I was hooked. I refused to buy games on PC through any other medium, because Steam makes everything so blissfully easy. I buy the game, I wait for it to download and install, I play the game. Steam is the closest PC gaming has come to the simplicity of console gaming and I am overjoyed that Rage is going to fully support it at a base level.

Now, my question is, does Steamworks support mean that no matter how you buy the game, you'll have the option of playing it through Steam and thus get DLC through Steam, as well? The implication being if I catch the retail on sale cheap, somewhere, I can add it to my Steam account and bypass the downloading phase?

@xiLeShadow A full featured online eco-system costs a ton of money just to maintain. The reason Microsoft has been able to not only maintain but constantly improve Xbox Live is because a lot of people paid for Gold, myself included. As a company, Sony simply can not afford to match XBL feature for feature and still be financially viable.

In addition, asking people to pay 50 bucks a year for a discount card is not going to bring people running to your service. Offering them quality services will. With these new services, PS Plus officially becomes something I would be willing to pay for, as these are features I would like to have.

@katssun a lot of Steam users, myself included, like the fact that when I go to Steam, it is one stop shopping. I can do everything from within their client for every game I have bought. When I buy a Steam game, I don't have to worry about logins or installs; everything just works.

What EA wants is to sell you the Battlefield 3 client through the Steam client. Once you've bought the client, you would log in to Origin when you run the game and then every other purchase would be handled through that client, making Steam completely pointless. I suppose that is fine if EA wants to go that route, but I can tell you that after dealing with their download manager for the Sims, I have zero interest in messing with Origin. This will likely mean that I am just not going to buy anymore EA games, I guess.

In essence, EA wants to use the selling power of Steam to lure gamers in, but they don't want to give Steam any other money after that initial sale. It is a total crock and I do not blame Steam for calling shenanigans, one bit.

@MGTrey The game is amazingly responsive and fun on the ipod. I also got it for a buck, so I dont ask for much out of it.

@iceytoa1 Their source is the fact that Crytek UK has been talking about Timesplitters 4 for years and I believe that was the game they were working on when Free Radical folded.

It's a rumor. Treat it as such until something is announced.

@Jawmuncher If MS stops treating all indie games equally, things would turn around quick. Games like Breath of Death VII, Cthulu, Vorpal and many others are not just good indie games. They are good games and should be treated with respect. What I wish is that MS would now and then promote the stellar indie titles to proper XBLA releases with support achievements. At the end of the day, though, the indie channel is what you make of it. I MADE A GAME WITH ZOMBIES in it supposedly did ok, from what I remember,