TBH I don't really care if a AAA title like Crysis 2 doesn't get a demo. If there was a demo, it'd be like 2GB anyway and chances are I wouldn't bother downloading that (rather watch videos and read reviews).

But Cevat Yerli is wrong about gaming in general. Small games *need* a demo. Shareware was a big hit and still is. Since small games (ie. indie games) are small to begin with, there's no reason to not include a demo.

I also think his statement that piracy is worsen due to the market going online is BS. You'll always get stupid kids who pirate the game, but most of the time it's the Russians or Germans who pirate since *they cannot buy the game*. It's the distribution that is the problem, as well as the price. Charge $50 for a $30 game and of course you will get piracy. The lack of a demo also doesn't help, since people do not want to spend $50 on a game they're unsure will work on their computer.

I really wish people would stop comparing the value of a movie ticket to the value of a game. Movies are not games and vice versa. When you see a movie, you have certain expectations whereas with games, your expectations are different. If you pay $60 for a game and you finish it in 10 hours, you will be angry - and rightfully so. Games have an inherent quality called replayability that is just not present in (most) movies. Since the beginning of time, games have had high scores, multiplayer, secrets and more, which are forms of replayability. If a game lacks these things, then the value of the game drops and thus that $60 was not well spent.


Anyway, about the article - Again, I think it's hard to compare and draw conclusions about free updates to a crappy Flash game versus a series of FPS maps. I still think $10 for a map pack is a rip-off though, but that's coming from a spoiled PC gamer who has gotten maps for free ever since Doom.

I miss expansion packs. Forking over 1 dollar for a tiny portion of what an expansion pack would've had just doesn't seem right!

This beta's really good so far. My laptop, which has like 30 games installed, did not require any redownloads.

Only thing bad about it is the compact list view is gone; but this is a beta and I suspect Valve'll re-add that in the future.

Umm, is B.Net 2.0 going to support other games? I thought it was for Blizzard-only games. If so, then it will never be "gaming's facebook".

Back in the days of Warcraft 2 and Starcraft, I really enjoyed the cutscenes. The reason was because they were really good cutscenes, and they were infrequent enough to serve as excellent rewards for beating those handful of missions. They were also skip-able.

Now-a-days, games seem to load up so many cutscenes that you may as well be watching a movie. Even worse are those stupid in-game cutscenes that are a part of the game, hence you can't skip past them (see: Half Life 2). I just want to play a game, damn it, not watch a video.

imo steam>gg>d2d>impulse

Impulse simply has a crap games catalogue and doesn't offer any good sales/deals (aside from their own games). GG offers great sales once in a while and has the awesometastic blue coins system (eg. get a free game eventually). D2D has had some good deals (their 5th anniversary sale comes to mind) but that's really about it. Steam is the clear king with community features, auto-patching, an awesome catalogue and routinely amazing sales (such as Mirror's Edge for $5 etc).

While it's nice to see consoles finally get a taste of MMORPG goodness, it's disappointing to see this kind of game not come to the PC. I've always wanted a solid zombie MMO, especially after playing Urban Dead (http://www.urbandead.com/). But I understand where they're coming from; the PC has so many damn MMORPGs (plus the WoW juggernaut) that no matter how good your MMORPG is, it'll never turn out as well as you'd like. On the consoles though, it'd make a lot of dough. The quality obviously won't be as good (no text chat, no UI mods/addons, aged graphics etc) but nobody would care about that stuff since, from a console gamer's perspective, this is the first MMORPG.

I have the original (not Orc Lords) and it's pretty awesome. Spent a solid amount of hours playing it I'm pretty disappointed that Orc Lords is a fully-priced game though; kinda wish it was a free patch or a $5 DLC.

Wow crazy... I think I'll just avoid posting anything negative or remotely offensive on EA's site :p

Well, it's good to see DICE is still workin' on these old games. They're still really popular so it'd be silly of them to ignore them. Hell, Blizzard still updates their ancient game Starcraft.

[i]"If you like it, they will stop making it" - Herblock's Law[/i]