piracy ethical question re:xbox360

[noiseredux]

this is quasi-related...

I think that the down economy has done wonders for the Wii. I know that sounds crazy in a way, but think of it this way: people think to themselves, "okay if I spend $200 on this Wii, then we'll have something to do when we stay in on the weekends. We can order a pizza and buy some beer and make it a fun night without going out."

I think that's become a big reason that 'local co-op' is so huge now. People want to have a good time. Together. On the somewhat cheap.

[the7k]

I'd love my 360 to be more of a hit at my house parties, but people just don't want to play it, pure and simple because there is hardly any local multiplayer on the system. Is Microsoft pushing these developers to omit it just so that customers are forced to buy Xbox live just to participate in multiplayer content? That strikes me as a little wrong on a few levels, I can look past the multiplayer achievements, and knowing that most of my games will never sit at 100% complete because of having to pay for live just to have the privilege of doing so. Does this mean that local multiplayer is going to be limited to fighting games and the Rock Band clones in the future?

I honestly think this has less to do with Xbox Live and more to do with developers just not caring enough to make local multiplayer work anymore. Perhaps they don't see the return on investment from having local multiplayer as being enough for all the time and money required to make local multiplayer doable.

Which is damn near moronic, really. I've bought plenty of mediocre games for no other reason that them having a 4 Player mode.

One of the reasons I don't think Xbox Live is responsible is that, if they were responsible, wouldn't games like Gears of War 2 and Halo 3 have no offline multiplayer? I would think the first-party games would suffer a lot more than the third-party games.

[MrPopo]

I think that Live does contribute, 7k. Having a good matchmaking service means that many players can now get a multiplayer offering that doesn't require having people over at your place. It's just that little extra nudge that allows developers to be lazy and claim things like "split-screen multiplayer is very underused" and justify not putting it in.

[the7k]

Well, I thought he was talking about Microsoft telling devs not to include local multiplayer so that people would pay for Xbox Live.

Yeah, online multiplayer definitely contributes to the lack of local multiplayer, but I thought we were talking about it affecting it in a much more direct way.

[Niode]

Well I don't know about Microsoft specifically telling devs to not include offline multiplayer, I'm just speculating. It could be a multitude of reasons, some very good ones are already mentioned in this thread.

The thing I'm not too convinced on is the no offline multiplayer because of rendering difficulties, the previous generations of systems had plenty of offline multiplayer, the only difference was there was some scaling back of graphics quality, I'd definitely play a game that looks like shit with my friends than to not play it at all.

[zarathstra]

I never, ever pirate current games. People spent a lot of time, money, and effort creating those games, and they deserve to get paid for their efforts. However, I have no problem pirating older games. The developer isn't seeing any extra money if I pay 100 bucks for Radiant Silvergun, after all.

[the7k]

Well, I remember Sengoku Basara 2: Heroes for the PS2 really suffered during co-op play. You could feel the framerate issues as soon as you went into a map. Made Unification Mode in Co-Op damn near unplayable.

Versus mode and the Co-Op Coliseum were alright - in fact, I had a ton of fun with friends in the Co-Op Coliseum. However, the poor frame rate during Unification Mode Co-Op was really sad. Were it up to snuff, it would have easily beaten out the Coliseum when it comes to the fun factor.

[aaron]

ask yourself if it's legal or not when you're putting the disc in your dvd burner and you read the words "do not make illegal copies of this disc" as the tray is closing.

you know the answer, it's just up to you if you want to risk it. i probably would.