It’s taken me a little longer than expected to get around to it – but if you load up Tube Notify on your iPhone now (no update to the application is required) you’ll see the DLR status has now appeared. Sorry it’s taken so long!
Didn’t get a chance to post yesterday as I was swamped working on some alterations to the DRM systems for Green Man Gaming. The story about GMG hit Rock Paper Shotgun yesterday and it was rather interesting:
Details are comically thin on the ground (the official site’s just a cheapo holding page, but VG247 has rounded up some pertinent quotes from CEO)
I’m wondering what an expensive holding page looks like? It’ll be changing in a few days anyway – so maybe it’ll look a little less cheap then. The pertinent quotes referenced are from the COO not CEO. Quite a big difference!
The rest of the post goes into guessing around commercials and the like. Which I guess has to be expected when the details are “comically thin on the ground”. If one basis of business on what some of the posts around the web have been guessing, then yes it’d be absurd! Apparently there’s no way a publisher would be interested in working with Green Man Gaming… the press release covers this already with the “400 titles for launch” so that’s pretty much put to bed already isn’t it?
Naturally the comments continue – the editor at Game Spy noted this:
Green Man Gaming is one company I’ll be keeping tabs on. If this takes off, it might be the start of something huge. Three letters keep popping into my head — D.R.M.
Yep, DRM. As noted earlier it’s something, along with Code Security that gets a lot of attention at Green Man Gaming. It’s worth making sure that we distinct the two there. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is just checks to make sure a piece of media is being used in the way it’s intended. Code Security is then used to protect it. The consumer world wraps this up in just DRM.
The DRM we’re employing is designed to be secure and lightweight and not intrude on the poor customer’s PC. I personally hate all the Sony hell that was created with their music DRM system. I’ll be happy to go into that in more detail another time if there’s a demand to know more.
So the news about Green Man Gaming hit the press yesterday and over the last 24 hours or so it’s managed to get around all the main sites. I’ve been reading through the comments and posts and felt the need to debunk some things where editors have added their own, wrong, spin to things:
On Geek.com it actually goes as far as:
This is interesting, but still not very good for consumers. Basically, what’s happening is you’ll never be able to buy a pre-owned game through Green Man Gaming: you just tell them you never want to play a game again, they give you some credit you can use for other purchases, and then that credit is used to pay royalties to the developers of the next game you buy.
Where in the press release did it say that? In fact MCV get it right, saying:
The firm will then re-sell that game code to another customer for a ‘pre-owned’ price
An interesting comment on kokatu brings up some interesting points:
Setting these systems up is not cheap.
Malloc is right, it certainly isn’t cheap. I can only speak from a technical point of view (being the CTO ‘n all), but the most significant expenditure has come from the tech. side of the business. We’ve hired some quite top notch developers to work on this and they’re storming through the last bits of the system.
It kind of reeks of something that would sound great to people who don’t really know a lot about how this stuff actually would work and figure they’ll just hammer out the logistics when they get there.
I’ll put this one to bed right now! Everyone at Green Man Gaming has a long background in the gaming industry. In fact, the full list of people involved is on Linked In – go check out the Green Man Gaming Profile on there.
By far the funniest has to be on Shacknews:
That placeholder construction image looks surprisingly sexual.
Yes… he appears to have a rather large err… we’ll leave that there.
I’ll keep reading up and probably grab some more snippets of info in the next few days – early comments appear to be good overall.
I know there’s been a lot of videos of this before – but I wanted to explore it myself. While I did, I made a video using the inbuilt Mac options for video recording. I got there via the Gnome/Bank Vault/Auto-Unstuck trick.
