Planetary Annihilation on GOG? - PC Gamer Article Here

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/04/22/gog-s ... se-alphas/

78% of those polled are in favor.

Good news for PA!

Mike

sweet

I voted in this poll.
The main objection to including the game in GOG's catalog was from purists who don't agree with the idea of a unique serial key being used to connect to Ubernet servers. Their argument was that this is a form of DRM, as it locks off certain gameplay features if you don't use the key.
I spent a lot of time in the threads pointing out that all of the server tools are available to players so they could make their own server that has all the features of Ubernet, minus the key requirement. (Much like what was done with FAF with regards to Supcom.) The only reason for the serial key is to prevent an overabundance of players on the official servers who may not legally own the game, potentially ruining the experience for paying customers. (And whether it's a permanent restriction remains to be seen.)

Of course, nobody ever reads previous posts on forum threads. Otherwise I suspect PA would have gotten closer to 90% votes.

I definitely support the notion of restricting Uber servers to paid customers with unique keys. Anything else would be very silly. They don't want pirates using their servers. If they wish to play with others they need to buy their own key :mrgreen:

I'm not too crazy about the concept myself for several reasons, but one of the main ones is that it can hurt a game's longevity quite a bit. One of the wonderful things about some of the old games out there is that you can still play them to full functionality today. There are still people playing Descent, Freespace, Quakeworld, Doom, Total Annihilation, and several other games from the 90s to this day. This wouldn't be as easy to accomplish if those games had multiplayer features that were only available on "official" servers. (And the games where the source code was made available fare even better. The Freespace SCP is incredible work, and is one of the main reasons Freespace 2 is still considered the greatest combat space-sim of all time. And all the games based on Quake's source code are amazing in their own right.)

Compare that to modern games that seem to die out whenever the publisher decides to shut down official servers. Those are all games that will be forgotten 10 years from now, where games from the 90s will STILL probably flourish.

Thankfully, Uber understands this, and I expect PA to last long after Uber moves on.

As long as they give out the code to allow privately owned servers at the end of the games' life we can all be playing Planetary Annihilation until doomsday.

They don't really need to give away the source-code. The server-software is enough. Plus the game needs to be "open" enough to allow for alternative server-browsers. Like FAF does with FA.

EDIT:
I don't really understand the perceived negatives about PA. PA will be without any drm. Technically it won't stop you from setting up a server and play on it with your friends online using a pirated copy of the game. You may need to work around the fact that the official server-browser will probably be only usable with an official version. However that should not be very hard, assuming that PA will allow a direct connect to a server behind a given IP, a feature that already SupCom:FA successfully implements.

And that you are not allowed to use UBERs official Servers and online-services for free is quite understandable imho and has nothing to do with DRM.
Using those servers does create a direct cost for UBER, so it is only logical to protect them.

That's what I meant.

That's nearly exactly what I said on the GOG forums. But nobody bothers to read. They just see "serial key for internet multiplayer" and assume SimCity-style always-on internet is required.

You are free to open your own server and host multiplayer games, what I mean is that Uber will probably have the official (best) servers for a while where tournaments and most epic battles with most quality will be held.

Anyone can buy a server, host PA there and give people access to play online.

All I'm saying is that if people want to play on Uber's servers and use their resources to have fun, they will need to legitimately buy the game.

Well i hope there will be some kind of backcheck with uberservers, like in Minecraft. i dont want pirates on my server. At least as long as uberservers are online.

I would assume that UBER will implement a client that is somehow similar to GPGnet or FAF. In fact a combination of the good points of both those clients would probably be the most epic online-system ever. Chatrooms with the whole community, Tournaments, Ladder, Map and Mod-vaults, Clanmanagment, etc. pp.

Such a system is THE HEART of a long living online-community. I hope UBER respects this.

I'd waste my life away if that happened.

....it must happen.

We definitely have big online plans. This is one of the reasons that the client is being built with a web browser UI. It's going to open up a lot of interesting options for doing cool stuff. For example leaderboards can just be a web page and can be looked at both inside and outside the game. Want to integrate chat? Get an irc client built into the game... etc.

Keep in mind that we expect this stuff to develop over time. Don't expect everything on day 1 of the alpha.

wat?

Yea wat u on about? I expect everything to be ready by Alpha. /idiotmode :ugeek:

On that note, what can we expect in the alpha actually?

Oh no, no, no, that's terrible, as much as I hate DRM just like the next guy Uber still need to protect the game from pirates.

I'll be buying the retail version but without DRM it will be a choice of buy the game or download the free version uploaded to torrent sites and we all know how a lot of people think unless of course that's Uber's business model -fund the game and all future DLC entirely with pre-orders and then count any post-release sales from honest people as a unexpected bonus.

May sound good on paper but I think you'll find further down the road when the people who have pre-ordered on Kickstarter see how easy it is for people who never paid a bean to download copies of the game for themselves that they will feel disgruntled and then when Uber try to get funding for their next game they will struggle because Kickstarters will remember what happened with PA and wait to download the pirate version instead.