After reading Mizz Kristen Salvatore's fluff-piece, pseudo-review of SPORE, in the November issue of PCG, I would not take anything she writes seriously.

She's the editor-in-chief of a big magazine which desperately needs the advertising revenues & special perks which emanate from big game-publishers such as EA.

Her magazine makes much more money with corporate advertising than with subscriptions coming from gamers. Considering that financial dependence, she's the very last person I would trust in what concerns the rights of gamers.

It's more of a blurb stuck on a largish quote than an article. I appreciate the intent of the GBR even though I believe (c) for software is wrong. Even more than that, I appreciate good conversations about "constitutional" matters. The quote from Ms. Salvatore included a couple of questions that occurred to me when I read the GBR:

"What constitutes a game's 'finished state,' and who determines it? What makes for a 'meaningful update'?"

p.s. I was really hoping to see a honcho other than Brad call shennanigans on something. Oh well.

I think that is par for the course given Brad is essentially the poster child for gamer rights and has been since the great Usenet days and he happens to own a publishing and development company to boot; accordingly he is the best target to attack.

Then she's not very bright. It would be counted a publicity stunt/all talk no substance if Stardock itself didn't follow them. But since they try to (though yes the definition of "finished state" is somewhat ambiguous depending on who you ask), she can hardly make this point.

The way I look at the GBR is more a proposed business model than a PR stunt. It's basically saying to the industry "Here's how Stardock does things, and we get support from our customers for it and we're selling games pretty well." Sure there's publicity there, but Stardock does back it by following it. They can't force the other publishers to do so.. does she expect this or something? Brad's always said ultimately it will be up to the gamers to drive the GBR "movement" because they are the ones who make the market.

I think the article is perfect irony, because it's designed precisely as a PR stunt. When everyone likes something, the one person who trashes it gets a lot of attention

[removed by poster]

Argh. Evil teaser is evil.

I was making a very specific mental point to pretend that the picture in question did not exist.  I will acknowledge it sometime closer to pre-order time.

I think Stardock is by far one of the best company's using the MoTTo "Customer First, Wallet First, Game First, Shareholders Last"  They have a model that works fine and like all models tend to need a little bit of tweaking as they get more and more experience.  Keep up the good work Stardock

As long as someone says "Have fun storming the castle!" I'll be good.

I hope some of you guys go to GP and post to the thread in support of SD. GP is pretty much ground zero for all things political with regards to the industry and lots of insiders are part of it.

I HOPE all of you actually read the whole piece and not that chopped up snippet of what she wrote.  She is very much for the GBR.  The article itself is about 5 paragraphs long and only one of those, consisting of 4 sentences, calls out these ambiguties.  It's not completely off base either.  What makes a meaningful update?  Poll the intrawebs and I'm sure you'll come across MANY different answers on what and update should include and what it should cost.

While you're criticizing the ambiguities of the GBR, let me ask you this: what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment?

In my experience 1 and 2 are reversed but I digress.