pimg src="http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/news2001/21329/piracy.jpg" align="left" hspace="5"/[Yesterday, Gamasutra spoke to the ESA and the PC Gaming Alliance about just how complex video game piracy really is, and how a combination of enforcement and education can form a solid foundation to fight it. Continuing our two-part special on piracy, we look at countermeasures against PC piracy, from Mass Effect to Titan Quest and beyond, with the PC Gaming Alliance's Christian Svensson explaining: "We don't make money by making your lives difficult."] Developing .../p pmap name="google_ad_map_ovA4NTLXaVKC7TeFAJwjc7SD1hg_"area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/ovA4NTLXaVKC7TeFAJwjc7SD1hg_?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//mapimg usemap="#google_ad_map_ovA4NTLXaVKC7TeFAJwjc7SD1hg_" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgclient=ca-pub-3896033488060561channel=feedburner-rssoutput=pngcuid=ovA4NTLXaVKC7TeFAJwjc7SD1hg_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamasutra.com%2Fphp-bin%2Fnews_index.php%3Fstory%3D21329"//pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=IRXBO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=IRXBO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=9W9JO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=9W9JO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=N1JgO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=N1JgO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/GamasutraNews/~4/474683345" height="1" width="1"/

BioShock creator adds that digital distribution represents a great opportunity to open up more product delivery channels

The PC gaming industry has seen many graphics chips come and go. Companies like 3dfx, S3, Trident, Intel, nVidia, ATI and others have tapped into the gaming industry and have produced 3d accellerators for the PC, and most of them have gone. There are only two major players in the PC graphics industry: nVidia and ATI.

These two graphics juggernauts unveil new products every year, which effectively doubles the effective processing power over the previous generation. This ruthless competition is both good and bad news for consumers: Good in that faster technology becomes cheaper, and we have many options. Bad in that the expensive video card you just purchased will remain bleeding edge for only a few months.

The latest battle comes just in time for the 2008 holiday season. ATI's 4800 series goes up against nVidia's GTX line of cards. Sapphire is one of the more well-known manufacturers of ATI-based video cards, and they have a secret weapon in the world of single-GPU video cards. Their 4870 Toxic video card not only comes pre-overclocked, but is stacked with 512MB of the fastest GDDR5 memory, which is certainly enough for today's gamer.
Read the full review at OCModShop.com

pFiled under: a href="http://www.joystiq.com/category/pc/" rel="tag"PC/a/pdiv align="center"a href="http://ih8evilstuff.livejournal.com/16992.html"img width="489" vspace="4" hspace="0" height="366" border="1" align="middle" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2008/12/gabe-sez-ur-dumb.png" //abr //div Not everyone knows this but, here at Joystiq we're not just a gaming blog - bringing you all the latest, breaking news on stuff like Mario boxer shorts - we're also a world-class PC gaming consultancy. Yup. PC gaming publishers come to us and say, "Joystiq, how do we - the titans of video game publishing - compete in the piracy-laden graveyard of PC gaming?" And we respond simply; "Copy Valve."br /br /We don't mean make a product that's sort of like Steam, or is influenced by Steam - we mean emmake Steam/em! Change one letter. Stream? Steem? Whatever, just make it. Bonus points if you change your company's name to Valfe or perhaps Varing;lve. While most PC gaming companies - except a href="http://www.joystiq.com/tag/stardock/"a few notable exceptions/a - continue to flail in the face of technological progress (read: the internet), Valve continues making a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/01/01/game-of-the-year-portal/"amazing/a a href="http://www.joystiq.com/tag/Left-4-Dead/"games/a, releasing an a href="http://www.joystiq.com/tag/Steam/"incredible platform/a, and bundling many of their technologies a href="http://www.joystiq.com/tag/Steamworks/"together/a for competing developers ... for free.br /br /So when Valve chieftain Gabe Newell addresses the kingdom, it's customary for us to take notes (remember: we'll sell these notes later). In response to a customer email inquiring as to the extent of Valve's relationship with EA (and, by proxy, validating EA's continued use of onerous DRM on PC games), Newell responded, "As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb." Incredible, no? There's no equivocation; no hesitation. DRM=dumb. Ah, but notice that qualifier: "most." Of course, Valve's very own Steam client is rife with DRM which Newell puts this way: "The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to)." When's the last time you heard someone complain about Steam's DRM? And when was the last time you pirated a game over Steam? Bill's in the mail, folks. br /br /[Via a href="http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/12/02/report-valve039s-gabe-newell-disses-drm"GamePolitics/a]p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/03/shocker-valves-gabe-newell-says-most-drm-is-dumb/"Shocker: Valve's Gabe Newell says most DRM is 'dumb'/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.joystiq.com"Joystiq/a on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:45:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./pp style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"nbsp;/ppa href=http://ih8evilstuff.livejournal.com/16992.htmlRead/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/03/shocker-valves-gabe-newell-says-most-drm-is-dumb/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/forward/1390306/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/03/shocker-valves-gabe-newell-says-most-drm-is-dumb/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/26DUM3PrVWMXm2eSbIJLiZp9Uq4/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/26DUM3PrVWMXm2eSbIJLiZp9Uq4/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?a=nWZvEWSo"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?i=nWZvEWSo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?a=DgLIPFHw"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?i=DgLIPFHw" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/joystiq/~4/wyxtsXQxsiU" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://www.edge-online.com/files/imagecache/article_homepage_large_144x108/levine_ken_0.jpg" alt="BioShock#039;s Levine Clings to PC" title="BioShock#039;s Levine Clings to PC" class="imagecache imagecache-article_homepage_large_144x108" /br /pstrong2K Games' BioShock has sold over 2 million copies, many of which have sold on consoles, but 2K Boston and BioShock creative director Ken Levine hopes that PC gaming can find its groove./strong/p pa href="http://www.edge-online.com/news/bioshocks-levine-clings-pc"read more/a/p

pThe newest and one of the best performing PC gaming platforms for the holiday season is the new Intel Core i7 CPU with an Intel X58 chipset mainboard. If you are looking to build yourself or a loved one a new gaming machine based on the Core i7 X58 parts, .../pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/I4UNews?a=jT6ESrhn"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/I4UNews?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/I4UNews?a=V1AUaZQx"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/I4UNews?i=V1AUaZQx" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/I4UNews?a=lqJjgahR"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/I4UNews?i=lqJjgahR" border="0"/img/a /div

pThe Games for Windows Live standalone Windows client has arrived. It's incredibly limited, but does bring Microsoft's PC gaming marketplace to desktops. /ppa href="http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2008/12/03/games-for-windows-live-standalone-client-is-live"Read More.../a/p

pimg src="http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/news2001/21133/discs.jpg" align="left" hspace="5"/[PC video game piracy is still a major issue, and in the first part of a two-part special on the subject, Gamasutra talks to representatives of the ESA and PC Gaming Alliance to examine how cracking down on physical goods piracy and educating consumers may help break the vicious cycle.] When 2D Boy recently claimed that the piracy rate for its PC independent game World of Goo was something like 90 percent, it raised two .../p pmap name="google_ad_map_U9GejaKgmR42Duph6V-fyCfbcmE_"area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/U9GejaKgmR42Duph6V-fyCfbcmE_?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//mapimg usemap="#google_ad_map_U9GejaKgmR42Duph6V-fyCfbcmE_" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgclient=ca-pub-3896033488060561channel=feedburner-rssoutput=pngcuid=U9GejaKgmR42Duph6V-fyCfbcmE_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamasutra.com%2Fphp-bin%2Fnews_index.php%3Fstory%3D21133"//pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=XqrEO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=XqrEO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=hNd9O"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=hNd9O" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=b0xOO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=b0xOO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/GamasutraNews/~4/473632801" height="1" width="1"/