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Dick move of the year

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George_Hukas

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#1  Edited By George_Hukas

Have you guys heard of Reflexive Arcade?
 
A while back I was looking for some casual games for a disabled friend who can only play games with one hand. I came across Ricochet, your typical Arkanoid clone. Not a terribly great game but it suited his needs. He bought a few other games from their site since then, as well. Fast forward to today, he linked me to the site where they are currently displaying this message: 

Its a frog.. idiot
Its a frog.. idiot

 
Valued Customers,


As of June 30th, 2010, games will no longer be available for purchase on Reflexive.com.

Please be sure to install and activate your purchases prior to July 31st, 2010.  

This means what you think it means. If you buy a game from them (Reflexive.com or any other GameCenterSolution affiliate) on July 30th and wait to activate it, you won't ever be able to play it. More importantly, those who already acquired a collection from them can't re-install if something goes wrong on their computer! (And it's not necessarily just Reflexive games, they distributed games from PopCap, BigFish etc.) Now, I understand, like myself, you may not be very hard pressed to care about this, considering the company and the particular games they make -but is it right they do this to their consumers just because they are super casual and don't know what a Steam is? I feel as we are progressing toward things like the need for online DRM authentication in single player experiences, issues like this can only become more prevalent. What happens when Ubisoft doesn't feel like authenticating my game sessions anymore?
 
Supposedly Reflexive said they want to focus on developing games, I'm not saying boycott, but who do they expect to buy it? Talk about biting the hand that feeds.. thoughts? 

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ahoodedfigure

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#2  Edited By ahoodedfigure

If it was a business decision, where they have to pay for the space, the licensed software, all of that, then they may be pulling out because keeping everything up indefinitely could cost them more money than they're making from the service, or a significant enough amount that they don't like the idea.  I don't know what's going on with them, but it might have been smart for them to be a bit more gradual in phasing out their service so people didn't feel blindsided by the announcement.

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MysteriousBob

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#3  Edited By MysteriousBob

I know this isn't the point of the thread but a good one handed game is Sonic. All you need to do is map the jump button (the only button other than pause) to the left shoulder button.

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Jams

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#4  Edited By Jams

you can play the sims 3 with one hand or even world of warcraft (i've had sessions where I never used the keyboard). But I don't know how raiding would be since I never raid. It sucks that they did that, But it's going to bite them in the ass later on for sure when they're remembered as the guys who screwed a bunch of people with activation.

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MattyFTM

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#5  Edited By MattyFTM  Moderator

Firstly, you've got your dates wrong. They're stopping selling games on June 30th, and you have until July 31st to activate them. That's a whole month to activate your games.
 
Secondly, from what I understand from my less scrupulous friends, Reflexive is the go-to site for casual game piracy, because the software to crack the activation key is extremely widely available. They updated their system a while ago to involve a new activation system, but it hackers quickly found ways around it and released a new program to crack the activation keys, which got thousands upon thousands of downloads from torrent sites.

So yeah, piracy from reflexive was rampant. Don't blame Reflexive, blame the pirates for this, it seems they've put Reflexive in severe financial trouble and they've been forced to shut the website down.

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infininja

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#6  Edited By infininja

I didn't read everything you posted, but I probably agree with it. 
 
DRM blows and hurts the paying customer.

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George_Hukas

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#7  Edited By George_Hukas

I don't know who to put the blame on, frankly, it doesn't matter.. the end result is lose/lose for both developers and consumers in this situation.