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-By the first sale doctrine, once you've given it to them it's theirs to do with as they like, including reselling (though this depends somewhat on the conditions in the "sales" contract and on the legal regime)

So where this doctrine is in effect, noncommercial licenses aren't enforceable?

For me a perfect adventure game puzzle is entirely logical yet still very creative and unobvious use of objects (or people) that will make me go "this is brilliant!" after I solve it (or "damn, that was brilliant, I should've given it more time" after I looked it up in a walkthrough).

[free]

But these were free keys. How can you steal something that is free?

Granting rights to downloading free of charge and/or verbatim distribution is absolutely not the same thing as granting rights to commercial use. Examples: Noncommercial Creative Commons licenses, pretty much all freeware games and software. Just because something is free for you to enjoy it, it in no way implies you can go on selling it unless explicitly allowed by the author. So you can call it theft, you can call it ripping off, you can call it whatever you want, but it's still absolutely illegal.

edit: Although, since games are products that you should be allowed to resell if you own them (at least in EU?), it probably complicates things. I'm not sure how it applies here and how it even works in combination with the above. In fact I'd be pretty grateful to anyone who'd be able to explain how this customer right works together with freeware licenses denying any rights to sell. Anyone?
But in this particular case I'm pretty sure copies obtained against the will of the copyright holder don't count anyway.

The mean thing with digital goods is that you can't even complain about them taking away and not leaving anything for the honest people.

I imagine most of the people who would've purchased the keys from the reseller would do so instead of buying from Dave, and for him, as any other full-time indie, that directly translates to losses of actual life sustenance. Surely you see the issue in that?

Huh?  Did someone say that it is ok to steal 30,000 keys from EA?

Well, now I did.

So it's okay to steal 30,000 keys from say, EA?

Specifically from EA? Yes.

Save your butts, penises and/or vaginae for the IRC.

Yes. Imagine the pride with which you'll be able to say "I've been saving my virginity for IRC".

I googled "google hangout alternatives" and found https://talky.io/ and http://vsee.com/.

Alternatively, and I mean no disrespect, if it bothers you to such extent you could just remember to log out from google every time then. Or use private tabs or even a separate browser or something.

Wow, Bulbapuck, that's messy. I approve.

To resell?! A game by a full-time indie? What a bunch of dicks.

I have a few things to say. Putting your final conclusion aside for the moment, you raise some fair points. But the thing is, adventure games have many issues, they always had, but their audience just has so much fun with them nobody cares about those issues, or at least they don't stop people who are into the genre from having fun. Personally I very rarely play adventure games for the puzzles (for me it's more about narrative and interactivity), so I don't care that much, as long as the puzzles aren't obnoxious and ruining the whole experience.

Having said that, however, the way I see it, there are puzzles that are good enough to be considered perfect for all intents and purposes. You said you've played Spellcasting, what about Death Gate from the same company? I think Legend entertainment was remarkably good at design, and in Death Gate the puzzles really shine. I can always point towards Death Gate and confidently say "That's how you do it". Then there's Flight of the Amazon Queen, a game that is in my opinion remarkable for being "just good" and not falling into either greatness or mediocrity, which includes puzzles, that have just the right difficulty and most of the time are perfectly logical and satisfying to figure out. Then there is recent Memoria that nailed absolutely perfectly everything you could do in an adventure game.

So yeah, I don't care about the concept of perfection applied to puzzles that much, even though I've enjoyed them in many games, but for the sake of the argument I don't agree with  Sunny Penguin. For me there are definitely things that are so good that no further improvements and fixes would actually increase the joy they bring or the overall quality. I do agree with "One man's perfect is another man's nightmare." though, to a certain extent.

And unlike Igor, I'm not sorry. Adventure games are damn fun, but they don't offer everything you can wish of a game. So there's nothing wrong with being tired of them or not being satisfied with them. I don't think we should be obsessively repressed or ashamed about this.

If you want to hear Adeel talk about his genitals, this is the place to be!

You're making our channel sound very single-minded. We talk about everybody's genitals.

[#clubgalen]

Just a reminder that we have an active friendly IRC chatroom called Club Galen going on.

It's #clubgalen on irc.clubgalen.com, port 6667.

You can join using any IRC client of your liking or if you can't be bothered to have any, just click here and join using your browser.

Here's an irc:// link if you want one: irc://irc.clubgalen.com:6667/clubgalen

If you want to read about our silly shenanigans you can check out the Club Galen wiki.

Lastly, BrutalSlakt wrote this tutorial that shows how to use mIRC to join our channel.

Well, that was a fun one.

Yeah, your proposition is all around decent, but the risks are high. If it didn't mean sacrificing efforts that could be put into making actual games and earning money in more established and straightforward ways, I'd be optimistic about doing something like that. For now, I'll just have to keep that at the back of my mind, I suppose.

And no, I don't think supporting different engines would notably complicate anything, as all sane contemporary engines don't need much of "support" to function, so to speak.

[HAVING SAID THAT]

It is not unreasonable to assume, given trends over the past decades taking us from a mass-consumer market to a specialized niche-market ...market, that further market fracturing will continue.  Just as in the past people would go through the effort of switching DVDs or CDs in their drives to change games, I don't think it would be such a stretch to run a different client for a different type of genre.  The motivation to do so would be entirely dependent on the quality of games on that client, of course, but if the system were properly calibrated to 1) give better cuts to developers 2) give better deals to players (i.e. by cutting out the middleman) and 3) sponsor a sense of community beyond just a commercial platform, I think it could be successful.

On one hand, yes. On another, I think every other gaming enthusiast will agree with me, that when you are actually passionate about games you often realize how little (very often exactly none) effort people put into finding good games. So you find yourself literally begging people to play the quality games you already found for them and still finding some considerable apathy (taste does come into this of course, but it doesn't entirely negate the argument). This kind of instances has the tendency of making the hopeful perception go away and the reality sink in. The reality being people for some reason don't like investing any real effort into getting their hands on good entertainment. Usually that results in that they end up playing things put in their mouths by the most massive PR campaigns. Which means everybody has played Skyrim but they probably haven't even heard about your game even if you shaped it after their most sacred desires. And that doesn't bode well for what you and I are talking about. Only the most devoted niche gamers would bother with scavenging over a bazillion of different niche-specific distribution services (and know about them in the first place) and these people would in most cases find what they want anywhere else. Everybody else will just wait until Steam slaps them in the face really hard with the next title that became high profile one way or another.

So what I fear in this situation is: the indie developers will spread thin over numerous different distribution services with little visibility while Steam keeps growing stronger with its centralization and massive diverse-yet-unified audience. And for all its failings I think Steam benefits from being centralized and unified tremendously. And so I'm thinking maybe indies should join efforts and stay in focus together as much as possible too, rather than fighting the good fight and falling alone.

Well ...yeah!  So is game making, though.  How many hundreds of hours have I slaved away at it... For what?  I guess it's just a passion thing. 

I'd argue it's a bit different though. A game is a work of art and no matter how good or bad it turns out to be in the end, it doesn't have a chance of becoming quite as ultimately useless as a game client that failed to catch on. And thus, I'd view spending efforts on the latter a much more bitter waste than even a really bad game.

Obviously you're going to do things for your own motivation, but let me set out a vision.  A Steam-like client linked to the main page of the AGS forums (from where there are several hundred downloads a week already -in the past it sometimes topped 1000).  Because this client is developed to support AGS games, publishing them is as simple as a click of a button.  No fussing around with compatibility (ask Dave about Gemini Rue & Direct Draw on Steam), pestering a middleman who's going to take a huge chunk of your profits to please please please consider your game (ask Dave....), or players who are used to the paradigms of other genres (ask Dave about the casual market....), or trawling the masses for people who like old-school point-and-click (because anyone signed up would already be a fan).  (Dave's great! ).  I wonder how much of Dave's time is spent on the non-development end the business?  If you could cut that "wasted time" out, how many more games would he make?  More broadly, developers who are just starting out may well find that overhead overwhelming, a disincentive to make quality (commercial) games.  I realise AGS doesn't have the market power of Steam, but there ARE more than 7000 forum members, and surely many more visitors.

This part of your argument makes me wonder even more: is this what we should be doing or if we should just use this to promote the games we endorse after putting them on already existing platforms?

ask Dave about Gemini Rue & Direct Draw on Steam

This is pretty much totally unimportant to our discussion, but I'd like to note that this is rather Windows / AGS issue than any degree of Steam's fault.

So setting up an AGS Steam-like client would be at first an exercise in market development, but it could pay large dividends down the road: a ready market for indie-developers at the touch of a button.  This would encourage developers to make more games (because they are squandering less time on the non-development end of the business), and would also benefit players by providing them with more games.  Even now, for a mid-range indie developer just starting out, a low-cost launch environment that nets him 1000 paying downloads could be the difference between launching a game-development career (meaning many more wonderful games to play) or finding another career path in life.  As the client attracts ever more users, the potential market grows.

This part of the argument is very definitely compelling towards your suggestion however. Very good points. I agree that making it easier to make the best of what we already have is a good purpose that provides some solid expectations. Still a risk, but you clearly outlined what the advantages are.

What about beyond just the commercial developers and the players?  Well, I think the client should support non-commercial games as well.  This would attract players to the client who might not be interested in paying for games now, but may well later, as well as provide a reason for the client while the commercial game inventory is being built up.  So the client would act as a platform for all developers in the community.  For commercial games, I think a cut should go towards the maintenance of the forums: I don't think it need be much, but people are carrying the costs for this place themselves at the moment (Chris previously, now Peder).  Finally I think the developer of the client should get a small cut, to compensate him for the effort of building it in the first place but also to encourage him to keep it up-to-date.  But as mentioned above I think the lion's share of proceeds should go directly to developers.

Completely agree with this.

So in conclusion, AGS Steam-like client is a win-win-win-win situation for developers, players, forumites and the guy who builds it.   

Would you agree though that making it actually engine-agnostic even if it's primary ground is AGS community is wiser? I mean assuming that first and foremost its AGS support is impeccable and everything. Like, make it for indie adventure gamers for instance rather than only for AGSers.

edit: I'd like to add a huge HAVING SAID THAT here and draw the following conclusion: I think if one does undertake making such a platform / client, aiming at a certain genre/style/kind affinity (and thus a specific existing audience) and basing it on an existing successful community are both really damn good ideas. Both are courtesy of Baron.

Why not allow users to select which file format to download? E.g. download as installer, download as archive.

No big reasons but: it requires you to provide two links (per platform?) all the time and doubles the storage space. Still, it's probably the optimal solution in most cases. Though...

What about big games? Let's say the game is 1 Gb or more. Would any experienced usersâ,,¢ still want a separate archive version?

Quite a dilemma. I suppose some kind of ideal solution would be an installer that is also recognized by archivers as a self-extracting archive so you can just open it with them and extract stuff wherever you want. Then you can just add a note that points that fact out so experienced users can take advantage of that fact if they wish.
Or am I just being a perfectionist and overcomplicating everything again?

We should definitely add this to the manual, right...?

Actually, yes. It's an actual limitation of the engine and users should be made aware of that as soon as possible as in any other such case.

So my ban of "being wrong about everything ever" has been lifted?

Well, yes. Sorry about that. You're a huge gaming enthusiast which means you're clearly right about many things (and most important ones too!). It's just Gray Matter is very special to my heart and I wanted to jokingly address just how disagreeable I find your judgment. Which brings us to that you're still utterly wrong about Gray Matter though. ^_^

Yep, Gribbler you're right.