From Ecyrd:

“Look at us: every year, we churn out more computer games than your entire industry is worth. You know how we do it? We like our customers. We don’t treat them like potential criminals, and try to make our products do less. We invent new things like online role-playing -games, where the money does not come from duplication of bits (which cannot be stopped, regardless of your DRM scheme) but from providing experiences that the people want.

We saw that you were old and weak. So we took advantage of it: told you things that you wanted to hear so we could kick you in the head in twenty years. Some of us told you that the future is going to be interactive – what did you do? You started to think how to make interactive movies (CD-I, anyone?), not what it really means, while we wrote games and tried to understand the new mediums, not how to bolt it on onto old things.

We lied to you. And we apologize for that, but it was for the greater good. So we’re not the least bit sorry.

Signed: The Computer Industry”

» The Butt Ugly Weblog: We lied to you

UPDATE: So poor old Ecyrd is getting smacked by everyone, especially Les Auteurs. As Yoz points out, Ecyrd glosses over some very salient points when it comes to some of his supporting arguement, but I know some of the back story to what he was trying to say, so I think characterising him as some uberzealous /.’er who wants everything to be free is not quite right. I can’t speak for him, but when he’s done this riff before IRL, it’s been about the inability of the computer industry to deliver on it’s promises/appeasement to/of the content industry, while simultaneuously shafting the users and the artists – NOT that all art and creativity should be free. Maybe the humour and the message got lost in translation. I’ve personally seen Ecyrd pay an awful lot of money, over and over again for art and creative works, especially those of Hayao Miyazaki! What this does however illustrate is that both artists and users are pissed off at how broke this stuff is, and the current options presented by the Redmond/Anaheim axis. Joshua and Warren are two artists doing something about it at least. Let’s move on from the smackdowns to a militant, united front between smart artists like those guys, and smart users/technologists like Ecyrd that can and will present compelling alternatives to the technology companies. Like mine I hope.