Creative Labs continues to give customers the bird…

All this mess about Creative Labs, Inc., their crappy Vista drivers with intentionally crippled drivers (that’s not me, that what they said!), threatening Daniel_K (also see Digg.com’s Creative Threatens modders) for fixing their drivers for the users so they can actually make use of the hardware they purchased with the features they purchased the sound card for, btw.

Originally, I would have thought if Creative had such bad programmers, that they would have contacted Daniel_K to hire him like some had suggested. And I totally disagree with those who say that Daniel_K was wrong for taking donations. Bandwidth for downloads is not cheap, and there are website costs etc. A simple shared-hosting service would not accommodate the needs of such a broad audience of users who would want to download these drivers. And why should he pay for that out of the goodness of his heart? He apparently did for awhile. Maybe it gives the appearance that he is making money on this, but if you really pay attention to what his out of pocket costs might be, it would be hard to blame him for at least trying to give folks a chance to help out with that through donations.

BTW: As noted elsewhere, Creative also sued A3D/Aureal/VORTEX back in 1998. They lost and Aureal won. But although Aureal won the battle, the war thrust them into bankruptcy and then Creative gobbled them up in a ‘fire sale.’

And if that wasn’t bad enough, in 2004, Creative Pressured id software regarding their EAX3D drivers (technology they got from A3D maybe??) and ‘agreement relating to Creative’s patented shadowing technique [also known as Carmack's Reverse in some coding circles] and id’s cutting-edge 3D graphics DOOM 3 engine.’

And don’t even get me started on their Lame/Non-Existent drivers for Vista and Linux. Or their flat out refusal to create an SDK that is reasonable so folks could actually create the drivers that Creative Labs can’t seem to do with their own hardware.

Back when I first started with computers, back in the DOS days; back when DOS games ruled, Creative Labs was wonderful! They set the standards that everyone else lived by. And they did it well. But they got cocky, extremely closed minded and closed proprietary crap, until the point that we have ended up with the crap we are dealing with today from Creative Labs.

If they had followed more in nVidia’s footsteps, they would have done things completely different, and their customers would generally love their hardware. (Now I am aware of the probems that nVidia currently has with Vista and I am sure they will fix it. Unlike Creative Labs.)

Gamers, tinkerers, hobbyists, computer technicians, etc. often make recommendations to others in their field and their clients, as well as friends and family. Creative has done a really bad and stupid thing by shutting out their greatest word of mouth adverting. I guess the only people that will be buying their products are people who buy ‘cheap’ systems and have absolutely no idea how to make them work or even know why their new computer doesn’t work right.

People have been getting more and more ticked off at Creative Labs for years for their, support, or lack thereof, and now they have really done the unforgivable.

Good bye Creative Labs, good bye to great memories of the sound card standards of the SoundBlaster card series, that helped gamers get some really great games running so much better in years past. Good bye and good riddance.

I can tell you Creative, I will be making sure that your sound chips are not in ANY motherboard, sound card or other audio/video cards that I buy. You do not exist for me any longer. You are a follower of the “Sue Happy Philosophy” in this country and you are dead to me.

If you have been sold a bill of goods by Creative Labs, paid good money for certain features in a sound card just to find out that those very features have been deliberately crippled in the newest operating system by Microsoft (Vista), and if you live in the United States of America, I would suggest you contact your State’s Attorney General’s office and see what they can do for you.

As I noted on my BambiCNI StumbUpon links, “Interesting path Creative has chosen for themselves.” Certainly not the path less traveled, the ethical path.

I think this posting by Durzel on 03-29-2008 07:58 AM (page 9) sums up my thoughts on the current situation quite nicely,

I don’t usually bother posting rants on forums because usually when people say “I will never buy from company X again!” it’s just a hollow threat. I also haven’t got any time for online petitions as they never achieve anything.

The above said – I’m not going to be buying another Creative sound card again.

I bought an Audigy 2 ZS Platinum a few years ago, along with a Cambridge Soundworks DTT3500 5.1 speaker system, both of these have served me well to date. I don’t believe in replacing hardware “just cos” when there is no justification for it.

When the X-Fi came out I was hugely disappointed to find out that Creative had effectively obsoleted the DTT3500 speakers by changing the protocol for the digital DIN port. There was apparently no logical reason for Creative to do this, and the net result simply was that the DTT3500 speaker set would not work with X-Fi cards, if I wanted 5.1+ sound I would have to buy a newer set of speakers (Gigaworks no doubt). This change annoyed a lot of DTT3500 owners as it seemed like Creative had changed the digital DIN output for no other reason than to deliberately obsolete the older speaker system and force users to upgrade.

Since I had no intention of paying £hundreds for a new speaker system when my DTT3500 set worked perfectly fine (not to mention that my Audigy card did everything I needed it to) I carried on using my Audigy card when I switched to Vista. Like most people I soon found out that the Creative Vista drivers were buggy, and it wasn’t long before Creative stopped providing Vista driver updates completely.

Then I found Daniel_K’s drivers, which fixed a whole host of problems for me and also provided features that were apparently impossible to provide on Audigy soundcards. Let’s not forget – Daniel_K isn’t even a Creative employee, he’s hasn’t got access to the source driver code, etc. The fact he was able to achieve what he did is hugely impressive.

I had assumed that Creative turned a blind eye to this, maybe they figured that they didn’t want to commit resources to developing drivers for older cards anymore. I can live with that, I wouldn’t expect Microsoft to be providing updates for XP in 2015. What doesn’t sit well with me is threads like this because they show categorically that the problem Creative has with Daniel_K is not that he is infringing copyright (which he isn’t), it’s that he is providing functionality that Creative has deliberately omitted from their Audigy Vista drivers, or has flat out lied about whether features were even possible on the Audigy cards.

This single thread proves that Creative just cares about their bottom line – they want people to upgrade their hardware simply because they want to milk more money from their consumers. They could provide the functionality Daniel_K has enabled in his modded drivers themselves, and probably more besides (since they have direct access to the source), but they choose not to because they don’t want users to be able to carry on using “old” hardware like Audigy cards.

I am disgusted by Creatives attitude to their consumer base. There is NOTHING wrong with my Audigy soundcard, and there is NOTHING wrong with my DTT3500 speaker system. I will be damned if I am going to pay Creative £hundreds to upgrade to whatever their current “supported” gen is simply because they refuse to provide functionality, or worse still – will only provide deliberately crippled or buggy drivers to older cards. This is a disgusting business practice.

Creative will never seen a penny from me again, and that’s not a hollow threat believe me.
Message Edited by Durzel on 03-29-2008 07:58 AM

You tell’m Durzel. There are so many comments of value in that forum topic!