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Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

positech.co.uk

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Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#211

Post by jhanschoo »

brc wrote: post #197
zouhair wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you buy a boat or a Rolex, you own a boat or a Rolex. Now you can buy all Star Citizen's ship you will own nothing, if tomorrow they decide to close their servers you are pretty much screwed.

With a boat, you might spend thousands on consumables. All that you have left is the memories of driving the boat around. Some guys spend $100k to go motor racing for a season in single-make cars. At the end of it, they don't own anything but any trophies they might have picked up. If people want to spend money on digital goods, putting up walls to stop or make it harder is unlikely to be successful unless you outrig…

I don't really buy into this argument. Regulating the sale digital goods works. Companies that wish to remain legal will refrain from the sale of digital goods in an illegal manner; mandatory company audits will be a vector governments use to enforce that.

The article and others in the thread have given arguments that digital goods are not victimless. Most societies acknowledge that gambling is harmful; digital gambling with fake money or with time spent in-game is presumably harmful as well.

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#212

Post by jhanschoo »

brc wrote: post #197
zouhair wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you buy a boat or a Rolex, you own a boat or a Rolex. Now you can buy all Star Citizen's ship you will own nothing, if tomorrow they decide to close their servers you are pretty much screwed.

With a boat, you might spend thousands on consumables. All that you have left is the memories of driving the boat around. Some guys spend $100k to go motor racing for a season in single-make cars. At the end of it, they don't own anything but any trophies they might have picked up. If people want to spend money on digital goods, putting up walls to stop or make it harder is unlikely to be successful unless you outrig…

I don't really buy into this argument. Regulating the sale digital goods works. Companies that wish to remain legal will refrain from the sale of digital goods in an illegal manner; mandatory company audits will be a vector governments use to enforce that.

The article and others in the thread have given arguments that digital goods are not victimless. Most societies acknowledge that gambling is harmful; digital gambling with fake money or with time spent in-game is presumably harmful as well.

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#213

Post by s73v3r »

wildmusings wrote: post #207
Retric wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society already had this discussion and gambling is highly regulated for a large number of reasons. Some games have destroyed lives, and enabling that is not in society's best interst. PS: We can fantasize about people being rational, but reality disagrees.

> PS: We can fantasize about people being rational, but reality disagrees. I worry that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That the less you treat people as rational beings responsible for their own decisions, the less rational and responsible they will be. It might already be happening, with victimitis in American politics being one of the most visible outcomes.

Worry all you want, but people have never been rational, even when governments didn't do anything about anything. And nothing will change that. Taking away the government regulations will only result in parasitic companies preying on others.

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#214

Post by voltagex_ »

mikeash wrote: post #126
Natsu wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, and if the game closes up for whatever reason (no longer making money, whatever), all of your investment into it can quickly vanish into literally nothing.

If you crash your uninsured Harley it's no different.

Can't buy Game Closure Insurance (yet)

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#215

Post by s73v3r »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #111
zxcdw wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Note that I am not the person you replied to.) I do honestly feel that there should be a law against that in the society which I live in, since I find such actions taken by the restaurant owner to be manipulative and purposefully deceptive (excuse me for not coming up with better terms, I am not a native English speaker), knowing that many people -- not all of them, but many -- thus end up drinking far more than the…

I am not arguing for giving up the notion of personal responsibility, but But you are. When you get to micromanaging such trivialities, there's no limit what a planner's mentality will settle on next. A ban on restaurants that offer salty free lunches with every purchase of beer because they're relying on the customer to make up for it by ordering drinks. It is absolutely not fraud. A happy hour was advertised, and t…

It absolutely is dishonest, and quite possibly fraud. There is absolutely no reason why we should allow this to happen, either.

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#216

Post by vinceguidry »

Retra wrote: post #148
vinceguidry wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they are. Are you really equating them?

Nothing is "just" commerce at work. This is also a prime example of the naturalistic fallacy. Just because these things happen to be legal doesn't necessitate that they should be.

When did I say they should be legal?

The political process has limits. There's such a thing as political capital and there's only so much of it at any given time.

Most people seem to think that shit is unlimited, that we could just fix everything all at once if the politicians just knew what it was.

That's emphatically not the case. Issues all get their time in the sun, and the political fix is almost never perfect. The issues you compared social video games to, slavery et. al. all were banned, rightfully, a long time ago.

When I say that this is "commerce as usual" I mean that the market will sort out the complained-about issues itself, without the need for a law. Legislation is a complicated, tortuous affair. Society needs many, many individual events to draw on in order to draft effective legislation. Someone has to study this stuff in order to write a law, someone has to convince others to vote for the law. None of this is free, it all comes at the expense of other issues needing attention at the moment. Votes get traded like horses.

In this case, political attention isn't needed, at least not yet. There are way too many other issues that beg attention.

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#217

Post by bduerst »

wildmusings wrote: post #178
bduerst wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Civil court enforcement You had just said it's not appropriate for governments to insert itself between two informed, consenting parties, because it is paternalistic and not part of a free society. Also what does market efficiency have to do with anything? There are always going to be asymmetrical distributions of power because information is asymmetrical.

Courts enforce consensual contracts between two people. That's a basic function of government and doesn't restrict your rights, except that you must abide by your word. What this discussion is about is legal constraints on the contents of those contracts. A lot of what the SEC and FTC do is require appropriate information disclosure to protect consumers from deception. The SEC requires financial disclosures, auditing…

Which is still paternalistic intervention by the government as you defined it. Don't go no-true-scotsman on me by trying to redefine "true" intervention.

And to the contrary, both the SEC and the FTC dictate what types of transactions take place in respective domains - unless you're arguing that the prevention of MLMs and ponzi schemes infringes on your freedoms.

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#218

Post by bduerst »

zouhair wrote: post #193
bduerst wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are inefficient, but are still useful as a information distribution method across inefficient markets. The perfect ad will lead to a mutually-beneficial transaction between a buyer and a seller. There is also a cognitive bias with ads, where people on attribute negative ad experiences to advertising, never the good ones (except in super bowls or other outliers).

You can also extract water from feces, that doesn't make them a good thing.

Well I certainly haven't had a cognitive bias or enjoyable experiences with feces, but if you have then sure, that analogy works for you.

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#219

Post by mindcrash »

_nedR wrote: post #209
WalterBright wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people with Fort Knox reserves of willpower In my case, it has nothing whatsoever to do with willpower. It's that video games bore me.

You. Are. Not. The. Audience. You are just one of the costs of doing a freemium business. Like the alcohol industry, the game is really targeted towards the psychologically vulnerable who represent most of the revenues. The game is boring by design. Actually its just barely interesting enough to keep the target audience playing, but not so interesting that it stops them from paying to get their psychological reward.…

Funny that they didn't make this particular episode available online.

Gee, I wonder why...

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#220

Post by mschuster91 »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #119
mschuster91 wrote: post #47

As someone who worked in the customer-facing ends of the gambling industry (hell, I haven't been able to totally let go, I just ordered a true casino machine for my home... for reverse engineering and pentesting)... that online shit is far worse than "offline" gambling. With gambling offline, well you have to leave your house, gonna dress up, and people will notice if you fuck up your life by gambling every day. Also…

Yes, and it's amazing how blind freemium game developers are to this. I'm a game developer, and I've done well off of freemium games, but no one wants to have this conversation.

I wouldn't call it "blind". From a capitalist POV, they're doing their job very well.
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