161–170 of 265 posts
This is beyond reasonable. You can still download it for free outside of Steam. If I make a Sonic fan game and Sega is like, you can keep it online, but just not on Steam, that’s nice. In this situation you still have the option of playing it on Steam for a modest price The alternative is the Nintendo route…
Wonder if the reaction would be the same if Wine was conditional on buying a license to Windows.
I think I'd pay for a Windows License if it means I get official support for Windows apps on Linux (provided the support is indeed good).
As a sidenote, this whole situation implies just how important platforms are. Nothing about OpenTTD has changed. You can literally just go download it off their website for free - same as it was 20 years ago. And you can add it to your Steam library just fine. It's only been on the Steam store for 5 of those years. But the open internet is dead now and just being "de-merchandised" from a platform feels like being rel…
That's cumbersome. The main benefit of platforms is comfort. Steam takes care of installation and updating, while often also offers some access with the community. Open internet has more choice and liberty, but for the price of more work and annoyance.
That the main reason why all big platforms succeed and the small platforms fail. Comfort is just too valuable.
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Open internet is dead only to those that don't take the effort to discover. Otherwise it's still as open as it always was. Since there was an internet to speak of, there always were and still are vast amounts of people unaware of stuff that exists, limited by no "platforms" but only by their own lack of desire.
That is true to some extent. However, let me ask you one simple question: how would you try to search for something if you are not aware of it's existence? In other words, how people that are not aware of existence of open-source projects (such as OpenTTD) are supposed to discover them if they're not searching for them on purpose (which is impossible given that they have no clue about their existence)? Of course ther…
How are most games on steam found? I kinda doubt all people find them through steam own mechanisms. I even doubt the majority find them this way. Gaming has multiple sources of information, be it news, social media, influencers or cooperations. Video-content is probably the biggest source of being discovered for most games these days.
So they were not "pressured" but Atari contacted them and they proceeded to make this decision based because they "needed to balance Atari’s commercial interests". That sound indistinguishable from being pressured.
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Reproducing someone’s intellectual property and publishing it is exactly what constitutes a copyright violation. You can retype someone’s book with your keyboard, it’s still not yours.
Reproducing is absolutely not a copyright violation. Otherwise emulators would have no legal option to exist.
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I think they're saying Atari didn't threaten them but they both understood that they could have. Honestly it sounds like Atari were trying to be nice. Like "you technically aren't allowed to do that, and we could just set our lawyers on you, but we'd like to not do that while also making money on our re-release". This seems like a perfectly reasonable compromise to me.
How is "I haven't talked to my lawyer yet but you know I could" not a threat/pressure?
I don't have much to add except to say that I think this is a stand-out example of how companies and preservationists should work together and not against each other. The childish folks who are upset about this aren't familiar with the realties of either open source games perseveration nor the realities of being an IP holder. This is as close as we have gotten to the Good Place. I wish Atari luck on the re-release an…
This is about as much as you can hope for tbh. More than a fair compromise. Society has become quite 'entitled' to 'free' things. As popular as they are, torrents and free streams and emulation and clones of games in an open source lib are all stealing something. I know thats an unpopular thing to say but it a fact. Now, those rights violations viewed in a larger context may change one's opinion on the whole, and I'm…
But, at the same time, I find it interesting that "emulations and clones" are considered entitlement (in a derogatory sense), but copyright protection is not. Before 1976 in the US, the _maximum_ copyright term was 56 years, and that would require filing for an extension from the default of _only 28 years_.
I think it's easy to forget that copyright as we know it is not set in stone. Historically, after 28 years, most works became public domain and that meant you could do literally whatever you want with it and it would not be legally stealing at all. I think we as a society have forgotten what it means to have a public domain.
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"no responsibility" but they could have chosen not to intentionally hurt them
Imagine if you were Atari. You've bought the rights to Transport Tycoon Deluxe from Chris Sawyer and want to sell the game up on Steam. Then you see OpenTTD (the exact same game except better in every way) also on Steam for free. What do you do?
I then go "well why re-release this ancient game running in an emulator, when this exists?" and ask the core team of OpenTTD if they want to monetize their steam/GOG releases now that I can licence out the TTD IP to them and remove any remaining legal ambiguity (and recoup my """investment""" via revenue sharing).
And if they don't I take it as a learning experience (to do my homework before I buy IPs) and release my TTD-in-an-emulator on steam and GOG knowing full well that its probably not going to generate many sales. Maybe I add "hey just so you know there's this really cool modern source port you can get for free..." to the description and hope that I can generate some sales off of good boy points.