181–190 of 265 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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?
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That's why we need to reel in these platforms. The mobile ones are slowly starting to relent, but that's only the beginning.
The mobile ones only have one storefront. PC games distribution is a healthy and competitive market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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?
This argument is like "you buy a McDonald's then realize there is a burger king across the road. What do you do?" Yes one is a clone of the other. But you don't get to just bulldoze the burger king.
Wonder if the reaction would be the same if Wine was conditional on buying a license to Windows.
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Indeed. It sounds like they were further pressured to say they were not being pressured.
The types of folks who make reimplemented game engines often do it as a labor of love towards the original. And the best companies often have great appreciation for their modding communities and preservationists. (Witness the good collaborations between some companies and SCUMMVM, for instance.) This may well have been a conversation that was entirely reasonable and respectful.
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How is "I haven't talked to my lawyer yet but you know I could" not a threat/pressure?
In the same way that "you kids aren't allowed to skate here, but maybe if you do it over there I could just turn around and not notice you" isn't a threat.
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Eh, Sawyer's career has left him a multi-millionaire, and Transport Tycoon is the foundation of that. If you've already made several lifetimes worth of income, I also don't really care about your IP rights anymore.
i don't care so much about his IP rights (legal) as about the fact that this is his project (moral)
Copyright being as extremely long as it is makes us think that making something once means we should profit from it in perpetuity, but that's not really beneficial for society to work like that. That's exactly why patents don't work like that.
Remember, the purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works. Well, if you can create one work and profit from it effectively (i.e., your entire career), why would you create another work? That's just a waste of effort. That's literally the business model of IP holding companies. They don't create. They just own. They're rent-seeking.
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…
> You can literally just go download it off their website for free 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…
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…
> You can literally just go download it off their website for free 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…
Steam succeeded because of its store, which still has the best prices on the market. That’s their original moat. Their current moat is sunk costs. People have thousands of dollars in their Steam Library. At this point Steam’s advantages as software are negligible, especially considering its poor performance.
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At the same time, the open source community has absolutely no responsibility to make Atari profits here either. The outcome here is simply that open source is getting screwed over It isn't kind hearted. Them trying to shut down openttd would lead to a gigantic clusterfuck that would hurt their sales. This is them trying to remove a direct competitor to them releasing a new game as much as possible, without generating…
> open source is getting screwed over It may have been "screwed over" if there was no access to the oss game. But you can still download the game from their website. They just do not want that these appear as competitors in steam/gog platforms, so they bundled the oss version. Both sides thought this was a reasonable resolution. Thus I don't see "screwing over" here.