361–370 of 506 posts
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What are the insurmountable obstacles to releasing the server code for the community to run?
As I understand it, the obstacles are mostly legal. Our development team would love to just throw the code on GitHub.
It seems like the fair solution to this problem is to open source server code if you are going to cease support for an online game. That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to. I also really support giving 60 day notice if an online game is going to shut down. Places I have worked have had policies like that for games they are sun setting and I think the best game publishers th…
I doubt it's possible for legislation to mandate meaningful compliance regarding something as dynamic and rapidly evolving as online games. Despite good intentions, such legislation often results in unintended consequences including distorting the market, creating perverse incentives or even making the problem worse. Serious problems are already apparent. Games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription." a…
I believe it's possible to write laws that serve the people they're supposed to protect. It may take iteration, but you have to start somewhere.
I'm willing to tolerate the new problems that may arise from trying to solve an existing one. Presenting the unknowns as something to be avoided because it might be complicated and require additional effort to fix, is not a sane refutation.
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Unintended consequences is the price of progress. The alternative is to continue farming by hand, and carry after from the river for your daily needs. We legislate away unintended consequences, that is the job of government. We put in laws and remove them if they are unsuitable. Analysis paralysis does no one any good.
I don't see how you can legislate away a move to subscriptions. That's not unintended consequences, that is an entirely foreseeable and direct consequence.
$company might see this requirement, to treat people with respect, as a threat to their business model and will respond by becoming worse.
Is only a problem if you're not willing or able to introduce additional requirements to compel ethical behavior.
The problem isn't companies are evil and we're hopeless to stop them so it's better to bend over. The problem is we're unwilling to force companies to behave ethically. Its more profitable to be evil. And it's not technically illegal to do so.... yet. (It's also more profitable to just steal.)
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Ultimately consumers can then make a better choice, to simply drop those subscription based games.
They could, but there is very little evidence to show that a dislike for subscription models outweighs people's desire to consume quality content. Evidence is strong that people follow the content they want, and then secondarily choose the least friction delivery model.
You're describing the reality, and the difference after adding these additional rule, they'd have to be honest about what you're paying for and for how long you are allowed to use it.
Additional, if it is a subscription, it's more likely ongoing revenue could possibly fund providing the service indefinitely. Will that always happen, obviously not, but then game studios won't be as likely to do the same exact thing that catalysed the stop killing games project.
Found this quote from the game industry interesting and depressing: > Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work Could the game industry just side step this legislation by moving games entirely to a subscription model, with no upfront purchase? When they stop offering the subscription, you lose access to the game. Similar to how various online S…
That's a lie. Consumers buy a copy of the product. There's a bunch of legal fundamentals that make it so. Contracts that give one side a complete control of someone else are rarely (if ever) legal. If it were, then people could be pressured to give away their fundamental rights, one of which is the right to property.
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What you're noticing - that companies suddenly started closed-sourcing their server code, isn't just something that happened for no reason. Internet connections got fast, and it enabled more complex games like MMORPGs and MOBAs which are an order of magnitude more complex than the shooter games you're probably thinking of (Quake III?) A LOT of architectural thinking goes into scaling MMORPGs, and it starts at the dat…
This whole thing doesn't apply to MMORPGs to begin with because they're all already subscription based. If I understand the main grievance correctly, the problem is giving the consumers the wrong impression they're making a normal one-time-payment PURCHASE and then rendering the item they purchased unusable later.
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And it's what would have happened anyway without the law. How is this difficult to understand? It's not like it's only a few games that shut down without recourse for the players. Ross Scott already did the research on this. Something like 95% of all online games that shut down do so without providing any way for the players to continue playing in some way or without issuing refunds.
Different person here, it's probably because they defensively reject anything that forces anyone to do anything, or would increase prices outside of market forces. Every argument that's used against this kind of legislation was also used against putting airbrakes on trains. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I don't see any world in which these "stop killing games" laws result in anything close to what the proponents are asking for, for multiple reasons, one of the biggest being that the proponents don't have a clear, coherent, cohesive vision that takes into account all of the side-effects, and everyone you talk to in this space has a slightly different idea of what they want, and even the main proponent, Ross Scott, ha…
Ross has had a consistent vision for years and i'm not sure where this delusion otherwise is coming from. At this point i'm wondering if people like you are just astroturf bots funded by the ESA.
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Unintended consequences is the price of progress. The alternative is to continue farming by hand, and carry after from the river for your daily needs. We legislate away unintended consequences, that is the job of government. We put in laws and remove them if they are unsuitable. Analysis paralysis does no one any good.