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Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

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Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#401

Video games publishers don't want you to play the same game for too long without spending more money. They don't want to make games like Terraria where you have a $10 game you can play for a thousand hours. They'd much rather you buy multiple $60+ games, plus expansions, "micro"-transactions and subscriptions. They don't want games that last forever, they want to pressure you into constantly buying the next big thing…

Why would you want to spend 1000s of hours in a game? That must be eradicated with fire. Time is your most precious resource... why waste it on one game? Games need to be shorter, maybe 20 hrs or so for high budget single player games.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> establish/find a consumer protection group to help legislative bodies craft the documents Yes, that's one of the ways to address this. Active consumer participation is still necessary, though, as the consumer protection group can still lose its way. > The hang ups can’t simply be nihilistic complaints about the government’s abilities without any solutions proposed. That’s an argument for doing nothing No, it's fact…

To correct your analogy to apply to prior comments, you didn’t like your soup so you tell the chef you have no confidence in their ability as a cook and should never even try to sell food because you have such little confidence in his abilities to create an dish anyone would enjoy eating. That’s nihilistic

You're just being obtuse. I'll serve up the final correction here. You hear about a restaurant that sometimes serves up really good food, but sometimes serves up really bad food. People online are choosing to ignore the bad food and praising the restaurant, and also becoming violently angry against anyone who brings up the bad food. Conductr comes along and says "we shouldn't even TRY the food here?" which is totally helpful and relevant.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Let the problem fester until the negative externalities build up so much it overcomes the coordination problem and companies are subject to the same coercion (but through 'market forces' so it's good), one day, eventually, maybe" isn't a meaningful argument against legislation.

Excellent summary of our current pseudocapitalist hellscape. How do we stop this ride when even the meta is a coordination problem.

and yet it would be solved overnight if the consumers just stopped buying what they evidently dislike so much

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent summary of our current pseudocapitalist hellscape. How do we stop this ride when even the meta is a coordination problem.

and yet it would be solved overnight if the consumers just stopped buying what they evidently dislike so much

The problem is that these consumers realize they'd dislike some things of a product long after buying it (and often it isn't the entire product that is a problem, so someone might still dislike a lot some aspect of a product while liking another aspect of it).

And others may not even realize the negative issues at all but still they create network effects that drag other consumers along the ride anyway, regardless of if they like it or not.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#405
post #4

> Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. No? How would the "rights holders" be in any way liable for someone posting illegal content on a community-hosted server after a game has gone end-of-life? Also, community…

Because parents and the general public won't see that it's Bob's private server for $game. They see $game_name by $developer/publisher. Mojang (creators of Minecraft ) is an unfortunate good case study for this. It's sale to Microsoft is in part down to not being able to balance freedom for server owners and the PR issues caused by people scamming others, in this case children, while obscuring it under the Minecraft…

> It's sale to Microsoft is in part down to not being able to balance freedom for server owners and the PR issues caused by people scamming others, in this case children, while obscuring it under the Minecraft brand.

Source? This is the first time I’ve heard this claim.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#406

Video games publishers don't want you to play the same game for too long without spending more money. They don't want to make games like Terraria where you have a $10 game you can play for a thousand hours. They'd much rather you buy multiple $60+ games, plus expansions, "micro"-transactions and subscriptions. They don't want games that last forever, they want to pressure you into constantly buying the next big thing…

Planned obsolescence even has affected video games too?

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#407
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And which are not owned by the developer or available to be perpetually licensed.

To my understanding the idea is that if a company licenses some 3rd-party component for their game, the component would either need to be severable from the game while still leaving it reasonably playable, or the license would need to permit people who have purchased the game to use that component. This is going foward, not applying retroactively to existing games. I think that's still fairly favorable to game publis…

> If you manufacture an office chair and license a patented swivel mechanism, the license you acquire cannot require you to break purchasers' chairs after the license expires, nor even to go around their homes swapping out the mechanism (which analogously may still be permitted for games).

Yes it can.

Fairly notably quite a lot of publishers sell their physical books and newspapers and require retailer unsold copies to be destroyed - but they were sold to the retailer.

> Moreover if the rightsholder for that patent had been licensing only under the terms that the purchased chair is destroyed after 5 years but then a change in consumer protection law prevents that practice, they'd need to license it out under more reasonable terms (like you can only sell the chairs with the mechanism for 5 years, but there's no limit on how long people can use the mechanism in their purchased chairs) - otherwise they'd get no business.

They quite possibly already have an alternative business of licensing the component for non-game offerings that they won't jeopardise.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said: > I don't care how smart you are, how much self control you have, whatever, in the face of billions of dollars, voting with your wallet does not stand a chance. The house always wins. Yes, you're totally right that HN users are far from the average consumer, but they weren't talking about the average consumer - they were making a categorical statement that all consumers have no self-agency and are mind-con…

That's a ludicrously ungenerous interpretation of what they said. Of course they weren't making an ontological claim. And I'm sure you know that too.

[deleted]

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#409
I did some looking into this a few days ago, and I can understand the sentiment. I can't understand the proposed implementation. There is a lack of technical discourse and heavy criticism of any negative opinion. I don't want to defend big publishers, I have not bought a new AAA game in many years. I think they are user hostile.

Stop Killing Games is just way too broad. Remove online DRM checks from my single player game? Sure, I have been on board with that for a very long time. Make sure my MMO stays playable forever? You're asking for a miracle. You as a consumer need to be informed about what you're paying for. It's your job.

"Just release the server's source / binary" is a pipe-dream and I figured more people here would understand this. Modern software is super complex, distributed, entangled with external services and dependencies. Often it's not just isolated, should you be forced to release the backend serving all of your (still active) games? Has anyone considered the security implications? Should you be forced to use only libraries that you can distribute? Can you see how this may stifle creativity?

"Just state when the game will go offline" is impossible. The game will go offline when it can't be responsibly funded it anymore. Whether that's 2 or 10 years from now. If a company has to declare when your game service will expire, expect most online games to transition to a subscription model going forward. If the consumer won't have that, expect less of them to exist. It's going to backfire spectacularly. A better idea would be to mandate a minimum support window, and refunds within that window.

What constitutes a "playable state"? Is the anti-cheat in an online FPS integral to playability? Many would argue so, I'll let you think about that one. This movement is riddled with such ambiguities.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me the local server executable.

It's peer to peer, isn't it? Afaik you can play it on a LAN with no Internet connection

Yes it is, I use a VPN to play on LAN mode with my family all the time from across the country.
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