Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 452 posts

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

#411

Post by joseda-hg »

surgical_fire wrote: post #58
meheleventyone wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you’re licensing content from third parties the more permissive rights you need the more expensive it is. Music is a very good example where it might not even be possible to get a perpetual license. A bunch of games have removed music as their license to it has expired for example. In the context of EOL of a game if you have to provide it for free to owners in perpetuity any third party content, code and so on n…

> In the context of EOL of a game if you have to provide it for free to owners in perpetuity any third party content You start your argument from a presumption that releasing an offline game is almost an impossibility. Are you trying yo argue that offline games have zero things licensed? This sounds like a major argument in favor of offline games. Sounds to me that the simple solution is just stop licensing things wi…

For some people that's true, But I've played with people that for example, slightly prefered PES Gameplay but just would refuse to play without a proper Real Madrid Team

In my experience, the more casual the player the more this mattered to them, but it was still a huge market

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

#412

Post by robertlagrant »

Hamuko wrote: post #387
robertlagrant wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't exactly an abuse of power - you can just not buy it. UbiSoft has transformed itself into a terrible, bloated company and it probably die soon, but the better way to do this is to have industry standards similar to PEGI that describe the game's future support, not to hit them with EU-specific regulations.

> you can just not buy it Did Ubisoft clearly advertise the fact that the game would stop functioning entirely in the future when it was selling it?

Hence:

> the better way to do this is to have industry standards similar to PEGI that describe the game's future support, not to hit them with EU-specific regulations.

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

#413

Post by robertlagrant »

m463 wrote: post #385
robertlagrant wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't exactly an abuse of power - you can just not buy it. UbiSoft has transformed itself into a terrible, bloated company and it probably die soon, but the better way to do this is to have industry standards similar to PEGI that describe the game's future support, not to hit them with EU-specific regulations.

Arguments like this are not very powerful. It seems like "abstinence is a birth control method" that said, more occurrences of this situation might make your argument more powerful over time.

> It seems like "abstinence is a birth control method"

Only with very very poor pattern matching. If people don't buy something, there is a 0% chance it will exist. That's better than any birth control method you might recommend.

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

#414

Post by justinrubek »

lofaszvanitt wrote: post #401
calibas wrote: post #137

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.

I detest this line of thinking. There are plenty of games that are playable for this length of time. I've played hundreds of hours of Factorio, and I am not even close to exhausting the experience. Terraria was a fine example, too.

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

#415

Post by wkat4242 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #343
PaulKeeble wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game that kicked this particular petition off was The Crew, a game that you could happily play single player which Ubisoft made always online purely for DRM reasons its a prime example of the abuse of power that legislators should be doing something ab0out.

This isn't exactly an abuse of power - you can just not buy it. UbiSoft has transformed itself into a terrible, bloated company and it probably die soon, but the better way to do this is to have industry standards similar to PEGI that describe the game's future support, not to hit them with EU-specific regulations.

> This isn't exactly an abuse of power - you can just not buy it.

This is the EU. We don't believe the market fixes everything. As an EU citizen I really applaud the restrictions on bad business practices of tech companies. A lot of those are US-based but they'll have to play by our rules if they want to operate here.

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

#416

Post by wkat4242 »

pjerem wrote: post #386
m463 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguments like this are not very powerful. It seems like "abstinence is a birth control method" that said, more occurrences of this situation might make your argument more powerful over time.

That’s the American/capitalist thinking : the market should sort itself out against bad actors.

Yeah and it doesn't work because the market isn't really free. Becoming a AAA game publisher requires so much money that has so many strings attached that there is no concept of a real free market.

Personally I don't believe a real free market can exist anyway. There always has to be a balance between socialism and capitalism.

All the big publishers are bound by these strings such as the wish for more recurring revenue. Hence the microtransactions and online models. You can't really avoid those.

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

#417

Post by s1gsegv »

acureau wrote: post #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…

I believe if you have a financial incentive not to release source / binaries then that’s a good financial incentive to keep the servers up. If such a mandate doesn’t result in actually releasing anything but instead properly incentivizes the right behavior, I’d still say the movement had won.

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

#418

Post by Tostino »

chickenzzzzu wrote: post #293
_aavaa_ wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sue people into oblivion if they want to reverse engineer and create their own servers.

That is a perfectly rational suggestion. It is repulsive that large companies such as my employer do this.

Keep in mind that is one of the things that this movement is asking for. Doesn't seem unreasonable at all IMO.

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

#419

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

eska wrote: post #5
anothernewdude wrote: post #2

Oh no! Not developer choice! This is the weakest argument I've ever heard. Compare: "Stop burning coal? That curtails factory owner choice!" etc. etc. I'm sure the people behind the movement would love to point out that, yes, that is the entire point.

They claim to protect from illegal content and unsafe communities, but those sound like desperate grasps at straws that are easily disproven. They also misrepresent the basic demands of the petition, as online only games are still allowed.

> illegal content and unsafe communities

Those are two arguments which will win over europeans and euro politicians.

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

#420

Post by Ukv »

Mindwipe wrote: post #407
Ukv wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Issue is with A->B->C due to business B being unable to legally fulfill the terms that'd require them to go around consumer C's homes destroying the chair they have bought (even if such destruction is hidden in some fine-print, given decent consumer protection laws). Some business B can still agree to terms impacting themselves (and as a business, typically have greater capacity to review/negotiate contracts), like destroying their unsold stock.

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

I think generally it's a large enough market (especially if this eventually expands beyond games to all purchased software, which I hope to see) that existing suppliers would adapt to either allow their component to be easily severed/mocked, or accept some probably-long-outdated version of their component being included in end-of-life releases (as it would for client-side components), else an alternative would emerge to fill that void.

Post reply on HN