Companies would still be cutting flour with chalk if they had their way. “It’s limiting blah blah blah” that’s the point you corpos, consumer rights are about the consumer not the bottom line
Not to mention that studios like Larian have proven that it’s entirely possible to make a blockbuster game without teams of 400 heads, changing direction and leadership every few years and laying off the people who made the product in the first place. They really seethed at that one, so many salty comments lol.
Larian has six studios and over four hundreds of employees. They are not as big as Ubisoft of course, but they are still very much an AAA game studio.
But they got that big by doing what the previous poster said
So did many of the other big AAA devs, then they changed. You’re not making any point at all. And don’t get me wrong, what Larian has done is amazing, and the response from the rest of the AAA game studios is both hilarious and depressing, but sadly not surprising. Most AAA studios got big by doing good, they wouldn’t have gotten that big otherwise. But then either new people came in an fucked them up or the ones already there got greedy and lost touch with reality, it’s the same with many other things.
Larian has close to 500 employees across studios in seven different countries. They’re definitely the good guys (at least for now), but they are not an example of a small indie studio.
BG3 being DRM-free and playable indefinitely also demonstrates that you can have plenty of success and not break your own product to do so.
Totally agree but the person they’re responding to implied they were some scrappy indie production. Ex33 (there are caveats/asterisks here but still) is a much better example. I think at its peak the whole team was like 40 people with hired hands.
They did not, they said you can be successful without corpo overhead and bullshittery.
Not to mention that studios like Larian have proven that it’s entirely possible to make a blockbuster game without teams of 400 heads, changing direction and leadership every few years and laying off the people who made the product in the first place. They really seethed at that one, so many salty comments lol.
Show me on the doll where that comment said Larian is an indie developer. Saying that they lack corporate interference does not equal claiming that they’re an indie team.
There’s this neat thing between indie devs and AAA corporate studios called AA. Big enough to fund larger projects than indie devs while being small enough to usually still be private companies that aren’t beholden to investors and therefore can take larger risks than the AAA devs are allowed, letting them make the games that they would want to play. CD Projekt RED and FromSoft both fit into this category as well, though all 3 companies are getting big enough to potentially start being considered AAA studios.
History taught us that corpos would literally burn the world for a few more bucks. And by history, I mean right now.
Businesses would bring back slavery if we let them.
They don’t really need to bring it back, it’s always been there, just in other countries
Copyright was invented so artists would be able to sell their art, and more art would be made.
When copyright is protected on a product that’s no longer sold, less art is made.
When a copyright holder stops selling their art, copyright protections should immediately cease, and they should be responsible for copyright obligations - releasing the source code to the public. Use it or lose it!
This is the most level headed approach to IP I’ve seen. If you’re not willing to use the property you forfeit it. It’s a common contact for licensing rights for movies that forces a studio to make a movie or lose rights. That way people can’t squat on a licence to prevent others using it.
Sony has to make a Spiderman movie every few years even though DVDs of the old ones are still being sold, but Ubisoft can just delete games forever and they can never be played again.
A good book on this is: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig
The same thing should apply to private property, especially in cities.
Pretty sure it was so publishers (printing press owners) could have a guaranteed profit. Those two things (publisher and artist profits) were correlated at the time. Not so much anymore. Streaming/subscription mentality is like planned obsolescence for IP.
Anti-murder laws are cuttailing my choice! What if I someday would like to make a choice to murder someone?
Yes! When I read that, I immediately thought “curtailing developer choice is exactly the point.”
Lol. We’re gamers. We know that if we encounter enemies we’re going in the right direction.
Still trying to find the right direction on animal crossing.
Towards the bees!
paying your debts. The game breaks as it cannot speculate anymore on your debt
“… curtail developer choice” - This from a bunch of people for whom the term ‘executive meddling’ was created.
Sounds like they just put together a bunch of meaningful sounding words. I know what they want to say though: "Noooo! But mah freedumbs! NOOOO 😭 "
Well when the choice is anti consumer, too fucking bad.
“curtail developer choice” is such a weak argument because you could equally apply it to literally every piece of regulation ever passed. Of course it curtails choice, that’s almost the dictionary definition of an industry regulation.
Why are publishers speaking for devs about how much choice devs would have? Why not get devs to speak?
Because sometimes publishers like to be the ones cuetailing dev choices
Because most devs are just codemonkeys implementing what they’re told to. This is pure manipulative propaganda from the suits who are already robbing wages from good devs.
This initiative sure would make things more complicated for the game publishers, yes.
Because they’re currently not doing the bare minimum.
If they weren’t so accustomed to not doing the bare minimum, maybe they would have different opinions! Just saying.
Edit: Just signed the petition. Didn’t think this was necessary before because, as soon as I heard of it, Finland was already top of the list percentage wise. But I did sign it, just for the hell yeah of it.
I agree wholeheartedly and I also signed late while being Finnish.
It’s not just for the hell of it!
Invalid votes will be removed when it’s time for the final tally, so the initiative needs a solid buffer to still he over a million after.
There’s been a talk of some people using bots to inflate the numbers in a misguided attempt to help the initiative, so every vote is still very welcome.
Also, I kinda want to see just how high Finland can go above the threshold.
Tell your friends!
I wouldn’t be surprised if the game industry isn’t also using bots to inflate the numbers to make people procrastinating not feel the need to contribute and make the petition look less valid.
Eh, doubtful. The initiative got a shitton of extra coverage as it was nearing/reached the goal. They would have preferred if it went a lot slower.
Major game publishers aren’t known for their good ideas.
Uh, yeah, that’s the point of all regulations. To make you not pick bad things.
Whenever a large games company talks about “developer choice” you know they’re referring to one of a few things:
- Think of the shareholders!
- Think of the rich CEO who adds zero value to the company!
- The people don’t know what they want and therefore we need to tell them exactly what they want and need!
So does not allowing food companies to sprinkle lead and uranium in food. What’s the point?
Yeah sometimes their choices are bad, that is like 1/3 of the whole point of government. To stop businesses from just doing whatever nonsense they want.
Imo, that should be the primary role of the government
I think providing human rights to it’s citizens is definitely more important, not sure if it is necessarily the primary one though.
Developer choice, ha-ha, very funny. I am not familiar with the industry and still feel safe to bet most of them (edit: actual software developers making games) just want to get enough money for doing what they can do without too much stress/disgust and also most of them don’t have a desire to see their work die just because some manager decided it is time to make some other games instead
I bet they’re really pissed off with ubisoft right now. They basically started this whole movement by being so egregious with The Crew. Less than a month before they shut the servers down the game was still on sale for the full price that it had launched with.
Granted it was shut down because it was the most mediocre game ever made but that still isn’t an excuse.
Tbh when I read of it, being an open world driving game where you can just drive around a very large area, I kind of wanted it. Not as a game, but simply for driving around. MarioKart is too happy for that. I just want to get lost in thoughts while driving.
I hear thats what European Truck Simulator 1, 2, and American truck simulator are excellent for. Driving around on long roads with meditative scenery.
Gran Turismo has similar stuff and is just better as a driving sim game.
Forza Horizon is good for that experience
“but black dynamite!.. i sell drugs to the community!”
I think people are overestimating what this petition is going to do. It will likely just end up in a response from the EU listing pros and cons but effectively saying “can’t really do anything about it, sorry!”. It’s still good, even MMOs have server software gaming companies could release if legislation forced them instead of causing fandoms to die. Games are culture. They may also be entertainment, but that’s culture as well. But I wouldn’t hold out hope.
I think forcing MMOs to release software is a bit much.
Opted for large scaled systems. It’s more than just simple software. There is a ton of infrastructure and proprietary solutioning that goes into it. That’s likely used for other games as well.
It may not even be possible to release the software because it is not just software and the resources to prepare it for releasing may not be available.
However, if a game company shut down their servers, they should not be allowed to prevent other people from try to reverse engineer and make their own servers.
Single player and local games 100% though should not be allowed to be killed.
Opted for large scaled systems. It’s more than just simple software. There is a ton of infrastructure and proprietary solutioning that goes into it. That’s likely used for other games as well.
Doesn’t mean it can’t be released, just that it might be difficult to reproduce. It would still be much, much easier to reverse engineer that than to reverse engineer everything from the client and network communication captures.
It may not even be possible to release the software because it is not just software and the resources to prepare it for releasing may not be available.
In other words, so you don’t know, and vague assumptions on a closed box because closed boxes allow you to make them.
Most MMOs usually have multiple instances running, each which need to be maintained separately. That means they have usually gone through the process of encapsulating the server functionality in a way that can be reproduced and recreated into new instances. They have to be maintained at the same time, so they need to be relatively standard. At one point those supposedly absent resources to duplicate the instance of a server have likely existed, and just need to be packaged for public release. Proprietary portions can simply be excluded - an incomplete release is preferable to an absent one. Can’t release databases, they can release schemas, etc. Incomplete > absent.
You largely seem to be giving MMO companies the excuse that if their server solution could theoretically be proprietary and convoluted enough, even if it really isn’t, that they not be subject to the Stop Killing Games initiative. MMOs, unlike single player games, have a far more notable sociable and persistence factor to them, a bigger cultural footprint within those communities, that makes the Stop Killing Games Initiative particularly applicable to them. There’s one simply way not to be subject to its demands - don’t kill the games.
