backlog gamepass would be hype. Like, this whole thing is shit and old game should probably cycle into the public domain; if a corp put work into keeping old games playable, how cool would that be?
C Suite / Upper Management doesn’t listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they’re being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.
Oh, no, it isn’t, and also taxis, largely don’t exist anymore, and also public transit (the much cheaper to the ‘consumer’ option) is now 10 to 15 years behind where it should be.
Roughly the same business model there.
You’re trading short term low cost and convenience and broad array of choices for long term higher prices and the broad stagnation/destruction of the entire industry, fucking over all the people who work in said industry.
You definitely have a point… if US was the only country in the world and Uber did not provide a much better service than our local taxis. I mean yeah the local ones are cheaper but considering overall service, fuck no.
For me, one of the major advantages of Game Pass is publishers are absolutely refusing to put local regional pricing nowadays. Games at 60$+ cannot be bought by anyone with middle class salaries. Now with push to 70-80 usd+ for AAA, even AA games getting to 60$ it is impossible to buy in my country.
So why should I get a single game at those prices when I can get few hundred at similar pricing? It’s MSs problem that they are willing to put their games day 1 on GP not mine. I don’t care whether games are getting “devalued” or whatever, I’m simply getting what I paid for.
Also, people do tend to buy games standalone and I really can’t see that going away honestly. I can’t see games ever going subscription only or anything like that.
You make good points, my view is obviously America centric.
As I literally used to work for MSFT, in various parts of their city sized corporate HQ outside of Seattle, and a few ‘smaller’, though still massive by the standards of any non megacorp, ‘satellite’ campuses in other parts of the broader Seattle area.
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I completely agree that refusal to do reasonable location specific pricing is a huge problem, and I’d say that basically stems from MSFT being astoundingly myopic, to the point of the management culture being cult-like.
Perhaps a sort of saving grace for international customers is that uh, the US dollar is currently crashing against basically every other currency?
Or perhaps that is an actual cause of why AAA game prices go up in USD: MSFTs costs are primarily in USD, so they figure out a way to smudge costs over the whole system in a way that trickles up to them in USD, by using their influence to functionally make everything else somewhat subsidize their attempt to grow or maintain market share.
MSFT gaming seems to be transitioning to pretty much abandoning being a ‘console maker’, and moving toward ‘we are an uber publisher’.
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But anyway… I get that from the consumer perspective, yes, it makes sense to go with GamesPass…
The problem is that from a business perspective, what this does is destroy the economics of actually making a game.
It reduces sales, which reduces profit, which means now game publishers force game studios to cut costs, so they fire half their staff or reassign them, which destroys all the undocumented knowledge of the game studio, and then they are replaced with cheaper per hour paid contractors who don’t know that information, which results in sloppier, buggier games that ironically always go overbudget, overschedule, and don’t sell as well.
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Maybe think if it as an infrasctucture style situation, with game devs as the road maintenance crews, and consumers of games as car drivers:
If you skimp on road maintenance, and then also make everyone drive much much more, by making public transit very expensive/shitty, and cars are now all a cheap personal rental service…
… eventually the roads give out, pot holes everywhere, bridges falling apart… and the entire system grinds to a halt rather rapidly, because now, a decade later, there aren’t any more talented road maintenance crews, they all quit from the shit wages and shit working conditions, their specialized vehicles sre in disrepair, and there is also not enough money to hire and train a massive new workforce to fix all the roads.
I know you’re joking but thanks to the Internet, I can confirm you do get the shotgun in the lost valley stage where dinosaurs are found. Now that I read up on it, the funniest part to me is that this meme might have actually chose a shotgun for that reason, especially since apparently you can totally take on a T-Rex with a shotgun.
the first Lara was unapologetically an asshole. she lived in a mansion that most world leaders can’t have in their dreams. it’s not like she was stealing out of necessity. she had a fucking butler and still went out to disturb world heritage sites and steal or destroy everything in them. just for fun.
The funniest thing is that I can guarantee that whatever numbers Deathloop did they would have been much worse without Gamepass. Great game, but not the kind of game that can have mass appeal.
Arkane sucks now because MSFT forced them to make the kind of game they did not have experience in making.
It’s like hiring a plumber to fix your electrical problems, hiring a car mechanic to diagnose your skin condition.
This is the whole thing of large publishers buying out successful dev teams, then mismanaging the fuck out of them, then destroying them, by firing 1/4 of the staff, throwing another 1/4 all around their various other studios, then hiring a bunch of contractors for the remaining dev team to babysit / onboard for 6 months before they know how to do anything useful…
…all for a game that’s either a castrated, mutated version of what the studio is known for, of course with latest trending corpo buzzwords a ‘core features’, or is just something wildly different from the studio’s previous work.
This happens with extreme regularity in the history of the video game industry.
Almost like being rich is more likely to indicate someone is a pompous buffoon that takes credit for other people’s successes and blames other people for their own failures, than it is to indicate they are some kind of Ayn Rand style entrepreneurial ubermensch, mr ‘gonzo- rand 19’.
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I’m not sure how small is small, but Splattercat Gaming is fun. It’s not the place to go for series unfortunately, though I wish he’d get back into them.
But Splat has a lot of interesting life experiences and he’s fun to listen to.
They only trust themselves and it’s kinda hard to install cyberware on yourself unless you already have something like Doc Oc’s tentacle arms installed.
Most likely, if they are forced to allow public servers after they shut down the official ones, they will pull some other bullshit. Like claim the game is still available, but the 300$ cosmetics you bought are not allowed on public servers because they are separate from the game.
They should be compelled to either make those cosmetics available for everyone or have some technical means to prove ownership (e.g. blockchain or cryptographically signed file). You can’t lose stuff you bought just because the publisher shut down the servers.
You can’t lose stuff you bought just because the publisher shut down the servers.
I mean that’s exactly how it works right now. And depending on the exact wording of any laws passed as a result of this petition only the game itself or some or all micro transactions will have to be made available after official support ends.
Public servers will either sell micro transactions themselves to finance servers or make all in game content available to everyone for free. I can see publishers having a problem with that.
Right, I’m explaining how Stop Killing Games would change things if adopted.
Public servers will either sell micro transactions themselves
That can certainly be restricted, since they’re profiting off someone else’s IP. Selling hosting is one thing, reselling assets in the game is another thing entirely and AFAIK would be a violation of copyright’s fair use provisions.
If they’re no longer profiting from a game, surely releasing access to gated content isn’t an issue any more? It’s not like they are losing anything. So I think unlocking cosmetics for everyone would be fine, but it’s up to them. If they want to preserve the restriction, they can find a way that doesn’t reauire ongoing costs, such as the ones I mentioned.
We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.
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. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
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Stop Killing Games is not trying to force companies to provide private servers or anything like that, but leave the game in a playable state after shutting off servers. This can mean:
provide alternatives to any online-only content
make the game P2P if it requires multiplayer (no server needed, each client is a server)
gracefully degrading the client experience when there’s no server
Of course, releasing server code is an option.
The expectation is:
if it’s a subscription game, I get access for whatever period I pay for
if it’s F2P, go nuts and break it whenever you want; there is the issue of I shame purchases, so that depends on how it’s advertised
if it’s a purchased game, it should still work after support ends
That didn’t restrict design decisions, it just places a requirement when the game is discontinued. If companies know this going in, they can plan ahead for their exit, just like we expect for mining companies (they’re expected to fill in holes and make it look nice once they’re done).
I argue Stop Killing Games doesn’t go far enough, and if it’s pissing off the games industry as well, then that means it strikes a good balance.
If server code is released such that people can run private servers after the official servers are shut down, then legally the people running the servers should be the ones liable for illegal activity that happens on them.
I could imagine third-party companies springing up whose entire business model is JUST providing unofficial servers for discontinued games and moderating them. Maybe a subscription service that provides access to servers for several different online service games.
Of course, it would be more likely that it would be just a player who hosts a server for themselves and their friends and doesn’t attempt to be profitable. That would be fine too.
I could imagine third-party companies springing up whose entire business model is JUST providing unofficial servers for discontinued games and moderating them
That kind of already exists, you can buy hosting for Minecraft and other games. AFAIK, moderation isn’t a part of it, but many private groups exist that run public servers and manage their own moderation. It exists already, and that should absolutely be brought up as a bill is being considered.
We have had that exact model for decades. Hosting companies use to and probably still offer rack space for arena shooters. The main company managed the master server, which was just a listing of IP addresses, but there were only ever a few official game servers with defaults loaded.
Minecraft has private servers (at least on Minecraft java) as well as their own server platform “Realms”, also every client is also a server. Though the authentication system is a Microsoft account so that’s likely to still be online well into the future
I understood that from a IP and trademark stand point. It could be hard to retain your copyright or trademark if you are no longer controlling a product
No, copyright isn’t relinquished from any of that (not even any effect on damages if you still require players to have bought the game to use the private servers), and trademarks wouldn’t be affected at all if you simply require that 3rd party servers are marked as unofficial
Exactly, and that also includes online games like Minecraft. Nobody is going to sue Microsoft because of what someone said or did in a private Minecraft server, though they might if it’s a Microsoft hosted one.
Stop Killing Games is not trying to force companies to provide private servers
I don’t think this is what they mean. They say that of they provide the tools for users to deploy the servers, bad things can happen. So I think they understood SKG, they just lie about the consequences for gamers
If that’s their argument, then the counterargument is simple: preserve the game another way. If hosting servers is dangerous, put the server code into the client and allow multiplayer w/ P2P tech, as had been done since the 90s (e.g. StarCraft).
What they seem to be doing is reframing the problem as requiring users to host servers, and arguing the various legal issues related to that. SKG just needs to clarify that there are multiple options here, and since devs know about the law at the start (SKG isn’t retroactive), studios can plan ahead.
It’s just a disingenuous argument trying to reframe the problem into cyber security and IP contexts, while neither has been an issue for other games in the past.
Another part of it is that if they discontinue support, they can’t stop the community from creating their own server software.
There are so many ways to approach this. The point is ensuring consumers retain the right to keep using what they purchased, even if they have to support it themselves.
Sort of. They need to have the tools as well. So I suppose they could release the APIs for their servers before shutting down their servers so community servers can be created, that would probably be sufficient. But they need to do something beyond just saying, “we won’t sue you if you reverse engineer it.”
Yeah… The abstract (sorry, will read article a bit later) is bunch of nonsense to me (in respect to what is written, no offense to you):
online experience commercially viable? The fuck they are talking about? Yeah, I know what is meant, but they would get fucking F in school for expressing thoughts in such a nonsensical way
protections against illegal content would not exist on private servers? Really? Like only your company’s servers can run that? What, you write them in machine code directly? Or is it all done manually? Anyhow, just release source code and it will be up to community to find a way to make it run
To be fair (and I used to like the gamepass. I recently started to change my mind on that) the PC offer for gamepass is better and less expensive than the XBOX
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