Nintendo doesn’t report digital sales of their games… so RDR2 has sold more than Mario kart 8 physical sales. The impressive part is that it’s still likely so far behind Mario kart 8’s total sales count.
I am a bit surprised of the bad reporting in this article to not realize that distinction
I think there is an implication that if you buy a game which is online by nature (e.g. an MMO) that the servers can and will shut down eventually. My cupboard is filled with defunct MMOs. And people do not “own” any commercial software per se, they run it under licence.
So I don’t see that Ubisoft has any legal obligation here. But as a good will gesture they really should put the server code in escrow, or open source chunks of it so that games can continue to enjoy life after the company itself has no economic incentive to continue running it.
I really hope that something gets done about games not being playable anymore. This is really important for the sake of our hobby and clearly not acceptable.
I could understand how multiplayer games would be harder to maintain 20 years after their release, but there is no excuse for solo games.
Wouldn’t be surprised if stop servicing/selling a game came with a tax write-off (small due to deprecation). If that were the case, I strongly believe they should, at least, release the server and remove all DRM. Let the community make it work again.
Who preserves historical artwork? Who makes sure it is available for all to enjoy?
I think governments and nonprofits (like museums) need to consider that archival of an interactive artwork means allowing it to continue being accessible and interactive. That’d be the real preservation.
Laws that say if you create something like this and it reaches some metric, then you are required to turn over all resources regarding it to open source public consumption once you are done actively maintaining it.
Art restoration is actually sort of similar to cracking games. (A difference being those games are still protected by copyright so it’s technically illegal.)
Going by US laws (life + 70 years), all of Picasso’s art is all still copyright protected in the US until 2043, so it’s even less of a difference than you may realize.
I don’t know where the line is because with art restoration you’re actually modifying a physical object. I guess a better comparison would be modifying an arcade cabinet or something.
It’s not the most robust analogy, but I actually really like your comparison to painting restoration; to do it well, one must understand the techniques and materials used in the original (even stuff below the visible surface).
Not a lawyer, but I think the original work is still copyrighted, and that restoration wouldn’t (or certainly shouldn’t) constitute a new artwork. Though now I’m wondering about that terrible Jesus painting restoration from a few years back — it’s certainly different from the original, and whilst it might not seem reasonable to call it a new piece of “art”, it’s certainly inspired a great many people(to make memes)
Whats funny is that most 20 year old multiplayer games today (at least on PC) are still perfectly playable because the server tech was given to the community, at launch. Battlefield 2 hasn’t been available for purchase anywhere officially in well over a decade, there’s still a dedicated, albiet small community.
I understand that with large, persistent worlds, it’s hard to release that server tech, but at least some form of it should be published. Ie, a smaller variant that maybe just lets a couple people join up as a co-op party, rather than dozens of people running around a large map at random, like in The Crew.
Oh cry me a river. These hacks don’t deserve the pity they’re clearly trying to win because they have already proven they don’t know how to make a technologically sound game. Every single one of their games has suffered from save-breaking glitches, and yeah I might be one of the unlucky ones to have experienced at least one in all of their games but I can count the amount of developers that have given me a similar experience on one fist (yes, I mean “fist”, not hand).
I have an up-to-date system, more than meet the requirements for this flaming turd of a game and even among the insane amount of loading screens, there are still frequent hang-ups from the game needing to load while walking through a plaza while the game is running on my SSD. That’s simply not good enough. The last time I experienced such behaviour in a game was when I was playing on a potato over a decade ago or playing online with abysmal internet.
Critics don’t have to be developers to be able to spot in what ways a game is bad and neither does the general public. This is very different from “I don’t like this so it’s bad.”. This is a case of “It runs like ass, the writing is boring and the traversal of their mostly-empty crafted universe is little more than a lag-hung menu with a stupid amount of layers to access what you’re actually looking for and a whole ton of loading screens and thus it is bad.”. They haven’t crafted some grand open universe like they advertised, they made a bunch of levels, added a slow fast travel system and a standard fast travel system and called it quits. They’re now finally being called out as the bunch of half-asses they really are and they have more than earned it.
“We were riding the limits of what was possible” is a common excuse given. Then maybe don’t bite off more than you can chew. “Overcome technology itself”. A bad craftsman blames his tools. Maybe stop using an engine that isn’t fit for purpose. The “Creation” engine - or as we might as well call it, Gamebryo - has long been cited as the cause of many problems and barely workable. Take time to retrain your developers to a user-friendly engine and you’ll quickly make up the lost time in efficiency but they insist on holding on to that dinosaur of an engine.
As a member of the general public, I can’t say I know how to make a game, let alone a good one but given the constant stutters, mostly empty world, boring writing, frequent instances of forcing grind to pad play time and ever-increasing tedium in their gameplay loop, I have to assume that Bugthesda doesn’t either. The fact they saw to set team members on reviews instead of fixing all the problems with their games, I have to say their priorities aren’t in the right place and the ones who are “disconnected” are Bethesda who seem to be under the delusion that they’ll get nothing but praise just for releasing a game, no matter the state it’s in.
Early Access works when you have a clear and concise roadmap in where you want a game to go.
It becomes a grifting operation when you have a game that has no direction. 7 Days to Die comes to mind. That game spent so many years in early access, I don't think it even left alpha stages. The developers basically went "yeaaaaaahhhh it's been a while, we got their money, so we're gonna release it". I truly don't think the developers really knew what to do with that game because every update they made, they'd take away something that was a good idea, next update, re-tool it, next update, fuck with something else.
While 7 days was tumultous at best, they’ve reached a pretty good point by now.
I do agree with you though, that having a proper direction and being clear about that direction to your fanbase makes for a much better early access period.
Like The Culling which completely ruined their own game because the devs thought they should move in one direction, but their fans and players thought the plan was completely different, having bought the game with a completely different direction in mind.
In the end though, having played quite a few good early access games, releasing a game in early access by Larian is fucking cheap. They have plenty money to make a full release without the early access injection. I see no reason why a succesfull studio like them would need it. Early access is fine for smaller devs. For some it could mean the difference between a hobby project and a full time job.
They‘ve been so successful with singleplayer stuff but would somehow rather burn billions failing live services than sticking with them. They could‘ve put that money into several offline experiences and made at least SOME money but yeah, rather lose MOUNTAINS of money, I guess.
The AAA label can be misleading. I’ve been playing Dying Light: The Beast, which is technically a AAA game, but it has an indie jankiness to it that all open world Techland games have which is part of its charm.
People who swear off AAA games seem to think that they’re all COD, and they’re missing out on the good ones.
FromSoftware is a AAA studio. And there are plenty of AAA studios that resist the typical enshittification common to big budget studios. Now that I’m thinking about it, a lot of the “good” triple A studios that come to mind are based in Europe or Japan. USA style capitalism is the problem, not AAA studios themselves.
We have capitalism here in Europe too, and don’t get me started about the work culture in Japan.
I think there’s something else in the US. It’s a lack of cultural diversity. Yes, the country is a mixing pot of cultures, technically speaking - but it’s also kinda not. US mainstream media (I don’t mean news, I mean games, movies, etc) in general is quite homogenized. It’s also a huge export, so of course people in other countries get influenced by a lot of it too, but we have a lot of our own culture, which doesn’t much influence the US, but influences us.
I blame the death of mid-budget movies for the death of American media diversity. Which of course is largely due to Netflix et al. So capitalism is still the root cause, but it’s also the extreme cultural dominance of the US. Whereas here in Europe most movies and TV shows get made with the expectation that they’ll be watched by people of the country where it’s made, so it can afford to be jankier, American media has the expectation of being consumed around the world - so it’s a bit more generic and polished.
There’s also the factor of the death or at least severe weakening of regional cultures, think your old Californian desert, Appalachian, or Old Boston cultures. A lot of these were weakened or even wiped out by the Great depression, Dust Bowl, and post war migrations, meaning that even the stronger of these more regional cultures can barely flex even in their own areas.
While it’s obviously misguided there is a reason rural folks are so conservative, the source isn’t necessarily political it’s because they recognize that their culture is weakening to the mainstream Pan American culture but assume it’s political since they don’t really have the language to figure out otherwise.
It’s weird to me that game devs don’t experiment with alternative organizational structures more often, kind of like Motion Twin; or how they’re only just beginning to unionize in some places. The “capital” in game development is a little bit computer hardware, but otherwise the vast majority of value in a game design studio is the human beings and their talent and skills.
I cannot think of any other industry where the workers are more essential, and management more superfluous and replaceable.
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