Back in 2013 or so, Microsoft launched the Windows Store alongside Windows 8, and was making some noises that sounded a lot like shutting out independent software stores like Steam and requiring everything on Windows to be sold through the Windows Store.
Valve reacted to this by saying “Welp I guess it’s time to start investing in gaming on Linux” and launched Steam Machines, little PCs designed to be connected to a television to bring the Steam experience to the living room couch. They ran a modified version of Debian Linux along with their own tweaked version of Wine that could run some Windows games alongside several (including Valve’s own library) that shipped Linux native versions.
The project itself was a bit of a flop; they relied on other companies to make Steam Machines, like Alienware and such. But a lot of things came from it.
Valve demonstrated they had the wherewithal to take the gaming market with them if Microsoft got too greedy.
Big Picture Mode, Steam Link, and the beginnings of Proton among others came from the Steam Machine project.
The Steam Controller came from this project, which I’ve heard GabeN talk about as a major learning experience they drew on during the design of the Steam Deck, aka why the Steam Deck has perfectly conventional controls.
They spent most of the 20teens adding steady improvements for Linux gaming to the point that we switched from having a list of games that ran on Linux, to a list of games that don’t run on Linux because that became easier to manage. Then they launched the Steam Deck, an unqualified successful Linux gaming platform. Then I came here, and then it was now, and then I don’t know what happened.
Valve tried selling Linux boxes for gaming back in 2013, but noone wanted to sell/make/buy them b/c the library wasn’t there and it’s a hard sell when Windows is already baked into OEM hardware pricing anyways (so it wasn’t any cheaper to buy a pre-made Steam Machine than it was a similar-spec windows box).
Isn’t Android very heavily based on Linux too (even if a lot of it is hidden at the surface level)? I can’t think of anything more mainstream than that.
I’m old enough to remember the Phantom Console bringing PC gaming to the masses too. Safe to say the Steam Deck is quite a lot more successful than that, given the only part they ended up making was a keyboard and mouse you could use from the sofa.
Android is Linux. It’s funny because this is the rare case where Stallman’s pedantry comes in handy. Android is absolutely not GNU/Linux, the OS family known as ‘Linux’, but the kernel is the Linux kernel.
If people don’t see Android as bringing Linux to the masses (which I don’t), then it’s dubious SteamOS would either. If it’s just a container for Steam, it’s not really the same thing as Linux adoption. ChromeOS actually is GNU/Linux, but I doubt many would count that either.
Even so, more consumer products with Linux inside means more improvements that benefit everyone.
It sucks, on one hand I’d prefer a delay so they can release what they’re happy with - but on the other this is a developer that I know and trust to continue working to make things better for a long time. For many other games this would leave a bitter taste, but for this one it’s a bit of a shrug for me.
To give an impression of what it’s been like for me:
I had a quest where I needed Iron. I found a random planet that had it, and picked a spot in the middle of the scan readouts. Arrive, looks like a barren rock - but that’s fine because I only wanted rocks. However, I see something in the distance, and check it out. On the way, I find a wandering trader taking her alien dog for a walk, and sell some stuff weighing me down. I find a cave, where a colonist is hiding out with a respiratory infection - and am able to help them get out as a little mini-quest, though the infection spreads to me.
I come past a little mining installation, where I find a bounty hunter that tells me of a bounty nearby she’s offering to split with me. We do so, fighting a base full of raiders to get to their captain, and I finally decide to leave.
The key here is, I don’t think any of those quests are amazing - they’re likely very dynamically generated. But they’re also not fun to “seek them out” - just to come across them in some other mission, like trying to make an outpost or mining for stuff.
I mean, I can’t even argue against that. Some people find some forms of work fulfilling, and even switch to games because their own jobs don’t actually give them that feeling of fulfillment.
Monster Hunter is a prime example of a game that sets such elongated goals that it’s regarded as a “grind-heavy” game - but its players like the grind. Heck, the entire space simulator genre often involves quite a lot of “Space Truck Simulator” gameplay, where you’re just engineering good ways to ferry cargo around.
Which is not to say that’s what Starfield aims for. From what I’ve played, it’s closer to Sea of Thieves, having adventurous interruptions - where you start a boring, routine mission to bring Sugar from one merchant post to another, but then get ambushed by a skeleton ship, then a giant shark, then find a map to a buried treasure nearby.
Half the reason I play Elite is space trucking. I’m only raising my empire rank to get the largest ship… in order to space truck better. The Fed Corvette I plan to make a combat vessel, but the Cutter will be my space truck.
I found that flow of the game works a little bit better if you just don’t fast travel at all. I played a lot of Elite and it gave me a little bit of Elite vibes when I just walk to my ship, go thru inside it and sit down. Then I take off “manually” using the button and jump to the target system by manually targeting it and press the jump button.
What Bethesda can do better is to just mask the loading with a flight animation, for example when you’re taking off from a planet the loading should be replaced by an animation where you’re going out of the atmosphere. And when you’re jumping between star systems, the loading should be replaced by something similar to Elite when we’re jumping through the witch space.
All in all, my experience with Starfield has been fine. I loved the weird stuff happening when you’re just fucking around. Although the main quest has taken a step back with their sense of urgency, compare it to previous Bethesda games, where there’s a big stake going on that pushes you to at least complete the main quest once. In Starfield there’s no such sense of urgency.
It seems like Bethesda is leaning heavy on their sandbox side, just letting people go around and do stuff.
With optimized settings from the HUB YouTube channel, my FPS never went below 60.
Yeah seems like the writer of the PC Gamer article doesn’t understand what VAT is.
To laymen like you and I, this situation probably seems pretty open and shut. If you make money on something, you pay taxes on it.
Yeah VAT is not a tax on money made. VAT is a tax that is applied to a transaction for goods and service between a business and a consumer. VAT is a tax that the consumer pays. The business only collects it and has the obligation to pay it to the tax services. So even if a business makes zero profit they still need to pay the VAT they collected.
The question here was if RuneScape gold is a product or if it is legal tender. If it was legal tender then you don’t pay VAT on it, similar to when if you trade one currency to another VAT is not applied.
The question here was if RuneScape gold is a product or if it is legal tender. If it was legal tender then you don’t pay VAT on it, similar to when if you trade one currency to another VAT is not applied.
Even if they went that way (good luck with that), doesn’t that mean farming gold regularly and for profit should still be registered as a professional activity? Or at least the result of it declared as revenue?
The real genius behind VAT is that it isn’t just applied to transactions between business and consumer, but to all transactions. The rule is normally very simple, it’s applied to all transactions, with few exceptions. The rate can vary, but those rules are also usually very simple. The trick is: When a business has a transaction with another business, VAT is still applied, but the selling party has to levy the tax and forward it to the government and the purchasing party can ask the government to give back the tax they paid on the transaction.
This may seem a bit convoluted, where the tax goes through the government only to end up back in the business. But this ensures the tax is applied always. Normally a profitable company would sell their products for more than the components they purchased. The difference between these two is the value added. And by getting back less from the purchases as what they have to pay for sales, the tax is only applied to the value added. And for consumers it functions as a sales tax, being applied to all transactions and no way around it.
This system is way harder to mess with than any other form of sales tax. The rules are simple with few exceptions and thus very easy to reinforce. It’s also a more fair system, where each party in the chain pays a part instead of the consumer paying for all of it.
In the end the consumer pays most, but as the taxes are supposed to be used to make their lives better, it seems like a fair deal? Now if you have a government that’s more about filling their own pockets than actually doing what they need to do to improve the lives of the people living there, well then you are going to have a bad day. But that doesn’t happen in civilized countries right?
Yeah EU VAT opened up a whole can of issues. It’s super complicated and annoying, with all sorts of weird exceptions. The exact opposite of what VAT was supposed to be. EU countries should have just gotten their shit together instead of this patch work.
I’ve actually seen that fraud in action. People used to ship around huge amounts of phones and CPUs, because they were high value, but took up very little room. A truck full of pallets of tray CPUs could be worth a huge amount.
I think now most of the holes are patched. But for a while there were special rules surrounding phones and CPUs just because they were often used in the fraud scheme.
Current system is obviously broken, but you don’t believe that artists and creators should have a right to control their intellectual property at all?
And yes, intellectual property is real whether you want it to be or not. And it’s not necessarily about money, but about controlling what can be done with your work.
For example, Bruce Springsteen should 100% be allowed to tell Trump to fuck off and stop using his music at rallys.
What would be the mechanism to do that without IP?
It’s imaginary property. It’s not real and only exists in our heads. Saying someone stole your “intellectual property” is akin to saying they “stole your idea.”
It is about the money, as well. Nobody should be able to own an idea.
Bruce Springsteen will just have to grow up and get over it.
IMO creators should have better protections - the current laws don’t seem to stop AI gobbling up their work. But at the same time this Nintendo thing is obviously bullshit. I’m surprised the court * allowed it. Probably a decision made by a very old Christian man who doesn’t understand what games are and can’t use a smartphone.
Oops decision was made by patent office who really should know better
Yeah it’s clearly broken. But there is a complete lack of nuance in these “get rid of IP and copyright completely (and if you disagree you’re an idiot)” arguments. They’re just supremely unhelpful.
Yep I’m right there with you. Artists of all types should be entitled to the proceeds of their work. Also, if I were creative and something I’d created was plagiarised, I’d be unhappy about that too. Just because a big company abuses a system doesn’t mean it shouldn’t protect individuals.
Why are you people always so fucking rude when you’re shit is challenged in any way?
Look at my other comments in this thread if you care to actually understand my position. I never even suggested that people would stop making music.
I even said that it could maybe work if we weren’t in an ultra capitalist society. But we are, so completely getting rid of the concept of IP is a bad idea.
Intellectual property leads to all kind of unfairness. It should be normalized that artist would be paid for the work done, nor for property ownership.
This adds to some other believes about people shouldn’t be paid just for “property ownership”.
And once the art is done and released is part of human race, that does include terrible human beings, but it also includes absolutely everyone else.
Some other argument for this… For instance, being an artist is one of the jobs with biggest pay disparity, from the poorest of them all to some of the richest. That’s a normal output of basing income on property ownership, things snowball once you have enough property.
I don’t think there’s a way to make private property (physical or intelectual) work in a fair economy. And remember, private property is not the same as personal property, just in case.
I do think the world of art would get much better and more diverse if we got rid of property as a way to measure revenue and put work in the center as a way to measure how much we should pay each artist.
You live in a dream world. Why would I release my music to the public when there are people who will make a living stealing it, putting their name on it, and selling 1000x more than I ever could because they already have name recognition? And those people WILL exist for every form of creative content.
Artists need some sort of mechanism to protect them from exploitation that is inherent to capitalism
In the current world I could torrent your music and you’ll be “losing money” and will end up investing more work in anti-piracy and advertisement than in making good music.
If instead you would be paid for the making of the music regardless of how many copies of a digital file you sold by a better system that’s not based on private property and the means of capitalism, it would mean that you could 100% focus on making music and everyone could enjoy the things you made. You couldn’t care less if I torrent your music in this new world. Hell, music would probably be mainly distributed by torrenting.
Everyone will be happy, except investors and people thriving of this inefficient and unfair system.
If instead you would be paid for the making of the music regardless of how many copies of a digital file you sold by a better system that’s not based on private property
And how would that system decide how much you get paid and where would the money for that payment come from? How do you make sure a carefully crafted piece of music, that brings happiness to millions of people gets paid fairly compared to someone just putting together a song in 5 minutes by pressing random notes on the keyboard?
Any system to evaluate compensation would be better than the actual one, which is a completely mess that does not properly compensate artists for their work.
Currently marketing, frontstore presence and market dominance is far more relevant on a particular artist income than their craft.
Any system that actually would think about what people think about a particular craft, how much time and effort got put into it, how much it was enjoyed, etc, would be better. Currently is just about who can make more sales and get more ad money, the art is secondary and I’m being generous.
What is “fair compensation”, in this case, for you? Does bringing joy to millions of people entitle you to more money or do you see the happiness you shared and subsequent fame as part of your “payment” - what you get out of it?
So is a world without murder. That doesn’t mean that we should defend murderers doesn’t it?
A world where gay people had equal rights surely was an utopia on the year 1800s, look how far have we come. Thanks to people that though that a better word is, indeed, possible.
Why wouldn’t we strive for a better way of doing things? Why defend faulty systems that we know they are bad just because those are the systems currently in place?
Just because we could do better doesn’t magically make tearing all protections down a remotely intelligent idea.
They’re asking for a SPECIFIC idea of what to replace them with… because you dummies will just end up reinventing IP laws without 70 year copyrights… like they were originally…
This is a trains for public transit situation… You’ll whine all day about the status quo, say nothing good exists, want to tear it all down … and then just reinvent the same fucking thing we already have but just need a different mix of…
All the personal attacks were completely out of place. So that person is out of the debate for me.
You were polite so I will answer to you.
First. Pay per access is no-go. Art is publicly release, pay or not pay access for things that are costless to copy is unrestricted. This already happens, piracy exist and cannot made go away. It’s just its legalization.
Second. Once pay per access is abolished. It’s more important to focus in pay for work or pay for release. Focusing more on making the artist a person who is being patronize for doing their art rather than a salesperson.
Once we have this idea of patronizing, instead of private labels we could focus more on cooperative labels, taking out investors and useless middlemen. People could paid for some artist or some label (which will be exclusively conformed by artist) in order for them to keep making their thing. Some labels could be actually public labels, this already exist to some degree when some state pays for art to be made, just expanding it.
Now that we changed the model in a model were people give their money before they get to see the final product we should put some protections in place to avoid scams and then we are golden.
It’s not so complicated really. Many systems already exist. The history is the same as with everything else capitalism and rich capitalists are in a dominant position so they make any change for the better harder.
One of the most popular artists in the world was all over the news last week because their art was destroyed by capitalists. What point where you trying to make?
You fools are asking to remove all protections for artists… How the fuck do you think that’s going to play out?
As long as the world still runs on capitalism, free art will ONLY mean destitute artists. The fact you fools cannot suss that out is straight up pathetic.
Yeah… victory belonging to the person with the widest reach and deepest pockets rather than the originator of the material/idea is one way to ensure that all creatives become paupers. This is one of those many on-paper ideas that, without the upheaval of pretty much every other established human social structure, would be awful in practice.
99+% of art is never sold. The vast majority of artist don’t make money. Who really cares about the extreme minority who use capitalism to control our culture. They don’t get to decide what the rest of the world does purely for their economic interests.
No they don’t need any mechanism. The arts and sciences existed for thousands of years without modern silly interpretations for commercial interests.
So for the artists that created works but did not sell them, you believe that they would be fine with someone else photocopying it and then selling it themselves?
Sorry I’m not a head in the clouds, utopian. I try to base my beliefs in plausible reality.
It’s interesting how other people here seem to have no issue discussing this topic with me. I wonder if they’d call me a “capitalist bootlicker” or if they’ve actually been paying attention to what I said.
People need to be compensated for their work, that may end up being an awful lot and probably in excess of what they need, but that’s how it has to work. Any other system would just disincentivize people from putting in the effort, in fact it would force them not to because they would have to do something else in order to earn enough money to live. The precise opposite of your desired outcome would happen, the rich would produce endless amounts of content just to more money, and all the smaller artists would have to go and get a job in Costco or something.
The only way your idea would work is if we completely change the economic system and got rid of money. Which I’m all in favour of but I suspect is probably outside of the scope of copyright law.
Intellectual property is a societal construct and it is as real as racism is. Which isn’t saying much.
If an artist doesn’t want their music to be heard and possibly replicated, altered, or used in a way they don’t like then it is their responsibility to never release it. Only by hiding it can they keep the world from misusing it.
Your inability to view your own shortcomings will be a hilarious continual failure for you. Congratulations on being one of far too many morons to walk thos earth.
You have no take other than approving the purchase and sale of our culture controlled by corporations.
You say IP is for the little guy, the average federal copyright lawsuit cost a quarter of a million dollars to pursue.
You have no clue about remix culture which was destroyed by profiteers. Corporations control the majority of artist’s commercial music. Many artists don’t own their own work.
Corporations constantly steal IP. AI has shown us that they don’t respect the very laws they created.
The only person living in a dystopia and loving it is you. The abolishment of IP would cause an explosion of science and art like the world hasn’t seen since they created laws to prevent it.
Not the person you responded to, but how would a recording artist earn a living in that model? If their work can get scooped up by a mega corporation and sold for pennies on the dollar due to the massive existing resources, reach, and infrastructure available to the corporation, what protections would there be against that happening?
Artist that want to make money can preform or sell their work like they have always done. IP is about commercial interests like royalties and licensing. This has nothing to do with the actual promotion of arts and science. It is about control.
Most artist don’t do it to make money even. This confusion of expression and commercial interest is the crux of what we are dealing with.
There is no natural protection from someone copying, remixing, or reinventing your work. This is literally how art is made. No one creates in a vacuum and everyone is inspired by someone else.
There are already no protections for the little guy. Corporations borrow and use whatever they want. The IP system is NOT for the average person. It is designed to benefit and enrich an extreme minority and it does this well.
Artist that want to make money can preform or sell their work like they have always done.
Unless someone who’s more famous than you decides to just steal it and put their name on it.
Oh well I guess. Back to the drawing board so it can happen again! Any day now, we’ll be a communist society with no need for money, so I’ll just keep putting out music to be stolen until then!
Doing something to make money and making enough from doing it to keep doing it full-time are two very different things, and I would argue the latter would be more difficult, not less under your proposed system. Yes, corporations do that already because they can throw enough money at the case to wear down the plaintiff into settling. But how much more do you think they would steal if they didn’t even have to do that?
Why do most people lock their doors at night? Do they really think that a piece of metal stuck in a slab of wood would stop any thief who really wants to get in? No, of course not. But the amount of effort and risk required is enough of a deterrent that most thieves won’t bother.
Copyright law is similar in my eyes. Will it stop a huge corporation that is willing to dump huge sums of money into any one case? Not really. But the effort and money involved is enough to deter them in most cases. Remove that they have no incentive not to steal work. Find a catchy song? Get one of the thousands of artists on contract to re-produce it to a T, send it to your millions of online viewers, and rack up 100k views in 12 hours. Congrats, you beat the artist to their 15 minutes of fame and any chance they could get at exposure, their potential earnings are yours now and it hasn’t even been a day. Any future web searches for the song will show you as well, so the original artist will likely be very quickly lost to time, and everyone remembers that one track the Capitol Records conglomerate put out that one time. That’s the kind of stuff I envision happening with literally no safeguards.
Exercising copyright in a court of law is extremely expensive. $250k+ minimum for a federal case. It is not a system designed for the artists you are describing.
In fact, it is just the opposite with corporations going after small artists regularly, not the other way around.
How has copyright been a deterrent to AI? This is a great case example of the system working as it is intended. Benefiting corporations which is what the system is designed to do.
Most major recording artists do not own their works. Where is their protection? The system is once again not designed for the individual.
Copyright was designed to create artificial scarcity. It was created out of the guilds back in England and was designed to censor and control the printing industry NOT protect authors rights.
While I will admit copyright is the most palatable of the Intellectual Properties it is still extremely problematic and we would be better off without it.
Don’t even get me started on patents and trademarks and the abuse these system perpetrate on our society. There is no doubt the elimination of intellectual property would be beneficial to our society at the detriment of the rent-seeking capitalists.
If Trump can sell Springsteen’s music cheaper than Springsteen then that’s just the free market.
Exactly. And why would Springsteen have any incentive to distribute (or ultimately, even record maybe) any of his music in this proposed reality?
Not a fan of Springsteen, was just the first example that came to mind.
I’m just trying to imagine the incalculable amount of great music we would have been deprived of had we been living in a world without IP laws.
They might have written them, but we’d never get to hear it.
If we weren’t in an ultra capitalist society, it could maybe work and that would be wonderful. But we’re not, so just getting rid of IP entirely is just a bad idea.
Artists and creators already don’t control their intellectual property. The megacorporations do, and they have always violated the intellectual property rights of small artists with little to no consequences.
Intellectual property laws are a recent and catastrophic mistake. For the majority of the history of our species, no one could retain sole ownership of art. And it was better. We make the best art when we trade it back & forth and reiterate on it.
We should scrap intellectual property laws, and heavily tax corporate AI use to fund a national artists stipend to provide them a good standard of living.
Intellectual property is a means of production after its released. It requires no further input from the creator, and so they shouldnt have a monopoly over it.
If the internet actually enforced copyright to the letter of the law, it wouldnt exist in its current form. No memes, no game streamers or videogame youtubers, no unlicensed music, no image sharing. Copyright needs to be defended to the best of the holders ability otherwise they lose it. It would necessitate a constant stream of scanning and policing and litigation thatd be so taxing on platforms theyd just shut down. Video game streaming operates in a legal grey zone because the law is flawed.
Theres a reason programming tools are almost all open source. From languages to libraries to software, the alternative is just too inefficient.
Copyright is an old shitty system from the days when books required publishers who had to register an ISBN for everything they published. The modern equivalent would be if every unique copyrightable contribution on the internet first required submitting the media to a government agency to store a hash of it and issue a UUID.
I wouldnt say that IP doesnt exist, but once you share information with someone, they are now also a holder of that IP, just by the nature of reality.
Intellectual property is a means of production after its released. It requires no further input from the creator, and so they shouldnt have a monopoly over it.
If the person who created it cannot profit from it, then nobody should be able to.
I think most artists would agree (unless they’re specifically interested in the concept of freely distributing their work).
There should be a mechanism to reward artists for their work and enable them to keep creating, but without also allowing a system of vampires to control that mechanism and enslave them in a twisted web of dependency and power.
Let’s say you design a revolutionary widget of some kind, but don’t have the means to to produce it at scale. How do you get it to market? You parter with a larger company. For a share of the proceeds, you have them produce the item. Without a patent, when you go to the manufacturer and show them the design, they can just start making it themselves and tell you to beat sand.
Also, patents require competitive companies to alter a product design in order to sell it. If everyone could just copy the same product, there would be further incentive to monopolize the means of production to produce the single product at a larger scale, since the only differentiation between products would be the price. Patents allow competition through limited-term protection of their innovations.
Is the patent system abused by large companies? Absolutely. But removing patents won’t make them.good actors. It’ll just remove any limitations on their theft.
Personally I don’t have an issue with individual intellectual property, it’s the acquisition and trade of it by corporations that I have an issue with. For example, I believe no copyright should last after the creator’s death. Disney is dead, Tolkien is dead, many musicians are dead, let alive creators contribute to their worlds.
Copyright law does run out after a while it’s not immediately upon the holders death but after their death there’s a grace period and then the copyright runs out.
The problem is the likes of Disney get special treatment. Their patents should have run out long before any of us were born and yet they didn’t.
The problem isn’t the system itself, the problem is the abuse of the system.
And don’t get me started on how the US treats copyright internationally. The whole world has been effectively subjugated to incredibly ass-backwards rules without even a say in it. “If it’s accessible via the internet it counts as officially published in the United States”? fuck off.
On the other side of the coin, we have agreements such as the Berne Convention, a 1886 document that still governs a good chunk of international copyright relations. Even the “good” parts of such agreements are terribly inadequate for the Information Age where works can be published and redistributed globally with little effort
I have a real issue here too. Though mine more centers around the purchase of IP to bury it because it would be competition. How many amazing creations that would benefit humanity and make all of our lives more livable are buried in archives at these big corpos?
This is what I would like to see fixed, in the most aggressive way possible. I want a clock on the ownership to bring a product to market based on the purchased patant and if that clock runs out, ownership reverts back to the creator.
They don’t seem to be protecting creators from getting their work subsumed by AI, so they’re clearly not fit for purpose. But I do think there needs to be some protection for artists and creators, it’s just that either the present laws are shit or the courts can be bought.
Patent law is the foundation of which our entire civilisation rest upon. I can agree it can be flawed and/or exploited sometimes.
But only a useful idiot would want patents to not exist at all. It’s the only thing that protects your innovation from being stolen by those with means to outproduce you.
It’s literally there so when you invent a new product, others (wealthy companies) can’t just steal your design and flood the market with cheaper versions due to the fact that they can mass produce it.
Software patents are pretty close to universally bad. Software moves fast and twenty years is ridiculous, when video codecs have grown to be biggest format and then been overtaken by their successors which in turn are overtaken by their own successors before the first codecs lose their patent then you know something is going wrong. Hardware patents have their place as you say, but software moves very quickly and can innovate just fine without the need for patents.
In theory you could make them viable by shortening the life, to just 5 years or something, but at that point the cost of administering them probably outweighs any benefits (if there would actually be any).
Copyright is another matter, I think we probably need that in some form (though the stupid length of copyright at the moment is even stupider for software)
Bullshit! The truth is that to even sell your product in the first place you have to sell it to a big corporation for peanuts so that they can then get rich on your idea because you can’t afford the marketing or production cost to popularize your product on your own. And software patents have even less reason to exist. They’re just pure evil!
Yes you generally do need to involve a business partner that has the means to produce the product in any meaningful capacity.
Or, if we go by what you want. They don’t even have to partner with you. They’ll just start making it themselves and push you out of the market because there’s absolutely nothing that would prevent them to.
No, they have utility as people shouldn’t be able to rip off other teams work as that disincentivizes any product research , innovation or the ability to sustain yourself based on sales of your art.
The only thing idiotic is the notion that these systems need to die rather than be refined.
I agree. The only big problem I’m aware of is the length of validity for patents/copyright (and how large corporations for years were getting the laws changed so their IP could last even longer).
After a decade or two, surely you have profiteered enough or at least had enough time to try profiteering from your idea or works? Time for public domain? 75 years (i think it is for copyright) seems crazy to me.
Me not experto though, but I do think lowering the time you can hold your invention or works hostage from the world would be amazing for the general public and advancement of tech (even though when I say that, it sounds like stealing a baby from a mother).
For patents it is much shorter than copyright. Copyright being roughly the lifespan of the creator makes sense when you think George RR Martin has been writing Game of Thrones for 20 years before it appears on HBO. Under a shorter span you could have people selling fanfiction of works before their creators saw any real profit.
IMO what needs reform is that if the public invests in your research the state shoukd hold a percentage of the revenue from the sale of that good. The USA did this until Reagan.
Gamers who don’t know any programming, or maybe made a little utility for themselves. Looovee to bring out the old “just change one line of code”, “just add this model”, etc. to alter something in a game.
They literally do not understand how complex systems become, specially in online multiplayer games. Riot had issues with their spaghetti code, and people were crawling over eachother to explain how “easy” it would be to just change an ability. Without realizing that it could impact and potentially break half a dozen other abilities.
In the wake of all the layoffs and such I don’t know if any former employees have (as vaguely as possible) discussed the codebase yet. It seems like such an absolute nightmare.
Absolutely, it’s impossible to know how much. But it’s a lot easier to grasp that it’s rarely just “changing a few lines” when it comes to these types of situations.
Specially since many programmers have encountered clients, managers, etc. who think it’s that simple as well.
And even then it’s sometimes impossible because how much can you keep in your head at once. Everybody specializes on these large projects. I may have 30000 ft view of how things operate but getting down into specifics can be hard. I have some intimate knowledge of the learning management system we develop for, which is way less complex than most games, and there are always little gotchas when you make code or architecture changes.
When a dev with game dev experience says something should be easy to fix, it’s under the assumption of a reasonable code base. Most games are built off of common engines and you can sometimes infer how things are likely organized if you track how bugs are introduced, how objects interact, how things are loaded, etc…
When something is a 1 day bugfix under ideal conditions, saying it will take 6+ months is admitting one of:
The codebase is fucked
All resources are going to new features
Something external is slowing it down (palworld lawsuit, company sale, C-suite politics, etc…)
Your current dev team is sub par
Not that any of those is completely undefendable or pure malpractice, but saying it “can’t” be done or blaming complexity is often a cop out.
Can’t be done is usually shorthand for the cost massively outweighs the benefits. No different from remodeling a building. Like coding, literally anything is theoretically possible but sometimes you’d have to redo so much existing work it’s never going to be worth it.
In the real world there is no entirely reasonable code base. There’s always going to be some aspects of it that are kind of shit, because you intended to do X but then had to change to doing Y, and you have not had time or sufficient reason to properly rewrite everything to reflect that.
We tend to underestimate how long things will take, precisely because when we imagine someone doing them we think of the ideal case, where everything is reasonable and goes well. Which is pretty much guaranteed to not be the case whenever you do anything complex.
I agree, real code always has tradeoffs. But there’s a difference between a conceptually simple change taking 3 weeks longer than planned and 6 months. The reality is game code is almost always junk and devs have no incentive to do better.
Getting a feature functional and out for launch day is the priority because you don’t have any cash flow until then. This has been exacerbated with digital distribution encouraging a ship-now-fix-later mentality.
This means game devs don’t generally have experience with large scale, living codebases. Code quality and stability doesn’t bring in any money, customer retention is irrelevant unless you’re making an mmo.
The correlation between code quality and game quality is almost negative. When you’re doing groundbreaking stuff or going for your own artistic vision it’s tough to code well, even more so when you hit a jackpot and have to expand quickly (e.g. League spaghetti, Palworld)
Diablo4 has memory leak issues. As a software engineer myself, I just don’t see any excuse for a game this long in production to have memory leak problems.
There is no doubt that a lot of games are getting rushed without being properly tested.
Tbf memory leaks can be very hard to diagnose and can also be hard to avoid in any software written in a language like C++, which is probably what Diablo 4 is written in.
In large scale online games you have issues ranging from obscure things causing memory leaks based on drivers, hardware combinations, etc. and all the way to basic things getting overlooked. One of my favorite examples being GTA5 online.
They forgot to update a function from early testing, and it was in the game for about a decade before someone else debugged the launch process. And then realized that it was going through the entire comparison file for each item it checked on the local list. So “changing a few lines” ended up reducing initial load times by up to 70% depending on the cpu and storage media.
That’s kind of a funny example because, on a quick skim, nothing he did was exceptionally clever or unusual (other than workarounds for not having source code). R* basically paid him 10k for some basic profiling that they never bothered to do.
Well why didn’t you start 6 months ago. It’s not my problem. I paid full price. If you wanna be left the fuck alone sell games for $15 and take your time no one will bother you. When you start asking $80 a game the price sets expectations. Devs lack of planning is not my problem as a consumer.
Gamer who doesn’t understand how gamedev works gets mad at guy telling them they don’t get how gamedev works, demanding their treats get here, right now anyway after being told it actually takes a bit to make. News at 11.
Yeah, you’re probably right, the video game you personally made is probably better and we’re just lazy. BTW I demand 20 hours of brand-new content to be released next week, and it better be cutting-edge, uniquely interesting and creative, bug-free and $4.99, or else you’re a lazy dev, too.
It’s genuinely funny watching these people learn absolutely nothing when slapped in the face with hard facts.
This person appears to deserve recognition and respect. It is also a macabre PR stunt to defect criticism for layoffs during what’s essentially an industry party of self congratulations.
I honestly expected TGA to be more tone deaf and not address it at all after speeches about the „golden era for gaming“ from previous years. The entire award show is a PR stunt anyway. At least this single award spreads some awarenes and reminds us layoffs aren‘t just a number, but real people.
…wait, actually this has the potential to be amazing! I remember the early days of online gaming, and gamers for the most part were some of the most welcoming and friendly people I’ve ever been around.
Something changed, and ‘gamer’ became a toxic word, and all but niche gaming communities kinda went to shit.
If Elon makes some cringe-ass MMO or something, it will act as a sponge to soak up all the toxic assholes from other gaming communities.
Risk of Rain 2 is developed by just 8 people. It’s a game that I don’t regret buying early access because the early access till 1.0 is the smoothest sailing i’ve ever seen for a game. I have a pretty old pc that’s low spec even back then, the game just run smoothly.
And of course a multibillion company is the one messing thing up.
Yeah I know, still not interested in any battlepasses, never was. I usually quit as soon as any game start their “Season of the…” crap and return to my evergreen Guild Wars 2.
I also got me a decent looking outfit already and the stats fit my playstyle, so I’m pretty much playing the game for fun now with no interest in any additional unlocks besides stratagems and ship upgrades.
Ah I get you. Just so you know, the battlepasses are more like level unlocks than typical battlepasses, but you probably know that. Also, old battlepasses that you didn’t finish or even start will stay in the game permanently, so don’t feel like there’s a rush to finish them.
Premium currency is freely available on missions and it’s not hard to accrue enough to make frequent buys in the money store without spending a cent. The problem becomes the amount of time I spend in game, which doesn’t feel like a problem.
This pushes games further toward kernel level software that has complete control over your computer so it can scan your hardware to make sure you aren’t using a cheating tool like this monitor.
Are you new to Bethesda games or it has just been a while? 🙂
I remember starting Skyrim for the first time and making it as far as the character selection screen (well, after spending a few hours fixing the no-voices bug) at which point I went wtf is this crap and went looking for mods.
The original vanilla Skyrim was pretty terrible. Don’t get me wrong it was playable but it was a very forgettable and unimpressive game. The low quality assets, the bugs, the half-assed talent trees, the uninspired and unfinished quest lines, the dumb AI, the barren ugly towns and landscapes etc. Just think about all the things you have to fix nowadays with mods to play it properly, nevermind adding new stuff.
But it is facts In talking about. Nobody in their right mind will pretend there weren’t bugs, or that the quests or talent trees or crafting or alchemy were well made, or that the AI was good etc.
All you’re saying is that you liked the game in spite of all that — either that or you can’t even remember how bad it was before the mods.
Skyrim’s greatest virtue will always be how moddable it is. But that still doesn’t mean that Bethesda put out a great game in 2011.
Nobody’s said the game was flawless, but I, at least, never experienced any bugs or design issues that detracted from the overall incredible experience.
Nobody in their right mind will pretend there weren’t bugs, or that the quests or talent trees or crafting or alchemy were well made
You’re conflating facts with opinion. I thought the quests and perk trees were, for the most part, very well made.
Someone yesterday said they don’t buy Bethesda games because they’re good at launch, instead they buy them because the modding community is so prolific.
Paying $60-70 for a game that requires teams of unpaid volunteers to make it playable after launch.
Mods exist now and have since day one. They’ve already made the game much better, but you are right they arent great yet cause they dont have the GECK. I do like to have a sort of “vanilla” playthrough before super mods. I didn’t clarify that.
Yeah kinda. I bought it to play the stock game with a few tweaks. But when creation kit comes out I’ll be back. And then again. And again.
People have thousands of hours into skyrim. You think that game has more than 100 hours of content? It’s years of going back and enjoying mods and the community surrounding them.
Yeah Bethesda profits off it. But you’d be surprised how many people pirated the game, eventually just buying the “goty” edition on sale.
Tbf vanilla Skyrim had more than 100 hours of content, just not story driven. Back when it came out I played well over that on PS3 in a single save with no mods. I explored every dragon shrine and collected all the priest masks in that playthrough. I did loot every damm vase though and inventory mgmt was slow. I got crafting up to 100 naturally, etc. Then made new characters eventually. Im sure I spent more than 300 hours over the years before I went to PC and installed mods
Modders generally only make mods for games that they are enthausiastic for. Its not a given that Starfield will have a modding scene on par with Skyrim.
No, not a given you are right. But regardless whether its on par with skyrim I’m interested in what they do the same way I was with fallout 4 despite not thinking that game was particularly good myself.
How did you get around how empty the game is? I played a few hours but it is just so empty. Being in a city just means either quick travelling or walking through 100s of meters without any interesting npc or anything at all. I felt skyrim did it much better.
Most people have talked about how empty things are by talking about the planets. I feel like that part feels too full if anything. They aren’t empty enough to give it character. The same goes for almost every other locations. They’re so full of junk that they’re empty of character.
I am waiting for official mod support to make it into a real game. There are so many awesome mods and I’ve tried a few but I’m too lazy to manually install them. Also I’m so not going to go through the storyline amount 9 times…
Factorio has a mod manager built in. It can browse, download, install mods all right there. It even syncs mods to save files and checks for updates. Factorio mods have better support than most games do. I really wish some other developers would put that kind of effort into mods. Just think of what, say, Minecraft could be if it had that.
Likewise the Paradox launcher has pretty good mod support. I think you have to add mods externally, but you can create profiles and things where one profile could be for The World of Darkness games and another could be for Game of Thrones, or whatever. You can easily swap between them without any trouble.
Somewhere in the vast chasm between “these are the best gameplay element ever conceived” and “this crap cannot be enjoyable with these left in” lies the actual description of their impact for a normal person.
They are perhaps marginally tedious. It bothered one modder enough that he modded them out with a mod that has about 7600 unique downloads. It bothered millions of others so little that they…just played the game anyway.
As I understand it, there’s not currently a PSN restriction on Helldivers 2. Valve themselves blocked it because Sony was making no promises that it would continue to be a legal and playable purchase in outside countries.
I would guess Sony may still have to convince Valve to increase the game’s availability. To sell a product that will remain usable, Valve needs a better commitment/promise than “We’we so sowwy consumews, we pwomise we won’t do it again.” Probably some kind of contract.
To my understanding that’s not valves responsibility (i dont have a source). It wouldnt make sense for valve to be required to make those changes themselves, the publisher would be responsible for making those edits.
I could only imagine all the problems if Valve accidentally restricted/allowed certain regions and got constant sued over it.
You’re browsing Steam. You find “ULTIMATE Inchworm Arena”, a strange but fun-looking online multiplayer arena. You buy it, and download it. The game then says “Welcome to Inchworm Arena! To certify yourself for online play, you must provide One MoistCoin, a cryptocurrency obtainable only in the Republic of Kongo!” None of this was clear from the Steam store page. The developer support response is less than helpful.
Would you continue protesting the developers, or would you blame Valve for presenting this obvious worthless scam game as an offering on Steam? By putting it on their store, Steam asserts some level of responsibility that the game in question is actually playable, and doesn’t contain critical bugs; like failing to start up, or having a user license agreement that its lawyers did not think through.
When this happened for Helldivers, it was Valve that restricted their access because Sony didn’t even know what they were doing on the PC store, and hadn’t thought through that players had no legal avenue to play in some countries. Valve does not want to be put through more cases of user customer support complaining to them, and wants to ensure certain behavior from their game vendors to ensure that doesn’t happen.
It shouldn’t be, but here’s the thing. Valve isn’t distributing games out of the goodness of their own heart. They don’t want to have to process refunds for every person who buys it and realizes they aren’t allowed to play it. That’s just a waste of time and money for them. And Sony hasn’t invested in a launcher and store of their own on PC, so they’ve got no choice but to obey whatever conditions Valve puts on the sale of their games, unless they want to pause until they get a storefront up.
Valve does not limit you in where your game is sold, the publisher of the game has to set this and the publisher for Helldivers 2 is PlayStation Publishing LLC.
Valve absolutely limits the sale of people’s games.
Usually, this would come in the case of “Hey, this game doesn’t work, we’re taking it out of sale everywhere.” But with Helldivers 2 being so popular and high profile, that wouldn’t have been a good look for Valve. Instead, they limited the zone of sale to prevent customer support complaints.
Sony was limiting where you could legally sign up for PSN and thus play the game, not where you could buy it off Steam. That was a conflict of their own mismanagement and inexperience selling on PCs. Had they been smarter, they would have restricted regions to begin with and there might have been less outcry, but poor planning caused Valve’s parental slap.
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