Good news! You’re allowed to skip them and instead play the hundreds to thousands of older games you’d surely love, but that slipped under your radar at the time. Plenty to hold us over until publishers and studios learn their lesson.
There will always be passionate developers eager to put down the work and make good games. There will be a lot of shit they will try to shovel down our throats, but it’s just as easy to ignore it.
I think it will go the way of the NFT. People who don’t understand tech will hype it beyond belief and then the actual developers will go “this is useless” and not use it.
Well, maybe not exactly like NFTs because NFTs were actually useless while AI looks like it might have some actual niche use.
honestly for most people i feel like AI has already a solidified use, “the magic thing that answers all your questions and generates pretty pictures*”
compare that to NFTs which had strictly no use for the average person. i think what we’re seeing with AI is quite different
will the hype maintain itself when the AI bubble bursts, the VC money dries up, free options get removed and paid options significantly ramp up in price? that remains to be seen
*(the fact that the answers and pictures are often garbage is irrelevant. as long as they’re good enough often enough, it has value to many people)
Once the VC funding is gone and AI companies need to become profitable, I don’t see myself as an individual paying for some LLM, at best I’d try to setup a free LLM like deep seek on local hardware, but maybe corporations might pay for AI access for their employees if they think it provides some benefits, even if that’s not really true in the long run
Wild. Sounds like Subnautica 2 dodged a bullet. Hope they sue the literal pants off them and then build the spiritual-Subnautica-2 we all always wanted with the damages awarded and the Early Access money that they know we’re going to give them the moment they announce it.
And RIP Inzoi, we barely knew you before you got infested with AI bullshit and it sounds like that’s only going to accelerate to hyperspeed now.
Inzoi was dead on arrival in terms of quality already. It’s so half baked and barebones the AI crap only served as the moldy cherry on top. Some players have pointed out it was obviously a K-Pop idol simulator before they marketed it as a Sims game. There are still a number of interactions in that AI slop for an excuse of a game that only make sense in this context. Oh well, luckily we live in the golden age of Indie games and don‘t have to put up with this.
Ehh, I wasn’t worried about that until the AI stuff happened. Even a K-Pop idol simulator would’ve been an interesting start. Filling in the content to a level that creates compelling stories and gameplay takes time. It takes years of expansions for Sims games to start getting decent levels of content and stop feeling soulless and shiny and bland compared to the previous game (arguably Sims 4 hasn’t even gotten there yet but that’s more of a Sims 4 problem).
Once Inzoi started trying to fill in the content with AI they thought they could rely on that to shortcut their way to success but I knew it wasn’t going to work. It needs the human touch, it’s gotta be quirky and have its own individual character. K-Pop idol might’ve been exactly what it needed to stand out if they had leaned on that instead of trying to fill in the gaps in content with bland and soulless AI, which is exactly what life sim games DON’T ever need more of.
I don‘t think a K-Pop simulator would‘ve sold very well. Especially not in the west because a lot of it seemingly revolved around romantic relationships and keeping them secret at all cost. Even as little as being seen with the opposite sex in public is career suicide for an idol. That seems like a tough pitch for a game tbh.
I’m not going to pretend I can judge its potential for commercial success, I’m just saying I think that hypothetical K-pop idol game would’ve been a more interesting game than Inzoi is currently or seems likely to ever be in the future I see for it now. That said, I’m not dying on this particular hill and I don’t have any particularly strong opinions about it so if you think I’m wrong about that you’re totally entitled to that point of view and I’m not going to try to defend my beliefs any further, I think I’ve said all I could possibly have to say about Inzoi at this point. Where the game goes from here is something which reality will eventually tell us, but I’m not optimistic about it.
I can see your point, though I belief it would probably be as superficial and soulless as an idol game as it is now. But I completely agree it‘s not a hill worth dying on. Inzoi in it‘s current form is a bit of a disaster and it will probably stay that way.
Bruh, I still haven’t bought the first game because I don’t wanna give money to Microsoft… now I won’t buy the sequel because I don’t wanna give money to Krafton. Madness.
Marcin Paczynski told The Game Business he could “write a book”
Please do
He didn’t even know that he owned the rights because this was just a package with his inheritance … we have a lot of stories like that.
Wow, no wonder the dude wasn’t aware. “Oh, just a box with papers. Meh”
stories like developers whose physical documentation of IP ownership was torched in a fire
It’s always interesting to know which games’ rights might seem “completely lost”, just so we can 🏴☠️ in peace. Say, wasn’t this strategy something GOG did originally? Just sell and see if the current rights-holder shows up?
That’s Microsoft now. And they’ve never seemed gung ho about GOG (I can’t think of any MS game that GOG listed while MS had control over it). Considering their “Dreamlist” thing and the status of Freelancer on it, I’m sure GOG has been lobbying hard with Microsoft to work with them, though.
Oh shit it is, and is owned by a Microsoft subsidiary that owns all sorts of games on GOG. Elder scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Quake, Dishonored, and more. GOG would be screwed if they pissed them off enough to get all those series taken off!
The upshot is that since nobody knows whether they own it or not there is nobody bothering to actively enforce copyright, so you can just download the games for free if you want on NOLFrevival.
Both NOLF 1&2 and Contract JACK are available on the website above, patched and fixed to work on modern machines.
YMMV but when I tried NOLF 1 for the first time earlier this year I sadly found the gameplay so poorly aged I wasn’t having enough fun to make myself finish it - despite the setting, theme and writing being quite fun.
I might give it another shot at some point though, it was a critic’s darling back in the day and I’d like to be able to say I have played it.
If you make a good effort to identify, locate, and contact copyright holders, but the path runs cold, can you disregard copyright? Maybe by claiming fair use or lack of traceable copyright?
Trademark requires active use. I don’t believe there’s such a thing for copyright. Are there limits other than regular fair use and documented year expiration?
No. You don’t get to just decide you have the right to use someone else’s work just because you coudn’t find them to ask, any more than you get to decide that you can use their car. Them not actively selling their works isn’t the equivalent of leaving the car derilict on public property.
That’s a good question though. What happens if a right’s holder dies and doesn’t transfer the rights to others? Are the rights then public domain or what?
I guess that depends on where you are in the world, but I’d imagine that the rights would be inherited by the closest family member? If not, it would probably go to the public domain.
It may depend on the country and state, but with a lack of heirs, it likely goes to the state like all other possessions. I’m no expert on this, though.
In particular including the mouse. The reason why the age is so long is because Disney keeps lobbying to get it extended. It used to be a much shorter period of time.
Sony (Horizon vs Light of Motiram) and Nintendo (Pokemon vs Palword), man. They really hurt the gaming industries freedom. Now we just need Microsoft (Blizzard) to sue Marvel Rivals for copying Overwatch in some form, then the Triforce is complete.
Tencent's Arena Breakout is very similar to Tarkov. Like, watching it, you'd just think tarkov got a bit of an update. They don't really care about IP unless it's their own.
You not being able to tell the difference in screenshots is not an infringement. These are two different games, that look similar and play similar. Its totally fine to do this. It’s sad that companies and even some players (like you) do not want that. Doing something similar should be okay.
Imagine cars couldn’t look the same, or websites couldn’t look the same or couldn’t be structured the same. Or imagine every music you listen to has to be vastly different from anything else. This stifles creativity and competition. Otherwise no one can improve on existing games.
As long as nothing directly is stolen, like the exact art, program code or whatever copyright is, it’s okay. I want more of the “same”, from more devs, more competition. I want more Pokemon, more Horizon, more Overwatch and I’m not even joking.
An identical sound means its a theft. That’s not the issue “we” or “I” am talking about. The issue with the games getting sued is, because they are similar. There is no audio, graphic or code being identical. It’s more like, if the music sounds similar, then you can sue someone.
Edit: Off course the situation with the “beat” being identical is petty and probably not under copyright anyway. I don’t think you can copyright a “beat”.
“Stifles creativity” when talking about this game is hilarious. Running defence of this game is ridiculous, it’s clearly a total ripoff which is why Sony is challenging them on it. Tencent has the budget to actually take risks and do something creative. This is just pathetic. Lots of games do what you are talking about. This isn’t one of them. It reeks of being designed in a corporate office by committee.
I’m all for game “copies” like this to exist, otherwise we end up in situations like Nintendo suing Palword or worse. And yes, I am talking about stifles creativity. No company should be in a position to sue for a game that looks, plays and feels similar or same. That should not be punishable. Even if they did not add much, it is a different game and should be treated as such.
Or we should start banning Mario Kart clones, fighting games like Street Fighter 2 because Capcom didn’t allow copies to exist in early history of videogames and so on. You are blind to see the problem if you want to ban this Horizon clone. At least it gives us a similar game to explore, without Sony having the full power over this type of game.
Imagine movies couldn’t look or feel the same as other movies before, because it is very similar to it. God i hate this idea of banning and suing similar games, even if they do not add much to it.
There are TONS of awesome RPGs out there to explore. lol you keep talking about creativity but nobody else seems to have that problem other than this team. This game is not creative or interesting, it’s just Horizon at home. Not to mention it hurts the reputation of other Chinese developers at a time when games like Black Myth are starting to blow up and get attention globally.
This one is pretty clear. Tencent is saying that Sony is trying to copyright an entire genre, like sci fi.
In reality it’s more like if Sony made Star wars, and tencent made the star of death with the jidoos with lasersabres. Tencent is just trying to say “how dare you trying to copyright sci fi!”
It’s not copyright, it’s trademark. Sony isn’t claiming they’re the same characters, they’re claiming that the style is so similar that people would mistakenly believe that Light of Motiram is actually a Horizon game, which is why this case is so stupid; it is a blatant ripoff, but ripoffs aren’t illegal, and no one is going to actually mix them up.
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