GOG does this too they will sell you cracked games and the money goes to whoever currently owns the IP, there is almost no point giving money to GOG at that point since they don’t do anything and the IP holder didn’t do anything either. Actually GOG might steal mods and claim they made them like with system shock.
Just a point against the second thread you linked, Gog selling cracked games, according to the thread you linked, allows them to be run without a disc on modern hardware
The crack also means it’s not altering the source code, according to the user’s in that thread
As for the first thread, yeah that’s pretty shitty.
I don’t think this is about removing copy protection to sell it.
It is more about that the crack they are now selling officially has been seen as illegal by the publisher/game developer itself. People have worked on this for no monetary compensation and therefore provided free labour to remove DRM. Now the publisher is banking on this free work, pretty much legitimising the crack. But none of the money actually goes to anyone who cracked the game, since that was still illegal.
If the publisher had just removed DRM themselves and sold those copies, no one would be outraged. But they exploit the work of people they keep condeming for cracking their games.
Well, if someone spray painted the door of my car without my permission, it’s vandalism but still my car. If it later turns out that it was done by Banxie and that “vandalism” is worth millions, I can still sell my car however I like and owe Banxie nothing.
Btw, freeware is a thing. Did those cracks ever get released without the permission to freely distribute? If not, those cracks may be used by the rights holder however they like. That’s not the problem. Releasing broken shit is the problem.
Seriously… a car analogy. Wow. And a pretty bad one at that.
But I will help you fix that analogy for free, since I feel nice today. A crack for DRM isn’t like adding artwork to a car to make it worth more.
If anything this is about a car that has certain defects that make it work less well than it should. E.g. you cannot switch into gear 5. It runs slower than it could. So people go and fix that, for free. Now the automobile maker takes that free fix and sells all new cars with it. Is that ok? There, still a crap analogy but arguably better than yours.
You ask if the cracks are released with permission to freely distribute? Actually no, they are not. Because they are marked illegal by the law. They should not be distributed since thats against the law. But its of course convenient for the publisher to use that work and distribute themselves. They are technically breaking the law themselves since they are applying illegal cracks to their own software. So thats ok then?
So people go and fix that, for free. Now the automobile maker takes that free fix and sells all new cars with it. Is that ok? There, still a crap analogy but arguably better than yours.
OK, cool. Too bad you forgot that in modern jurisdiction buying a game is merely like leasing a car. So yeah, if a workshop fixes the car for free the actual owner of the car can make use of those fixes however he likes.
Maybe target your energy at the actual shitty thing Rockstar does: Selling broken games. The means how they removed Securom is irrelevant. The fact that the games are broken garbage is not.
It’s not GOG that does that. A lot of developers that publish there having lost the source code or the tools and knowledge to build it upload cracked or patched releases themselves. And it’s not a GOG thing either, as for example Sam & Max: Hit the Road is just the cracked DOS game bundled inside a ScummVM runner on both Steam and GOG releases.
This honestly sounds like the perfect distribution model. You get the game, IP holder gets paid, no one is bothered by DRM. If you don’t want to pay because you don’t want to pay, well that’s up to you.
Like I’m kind of confused by the premise of your argument and excuse me if I got it wrong but certainly you’re not saying if you pay, it better have some kind of DRM?
Look if i’m going to buy torrented and cracked files owned by whatever billion dollar company has vacuumed up a 1000 ip’s in a go I at least want to know 0 effort has been put into packaging the game and that all I’m doing is buying a pirated version of the game with other peoples stuff resold without credit or reimbursement. Like cracks and mods they package into these releases.
Well with system shock 2 they just downloaded mods and fixes and added it to the game and then claimed they worked on them. Given that one would think that’s basically all they do.
Had to happen sometime. Sad to see it come, but Charles has had a hell of a run. He will continue to be the template for Mario, Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi for the rest of the characters’ existence.
Very much, in my mind, like any new Looney Tunes voice actors are just trying to sound like Mel Blanc.
It’ll be great to hear Charles’ influence for years to come, even if he’s not doing (or doing less of) the performances anymore.
He basically invented Luigi’s personality on the fly.
Luigi was just green Mario, right until they put Martinet with a live 3D face animation rig at an event and “talk to Luigi!” was one of the options.
He then came up with Luigi as the slightly cowardly, not as confident, but good spirited and kind, companion to Mario. The voice tone, the mannerisms, he just made it all up and Nintendo loved it.
Without that, no Luigi’s Mansion and the green Mario dude would still have no personality.
Nah. Luigi had a personality prior to the 3D era. His modern portrayal is, at bare minimum, inspired by the Super Mario Adventure comics, where he was portrayed as the more cowardly of the two brothers. And that’s not even looking into things like the Super Show, which created Toad’s modern voice or the CYOA novels.
He put a voice to that persona, but he didn’t create it whole cloth.
Martinet himself explains how he made up the “cowardly” trait because at first, when people asked about Luigi, his way of dealing with it was replying that “my brother is too shy! Too scared! He can’t show up”.
This would harm not only us, but fellow game studios of all budgets and sizes. If this goes through, we’d delay content and features our players actually want to port our game elsewhere (as others are also considering). But many developers won’t have the time or means to do the same.
Stop it. Wtf?
HEY GAMERS!
Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they’ll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.
Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That’s right, it’s us and a lot of other developers.
That means Another Crab’s Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.
And that’s before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!
This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren’t rolled back, we’ll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we’ve accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we’d rather not do.
On behalf of the dev community, we’re calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product’s actual users.
It will ask a small fee for every install, on top of the royalties. The issue seems that for small studios this fee is not feasible, and it seems that also pirated games and demos would count
It’s only once they’ve taken in like $200k in revenue btw. Demos don’t count, neither do game pass subscriptions or games bought via humble bundle etc.
It was actually true that multiple installs per user would count multiple times, but Unity rolled back that decision not long after announcing it. However, install bombs will still be possible, I seriously doubt Unity has a fool proof way to accurately identify the same user over multiple installs if the user is reinstalling maliciously to cost the developer money.
And? It would take a trivial amount of effort to spin up VMs and install the game on each. If I immediately tear the VM down after, I’m sure my cost would be covered by free AWS credits.
But also, what entitles them to even a portion of the games proceeds? Adobe doesn’t get a cut for every digital piece you create. Dundermifflin doesn’t get a cut everytime you write a new contract. That’s absolute bullshit and they should get a fine for even thinking they’re allowed to be this big and change the rules like this. That’s a monopoly mindset.
I guess it really depends how it’s done. I don’t think an actual cut of the proceeds is fair either, but stuff like having a low entry point and scaling your tool’s cost a bit according to the project success can be a good idea.
That said after they’d try to pull a stunt like they did I definitely wouldn’t trust them anymore.
Considering at this point, I only really care about F-Zero and Star Fox’s languishing, as far as Nintendo’s catalogue is concerned; I’m just not going to hype. If something’s worth seeing in the direct, I’ll hear about it and watch it after the fact.
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