Appealing to the widest audience possible for the largest gross profits, rather than appealing to specific audiences with a smaller budget, is part of the issue with modern gaming.
You can only throw away hundreds of millions of dollars on Avengers and Suicide Squad so many times before they decide to come up with something people are willing to pay for.
Right. What does AAA even mean? Meta spent billions on their Horizons Metaverse, but countless Indie Metaverses are way higher rated some made by just one person. Clearly AAA does not mean the size of the team or the budget.
Why would I believe anything andreesen Horowitz says about anything, let alone gaming? These people believed that NFTs were the future of gaming. Grifter bellends.
Hmm… That’s a bit of an odd case. I’m not sure how that would fare under this proposal. I would personally be for saving that content, but if they argue the removal of that older content is part of the experience of the game, similar to how MMO’s change things with updates… I dunno, could be tricky.
So what happened was, they sold the base game for $60, then had multiple paid expansions over time.
A few years in, Bungie decided to start “Vaulting” content, literally removing it from the game. This included all of the original story based missions, 1/2 of the planetary destinations, the first two expansions, and all their associated missions, strikes, raids, etc. etc.
Just gone. Not in the game anymore.
The stated reason was that it was too much for new players to download, but then new players came in going “I don’t know where to start. What do I do?” because all the story based progression had been removed.
They have since changed their mind on vaulting MORE content, but at the same time, they haven’t restored anything either.
Ah, if you paid specifically for that content (as like a DLC or something) and it has been removed, I think this initiative might help with that, because that is absolutely destroying access to something you paid for. The main game may still be online and supported, but if they kill support for the expansions you purchased, that’s effectively ‘ending’ support for the DLC/expansion, which is destroying a product you paid for.
I'm impressed at how well thought out this battle plan is. I'm usually pessimistic when it comes to governments taking pro-consumer stances, but then again all it takes is one government siding against game companies to set a precedent. Hopefully this picks up steam and gets to a wider audience. It feels like one of the few things gamers can agree on these days is how much they hate business practices like this.
It's an impressive battle plan. I'm always a little pessimistic when it comes to these things, but at least this effort is casting a wide net. If even one of them succeeds that could impact the entire industry. Hopefully some government body, somewhere chooses to take this seriously.
The problem is IMO much bigger. Every connected and/or IoT device becomes physical waste if the vendor shuts down the backing infrastructure.
Every product (physical or digital) should be considered as a unit with the required technical infrastructure. Companies/producers should only have two choices: keep maintaining the infrastructure or publish everything necessary for individuals and/or a community to take over. This must be ready from the moment such a product enters the market and it must be part of the “will” of the company so if it goes bankrupt, the whole process can be triggered more or less automatically.
I take issue with the requirement being “when it’s no longer supported” for similar reasons. I can foresee an argument where a company advocates for some scenario where they’re going out of business and can’t do it, and some 75-year-old judge who hasn’t played a video game since Tetris lets it slide. Still, this is the shot we have, and we need to take it.
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Aktywne