Anyone who gives steam $100 can upload as many “games” any “game” they want. There is no quality control.
It’s a common scam to throw some free assets together to make “collect coin” and then swap the coin asset out with a stick and call it “collect stick” and then swap out the stick with a brick and call it “collect brick” then upload all of them to Steam and bundle them into a 50 game pack with a sale price of $100 (95% off!) and hope someone buys the collection thinking they’re getting 50 real games at a steep discount.
Here’s an example. It’s a 33 game bundle for 99% off its original price of $8,579! They’re all the same “game” with different free assets made by the same dev who uploaded 167 versions of this “game” to steam on March 28, 2024 and priced each around $200.
It seems like it was a DMCA takedown request. Anyone can submit these to content hosters and the hoster has to follow the process, which typically means removing the content until it can be proven that it isnt violating copyright. The problem isn’t the takedown request, but that it was given to itch.io’s registrar instead of itch.io itself. It’d be like asking to takedown youtube from the web because someone reposted your video on it.
It might not be the engine. Some companies just don’t care much about optimization when they can just tell their players to buy better hardware.
Take GTA5 for example. It had a notoriously long load screen when starting up. Ranging from 2 minutes to 10 minutes depending on the read speeds of your storage drive. A modder ended up finding the problem. The code to load up the items in the game opened and read a file, but there was a bug that caused it to read through the entire file for each item loaded. The file was being read thousand of times. The modder changed one line of code and the loading time was reduced significantly. This was a bug that plagued GTA5 for years, caused by a single line of code, that the company didn’t fix because their fix was to buy better hardware.
The computer was probably cheating too. Creating AI that understands the strategy of resource management is hard so most devs just give the computer a steady stream of resources and faster build times. That way the computer doesn’t need to worry about planning, they can just spam build.
Unfortunately, my friends play it and I’m often roped into playing it with them. My advice: The game is greatly improved if you disable all forms of interaction with other players. Chat is muted by default now, but I’d also recommend muting pings and emotes. No form of interaction is ever positive in that game.
Even then, their matchmaking algorithm seems to be designed to hand an easy win to one team and just switches up which side you’re on enough times that you won’t quit.
Games sold on Steam are not required to use Steam’s DRM. There are lots of DRM free games on Steam. Steam is only required to be installed to purchase/download them but not to run them. After download, the game files can be copied and ran on any computer without any verification.
It’s crazy that they released it. They had early access and preorders and those only attracted something like 1,000 players. This is a game that had a $100 million budget. So few players during the early stages should have told the studio to cancel it while it was still in production. Apparently they thought they’d release it and would just jump from 1,000 players to 100,000 overnight with no changes.
In the “other references” they link to the bulbapedia article for Pokemon box so I figured thats what the whole thing was about, but yeah it does read like accessing data on a server
What is the benefit of forcing developers to provide access to old games that require online functionality indefinitely, instead of just hard limiting them to say 10 years wich is essentially indefinite in terms of non-live service games.
In a choice between “you can play online until 2035” and “you can play online forever”, the answer is pretty obvious. All things being equal, the indefinite option is better. I think the problem is that all things are not equal, and making it a legal requirement that all games with online features come with a guarantee those features work indefinitely is incredibly vague and can lead to situations that outright hurt developers.
If the devs need to provide a server binary for players to host a server, how do they ensure these servers only allow players who have purchased the game to play? If they can’t ensure it, then the law is forcing companies to allow pirate servers to exist
How do they ensure people running these community servers aren’t charging money for people to play? If they can’t ensure it, then the law is allowing people to use a company’s IP to generate money without a licence.
If the original version had an in-game shop where you can unlock things with real life money but the offline version doesn’t have a shop, thus making parts of the game forever unobtainable, did they follow the law? If not, then devs would have to give out paid features for free.
Unless these kinds of details are accounted for, this vague idea is doomed to fail because no government is going to force a company to give up their copyright/IP for free. I know a lot of people have also said “fuck these giant corporations” but this also affects indie developers as well. Copyright protects small creators as much as it does large ones.