OK, then why fucking make them? Aren’t games supposed to be fun?
This whole genre really bugs me, and I’m someone who LOVES space games. The best game in the genre IMO is elite dangerous, because their ship to ship combat is so damn fun to play that I can hop in for a bit and have a blast without having to engage with the other systems that are often painfully boring.
The problem here is that people what the feeling of being explorers and finding new things, but video games inherently can’t provide that. There aren’t computers strong enough to produce thousands or millions of planets that all have genuinely interesting features on them that are worth exploring for. “Exploration” in current space Sims is basically “stick your name on something someone else hasn’t already stuck their name on, maybe grab some resources from it, and leave.” That gets dull very fast.
Developers COULD choose instead to make a couple of good, big planets that are interesting and full of actually good content. They could give you a reason to explore beyond “look other planets cool.”
If you made 1000 planets and only 10 of them are at all interesting, and your game is centered on exploring other planets and not really focussed on much else, you’ve made a boring game.
Yeah this is a definition of “theft” that doesn’t really work at all with the commonly used one.
Like, if you download a torrent, it was uploaded by someone else, willingly. If they bought a DVD and handed it to a friend, that friend wouldn’t be stealing the DVD. But now, if they upload the file to the internet for other people to watch, this class is calling that theft.
Its the kind of “theft” that leaves no victims. The alleged “victim” isn’t the person from whom the content was downloaded, no, it’s the third party who originally sold that person the product in the first place.
The whole concept isn’t logically consistent, but the corporations wrote the laws and get to decide how they are enforced and what they mean so it doesn’t matter that the law makes no sense and is punishing people for “crimes” that are, at their very core, victimless.
Movies and books exist and they are one time purchases that you use once and stop interacting with. Why do games get special excuses for being extremely exploitative and shitty to their players? I don’t have to pay for a book chapter by chapter or pay extra for a character to appear, but authors and filmmakers still make TONS of money.
The game industry makes lots of excuses for it’s shitty behavior but none of them hold water.