The article brings up good criticisms, like all the minors getting molested due to the platform being negligent, and manipulative in game spending options. Paying for online content creation work doesn’t seem as bad as that to me though.
Here’s an idea: gameplay sort of like Goblin Cleanup, you have various chores you have to do cleaning and arranging the various levels of the tower at night while the dragon is home, and your work has to pass an inspection. Then during the day you are locked in your room, and have some ability to watch a prospective rescuer attempt the dungeon crawl without your direct input. But you can strategically arrange items, enemy spawns, and Dark Souls style hints to try to tip the scales during the chores phase. So kind of like a tower defense game in reverse where you are trying to lose.
If we’re wishing for things that probably won’t happen, how about a government agency for game preservation? Source code gets submitted before release, approval for sale is conditional on them being able to successfully build and deploy it. Then 20 years later it gets automatically published to the public domain. That way even online only games will end up being preserved.
I disagree about Soma being an isolated setting, there are actually lots of characters, it’s just that they’re all insane cyborgs who mostly happen to have their own personal reasons for attacking you.
I can’t seem to find them, but before the game came out there was a series of live action video shorts made in association with it to help establish the concept and setting, I’d imagine a show being along the lines of those but fleshed out more.
There reaches a point with vaporware projects where it’s like, actually release something or I don’t care anymore, it doesn’t deserve to keep getting press
Even if they tried I don’t think they have the leverage to make that work. What games or publishers are big enough that such a move would go worse for Twitch than it would for them? Most of the time indie games make for better content anyway. Twitch could just ban games that don’t include an unconditional free streaming license in their terms of service and not lose much of any popularity, while the game publishers trying to extort them would absolutely lose popularity.
Each server would likely have to utilize a payment service.
Yeah but that would mean each server has to take custody of funds, have their own individual contractual agreements with game companies, handle refunds, bear all the legal and tax burdens of this, and get people to trust they won’t scam them. It’s just too much of a burden, these are all things that benefit heavily from centralization and economies of scale, due to the legalistic nature of payments. You would end up with one dominant instance and unused federation, if there was even anyone willing to deal with all that stuff to begin with.
I feel like you could solve this stuff pretty well with crypto, having payment go directly to the game devs, and a no refund policy or something to simplify things, but crypto is too hated so that wouldn’t work right now.
I am skeptical that this is the main reason (even though it’s true and is a reason). I think people don’t like the idea of having their games library split across multiple services, and don’t like using/learning software they aren’t familiar with, or that other people aren’t using.