I can’t go that far. I can’t be upset at people for looking at deals and NOT thinking “but what about the companies?” Granted this hits differently as a field I love, but still, I get it.
Some scenes in MW2 stick out so strongly to me still. ::: spoiler Spoilers for a very old game. The march through the neighborhood, the White House, the knife throw at the end … ::: It’s funny to me that the controversial moment won’t be a big deal at all in a movie, as there’s no player control.
/Edit: COD’s bread and butter really is big budget action movie moments.
You got lots of downvotes, but assuming you’re earnest, the game has a reputation of being rife with cheaters. Here’s a popular video that showed how bad it was a couple of years ago: youtu.be/p5LfGcDB7Ek
There’s also lots of allegations about the developers not being great people, which you can read in this thread. I have no idea about that, though. But complaints are not rare.
This is why I loved the DMZ mode of Warzone when it launched. The stronger bots were mother fuckers but there were missions to finish, so the players (all fresh from Warzone and new to having prox chat,) were mostly carefully happy to talk and often helped each other. It got pretty sweaty over the next two seasons though. After that it was kill on sight.
A few weeks ago, soon after they spun it off to its own download apart from Warzone, someone cracked it for solo play. I’d love someone figuring out a way to let people play private servers for that.
I agree with you, but there are people who enjoy moving over others’ sandcastles more than making their own. Some people enjoy ruining things for others. Others believe everyone else is cheating too, and their cheating is evening the playing field. The latter is a very common defense when asked directly.
Several content creators lose to cheaters and manage to interview the blatant cheaters who admit to it. There are also relatively popular YouTubers whose entire channels are accusing pro players and streamers of cheating in COD and games. Lots of people assume good players are all cheating, and that it’s approved (if not facilitated) by the developers. (Which is a necessary belief for them, considering these players will also often perform very well on LAN tournaments against other pros.)
I think the general idea is that if I want to spin up a server for my friend group that’s been gaming together for 20 years, we can buy the game and do just that. That’s opposed to the money I spent on the game being useless when they decide they want to stop paying for servers.
And a screen where it plays YouTubers comparing it to every version of Madden for a decade-plus after. Eventually finding Madden to look better, but always finding Madden lacking in features and presentation.
But I think it’s worth communicating that we all understand new government regulation is likely going to be a pain in the ass. We just think it’s worth the pain/money.
Game Pass obviously and absolutely affects game sales. At the same time this conversation only happens because we’re comparing “the industry with Game Pass” to “games at face value”. That second one only lasted 10-15-ish years. Before that, there was “the industry with game rentals”. Blockbuster was also absolutely eating up some sales.
But game rentals were often seen as a “try before you buy” case to many, as you may want to play a game more than 3-5 days. So maybe the answer is don’t lease your game to Game Pass for a year at a time. Just offer it for a month or three. (Also make an easy way for the non-technical to export/import saves.) This also would let Microsoft make more deals for more games in their rotation. Seems like a shorter time helps everyone out.
I think your response is coming off as kinda “oh just do it different”. But that still means an entire industry of people are going to have to change how they make things. (And still spend time and money evaluating things at the end, just to be sure nothing slipped through.) I’m in favor of this at least being looked at and honest conversations happening, (which will not happen without this.) But there will certainly be an adjustment period where people on ground level learn and develop new “best practices”. And invariably someone will screw up. The companies are obviously only worried about money. They’ll get over it, is my opinion. But I think it’s worth communicating that we all understand new government regulation is likely going to be a pain in the ass. We just think it’s worth the pain/money. And that’s open sourcing or just creating a new mode for offline play in everything.