Does anyone else find it suspicious there wasn’t any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures?
Nobody here disagrees with any point of the petition. I signed it. Even if gaming companies were rushing to send shills to raid discussions they would have done it months ago and last places they would go astroturff for is this Kazakhstani anti-whaling forum. Especially when their target now is the Eu bureaucracy and MEPs. Where I might say they have not a bad chance of succeeding.
donated to some fund that then went to paying a lobbyist/think tank to work for them
It would be more effective to get a quarter of 1.4 million people organized with united demands and on the streets of Brussels with the actual risk of projecting threat violence on EU bureaucrats, then StopKillingGames or any petition or demand would have a much better chance of passing. At that point you wouldn’t even need collect any names before hand :) All the voting, all the petitions all the representation only exists to act as an filter and push the little people people and their little people idea’s far away from actual power as possible.
I’ll be positively surprised if this passes, but I really really really doubt it. Too much money at stake here just for the sake of having some pro consumer common sense.
It’s just the basic logic of maturing market. They couldn’t really increase the game prices that much more without affecting demands, nor could they improve efficiency of making games (the capital costs and team sizes have only gotten up) so they did the thing they could. Try to turn games from a product that the sell into a service they provide and can therefore lock people into their walled gardens and keep continuously charging fees and subscriptions. Too bad games are more of an art form than a news paper or a some tool maintenance contract is.
Or maybe ya’ll are have been so full of hubris and are now finally getting wiser with age and start to recognize that you were always shit or average at best.
many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
One major argument for consoles is still that there is a single unified platform that gives better bang-for-buck than PC of the same price, and that studios can dev and optimize their games on more easily.
That is not how their business model works. The consoles themselves are sold almost at cost of production or at a loss. The money for Microsoft, Nintendo, Microsoft comes from those exclusives and live service subscriptions. They want to maximize the amount of their hardware in homes and then make the money on selling the thing that actually makes them useful.
They can’t. It’s too sweet of a deal when there is an already existing fanbase ready to give them their money for much less work and risk than building a totally new game.