I am between games at the moment. Having finished university until September, I have a wide open summer, and a huge list of games… and am thus suffering from choice overload, not certain what I want to play.
For me the biggest problem with modern games is the obsession with high fidelity graphics. The dev teams that create games without a focus on photo-realism or jaw dropping visuals are often the teams creating the best games in my eyes.
I think this is very much down to personal taste. While I don’t think a great game needs photo-realistic graphics, for me a game’s graphics do factor into my enjoyment of it, so it should at least feel like the devs put some effort into making the game visually appealing. That could be focusing on making the graphics beautiful, or stylised and quirky, or just incredibly cute. But if I’m gonna spend hours looking at something, I want it to look nice.
You get what you pay for. If you download a free game, then of course it’s going to be full of pay-to-win microtransactions. Although there are issues with greed in some larger games run by big companies, the reality is that game devs deserve to earn a living too, and that means at some point a game needs to be paid for.
There are still plenty of good quality mobile games out there, they just don’t tend to be free to download. Back when I had more free time, I actually got good usage out of the Play Pass on Android, which was £5 a month and gave me access to a catalogue of excellent mobile games with no microtransactions at all, the vast majority of which were single-player, offline games. Literally the only reason I’m not still subscribed is I just don’t have time to play mobile games at the moment - the chances of me subscribing again over the summer when I’m not at uni is high.
I thought about this too, but then I checked the end date of the petition. It’s in October, as petitions have to run for 6 months in order to give them enough time to get to the 100,000 signatures. So by the time this petition ends, and then rises to the top of the list of petitions to be debated, we’ll definitely have a new government. 😉
Of course they wouldn’t, and they shouldn’t. Releasing the source code doesn’t absolve them of a responsibility to make sure the game is actually working when they end support. “We fucked over all our players, but here’s the source code so someone else can fix it for nothing” would be a really shitty thing to do and they shouldn’t avoid penalty for fucking over the majority of their players (and the unpaid people who will have to fix it for them).
On the other hand “we patched the game so it’ll continue to work for everyone who bought it” benefits most players, and “we patched the game so it’ll continue to work for everyone who bought it, AND here’s the source code so others can expand/modify it if they feel so inclined” would satisfy everybody. It just shouldn’t be a legal requirement.
Also keep in mind that in the UK system, if a petition reaches its 100,000 signature minimum in order to be considered for debate in parliament, that’s only the beginning of the process. It doesn’t just get put into law exactly as the petitioner words it. It goes through multiple debate stages, where the MPs consider all the options, and then the law gets written - and then it usually gets amended a few times. So I would expect that if this petition did lead to a change in the law, the resulting legislation would have considered multiple options for what “leaving the game in a working state” would look like. A surprisingly large amount of UK legislation on this kind of stuff sort of goes “this is what we want, but companies have freedom to choose how they will implement it”.
“Release the source code” isn’t going to be considered a reasonable thing to ask a government to legislate on. “Make sure the game can still be played after support ends”, which in practice means patching it so it doesn’t require an internet connection to servers that no longer exist and/or allowing players to self-host their own servers, is far more likely to succeed. It’s a reasonable request that someone who has bought something should be able to continue using it for as long as they want, no matter what happens to the company that sold it to them.
It’s a request that stands a decent chance of success if a politician can be made to understand what the problem is, because it is an easy extension of existing consumer rights law. Requiring game studios to hand over their source code to gamers would be considered excessive and unreasonable, and is therefore much more likely to be denied outright.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. For the majority of gamers, the changes proposed would be more than sufficient, so that’s a good reason to push for it even if it isn’t what an open source idealist would want.
A requirement to leave a game in a “working state when support ends” doesn’t mean continuing support (ie, running the server). It means the game should still work when the server is gone, which means either fully offline play, or a means for players to run their own servers. That’s the whole point of this campaign, which is taking place across multiple countries.
Ah, it’s active! I saw this a few weeks ago when the petition had been created but was being reviewed by the petitions team. Been waiting for it to be open for signatures, so thanks for the reminder. I have signed it.
I don’t expect the government to do much about it, though. I’ve signed a number of these petitions over the years and the government response is always very non-committal. They can get more traction when an MP can be inspired to care, so if anyone has a youngish MP who might actually be capable of understanding what the problem is, it could be worth writing a letter to them directly (regardless of what party they’re in - a 35 year old Tory MP isn’t a complete write-off and may be more sympathetic than you’d expect.)
That said… could be the kind of thing the next government could be pushed to act on. We’ll likely have a cash-strapped Labour government that’ll be looking for stuff they can do to make things better for normal people which also don’t cost the government any money, and this is a simple adjustment to consumer rights that would achieve that.
Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. I loved Abzu, and Journey went on my wishlist because so many people had said how similar they were. I’d have probably played it already if I wasn’t ill - I can barely hear anything right now, and that’s not the best time to play a game where the music is a big part of the experience!
I haven’t played it yet, but it was on my wishlist for a while, so when I saw it on sale a few days ago, I snapped it up and immediately installed it. I’m really excited to play it as soon as I have some free hours.
I mean, that’s kind of the point. For the vast majority of games, there’s no real reason why the protagonist has to be a straight white dude, yet 99% of the time, that’s what they are. I like it when devs do something different.
Slime Rancher’s protagonist, Beatrix LeBeau, is definitely not white. It’s not the most story-driven game out there, but I really appreciated how the main character is a PoC woman, with zero fuss about it. She’s just a lady with a ranch on an alien planet, and why shouldn’t she be a PoC woman rather than a white dude?
Their Kickstarter page says they’re a husband and wife team (plus some help from freelancers and AI), so the latter outcome seems more likely than the former. They do intend to distribute the game for free, which… can work to avoid getting sued, but then there’s all the money from the Kickstarter campaign.
I think it’s a really cool project, and it’s definitely the kind of thing I’d be interested in playing, but I would definitely hesitate to invest in the Kickstarer when a lawsuit seems pretty inevitable.
Yeah, it’s definitely more of a horror game if a lot of the setting fills you with primal dread! I’m definitely enjoying it, just… only in small doses.
Playing Subnautica this week. Having the slight problem that I find all the small fish so adorable that I feel bad about cooking and eating them. It’s also worth noting that I have thalassophobia, which is impeding progress a little because underwater caves are scary, deep water is scary, not being able to see the bottom is scary, and not being able to see the surface is scary.