He was dragged for persistently lying about it, doing everything in his power to shut down discussion of it, and being absurdly hostile on a personal level to the founder of the initiative unprovoked. Not for being against it.
what's the risk? "Oh no we might have to provide the product we sold!" Lmao. That's the right kind of risk to force on sellers in a market. Sellers risk getting penalized for not providing what they have paid for. Great. Fanastic. Sounds healthy for any market and may even increase average customer confidence enough for a surge in sales, one that can't be created by one company alone.
Ross has had a consistent vision for years and i'm not sure where this delusion otherwise is coming from. At this point i'm wondering if people like you are just astroturf bots funded by the ESA.
Assuming people who bring new ideas to the table are bots or part of an evil conspiracy is a great way to irrelevancy. That said, I'm curious if wouldn't mind watching some interviews with him and try to suss out exactly what he thinks companies should do, and what companies should be affected. There's a lot of (and this is what it sounds like to me) "maybe publish an API spec, maybe share the binary, maybe publish full source code, I dunno!"
I’m not sure what you mean. If you shut down a game and a law demands extra work to stand up a F2P server, who pays for that work? That’s the “shutdown bill” I’m talking about.
Yes, the law encourages you to act responsibly from the start.
This is like a chemical plant complaining that they have to pay for cleanup when they shut down because they didn't follow proper procedures to prevent environmental harm while operating.
So an indie dev just trying to make a multiplayer game with no budget and no graceful shutdown plan may be acting irresponsibly?
Is the world really better if those people face additional burden? Does it create a fairer system that helps indies succeed? Does it encourage creativity?
this is absurd and untrue. this is like being told you have to pour a concrete pillar 2 meters to the left of where you were planning so that you're not destroying some vital infrastructure, then bemoaning the loss of the concrete pillar industry.
Stop building games to self destruct. Once you fix your bad practices (which, you should not have been doing to begin with, pay for them once with some retooling and moving forward you don't need to pay more, then get some ethics and you will incur fewer costs like this going forward) there is no ongoing cost here.
I am not arguing its RIGHT to stop supporting games. It's just a sad situation where people frame these things as moral/ethical debates when they have real world costs to players who get less games and game makers who will go out of business and the big business that people want to hurt will be just fine.
I think your analogy is a great one. I had a plan to pour a pillar that wouldn't exist without me somewhere (lets say this is online matchmaking), and you come and tell me I cant do my plan anymore, or if I do, I have to pour a second/different one (self hosted servers or p2p) or give away the pillar I make for free.
Games take money to maintain, if you make a law that forces people to maintain them for longer (or forever), that increases the costs. Higher costs -> less games. Most game makers are not Electronic Arts or Rockstar. Those companies will be 100% fine and will pass any costs onto you.
It just seems crazy that a company should be forced to give a refund to all players or spend 1000s of person-hours implementing outdated multiplayer features becasue only 50 people are playing their game once a month.
I won't enjoy it, and things aren't perfect as they are, but I will think back to this thread when the articles of layoffs, price hikes, ads, dark patterns, and "lack of quality games" become more and more prevalent because this law will have directly influenced it.
> I'm surprised AdaFruit did something wrong here. They frequently blog about their stances on issues and seem to try to take the moral high ground on a lot of issues.
This aspect is not very surprising, it is usually moral high grounders who end up found to be doing something wrong, people like to compensate and try to put down others when they know they are in the wrong.
She tried to run down the officer that was in front of the vehicle, not the one to the side that was holding the door handle. Turns out the bullet hole on the glass is on the front of the windshield, it's not possible if she wasn't accelerating towards the officer that fired. I can see how the video could be misleading though.
It's worth keeping in mind that the "market" for a particular player can actually be incredibly small depending on their interests. In the most extreme example, a player might be a fan specifically of a single IP or series of games. Call of duty is one good example because there really are a lot of people who are like this. Video game IPs are a government granted monopoly on a small scale, and the word monopoly is not there for no reason, there is only one place to get CoD if you are a fan of CoD. Predictably, these companies follow the OA's suggested strategy very closely!
It is a valid concern as to why companies don't do this already. In the face of the legal requirements the initiative is attempting to establish, however, the IP problem would be pretty easily resolved, as companies that sold their server libraries/services with a prohibition on redistribution would either need to change those licenses, or lose customers who want to be able to sell in Europe.
How so? Or, more specifically, what method of action are you predicting will produce those outcomes?
From my observation, smaller studios are vastly more likely than larger ones to already be in compliance with this initiative's requests: It's not the giant, AAA games that are having community servers or peer-to-peer networking. Companies that are doing that already have to change nothing to be in compliance.
Studios that have private, monopolized backends merely need to release their server binaries at the end of life. That's not a significant expense, either (you already have access to file distribution in order to distribute your client in the first place). Assuming that the studio is paying directly for file distribution (not the case for most), and that the server binaries are 100 GB (an obscene over-estimate), and that every single user downloads the server files, you're looking at a couple of cents or so a user. Which again, smaller studios don't pay for file distribution, that's coming out of the platform fees that you're already paying.
The only hard and fast, "this might cost us money" position I can point to is the large studios that release franchises lose the ability to use cutting off people's access to previous games in a series as a motivator to purchase newer ones in the series. And that's an ability exclusively available to massive studios that put out entire franchises of games.
That does happen a lot. They get licenses to use but not distribute software for example. Servers are hard so it makes sense they'd want to buy rather than build.
It's the same reason most games aren't open sourced when their commercial viability ends: lots of third party software with no public source.
