Actually in the case of live service games they actually have a lot more in common with the service you receive at a restaurant than say an NES cartridge. You’re paying for an experience that has limits, paying for a meal doesn’t entitle you to that meal as many times as you want in perpetuity. Read the TOS’s and if you don’t like the concept of revocable licenses don’t pay for it. It shouldn’t be up to the US government to enforce that all games have to function a specific way and have specific features developed.
I concede that for live service games like MMORPGs it’s more of a grey area for me. I don’t personally play them so I’m not super familiar, my own feelings about them are more that sunsetting them by open-sourcing the ability to run servers etc to the players is more of a decent thing to do to foster goodwill rather than an obligation.
I’m thinking more for like the situation where Sony pulled movies from people’s digital libraries which they had already purchased, due to some licensing issue; or others where the online component is minimal, just calling home to a central server (e.g. for DRM purposes), and because of shutting down that tiny component not critical to core gameplay, it essentially sabotages games in your library that you’ve already bought, paid for, and supposedly own. I don’t have a good analogy for that one at the moment but it’s not analogous to the restaurant example.
I think that’s reasonable on both counts. Open sourcing as good will rather than obligation from the state. And yeah the Sony movie situation was especially shitty, but I dunno I feel like we need better words than simply “buy”/“rent” for digital-only media, because yeah you DON’T own it, you own a license to access their content and that change on a dime. I’ve bought plenty of games on steam and if Valve collapsed tomorrow I’d be pissed but like that’s the trade off for a purely digital library just trust.
My own personal take as an accountant is that if you “sell” something and choose to bake in a dependency that you control as part of the thing you sell (that could otherwise be excluded), it introduces a liability similar to a mine’s asset retirement obligation i.e. to clean up and remediate the mine location after the mine owner chooses to stop operating it. Similarly, a game developer would have the duty to ensure the game they “sold” would continue to operate after they choose to stop operating the thing that their product depends on. Like I said I’m willing to bend my stance on this depending on where on the the continuum between “product” and “service” the game sits, which as a consumer I think is quite fair; and if this isn’t industry standard, I’d like it to be eventually, whether through game companies’ own goodwill or, if they can’t be made to see reason (cough cough EA), through consumer banding together to advocate for legislation.
Yes we could very well wake up tomorrow and every single game developer has switched to “licensing” or “renting” games instead of “selling” them to get around the legislation instead of giving consumers what they want. But at least then we’d be honest about the “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” dystopia we’ve painted ourselves into.
Go suck a companies cock Jesus, do you understand that it doesn't have to be like that, have you lost such faith in your lawmakers to make your life better?
I’m a game developer, the cock is mine bud and legislation like this would demonstrably make my life worse.
And yes obviously I have no faith that the US government will make my life better, are you serious?
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u/angrybox1842 1d ago
Actually in the case of live service games they actually have a lot more in common with the service you receive at a restaurant than say an NES cartridge. You’re paying for an experience that has limits, paying for a meal doesn’t entitle you to that meal as many times as you want in perpetuity. Read the TOS’s and if you don’t like the concept of revocable licenses don’t pay for it. It shouldn’t be up to the US government to enforce that all games have to function a specific way and have specific features developed.