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Game Ownership and "Creep"
Posts
modding isn't hacking hth
modding = hacking the game engine, does it not? Well, excepting mod tools but those don't always exist
Understood.
You sir, seem to be obtuse in the extreme and willing to interpret a deliberate attempt at humor as an actual character attack. I have no basis for knowing the extent to which you are, or are not, bucktooth and I would hope that would be obvious. I fault you for this.
I do not fault you for any flaw of parentage, choice of sexual partner or physical deformity.
Ah, no it's not, not when the tools are provided with the product such as in the example you provided. There are some 'mods' that hack the engine without tools to change stuff, but not total conversions ("whole new games") you mentioned. Modding in this way is agreeable with the EULA as long as you're not making a profit.
But you're diluting your original point.
Still wondering why it's ok to advocate breaking a game's EULA but not pirating it
猿も木から落ちる
you are the only one in this thread comparing anything to theft.
Like any copyrighted work, buying a copy at the store doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it, it means you are entitled to use it in specific ways. As we frequently see with "abandonware" titles, the creators don't just stop having control of their properties because a fan somewhere decides they aren't supporting them properly.
edit: and yeah, valve as far as I know has always acknowledged and encouraged the mod community, so that example kind of falls flat
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Any sort of modding to extend the multiplayer life of the Madden games, for instance, would sharply deviate from what their sales model seems to be. I reckon that they would have something to say about that.
Ah, that I did not know
I guess to me, it's 100% intention here, and who it affects
I think breaking your EULA only affects you potentially negatively, as opposed to pirating which affects everyone who created the game up to and including a potential sale, negatively
I'm confused as to what ways I couldn't use, say, a book which don't directly fall under piracy
Same with movies
I would maybe try to frame your argument in terms of the consumer's rights without basically guessing at how many people are affected vs the burden borne by the provider.
Seems like something we might want to nail down before we start discussing how terrible it is to break one.
I was going to say, EULAs, unless we're going into piracy stuff, seem like freedom of speech/expression infringements
They could do better, however, in getting people to avoid playing Mercenaries 2
They could stop selling it altogether, perhaps
My point is simply that as a group gamers ought to be less willing to support server-side DRM in games where it is not the inherent an unavoidable consequence of the game itself.
I think that the "creep" entered into our mindset when more people began to play games that authenticated with unique keys such as WoW. Absent a basic understanding of the underlying servers and whatnot that may have done a great deal to normalize that type of authentication.
Now that its appearing in single player games its already been accepted to an extent. I think most here can agree that this sort of thing wouldn't have been supported five years ago. Perhaps the extent to which the EULA language could be enforced wouldn't have even reached that far before DMCA.
If you were to set up your own free or cheap movie theater, then buy retail copies of movies and show them to whomever wanted to come, it wouldn't be all that long before you received a C&D.
I also question how piracy of a game can be said to affect everyone in the production chain, but breaking the EULA somehow does not. Who makes that distinction, you or the rightsholder?
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Seriously. Not to mention that if someone is still playing Mercs 2 in a post Just Cause 2 world, then I don't know what to say to them.
They have no-one to blame but themselves.
Hahahah
Perhaps they could package it with a game even less desirable?
Also, -SPI- You have no idea, if Just Cause 2 had multiplayer how happy I would be. That whole game really underscores how much Mercs 2 needed a parachute.
What if somebody did it with books? And, even worse, let people take them home for free and read them without having to buy them?
[But then again, books don't have an EULA I guess.]
What's the big deal? Those million copies of Madden 20xx are being bought by people who are willing to, well, buy them. It's not like the production of games is zero-sum. Buy games you like, and let people buy games they like. Getting upset at EA for the Madden scheme because people buy them is like being pissed at rappers because people keep buy rap music, and damnit, you hate rap music.
EULAs will never be tested in court, because if the ruling goes against EULAs, every software corp in the US suddenly has to overhaul their legal department at their own expense. Better to have a campaign of consistent harassment towards the consumer and settle with the minute percentage of people who are willing to/can afford to stand up to them.
Another dumb analogy. You can check out movies and music from your local library. That really has nothing to do with displaying that media for an audience, which has nothing to do with EULAs, and everything to do with copyright law.
This analogy would be better if the Rap CD you purchased at full price today ceased to function in a year because someone at the record company hit a switch.
By cultivating a large consumer base that accepts that 1 year multiplayer disconnect treatment they've normalized, they established a precedent. That the Madden audience allows that to be done to them gives EA justification for extending that behavior over to games that I want to enjoy.
If that Madden audience had done what various segments of the community are trying to do now by boycotting AC2 and whatnot, this thing would never have gotten the head of steam that it has. I can't fault them for not caring, I'm sure they're happier for it, it just makes my wretched and shriveled existence that much worse.
The EULA for a game generally states that the license you purchased is for "single use only", meaning you cannot rent or loan it. Quite a few libraries have games available to borrow as well.
I wasn't making a serious argument so much as I was making fun of the EULA/Copyright situation in this country.
Copyright law in general, other than the bullshit length of it, in this country is quite fair. It is the EULA debacle and the DMCA that have borked things up royally.
It's not like the rest of the industry is going to uniformly go "hey, what works for EA will certainly work for us, let's all move to this business model".
Of course, I don't play multiplayer games, so maybe my opinion doesn't matter.
With the new Maddens coming out every year and the servers being shut down really the customer is paying for the use of online play, with some features being added on the side and a new roster. It is like subscribing for WoW, but with football. And the company making the game doesn't care much about quality.
I think you overestimate most videogame companies these days.
All they will see is "[Company] is making money off of [Procedure]. If we do [Procedure], we could probably make money too. Let's do [Procedure]." Especially with DRM.
It happened with manual checks, code wheels, shareware, disc checks, CD-Keys, authentication software (SecuRom, etc), the MMO model, and will likely start to happen with server-based DRM sometime in the future.
It seems to me that the only way to keep that from happening is for the sales figures to demonstrate that it isn't a profitable practice. Which I posit will only happen if the sales of those games are low, which they are not.
I'm not entirely confident that the non-sports game community would reject that treatment if it came right down to it, and it worries me.
Honestly I'm a little bit surprised that EA hasn't just started selling madden as a subscription franchise a la MMOs.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
And there's the human factor. Do you know how many people would still play Madden 2009 per day now that 2010 is out? Dozens. Maybe. If it were triple digits I would be astounded. The same goes for Mercs 2. It sucks that you're one of the vanishingly few people affected, RogerCly, but there it is. The sun has set on that game.
My fondest wish would be that Fox would hire out Joss Whedon and company to make a dozen more seasons of Firefly but it's just not cost-effective for them. Doesn't make it any easier for me to swallow though.
I can fire up Unreal Tournament right now and find or start a multiplayer game. Unreal Tournament was released eleven years ago.
The cost of maintaining servers isn't really something you can argue, since if EA released dedicated server software for Mercs 2, they wouldn't pay a cent in server upkeep. The people who wanted to play the game would have to shoulder that cost.
All in all, it would seem like a pretty good move for a company - satisfy a few hardcore fans, get a few points of positive PR, and you'd get to ditch the responsibility and cost of hosting servers all at the same time.
And in the Mercs 2 example, you don't even need dedicated server software, just a patch to remove the authentication since its locally hosted anyway. With Pandemic gone though, thats probably not likely at all.
Come to think of it, who owns the right to Pandemic's stuff now, EA? They may not even be able to legally modify it.
Are you really citing one of the most prolific FPS games ever made? The fact is that with UT the community still wants to play it. The same community does not exist for Madden games. Most of those people move on to the sequels. This would be true for most games they've canceled support for.
I guess for Mercs 2 they simply wanted people to move on to other games.
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There was probably more people involved keeping Mercs 2 online than playing it.
I am quite sure you have some sort of evidence to support this right? And keep in mind that most people have moved on from UT, but that has jack crap to do with the fact that some people still play it. Most people may have moved on from last years Madden, that simply means that some people haven't. If they didn't have such a shitty server/MP model people could continue playing it if they wanted, as Smokestacks already mentioned.
You obviously know nothing about server management. If the game is no longer being patched and you have the server configured correctly it can sit there unattended for years chugging along hosting games without a glitch. If you have to sit there and baby sit a server you're doing it wrong. So no, there were not more people involved in keeping the game online than there were players.
Its like D & D with the rules and set pieces constantly being mothballed every year.
Why is this a mute point, because EA doesn't care about madden in terms of a game, they perfected solid football gameplay 10 years ago, from that point on, when you got basic football down, it was just keeping the names on the little dots and giving the public more stats to play with. Its a good business model and nothing anyone does (short of making a Madden MMO that you pay $15 a month for) is going to change that.
Its pointless to compare it to shooters, RPGs, or sandbox games, because they were designed with a 1 year cycle like Madden.
In terms of DRM, DLC, EULA, and a whole bunch more acronyms tied to gameplay and making money for the publisher. Restricting games to their servers makes sense to keep out cheaters but in the long run, enabling dedicated servers and LAN play keeps the consumer happy. On the one hand, they are becoming so scarce that those games who do have it can use them as a selling point but on the other hand, games that advertise coop and don't deliver are a special kind of wrong that should be settled with a lawsuit. Consider someone buying the Tabula Rasa collector's edition or Hellgate: London CE and finding out they were shut down. That is the point the OP tried to bring across.
Protesting with piracy is like selling crack to kids so you can buy gas to drive to the store that moved away from people who sell crack to kids. You are only making the problem worse by making that environment less profitable and appealing to the business you want.
Real protest against PC game trends you don't like involves polite letters to the publishers and designers and using your wallet to fund independent developers and those publishers whose practices you like.
tl;dr
Madden and all other games are like apples and oranges, talk with you wallet and not your scimictar.
I guess you're right that I'm assuming something that may not be true, but I would think that while it is possible Madden '09 might now have a larger population, I'm pretty certain that most of the games EA has canceled have smaller populations. Besides it doesn't detract from the business sense of shutting down servers.
I don't really have any experience with this. Wouldn't there be some maintenance costs, what about the opportunity costs incurred from not using that server for another game or selling it? Power costs?
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