Comment by dijit
7 days ago
I can’t speak for them because I never worked on them, but you’d be surprised how often a piece of music or a graphic is copyrighted. One of thousands of your common textures gets a bit too close to something else and suddenly you need a license.
Fun fact: a lot of game audio is licensed too, sound effects and such.
Regardless, the issue of sublicensing goes beyond what you’re allowed to let people do, it also goes into the idea that you’re often forced to disallow people from harvesting those assets from the game, or allowing the game to turn into derivative works - and because you yourself do not actually own the asset, you’re forced to confront it.
To avoid these issues, games would have to be very small (2D? Chiptunes? idk how small), but it’s one of a million tiny issues that comes up in game development, and each one of those tiny issues risks not allowing you to release the game.
Games are really, really hard to make, there are so many issues waiting to kill it- and even if you manage to make it, there’s no guarantee it’s successful, so spending time on these things is stealing time from making it fun or viable.
Again, what the fuck does the licensing of music or textures have anything to do with people playing the game offline?
Why do you mix your awful DRM scheme with something completely separated from the subject matter?
Are you trying to claim that the licensing scheme establishes by contract that the players must be stripped of their consumer rights by not being able to own the game they bought?
Well, good news for you, maybe the regulations that will come out of it will make this sort of licensing contract illegal. Perhaps it will make it easier to make games for you.
It’ll make licensing more expensive because the net result is more permissive. Or in the hypothetical the content could be removed and replaced with something bespoke or cheaper to licence. But both of these options will make the game more expensive to build overall across its surface area.
If the law is that you can't do this, then those terms will just disappear from licencing agreements. It's not like there's a shortage of textures and sounds in the marketplace.
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How is it more permissive? The product is the same as it was before the official servers went down.
Forcing games to be moddable is unrelated to stop killing games.
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> It’ll make licensing more expensive because the net result is more permissive
The current state of affairs is that the net result is such that consumers are stripped of their rights. I find it more unacceptable.
If the licensing costs without fucking over consumers is prohibitive, then maybe those games should not exist. If no one is licensing the brands/assets/music/whatever because the licensing costs are too high, it's likely that in time the costs will come down.
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