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Comment by surgical_fire

7 days ago

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.

    • Yea, I think some people are acting like these "licenses" are physical constants, found in nature and can't be modified! They are made by humans and can be unmade by humans. Regulation could deem those licenses unenforceable. Regulation could force permissive licensing. Regulation could add or remove IP protection. It's all conjured up by humans.

      Yes, it is unlikely that legislators, bought and paid for by big corporations, will ever change the rules to reduce help to big corporations, but it's at least humanly possible.

    • For some things.

      For others you may not be able to license it.

      Example: have you seen a street racing game with Toyota’s in it?

      There’s a reason that Need For Speed games fell off after Most Wanted (original) and it’s because they themselves don’t get total artistic license on their works.

      And part of the agreements is a reasonable expectation that you will not assist anyone else to violate the agreement - and, the agreements are not perpetual either.

      So, depends on context. There are examples where licensing opportunities dry up.

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    • That entirely depends on the content, some is fungible and some isn’t. For the majority of general content developers are already getting a perpetual license so it’s really these special cases that will remain an issue and are unlikely to be resolved in the manner you suggest.

  • 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.

    • When you’re licensing content from third parties the more permissive rights you need the more expensive it is. Music is a very good example where it might not even be possible to get a perpetual license. A bunch of games have removed music as their license to it has expired for example. In the context of EOL of a game if you have to provide it for free to owners in perpetuity any third party content, code and so on needs to have been licensed for that use. That is typically more permissive than licenses as mentioned up thread and so more expensive.

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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.