Comment by charcircuit
8 days ago
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.
8 days ago
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.
> In the context of EOL of a game if you have to provide it for free to owners in perpetuity any third party content
You start your argument from a presumption that releasing an offline game is almost an impossibility. Are you trying yo argue that offline games have zero things licensed? This sounds like a major argument in favor of offline games.
Sounds to me that the simple solution is just stop licensing things with such draconian requirements. If I play a racing game I care about it being fun. If the car I am using in-game is a BMW or a made up brand for the game is immaterial.
For some people that's true, But I've played with people that for example, slightly prefered PES Gameplay but just would refuse to play without a proper Real Madrid Team
In my experience, the more casual the player the more this mattered to them, but it was still a huge market
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It’s about the distribution of games, doesn’t matter whether it’s online or offline you need a license to distribute IP that you don’t own.
Never making a licensed product or using third-party IP is definitely one solution but I don’t think is the intent nor without adverse effects.
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Stop killing games is not about forcing developers to perpetually sell games. They can still stop selling games. They just can't leave it in an unplayable state.
If developers want to get the rights to distribute a song for 5 years with their game, they can still do that.
No I’m talking about the distribution of games. With physical media that’s all fine because once the license expires they stop making new copies. People that own a copy are fine. With digital distribution once you’ve EOL’d a product you still need to make it available right? Otherwise how do people that have paid for it get it? But that means you can’t distribute elements you no longer have the license to.
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This seems pretty easy. If the license to the music goes for X years, then build that expiration into the game. After X years, licensed music goes away, and the game is still playable. This is completely in scope of SKG. Everyone understands that not every feature has to be retained to stay the playable game.
That expiration date should, of course, be on the box. The consumer deserves to know.
That’s absurd. I can still pop in my Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater CD from decades ago and listen to the original soundtrack. TTL licensing should be illegal.
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That would be frustrating to code for.
Before anyone says that its as simple as a switch statement, it’s not, its date enumeration and a switch statement, and an alternative codepath for testing and more assets: on every hot path, when you already only get 8ms for your frame is an annoying cost.
The expiration date properly visible is not a terrible idea though; or at least a “this edition is valid for x years” after which, updates that fix issues may remove content. Hrm.
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