Adalast @ Adalast @lemmy.world

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685

Joined

2 yr. ago

And by what mechanism would it have affected sales of the sequel? Historically, and demonstrably, greater access to a game increases the sales of sequels. Why do you think developers put games in a series on sale when a new game in a series is coming out? I would definitely argue that having released the server hosting code for The Crew to allow people to host private servers would have potentially added to The Crew 2 sales. Also, if they release the server code, but not the game code, they could continue the sales of the game on storefronts at a reduced price having it marked that it will no longer receive updates and still made even more money from those sales. I would definitely prefer if they just release the whole game, but either would have worked.

I don't really see it as an entirely separate topic. It is still an abuse of rights. In this case, it is an abuse of ownership. If I make a purchase of a good, I should own that good. If the company later decides that they no longer want to support the services which support that purchase, they should be required to provide the opportunity that all purchased goods remain valid and operational. If we take a different good as a stand in, cars, a manufacturer may eventually decide to stop supporting a vehicle, but they do have to sell the component rights to aftermarket manufacturers (or at least make good faith attempts) when they drop support so people who own those vehicles have the chance to maintain and use them. I see this as no different than that. Their dropping of support means that products purchased are removed from use or function without the owner's consent.

And I know you are going to say "well the EULA says you don't own it and you agreed to it" which is precicely the problem we are arguing. Purchase should mean ownership and forcing people to agree to whatever you want is wrong. Legislation is required because no company will protect the rights of customers, that is the duty of legal systems.

What does releasing the code have to do with development decisions? I am a developer and this sentiment really confused me, so please elucidate.

If that pub has been around long enough that it can reasonably be argued that it is part of regional heritage, then yes.

Except... For a contract to be legal it must be agreed upon by both parties free of manipulation or coercion. Now, usually this is specified to be manipulation or coercion on the part of one of the parties, but what I argue is that in the modern era that is insufficient to encompass the growing complexity around the way society works and how it will continue moving forward.

Pulling the numbers out of my well educated ass, 40 years ago the average person would encounter EULA-like contracts a handful of times per year. Maybe for a mail order service, or a piece of software. Today we encounter them daily. The amount of information in them is intentionally made dense and overwhelming so the average person becomes numb very quickly and opts to click through on most of them without reading them. This enables all sorts of personal liberty and information abuses on the part of corporations.

40 years ago you did not have one to find a job, a lover, buy a car (still had a loan contract, but if you paid up front you had 0 contracts other than the bill of sale). You would not encounter them to work most jobs. You could go years without having to risk signing your rights over to a company and usually when you did you had negotiation power. This is not true today. You work for a company, they use Zoom, Slack, Google Workplace, a Virtual Timecard service, all of which have individual EULA that you as a private citizen, not an employer, must agree to and be bound by. Microsoft can put in their EULA that they are allowed to take a screenshot of your computer every 15 seconds and transmit it to their servers. This could be intercepted, or the servers could be hacked and have the entire database compromised and you have 0 say other than public outcry or to airgap your system, which then complains constantly that it cannot connect to the internet and becomes virtually unusable for about 80% of why you want to own it.

Being required by an employer to use software which requires that you as an individual sign a EULA is coercion. Having 0 recourse for alternatives in a marketplace which do not require signing a EULA is coercion. Having the terms which strip your rights irrevocably and transferrably buried and written in confusing ways is manipulation.

I should never have to worry that my copyright is being stripped from a piece of art I create just because I share it to a friend on some website.

That is not a rebuttal. A rebuttal requires evidentiary support of your stance. For instance, as support for saying it costs them nothing, one might offer the following:

• once released, users would distribute and maintain the file servers independently of the corporation, thus costing the company nothing.
• once released, users would maintain independent game servers and pay for their upkeep, thus costing the company nothing.
• once released, the modding community would take over the maintenance and development on the code base, thus costing the company nothing.

There, 3 salient points which support the position that releasing the codebase for the game when sunsetting it costs the company nothing. I could even make points about how it is actually profitable for the company, but I want to give you your turn to rebutt me now that you have a good example of how to provide a good argument.

"No shirt, no shoes, no service" is a health code, not a EULA.

Also, you are conflating social contracts with actual legally binding ones. If you had to sign a contract to eat at a resteraunt which gave them the right to photograph you and record all of your conversations while you ate then use all of it for marketing without compensating you or to sell the contents of your conversations and likeness to unknown 3rd parties without informing you of who they were sold to and what the intended use was, would you still eat there.

Your comment shows an utter lack of understanding of the issues at hand and what abuses of rights are done in digital spaces.

Yeah, but a contract that you cannot negotiate before signing isn't really a contract is it? It is a gate keeper. A gun to the head. An "agree to this or else". In the modern world, one can do essentially nothing without signing a EULA. Want to get a job without signing one? Good luck. Want to play a game? Not many of them. Want to shop online, look at art, communicate with friends and family. Many of the most integral parts of maintaining our mental health are being put behind abusive "contracts" that strip us of any rights we think we have. Community, leisure, socialization, entertainment, all of the primary avenues in the modern world have predominantly become privatized and every one of those comes at a pretty steep nonmonetary cost.

I was so happy to go through the Steam EULA and find that it explicitly states that all disputes will be heard in the court local to the customers.

You always have with Nintendo products. They have always had very aggressive licensing practices. In the early days they were more flexing them on developers, but it does not surprise me that in the wake of everyone telling them that modding and emulators can be explicitly legal that they would turn that particularly litigious aspect of their family friendly brand on the customers.

Because a browser is several orders of magnitudee more complex than a website.

Got stabbed by a friend at lunch.

This is the clearest case I have ever seen of pareidolia I have ever seen, and I saw people talking about sphinxes on Mars.

Omg, you are right! That is just the height of arrogance since the only way they could actually provide any protection in the case of a decompression, you know, the thing that is the only job of an extra atmospheric flight suit, would be if there was an air tight sleeve attached to the boots. That would make the pants just fashion and wasted weight being launched. The extra kg of fabric would not add a lot to the fuel costs, but it would be measurable.

One group of billionaires went squish under the ocean, another is going to end up finding out how they make astronaut food in space.

I have a graphite stain in my palm from 8th grade and I'm 40.

Paleolithic Safety Dance?

I like to believe that Billy Ignore instructions is Bobby Tables' kid.

Locally sourcing boulders over the Marianas Trench is going to be such a pain. I'm pretty sure the environmental benefits will outweigh importing some nice basalt from Hawaii before we leave out.

Shhhh. You will scare them.

That would likely depend on their motives. If they are wanting to infiltrate and don't have a good cloaking tech, then entering on a day when any reports would likely be dismissed would be a spectacularly intelligent decision.