Companies would still be cutting flour with chalk if they had their way. "It's limiting blah blah blah" that's the point you corpos, consumer rights are about the consumer not the bottom line

Not to mention that studios like Larian have proven that it's entirely possible to make a blockbuster game without teams of 400 heads, changing direction and leadership every few years and laying off the people who made the product in the first place. They really seethed at that one, so many salty comments lol.

Larian has close to 500 employees across studios in seven different countries. They're definitely the good guys (at least for now), but they are not an example of a small indie studio.

Larian has six studios and over four hundreds of employees. They are not as big as Ubisoft of course, but they are still very much an AAA game studio.

So does not allowing food companies to sprinkle lead and uranium in food. What's the point?

This is just pure fabricated bullshit. They themselves started limiting options. Remember the old days where you could host your own server with basically any game? They took that away, not us. So they themselves are 100% responsible for this 'uprising'. Besides they could just provide/open-source the backend and disable drm. Hardly any work at all.

But of course it's not about that. They just try to hide behind this 'limits options' argument. But they simply don't want you to be able to play their old games. They want you to buy their latest CoD 42.

Yeah sometimes their choices are bad, that is like 1/3 of the whole point of government. To stop businesses from just doing whatever nonsense they want.

"Developers" are the ones who are passionate about the games they make, and definitely don't want their games dead.

"Corporations" are the ones who only want to profit from selling the game, and then ditch it once it's no longer lucrative enough.

Corporate jargon translation:

"It's going to limit innovation" = "We won't be able to use those new ways of ripping off our customers anymore"

BG3 being DRM-free and playable indefinitely also demonstrates that you can have plenty of success and not break your own product to do so.

Let's be real, open sourcing it isn't "hardly any work". All the code has to be reviewed to make sure they can legally release it, no third-party proprietary stuff.

Oh but with the new rules they could do that before making their code work that way. The idea is not for the new laws to apply retroactively but for new games.

Ah, the propaganda war has started.

I'm speaking from ignorance but isn't the server backend often licensed and they couldn't release it if they wanted, even as binaries? Granted, going forward they'd have to make those considerations before they accept restrictive licenses in core parts of their game. And the market for those licenses will change accordingly. So there core of your argument is correct.

When starting a new game, don't include that stuff. Not including proprietary stuff without meeting the licensing requirements is already a step in the process.

Choice to do what?

These are their two points:

Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

I feel like the first is fair enough at the moment, but with accompanying laws it could be resolved. Eg once a developer enacts an end of life plan, their legal culpability is removed. Plus give the right tools for moderation and the community can take care of it.

Second is just a cop out I think. "Many titles are designed from the ground up to be online only" - that's the whole point. It's not retroactive, so you don't need to redesign an existing game. But going forward you would need to plan for the eventual end of life. Developers have chimed in that it can be done.

Even if this would be true (which it isn’t, it’s made up bullshit): I do not give a crap.

No, I do not care about the publisher.

No, I do not care about the studio.

No, I do not care about the developer anymore too.

I do not give a single fuck about any of them anymore. I want to own the game I buy. I don’t want anyone being able to pull the plug. I also want to own the hardware or console I buy. I am ready to watch their existence to crumble as long as I get what I want.

These people lied and conned this hobby of mine into monetised shite. I hope a lot of them somehow crash and burn. Would laugh and dance when they croak. I can play Factorio and Terraria until the heat death of the universe. Your new Assassins Blood Pack: Revenge of the Fortnite 2 Deluxe Bundle MMO-Life Service Definitive Expansion Season Pass DLC Dark of the Moon Surprise Mechanic won’t be missed anyway.

That's good news. Means the initiative has a shot.

It was disquieting back when they were just flat out ignoring it.

Of course it's limiting your options!

Screwing up the customer should not be an option you're allowed to take!