Sega

Hasbro

And I thought there was a third example in recent weeks, but I’m struggling to find it right now. In place of that, you can look at the implosion of Sony’s live service efforts, with Marathon falling far short of making money, and for some reason Fairgames, rumored to now be called Break-In, will be the last one out the door after that Horizon live service. After that, I’d be shocked if they keep trying.

It was the only mainline game I hadn’t played at the time. I still haven’t played Tactics, Shelter, or 76 and don’t really intend to.

Video game adaptations are effective marketing. I’ll say from experience, the Fallout show was the most effective commercial I’d ever seen. They probably hoped it would lead me to playing Fallout 76 like it did for so many other folks, but I played Fallout 2 instead.

You have to first understand the ways in which you can be burned, which takes lived experience.

I don’t have a PS5, and I only play on PC, so every game requires a download to play it. But I do think that if this criteria matters to other folks and this site still doesn’t cover the part that matters to me, it’s demonstrative of all the ways that studios have compromised the products they sold to us.

I’m not sure if everything is covered on the Steam game pages, but that is a good first starting point.

It’s worse than that, actually. They technically provide all of the resources to inform the customer of this stuff, but it isn’t enforced. Palworld used to say that it requires an internet connection in the Steam Deck verified section, but that wasn’t actually true. Every Borderlands game except for BL1 GOTY edition has LAN play, meaning that series will survive a server shutdown, but two of them don’t list it; my guess is that the person managing the page doesn’t know or care. I’ve got a friend, as we speak, looking into which features of 007 First Light still work without an internet connection, which I wouldn’t even know was worth checking if it wasn’t for IO Interactive pulling new shenanigans with the latest Hitman games (he’s being more thorough, but the initial assessment is that it might restrict access to the challenge rooms).

UPDATE: My friend confirmed the challenge rooms are locked without internet. Bastards.

When existing legislation didn’t suffice, the movement was for further legislation, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that postdated Ruby Bridges’ attendance of an integrated school. And now we can bring that back to SKG requesting additional legislation because the existing legislation doesn’t suffice.

Definitely not the end of the movement, but it’s still disappointing that they reached anything other than the obvious conclusion with so much grassroots support.

Unfortunately it often takes a lot of research to find out which ones are which. Store pages can be really bad at conveying that sort of thing.

Way ahead of you.

Famously, the civil rights movement didn’t end with zero changes to laws on the books because they were all perfect beforehand. The EU commission did not outline how this erodes intellectual property rights, but somehow, after a behind-closed-doors meeting with the industry that SKG wasn’t allowed to attend, they were convinced that it would.

Those are terrible examples. We needed affirmative action policies to get past people’s biases, and women’s suffrage needed an amendment to the Constitution. MeToo was more the destruction of “catch and kill” tactics by social media for powerful men committing crimes that rarely leave evidence beyond corroborating witnesses.

Plus, there was zero danger of eroding intellectual property rights here.

The reason these games can be destroyed is that even piracy is often impossible. The ones you’re pirating are more often than not going to be the ones that were never at risk of being targeted by this initiative.

I know of no examples where people rose up to demand enforcement of existing laws and rights and something changed, but I’d love to learn that I’m wrong. The lack of enforcement usually shows a gap where the law didn’t cover the real world scenario diligently enough.

On the bright side, there’s not enough money in live service anymore, so plenty of companies are getting cold feet when it comes to making games that can be killed anyway. Yeah, that’s a reach for a silver lining, but it’s something. I’d like to believe that the action they say they’re taking will result in real change, but it sure doesn’t sound like it.

“Closed source” is reaching. As much as I think Doom shows why it should be desirable, let alone not taboo, it’s always been the industry standard and applies to 99.99% of games.

Really? They’ve been mostly misses from what I can tell. They don’t review very well or sell many copies for most of their games. Recent reporting indicates that Tencent no longer wants to finance them, and their future is shaky.

A game developer with a consistently high hit rate in their output? Kojima, maybe? FromSoft? We’ve seen a lot of empires fall in recent years.

We can’t know what’s going to be the greatest of all time in the future, only what’s the greatest of all time so far.

Time is cyclical it seems. They did something just like this 20 years ago.