Everything is like that. You buy a CD, DVD, record album, painting, concert ticket, movie ticket, whatever it is, you don’t own the artwork, the creator retains the rights to the artwork, you just own a limited license to view it. You can’t go put on your own concert or show using that license without consulting the owner. You can’t create derivative works without consulting the owner. You can’t make copies without consulting the owner.

It’s not just video games, that’s just how copyright works.

Edit: did you know that a tattoo artist retains the rights to the artwork on your body? If you’re an actor with a tattoo, anyone who hires you needs to either get permission from the artist to show the tattoos in their work, or cover your tattoos.

Yeah, but anti-consumer is soooo IN right now.

Alright, yeah if that was the intention of the headline, then fine enough. I think I’m not the only one in this thread who didn’t read it that way.

Cheers.

They are designed the way they are now largely so they can collect data from you. It is consumer hostile.

You mean with centralized servers? No, it’s so they can be server authoritative to guarantee some level of stability, matchmaking, cross-game state, anti-cheat, etc. Ex. you would not be able to have the Arc Raiders experience with p2p servers. As for your data, they can gather that regardless, this would not be a cost effective way to do it.

No one here is disagreeing with the motives of SKG. The discussion at hand is whether this article you posted refers to a scenario that would be improved by the SKG initiative. And it sounds like you agree it satisfies what SKG wants. So the headline should read more like “2K is doing <blah> which is good. Reminder that SKG is trying to guarantee this.”

That does not mean that they cannot seek or want more, though.

For SKG, all that matters to me is what becomes a government-enforced requirement. We can advocate for more all we want, but we were already doing that, and will continue to. Ross can believe whatever he wants about what a company should do, but if SKG isn’t advocating for it as legislation, then I don’t see it as relevant to the initiative.

From the article,

2K games is delisting casual racing game Lego 2K Drive this week, but it’ll remain playable online for another year and work offline once support ends.

Assuming “work offline” means players don’t lose any game modes, this is literally a best case scenario. Stop Killing Games wouldn’t/can’t ask for any more. They could literally use this as an example of what should be done.

what if they were required by legislation to inform the consumer before purchase how long their game would have full functionality?

This is often something that can’t be known. They might be prepared to host the servers for a decade if it makes financial sense, or if there are only 20ppl online a week after launch, they’ll probably have to shut it down in a month, and possibly go bankrupt. As long as they don’t prohibit [those 20] buyers from continuing to play the game, it doesn’t matter. Stop Killing Games can’t make them know the future, but it can make them provide a way for the community to continue without them regardless of what happens.

From a customer perspective, like 80% of the population is functionally tech-illiterate. They want to play games with the confidence that things will “just work”. They buy the console, it has everything they need for a set price, they hook it to the TV, they choose a game, everything just works, and if it doesn’t they know it’s defective and they can just return it.

From a developer perspective, the hardware is fixed, so you don’t need to consider every possible configuration of hardware, (CPU, GPU, displays, disk speed, controller, etc) windowing, OS versions, driver versions, etc. Every single one of these factors adds another dimension to testing requirements and debugging. You also get lower-level access to hardware, which allows for more granular optimizations. As a result, the console designers can put mid-range hw in it and expect devs to squeeze out performance compareable to high end PCs.

As a customer, I prefer PC, but as a dev, PC is kind of awful to deal with. So much time spent hunting down weird little corner cases that only occur in very certain circumstances.

Welcome to the trump administration.