ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: BATTLEFORGE

[Ross Scott]

Gamers (as a whole) are some of the most easily deceived consumers out there unfortunately, ranking a little better than illicit drug users. If they weren't, we wouldn't have encroachments of microtransactions on a full-priced game, literally selling a game ending as DLC, or killing games. I think any study will show the VAST majority of gamers do not WANT these anti-consumer practices, they're just tolerated because consumers are either ignorant, or are so interested in the unique entertainment that they buy them in SPITE of the practices. Again, someone else can probably state this better than I can, but I see these practices as setting the worst precedent imagineable for the art / entertainment world. It says that it's mandated to simply destroy culture by design, which I can't see as anything other than dystopian. Like you said, there's no legal ground to basis this one (except maybe predatory practices), but I'm simply unable to see this practice as acceptable. Venting with this video is about all I can do.

 

I agree mostly, actually. I don't know if I was clear in my original post but I certainly wasn't supporting the system in place. Or even criticising your video, actually, more the idea that there's some kind of easy legal solution to this whole thing. Not mentioned in the video, but its a sentiment I see way too much around the internet.

 

On the topic of gamers being easily decieved, I'd actually go as far to say that the entire foundation of "Gamers" as a culture is wasting excessive amounts of money. You can't really have a unified culture based around just a medium, so like with literature and film the "Gamer" culture caters mostly to snobs with money to burn. I shake my head at the people who spend upwards of $100 on a new edition of a common classic book the same way I shake my head at people who buy online-only games then act surprised when they get shut down. I don't even like to use the word Gamer anymore since it connects to so much idiotic baggage these days.

 

I think more discourse should be spent on why people are willing to support a culture like this, but I suppose that topic is rather complicated and goes way beyond the scope of game reviews. Though for what its worth I consider one of the main attractions of your videos to be your willingness to comment on issues most reviewers act like are unrelated to the topic. Given how much flak political stuff gets on the internet these days I imagine making some kind of politics-oriented series isn't very attractive anyway.

Well the biggest barriers to having the law changed are the encroachment of big money interests in our current systems and the inability of gamers caring enough or being savvy enough to change it. Just because someone can reverse engineer code doesn't mean they know how to gain any influence in Washington D.C. As for theoretical barriers, as with anything, I think if there was enough legal pressure to have the law changed, we would find an adequate solution. I mean how's this for a simple law:

 

Make it mandatory to provide all customers a full refund if they cannot run the game due to reliance on a server that the company has shut down for X time (say 6 months).

 

That means if a company wanted to shut down a game, they damn sure better have SOME sort of patch, otherwise they would literally risk all gross income made from the game. The law wouldn't have to get any more complex than that, the companies themselves would find the solutions. That would cause companies developing online-only games to treat the expenditure as seriously as it should be taken.

 

As for your perception of gamers, that might be true for what gets the most attention media-wise, but I'm WAY behind the curve in terms of money invested. My interest in older games means I could likely find games to play for years without spending a dime, on a very meager system also. While I of course am interested in newer ones some that require more overhead, I just about never touch brand new games because the costs just never justify for it me. I really see games as exploding in every different direction nowadays, so that anyone with interest in it can find something they might like at just a bare minimum cost.

[Forgot_My_Account]

I mean how's this for a simple law:

 

Make it mandatory to provide all customers a full refund if they cannot run the game due to reliance on a server that the company has shut down for X time (say 6 months).

 

That means if a company wanted to shut down a game, they damn sure better have SOME sort of patch, otherwise they would literally risk all gross income made from the game. The law wouldn't have to get any more complex than that, the companies themselves would find the solutions. That would cause companies developing online-only games to treat the expenditure as seriously as it should be taken.

The problem with that example is that's also very easy to circumvent. Whenever you want to publish an always-online game, just publish it under some dummy company which can declare bankruptcy at any time and sell the franchise to the parent company.

 

After thinking this through, maybe we need to be more mature about it. Movies and paintings disappear all of the time. That's the nature of some forms of art - it's up to the creator to determine its fate. Sometimes that doesn't fit our needs or is fair, but after all, it's not our vision we're talking about - it's the creator's. And if the creator is a douche, well, we're at fault because we chose to participate in and fuel that douche's ambitions.

The destruction of art is used traditionally as the final act of creating art. Now it's just used as a means to save money. But still, you can't ban a practice that might be legitimate because some people abuse it. But you do need to counteract it with another law.

 

Maybe what we need is some form of preservation. The same way the US preserves movies in the National Film Registry, we need that alternative for games, mainly online ones. We need laws to make the creators release the code because they've created something bigger than they've originally envisioned.

 

And I know, a company can't be a douche, nor there is more than a singular creator. But the company functions as one body, and if a company's actions are consistent enough, it can be avoided - just like regular scumbags.

 

P.S.

Yes, it doesn't really solve the issue you've mentioned, of games that haven't gained popularity disappearing. But think about all of the unknown artists who paint or make amateur movies and will never see the light of day again. That problem always existed and it never had a solution - but it just became slightly worse when you're paying for an experience with an unmentioned expiration date.

We do need companies to guarantee us they'll keep something alive for at least a certain period so consumers can take it into account, and maybe it can be preserved by knowledgeable fans. But if they'll make a law about it, what about films and paintings who are subject to oxidization and other environmental affects? The law would be absurd and overlooked! I just don't think something that can't be described by current laws, but we do need to be better consumers so we won't get hurt.

[HLPrincess]

 

After thinking this through, maybe we need to be more mature about it. Movies and paintings disappear all of the time. That's the nature of some forms of art - it's up to the creator to determine its fate. Sometimes that doesn't fit our needs or is fair, but after all, it's not our vision we're talking about - it's the creator's. And if the creator is a douche, well, we're at fault because we chose to participate in and fuel that douche's ambitions.

The destruction of art is used traditionally as the final act of creating art. Now it's just used as a means to save money. But still, you can't ban a practice that might be legitimate because some people abuse it. But you do need to counteract it with another law.

 

Be more mature about it? the companies that make online only contents should get mature. This is not an art gallery, but a market. And we are customers, customers have rights. We PAY a company for a product.

Do you buy a book to have it taken away after 5 years? If you want to give it back, you go to a library and it's FREE. (I know a concept of a book may be foreign to some people, but that's how it works )

 

Games are art, but are also a product and if you pay for it, you have a right to have it and use it as long as you please. And if you can't use it as long as you please, than you have to get a compensation. Simple market law.

[Forgot_My_Account]

Be more mature about it? the companies that make online only contents should get mature. This is not an art gallery, but a market. And we are customers, customers have rights. We PAY a company for a product.

Do you buy a book to have it taken away after 5 years? If you want to give it back, you go to a library and it's FREE. (I know a concept of a book may be foreign to some people, but that's how it works )

 

Games are art, but are also a product and if you pay for it, you have a right to have it and use it as long as you please. And if you can't use it as long as you please, than you have to get a compensation. Simple market law.

 

The problem is that games are so widespread as an art form, it's really hard to define them using classic terms.

If you say games are inanimate, like a chair or a table, then they shouldn't have any expiration date, either artificial nor a natural one.

If you say games are an experience, like dining, can you really blame them for having an expiration date? If you order a dish at a restaurant and eat it bit by bit for a week - do you really expect it to stay the same? It needs some maintenance for you to have a consistent experience, and in the end, it'll still go bad. Shit dies and you can't blame anyone for it. That's the way the world works.

And, yes, if you buy a book and return to it after 10 years, its pages will turn yellow. Some words will become ineligible, and some pages will outright fall out. The ravages of time are inevitable, and the more information something contains, the more it loses as time goes on.

 

Now, I'm against planned obsolescence, but I cannot deny that it's sometimes used for good. I hate rotting food but I like beer.

So what can I do to not suffer constantly? Do my homework. I need to know that if I buy a refurbished Apple product, its battery will die out within a year because of tempering and planned obsolescence. I cannot indict Apple for being dicks, but I can be aware of their shitty business practices.

And we need to make that information widespread, to discourage companies from doing it and consumers from engaging in those practices. We can't outright ban them, but we can inform people.

[Mrekalis]

As for your perception of gamers, that might be true for what gets the most attention media-wise, but I'm WAY behind the curve in terms of money invested. My interest in older games means I could likely find games to play for years without spending a dime, on a very meager system also. While I of course am interested in newer ones some that require more overhead, I just about never touch brand new games because the costs just never justify for it me. I really see games as exploding in every different direction nowadays, so that anyone with interest in it can find something they might like at just a bare minimum cost.

 

Well, that's kind of my point with putting "Gamer" in quotation marks. This is a phrase that's been repeated a lot, but just the act of playing games doesn't really make you part of a unified culture. I think the same thing applies to movies and books as well. There's a very specific stereotype that comes to mind when you describe someone as a Literary Type or a Film Snob. The people who get into the minutae of the medium and seem to be more interested in timelines, important dates and big people in the industry than what said industry actually seems to produce. Gaming is kind of the same. No major outlet ever shuts up about how far graphics have come the same way I occasionally sit through an art student lecturing me about pigments and paint-bases.

 

That's not to say that stuff isn't interesting, I actually read about those sorts of things a lot on my own time. The point is more that the culture is overwhelming focused more on the production than the product. If movies and literature are any indication then this might just be a universal aspect of the way people consume media. In this particular issue, all the money and descision-making power is tied to the prople who only seem to care about production. The product itself is tantamount to trash after the novelty wears off. I see this so much that I've gone way past the point of being shocked and now its just unfathomably alien to me.

[HLPrincess]

Be more mature about it? the companies that make online only contents should get mature. This is not an art gallery, but a market. And we are customers, customers have rights. We PAY a company for a product.

Do you buy a book to have it taken away after 5 years? If you want to give it back, you go to a library and it's FREE. (I know a concept of a book may be foreign to some people, but that's how it works )

 

Games are art, but are also a product and if you pay for it, you have a right to have it and use it as long as you please. And if you can't use it as long as you please, than you have to get a compensation. Simple market law.

 

The problem is that games are so widespread as an art form, it's really hard to define them using classic terms.

If you say games are inanimate, like a chair or a table, then they shouldn't have any expiration date, either artificial nor a natural one.

If you say games are an experience, like dining, can you really blame them for having an expiration date? If you order a dish at a restaurant and eat it bit by bit for a week - do you really expect it to stay the same? It needs some maintenance for you to have a consistent experience, and in the end, it'll still go bad. Shit dies and you can't blame anyone for it. That's the way the world works.

And, yes, if you buy a book and return to it after 10 years, its pages will turn yellow. Some words will become ineligible, and some pages will outright fall out. The ravages of time are inevitable, and the more information something contains, the more it loses as time goes on.

 

Now, I'm against planned obsolescence, but I cannot deny that it's sometimes used for good. I hate rotting food but I like beer.

So what can I do to not suffer constantly? Do my homework. I need to know that if I buy a refurbished Apple product, its battery will die out within a year because of tempering and planned obsolescence. I cannot indict Apple for being dicks, but I can be aware of their shitty business practices.

And we need to make that information widespread, to discourage companies from doing it and consumers from engaging in those practices. We can't outright ban them, but we can inform people.

 

Why do you keep on pressing on art side? I'm talking about games that you pay for. Art or not, you PAY for it. A company made it, you PAY for it. That ends the discussion here for me and other discussing it as an art, has no sense in this context.

 

A game that you paid for is a product. By what it is, it's something similar to a movie or a book (e-book). If a company says you buy a license or whatever, that's just a sneaky way for them to make you feel like you don't own it. But you're a consumer, and it's a product you're going to consume (in a sense of using it). It's not a piece of food to have an expiration date easy to define.

There is NO problem with dividing it into inanimate or animate object. Movies and books (e-books) don't have an expiration date and it's not necessary to wonder if they have. A game can remain up and running even after many years. It all depends on having your data and software running and a right equipment. In this point of view, a game cannot ever expire if you have right conditions to run it.

 

A game cannot really have a planned obsolescence. It can only be killed by making the essential data inaccessible. It's not a piece of hardware only. When a game comes out, no one (sane) expects the hardware/software needed to run it suddenly breaking apart exactly after 4/5 years (Well, that's it! We had our fun, but it expired!). A game can be only artificially killed/ taken away form the users by making it online only and denying access to it.

 

So, if a company makes a game that they plan to kill later, there should be a clear information within marketing/informative materials for it or at least in the moment of purchase: "This game will expire after 4 years because we decided so. Have fun till you can!" And very few people would buy it!

[GrooveWindow]

 

This is not an art gallery, but a market.

 

Just stopping by to give props to a line I personally found brilliant.

[Forgot_My_Account]

Why do you keep on pressing on art side? I'm talking about games that you pay for. Art or not, you PAY for it. A company made it, you PAY for it. That ends the discussion here for me and other discussing it as an art, has no sense in this context.

 

A game that you paid for is a product. By what it is, it's something similar to a movie or a book (e-book). If a company says you buy a license or whatever, that's just a sneaky way for them to make you feel like you don't own it. But you're a consumer, and it's a product you're going to consume (in a sense of using it). It's not a piece of food to have an expiration date easy to define.

There is NO problem with dividing it into inanimate or animate object. Movies and books (e-books) don't have an expiration date and it's not necessary to wonder if they have. A game can remain up and running even after many years. It all depends on having your data and software running and a right equipment. In this point of view, a game cannot ever expire if you have right conditions to run it.

 

A game cannot really have a planned obsolescence. It can only be killed by making the essential data inaccessible. It's not a piece of hardware only. When a game comes out, no one (sane) expects the hardware/software needed to run it suddenly breaking apart exactly after 4/5 years (Well, that's it! We had our fun, but it expired!). A game can be only artificially killed/ taken away form the users by making it online only and denying access to it.

 

So, if a company makes a game that they plan to kill later, there should be a clear information within marketing/informative materials for it or at least in the moment of purchase: "This game will expire after 4 years because we decided so. Have fun till you can!" And very few people would buy it!

 

I could take on the market angle, but it's far more interesting taking the art angle. After all, when you think about the things you buy, you rarely keep them for more then 10 years - while art is pretty much considered timeless. But my point was that without maintenance it will be ruined, and even with it - it will eventually be ruined anyway.

Do this for an experiment: Take a high end external HD drive, and load onto it an entire library. Let it sit for about 12-15 years. When you plug it back to your computer, you'll find that some or all of the data is corrupted. Now, what's the lesson here? That you need maintenance, even if it's minimal and pretty much done for you, to keep something running/existing.

So the entire art/products/food thing isn't really relevant. In our context, everything dies without maintenance, and once that maintenance is on the company's side - of course they're going to pull it once it's no longer profitable.

 

Now, I'm not saying that it's fair to the consumer - I'm saying that it can't really be avoided. Because data degrades, you can't really stop any company from just shutting down the servers. It's just expediting the nature of things, which I'm not really for but I can see the reasoning behind it.

And yes, you've got the whole expiration date thing figured out! When companies are obliged to put "WE WILL KILL THIS GAME IN 4 YEARS" on the box, no one will buy it. That's the whole point of informing the customer of bad business practices - even if you can't ban them, you can put a spotlight on them. When a company sees that that practice is no longer profitable, they'll cease doing it - and isn't that what we're hoping to achieve?

[Mrekalis]

This is kind of a general point, but people need to understand that art is a thing you buy. It doesn't neccesarily need to be considered a product, but it is still subject to demand and price issues. Even classic works of art were not immune to this. Look up any patron of the arts from the Medieval and Renaissance age and you'll find that almost all of them were shady, greedy assholes who only cared about art because it made them look more cultured. But without said patrons, many historical artists would have either starved or moved into a more mundane line of work.

 

Art also gets destroyed all the time. Constantly, even. Its sometimes due to stupidity but often its just due to the fact that nobody can keep up with all of it. Preservation takes a tremendous amount of resources and a seriously dedicated workforce. The vast majority of artwork human culture has ever produced is lost. In general, once you start to take into account the sheer scale of how much art humans produce the idea of preserving all or even a fraction of it is nothing short of ludicrous.

 

I get it. It sucks that we have to lose things that people care about. If things were easier I'd have no disagreement with the idea that art needs to be preserved at all costs. But as it stands in the present day I think everyone needs to stop and consider how impossible that demand is. Also, consider that the destruction of art after its novelty has worn off is pretty much the general outlook the average person has on art. Its always been like that. The stuff people have preserved only ended up like that for very specific reasons or in the case of extreme luck. To some extent I'd go as far to say that the idea of universal preservation of art is an entirely modern viewpoint.

 

Yeah, its shitty for a corporation to just toss something in the bin when they're done with it. Bad business? Yes. Short-sighted? Yes. Unneccesary? Absolutely. Grand historical tragedy? Ehhhhhh, no. Unless you factor it into the greater human tragedy of what we lose in the ceaseless march of industry and politics, but that's kind of stretching it. I think people are trying to analyze what is ultimately an existential problem in purely empirical ways.

[Ross Scott]

The problem with that example is that's also very easy to circumvent. Whenever you want to publish an always-online game, just publish it under some dummy company which can declare bankruptcy at any time and sell the franchise to the parent company.

Well that would be a workaround, although you would think the subsidiary would inherit the debts owed by the child company. Regardless, I'm sure lawmakers could come up with something more bulletproof if the incentive was there to fix it by those with influence.

 

After thinking this through, maybe we need to be more mature about it. Movies and paintings disappear all of the time. That's the nature of some forms of art - it's up to the creator to determine its fate. Sometimes that doesn't fit our needs or is fair, but after all, it's not our vision we're talking about - it's the creator's. And if the creator is a douche, well, we're at fault because we chose to participate in and fuel that douche's ambitions.

The destruction of art is used traditionally as the final act of creating art. Now it's just used as a means to save money. But still, you can't ban a practice that might be legitimate because some people abuse it. But you do need to counteract it with another law.

See I don't accept this at all and see it as a false comparison. An obscure game becoming extinct because of lack of attention or interest, that's a natural death. Sometimes it's a tragedy, sometimes its value is quite questionable. That lies in due dilegence of the consumers or players, not on the creator. They created the game, then released it. I don't see any further responsibilities being required of them.

 

What I'm talking about is night and day compared to that. It was killed BY DESIGN. So from Day 1 it was on life support with no backup plan whatsoever. It's a deliberate death that nobody involved wanted. The players sure as hell don't want this, the developers don't, and management almost certainly doesn't care in the first place. It's something that shouldn't be happening. In these cases, the company is FORCING the responsibility to keep it alive on themselves, then is utterly negligent. You say "some people abuse it", the VAST MAJORITY of games with online-only requirements go down this way. It's the standard, not the exception.

 

If you say games are an experience, like dining, can you really blame them for having an expiration date? If you order a dish at a restaurant and eat it bit by bit for a week - do you really expect it to stay the same? It needs some maintenance for you to have a consistent experience, and in the end, it'll still go bad. Shit dies and you can't blame anyone for it. That's the way the world works.

I think this is a completely disengenous example that borders on trolling. Food rots naturally. Games don't die naturally, they have to be specifically designed that way AND be enforced to prevent them from being restored (afterall, the company could just release the server software as-is). It's deliberate as can be. The comparison should be made to books, music, and movies. We're still hearing about The Odyssey thousands of years after the fact because it's a good story worth hearing. Games are akin to this, not fruit. I'm not aware of any parallel to this in media outside of performance art (which are often designed to shock anyway).

 

Now, I'm against planned obsolescence, but I cannot deny that it's sometimes used for good

I'm not aware of any good use of this practice, maybe you know one I haven't thought of. Food doesn't really qualify, we don't design food to spoil, it happens naturally.

 

Well, that's kind of my point with putting "Gamer" in quotation marks. This is a phrase that's been repeated a lot, but just the act of playing games doesn't really make you part of a unified culture. I think the same thing applies to movies and books as well. There's a very specific stereotype that comes to mind when you describe someone as a Literary Type or a Film Snob. The people who get into the minutae of the medium and seem to be more interested in timelines, important dates and big people in the industry than what said industry actually seems to produce. Gaming is kind of the same. No major outlet ever shuts up about how far graphics have come the same way I occasionally sit through an art student lecturing me about pigments and paint-bases.

 

That's not to say that stuff isn't interesting, I actually read about those sorts of things a lot on my own time. The point is more that the culture is overwhelming focused more on the production than the product. If movies and literature are any indication then this might just be a universal aspect of the way people consume media. In this particular issue, all the money and descision-making power is tied to the prople who only seem to care about production. The product itself is tantamount to trash after the novelty wears off. I see this so much that I've gone way past the point of being shocked and now its just unfathomably alien to me.

Yeah I get what you're saying now, people who play games aren't exactly a collective. I dislike that mentality of focusing on something because it's new as opposed to trying to see if it has some lasting merit, it feels very hollow. Game Dungeon is absolutely devoted to games that manage to retain something worth looking at (good or bad) even after time has passed.

 

I get it. It sucks that we have to lose things that people care about. If things were easier I'd have no disagreement with the idea that art needs to be preserved at all costs. But as it stands in the present day I think everyone needs to stop and consider how impossible that demand is. Also, consider that the destruction of art after its novelty has worn off is pretty much the general outlook the average person has on art. Its always been like that. The stuff people have preserved only ended up like that for very specific reasons or in the case of extreme luck. To some extent I'd go as far to say that the idea of universal preservation of art is an entirely modern viewpoint.

Guys, I think you're obfuscating the real distinction here: This is being destroyed BY DESIGN. If a painting is destroyed, it's due to lack of diligence, or an accident. It's not because the painter secretly built in a timed explosive upon its creation. The average person is absolutely powerless to prevent it. I am not advocating everything needs to be preserved, that's not really practical. I'm saying we shouldn't be designing art for profit that is ARTIFICIALLY destined for death. To me that's all the difference in the world. Battleforge obviously had a devote fanbase wanting (and still wanting) to play it and now it's dead because a company that was paid money deliberately killed it. Comparing that to a game that gets lost to time and people forget about isn't the same thing at all.

 

Yeah, its shitty for a corporation to just toss something in the bin when they're done with it. Bad business? Yes. Short-sighted? Yes. Unneccesary? Absolutely. Grand historical tragedy? Ehhhhhh, no. Unless you factor it into the greater human tragedy of what we lose in the ceaseless march of industry and politics, but that's kind of stretching it. I think people are trying to analyze what is ultimately an existential problem in purely empirical ways.

I was just trying to keep this contained to gaming. There are much larger issues going on in the world of course, but I can't think of one in the realm of gaming. I mean you say an existential problem, but this literally didn't use to exist. If you go back far enough, videogames were never made to die intentionally. This is not a necessary state of things tied to the existence of man. I think existentialism only comes in where if you realize that if we're allowing this to happen, other safeguards in society must be failing prior this.

[Forgot_My_Account]

See I don't accept this at all and see it as a false comparison. An obscure game becoming extinct because of lack of attention or interest, that's a natural death. Sometimes it's a tragedy, sometimes its value is quite questionable. That lies in due dilegence of the consumers or players, not on the creator. They created the game, then released it. I don't see any further responsibilities being required of them.

 

What I'm talking about is night and day compared to that. It was killed BY DESIGN. So from Day 1 it was on life support with no backup plan whatsoever. It's a deliberate death that nobody involved wanted. The players sure as hell don't want this, the developers don't, and management almost certainly doesn't care in the first place. It's something that shouldn't be happening. In these cases, the company is FORCING the responsibility to keep it alive on themselves, then is utterly negligent. You say "some people abuse it", the VAST MAJORITY of games with online-only requirements go down this way. It's the standard, not the exception.

First of all, "The Company" DOES want old games to die. From a business perspective, it makes absolute and total sense - planned obsolescence basically forces the customer to buy the same product again, even if you haven't improved upon it or even damaged it (to a reasonable degree). Have you watched Blade Runner? That's the whole premise of the Replicants - they're designed to be replaced so the corporation will continue making profits without true innovation. When you think about it, EA is a lot like that, releasing the same games over and over and people are compelled to buy the next iteration of the same game, but I'm digressing here.

So, no one is actually forcing anyone to keep a game alive. The creator, whether it was with or without his conscious consent, knew this game was going to die and designed it so. You can't just dump paywalls everywhere, you have to design around it - so in many cases, it's clear whenever a game is just designed to be dropped whenever no longer profitable.

Above all, I think the most obvious example is Peter Molyneux's Curiosity. It was designed to have a definite end (which was defined by whenever Peter Molyneux wanted it to end) and micro transactions. It was very simplistic, but it was designed to die by its creator with the promise of a prize at the end. Everyone involved wanted that game to die, and so it has.

 

Also, I'm not saying you're wrong - it's just that I avoid online only games, so I don't really know how much it's abused. I'll take your word on it that the majority of online only games are designed to die - and I agree with you that it's a bad direction for the industry to head in. I'm also saying it can't really banned by laws, but we can use the knowledge we have to inform everyone, from the casual to the hardcore, of those bad business practices to discourage them from supporting it. I've said I'm not for planned obsolescence, but I know it just can't be banned.

 

I think this is a completely disengenous example that borders on trolling. Food rots naturally. Games don't die naturally, they have to be specifically designed that way AND be enforced to prevent them from being restored (afterall, the company could just release the server software as-is). It's deliberate as can be. The comparison should be made to books, music, and movies. We're still hearing about The Odyssey thousands of years after the fact because it's a good story worth hearing. Games are akin to this, not fruit. I'm not aware of any parallel to this in media outside of performance art (which are often designed to shock anyway).

I took the most extreme example, food, because it's something we can all agree upon without delving into a discussion within a discussion. But let's take look at the your example, which took massive amounts of dedication to survive - The Odyssey, for which the original manuscript is lost (or more likely, turned to dust), and was copied hundred of times over the course of almost 3 millennia. I can give you a dozen examples from the same period, even the same country - the writings of Socrates - which have not been preserved at all but were considered extremely important, and all we have to know that they've existed are the writings of his student, Plato.

Also, there's biodegradable art (literally the first link on Google), which you don't hear much about because it basically exists momentarily and you're either there to see it or it's irrelevant. We've actually had someone in uni do something like this, he hung a bunch of Doritos from the ceiling and begged people not to eat them until he did his presentation. Point is, it's stupid, transient and can't be sold - that's why you don't hear much about it.

 

I hope that proved that I'm not a troll and actual thought is going into my words, I'm not just trying to annoy everyone.

 

Now, I'm against planned obsolescence, but I cannot deny that it's sometimes used for good

I'm not aware of any good use of this practice, maybe you know one I haven't thought of. Food doesn't really qualify, we don't design food to spoil, it happens naturally.

Well, there's cars. Do you know all of those lead-fueled death machines of the past? They were basically all killed (stopped manufacturing replacement parts and providing maintenance) again and again after the invention of seatbelts, airbags, ABS, urea-injection etc. But to be honest, it's also abused when every year a new model comes out for the same car with tiny cosmetic adjustments, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.

[Ross Scott]

First of all, "The Company" DOES want old games to die. From a business perspective, it makes absolute and total sense - planned obsolescence basically forces the customer to buy the same product again, even if you haven't improved upon it or even damaged it (to a reasonable degree).

See, again, I don't think this argument holds up. When Battleforge died, EA had NOTHING to fill in the gap. They cancelled another RTS they were working on and I'm not aware of one they've created since. I mean this is a line I left out of the review, but we don't even know if Battleforge was still making a profit or not. It certainly had a lot of die hard fans when they killed it. All we know is it wasn't making ENORMOUS profits, which is typically how EA's management mentality works. Even then, I don't think this justifies the practice. It would be like destroying all copies of 1987 Robocop because 2014 Robocop had been released. Each game is a unique artistic experience, not something like a retooled screwdriver. In this case, instead of trying to maintain a smaller, but loyal demographic, EA was basically herding its RTS fans towards their competition, away from them.

 

Above all, I think the most obvious example is Peter Molyneux's Curiosity. It was designed to have a definite end (which was defined by whenever Peter Molyneux wanted it to end) and micro transactions. It was very simplistic, but it was designed to die by its creator with the promise of a prize at the end. Everyone involved wanted that game to die, and so it has.

Cases like these are extremely rare and I consider them more performance art pieces rather than a common practice. I'd be willing to take a bet that 99% of developers who put time into a game that had been killed would want future people to be able to see their work if they wanted to.

 

We've actually had someone in uni do something like this, he hung a bunch of Doritos from the ceiling and begged people not to eat them until he did his presentation. Point is, it's stupid, transient and can't be sold - that's why you don't hear much about it.

Again, this is basically performance art. There was no artistic vision in making Battleforge (or the vast majority of games) die. If it had still been raking in enormous profits, they would never have killed it. Sorry for the troll accusation, it just felt you were conflating something dying off naturally with forcibly destroying something. In the case of games, that's a completely false analogy and it feels like an unsupported rationalization for a practice that just shouldn't be happening. I feel like you've been making a strawman argument by trying to merge the two concepts.

 

Well, there's cars. Do you know all of those lead-fueled death machines of the past? They were basically all killed (stopped manufacturing replacement parts and providing maintenance) again and again after the invention of seatbelts, airbags, ABS, urea-injection etc. But to be honest, it's also abused when every year a new model comes out for the same car with tiny cosmetic adjustments, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.

But as you've described it, that's not planned obsolescence, that's cycling out an inferior product. Again, this feels like a strawman argument, it's trying to equate two different concepts. If EA had simply retired Battleforge, but old players could continue playing it, I never would have made this video.

[Forgot_My_Account]

See, again, I don't think this argument holds up. When Battleforge died, EA had NOTHING to fill in the gap. They cancelled another RTS they were working on and I'm not aware of one they've created since. I mean this is a line I left out of the review, but we don't even know if Battleforge was still making a profit or not.

I'm going to bet that it didn't make enough to keep it running, or at the very was projected to lose money. Either way, EA would have made a sequel or any other supplement to fill in the gap if it were successful enough, just like NfS World - It was killed just in time for NfS 2015. But due to the model of planned obsolescence, it was meant to die from the get go, even if they botched things and didn't have a replacement.

But it doesn't really matter. We all agree that prematurely killing games is bad, it's just that I don't think that it can be outlawed, and I'm opting for the easier solution which may have an easier integration in the law - expiration dates and informing the public. In the short term, it'll focus technical people on which games to save. In the long term, I'm hoping it'll just discourage companies from doing it.

 

Again, this is basically performance art.

I'm not an art snob myself, but I think the difference between performance art and whatever the Doritos thing was is that performance art is transient because the entire art is in the act of doing it. With the other thing, you create a transient product which stands by its own. That's why I also talked about food as art before - I was thinking about gourmet dinners and the like.

By creating a game that's transient but not directly interfering with it as it runs, I don't think it qualifies as performance art.

 

Well, there's cars. Do you know all of those lead-fueled death machines of the past? They were basically all killed (stopped manufacturing replacement parts and providing maintenance) again and again after the invention of seatbelts, airbags, ABS, urea-injection etc. But to be honest, it's also abused when every year a new model comes out for the same car with tiny cosmetic adjustments, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.

But as you've described it, that's not planned obsolescence, that's cycling out an inferior product. Again, this feels like a strawman argument, it's trying to equate two different concepts. If EA had simply retired Battleforge, but old players could continue playing it, I never would have made this video.

I might have described it inaccurately. Most of those inventions were actually known and integrated into certain cars as a safety measure, but weren't marketed to mainstream customers mainly because of their cost. So most cars in the time between said inventions and widespread integration were a case of planned obsolescence.

[Mrekalis]

Guys, I think you're obfuscating the real distinction here: This is being destroyed BY DESIGN. If a painting is destroyed, it's due to lack of diligence, or an accident. It's not because the painter secretly built in a timed explosive upon its creation. The average person is absolutely powerless to prevent it. I am not advocating everything needs to be preserved, that's not really practical. I'm saying we shouldn't be designing art for profit that is ARTIFICIALLY destined for death. To me that's all the difference in the world. Battleforge obviously had a devote fanbase wanting (and still wanting) to play it and now it's dead because a company that was paid money deliberately killed it. Comparing that to a game that gets lost to time and people forget about isn't the same thing at all.

 

My point is more that art is sort of made to be disposable. In this case its just particularly effective because of how electronic media works. I've almost never heard of a company that bothers supporting any kind of product after they're decided to discontinue it except for cases where they were legally roped into it. With a book or a painting the damn thing won't disintegrate if you take care of it but for online-only stuff is obviously wrecked once the server is taken offline. My point is I don't think companies see it any different from a regular product.

 

The real question here is why the hell online-only games are being sold. People will buy anything, but I'm not sure I see the advantage that a corporation gets from designing an online-only game like this. Piracy is usually what's pointed to but I have to wonder if shelling out to run the servers and paying a staff to keep the game in order on their end really offsets the predicted losses a game like that would take from piracy. The market is usually very lazy, so when you see businesses going out of their way to do something way more complicated usually there's some kind of serious motivation behind it.

 

Psychology buffs like to claim that business types are power-obssessed sociopaths and the online-only stuff appeals inherently to that mindset. Possibly, but I don't think the people in charge care enough about their products to really understand what their minions on the ground are doing. I highly doubt they pay enough attention to their fanbases to lord over their control of a product like that. These are people who mainly care about numbers, and what improves their numbers and detriments their competitors' numbers.

 

Unless I'm missing some huge advantage here I'd go as far to say that online-only games are some kind of industry trend more than any kind of specially engineered marketing tactic. Someone big in the industry started talking about it and everyone tried to cash in on it despite having no real motivation. "This was successful for the other guy and I hope its successful for me." Does anyone know who the first big company to start shouting about this was? I mean the ones who started trying to market it, not just the ones who started quietly using it and pretending nothing had changed.

[Ross Scott]

I'm going to bet that it didn't make enough to keep it running, or at the very was projected to lose money. Either way, EA would have made a sequel or any other supplement to fill in the gap if it were successful enough, just like NfS World - It was killed just in time for NfS 2015. But due to the model of planned obsolescence, it was meant to die from the get go, even if they botched things and didn't have a replacement.

But it doesn't really matter. We all agree that prematurely killing games is bad, it's just that I don't think that it can be outlawed, and I'm opting for the easier solution which may have an easier integration in the law - expiration dates and informing the public. In the short term, it'll focus technical people on which games to save. In the long term, I'm hoping it'll just discourage companies from doing it.

I don't see this as any more effective or less impossible than simply making a law that holds the company financially liable for discontinuing a product that people have paid for. I mean here are the issues I see with what you're advocating:

 

1. (except for the rare cases like Molyneux's game) No company is going to ADMIT they intend on shutting the server down. On the contrary, if it's making LOTS of money, they have incentive to keep it going, not kill it. The company can't predict exactly how successful it will be, thus, they can't predict its lifespan. Look at Tabula Rasa or Hellgate London. Each of those only made it 1.5 years before it was shut down.

 

2. We're already doing this in a way, and it's clearly not effective. All these games (for ones that were sold in retail anyway) say on the box "this game requires an online connection." Since this practice is only INCREASING, that's not enough.

 

3. Gamers have demonstrated they're willing to take abuse after abuse if the game they're playing is good enough. What if, against odds, your labeling law was passed and all online-only games state "This game is only guaranteed to function for 1.5 years" on the box, then gamers STILL buy it at about the same rate they do now? It would legitimize this practice, which again, is a nightmare scenario for me.

 

Consumer laws are not unheard of. If the industry recognizes a practice is harmful enough, laws can be made to prevent it. While I don't see mandatory refunds as the only option, I believe there needs to be SOMETHING to give games a fighting chance to survive. I would even consider something as nebulous as

 

"company is required to make a 'best effort' to allow the game to run without their servers in the event they shut them down, or face anti-consumer charges and pay corresponding fines"

 

You might see that as an excuse to worm out of it, but something like that would be a MASSIVE improvement to what we have now. They could release partial source code, a patched client, the point is, they would be required to do SOMETHING. The way it stands now, they not only kill the game outright, but literally do NOTHING to try and make sure paying customers can still use the product. Now every company will have a different definition of "best effort", but I think the law can be pretty clear that doing NOTHING is not a "best effort".

 

I might have described it inaccurately. Most of those inventions were actually known and integrated into certain cars as a safety measure, but weren't marketed to mainstream customers mainly because of their cost. So most cars in the time between said inventions and widespread integration were a case of planned obsolescence.

Again, that's not planned obsolescence, that's just phasing the product out. If you make a product you know you're going to discontinue, that has nothing to do necessarily with planned obsolescence. Look at videocards or CPUs. If I buy a computer parts that's 5 years old, the company probably isn't manufacturing those anymore, they've been phased out as they're now making more powerful ones. This doesn't mean the part I buy is DESIGNED TO DIE. I could buy that part and it could serve me as advertised for 30 years. Planned obsolescence would be if the car or computer part was specifically engineered so that it would fall apart after 5 years, without fail. Printers are a good example of this. All the parts could be in perfect working order, but the software will activate a killswitch after x years, so that the printer will no longer work and you're forced to buy a new one. You may have some confusion on terms. "Planned obsolescence" does NOT mean a product is outdated or been replaced by newer ones (that can be a side effect of planned obsolescence, but it's not the definition). It means it was designed to die after a certain period of time and weakened artificially.

 

Psychology buffs like to claim that business types are power-obssessed sociopaths and the online-only stuff appeals inherently to that mindset. Possibly, but I don't think the people in charge care enough about their products to really understand what their minions on the ground are doing. I highly doubt they pay enough attention to their fanbases to lord over their control of a product like that. These are people who mainly care about numbers, and what improves their numbers and detriments their competitors' numbers.

Ha, I would argue BOTH are true. The tendencies are sociopathic AND they don't know how / care they're affecting people on the ground. Like you said, they don't care about the product. That's why ideally the noise on this practice would be so loud even management would hear it, but I don't think that's going to be the case.

 

Unless I'm missing some huge advantage here I'd go as far to say that online-only games are some kind of industry trend more than any kind of specially engineered marketing tactic. Someone big in the industry started talking about it and everyone tried to cash in on it despite having no real motivation. "This was successful for the other guy and I hope its successful for me." Does anyone know who the first big company to start shouting about this was? I mean the ones who started trying to market it, not just the ones who started quietly using it and pretending nothing had changed.

Online-only games CAN stop piracy dead in their tracks if done right. I'm pretty sure Battleforge had a 0% piracy rate, that's a claim not many companies can make. They can also reduce hacking and allow control of the economy with stores or auction houses, that sort of thing. As for first BIG successes with online-only, it varies. I could be off, but here are some I know of:

 

First big MMO to use online only: Everquest 1999, though World of Warcraft 2004 became much, much bigger.

First big non-subscription multiplayer game to require a central server: Halo on Xbox, 2001

First big single-player game to (artificially) require an online connection: Half-Life 2, 2004

First big single-player game to (artificially) require an always-online connection: Assassin's Creed 2, 2009

First big online-only game to make large use of microtransactions: Farmville, 2009

First big single-player game to REALLY require online-only connection: Diablo 3, 2011

 

I would also give an honorable mention to Modern Warfare 2 since I heard it bucked the trend of previous games in requiring a central server as opposed to allowing private ones. These aren't the first games to execute this stuff, but they are the big ones I'm aware of.

[Forgot_My_Account]

The difference between "This game is expected to die on dd/mm/yyyy (but it might live on)" and "This game requires an online connection" is that we have a time frame. We have a guarantee and we can hold the company for liability. And we can have industry standards - the same way people don't shell out $60 for a 4 hour game, people will be reluctant to buy anything, whether it be the game or microtransactions for a game that'll disappear in 1.5 years. That way, short-lived games will also be phased out, because they would become non-profitable.

I think that even 4 years is an outrageously short time. My hope is that this practice be eradicated bit by bit, or that we'll at least have games that run for a decade. That's enough time for reverse engineering.

 

Actually, your version is also kind of good. I'm guessing it can be worded into a lengthy law in which the game doesn't rely on any external data or modules to run, provided that the company still has the source code. But they can half-ass it, and if the game was sold to it by another company and some of the assets were lost in the process, we're screwed - though in that case, we may be screwed either way.

Anyway, while I'm against forcing a company to do something against its business model (because they'll do it the worst possible way and leave everyone with a bad taste in their mouth), I think that it's a good compromise if you think that this practice cannot be eliminated.

 

Again, that's not planned obsolescence, that's just phasing the product out.

Planned obsolescence isn't just sabotaging a product so it'll fail after a certain time. It can also be leaving out an integral component or feature for future updates. All of the examples I know of are from the army, so it's an issue talking about them - but the business model is this:

(1) Create a good product.

(2) Lobotomize it while retaining core functionality.

(3) Restore a part of the original functionality.

(4) Release new versions in a regular interval and create dependence.

You make your old product inferior, or obsolete, by forethought - thus planned obsolescence. In the car industry, this was used to widely integrate safety features (calling them "luxury items" in the beginning) even before it was required by law because of consumer dependence.

[Jeb_CC]

I finally got around to watching this. Finally.

And I'd have to say Ross, you've struck me with FEAR. XD Cause one day... I'm going to want to play Guild Wars for that sense of nostalgia, to find it just doesn't work. A game that runs SOLELY on the internet. However, Guild Wars isn't owned by EA so that's a big plus. Buuut... Guild Wars 2 is a thing and has been out for some time now. I'm just waiting for the day where the devs go; "Okay! You've had your fun. Everyone migrate to Guild Wars 2, you nostalgic freaks." Just how the awful economy works I guess.

 

Thankfully I don't play enough games of EA to find myself in any trouble. I do play The Sims 3 quite frequently, but HA, sucked in EA, it's pure single-player and you don't need an internet connection to play it. Half of me wants EA to just make a Multiplayer Sims game that WORKS. But the other half says; "That's a bad idea." because I know it's going to be a really bad game now that it's made by a new team.

[Ross Scott]

The difference between "This game is expected to die on dd/mm/yyyy (but it might live on)" and "This game requires an online connection" is that we have a time frame. We have a guarantee and we can hold the company for liability. And we can have industry standards - the same way people don't shell out $60 for a 4 hour game, people will be reluctant to buy anything, whether it be the game or microtransactions for a game that'll disappear in 1.5 years. That way, short-lived games will also be phased out, because they would become non-profitable.

I think that even 4 years is an outrageously short time. My hope is that this practice be eradicated bit by bit, or that we'll at least have games that run for a decade. That's enough time for reverse engineering.

Well like I said on the video, I know I'm on the extremist end. I think killing any game intentionally is unacceptable. I see a longer lifespan as just a stay of execution. Besides, that only allows reverse engineering if there's enough programming masterminds interested in the game to do so. It does nothing for less-popular ones. I think anyone who wants to keep some sort of media preserved should at least have the opportunity to do so. I mean hell, I have couple soundtracks I'm not sure many others on the planet have. That's because there wasn't a parent company intentionally corrupting the music file that I saved after a length of time.

 

Actually, your version is also kind of good. I'm guessing it can be worded into a lengthy law in which the game doesn't rely on any external data or modules to run, provided that the company still has the source code. But they can half-ass it, and if the game was sold to it by another company and some of the assets were lost in the process, we're screwed - though in that case, we may be screwed either way.

Anyway, while I'm against forcing a company to do something against its business model (because they'll do it the worst possible way and leave everyone with a bad taste in their mouth), I think that it's a good compromise if you think that this practice cannot be eliminated.

I would argue it's very debatable if it's against their business model or even hurts profits. Having old games still in play can keep a franchise relevant and still profits. Even for the games that are meant to be directly replaced, they could just withdraw support and still not outright kill the game. So if a game goes from requiring a central server with lots of social media features / full support to having only private servers with no official support at all, the game has arguably lost value. But they can KEEP SELLING IT and potentially draw people towards the latest game in the franchise which has full support. I guarantee you whatever they're doing EA is making NO money on Battleforge currently.

 

Planned obsolescence isn't just sabotaging a product so it'll fail after a certain time. It can also be leaving out an integral component or feature for future updates.

We're just arguing semantics now. For my purposes, planned obsolescence has a very specific meaning, which is that is artificially designed to no longer function properly after a certain length of time. This aspect you're mentioning is sort of a subset of that, where it's simply DIFFICULT to use the product in the future or it's less relevant. For sake of clarification, I'm referring to situations where it is IMPOSSIBLE to use. Betamax tapes and 8-track players are now obsolete. It's still POSSIBLE to use them though if you can hunt them down and get them working. Maybe they're not obsolete for your purposes, like if there's a specific movie or music on that format that you can't obtain in another way. When I'm arguing against planned obsolescence, I'm talking about situations where it is impossible to keep them going, by design, and an artificial one at that. I hope that clears up any confusion.

 

And I'd have to say Ross, you've struck me with FEAR

Good, it's a fool's errand on my part trying to raise awareness, but I at least want SOME people to realize what's at the end of the rainbow of online-only games. As for Guild Wars, you're probably safe since I think that game would have the "critical mass" to get an emulator functioning if it died. As for The Sims, you're probably aware that EA has had and killed The Sims Online also.

[scottmitting]

If a painting is destroyed, it's due to lack of diligence, or an accident. It's not because the painter secretly built in a timed explosive upon its creation.

 

OMG - That would be a brilliant concept for a new work of art... one that destroys itself after a set amount of time as a protest for planned obsolescence. Be a pretty risky piece, since you're likely to upset whoever paid for it, if it's displayed in a manner to really make it a true piece of protest art.

[Binky The Rabbit]

^That I'd like to read in a newspaper.