reverendjoe

So, hey, funny thing, Ross brings up Destiny 2 in the video, talking about the difficulty of companies selling consumers on the "your game is a limited time service" model. And today, I start up steam, and what's the first thing to pop up in the news? Destiny 2. And it's going to be free to play. And you know what that means. So, yeah, even assuming best case scenario, where games are treated as goods by the law, AND the courts are willing and able to enforce said laws consistently, you're going to be seeing even more of this: AAA titles using the same F2P financed by microtransactions model as Android garbage. Hell, we're going to be seeing a lot more of this in any case. It's a perfect setup for the game publishers: they stand to make even more money off of microtransactions than they would with a one-time game sale, and because they're not actually selling the game itself, they get to say it's not a good. You can still argue the stuff you buy with the microtransactions is a good, but stuff like that gets really woolly, especially when the microtransaction buys you in-game currency, for example. It's gonna be a lot harder to argue stuff like that in court, especially when the judge barely knows what a game is to begin with. Oh, and a bonus: because people aren't paying for the game itself, this will encourage them to think of the game as more ephemeral, not as a good they bought, a tangible thing, but as more of a... I don't know what, exactly. A service? A free program you downloaded? Whatever it is, it's not something people will think of as owning, or having ownership rights to.

I watched a couple of my friends play Death Road to Canada, hooked up to a TV, in a bar. It was pretty fun to watch while I was sitting in a bar getting drunk, but novelty factor aside it didn't look like much fun to play. And about the intro, Ross, you shouldn't sweat it. It's a five second intro on a video that's almost never less than fifteen minutes long. I think it would take most people more time to try to skip it than to just let it play.

Hey, Ross, when you were talking about what the future will look like -- give Player Piano a read if you haven't already. The ending is too hopeful, in my opinion, because Kurt Vonnegut didn't want to give up on the human spirit, but it gives a good picture of how even the best case scenario, in a situation of total automation like this, can be pretty messed up.