Judging by the descriptions given by another user these “between track” drives are A. Part of the race and removing actual time on the actual tracks, and B. Not optional. Those things together make for some seriously bad game design.

Agree, but let’s not dilute the meaning of “gaslighting”. That word has a VERY specific definition and it had been getting used in inappropriate contexts so much that that very specific and necessary definition is being lost. It refers to a specific abusive behavior pattern which needs a good and concrete word to communicate it. My teen stepdaughter had it in her head that us educating her on the world was “gaslighting”, which is dangerous because she had the “gaslighting bad” reaction to things that were not gaslighting, and it is not limited to her. There is a concerted effort on the part of some political groups to break and weaponize the definitions of things like gaslighting and manipulation, we need to work to make sure it is not successful.

Also, under US law, ignorance is not a defense in both civil and criminal court. It does not matter if you did not know it was illegal, it does not matter if you did not know it was happening, if you provide an avenue and forum for illegal activity you are culpable at minimum. The corporate shield will prevent any criminal charges against individuals, unfortunately, but the civil liability is pretty evident. It occurred on their platform which means that they did not take sufficient steps to prevent or discourage the practice in the first place. It should not have been a thing that was present to report or react to in the first place. It falls into the same vein as doing background checks and personality evaluations on prospective teachers and daycare workers. Doing 0 checks to validate that these people are not a danger and then claiming ignorance when they touch children in the broom closet is a nonstarter too.

That is interesting and a bit anarcho, and I will not say I disagree, but I am of two minds given my distinct role on both sides of the line. We have made some of our code public, but there are privacy and security concerns given we are handling people’s personal data and private artwork, so exposing the whole codebase exposes potential security flaws, so keeping parts closed source makes sense. Balancing people’s privacy has to be a consideration as well when dealing with offering services.

Just wanting to make sure I understand your position, only open source code can be ethical?

I get what you are sayin, but it was not an advertisement since I am acting as a citizen, not an employee. I wanted to actually share that I was proud of my bosses for doing things the way they should. If we don’t share the ones that behave right, they will all vanish because it is not as profitable to behave right as it is to abuse customers and employees. I would encourage anyone who works somewhere that acts with honor and respect to share it and offer proof of why it is true. Laude the laudable, ya know? We do a good job of calling out the pieces of shit, but not for offering alternatives.

Edit: why is it wrong to laude a company I work for because they are ethical and doing business how it should be done? If we do not share the good companies as alternatives how will we ensure that they stick around?

I am actually very proud that the company I work for literally does not tick a single box.

www.GridMarkets.com

We are a cloud infrastructure company that caters to animation and visual effects artists. We sponsor people’s passion projects. Everything is a prepay model that does not have any minimums and actually let’s you zero your account. No advertising, no data harvesting (I can say that with confidence as I would be the person doing it if it were happening and I don’t). Genuine altruism and genuine customer centric development. And the culture is not toxic in the slightest. The owners always make sure we are all paid before taking a dime and never take more than they pay the rest of us. It is seriously such a good company.

They also do compute for computational chemistry, prosumer AI platforming (providing access to ComfyUI, A1111, etc, not actually building AIs or stealing anyone’s data), and we can handle just about anything else.

If anyone out there has need for compute power for anything and want to work with a company that actually gives a shit, reach out. Especially if it is in a vertical space we already provide services in.

I picked up Monster Train 2 and I am so happy with it.

At what point in the purchase cycle is it known that they won’t? Because the right reserved in a EULA is not a guarantee of occurrence, so how does one make a decision when or when not to purchase?

Also, when single player games are being forced to be always online and are being affected, there is a real problem. If there is no valid tangible benefit to the player for a game to be online, and require the online component to play the game, it should be illegal.

I know I could find examples, but I am exhausted after coding all day on one thorny problem, so I am just going to make educated guesses from what I know of US history. I would bet that the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore received National Landmark status before the general 50 year mark. I would hazard that the presidential monuments on DC did as well.

That said, this was an exercise in examples of things that need to be protected as part of history. Works of art have a much lower bar than national landmarks for this. Games that are transformative or innovative in a way that we still feel today, or games that are massive parts of the cultural zeitgeist for a period definitely deserve preservation. Rogue, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy VII, Super Mario Brothers, Zork, etc. The reason this is such a big deal is that it might be hard to measure in a moment what is or is not going to have that long reaching impact. Imagine you are an art historian in 30 years and you are doing a paper on the growth and history of game mechanics. How are you going to research that. If you were doing one on painting and how techniques grow over time, you go look at the paintings, study them. The game paper will have no source material to study to draw new conclusions or find previously unnoticed connections if 70+% of the source media disappears in the next 10 years.

In this case, it is a prohibition on sunsetting a game without providing the means for purchasers to continue playing without your support. They are taking an action in their sunsetting decision, this is a prohibition on one choice made in that process.

But people are forced by circumstances to agree. I have to use Slack for my job. I cannot keep my job if I do not agree, thus, I am forced to agree.

This is what I mean by the current definitions are no longer sufficient to cover the modern world.

The general minimum for a National Landmark is 50 years. This would make any game released prior to 1975 eligible. That is a good chunk of games. That said, protecting works of art are usually much shorter terms. Works of art can be justified to be protected almost immediately depending on the artist and work.

And by what mechanism would it have affected sales of the sequel? Historically, and demonstrably, greater access to a game increases the sales of sequels. Why do you think developers put games in a series on sale when a new game in a series is coming out? I would definitely argue that having released the server hosting code for The Crew to allow people to host private servers would have potentially added to The Crew 2 sales. Also, if they release the server code, but not the game code, they could continue the sales of the game on storefronts at a reduced price having it marked that it will no longer receive updates and still made even more money from those sales. I would definitely prefer if they just release the whole game, but either would have worked.

I don’t really see it as an entirely separate topic. It is still an abuse of rights. In this case, it is an abuse of ownership. If I make a purchase of a good, I should own that good. If the company later decides that they no longer want to support the services which support that purchase, they should be required to provide the opportunity that all purchased goods remain valid and operational. If we take a different good as a stand in, cars, a manufacturer may eventually decide to stop supporting a vehicle, but they do have to sell the component rights to aftermarket manufacturers (or at least make good faith attempts) when they drop support so people who own those vehicles have the chance to maintain and use them. I see this as no different than that. Their dropping of support means that products purchased are removed from use or function without the owner’s consent.

And I know you are going to say “well the EULA says you don’t own it and you agreed to it” which is precicely the problem we are arguing. Purchase should mean ownership and forcing people to agree to whatever you want is wrong. Legislation is required because no company will protect the rights of customers, that is the duty of legal systems.

What does releasing the code have to do with development decisions? I am a developer and this sentiment really confused me, so please elucidate.

If that pub has been around long enough that it can reasonably be argued that it is part of regional heritage, then yes.

Except… For a contract to be legal it must be agreed upon by both parties free of manipulation or coercion. Now, usually this is specified to be manipulation or coercion on the part of one of the parties, but what I argue is that in the modern era that is insufficient to encompass the growing complexity around the way society works and how it will continue moving forward.

Pulling the numbers out of my well educated ass, 40 years ago the average person would encounter EULA-like contracts a handful of times per year. Maybe for a mail order service, or a piece of software. Today we encounter them daily. The amount of information in them is intentionally made dense and overwhelming so the average person becomes numb very quickly and opts to click through on most of them without reading them. This enables all sorts of personal liberty and information abuses on the part of corporations.

40 years ago you did not have one to find a job, a lover, buy a car (still had a loan contract, but if you paid up front you had 0 contracts other than the bill of sale). You would not encounter them to work most jobs. You could go years without having to risk signing your rights over to a company and usually when you did you had negotiation power. This is not true today. You work for a company, they use Zoom, Slack, Google Workplace, a Virtual Timecard service, all of which have individual EULA that you as a private citizen, not an employer, must agree to and be bound by. Microsoft can put in their EULA that they are allowed to take a screenshot of your computer every 15 seconds and transmit it to their servers. This could be intercepted, or the servers could be hacked and have the entire database compromised and you have 0 say other than public outcry or to airgap your system, which then complains constantly that it cannot connect to the internet and becomes virtually unusable for about 80% of why you want to own it.

Being required by an employer to use software which requires that you as an individual sign a EULA is coercion. Having 0 recourse for alternatives in a marketplace which do not require signing a EULA is coercion. Having the terms which strip your rights irrevocably and transferrably buried and written in confusing ways is manipulation.

I should never have to worry that my copyright is being stripped from a piece of art I create just because I share it to a friend on some website.

That is not a rebuttal. A rebuttal requires evidentiary support of your stance. For instance, as support for saying it costs them nothing, one might offer the following:

• once released, users would distribute and maintain the file servers independently of the corporation, thus costing the company nothing.
• once released, users would maintain independent game servers and pay for their upkeep, thus costing the company nothing.
• once released, the modding community would take over the maintenance and development on the code base, thus costing the company nothing.

There, 3 salient points which support the position that releasing the codebase for the game when sunsetting it costs the company nothing. I could even make points about how it is actually profitable for the company, but I want to give you your turn to rebutt me now that you have a good example of how to provide a good argument.

“No shirt, no shoes, no service” is a health code, not a EULA.

Also, you are conflating social contracts with actual legally binding ones. If you had to sign a contract to eat at a resteraunt which gave them the right to photograph you and record all of your conversations while you ate then use all of it for marketing without compensating you or to sell the contents of your conversations and likeness to unknown 3rd parties without informing you of who they were sold to and what the intended use was, would you still eat there.

Your comment shows an utter lack of understanding of the issues at hand and what abuses of rights are done in digital spaces.