You don’t own anything you purchase on Steam

Games sold on Steam are not required to use Steam’s DRM. There are lots of DRM free games on Steam. Steam is only required to be installed to purchase/download them but not to run them. After download, the game files can be copied and ran on any computer without any verification.

I was a funeral director in Ontario, Canada. The law here is that the contract you sign with the crematorium will have a cremation number which will be stamped into a metal disk and that disk will be placed with the remains. After cremation, the disk will be in the cremated remains. People who receive the cremated remains can check that the number on the disk matches the number on the contract they signed.

This system stops honest mistakes but nothing stops people from intentionally swapping disks. Say a funeral home worker is filling urns with a batch of cremated remains they recieved from the crematorium. They accidentally put remains A into the urn for family B and remains B into the urn for family A. The worker should swap the remains…but swaping the disks is easier. Most people I’ve worked with would do the right thing but the system still relies on people being honest.

…on what?

There was a study done where police K9 units where told they’d be testing the accuracy of the dog’s ability to find drugs. In actuality, they were testing the handlers. Handlers were told drugs were hidden in a certain location, but there wasn’t actually drugs there. Despite that, all their dogs alerted several times to the location the handlers were told about.

I mean…you can. All lawsuits start with an application at a courthouse and that application can say whatever the plaintiff wants.

Here’s youtube lawyer LegalEagle reviewing some crazy ones. Like a man who sued David Copperfield for stealing magical powers granted to him by God. Lawsuits can say literally anything in their initial application.

It’s crazy that they released it. They had early access and preorders and those only attracted something like 1,000 players. This is a game that had a $100 million budget. So few players during the early stages should have told the studio to cancel it while it was still in production. Apparently they thought they’d release it and would just jump from 1,000 players to 100,000 overnight with no changes.

It’s a patent lawsuit which might have a better chance than a copyright lawsuit but Nintendo didn’t disclose which patent(s) and Pocketpair also doesn’t know yet either.

You’re right though that any patent Pocketpair is infringing upon would also have likely been infringed by dozens of other games. Nintendo is just upset Pocketpair made millions with a game that appealed to Pokemon fans and want to ensure nobody else does it again.

In the “other references” they link to the bulbapedia article for Pokemon box so I figured thats what the whole thing was about, but yeah it does read like accessing data on a server

My guess is the “Pokemon Box Storage” system since palworld stores pals in a palbox.

They seem to have a patent for “Pokemon Box Storage” and palworld also has a “Palbox” so maybe that?

I’m glad Microsoft realized allowing any company to push kernel-level code to consumers was a terrible idea. A bug at that level can brick a PC and needs to be thoroughly scrutinized before being pushed out to end users. If a company dedicated to computer security wasn’t doing proper code reviews I really doubt game studios were either.

While it’s great they’re not going to somehow make it a subscription based game, I’m confused by something else now:

We are still considering skins and DLC for Palworld in future as a means to support development

Didn’t this small team just make tens of millions of dollars in sales? An amount the CEO said was “too big for a studio with our size to handle.” Why do they need more money to continue development?

I just got it and have already put dozens of hours into it. I can definitely see it being the next big multiplayer game.

However, I already see some of the same problems that other multiplayer games have. Matchmaking struggles to make fair matches. There’s toxicity when games start to snowball towards one team. Lots of players will disconnect midway through a match if they don’t think they’ll win. These things are common in pretty much every multiplayer game now but I wonder if Valve will find a way to mitigate it.

The manipulative tactics listed in the article:

• Consumers cannot see the real cost of digital items, leading to overspending: the lack of price transparency of premium in-game currencies and the need to buy extra currency in bundles pushes consumers to spend more. In-game purchases should always be displayed in real money (e.g.: Euro), or at least they should display the equivalence in real-world currency.
• Companies’ claims that gamers prefer in-game premium currencies are wrong: Many consumers find this unnecessary step misleading and prefer buying items directly with real money.
• Consumers are often denied their rights when using premium in-game currencies, tied to unfair terms favouring game developers.
• Children are even more vulnerable to these manipulative tactics. Data shows that children in Europe are spending on average €39 per month on in-game purchases. While they are among the ones playing the most, they have limited financial literacy and are easily swayed by virtual currencies.

What is the benefit of forcing developers to provide access to old games that require online functionality indefinitely, instead of just hard limiting them to say 10 years wich is essentially indefinite in terms of non-live service games.

In a choice between “you can play online until 2035” and “you can play online forever”, the answer is pretty obvious. All things being equal, the indefinite option is better. I think the problem is that all things are not equal, and making it a legal requirement that all games with online features come with a guarantee those features work indefinitely is incredibly vague and can lead to situations that outright hurt developers.

If the devs need to provide a server binary for players to host a server, how do they ensure these servers only allow players who have purchased the game to play? If they can’t ensure it, then the law is forcing companies to allow pirate servers to exist

How do they ensure people running these community servers aren’t charging money for people to play? If they can’t ensure it, then the law is allowing people to use a company’s IP to generate money without a licence.

If the original version had an in-game shop where you can unlock things with real life money but the offline version doesn’t have a shop, thus making parts of the game forever unobtainable, did they follow the law? If not, then devs would have to give out paid features for free.

Unless these kinds of details are accounted for, this vague idea is doomed to fail because no government is going to force a company to give up their copyright/IP for free. I know a lot of people have also said “fuck these giant corporations” but this also affects indie developers as well. Copyright protects small creators as much as it does large ones.

Idk if he even codes

He was a hacker for the US government and has won 3 competitions at DEFCON. Before that he was a programmer for Blizzard and Amazon Games.

They’re doing this because they’ve lost so much money investors are angry and the executives want to win people back. They aren’t worried about law changes, they’re worried about their stock price and reputation.

In the 12 years since European Citizens Initiatives have existed, there have been few successful campaigns even fewer actual law changes. If I were a greedy company, I wouldn’t be worried about this in the slightest.

If ECIs are to become a useful tool for civil society, campaigners would benefit from a better understanding of how to craft their demands in a way that is likely to lead the Commission to actually propose a legislative initiative. There have now been 133 ECI attempts, millions of signatures collected, a significant amount of money spent, and little to show for it.

Once again. No government intervention required. Companies listen to consumers.

A gacha game asking money for something useless? That’s the entire model!

Players that buy stuff in these games usually see it as a donation to devs making a good game. If nobody bought any of the useless stuff the game would shutdown. That’s how I treat the $10 a month I spend on Reverse 1999. Or they’re a gambling addict and can’t stop themselves from spinning the wheel.

I had to create an account on a government website. The website didn’t list a character limit so I used a password manager to generate a 32 character password. My account was created but I couldn’t log in. I used the “forgot my password” option and I received an email of my password in plain text. I also noticed why I couldn’t log in. The password was truncated to just 20 characters. Brilliant website! Tax dollars at work!