• 26 minutes

    Why ESL is bad ? They don’t make any games. They just do esports that promote gaming.

    Why Sega is bad ? What did Bandai Namco ?

    Only one Chinese company but no explicitly Tencent who owns Supercell and have 1/3 Epic Games, 1/3 Ubisoft it is just it’s brand name Level Infinite that means nothing.

    No Scopely who owns Monopoly Go that alone makes $200M per month on gambling.

    Any mobile gambling companies with micro transactions that are in fact casinos should be there instead of companies that just make AAA flops.

  • I agree with the thrust of this, but I have no faith in the resolve of the average consumer to make a difference.

  • 20 minutes

    We were barely 1.3 million that bothered to sign a petition, and you want to convince a meaningful amount of people to give up games from 95% of publishers? Good luck lol.

    I figure this battle is lost so I started hoarding and archiving everything i come across that works/can work offline

  • 2 hours

    This is pretty much every company that publishes games. So we just don’t buy / play games ? We want real change we need to push for more physical releases with game on disc. On top of that we need to push for more single player experiences. This way no matter the licenses agreement I can still boot the games

    Going back as far as the mid 90s I recall seeing verbiage in the software agreement that I didn’t own the software. And they had the right to refuse my access without notice But because the software is on the disc I can still boot it to this day

    I don’t expect companies to hold servers for the rest of time so I can redownload my game. What I ask for is a physical copy.

  • 3 hours

    Should I feel bad for assuming any company’s name that ends in “group” probably do some heinous shit

  • I don’t even remember the last game I bought that required an internet server. If I can’t host a local game or private server for multi-player, I’m not interested. Of course, I only buy maybe one game a year, and it’s never anything current these days.

  • Most of those are ones i already hate.

    My childhood friend and a common acquaintance work at Supercell. I once asked them what they think about the moral issue of putting paid loot boxes in games for children.

    They had never heard of such a controversy and didn’t understand why a fun and profitable feature would be somehow wrong.

  • I bought a few games from smaller studios and indie devs and i get “AAA” when it’s a giveaway like GTA 5 a few years ago but i mostly go sailing and even that isn’t necessary lately because of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. G.A.M.M.A. and been playing it since 0.9.3 so about 2 years maybe and i did try S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and it was meh so paying 60-200$ for 1 game that will most likely barely be played is a waste of money for me so no point in coming into port.

  • 3 hours

    This is the movement. It is time to take gaming back from for profit studios who want us to have zero rights to what we purchase.

  • It is not self-explanatory. You needed to explain it. On its face, it sounds like it’s saying to just pirate. I can get behind the message, but these three words aren’t it. I know that coming up with effective, catchy slogans is hard, but this one’s not going to do well.

    • 3 hours

      I am going to be frank, most people don’t care about piracy. You making it the crux of this issue is a red hearing and disingenuous. It is something a corporate shill would bring up.

      • Being frank, nothing will come of a movement about consumer rights if it looks like you just want to get things for free.

        • 3 hours

          Listen, as long as we allow corporations to ruin culture we will never be happy. There is no magical world where we respect copyright and corporate rule and get what we want.

          Your opinion is simply wrong for multiple reasons. That is okay.

          • I can’t dictate whether or not you pirate; I just think you can help influence the world in a more positive way if you don’t. There are games made by people who worked hard and aren’t employed by a corporation. I would encourage you to buy from them, because you can show that you value their hard work and want them to keep doing it. Games have the good fortune of being more democratized than other media, so even if they have the lion’s share of the market, you can go on enjoying video games, even paying for video games, without giving those corporations the time of day.

            • 3 hours

              You don’t have to explain to me, I already know. I said you were wrong and I meant it. There is not going to be a corporation that is not enshitified. Did you miss all of the independent studious being bought up and now closed.

              They are destroying our culture and the best you can muster is buy ethically? We are far beyond that rhetoric now. Like I said before it is okay. You have not really thought about what is going on and there is no shame in that.

              • No, I didn’t miss the independent studios being bought up, nor did I miss the countless others formed in their wake and free from corporate control. I’m not ashamed that I have a realistic view of the world, and I find yours to be childish.

                • 2 hours

                  More independent studios to be forced to use corporate stores to sell digital merchandise that can be revoked at any time. The only person acting childlike is you playing pretend that this is acceptable.

                  I totally get it, you want to ride your high horse into the sunset. Do a us all a favor and do this. You don’t have answers, you just want the status quo and we are all tired of it already.

    • 6 hours

      Not pay and even if pirate don’t promote these games

      • If you’re endorsing piracy as a political stance in any way, I don’t see it gaining traction. People need to be paid for their work; especially those who built a product for you that’s meant to last and can’t be taken away from you. I don’t know how you convey that in a three- or four-word slogan, but I don’t think this one does it.

        • 6 hours

          Well if single player game needs to connect to publisher sever to play then you don’t buy this game and piracy is just preservation. I’m not endorsing piracy, but not condemning it.

          • I agree with the first sentence, but that’s what I feel this slogan does a poor job of reinforcing.

        • People need to be paid for their work

          The dogged insistence that piracy of a corporate product impacts the pay of it’s employees neglects how the wage system works.

          • The wages only appear if the thing they produce creates profits for the corporation. If they continually produce something that doesn’t sell, they won’t have a job anymore. And I’ll raise you another part of this equation. If you pirated Assassin’s Creed: Shadows because you hate Ubisoft or whatever, that game will take somewhere between 35 and 65 hours for most people to finish, according to How Long to Beat. That’s 35 to 65 hours that you weren’t spending in some other game, perhaps a game that respects your values enough that you’d part with your money to play. Maybe that’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance II or The Alters or Knights in Tight Spaces; whatever your preferences are, there’s some other game that also didn’t get your money because you were playing that pirated game instead, and I picked those three examples because they’re recent and run a range of different developer/publisher models while still being DRM-free.

            • 1 hour

              What are you talking about? Game devs are constantly being laid off even after the product they create, creates profits for the corp.

              • That’s a different story entirely. That’s poor allocation of resources on large projects, when certain disciplines needed at the end of a project don’t necessarily have work to do at the beginning of another. The money that hired those people in the first place still came from selling the company’s previous video games.

            • And yet there are free indie games out there that are generally better than the corp funded crap. Creators will create, no matter what happens.

              • You’ll find far fewer of them creating when they need to spend more of their time at a job that will allow them to feed their families. And I don’t think the games I’ve found for free (actually free, not given away for free once as a promo) have tended to be better than the paid ones.

                • I’ve put more hours into Infiniminer, Minetest/Luanti, Industry, Dopewars, dnd, dopewars, and various Twine/Frotz games than any corporate games. When I do want an FPS (rare), I look at Doom sourceports and maybe Cube/Sauerbraten.

                  And there’s the real time-murderer: Nethack.

            • The wages only appear if the thing they produce creates profits for the corporation.

              Would you take a job that requires years to complete and forego wages until it retails?

              Nobody actually works like that.

              • No, they typically don’t. That’s more what startups do. In the corporate world, the schedules are amortized, but the money has to come from somewhere.

                • You’re right. It often comes from the previous game but if that game doesn’t do well then the chances of there being another are greatly reduced.

  • joke on you im playing retro games!!!

    EDIT: but no seriously playing retro games is a great alternative then playing what’s new

  • 3 hours

    All software has been licensed since day 1. You have never owned software in your life, even if you have a disc.

    • 15 minutes

      When you buy software on a DVD, you own the software, at least until you install it and agree to the clickwrap agreement that revokes your ownership.

      In the olden days, we installed software by copying it off floppy disks onto our hard drives. There was no clickwrap agreement, because there was no installer. We owned that software.

      GOG advertises that purchasers own the software they buy. https://www.gog.com/en/news/welcome_to_gog

      Lots of open source software can be owned. You have to do something that grants you ownership in the first place, like buying it on a disc. Downloading it for free might or might not, I don’t know. But no FOSS license I know of has any clause that revokes ownership. The GPLv2 has a specific clause that says

      You are not required to accept this License

      so you can always choose to reject the whole GPL, and revert back to the implicit rules of commerce, “Pay money, receive thing” which confers ownership.

    • 58 minutes

      That’s just false, you can still buy and sell the games that you bought on disk 15 years ago. It doesn’t matter that you only own a license to the software as long as you own the whole end product.