Comment Re:Commonwealth Fusion (Score 1) 56
By your powers combined, I am... the British Colonies!
By your powers combined, I am... the British Colonies!
The main aim of Stop Killing Games is to ensure the practice of rug-pulling eventually comes to an end. They are not trying to save MMOs, for example.
Moreover they don't demand that every game currently on the market comply with open-sourcing requirements: at a minimum, companies always have the option of simply providing customers with adequate notice before shutdown. Open-sourcing the server would be nice, but it's hardly the only way to protect consumers' interests. Scott has, for example, suggested game boxes being marked with an estimated expiry date for online service functionality.
But most importantly: because this is about future games, not the present, the market has time to change. If studios and publishers are designing their games with a fair EOL in mind, then they can make decisions from the get-go to avoid licensing dependencies that they won't be able to release in a possible 'afterlife' version of the game. As suggested by your example of GameSpy in C&C: Generals, when a commercial dependency is crucial to a game's success, it tends to be a client-side library, but typically the problematic dependencies aren't crucial; they're e.g. add-ons for Unity or Unreal that the studio bought to save time. In a world with SKG laws, the providers of these dependencies aren't going to be a stagnant target either—demand for compliant libraries will motivate development of open-source versions.
Interestingly, the will for doing this does exist among game developers; they just need the institutional support from legislation to twist the arms of the studios and publishers. Ross Scott has talked to a lot of devs who are burnt out from having their projects cancelled, leaving them with huge gaping holes in their resumes and portfolios where they've spent years on unreleased projects that are stuck under NDA. In general they tend to see SKG as a path to ensuring the games that do see the light of day aren't also scrapped, which would erode their work histories even further. (Apparently it also just plain feels bad to have your work erased from history. Shocking, I know.)
Fear not! It's entirely possible the category was chosen by an AI. Editorial automation would probably reduce the error rate here.
It's all a small price to pay for Eat Your Veggies.
Duke 3D's soundtrack was not exclusively the work of Bobby Prince; Lee Jackson, Apogee's go-to music guy, also did some of the tracks, including the title theme, Grabbag.
Prince used not only his MIDI skills but also his experience as a lawyer to ensure his 'inspired' derivatives were as close as legally possible to the originals. The relationship between individual tracks is often very clear and sometimes even hinted in the metadata of the source files.
We will never truly know how many dimensions the Chess game has.
Say it with me, now. As we all know, the infamous saying goes:
A COMPUTER
CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER
MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION
It's really incredible how marketing departments can radiate amnesia like this with such proficiency.
Well, what are you waiting for? Step on it!
(The idiots may also have been algorithms.)
"Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained." -- The Tao of Programming