It's becoming flagrantly apparent that the gaming industry, albeit mostly the Triple A scene is suffering from a lack of quality in the content in which the publishers produce. It seems as if all the video game franchises we've come to know and love all those years ago have become exploited and repurposed as soulless cash cow franchise zombies. The most common response is to attribute this to the greedy executives of Nintendo, EA, Activision, and Ubisoft among others. However, take a moment to ponder the true problem plaguing gaming as we know it, and you will soon realise that the current paradigm of publishers prioritising cash over creativity is merely a corruption of what the gaming industry ought to be.
We need to realize that ultimately, the interests of every executive is to maximize profit. But that doesn't necessarily mean the works they produce are always low-quality. Sometimes, the interests of the creators and executives line up and great content gets made. People like to reminisce about how their favourite game developers used to make amazing games when they started but are now shells of what they once were that now produce crap courtesy of the publishers. The reason they initially produced good games was because their publishers let them. Every game developer needs to produce quality content to get established in the market and that meant producing content people would want to buy. Which is why a lot of indie games are well-received. The developers who were successful got established fan bases. But overtime, the quality of their games started to lower, until eventually the publishers decided to rush game development, add microtransactions and other anti-consumer that we have to put up with to this day.
Every week, we get a negative review of a Triple-A game sequel, a controversy about microtransactions in a game that previously had none or some other story that spells disappointment. There's something fundamentally wrong here, otherwise we wouldn't have such high levels of consumer dissatisfaction prevalent in the industry.
The problem is copyright, the notion that one can have a monopoly on the expression of ideas. That is the evil behind most of the executive creative control gaming faces today. The natural response to having a monopoly is to cut costs and make decisions that maximize profit while fucking over the consumer. EA, Activision and every other shitty publisher doesn't give a fuck about pleasing gamers or making good games, because they're guaranteed to have fanbases who will buy their products regardless of the quality because they like their IPs. By taking away their monopolies, the fans buying decisions will move to the next rung, quality. It won't be a matter of who's sells X, it'll be a matter of who sells the best X? And all the shitty business practices we have to put up with now would be a thing of the past, because there would be a developer that makes better games without anti-consumerist policies. There would be true competition in the industry, and we'd finally get good Triple-A games again. But as long as we continue not to recognize the problem, we'll keep having perpetual strife indefinitely.
I heard there can't be a new Rival Schools due to some kind of copyright or license thing in Japan.
Lincoln Ortiz
Japanese copyright laws are a clusterfuck to deal with.
Nathan Watson
What the people making rom hacks need to start doing is fucking shutting up. Stop announcing you're doing it and just release it anonymously. For fucks sake, this happens everytime someone tries to show off before its done.
Gabriel Wilson
You are entirely correct but there is no way to remove this copyright bullshit and the best we can do is only support games that are entirely non-proprietary: both in their code and their assets.
Ian Moore
Yes there is, of all the software fields gaming is practically the only one that has ignored FLOSS or gone backwards since the late 90s.
There is now a distinct division between the creators and users. Before fan made levels were common place, modding was considered normal, hosting your own server or hooking a few PCs together for a LAN party was a typical thing to do. Developers would release their engines to the public and real organic communities would form online. Cheat codes meant to help testers debug were left in as the idea of using a system of 'achievements' to do behavioural analysis for cutting costs on later products was unfathomable.
They've consolidated their control for as much profit as possible and everyone is worse much off. The consumers are the ones to blame for allowing this to happen.
And with the newest generation growing it's going to get much worse. To them everything we're unhappy about is perfectly normal.
Charles Wood
This already technically exists. EA and Activision don't hold the 'exclusive rights' to make FPS, Nintendo doesn't own the rights to the platforming genre, Capcom doesn't own survival horror, and any upstart indie is free to churn out his rendition of yet another clone in any one of these genres. However, that's not what you're talking about, is it? You're talking about forcing publishers and corporations alike to relinquish their grapple hold on the licensing of any given intellectual property, such that anyone and your mother can use it to make whatever the fuck they want. Okay, but how exactly is this going to make things better? It's going to be the same exact situation that we have now, except that big name franchises and their characters like Mario, Crash, Cloud Strife, Nathan Drake, Leon S Kennedy, and a number of others will be featured in all manner of shitty shovelware titles that will flood the market in an attempt to cash in on brand recognition alone.
Landon Bell
What does gaming have to do with dental care?
Parker Long
No, but they do own the rights to individual franchises - franchises people love and hold in high regard. By doing away with copyright, the executives would be incentivised to produce good content with beloved ideas or someone else might out do them.
I want to restore the gaming industry to a state where anti-consumerism and executive creative control is kept to a minimum, and incentivise publishers to produce good content instead of fucking over the devs and fans. How has the status quo worked out for you? Microtransactions, content streamlining, and consumer dissatisfaction across the board - All because the publishers can make whatever greedy decisions they like with no recourse. And you're worried about a few bad games being made? The effects of not having copyright pale in comparison to the widespread executive meddling as a result of copyright.
As for the doom and gloom you think would happen in copyright-free gaming, remember that everyone would have access to brand recognition. And if a developer just relied on that alone, no one would buy from them, and they'd go bankrupt. And so, developers would be incentivised to make good content worth buying. If they just made shitty shovelware like you say, they would have wasted money and have gone out of business. The new gaming industry wouldn't be Steam Greenlight, there'd be forms of quality control like publishers who want to make sure that the developers who want to work with them have good enough ideas that won't result in them losing money. As stated before, they would be apprehensive to make anti-consumer decisions lest they lose their market share to their competitors.
Adam Gonzalez
Games work on the basis of being a product of modern times. They are fashionable and thus fade away over the course of a few works or months. Not only that but there are tools given to mass produce games. Your presumption is if copyright was removed, these things would be prevented. Flappy bird. Candy crush. Farmville. All of these games have been played more than any of the so called "evil" AAA games.
And since you want examples here, fine. CSGO, Bioshock Infinite, Skyrim, Fallout 4. The only reason CSGO has retained its playerbase is the constant new "fashions" within the game.
The issue isn't copyright or how "evil" companies are. The issue is that programmers in the West in general are exploited for their work. Crazy work hours. Low pay. Job instability. Programmers are treated as a commonity and their worth is not taken into consideration. Few companies would hire an experienced dev that demands good work hours and pay.
Hunter Perez
Not really, they'd just be incentivized, just like always, to do what works. Someone will find some gameplay mechanic that gets popular and everyone will follow the trend. Next thing you know, a multitude of copycats will hit the marketplace, and this will repeat until someone makes some new mechanic or game type that sells like hotcakes. You think this will lead to overall better products, but I just think it will lead to even more generic garbage being churned out, and for longer periods of time. Sure, maybe that one mechanic is really good, but you won't think that fifteen years later when it's outstayed its welcome. Technology, and the human capacities that must be developed in order to make new and innovative gameplay loops, tend to improve in increments, and the gap between said increments tends to be quite long. Most of the new hardware these days can be chalked up to gimmicks and very small increases in power. Noble, but futile. As long as there is money to be made, and as long as the corporations have the means to accelerate a streamlined process for developing new content, then video games as a medium will never flourish. No, you're missing the point. As I've already pointed out, there is no incentive for any publisher, or anyone interested in actually making money, to be innovative or creative or imaginative. Instead, corporations seek out consumer feedback, focus group testing, data mining, marketing techniques, and various other types of public relations and data collection that allow them to make decisions that will ultimately impact the type of products that are being produced and their bottom line. Brand recognition is only one facet of this process. If you removed long term IP ownership, you'd just end up making the games themselves more generic than before. The popularity of brands like Mario and the like would be severely diminished, as the marketplace becomes saturated with an overflowing of garbage content that features characters and scenarios from well known franchises. Therefore, consumers would eventually stop caring about the character on the box.
Easton Sanchez
I argue that USAian copyright laws are dumber
Camden Smith
I call the things that perpetuate the problems of the industry casuals, a majority group characterized by excessive apathy toward the direction of the industry. People vote with their wallet and I see them as an incredibly large number of uninformed voters. A kind of demonization of the mass market I have no longer seen myself as a part of for roughly a decade. Every practice I despise is perpetuated because it works on them. There's a sucker born every minute.
Copyright in particular disgusts me in the form it commonly takes in the comicbook industry as in intellectual properties not being owned by the creators. People dragging things though the mud en masse to be used as a soup box for their incredibly far left political opinions. Games have commonly suffered from a similar problem of creator ownership. You shouldn't be able to make a Metal Gear game without Hideo Kojima at the helm. You should be forced to make an "Operation Winback".
Mass Effect: Andromeda should not be able to exist without one Drew Karpyshyn or perhaps Casey Hudson. They should be forced to replace the aliens with different looking aliens and call the game something original especially after what happened to the last one. But to a publisher a bad pedigree is better than no pedigree.
Connor Baker
Nice strawman. I have no problem with games like Flappy Bird, Candy Crush, and Farmville. They were made to make money. No one is up in arms about those titles. What I'm against is anyone having a monopoly on an idea. Monopolies lead to abuse and anti-consumer policies simply because the consumers have no on else to buy from. So, the executives can do whatever they want with no recourse. We've seen this time and time again from publishers like EA and Activision who couldn't care less about the consumer or doing anything good with their franchises.
I fail to see how programmers being treated unfairly has anything to do with the topic at hand. But I'll tell you this, by getting rid of copyright, productivity will increase exponentially and more opportunities to work on video games will be available for programmers.
Gabriel Wright
There aren't monopolies over ideas. That actually used to be a thing in the past. Where a dev copyrighted certain gameplay parts simply so it can attract potential buyers. Franchises aren't ideas. They can have any ideas put within them, in fact. But on their own, they are a brand. The "Final Fantasy brand". The "Dead Space brand". And so on. That's another form of fashion. Fashion has a lot to do with what you're talking about since it's put as the ideal as well as social mechanism of modern capitalism. Removing that simply means that the brand of games is replaced by the brand of companies and individuals to its entirety. That hasn't worked out all that well. Peter Molyneux, Bethesda as examples of either.
Also, if you categorize companies as evil and this as a form of justice, you won't get anywhere.
Ian Morales
Funny, is that why a lot of notable indie games are unique in their own right? There would always be people have great ideas and publishers willing to support them. The new gaming industry would be decentralized enough to have multiple companies with varying mindsets as to the content they wish to make. Some might follow trends, while others might experiment. And for the ones who experiment, if they're successful, they will have a competitive advantage over other companies. You could do what everyone else is doing, but if you really want to succeed in a free market, you need to have an idea unique enough that's worth supporting. I don't hope to get copyright repealed anytime soon, but all we need is one jurisdiction free of copyright. When that happens, the entire global gaming industry will drastically change. And that's when those bootleggers and wannabes go out of business. If you produce garbage, no one will buy from you, therefore, there will always be an incentive to innovate and put your all into your work, to make your idea worth supporting.
Eli Carter
No matter what you call them, it doesn't change the fact that they're still monopolies. I have never once stated that companies are evil. I was stating how copyright is the evil, as in the enemy. The main reason games go out of fashion is because the publishers don't care enough to resurrect them. And they're unwilling to release the copyright because they don't want their competitors to have an advantage over them. Copyright is not apart of capitalism, it's corporatism. Look up the history of how copyright came into being. The book publishers of England lobbied the British Crown to give them monopolies over the publishing of works. And today, Disney lobbies congress to extend copyright ad infinitum.
Eli White
You seem to have this idea that brand recognition alone is what makes some video games so successful and, by extension, what enables all manner of anti-consumer practices. I might be able to agree with you on the first portion of this statement; indeed, there are a lot of video game franchises that seem to rely only on their name recognition alone to sell their newest iteration, and it seems like a large majority of people don't seem to care whether or not the newest version contains features that warrant its existence. However, you lose me on the second bit. How exactly does brand recognition contribute to anti-consumerism? Your argument is How? How does that bit follow? How are microtransactions, day 1 DLC, the entirety of the free to play model, exclusive retailer content, season passes, and every other anti-consumer practice you can think of going to be eradicated when intellectual property right ownership is destroyed? You adamantly believe this, but you haven't explained how this process works. You're wrong if you think that Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are going to suddenly remove the paywall behind their networks in response to a legally mandated liquidation of their intellectual property rights into the public domain.
Connor Rivera
So you're saying it should be like how ZUN handles Touhou?
Michael Morgan
Copyright in general needs to go the way of the dinosaur yesterday. Make public domain great again.
Julian Lopez
Great opening statement, but your conclusion is nonsensical and doesn't flow naturally from it. You're leading with A, touching on B, and then magically jumping to L in summation, or something like that.
I'm a bit too late to the argument to hop right in, but I just wanted to respond to the OP since it's clear you put in a lot of effort to make this a non-shit thread. However, your conclusion and poorly-explained dogmatic defense of it is kind of ruining it. It's still pretty good, definitely better than shitposting and template threads, but it could be better.
Jayden Bell
Communism is a disease.
Wyatt Martin
So nothing changes?
Eli Williams
It's the way that copyright is handled that cripples any creative work that would be forthcoming, especially in clapistan. I read that copyright was much fairer when it was first introduced. The creator gets the credit and the money, and everyone else is given the freedom to build on that work. I can't remember the specifics anymore, but it was a system that benefited the inventor, the customer, and the inventor building on other inventions. It was built in a way that one person's idea benefited everyone involved.
Somewhere along the way, people got greedy, and it has gotten to the point that no one can buy rights for the creative works they want to work on unless they are billionaires. Independent works are slapped with CnD even if it's not for monetary gain, everyone jealously guards and sits on their creations doing nothing with them. It harms everyone else but the one holding the copyright. It stifles any creative and inventive idea that would help improve the product. Copyrights are in dire need of a reworking, but why rock the boat?
Kayden Edwards
Copyleft only works with FOSS. If you try to have no copyright and sell your product, the jews will come along and copy it, use their shekels to advertise it, and profit off your work. Wow great idea fam. To be fair the chinks do it anyways because they don't give a shit about copyright.
Copyright was originally meant to protect content creators and reward them for their effort. Obviously that is not the case today, as copyright law is almost exclusively used to jew content creators. Having sensible copyright laws that cannot be changed by kikes lobbying the government would be ideal:
Look at that, I just wrote better copyright law than the US has
Jayden Williams
Yes indeed.
John Rogers
Lol. Yeah, just what we need. Chinese knocks offs and shitty fan games of already garbage AAA games. It's not like the majority of good games have mods or open source fan projects, all of which have absolutely nothing new to offer and are extremely weak in comparison to the source material. It's not like if you want to make your own spinoff you can literally just change a few letters in various names. There was a time when there was a high level of quality control over iconic characters, which made copyright extremely helpful to anyone since you wouldn't have shitty knockoffs.
Anyone can make any game of any genre, they just don't because this is an industry of stealing and copying whatevers popular (hollywood 2.0). If anyone has a new idea, they can't compete because they are outmarketed and most people who want to play a good game either assume the industry is dead or pirate everything. The idea that copyright is the reason why quality has died off is absolutely fucking retarded. You bought way too hard into Holla Forums and Holla Forums.
That's not to say copyright isn't being abused by ancient companies like Disney
Angel Collins
Seems to me that video game development and producing needs to be more ethical. Maybe a law that forbids nickel-and-dimeing customers? Because I'm all for it. The situation right now is that games can be released at full-price, while actually not being finished. All of these practices are just screwing everyone over. If there was a law against this, or at least limiting it, it would be a step in the right direction.
Ethan Brooks
If it was Communism then video game production would be managed by the state. What OP is proposing is more akin to Anarchy.
Colton Cox
What a startling vision of the future. OH WAIT IT'S LITERALLY WHAT HAS HAPPENED RIGHT NOW WITH ALL OF THE COPYRIGHT WHORING FROM PUBLISHERS
Henry Russell
The reason the game industry is shit is because it's Hollywood 2.0
Caleb Williams
A guy who got famous for making a game about how genes don't determine your destiny isn't a guy whose views have any overlap with Holla Forums. But you're right that IPs shouldn't be taken away from their creators and casuals are pretty much cancer.
Threads similar to this have been posted on both Holla Forums and Holla Forums many times, and they both generally miss the point. Holla Forums's explanation for why videogames have gone to shit, much like their explanation for everything else, is Jews. Holla Forums on the other hand blames a broader, multiracial class of greedy corporate exploiters, but the real problem is that if the general public wasn't fucking stupid as shit, none of these terrible business practices would make money.
James Lewis
A guy who got famous for making a game about how genes don't determine your destiny isn't a guy whose views have any overlap with Holla Forums. But you're right that IPs shouldn't be taken away from their creators and casuals are pretty much cancer.
Threads similar to this have been posted on both Holla Forums and Holla Forums many times, and they both generally miss the point. Holla Forums's explanation for why videogames have gone to shit, much like their explanation for everything else, is Jews. Holla Forums on the other hand blames a broader, multiracial class of greedy corporate exploiters, but the real problem is that if the general public wasn't fucking stupid as shit, none of these terrible business practices would make money.
Just more identitarian posturing. Pure Anarchy is the only form of Anarchy that could possibly come about. Anarcho-anything is the political realm of special snowflakes.
Luis Fisher
This also, but people either are too lazy to look for alternatives, don't care enough, or can't find them. I can't imagine your typical family with a screeching 13-year-old caring enough about industry standards to demand better quality from CoD or the next NHL game, much less about localization of japanese RPGs. Only way to spread awareness is to tell everyone about how much they're getting screwed and maybe it will make people demand more quality. But seeing as the layman has no idea how video games are made, who develops them and how much effort goes into it, I don't ever expect it to take off.
"True" video games, the ones you and I like, are still a niche product. Video games have just been simplified to the point hat anyone can enjoy them, and we who already got comfortable with the quality and challenge with older games get left behind. We will live on, but as for mainstream quality we can only expect incremental development over several years, if even that.
Carson Phillips
the only way to save video games is if they could be un-mainstreamed
they can't
Jack Jenkins
I doubt eveyone on Holla Forums seriously belives that genes entirely determine you destiny, if that were the case then how could a large number of them justify being NEET failures despite having "surperior" genes? Metal Gear was about how you can forge your own destiny in spite of your genes. Its a good message for anyone honestly
Kayden Kelly
Oh boy, can't wait for that political derail
Thomas King
Copyright isn't the problem most of the times. Its dumb greedy people wanting in on things they trivialize or are ignorant of being exploited and accepting that because of peer preassure.
