Did I mention we updated the #Mastodon server with full text search? No? Well I'm doing it right now then!

Hey everyone, we updated the Mastodon  server with full text search!!

#TheGamersTavern #Mastodon #MastoAdmin

let's play boarderland 3 on linux part 1 revised

https://video.gamerstavern.online/videos/watch/ab50a8c8-49d8-4008-8609-a7cb4c455ebe

Want to own the games you buy in the future and have them accessible after the publisher ceases support? Do you live in a European country that’s party of the EU? Then you can help by signing this initiative.

Stop Killing Games. The project has a goal; have games in functional state at the end of their life. Lot of games already have this built-in. However, every game that requires always-online functionality has a high probability of just dying on you. You won’t get to play the game because the publisher doesn’t support it anymore. The game’s obsolescence is built-in, planned to get you off that game and move to another product of their. Shut up and consume products, you have no right to this license. I don’t think many will agree with my take here, but this is something I want to get out of my system. Give the above links a read if consider the idea of Stop Killing Games a good one.

I hate the idea of government needing to tell companies to stop being abusive towards their customers. However, current laws across the globe largely benefit the companies, as they’ve had lobbyists doing that for them. The balance of power between consumers and corporations is grossly unbalanced. Consumers are expected to pay up and be happy to own nothing.

Therefore, you go in bed with the devil yourself in the best way you can. This EU Initiative is not making a law. It can be a start for a ruling. It’s a far shot, as members of the EU parliament are largely clueless idiots, who don’t read the papers and rulings they vote on. These parliament members are informed by their assistants, whose job is to read through these papers and help to make informed voting decisions. Of course, these assistants have their own agendas and will mislead the parliament members if they want.

I have no love for the EU, but this is a chance consumers can’t really sit on. On the long run, this isn’t just about having all video and computer games independently functional. This is also about ownership and license purchases work. There’s only a net positive if purchasing a license would end up equating to purchasing a physical product. Think it much like buying a music CD. You own that particular copy of the CD, but not the intellectual property on it. That’s your copy to do what you want with, even sell it to someone else. We should have the right to sell digital goods we’ve bought. The only reason you can’t is because the gaming industry might lose revenue from that. Again, the teeter-totter is against the consumer.

If this initiative would pass and the ruling would require publishers to ensure games would be in a reasonably working condition, it would also make a precedent for other industries. For example, a music player that requires an always-Online connection to the provider servers might be required to ensure the player would still work after they drop support and close the servers down. This naturally ties to Right to Repair, where customers fixing their own stuff to make them work again would be that much easier and simpler if the companies wouldn’t fight them to tooth and nail.

Unlike some buzz on the Internet about this initiative solely being to kill Live Service model games, that’s not the case. Live service games would be heavily impacted, but that’s just because they’re inherently anti-consumer. The core audience of video games have been treated like trash for long enough, and if this initiative doesn’t pass, and then hit its intended target, the industry will end up even more draconian. In no part of history has an industry looked at itself and considered whether or not they’re going too far. Instead, they’ll plough straight through into injuring other consumer protection laws and then decimate them through lobbyists and gerrymandering.

The game industry won’t stop the bad, anti-consumer practices and standards they have going on wilfully. It’d be nice if they’d start being consumer friendly and transparent, yet only a few developer and publisher ever seems to go for that. Instead, there have been even more layers obfuscating the separation between the consumers, developers and publishers. It doesn’t help that the gaming media is just another arm of the publisher PR machine. Hype the Big Game, buy the Big Game and a year later the Big Game is announced a disappointment after million dollars initial sales. There’s no monetary benefit for the industry to be pro-consumer, not at this point. Some talking heads have raised worries of this initiative opening publishers and developers for abuse from the consumers, but that’s goddamn rich talk when the industry is openly abusing its customers. To be make a very extreme point, anyone who sells you something should be treated with high suspicion, like they’re a drug seller trying to sell you bad juju instead of the good and pure stuff.

The initiative isn’t perfect and is intentionally rather vague. There are tons of stuff that can’t be pinpointed down until the later by the parliament starts their discussions on the topic. Some people want to know the details how these games would be kept functional. All that minutia would just slow down the conversation, and in the end, that’s up to the developers. Be it allowing consumers to access server binaries or built a multiplayer-only game to have AI opponents, that’s fully on the developers to figure out as far as I’m concerned. Every industry rejects and fights change that’s for the customer, but just like how car manufacturers nowadays have seatbelts, the game industry will too adjust and design games to be accessible in the future as well.

Future being the keyword, as it wouldn’t be fair to grandfather in games that have been already published and abandoned. I would include games that are currently active and live, e.g. Street Fighter 6 wouldn’t just go poof after Capcom shuts the servers down.

Which of course begs the question about console games. The Big N, MS and Sony would need to provide some method to access certain online functions after they drop support on their consoles. For example, they could patch the Wii to have an option to access a custom server that can run online-only game. Or maybe an older example, Capcom would need to offer a way to access Online-only quests in the original Monster Hunter. Not that either examples would be grandfathered in, they’re just examples. Still, that’s mostly beside the point. The minutia of how comes after.

It shouldn’t be any surprise that I support this initiative. Everything that’s pro-consumer, pro-Right to Repair and pro-ownership is only a net good thing. Anything that empowers individual more and allows individual rights and freedoms to be expressed without oppressive corporate oversight is one step toward a brighter future.

https://aaltomies.wordpress.com/2024/08/20/you-can-help-to-stop-killing-games-if-you-are-a-eu-citizen/

#customerAndService #customerService #electronicGames #games #gaming #videoGames #videogames

you can now play EA games on heroic launcher but EA as usual made it more complicated then it should

https://video.gamerstavern.online/videos/watch/b5206899-dfe3-47e4-bdc6-a8ab8a5f7a05

After a few weeks of using Fedilab instead of Tusky, I must admit that the extra features and the extra configurability are a good compromise for a UI not so curated.

Everything is under control, except muscle memory. Muscle memory is strong in this one.

#Fediverse #Fedilab #Tusky #Mastodon #Pixelfed #Android