Games had a higher quality to them before being released.
The quality was definitely higher, but there were also definitely still bugs in the released version.
Why do you say that the ability (and requirement) to patch the game after release is a benefit to the company that released the game?
How to think of games has changed over the years.
Arguably the first real computer game game “Spacewar!” followed the “the “hacker ethic”, whereby all programs were freely shared and modified by other programmers in a collaborative environment without concern for ownership or copyright”.
After a while, copyright came into play, and people were expected to “buy” a copy of the game, but “piracy” was common.
Meanwhile, the consoles pretended the game was a physical object, and that you needed that physical object to play, and that you could give that physical object to someone else, or sell it back to the store.
And then there was the shareware model, used for games like Doom. It kept the idea that games were copyrightable stuff, but it didn’t try to stop people from copying, and allowed them to share the games around. People were just asked to pay for extra levels, or sometimes just to send in some money if they liked the game.
On PC, Steam became the dominant platform because it’s less of a headache than piracy. Steam doesn’t pretend you own a physical object, you’re buying a license.
Fundamentally, gamers want the games to be free. If possible, they want to avoid paying for them at all. They want to be able to give them to friends, and have no restrictions on how or where they can run them: online, offline, on a phone, on a toaster, whatever. Once they have access to the game, they don’t ever want to have to give up access for any reason. They want the companies that make the games to release patches for any bugs that are discovered, and ideally, they’d like free additional content post-release.
Game companies want gamers to pay as much as possible for games. They want people to buy their games, they want an additional purpose for every additional machine the game is installed on. In addition, if they can manage it, they want people to pay continuously for playing the game, so it’s not just a one-time payment. They also want to be able to revoke access to the game at any time, and not have to pay the players when they do that. They don’t want to have to keep maintaining the game after it has been released, though they might be willing to do that if it’s profitable because it means more people will buy the game.
Neither extreme position makes much sense. If people aren’t going to give money to the developers, there will still be people making games as a hobby, but there won’t be high-budget AAA games made as a business. On the other extreme, if a game is too expensive, can’t be refunded, might be revoked at any time, and requires that you continuously pay while playing it, most people won’t bother.
So, what’s left is a negotiation, what will people put up with? Gamers typically hate paying for live service games, but if they do that there’s a reasonable business case for the game company to keep releasing content for the game. Gamers would like to be able to re-sell their game (really their licenses to those games), but that means a significant loss of revenue for the game companies, so they’re unlikely to accept that. The additional revenue means they can either keep the price lower, or can make a better, more polished game. Gamers would love to be able to play games forever without additional payment, even online games requiring servers. Game companies don’t want to have to support that based on a single sale that might have happened a decade ago. Game companies would love it if old games stopped working, so people have to buy new ones. That’s unlikely to be a fight they win in the long term though, because unless there is a required online component, it seems absurd to cut off access to the game just because it’s old.
In the end, there will probably be compromises. For a lot of people, the compromises will be unfair. Maybe they’ll play more indie games or even free software games. For other people, they’ll grudgingly accept, but in exchange will get games that have 100,000x the budget of something like “Spacewar!”
We didn’t descend from either chimps or bonobos. Chimps, bonobos and humans all descended from a common ancestor.
In addition, bonobos do engage in violent conflicts. Much less often than chimps, but it does happen.
Pleasure? I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I’m talking politics.
He’s right, in politics the top just pounds the bottom, over and over again. In civil society, unions sometimes change the dynamic. The bottom is more confident and learns to wield their power, sometimes that even gives them the power to control the top. The top might never stop trying to fuck the bottom, but with the right rules in place, it can still be a happy ending for the bottom.
I never liked the jewel cases. Not enough space for anything interesting inside other than just the disc.
What I miss is cloth maps. I don’t know what I did with mine, but if I ever open a moving box and find one, I’m framing it and putting it up on my wall.
That reminds me of this awesome video
Apparently Dortmund did their own version more recently, and they did it with a whole stadium full of Dortmund supporters present.
Considering that we know that chimps engage in “war”, and war has been part of recorded history since as long as there has been recorded history, it’s pretty easy to assume that there has always been “war”.
Tennis games aren’t perfectly flat. Wimbledon is famous for being played on grass, which isn’t flat even before the wear and tear sets in. And that’s in a sport where judging the bounce of the ball is critically important.
Yes, but they can get away with a tiny amount of it
Not really. Developers have forgotten how to write small, efficient code. Everything is a web page these days, and so the bare minimum app is a web browser, and a web browser is huge.
Wrangled would be more hogtied. That’s more mangled.
What about the Toyota Water Cruiser?
Or the Honda Bucolic:
(it’s surprisingly hard to find an antonym for “civic”)
I’ve come to terms with the fact I’m not going to be buying any new computer-type devices until the bubble pops.
I’m just terrified what happens if one of my existing devices breaks. If a RAM stick goes bad, I might have to mortgage my non-existent house.
Even those contain RAM.
It’s more “regulatory capture” than it is capitalism. In any system where there are supposed to be people who protect the rights of the people, if those organizations are prevented from doing their jobs, you get stuff like this.
The USSR, for example, was famous for its “new word formulation” after the revolution, which George Orwell referenced as “newspeak” in 1984. I mean, the official Soviet newspaper was named “Pravda” meaning “Truth” when it was famous for publishing propaganda that was clearly untrue.
you’re trolling attempts
Now whose trolling?
are there enough people like that to make the “having sex with children party” win the elections?
The GOP? It seems like it.
Just because a day one patch is standard doesn’t mean it’s good for the game developer. Also, just because the game can be released in a buggy state doesn’t mean that’s good either. There are a lot of games that received massively negative reviews because they were released in a buggy state.
It gives you a chance to save your reputation if your QA processes are shit, but if they are that will bite you in the ass at some point.