That was an interesting read. Thanks !!

Nice.

Games that require activation or that require connection to a remote server to play should be exempt from cracking if they are no longer supported. Once you have paid for a game, your rights as a consumer don't end just because the publisher decides they don't want to support the game any more.

Where the problem comes in, though, is that for things like sports games it could potentially hurt sales of this years installment of the game if you still have people playing older versions of the game. Will Madden 20xx sell the same number of copies when gamers are still playing versions from years past? And once you open the door to cracking older versions, that means players will be able to mod their games to reflect the latest team rosters, reducing the incentive to buy the latest version even more.

sliderider wrote:

Where the problem comes in, though, is that for things like sports games it could potentially hurt sales of this years installment of the game if you still have people playing older versions of the game. Will Madden 20xx sell the same number of copies when gamers are still playing versions from years past? And once you open the door to cracking older versions, that means players will be able to mod their games to reflect the latest team rosters, reducing the incentive to buy the latest version even more.

To a good extent, the idea that "customers playing old games are not buying new games" applies regardless of game genre. In this case, the EFF proposal was limited to allow people to hack games to make them work as intended, not to authorize mods beyond that. Of course, if people want to mod sports games to reflect the current year's roster, they will probably do so anyway, LoC approval or not.

Of course, this may provide companies with an incentive to support their previous year versions longer. I would suspect that most people today tend to understand a sports game like Madden as essentially giving them a season's pass. Sports games don't age very well anyway, and I do not know of many having the support of, say, Tecmo Super Bowl.

sliderider wrote:

Where the problem comes in, though, is that for things like sports games it could potentially hurt sales of this years installment of the game if you still have people playing older versions of the game. Will Madden 20xx sell the same number of copies when gamers are still playing versions from years past? And once you open the door to cracking older versions, that means players will be able to mod their games to reflect the latest team rosters, reducing the incentive to buy the latest version even more.

That's the problem for game publishers, not for us the consumers. If anything, the exemption is a good thing for the consumers, because it "forces" game publishers to actually improve newer iteration of sport games -instead of lazily relying on newer team rosters to sell "new" version of their games.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

sliderider wrote:

Where the problem comes in, though, is that for things like sports games it could potentially hurt sales of this years installment of the game if you still have people playing older versions of the game. Will Madden 20xx sell the same number of copies when gamers are still playing versions from years past? And once you open the door to cracking older versions, that means players will be able to mod their games to reflect the latest team rosters, reducing the incentive to buy the latest version even more.

That's the problem for game publishers, not for us the consumers. If anything, the exemption is a good thing for the consumers, because it "forces" game publishers to actually improve newer iteration of sport games -instead of lazily relying on newer team rosters to sell "new" version of their games.

+1

Video games are not a type of media that should be a big problem with. Because graphics are always getting better thus should make the game attractive.
If they are not getting better, then the developer isn't doing what they should be.

The DMCA anti-circumvention clause is a work of evil.