BaronSFel001 wrote on Yesterday, 20:25:
It is not the digitization of games that are the problem; the pioneers in shareware and disk magazines were taking full advantage of network- and subscription-based distribution decades ago, many players experiencing games totally absent from what we would consider actual physical releases. The problem is the centralization of control: from activation-based DRM, to necessitating a constant connection to the internet, to having the access to the product you already paid for arbitrarily revoked at any time. I appreciate GOG for conforming to the older, friendlier, DRM-free formula.
I think at this point ALL my gaming qualifies as retro, and this is part of the reason why.
I would say this coincides with a synthesis of 'How big is the publisher?', 'How important do they think they are?', and 'How far have they scraped the barrel for low-hanging profit sources already?'
Generally, smaller publishers, less known publishers, and newer publishers, dont press for these things.
It's the ones that are huge, with massive IP portfolios they whore out, that are so well known that they are now infamous (like EA and Ubisoft), and have squeezed and squeezed and squeezed so much already, that the only thing left is to bundle bads with their software, to increase profitability, that get up to this shit.
Sony qualifies as all 3 features.
At some point, the only way to get more profit, is to abuse the customer.
Which is exactly what these practices are.
[In past ages, we determined that mega-companies like these were bad, and we created laws that broke them up to make them smaller again, made it substantially harder for them to form, and that penalized the practices they got up to very intensely. But we've spent the better part of the century deluding ourselves that those kinds of things would never happen again, and that the consumer protection laws of the past were onerous barriers to growth and 'innovation'. And here we are.]
