FalcomAdol

Sadly, whatever the law, not every streamer has the EFF to back their lawsuit. Getting your day in court in the US costs money unless you're the defendant and the state is bringing a criminal case. The legal system in the U.S., by default favors those who can afford to defend "their rights" in court.

The next time something like this goes to court I bet it's a class action for everyone who got a takedown on Youtube.

Companies have some a legitimate interest in the products and developments created by an employee while they're paying them. Probably now more than ever. What does "on company time" and "off the clock" mean anymore? If I'm standing in a line or waiting to pick up my car at the mechanic, I'm as likely to get a few work emails dealt with as to pay a round of 2048 or Kinectimals.

In a lot of cases, 24-hour availability on at least some limited reasonable basis is an expectation that you're implicitly being paid for (or explicitly in some cases).

That doesn't mean they should claim that they own 100% of what you create on the side, but it's really hard to write a contract that makes an allowance when people don't work set schedules and are often not required to always be in the office.

Most of the time these things don't come up because there's no significant amount of money involved. Let's get real, if Oculus didn't sell out to Facebook, ZeniMax wouldn't have come knocking on their door for money. Now there are deep pockets involved, and the lawyers start drooling like Pavlov's dogs hearing that bell ringing.

Oddly enough, you can play Assassin's Creed non-lethal, if you choose to. Possibly not all of them, but from AC3 on, yes. If you attack people with non-bladed weapons (fists, brooms), you definitely knock people down, rather than killing them, and you can "kill" bosses the same way (death in a cutscene doesn't count).

You're wrong Patrick.

Legally, Oculus owes nothing. That is the only respect in which they don't owe anything to those people who backed their kickstarter.

Doing what is legally required of you is the bare minimum expected of people and companies in a civil society, and certainly doesn't begin to cover what is morally right or ethical.

If every company and individual does only what it is required to do, we're all up shit's creek.

No, it can't, Massachusetts has a healthcare law ("Romneycare") that requires employers with 10 full time employees to provide a healthcare option to employees. Unless he moves to Rhode Island. If he does that, fuck him. All defenses are meaningless.

Schilling did that, and now he's got cancer. I'm not saying there's a connection...but...ALIENS.

What are you talking about?, 2K closed Marin just last year.

Irrational was fully owned by 2k, there's no tax dodge to be gotten here.

Given how game development goes, having a 200 person staff for a game that was going to take another 2 to 3 years to ramp up to needing that many people was never going to be sustainable.

Speculation: It's possible that it was intended to be a two game studio and whatever their "off-year" project was got canned, suddenly guys and women who were prepared to shift to doing art and finish design work on a second game had nothing to work on.

I'm sad to see so many people lose their jobs in one fell swoop, especially in my home state, but the other reality of current game development is that there's more room than ever for new small studios to form and for people to be able to create outside of the studio and publisher structure. There are worse places to have to start a company than Massachusetts as well, there's an availability of investment capital and knowledgeable base of workers, and as you pointed out a lot of studios doing a lot of things that will help to absorb these developers.

Hopefully we'll be seeing the next game like Gone Home from them soon.

And maybe Backbone will decide to reopen their Framingham studio now that they're flush with Amazon cash.

I thought Phil wasn't even the programmer or designer on Fez II, he was off doing some other thing...

The other thing I'm not clear on is what the console makers mean what they say "self publish."

Does self publish mean there won't be any TCRs, that it's the wild wild west on updates and prices are whatever you want and changeable on a dime? If Microsoft says "no self publishing" does that mean that they are acting as the publisher for games that aren't coming out of a third party (i.e. taking a cut of the price and possibly surfacing the games in advertisements or sales?)

They could totally be talking in opposite directions with the media hearing whatever they want to.

Sounds like the "used game fee" is not borne by the users anyway, it's between the retailers and publishers. The entire system of account verification is established to ensure that once someone else starts using a license key, you can't use it anymore.

It doesn't need to be online, unless you want to actually stream the Daily Show to it.

Yeah, it's pretty shady that you can easily buy games on Steam that your system is just too new to play or totally incompatible with. Some games just won't play on ATI hardware (primarily Xbox era games with a PC version, some functions were written for Nvidia cards specifically), others won't play on anything new because they're GLIDE based. Constantly testing every configuration and so forth would certainly be an impossible mission but with no recourse for "returning" the game, it kind of sucks.

I'm another one that hasn't bought a used game in several years. Buying used shorts the developers, it is anti-developer. The used game market is also predatory towards users who buy and sell in that market where the prices are basically set by a monopolist (Gamestop). No used games means that new games have to drop in price faster, because that price drop is how you get penetration into the wider customer base. The availability of used games props up the price of new games, and the stickiness of new game prices is allowing users to be boned by Gamestop selling you the same title for 5 bucks less than a NIB one (and 10 dollars more than Amazon).

I don't know, I'm not feeling good about the entire state of gaming right now, maybe in part because there's not enough information. I feel like everyone is telling half the truth (or less).