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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2549 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 2, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Yes, government is bad. But, as I understand it, Accursed Farms does not want to force the publisher to maintain the servers forever. Rather, he wants to force the publisher to make it possible for players to set up their own servers after the publisher's servers are shut down.

Quote from the petition:

An increasing number of publishers are selling videogames that are required to connect through the internet to the game publisher, or "phone home" to function. While this is not a problem in itself, when support ends for these types of games, very often publishers simply sever the connection necessary for the game to function, proceed to destroy all working copies of the game, and implement extensive measures to prevent the customer from repairing the game in any way.

"Repairing the game" includes setting up non-publisher-controlled servers.

I have generally two brains when thinking about policy. One is my libertarian brain that does indeed say "government is bad". But the other is my economics degree brain that mostly screams about tradeoffs, and tells my libertarian brain that some forms of "government bad" are worth it for the product they provide.

My libertarian brain is mostly not concerned with places where I don't live. In fact, if they have an awful government it can serve as an example of what not to do where I live.

My economics brain is still bothered though.

The existence of regulation can create tradeoffs but there is also sets of tradeoffs within regulations.

The rules can be clearly written and fail to cover all edge cases. Or the rules can be vaguely written and operate on vibes and feels at a court level.

Large entities mostly don't go for vibes. It rightfully scares the crap out of everyone, cuz outside of small communities vibes are not very legible.

So they've got to get super detailed legislation written by bureaucrats in Brussels that will somehow appropriately understand different game type and business models. And then craft a set of tradeoffs in the legislation that make the specific practice they don't like unprofitable.

It's a tight needle to thread. And my previous experience with EU legislation doesn't make me hopeful. They've added a minor annoyance to literally every website I visit with those annoying cookie popups. They've had like a decade to correct that ... and yet I still get the stupid popups.

And cookie tracking on websites is way simpler than any individual game preservation effort.

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