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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Is this, uh… actually a good outcome? If games make most of their money in the first couple months anyway (I’m not sure about this claim but it seems intuitively possible, at least for AAA), then getting anti-piracy for that timeframe seems like a high priority.

Then, the subscription can be allowed to lapse… and the game can be preserved, at least to the extent to which it can run without servers. If we have any belief in the “games as art” idea, this seems like a good result for preserving art.

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It's a pretty good outcome, yeah. Kind of makes one wonder why copyright needs to be 70 years + life, when the overwhelming majority of sales are in the first year...

You make a good point, but there's a lot of money in sequels and IP.

Trademark, not Copyright.

No, the IP is protected by copyright, not by trademark.

The stories are copyrighted, but the characters inside are also trademarked. You can go distribute Steamboat Willie without consequences, but Mickey is still Disney IP.

And what stops you from making new content with Mickey Mouse in it is the set of copyrights Disney holds on Mickey Mouse. The trademark does nothing.

Established law says that every publication of a work involving a copyrighted character creates a new version of that character whose copyright extends for the full period starting from the publication of that work. This came up when someone wrote a story about Sherlock Holmes, who was out of copyright, and they were sued, successfully, on the theory that they had used aspects of Sherlock Holmes' personality that were developed in stories still under copyright.

Sam Logan had some fun with the concept here: https://www.samandfuzzy.com/3429

> After nearly 100 years of acting, what's your favorite of your roles?

> Steamboat Willie.

> Really? Not any of your other--

> We don't talk about my other roles. They're a burden. A liability, used to control me. I have left them behind, so that I may be free.

It works out pretty well as long as publishers follow that step yeah. it would be nicest to open source the game after it's life span maybe

It would be nicest not to use unethical software (Denuvo or any other DRM) and distribute the game source with the binaries since the initial release. I can't believe that this needs to be repeated and that our understanding of open source has been perverted to 'is it on Github, and do the devs/community work for free so we can take advantage from them?' and that it's ok for games to be proprietary software...

As someone who regularly used to visit the ship and heavy rain websites for video games, I actually feel the modern usage of Denuvo—protect sales for the first bit, and then remove it for the long tail—is a decent middle ground between EA-style DRM that locks down a game and its servers for ever, versus having a game completely blown open the first day, and a new-ish studio losing a considerable amount of genuinely-deserved revenue the first few days after release because they had no DRM on.

Nobody needs video games. It’s ok if you can’t play video games.

By that logic nobody needs game developers and it's OK if we remove any laws (e.g. copyright) that protect them.

I don’t see how you arrived at that conclusion. People pirate games as if they’re entitled to play them without paying. If someone can’t afford the game they want, too bad. There were plenty of games I could not afford as a kid, so I did other things.

I'm not seeing the connection here. By the same logic, nobody needs software, it's ok if you can't use software, thus proprietary software is not unethical?

I mean, I'm pretty happy with the arrangement. People who buy day-1 bugfests for full price have to deal with awful DRM. But if you wait a year or two, then the most egregious bugs get fixed, it goes on sale, and the intrusive DRM is gone.

Of course, this means that casuals like me get a much better experience than their core, dedicated, day-1 customers ... but really, that sort of contempt for your core audience is a foundational principle of AAA these days.

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