xianc78 @xianc78@gameliberty.club

@PurpCat @lina
>because few developers want to be seen as making a "mass shooter simulator"

And even fewer developers want to make games involving child death. That's why children are absent in games like GTA, Postal, and Hatred. This especially became true after Columbine. Hell, a lot of people believe that part of the reason that Mother 3 still hasn't been localized is the fact that child death is a key part of the game's plot.

@lina @PurpCat Honestly, the "family vacation" mission in MW3 is much more shocking because it involves a small child being killed on-screen, yet that mission never remotely received the amount of backlashed that "No Russian" did.

@bonkmaykr
>I imagine it wasn't very well thought out because Commodore's main business model was to cut hardware costs, not sell at a loss and live off of software licensing.

That's what also partly killed the TurboGrafx-16 outside of Japan. It seems like the common mistake that computer manufacturers make when trying to enter the console business.

>I don't know much about Atari, I think they tried to improve security after the 2600 but that doesn't exactly work if nobody's buying your machines to begin with.

Atari just never recovered from the video game crash. The 7800 was soft-launched shortly before the NES, but could not compete with it after the NES came to market (games were the exact same ones from the 2600 era, but with better graphics). The Lynx was way too expensive, bulky and ate up batteries. And the Jaguar was a nightmare to program for and whatever advantages it had compared to it's 32-bit or even 16-bit competition was never really shown off during it's lifetime. Piracy didn't kill any of those consoles, but the Atari 2600 was declared an open platform by the courts and that did contribute to their downfall.

Even to this day, they have no idea what they are doing. They thought they could've learned from the mistakes the Ouya made with the VCS, but they didn't realize that PC gaming has become much more accessible over the years (especially when it comes to plugging a PC into the TV) that there really isn't any demand for an "open console" anymore.

I love how for years now that console gamers always bring up how they still get physical games while PC gamers only get digital releases now, which is untrue as indie games occasionally get physical releases on PC. Now, PlayStation is going digital only, PC gamers can actually make that argument, even if it's just indie games. As long as computers have some form of removable storage, physical releases will always be possible even if it's very niche.

Also, the whole physical vs digital debate has always seemed like a false dichotomy to me. People say that you always own your copy if it's physical and you never own it if it's digital, but that is entirely untrue. I own all my MP3 files on my MP3 player and no company can take those away from me. I can back them up on multiple devices. And physical media can have DRM and revocable licenses where you can lose ownership at anytime. The real argument should be whether or not the medium in question has DRM, not whether it is physical or digital.

@bonkmaykr Even actual gaming hardware like the Dreamcast didn't die from piracy, at least not directly. If publishers knew (or at least acknowledged) that piracy doesn't kill sales, they would've still supported that hardware. The real problem was that if your console can easily run pirated software, then it can also easily run homebrew and publishers wouldn't have to pay licensing fees to publish their games on your system, and licensing fees are how console manufacturers make money as they sell their systems at a loss. Homebrew is the biggest threat to any console manufacturer (not including "open-source consoles like the Ouya or OpenPandora), not piracy.

>90% of people illegally copying the full version doesn't change that if you're outdoing Windows in install frequency.

And I bet most of those people who pirated the retail version of DOOM were either kids whose parents refused to buy that game for them or people living in countries where the game was outright banned.