30th March 2009, 6:50 AM
Those are some good concerns developer side too.
When it comes right down to it, the basic issue for me is that I don't want to pay monthly fees to play my games, excepting certain online services where that's understandable. Further, I don't want whether or not I can still play my game subject to whether the service is still there. And, it's not just about if this service succeeds, there's the issue of contract renewals. If a company goes under and doesn't renew a contract, and those liscenses end up impossibly split across 7 entites by the end of it so no new contract would even be feasable (it's happened in the past), that game that I've been playing and would likely go back to again and again if I liked it disappears from the system. If I actually OWN the game, that's not a concern. I have it forever no matter how the liscenses change.
In the distant future, my way of thinking may well be a relic of older times as so many of these transhumanists going on about how cloud computing is humanity's next great step are claiming. Heck I hope we do get something in place that actually accounts for all these scenarios and guarentees my eternal playness of these games (without a fee if at all possible, but being transhumanists, this future would also use post scarcity ecomonics where money is meaningless and every job no one wants to do is done by robots). Until then, this is way way ahead of it's time and just not something I want to bother with. Come to think of it, even as a solution for those struggling to get by, it doesn't work too well. They tend to buy used N64s and a handful of games for $15 and use that for years at a time. A monthly fee would just be an unnecesarry financial drain.
When it comes right down to it, the basic issue for me is that I don't want to pay monthly fees to play my games, excepting certain online services where that's understandable. Further, I don't want whether or not I can still play my game subject to whether the service is still there. And, it's not just about if this service succeeds, there's the issue of contract renewals. If a company goes under and doesn't renew a contract, and those liscenses end up impossibly split across 7 entites by the end of it so no new contract would even be feasable (it's happened in the past), that game that I've been playing and would likely go back to again and again if I liked it disappears from the system. If I actually OWN the game, that's not a concern. I have it forever no matter how the liscenses change.
In the distant future, my way of thinking may well be a relic of older times as so many of these transhumanists going on about how cloud computing is humanity's next great step are claiming. Heck I hope we do get something in place that actually accounts for all these scenarios and guarentees my eternal playness of these games (without a fee if at all possible, but being transhumanists, this future would also use post scarcity ecomonics where money is meaningless and every job no one wants to do is done by robots). Until then, this is way way ahead of it's time and just not something I want to bother with. Come to think of it, even as a solution for those struggling to get by, it doesn't work too well. They tend to buy used N64s and a handful of games for $15 and use that for years at a time. A monthly fee would just be an unnecesarry financial drain.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)