Quote:
Originally Posted by fastboy21
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the key phrase is that blizzard took action. why they did is unimportant.
sony hasn't taken any action against p1999. if they did p1999 would be shut down also. it has nothing to do with the legal arguments of whether p1999 is actually in violation of copyright law or not. it has to do with the fact that sony can easily throw legal resources at p1999 and its creators that would be highly inhibitive.
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Its still nebulous to me to see if corporations will clamp down on servers like p99 who have no intentions of making money off a game beside donations. You can see the trend though, people who are older and are "hardcore" PC gamers probably have fond memories of the whole mod scene that grew with the release of doom. New maps, new weapons, and then completely new modes of play when games like Half-life came into being (Counter-strike, Natural selection).
Now companies like Bethesda, who used to sell games because their games were so moddable in the past, are trying to appropriate themselves this idea of independent fiddling with a game to extend shelf life way past what it would accomplish on its own. So now you got ridiculous things like bethesda selling horse saddles for 2$ for oblivion. Thats all the downloadable content trends that we are seeing now, where companies are nickle and diming players of content that they used to get in one big expansion every year or so. This trend has another incarnation in the form of MMOs who use micro-transactions as a payment model.
I think one of the reasons to clamp down on independent developpers like the ones here at p99s would be that it makes them look bad. Some of the unreal2004 maps were mind blowing, top notch stuff made by amateurs. One example of this is how starcraft 2 is run. Now if you make a map for SC2, by default the work is owned by Blizz. Theres a huge rant somewhere that i cant find right now on SC2 that splits opens this recent trend of companies like Blizz and Bethesda who used to be at the forefront of the modding scene who are now trying to cash in and push the independents who were responsible for it in the first place to the side. Im afraid this is whats coming for the Indy MMO mod scene as well.
I think the crux of the matter is that when the influence of the bean counters in big companies like Blizzard becomes too big, those companies who used to be at the forefront of the "For gamers by gamers" motto gets diluted and people like Kotick at activision runs companies into the ground. Its not all gloomy though because it leaves a vacuum for quality games that (hopefully) theres always a new batch of "garage" devs like ID software were back in the days ready to blow up the spot. To me these new studios are companies like Relic and Stardock. Unfortunatly i see MMOs taking the hard nose dive recent where no game that has come in the last 2 years has got me to play for more than a month (Fallen earth, Darkfall, Champions online demo). There are so much MMOs coming out, i really hope that these corporate fucks will lose a shit ton of money because they dont understand why people play games (fun) so that they get burned and leave the genre alone. Then when all the shit is filtered out what will remain is games that will stand out because of the passion behind the people making them.