Content updates for a paid game aren't free. They're adding to a package that, more often than not, was incomplete to begin with. And they'll often result in more sales, which is how they pay for themselves.
Not that they're bad, but wording them like they're some huge act of generosity from the studio instead of a reasonable expectation pushes the baseline away from where it should be.
i bought a game that contained X with no expectations of more content.
the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates. i did not pay for those updates. so it seems completely reasonable to consider those updates to be free.
wording it as something i paid for when i didn't pushes the baseline towards dishonesty.
> the game now has Y and Z. i did not purchase the game expecting those updates.
Yeah. Back in the day, those would almost always be paid expansions... if not whole-ass sequels.
There's a subset of video game players these days who expect years and years of substantial changes to a game. Why, back in my day you had to pay for anything more than a game-breaking bug fix... and you counted yourself lucky if you even got those!
Back in the day, they had to ship complete working games, because the cost to fix it later was too high.
Not that they wouldn't mess up all the time, but the punishment for messing up was severe.
And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves. Those are a lot of value, and there's nothing wrong with them. They even still exist today, though rarer.
Maybe the NMS's updates did amount to one or two expansions throughout the 10 years of updates, but they were done piecemeal. Were it not a game that massively under delivered on release, they could've gone that route.
Sounds like being required to ship a "complete working game" didn't matter much. Weird.
> And paid expansions were often the size of a whole game by themselves.
And many were not. Plus, if we ignore shovelware -both past and present- most games these days are way larger than they were back in the day.
Have you ever gone back and played those old games you fuzzily remember through a haze of nostalgia? Many of them [0] would be derided as low-effort asset flips [1] these days. Many of the NMS updates (and tragically many updates to other games) definitely would qualify as "expansion pack"-sized. Some updates are big enough to be whole-ass overhauls. It's _nuts_ how much work some industrious indie game devs put into their games.
It's fine to be angry at how the circumstances of NMS's launch, and be sore that Hello Games is getting any praise after all that. But it's dishonest to refuse to recognize both that a very vocal subset of gamers expects that games will come with months and years of substantial post-release changes provided free-of-charge and that many devs -for better or worse- provide what these folks are demanding.
[0] ...but definitely not all of them...
[1] Granted, all sorts of things get called "asset flips", so the "low-effort" part is the important bit here.
Always having some instance of someone messing up is still substantially different from more instances than not being messed up. So it did actually matter quite a lot.
Now, as someone who is an avid retro gamer, I play plenty of those old games you're talking about. In the very old days, games were definitely shorter, but by the 5th and 6th gen, the gap isn't quite as big. If anything, they're often too large now, but that's neither here nor there. Budgets are bigger, teams are bigger, and most importantly, the consumer base is bigger. So size of games and expansions needs to be looked at relatively.
Regardless, for non-early access (of which NMS is an example of in all but name) and non-live service games, there mostly isn't an expectation that content will be added, only that updates will be made that improve and fix what's there. The exceptions are mostly when there's a pattern of content uodates happening before, or when something is clearly incomplete compared to what's usual for a series. See the Monster Hunter series as an example for both the latter ones.
Overall, it's natural for customers to want things that are at least as good or better than before when technology improves. It's the opposite that should not be happening.
There's a difference between DLC and providing "the base game content" – which No Man's Sky was doing. It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now. They could have cut their losses but it would've ended the studio.
Now they're being touted as a paragon of scrappy game dev. Which is wrong.
> It wasn't an actual game on launch and it's barely one now.
I'd argue that it was barely a game at launch, and it's still barely a game today... it has always been a sandbox with very little game in it, and that's fine. [0] But that's neither here nor there.
They released a "game" ten years ago. They've updated that "game" many times and never charged for updates.
That makes those updates free. You can justifiably be angry about the circumstances of the launch, and justifiably be angry that anyone's saying anything good about the devs. That doesn't change the fact that this [3]
And the features they've bolted on "for free"...
is an asinine use of scare quotes. The updates were delivered free of charge, and the price of the base game hasn't been increased to account for them. This makes them free updates.
[0] See the fourth paragraph of [1] as well as most of [2] for a little more commentary on this.
Many people bought it expecting more, because the studio promised a lot more. You can say that's on the people for not checking before buying, but that doesn't invalidate the dishonesty on their part.
Were it an early access game, you would in fact be purchasing expecting updates. Not guaranteed updates, but certainly expecting them. This game was an amazing early access release in all but name.
I'm not saying you should word it as updates you paid for, you just don't word them as if they're an act of generosity. Just call them "updates", not "free updates" like you did right before the reply that put "free updates" in quotes.
First, leaking a device's content filtering settings is not the same as leaking a user's age bracket. For example, if the server identifies a web browser that isn't loading tags annotated with "sexual-content" that might indicate that the user is a child but could equally well indicate that they're a corporate office worker, religious, or anyone else who prefers not to see such content at the moment.
Second, if the standard defined multiple semantic tags or levels (e.g. violence, extreme violence, substance use, unknown, etc) then this gives more granular control to device administrators who may care more about some types of content than others.
Third, web browsers wouldn't even have to leak the content filtering settings. For example, perhaps an administrator could configure the web browser to render content overlaid with a semi-opaque blur, in which case the server would not know.
Fourth, and this is more philosophical, asking websites to provide more information to the device so that an admin can do their own filtering leaves the choices to them. Whereas if the only way a device admin can filter content is to submit the age of the device's user to a third party so the third party can decide how to pre-filter the content it sends back, that gives an uncomfortable amount of control to platforms and regulators.
That's exactly what the law will do, but on the device. The parents will input the child's age during device setup, and then every service will query the age range based on that and work in "child account" mode.
Without any requirement for verification, it'll be completely up to the parents to decide what their child will see, while the services will only get the minimum information needed. It'll basically make parental control easy, but still in the parent's control.
That's a very shallow understanding of reading, especially coming from an author.
No, reading is not just about getting the idea from the author. It's an experience in and of itself, and the lack of something makes the experience just as much as the presence of something.
It's almost like saying a comic and an animation are the same thing, or that an animation is better, since it has more possibilities.
There's this tendency to treat things as if they're the same, otherwise one is inferior. But that's just not the case. Two things can be both different and valuable in their own way.
We still do that, though, within our own little tribes inside civilization. Most people still love their grandparents, even though they're old. That just doesn't necessarily extend to all of civilization.
We don't need to have every human care about every single other human to thrive as a species. If anything, if we did, we wouldn't be able to thrive at all.
The issues you mentioned are, in the vast majority of cases, caused by the lack of peaceful coexistence to begin with, because as long as me and everyone else is coexisting peacefully, getting more for myself isn't taking anything away from those in the situations you mentioned. Resources might be scarce, but that doesn't mean they're zero sum.
> Humans, by virtue of being living, thinking beings deserve lives of fulfillment, dignity, and security.
You wanting people to have that doesn't mean that people deserve to have that. Fundamentally, no one deserves anything. We, as a species, lived for a hundred thousand years with absolutely nothing except what we could carve off the world by ourselves or with the help of small groups that chose to work with us. Everything else since then is a bonus (or sometimes a malus, but on average a bonus).
Also, as much as it sounds nice to declare such things as goals, deserved or not, it is indeed impossible, and probably not desirable, since, for starters, you can't even define what those things would be like. Those aren't actionable, they're at most occasional consequences of a system that is working to alleviate scarcity of resources.
Unfortunately, we're nowhere near that replicator.
> The person who did the work deserved credit and compensation.
That's the part of the argument in favor of copyright that is inherently flawed.
Doing some amount of work doesn't entitle you to anything besides whatever you've agreed to get for that work, or possession of the output, in case you did it for yourself. But that's all you're entitled to get.
Work itself doesn't have any intrinsic value, only output does. The scarcity of output is what dictates what is actually valuable.
Creative work has the characteristic of its marginal cost being very high for the first copy, but nearly zero for additional copies. That's true simply because of the nature of such work, it isn't something that is unfairly imposed upon creative workers. Whenever you choose to engage in creative work, you know that, or at least you should. And if you choose to give away the first copy for free, or very cheap, that's your prerrogative, but it doesn't inherently entitle you to anything else besides the value of that first copy.
Yes, there are laws such as copyright laws that exist to artificially inflate the value of additional copies, but they go against how things work naturally, so you shouldn't rely on them, and you certainly shouldn't base your moral compass on them.
Now, I do still prefer copyleft licenses over permissive ones for the work I choose to give away for free, but only to stop corporations from taking that work and then using copyright laws to keep it exclusive to them. Once copyright is no longer an issue, they won't be necessary anymore.
> it doesn't inherently entitle you to anything else besides the value of that first copy
What if many people want to buy a copy but nobody wants to be the first because he'd pay the full cost and the others could get the next copy for free? What if they instead agree to share the cost equally?
But then this group doesn't wanna be the first because the next group could get it for free? So what if they get the whole country together and agree to share the cost?
How much? They agree to determine that by supply and demand.
Congratulations, we're just reinvented copyright laws.
Anarchists and especially ancaps never game things out in their heads because they'd arrive at some variation of the current system. Sad because they usually could come up with an improved version. But they choose to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Not that they're bad, but wording them like they're some huge act of generosity from the studio instead of a reasonable expectation pushes the baseline away from where it should be.
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