• mtlvmpr@sopuli.xyz
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    4 months ago

    This would be a perfect spot to advertise that EU petition. There must’ve been at least 1 person who liked the game and now can’t play anymore.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.

        Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.

        • DarthYoshiBoy@beehaw.org
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          2 months ago

          Well, I’m not above admitting that I was wrong. Kudos to you. I legit figured they’d let that corpse shamble along for at least a year as a F2P endeavor, but they seem to have reached a correct conclusion earlier than I would have credited them.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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            2 months ago

            Hey, I appreciate your honesty and integrity!

            I suppose it is still possible that the Concord themed Secret Level episode will still air…

            I still doubt it.

            I’m still willing to bet 2¢ it won’t air, haha.

            But yeah… the marketing (the video presentations of staff and developers, their public statements etc) seemed to me to very much indicate that the whole plan was to create an entire Concord Expanded Universe.

            The game was supposed to have weekly story/character progression updates like some older MMOs, they talked about being in many different media formats, they literally used the phrase Concord Universe or Universe of Concord.

            When you go all in on a new IP and … its the biggest failure in the history of gaming… all your plans are done, kaput. You have to wait for people to forget about it and then ‘reimagine’ it a decade later if you even want to try to resurrect it.

            From a game design standpoint… it wasn’t designed to work as a heavily MTX dependent game.

            That’s actually a whole lot more development, more content, more UIs, more testing… and thus money you have to throw at it to get it to be that… and it already has failed, and been stupendously expensive to develop, has a horrific general reputation/perception.

            But as to at least the Secret Level episode airing?

            You do have good arguments that basically boil down to it already being completed or mostly complete, and the … who gets paid by what contract with who for what… that kind of set up … may lead to it making more business sense to just air it anyway.

            But I would still counter that Sony wants to memory hole this IP from collective knowledge, and that they value that, as a means of improving their public perception, more than whatever they’d lose from breaking their contracts with Amazon.

    • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de
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      4 months ago

      As much as I’d like to see this game preserved, I don’t think the dev can be held responsible when they’re refunding everyone who purchased the game.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.

        • s12@sopuli.xyz
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          4 months ago

          I believe another alternative would be to make it completely clear that you’re getting a temporary license. You shouldn’t be able to try to make it look like you’re buying a game when you don’t then even own.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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            4 months ago

            No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.

            If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.

            If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.

            If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…

            Who, other than children, do not know this yet?

            That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.

            It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.