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Why is there no regulation
Kovia
Member UncommonPosts: 5
This industry seriously needs regulating...
There is a new MMORPG being developed right now called Dragons Prophet.
Here are 2 videos.... The first video, an official trailer released by the company
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYSTaDxu-qM&feature=youtu.be
The second video, a gameplay video, recordered by a korean player and posted on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ69QPAtgtI
Now, there is ofcourse the posibility that the guy who uploaded the video is infact not playing dragons prophet which seems unlikely but these 2 videos are not even remotely the same game.
One looks like a new mmo and the other looks like an mmo that was developed 15 years ago...
How are MMO companies allowed to get away with that level of whatever the equivalent to false advertising is when selling virtual products
Comments
How do you know the guy isn't playing a beta or just has his settings turned way down. They don't really look that different.
Besides these games are pretty hard to hide a change like that. By the time a game launches there is a lot of game play footage out there to watch. If a company can pull a fast one on it's customers they either didn't do enough research or bought into a game way too early. They don't need regulation. People just need to be more responcable when it comes to spending their money.
Pretty much this.
I didnt see that big a difference either, other then the player probebly using average settings to play, opposing to max settings for a trailer and probebly used low settings to record.
Then ofcourse.. the trailer is made from PoV of a camera man and a director's hand cut fragments together showing the better parts of the animations and combat, the player recording seemed like complete different class(es) picked and used raw material to post.
Atleast they seemed to make a trailer from actual in game footage opposing to too many (bigger)companies who create cutscenes-trailers, like.. WoW for instance.
To expand on this, massive regulatory schemes are expensive to comply with, and create scaling incentives that favor big businesses. If business A is just as big as businesses B, C, D... Z added together but all have the same amount of work to do to comply with regulations, then they all have the same costs, but for business A, that cost is a much smaller fraction of their revenue than for the others, which gives them a big advantage.
The really big publishers will be able to comply with regulations just fine--and lobby to get the regulations tuned to their liking. Smaller indie developers could easily get squeezed out and forced to try to get themselves bought out by a bigger company. That's not the world I want.
That's why many regulations are only written to affect businesses above a certain size--and why businesses just below key threshold sizes may well think long and hard before hiring that extra employee that will require them to comply wtih a ton of new regulations.
Nuisance suits because little jimmy had buyer's remorse over a sixty dollar game purchase he failed to research...no, that doesn't sound terribly appealing.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
That looks like the exact same game to me.
Did you by any chance jump on the SWTOR train? After watching the trailer I thought hmm, this might actually be really good. Then the first gameplay video I saw you could easily see it was the same gameplay as any MMO. For me that turned me off the game.
TL;DR : Don't get hyped for a game untill you see actual gameplay footage.
My thoughts exactly.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
I'm not a fan of having the gov. stepping in but some things that have been going on do make me some what open to it.
Want to play a sports game? The only place to find it is at EA. This prevents any kind of competition because EA is the only source. If Microsoft can get hit because of these kinds of practices why can't EA?
False advertisement has become a norm in the industry, some like War Z take it to an extreme but to a lesser degree false advertising has become the norm.
Larger companies intentionally preying on addictions and other conditions.
While I'm not entirely for regulations, I'm not entirely against it due to a large number of growing issues within the industry. Thats not even talking about working conditions. Many of these coporations treat these devs and such like they were running a sweat shop. They even go so far as to fire devs to avoid paying bonuses or overtime.
We can't even rely on reviewers now days because many of them are bought and paid for and these coporations even go so far to pay for shills to come to forums and harass naysayers and hype games by any means neccessary.
The under belly of the gaming industry can be pretty horrific.
If the gaming industry can't regulate itself the government is eventually going to be forced to step in and regulate it.
@Quizzical and BitterClinger
You do realize that the larger companies are already making it near impossible for the smaller companies don't you?
They buy and dismantle them, when they can't buy them and dismantle them they do hostile take overs and then dismantle them. They do any underhanded thing they can to keep competition stiffled.
Bioware is gone, Mythic is gone, Origins is gone, so many smaller developers and publishers have been gobbled up and or destroyed. What exactly would be different?
Anyone can make a sports game. EA only bought the licenses to use the team names. This is no different from any other licensing.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
First off, they don't have the exclusive for one sport, they have the exclusive license for pretty much every sport. Yes, you can make a sports game but you can't use any teams that sports fans want to play, you can't use any players that anyone wants to use, and you can't use any official stats and such that anyone cares about.
It wasn't like that in the past. EA games were outsold by better made games. Instead of making better games EA did a lot of underhanded deals to gain exclusive rights and become the only place to get any sort of official sports game. No sports game out sales an EA sports game anymore because they don't have any of the things that people that play these games care about.
Again, Microsft got hit because of similar practices.
I know exactly what they have and how long they've had it. There is nothing remotely illegal or shady about it. What you're suggesting is that people who want a sports game don't care about graphics or gameplay, just that they can be the Nets, Jets, Mets, or whatever. This seems to be a strong point of contention for you, so I won't press it any further.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Are you likewise upset because because no one else besides Nike is allowed to make official NFL apparel?
What you need to realize is that the pro sports leagues are primarily in the business of making money. If selling naming rights exclusively to one company is more profitable than licensing naming rights to several (and it strikes me as highly plausible that it would be), then it was inevitable that they'd eventually do that. If not with EA, then with some other company that likewise wouldn't feel the need to make a good product due to the lack of competition. Come to think of it, that's basically the same reason why games based on movies tend to be terrible.
It really only becomes despicable in the case of amateur leagues, where they sell the exclusive right to use the likenesses of athletes while neither compensating the athletes nor getting their permission. That's what Ed O'Bannon's lawsuit is about, though I think that's targeted mainly at the NCAA.
If by "similar practices" you mean not giving boat loads of money to D.C. lobbyists, then you are correct and truly understand the entire point of "regulation".
Prior to 1998, Microsoft spent no money (as in $0) on lobbying politicians in our Federal government. So, the federal government brought an anti-monopoly lawsuit against Microsoft. Sure, absolutely NOTHING changed about the way MSFT did business or packaged products with its operating systems as a result of the lawsuit, but MSFT DID start contributing $2 million to lobbying politicians in Washington. That number has grown to over $9 million dollars today.
Rest assured, the gaming industry is making too much money to be left alone. Some sort of Federal "regulation" is coming, probably in the form of "protecting the children" from violent images and what not, but that probably won't change a lot by itself. Regulation works like torture, no one regulation is very onerous, but it will spell death by a thousand cuts for the gaming industry (but perhaps not for those who REALLY like WOW clones).
I mean, let's not forget the original complaint against UO... "I can't play the entire game that I purchased without someone else interfering with my experience."
If we plunge down the path of busy-bodies and regulators now, how long until they start regulating the "experience". Ever read or hear the word "gay" or "ghey" in an online game? How about the "N" word? What about FCC regulated language, in general? Does your indie game have handicap accessibility? No? Oh my...
Yes, I think the "regulators" will come for the gaming industry dollars eventually... all to protect the helpless consumer, of course, but I think we'll all be a lot better off fending them off for as long as possible.
Yet this is exactly what the anti-trust laws were set in place to prevent. Monopolizing in the name of profit. The problem is that no one enforces them anymore even though they are even more relevant today than when they were first implemented. As if corporate corruption wasn't already obvious, you can see it in the complete denial of current laws and regulations as palms get greased in the halls of Congress and the various regulatory bodies. Everyone seems to scream bloody murder about regulations in every industry, yet we see evidence every day where regulations are being outright ignored in our food, energy supplies, drugs and the never ending Wall Street debacles. Sadly, the Fox is running the hen house.
"Forced"?? By whom and to what consequence? Who is going to "force" the government to start wrapping the gaming industry in its usual strangling web of regulation? Those foolish enough to spend their money without doing any research, or bothering to think for themselves?... Or those who seek to have such people "protected" from the "horrors" of bad games, and their own poor judgement?...
You do realize that the road to a rather warm, unpleasant place, is paved with good intentions?... The LAST thing we need is to get governments heavy hand involved in the gaming industry.
As for the nonsense that is the typical anti trust case, you do realize that its usually started to benefit one of the other companies involved in a given market sector, that uses its politicians to attack its competition?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Criticism
A monopoly is a monopoly regardless of how you try and spin it.
Pro sports leagues have an anti-trust exemption on the basis that you kind of have to have an anti-trust exemption in order to have a coherent league. The anti-trust exemption does not stop someone else from making a different league that plays the same sport as you, however.
Would that such was the case. In reality, matters are more complicated. From the wiki.
"There are two main kinds of monopolies: de jure monopolies, which are those that are protected from competition by government actions, and de facto monopolies, which are not protected by law from competition and are simply the only supplier of a good or service. Advocates of laissez-faire capitalism advocate that the only type of monopoly that should be broken up is what they call a coercive monopoly, that is the persistent, exclusive control of a vitally needed resource, good, or service such that the community is at the mercy of the controller, and where there are no suppliers of the same or substitute goods to which the consumer can turn. In such a monopoly, the monopolist is able to make pricing and production decisions without an eye on competitive market forces and is able to curtail production to price-gouge consumers. Laissez-faire advocates argue that such a monopoly can only come about through the use of physical coercion or fraudulent means by the corporation or by government intervention and that there is no case of a coercive monopoly ever existing that was not the result of government policies.
Free market economist Milton Friedman states that he initially agreed with the underlying principles of antitrust laws (breaking up monopolies and oligopolies and promoting more competition), but that he came to the conclusion that they do more harm than good.[11]
Critics also argue that the empirical evidence shows that "predatory pricing" does not work in practice and is better defeated by a truly free market than by antitrust laws (see Criticism of the theory of predatory pricing).
Thomas Sowell argues that, even if a superior business drives out a competitor, it does not follow that competition has ended:
Alan Greenspan argues that the very existence of antitrust laws discourages businessmen from some activities that might be socially useful out of fear that their business actions will be determined illegal and dismantled by government. In his essay entitled Antitrust, he says: "No one will ever know what new products, processes, machines, and cost-saving mergers failed to come into existence, killed by the Sherman Act before they were born. No one can ever compute the price that all of us have paid for that Act which, by inducing less effective use of capital, has kept our standard of living lower than would otherwise have been possible." Those, like Greenspan, who oppose antitrust tend not to support competition as an end in itself but for its results—low prices. As long as a monopoly is not a coercive monopoly where a firm is securely insulated from potential competition, it is argued that the firm must keep prices low in order to discourage competition from arising. Hence, legal action is uncalled for and wrongly harms the firm and consumers.[13]
Thomas DiLorenzo, an adherent of the Austrian school of economics, found that the "trusts" of the late 19th century were dropping their prices faster than the rest of the economy, and he holds that they were not monopolists at all.[14]
Ayn Rand, the American writer, provides a moral argument against antitrust laws. She holds that these laws in principle criminalize any person engaged in making a business successful, and, thus, are gross violations of their individual expectations.[15]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Criticism
There is no need for regulations, just check up on games before you buy them. And by checking up I dont mean reading a hype thread here and only caring about the post saying the game is good but by reading about the mechanics, watching a few vids and reading a review or 2.
Just stop buying crap and there is no problem.
I assume you had a point? If so I would try and make it rather than copy and pasting something that will be clipped and ignored considering it isn't some earth shattering revalation that is unkown to all but you.
The bottom line is this, picking one thing posted while ingoring the rest means nada. You can't deny there has been a great deal of shady, underhanded, and plain distasteful things going on in the gaming inudustry. You can not deny that it has been bad for developers and gamers alike. You can not deny that things have gotten progressively worse. You also can not deny that all things have a breaking point. We've already seen numerous lawsuits and even several class action lawsuits in and revolving around the gaming industry.
When the courts get hit with these types of things to often then yes, eventually the government will step in on it's own accord. To say this isn't a possibility is naive to say the least.
In a few cases as of late governments have been getting involved already due to massive outcry from it's people. Think it won't happen here if you want.
There are none so blind as they who will not see... I provided information about the nature of the topic under discussion. If some wish to ignore the reality of these things, in favor of surface illusions/delusions, that is entirely their own choice.
The reality is that many of these actions are ill conceived, and that the consequences of the actions in question, tend to make matters worse, rather than better. Unlike some might maintain, people *are* responsible for their own actions/inactions. In the vast majority of these cases, if simple common sense, and good judgement had been employed, the situation would not have been nearly as adverse.
Those who start in with "Government SHOULD DO SOMETHING!!" about this, that or the other, are in fact part of the problem, rather than any real solution. In terms of games, people need to learn to do their own research, and make their own *informed* choices. If that becomes common, there would be no need for government to "protect" people.