Comments by "Ash Roskell" (@ashroskell) on "Emulating Might Be More Illegal Than I Thought..." video.

  1. That’s a good point. I have often thought that most of the TOS that games use would never stand up to a serious legal challenge. But it’s just a question of someone having the money and the will to do it. That person would face private investigators acting like CIA spooks, trying to intimidate them, death threats, bribes, all kinds of horrors which have been documented already as the common practices of publishers like EA Publishing, Take Two and Ubisoft, for example. Consider this example just to start with: What other industry is able to get you to buy their product, fully pay for it, download and install that product and only then, after they have your money, after they have installed all their monitoring programs which generate cash for them, can you read their Terms Of Service and have to agree to them if you want to play your game? If you disagree you cannot play and you are not entitled to your money back. That’s insane! No court in any free country would uphold an industry’s right to hold you to ransom like that! “I only get to look at the contract AFTER I paid for the product?” The publisher would be laughed out of court! But no one challenges this standard practice. There are a raft of things that the games industry gets away with that they must know they could never back up in the courts. But they rely on lobby groups to make politicians look the other way and the abject ignorance of those mostly elderly politicians, more interested in book and film laws, or oil rights. We need entire departments specialising in gaming law in each of the free world’s countries, as a matter of urgency. We’re talking multiple $£€ billions here, for single publishers alone! Massive tax revenues and consumer rights issues, sailing blithely under the radar! Would you buy a house, a car, a fridge, without knowing anything about it other than what the ads tell you, only to get it home and find out it isn’t even FINISHED yet!? “Oh don’t worry. The steering wheel is coming in an update in a couple of months . . . maybe.” WTF??? “Of course you’ll get a roof on your house! It’s a new house! You didn’t expect it to be perfect on day one, did you? Wait for the patch!” Whuh? . . . The games industry is the ONLY industry on Planet Earth that is routinely getting away with murder at the levels of a Bangladeshi Telemarketer, yet we do NOTHING about this??? That’s why, for example, CyberPunk 2077 became such a good game after its SHAMEFUL launch. Because the Polish Government had invested serious capital into that game and were expecting results. They only had to make the threat of taking CDPR to court and they caved instantly, acceding to every demand the government made, no matter how unreasonable they thought they were being. Because they KNEW they had no legal legs to stand on and that other aspects of gaming law might come under scrutiny, setting precedents that could start the dominoes falling throughout the entire industry. And NO ONE in the games publishing industry wants a powerful organisation like a government, challenging the way they do business on behalf of consumers. That’s a Pandora’s Box they need to keep firmly shut. The rumour is that other publishers stepped in, (I heard Take Two was one of them, but I have no proof) offering the Polish government money to buy CDPR time and offering to make them whole if CDPR failed to turn things around. But, make no mistake. We’re at these levels now. Where a games publishing company can destabilise the entire economy of a European power, through the failed launch of one game! And it’s not like they didn’t make serious profits anyway! Just not as much as they projected. If a games company making a serious profit, but just not enough, if what it takes to rock the economy of Poland, consider the God Tier levels this economic game is being played around the world?
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  2. Isn’t it time that the nations’ libraries started preserving games, in the manner they preserve books? The British Library has a copy of every book that ever went to print. Every single one, in one form or other, with countless originals, including hand written ones. An irreplaceable treasure. Time for games to get a little respect around here. Maybe a special library of the type they have for film? Like the British Film Institute, or something? A national games archive?
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  3.  @cykablyat1466  : Though, we really ought to examine what we mean by, “traditional business model,” don’t you think? Would you buy any other product that doesn’t allow you to see their TOS contract that you have to sign (if you want your game to work?) until AFTER you have paid for it, installed their software onto you machine and allowed them to gather up your data? No other industry works that way, nor could it.
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