Forgot_My_Account

If everyone started doing it, do you mind if I drop some advice too? Everyone makes mistakes sometimes. It's pretty much agreed upon that even if the format isn't bad, the episode wasn't that good. But instead of saying what we feel about it, we can just compare it to Let's Play that are successful RIGHT NOW and derive what's wrong with it. -SUDDEN REALIZATION- No need to bother, actually. Everyone here agrees that the Let's Play format right now is full of sensationalist bullshit, geared toward children or is just background noise. That describes none of what you do, or what you're (I think) trying to achieve. So far, every RGD had some sort of educational value beyond the game reviewed itself. So even if you can force yourself to shut off your personality to create something that isn't you, would it really be worth it? Or better yet, is it something you want yourself to be associated with? Even just thinking about Let's Plays today, you see YouTubers pumping them out in an incredible rate, because they're a hit and miss with a low retention rate. You simply can't make something like that with a high production value and a message that's consistent between videos. You can't say "Tom called it in the first video" when some people might just join in for the third because that's what popped up. The only option is to segment videos not only by content, but by subjects as well. And not make any predictions or talk about anything that might get too long or interesting or lead to another deep subject. If that doesn't sound dull and mind numbing, I don't know what is. tl;dr - You're incompatible with the format. Not that bad, considering that Let's Plays are the Daytime TV of YouTube. Please don't force yourself into it.

I actually remembered this game vaguely from my childhood, and once every few years I'd google "teddy bears skateboard DOS" but only found an entry on DOS Games Archive a month back. I've only played a few levels from the shareware version when I was a kid and it looked like a pretty good Jazz Jackrabbit clone, which I played to death when I was younger - so I was planning to play this the moment I have some free time on my hands. This Let's Play pretty much destroyed this - but at least I didn't waste my time getting frustrated and disappointed. Maybe I'll play Jazz Jackrabbit again instead, I wonder how they aged. Oh, and while I don't find this format bad - at least you edit your Let's Play so they're more enjoyable, I like concise overviews and reviews even more. I don't feel like this game had enough content in it to hold 70 minutes of talking. If you're trying to piece together a game's story and/or intentions while playing it, maybe a more obtuse game be a better fit - maybe something along the lines of Dark Souls or murder mystery adventure games.

The difference between "This game is expected to die on dd/mm/yyyy (but it might live on)" and "This game requires an online connection" is that we have a time frame. We have a guarantee and we can hold the company for liability. And we can have industry standards - the same way people don't shell out $60 for a 4 hour game, people will be reluctant to buy anything, whether it be the game or microtransactions for a game that'll disappear in 1.5 years. That way, short-lived games will also be phased out, because they would become non-profitable. I think that even 4 years is an outrageously short time. My hope is that this practice be eradicated bit by bit, or that we'll at least have games that run for a decade. That's enough time for reverse engineering. Actually, your version is also kind of good. I'm guessing it can be worded into a lengthy law in which the game doesn't rely on any external data or modules to run, provided that the company still has the source code. But they can half-ass it, and if the game was sold to it by another company and some of the assets were lost in the process, we're screwed - though in that case, we may be screwed either way. Anyway, while I'm against forcing a company to do something against its business model (because they'll do it the worst possible way and leave everyone with a bad taste in their mouth), I think that it's a good compromise if you think that this practice cannot be eliminated. Planned obsolescence isn't just sabotaging a product so it'll fail after a certain time. It can also be leaving out an integral component or feature for future updates. All of the examples I know of are from the army, so it's an issue talking about them - but the business model is this: (1) Create a good product. (2) Lobotomize it while retaining core functionality. (3) Restore a part of the original functionality. (4) Release new versions in a regular interval and create dependence. You make your old product inferior, or obsolete, by forethought - thus planned obsolescence. In the car industry, this was used to widely integrate safety features (calling them "luxury items" in the beginning) even before it was required by law because of consumer dependence.

I'm going to bet that it didn't make enough to keep it running, or at the very was projected to lose money. Either way, EA would have made a sequel or any other supplement to fill in the gap if it were successful enough, just like NfS World - It was killed just in time for NfS 2015. But due to the model of planned obsolescence, it was meant to die from the get go, even if they botched things and didn't have a replacement. But it doesn't really matter. We all agree that prematurely killing games is bad, it's just that I don't think that it can be outlawed, and I'm opting for the easier solution which may have an easier integration in the law - expiration dates and informing the public. In the short term, it'll focus technical people on which games to save. In the long term, I'm hoping it'll just discourage companies from doing it. I'm not an art snob myself, but I think the difference between performance art and whatever the Doritos thing was is that performance art is transient because the entire art is in the act of doing it. With the other thing, you create a transient product which stands by its own. That's why I also talked about food as art before - I was thinking about gourmet dinners and the like. By creating a game that's transient but not directly interfering with it as it runs, I don't think it qualifies as performance art. But as you've described it, that's not planned obsolescence, that's cycling out an inferior product. Again, this feels like a strawman argument, it's trying to equate two different concepts. If EA had simply retired Battleforge, but old players could continue playing it, I never would have made this video. I might have described it inaccurately. Most of those inventions were actually known and integrated into certain cars as a safety measure, but weren't marketed to mainstream customers mainly because of their cost. So most cars in the time between said inventions and widespread integration were a case of planned obsolescence.

First of all, "The Company" DOES want old games to die. From a business perspective, it makes absolute and total sense - planned obsolescence basically forces the customer to buy the same product again, even if you haven't improved upon it or even damaged it (to a reasonable degree). Have you watched Blade Runner? That's the whole premise of the Replicants - they're designed to be replaced so the corporation will continue making profits without true innovation. When you think about it, EA is a lot like that, releasing the same games over and over and people are compelled to buy the next iteration of the same game, but I'm digressing here. So, no one is actually forcing anyone to keep a game alive. The creator, whether it was with or without his conscious consent, knew this game was going to die and designed it so. You can't just dump paywalls everywhere, you have to design around it - so in many cases, it's clear whenever a game is just designed to be dropped whenever no longer profitable. Above all, I think the most obvious example is Peter Molyneux's Curiosity. It was designed to have a definite end (which was defined by whenever Peter Molyneux wanted it to end) and micro transactions. It was very simplistic, but it was designed to die by its creator with the promise of a prize at the end. Everyone involved wanted that game to die, and so it has. Also, I'm not saying you're wrong - it's just that I avoid online only games, so I don't really know how much it's abused. I'll take your word on it that the majority of online only games are designed to die - and I agree with you that it's a bad direction for the industry to head in. I'm also saying it can't really banned by laws, but we can use the knowledge we have to inform everyone, from the casual to the hardcore, of those bad business practices to discourage them from supporting it. I've said I'm not for planned obsolescence, but I know it just can't be banned. I took the most extreme example, food, because it's something we can all agree upon without delving into a discussion within a discussion. But let's take look at the your example, which took massive amounts of dedication to survive - The Odyssey, for which the original manuscript is lost (or more likely, turned to dust), and was copied hundred of times over the course of almost 3 millennia. I can give you a dozen examples from the same period, even the same country - the writings of Socrates - which have not been preserved at all but were considered extremely important, and all we have to know that they've existed are the writings of his student, Plato. Also, there's biodegradable art (literally the first link on Google), which you don't hear much about because it basically exists momentarily and you're either there to see it or it's irrelevant. We've actually had someone in uni do something like this, he hung a bunch of Doritos from the ceiling and begged people not to eat them until he did his presentation. Point is, it's stupid, transient and can't be sold - that's why you don't hear much about it. I hope that proved that I'm not a troll and actual thought is going into my words, I'm not just trying to annoy everyone. I'm not aware of any good use of this practice, maybe you know one I haven't thought of. Food doesn't really qualify, we don't design food to spoil, it happens naturally. Well, there's cars. Do you know all of those lead-fueled death machines of the past? They were basically all killed (stopped manufacturing replacement parts and providing maintenance) again and again after the invention of seatbelts, airbags, ABS, urea-injection etc. But to be honest, it's also abused when every year a new model comes out for the same car with tiny cosmetic adjustments, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.

I could take on the market angle, but it's far more interesting taking the art angle. After all, when you think about the things you buy, you rarely keep them for more then 10 years - while art is pretty much considered timeless. But my point was that without maintenance it will be ruined, and even with it - it will eventually be ruined anyway. Do this for an experiment: Take a high end external HD drive, and load onto it an entire library. Let it sit for about 12-15 years. When you plug it back to your computer, you'll find that some or all of the data is corrupted. Now, what's the lesson here? That you need maintenance, even if it's minimal and pretty much done for you, to keep something running/existing. So the entire art/products/food thing isn't really relevant. In our context, everything dies without maintenance, and once that maintenance is on the company's side - of course they're going to pull it once it's no longer profitable. Now, I'm not saying that it's fair to the consumer - I'm saying that it can't really be avoided. Because data degrades, you can't really stop any company from just shutting down the servers. It's just expediting the nature of things, which I'm not really for but I can see the reasoning behind it. And yes, you've got the whole expiration date thing figured out! When companies are obliged to put "WE WILL KILL THIS GAME IN 4 YEARS" on the box, no one will buy it. That's the whole point of informing the customer of bad business practices - even if you can't ban them, you can put a spotlight on them. When a company sees that that practice is no longer profitable, they'll cease doing it - and isn't that what we're hoping to achieve?

The problem is that games are so widespread as an art form, it's really hard to define them using classic terms. If you say games are inanimate, like a chair or a table, then they shouldn't have any expiration date, either artificial nor a natural one. If you say games are an experience, like dining, can you really blame them for having an expiration date? If you order a dish at a restaurant and eat it bit by bit for a week - do you really expect it to stay the same? It needs some maintenance for you to have a consistent experience, and in the end, it'll still go bad. Shit dies and you can't blame anyone for it. That's the way the world works. And, yes, if you buy a book and return to it after 10 years, its pages will turn yellow. Some words will become ineligible, and some pages will outright fall out. The ravages of time are inevitable, and the more information something contains, the more it loses as time goes on. Now, I'm against planned obsolescence, but I cannot deny that it's sometimes used for good. I hate rotting food but I like beer. So what can I do to not suffer constantly? Do my homework. I need to know that if I buy a refurbished Apple product, its battery will die out within a year because of tempering and planned obsolescence. I cannot indict Apple for being dicks, but I can be aware of their shitty business practices. And we need to make that information widespread, to discourage companies from doing it and consumers from engaging in those practices. We can't outright ban them, but we can inform people.

The problem with that example is that's also very easy to circumvent. Whenever you want to publish an always-online game, just publish it under some dummy company which can declare bankruptcy at any time and sell the franchise to the parent company. After thinking this through, maybe we need to be more mature about it. Movies and paintings disappear all of the time. That's the nature of some forms of art - it's up to the creator to determine its fate. Sometimes that doesn't fit our needs or is fair, but after all, it's not our vision we're talking about - it's the creator's. And if the creator is a douche, well, we're at fault because we chose to participate in and fuel that douche's ambitions. The destruction of art is used traditionally as the final act of creating art. Now it's just used as a means to save money. But still, you can't ban a practice that might be legitimate because some people abuse it. But you do need to counteract it with another law. Maybe what we need is some form of preservation. The same way the US preserves movies in the National Film Registry, we need that alternative for games, mainly online ones. We need laws to make the creators release the code because they've created something bigger than they've originally envisioned. And I know, a company can't be a douche, nor there is more than a singular creator. But the company functions as one body, and if a company's actions are consistent enough, it can be avoided - just like regular scumbags. P.S. Yes, it doesn't really solve the issue you've mentioned, of games that haven't gained popularity disappearing. But think about all of the unknown artists who paint or make amateur movies and will never see the light of day again. That problem always existed and it never had a solution - but it just became slightly worse when you're paying for an experience with an unmentioned expiration date. We do need companies to guarantee us they'll keep something alive for at least a certain period so consumers can take it into account, and maybe it can be preserved by knowledgeable fans. But if they'll make a law about it, what about films and paintings who are subject to oxidization and other environmental affects? The law would be absurd and overlooked! I just don't think something that can't be described by current laws, but we do need to be better consumers so we won't get hurt.