Magic City Morning Star: Will Blizzard Destroy the Future of Videogames?
Magic City Morning Star: Will Blizzard Destroy the Future of Videogames?:
The main goal of Vivendi Universal is to make money. In our capitalist society, mostly everything else is secondary. Blizzard makes good games in order to get paid; that's why Vivendi owns them. Blizzard/Vivendi sue the developers of bNetd because they can, not because they're evil. Suing the bnetd developers is easier than the alternatives:
AOL and MSN have obviously followed the former idea with their messenger applications, and most of us view it as an annoyance and a waste of time, so that's not a really good return on the investment of labour. We've seen, so many times, companies that try and work with their gamer community, but don't end up getting it and eventually get sour or ignore the community already (sorry guys, but SCO is mostly ignoring you, because you just insulted its efforts to work with you after SuSE got Ransom to say 'Seat License').
Larger companies can no longer understand how to be a small company, and successful small companies are the only ones who can adequately work with the cacophany of egoes currently comprising the Linux and/or Free Software community -- labeling Mr Stallman as their leader is never true, but sometimes apt.
Larger companies, though, have this third option: Blizzard sells so many decent software titles that it's not like we can effectively boycott them for being rat bastards, so they weild the DMCA like the big-business anti-competitive club it is. They have sued, and will continue to sue to stop any effort that can potentially damage them at all, as long as the effort to sue requires less resources than any other option.
That's just the way business works. It's not evil, good, happy, sad or French; it's all Investment and Returns, and the sooner we wake up to this soulless capitalism nightmare, the better we all will be.
Now go read about how the American Military has destroyed artefacts older than civilisation (which, it can be suggested, they represent the death of anyway).
"If it stands, the lower court's decision would make it unlawful in most cases to reverse-engineer any commercial software program, thus making it impossible to create new programs that interoperate with older ones. This squeezes consumer choice out of the marketplace by essentially allowing companies to outlaw competitors' products that interact with their own."Um, yeah, of course they will destroy the future of video games, but that's not the main goal.
The main goal of Vivendi Universal is to make money. In our capitalist society, mostly everything else is secondary. Blizzard makes good games in order to get paid; that's why Vivendi owns them. Blizzard/Vivendi sue the developers of bNetd because they can, not because they're evil. Suing the bnetd developers is easier than the alternatives:
- Coding the networking protocol to better exclude third-party servers
- working with the community to improve the game
AOL and MSN have obviously followed the former idea with their messenger applications, and most of us view it as an annoyance and a waste of time, so that's not a really good return on the investment of labour. We've seen, so many times, companies that try and work with their gamer community, but don't end up getting it and eventually get sour or ignore the community already (sorry guys, but SCO is mostly ignoring you, because you just insulted its efforts to work with you after SuSE got Ransom to say 'Seat License').
Larger companies can no longer understand how to be a small company, and successful small companies are the only ones who can adequately work with the cacophany of egoes currently comprising the Linux and/or Free Software community -- labeling Mr Stallman as their leader is never true, but sometimes apt.
Larger companies, though, have this third option: Blizzard sells so many decent software titles that it's not like we can effectively boycott them for being rat bastards, so they weild the DMCA like the big-business anti-competitive club it is. They have sued, and will continue to sue to stop any effort that can potentially damage them at all, as long as the effort to sue requires less resources than any other option.
That's just the way business works. It's not evil, good, happy, sad or French; it's all Investment and Returns, and the sooner we wake up to this soulless capitalism nightmare, the better we all will be.
Now go read about how the American Military has destroyed artefacts older than civilisation (which, it can be suggested, they represent the death of anyway).
posted by Westley | 1:41 PM
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