![]() So what's worse: a world in which we have excellent games hobbled by money extraction mechanisms, or a world in which we don't have excellent games? I know which one I prefer. ![]() And rather than hate that fact, consider that without the ability to extract monetary value, these projects would not have been executed in the first place. All of these technologies exist to extract money from something that is naturally not scarce. Gaming companies have invented ways to create scarcity ranging from account-bound DRM (Steam, ), dongles, and always-on phone-home requirement for the runtime. Facebook and Google's fortunes have been built on the scarcity of ad space. Note that this truth applies to FAANG as well. New forms of scarcity have been invented, some better than others (from the end-user perspective). With Swat 4, in the multiplayer mode it's possible to 1) host a game and to play it, 2) to run it as dedicated server (without playing) and 3) to install a copy on another computer, and run the Swat4DedicatedServer.exe from the other computer. Personal computing and the internet has mostly eliminated that form of scarcity. In the beginning, physical media allowed data goods to piggy-back on the retail structures already in place. This is because data is naturally not scarce. ![]() ![]() At least this way they exist, and can (and will!) be rescued by the hackers of the world.ĮDIT: it's impossible to make money off of digital goods without artificial scarcity. OTOH these innovations in creating artificial scarcity is what enabled the games to be funded in the first place. ![]()
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