this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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Hot take - while it's obviously greedy for the publishers to be charging for this, the real problem is the idiots who are paying.
Right?
Companies would never employ predatory behaviour to prey on customers, and have never had to be regulated before. It really is the customer's fault for engaging.
Yes - it really is the customers' fault.
It'd be different if games were a necessity - then the idea of "predatory" behavior would be relevant, since we'd be talking about someone taking advantage of the fact that the consumer has to buy the thing in question.
But games aren't a necessity - not even close - so any consumer is at any time entirely free to say no to any transaction without suffering any meaningful ill effects.
And any consumers who, in such a situation, do not say no to a bad deal have nobody to blame but themselves.
While I, to some extent, agree with you; it is predatory behaviour by those companies and I don't like it.
And some people are weak to such practices. Customers have to be protected from themselves to some extent, as has been shown in other industries.
Exactly. It's not like internet service where you may only have 2 options, and both are predatory. If a AAA is predatory, you can pick another, or play AA and indie games. Hit them where it counts: in the player count.
That said, there may be room to step in if they change the terms of the deal later on. That's a fraudulent transaction, and they should be punished for it.
Regulations also hurt them.
Nah, it just encourages them to find clever ways around it. Or just pay the fines as a cost of doing business.
Is it your view then that all laws are useless?
What if the fine was... one billion dollars.
No, that's quite the extreme opposite end of the spectrum.
I just think that, in general, we should refrain from making laws unless it's to protect victims. I don't think, in general, people choosing to waste money on stupid games qualifies as being a victim, you can't victimize yourself. However, changing the terms after the sale certainly qualifies as a bait and switch, and should be illegal and strictly prosecuted.
If we just make laws for every problem we see, we'll get incredibly inconsistent enforcement. If we have a narrower set of laws, we should see more effective enforcement. That's where I'm coming from. Save the legislation for truly important things and follow up on enforcement.
I don't disagree, but I feel you're kind of assuming everyone is capable of rationally engaging with these stupid games. It's the irrational ones I worry about. Loot boxes and gambling addicts, for instance.
That said, though, the validity of blaming companies for the bad decisions they make knowing they'll catch so many fish in their net is all I'm really here for. I've no idea how I'd "regulate early access" or if that's even worth doing.
If someone is looking for an addiction, they'll find it, whether it's mobile games, live service PC/console games, or actual online gambling. Banning addictions isn't going to work, the people making these things will just innovate around whatever the regulations are. Gambling is illegal in my area, yet people find all kinds of creative ways to get their fix.
The solution isn't to ban addicting things, but to teach people to avoid them. This is a behavioral problem, not a legal problem.
This is why I asked if you think laws are useless.
And yeah, casinos and whatever will skirt the laws (if they're able), but the point of regulating a practice is to keep things from getting out of hand.
Predatory gambling games are basically just fancy theft. You create games that are unwinnable, and then you goad suckers into taking the bet. It's regulations that keep a lot of them even marginally fair.
And what of the business' behavior? Should we not teach them to be better?
Sure, but those regulations aren't about the addictiveness or whatever, they're about transparency. If the odds of the game aren't clear or accurate, they can get into a lot of trouble.
Businesses are motivated by profit, so they'll do whatever they think will make them the most money. Getting businesses to behave requires making "bad" behaviors less profitable than "good" behaviors, and that's an endless game of whack-a-mole, especially when a lot of laws just aren't enforced consistently enough to matter, or the fines are lobbied down to relevance.
People are often motivated by pleasure, and replacing one from of pleasure (predatory games) with another is quite feasible, especially if you can point out how to find less predatory games. Making regulations to help this be transparent is a lot easier than making them go away.
So no, we shouldn't try to teach businesses anything because they don't learn. We should instead force them to be transparent and teach people to interpret that.
Do you suppose that choosing not to wear a seatbelt, a very bad deal, should be left entirely up to individuals, um, "stupid" enough to take it?
Yes.
Wow. I wasn't expecting so much contempt for your fellow man.
I would say that there's almost nothing that demonstrates more contempt for one's fellow man than decreeing that they shouldn't even be allowed to make their own choices.
A plastic casing over a table saw "limits what choices a person can make." This is a very anti-covid-vaccine argument you're making.
But that's fine. I suppose being victim to an unregulated casino means you deserve to rot in Rancho Charleston or whatever.
It's amusing and revealing that at no point here have you actually directly addressed anything that I've actually said. Instead, you've just used what I've said as a jumping off point for a ludicrously exaggerated, barely relevant and deliberately insulting strawman.
Here's a challenge for you - instead of leaping from strawman to strawman in this vain effort to somehow prove that I'm a horrible person and therefore wrong, go all the way back to the beginning here and frame a positive argument for your position. Tell me exactly why and on what basis (as appears to be your position) publishers should be prohibited from charging extra for early access, and what nominal public good that would serve.
As a bonus, you might also try to explain how the position that publishers should be allowed to charge extra for early access is in any way "a very anti-covid-vaccine argument." I'm especially curious about that one.
Feel free to take your time
Oh wow, I really riled you up.
I mean, I think that this is contentious enough to be worth picking apart.
I can't imagine calling someone an idiot unless I thought they kind of deserved what was coming to them. It's this schadenfreude you seem to feel that I take issue with.
Oh, that would be this, actually:
You are, for some reason, arguing against the concept of rules. I never asked you to do that.
Presuming, for the moment, that this laughable, trite and terribly cliched rejoinder is in any way true, how would it be relevant to anything?
Never mind though - that was a rhetorical question. I know, and I suspect you do as well, that it's not. It's just a casual, and at this point entirely predictable, bit of disparagement tossed out to give yourself what you erroneously believe to be an edge.
Feel free. I'm more than willing to explain in as much detail as you want exactly why it is that I think that people who pay extra for early access to games are "idiots."
(Just, by the bye, as I think that people who don't wear seat belts, tahe the guards off their table saws or don't get covid vaccines are "idiots.")
Which is exactly what I do in fact think.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I don't feel any sort of pleasure or sense of fulfillment at their idiocy - I simply note it.
In response to my statement that:
you wrote:
Clearly, with that, you established that the point you wished to dispute was whether or not "choosing... a very bad deal should be left entirely up to individuals." That was the exact point of contention you stipulated.
So this:
is blatant bullshit. In point of fact, with the example above, that's the specific focus you introduced. Curiously, you said nothing at all about the "contentious" phrasing of my original post or my supposed "schadenfreude." That only came along now, in this desperate bit of backing and filling in which you're vainly engaged. Rather, your immediate and exclusive focus was on whether or not "choosing... a very bad deal should be left entirely up to individuals." The clear, and in fact only, alternative to that is that it should not be left up to individuals, so that's the position you've taken, and the position in support of which I'm still waiting for you to provide an argument.
Now - if that's truly not what you intended to say or imply, that would be another matter. And in fact, in any other situation, I'd be willing to simply grant that that wasn't your intent and amend my responses accordingly. We could simply cooperate to find the exact point of our disagreement and focus on that (and could both enjoy this exchange much more).
But you blew that chance a long time ago.
So that was in fact the position you took, whether intentionally or not. And I'm still waiting for an argument in support of it.
Nobody is arguing that seatbelts shouldn't be installed, just that they shouldn't be required. Choosing to not wear a seatbelt doesn't endanger your fellow man, it only endangers yourself. You should always be free to make bad choices for yourself, and we should have a sufficient safety net that your stupid choices don't unduly impact those who rely on you (e.g. the family you're leaving behind).
If we bring this back to the original argument, paying for pre-release doesn't hurt anyone but your own wallet. It's stupid, and we should be telling people to not do that, but you should always be free to make stupid decisions. Laws shouldn't be crafted to reduce my ability to harm myself, as an adult, I can make my own choices. I can absolutely see things related to FOMO being locked behind age gates or something, but a consenting adult should be able to make poor choices.
And that goes for everything. You talked about plastic protections on table saws further down, as a consenting adult, I should be able to easily remove them. You talked about vaccines, as a consenting adult, I should be able to refuse getting them. As a responsible adult, I personally keep safety equipment equipped and get every vaccine my doctor recommends, but I must have the ability to make an alternate decision as a free individual.
So no, we shouldn't be banning predatory practices from companies, we should be making them more transparent and perhaps putting them behind an age gate if they prove particularly problematic for children. If you want to make a stupid decision, that's fine, provided you know the consequences going in.
Lol no. Not if you're going to be around other people. I don't want measles, thanks.
Also I have an interest in your idiotic ass not dying because you didn't wear a seat belt. We live in a society.
This is kind of off topic from "people should stop pre ordering video games", though.
We can certainly have restrictions, like you must have proof of vaccination against a deadly disease to go to a public school, provided there's a viable alternative to meet legal standards (e.g. home school or private school). Likewise, companies should absolutely be allowed to require proof of vaccination status for entering their store to protect their other customers.
But there should not be a blanked requirement to get vaccinated. You should be able to go to any public space (e.g. parks, sidewalks) w/o being vaccinated, as well as any private space that doesn't require proof of vaccination.
We live in a free society, and freedom means being able to make your own choices. Life should be easier if you make good choices (get vaccinated, wear a seat belt, etc), but you should be able to make your own bed and lay in it.
And yeah, it is off-topic, but I'm not the one who brought up seat-belts or vaccinations. However, the principles are the same, I should absolutely be free to make stupid decisions, otherwise I'm not free and my only choice is to hopefully elect someone who will force me to do things that I agree with. We should remove force from the equation entirely and merely make consequences for stupid decisions transparent. For something like pre-ordering video games, those consequences are very small, but the principle remains the same.
Measles hangs out in the air for like two hours. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/causes/index.html . You'd be dangerous on the sidewalks and in the parks, and extremely dangerous in any indoor space.
The freedom to cause an outbreak is not a particularly valuable freedom. The freedom to live life because there's not another measles outbreak is.
"My personal freedom is more important than yours and your safety" is being a huge asshole, and society has no obligation to support that behavior.
Your freedom to make stupid decisions will often clash with other people's freedom to live. Your individual freedom is less important than everyone else's freedom to be safe from measles.
Furthermore, with seatbelts, I'm a stakeholder in your ass not flying through the window and dying. I pay in various ways for your health care, and I lose out when you die. When you hurt yourself, you hurt everyone.
The nuance and where we disagree is where that line is. "You wasted your money on a shit video game" for me is on the "that's small enough to not worry about" side. Vaccinations, helmets, seatbelts, those have low costs for the individual and large benefits for society.
I 100% agree. That's why the rest of us take vaccines to protect ourselves and the ones we love from diseases like this, and those with particular sensitivities (esp. those that cannot use vaccines) take added measures to protect themselves. That's personal responsibility 101. Enough of us choose to get the measles vaccine that measles isn't a significant concern anymore.
I think living life w/o getting vaccinated should be possible, but far from convenient. I think you should pay extra for insurance, have to home-school your kids, and not be able to use airplanes, trains, etc. If you spread a disease and it can be traced back to you, you should be charged with criminal negligence and perhaps a few other crimes. If you get locked up, I think forced vaccination should absolutely be on the table (alternative being some kind of body suit to protect guards and other inmates from you, at your expense), unless there's a private prison that'll take you that doesn't require vaccination.
But a law forcing me to put anything into my body will always be immoral, regardless of the intention, because the ends absolutely do not justify the means.
And you should not. If I am killed or seriously injured due to not wearing a seatbelt, that should invalidate any kind of public payment, and I think certain private payments could reasonably be reduced as well (e.g. auto insurance may limit medical coverage if safety equipment wasn't properly used). Making stupid choices should have consequences for the person making those stupid choices.
I think you're overstating the benefits for society. If I don't wear a helmet and die, how does that realistically hurt society? Public benefits and whatnot can absolutely be limited due to negligence. Vaccines are more interesting, but again, I think it's not really an issue in practice because most people get them, and we can also allow insurance premiums to skyrocket for those who choose not to.
I am totally on-board with limiting protections for people who make stupid choices, but I am not on-board with banning the stupid choices entirely. Make the stupid choices less attractive, but don't threaten jail time or whatever.
If it's not a mandate, people will "choose" not to do it, and then people will suffer and die. There are some things, like vaccines, that the cost:benefit is extremely clear.
Sucks for the kids. Also how are you going to enforce that? An ankle bracelet? How are you going to make whole the people harmed by someone decides their personal freedom is the only freedom that matters?
Sucks for the other prisoners who get measles because the private prison didn't want to pay for vaccines.
I do not accept this axiom.
I'm not talking about literal financial transactions. When you die because you didn't wear a helmet, I lose out on the investment in you. All those years of education, gone. Any job training you had? In the trash. Your mother taking off work to grieve? Ripples of suck spreading through society.
Presumably you live in a society with people who care about you. If the lead front eng at work died, the project is going to be delayed, we're all going to be unhappy, we have to ramp someone up. The whole company could fail as a result.
That's not even counting the non-work connections.
Things are connected. Someone dying or being seriously injured is a big rock to drop in the pond, and those ripples affect many people. It's not just money stuff. It's also social and opportunity costs.
Yes, that's one of the consequences of stupid choices. The point for a society to figure out is how to contain those consequences to those who made a stupid choice.
The same way we did it during the COVID-19 pandemic, send proof of vaccination to your insurance, airlines, etc. I did that when visiting Canada by car, and people did it when taking airplanes for travel. It worked fine. It's a little more complicated when the number of vaccinations goes up, but if a company like an airline really cares about it, they can set the parameters for how you can prove it. Then its up to customers to decide whether that process is worth doing, or if they'll just use a competitor.
But the fact is, many businesses won't bother unless it's really important, like if there's a breakout or something of a specific disease.
Prisoners should be able to refuse to go to a private prison and the state should accommodate that.
Sure, and that's why safety equipment and preventative medicine is so important. But at the end of the day, it's my life to throw away, and nobody else has any valid claim to my education, abilities, etc. Someone who cares about those around them will take the necessary precautions to preserve their life for the benefit of those around them, but that decision should remain theirs.
The only time I think it's valid to step in and override someone's choice is if that choice was not made with a clear conscience.
I do not accept we need measles and polio outbreaks so casually.
So you accept that there's not going to be vaccine checking at every bar, hotel, movie theater, museum, etc because that's impractical. Also a privacy nightmare. But if you're not making people get vaccinated then you're just asking for an outbreak. And now people who are worried about that (eg: immunocompromised people, the elderly), their freedom is massively curtailed.
Prisoners are not typically high on the list of people whose rights and dignity are respected. Especially not when profit is to be made. Your position is wildly unrealistic.
Disagree. Society has an interest in your well being. I also do not accept that the individual is the most important thing, and their desires are paramount. You probably also don't, at least in some cases, unless you think people should be able to shit everywhere they want and set off dirty bombs for fun in urban areas.
Additionally, if you decide to not wear a bike helmet, get in an accident with me, and then die because your bare skull hit the concrete, then you've inflicted that trauma on me. Thanks. I would like to be free of that.
I think our axioms are too different for us to easily have a meaningful conversation. I view your position as fundamentally selfish and too focused on the individual. The supremacy of individual freedom above all else is no way to build a society. I accept that you likely have a fundamental, perhaps visceral, rejection of my worldview.
I also would like to add that there are probably things we do agree on, and I appreciate you taking the time to write all of these replies. I don't think I have it in me to keep going, though.
Yes, it's impractical, but I don't think it's necessarily a privacy nightmare. It would be easy to build an app that merely confirms whether a given vaccine has been taken (esp useful in a pandemic), without revealing any other info. The issue is getting doctors and stores to use it. But if there's enough demand, it would happen.
The more likely scenario is what we already have: core services like public schools would require vax info when you register.
How so? It's exactly what we're doing now, and outbreaks are rare and very localized. It turns out the quiet majority finds value in vaccines.
What we should be working on is increasing access to vaccines. It's currently pretty good, but it can be expensive depending on your insurance (or lack thereof). If we want more people vaxxed, the easiest way to do that is to make it free and available at any pharmacy, just like with COVID.
And that should absolutely change. I hate pretty much everything about our criminal justice system, and one of my big ticket items is giving prisoners more choice in their incarceration.
I obviously don't have any power to enact any of the changes I've discussed, but if I could pick one, it would be prisons. I think we should:
That should transition prisons to specialized rehab centers instead of just places to keep people, which should result in lower overall prison population. Traditional prisons would exist for the truly dangerous criminals, but others would have options.
Your rights end where mine begin. Those two you mentioned directly impact others and thus aren't moral.
The small possibility of me dying in front of you does not, by itself, cause you any harm. The possibility of trauma is not itself a violation of your rights. I could understand me slaughtering animals in public being an issue, but the mere chance of me getting seriously or fatally injured in public isn't one.
And you'd be right, both on this point and on the point of us agreeing on a ton of things. However, those aren't what we're talking about, but I'll list a few just in case you're curious:
All of this comes from a place of putting individual rights first, but it's entirely reasonable to arrive there by other means.
Anyway, I hope you have a fantastic day. I'm sure we both share similar frustrations, we just have different limits on what we're willing to do to address them.
It is. I just pegged them as libertarians, and I was right.
If I'm being honest, I thought they would have perceived the bait and pretended to care about public health, but alas.
Nobody's safety is at risk here, it's just people who can't wait 3 days paying more money. It's bullshit that companies will have a completed game but delay releasing it so people can pay extra for " ~~early~~ on release access" but the solution is simple: don't pay for it.
Correct. Very astute.
Sure. But of course, the point of doing that is to suggest to companies that this is naughty behavior. This is naughty behavior, isn't it?
I do believe I did call it bullshit in the post you're replying to. However, people paying for it implies acceptable behavior, doesn't it?
Nooooo-ho-ho-ho, no it does not. You can justify a lot of evil shit with that line of thinking.
Many people are bad at delayed gratification. It's a little strange to me. Like, I occasionally do impulse buys, but some people are just like "omg I need this sparkly horse armor preorder bonus or I'LL DIE"
I don't know if that's a skill that can be taught or what.
Agreed, I don't blame the publishers for this. It's clearly working on some amount of population that makes it worthwhile when they do the spreadsheets. The only beta game I've purchased recently lets you self-host servers and I was happy with the state it was in even if it was dropped and died all together. I refuse to purchase just about anything else that is still in "beta" or "early access". I remember when "Beta" meant "download this game and play it... If you like it you can buy it next month".
It's that population that actively makes games worse for all of us as publishers can choose to just be lazy. I was stupid happy when BG3 got the praise it got on launch. That's what it used to be... that's how it should be.
I'll grab early access for either a new studio or a studio with a history of taking their early access to full completion so that there can be more options, but not for IP that's in the hands of mega studios/ones with a long history or ones with a history of giving up on previous early access projects.
I got Valheim, Rust, and Raft all early access and I've thoroughly enjoyed them as well as seeing how they have been developed since I don't know much about game dev and it's interesting to me. Kinda like watching plants grow.
That's exactly why I don't cut them any slack. Their dumb choices don't just harm themselves - they harm me and all other gamers, insofar as they've made it so that publishers can get away with putting out unfinished, buggy, unbalanced crap.
Sure - the gamers might spend a while ineffectually bitching on forums and handing out 1 star reviews, but that's just meaningless noise. The ONLY thing that matters to the publishers is whether or not people buy the game, and those dunderheads not only buy the game - they line right up to buy the next one too.
Or, now, line right up to pay extra for early access to the next one.
Yes! Boycott early access
Been doing it for years. Come join us, the water's great and not full of bugs.
I can't swim today- I bought the last two monster hunter games and all of their dlc for fifteen dollars total
Gamers can't boycott
The average person is fucking stupid, and half of the population is stupider than that. It's why gatekeeping is good, it's why popularity is bad, it's why the hipsters were right.