Sony is begging you: please forget about concord
So they invest millions in a project that fundamentally failed, ax the official servers prematurely and pretend it doesn’t exist.
But then go after people who still bother with it.
They ought to be fucking thankful people still play it at all.
So, it’s all about control, at the end.
StopKillingGames? More like StopMurderingGamesAndExecutingThemInColdBlood.
Assholes
My understanding is they refunded everyone who bought it.
Still dumb for them to do this, don’t mistake me.
There’s isn’t even an IP argument to be had. They abandoned the game, so why pay a lawyer to
sewsue?Edit to correct.
IANAL but, just because they abandoned the game doesn’t mean they don’t own the IP. It’s still their IP and unfortunately IP laws everywhere suck ass. IP law only works if you defend your IP. If you don’t defend it then it can weaken IP protection on other IP you own. Even if you don’t actively use the IP you still need to defend it to keep up protection on your other IP.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right.
so why pay a lawyer to sew?
I hate to be that person but just in case you wanted to know, it’s spelled sue.
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sew: to unite or fasten by stitches
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sue: to seek justice or right from a person by legal process, specifically to bring an action against
Fuck me I can’t go two days in a row without a spelling mistake! Also don’t apologize, I would rather be embarrassed once now, than potentially infinitely in the future!
BTW, to answer your original question: just because someone is a lawyer doesn’t mean that can’t also know how to sew. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a darning egg or two in a legal professional’s briefcase. They do have to wear fancy suits, after all.
Lol, this is so apropos! I just started studying law and am a bad ass needle pointer.
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you’d think they would be happy people are going out of their way to preserve the service. It gives them excuse to shut down their servers if they can point to these. but nope
It all comes down to Japanese peoples’ bizarrebeliefs. They see modding their games as a shameful behavior because they compare it to plagiarism. As ridiculous as it is, they see it as stealing their ideas instead of coming up with your own. In their eyes you should be making your own game from scratch instead of ressurecting theirs.
It’s the same reason why Nintendo is so god damn evil. In their eyes they’re doing the honorable thing by suing their own customer base.
They see modding their games as a shameful behavior
Seems some of them are avowed purists.
They also think modding is a form of cheating, as in supposedly breaking the game mechanics, forgetting that some games are good visually but have awful difficulty or needing more immersion.
Oh it’s never about that. You can’t milk a game that lives for free. Although they pay for publicity (ads, etc.), getting it for free means less cash flow, means less numbers on quarterly earnings, means less investor money.
It is always about the number on their bank account, never about you, me, or anyone else. They don’t give a flying fuck, they’d happily let us burn in a house fire if it meant just a teensy bit more dollars.
Fuck Sony, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft, ActiBlizzosoft, and the rest of them.
Blame the suits, they got into the video game business once Atari became a household word.
Its bad press for them. The whole game is bad news for them all the way around. I bet they won’t ever mention it by name again.
They really hate their own fans. Be aware of that next time you purchase any Sony product.
I don’t understand the word “purchasing” in the context of “Sony product”. What do you mean with that?
If you want to pirate a camera, a phone, a set of headphones, a walkman, a games console or any other consumer electronics goods, be my guest. I don’t see how you can do that…
Simple. I’ll just download it. Back in my day you used to be able to download RAM too.
epic anti-piracy ad music
You wouldn’t download RAMFunnily enough they pirated that music for the anti-piracy ad on vhs tapes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sony_Interactive_Entertainment_video_games
Sony has been the publisher for a zillion games via SEI.
They also literally directly own a bunch of game studios including Naughty Dog (The Last of Us, Uncharted, all the way back to Crash Bandicoot), Arrowhead Studios (Helldivers), Guerilla Games (Horizon) and now also Bungie (Destiny, Halo). That’s just a few of the big studios they own. Complete list here: https://www.gamesradar.com/playstation-studios-sony/
Edit: Oh and of course they owned the studio that made Concord (Firewalk Studios)
Yes I know, (my Sony boycott is a well-informed one, before I purchase a game I make sure that there’s no Sony stench coming off it), and I can understand how you can pirate those (Which I assume was the joke that Tattorack was making).
But Sony is much bigger than just its games division. It’s also the music label, the movie label and the electronics. Music and Movies can also be “pirated”, but not the consumer electronics.
Sony doesn’t only make games.
I’m not awake yet. Thought this was a response to me. Sorry. Have had a crappy night
Pissing off perhaps the only fans of this failure lol
Ahh yes, just the PR Sony wants after Valve dropped an atomic bomb of an announcement.
What was the announcement?
- New home console (called “GabeCube”)
- New Steam controller
- New VR Headset (called “Steam Frame”)
Oh, yeah. I saw that all over Lemmy. I thought they might have been talking about something else.
Thanks for the response.
Are people still having anything to do with Sony? The absolutly worst compny ever, Comcast is second place. Complete shit.
Once in a while Sony reconfirms my choice to boycott them since the rootkit CD scandal in the 00s.
I think I’ve boycotted sony for one thing or the other for the large part of my adult life. Only backed down in 2021 and bought some shares. Time to return back to normal I guess.
They make some pretty good bluetooth headphones though…
I’ve been using Bose Quiet Comfort noise reduction headphones for almost 2 decades now, ever since I had to do software development in a large open space office alongside the noisy business-side types (this was in Investment Banking - so whilst not a heavy-machinery-noisy environment, certain the top range of office noisy) and those they were very good already back then (I’m still using at home the first model I got, after replacing the ear-pads which is what gets damaged over time).
The QC 3.5 and onwards have bluetooth AND also a wired connection as fallback (which I have had to use with devices without bluetooth).
Of course, you pay for it (last ones I got were €250 if I remember it correctly), but then again they last a long time (as I said, the first ones, now almost 2 decades old, are still work fine even if the outside is all scratched up and they’re now on the 5th or 6th pair or earpads).
I very much doubt Sony one’s are anywhere close to that, especially given that the quality of Sony devices took a massive dive in the late 90s when top level management which until then was dominated by the Engineering side was taken over by the Media side took over (before they used to be known for the high quality of their electronics).
Same. I’ll never make the mistake of purchasing a Sony product ever again
I’ve made a whole series of purchase decisions based on similar motivation. For decades I’ve avoided DSLRs, consoles, games, phones, tablets and a whole bunch of products made by Sony. I pirate what I can, everything else is just off-limits.
The only exception I make is used consoles since I know they hate that the used market exists. Even then, they haven’t really put out anything worth getting since ps2.
So DMCA takedowns are only for gameplay videos, they haven’t sent any takedown (or any other) notice to whoever is hosting / running / developing the custom server code.
It will be interesting to see how it progresses.
You can’t go after the server devs without those streamers publicizing the takedowns. The better choice is to hit streamers then nuke the servers once people forget about the game.
How dare they try and play a game they paid for.
They’re not. Sony refunded all copy’s sold. Sony lost a metric butt ton of money on the game realized it was a massive ideological and developmental mistake and tried to correct course.
For some reason people are being super stubborn about this objectively terrible game.
Jesus just let it die.
On the other hand, why they actually enjoy this, regardless of the reasons, why would they stop?
Sony could just have ignored this
Please, tell me how it’s objectively terrible.
It’s a weak overwatch clone that came out years too late to ride it’s coattails
That’s a subjective opinion.
Fine. Objectively it failed because very few people wanted to play it. Those people largely didn’t want to play it because it was a weak overwatch clone that came out years too late to ride it’s coattails. Happy?
That doesn’t make it terrible, that simply makes it not original
That’s just laundering your opinion through Argumentum ad populum.
That is a subjective opinion on my reply and also throwing out fallacy names is technically an appeal to authority
That’s not an answer to the question that was asked.
And you’re not the person I was answering
…so?
This is 100% proof Sony is going to write this off as a tax write off
I firmly believe that anything “written off” in that manner - this includes movies, too, in particular - should have to be released into the public domain as part of that process.
Any business that’s paying less taxes is harming the public good; we should at least benefit in some small way from that.
Well if it’s “written off” of their taxes that means it’s taxes they don’t pay which is essentially paid by the rest of us in taxes we do pay. So yeah it should be public domain since we “bought” it.
That’s not accurate. A tax write-off isn’t “taxes you don’t pay”. It’s “lost income that isn’t taxed”.
The US corporate income tax is nominally 21%. If a company writes off 100 of loss (or charitible donations, or expenses, or anything else), their earnings are reduced by 100 dollars, saving them 21 bucks. There’s no way to “profit” off of failure through write-offs.
Exactly, can’t pay corporation tax on a loss because corporation tax is only paid on profit. Worked in a small company before and heard moaning from high up about having to pay corporation tax when Amazon don’t. We could have paid no corporation tax simply by giving everyone a pay raise.
Imagine you create a product that is mechanically functional but fundamentally terrible. Only a tiny group is willing to pay for it, and even that isn’t enough to break even. You have no choice but to pull it from the market and discard it. Then the government steps in and starts distributing that product for free. This is your personal intellectual property, you no longer control it or own it.
Your comment is deeply frustrating. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright and intellectual property, which is frankly astounding.
This is your personal intellectual property
In the US our Constitution only grants you a monopoly on your creation for a limited time before it ends up in the public domain.
The constitution grants Congress the right to create public domain laws, and that’s it. With current law it’s decades away from applying to this game.
It’s more likely they have contractual obligations with marketing companies, retailers, data centers, etc. If a product is discontinued they can get out of those obligations. Sure they will write off a loss and reduce the taxes they pay, but it’s not as if a bigger loss nets them more money somehow.
Really what needs to be regulated is all of the excessive exclusive B2B contracts which mean a company can’t just sell a product for a small amount of money to someone to maintain it when they’re done with that product.
How does community-run servers prevent them from writing off their losses?
I guess the loss could be argued against in court given that there is player activity, even though it’s not endorsed nor hosted by them. Just speculation
Not really. Now, please remember, im not a Japanese or American tax lawyer. A write-off is just a bookkeeping manouver that means: we are never going to make a profit on this investment so we will take the remaining cost right now instead of in installment over the bookkeeping calculated time frame we intended. It might have a time-vslue of money effect on the total value of the cost, but it’s not very significant. The tax write-off was always going to come; it was a cost after all. It’s just a matter of timing.
Let me give you an example. I’m developing a game console and it takes me 10 dollars and a year to do it. In a naïve bookkeeping world, I’d have a cost of 10 dollars the first year and for the next ten years, I’d have the COGS (cost of goods sold) as the cost and the money people pay as the income. This is not how modern bookkeeping works. The cost of year one will be split on the (for example) first 10 years of the game console life as this more realistically reflects what is going on. Cashflow is a very different thing.
I’m sure I’ve used the wrong terms for cost and income, I always do. But no one that didn’t already know what I said will notice…
You’ve said something with such absolute certainty that is not making sense to me.
Now I’m not versed in Japanese tax law, but Japan does follow International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). I’m also not versed in the capitalization of video game development expenses.
A business is going to write down their asset based on their ability to generate future revenue from it. With Concord dead on arrival, it would be fair to say that they would write down everything related to the individual game development. If they left any asset on the books it would be related to the IP/trademarks/copyrights/etc (maybe some transferrable technology if they are getting really specific).
I’m not able to make the connection between issuing takedowns on community servers/videos and the accounting write off of an impaired asset. Issuing takedowns seems more in line with IP protection.
IP/trademarks/copyrights/etc.
This is likely going to be the main reason for the takedown notices, Sony will be exercising their legal rights in order to defend their trademarks & copyrights on Concord assets.
If a company doesn’t defend them vigorously, then any unlicensed works that are allowed to exist are then used as legal precedent moving forward to null/void such copyrights and trademarks.
As an aside, Sony is a global corporation and can likely choose to write down these losses in the most preferred region to maximise the tax offset - so likely either the US, or Ireland.
Sony refunded everyone who bought the game though.
A seller doesn’t get to walk in your home, hand you a check and take your couch. The same should not be allowed for digital goods. A voluntary refund should never revoke ownership rights. But we don’t actually have ownership rights any more, do we? Or any rights.
Digital ownership is probably going to happen, but it’s going to take a generation of politicians to die off. Once we get more people that understand computers and digital goods aren’t magic, there can be change.
The average EU politician is 50. They were 25 when Napster did its thing.
There will be no change as long as the EU is fundamentally a liberal institution.
The EU is working it’s way towards digital ownership. Gdpr and dma are steps in reducing corporate power and granting ownership over identity.
Yeah, EU has plenty of flaws but are making some good steps.
But we don’t actually have ownership rights any more, do we?
When it comes to video games, we’ve never had ownership rights. Buying a game has always been just buying a license. The only thing that’s changed is that now publishers have a mechanism with which to enforce it.
That is absolutely untrue. Games used to be sold as a physical object containing the game files. No serial numbers to redeem, no servers, no downloads or updates. Sometimes you’d get a booklet with the game that had some codes in it that the game would ask for on startup to make making copies a little more difficult, but that was it.
You’d literally have everything you need just on the CD, disk, or cartridge. We 100% owned the game and the system it was played on, and the only way to revoke that would have been to physically break into your house and steal it.
This whole games as services thing is about 20 years old tops, and it wasn’t even remotely approaching the standard for quite a while after that.
Games used to be sold as a physical object containing the game files.
I can do that today too. I can buy from gog, download the installer an burn it to a DVD. I now own a physical object with the game files that gog or the game publisher can not easily take away from me. I’d still just own a license, not the game, and the license can be revoked. They just couldn’t really keep me from playing the game even after it was.
You need to understand the difference between having something in your possession and having the rights to it. You never owned any video game, even in the days of cartridges, they were always licenses.
“Having” is not the same as “owning”.
Meaningless hair splitting. I still have my entire collection of SNES cartridges. They’re still playable, and no one can take them short of robbing me. If my ownership of those games was limited to a license that could be revoked, that might not be the case.
Fuck that, when I bought Chrono Trigger for the SNES, I owned that game. I still own that game. Nintendo has not broken into my home to rescind my license to a physical cartridge that I purchased.
Legally speaking, you own the physical cartridge, but you only own a license to the software on the cartridge.
Practically speaking, no one will break into your house to control what you do with the cartridge.
You’ve never owned Chrono Trigger.
Sorry, another way in which the world was a lie.
But as the other person replying said, with physical media they’d have to break into your house; probably not happening without them wining some kind of devastating lawsuit against you.
Anyway the point we’re all making by pointing out this seemingly pedantic distinction is that digital media is sold in the same way physical was (just, without the need to transport a physical object to provide access to the media); this is what allows media companies to now take advantage. Whether it’s losing all your “owned” movies when the PS3 store shut down, or your games being “stolen” when Ubisoft shuts down the license server, etc.
Laws haven’t caught up because this transition happened gradually and without such poor practices; and now through regulatory capture will largely be ignored.
It’s a class war and they’re winning, even though they have no idea what the consequences will be as long as they get to live in opulence and control for now.
I’m not sure why you are downvoted, this is 100% correct.
I don’t see why I should pay for a license, especially when it can be revoked any time for any reason. That’s just not a valuable product
You always have. Physical copies are sold as a license to use the product but not copy it (in some jurisdictions this is limited to “copy with intent to distribute”). This is also true of movies, music, and other media. This has been true since physical media has been available.
Under our current laws, “owning” a piece of media means control of the copyright; seems pedantic when the common terminology for having a piece of physical media is “owning”; but the point is that they would never sell you ownership; they would have to sell you a non-revocable license.
In case you weren’t aware, we’ve never had digital ownership. All software has been licensed since the dawn of software, including physical media you’ve bought
Are you using a product that is no longer sold because you have the physical media? If the rights holder decides to go after you to compel you to stop or even try to collect damages, they fucking can.
They historically haven’t because it’s a terrible PR move and they might not have a chance in court due to the physical nature of the transaction; but you’ve never “owned” software in the same way you’ve never owned a movie or music. The sale has always been a license and a physical copy.
The problem has always been the pesky physical copy, which couldn’t be revoked. Since we’ve moved to digital, boomers don’t recognize that this is theft in the digital world they’d never stand for in the real world, and the elite take advantage.
There was a physical release
To be fair, everyone was offered a refund for that game. So technically they probably haven‘t paid for it anymore.
I still totally agree that Sony shouldn‘t go after private Concord servers. This game is very interesting, because it was an unbelievable failure despite having pretty solid gameplay. And preserving that on private servers provides a great way for other developers to learn, and maybe prevent, the tons of other issues leading to the game‘s failure.
Had to laugh, here I am scrolling Lemmy and see a post about those server existing, random post next, then this one.
Thank you everyone for giving them money so they can use that money against us.
