‘This person’s not allowed to do the right thing, because he was born wrong.’

Uh huh.

If you want to get weirder, Tengen released the first version of Tetris on NES. It looks better. It plays worse.

Copyright’s explicit purpose is to give the public new works. You can’t “unpublish.” Once it’s out there, it’s ours, and you are entitled to money… or not.

NASCAR has chosen not.

Take everything freely.

Inverting the PVP to be intra-team sounds brilliant. You’re there to be the best on your side, at any cost… and then there’s five other schmucks present. There’d still be a contest between teams, but it wouldn’t really matter. That’s the background noise for trying to steal kills from the other guy in your lane. One player can even be “the albatross,” the worst loser on your side, motivated above-all-else to foist that label onto another player.

The simpler fix is to make rounds so fast and chaotic that people can’t develop narratives about how so-and-so fucked them over. Let people win some rounds and lose some rounds, even if the outcome is a devastating three-and-eight loss. Make their catastrophic fuckups contained. Allow everyone the opportunity to clutch critical moments, by making more moments critical, without creating one continuous hour-long panic attack.

Key to any of this is scoring via bots. The game can snapshot any moment of gameplay, and run it back over and over, with AI substituting any given player. It’s VORP. If you just got your ass handed to you - would any bot have done better? If not, then that failure shouldn’t count against you. If this failure was caused by the game introducing randomness, then your bad karma can be made-up-for with better luck later on. But if you fumbled a fight that 99% of simulations survived, the game is free to laugh at you, and so are the other players.

It’s a zero-sum team project. Half the people playing will lose, and none of them will feel responsible. Even though they need to work together the entire time, to such a degree that any single person can ruin it for everybody… and one player quitting counts as ruining it for everybody. You’re handcuffed to these people for an hour. If this was all silly fun-times then you’d laugh it off, but of course, no, it’s a competitive sweatbox.

This is a formula for a stranger in Nebraska to blow out your headphones screaming obscenities because you clicked NPCs wrong twenty minutes ago.

Compare other hyper-competitive team games like Counter-Strike. One player can clutch a 1v5. Quitting is heavily discouraged, but is roughly balanced through numeric adjustments. And most importantly, games are quick. A round can happen in under a minute. Whole matches can be as long as a MOBA round, but being broken up into multiple phases - each one a separate win or loss - lets people feel that they did okay. Even if they stood no chance. Nobody invents a racial slur, mid-aneurysm, when they lose an aim-duel in silver.

One of the ex-devs for LoL or DotA said people should get kicked just for picking the wrong guy. If you can commit a bannable offense on the character select screen, maybe the game has intrinsic problems.

Beatings won’t improve systemic problems with your genre.

There’s a reason every MOBA is this toxic, and only MOBAs are this toxic. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes. You designed this problem.

Ballpark $300 per go, typically ~10,000 ft, internet says that’s 30 seconds of freefall… I think you can get a dollar’s worth of skydiving by rolling out of bed the wrong way.

Making one game a “saga” was pretty messed-up.

People made the same excuse for the Wii. ‘Oh it’s not competing with the PS3 and 360. It plays completely different games.’ The same people inevitably turn around and say those real consoles ‘have no games,’ because they mostly play the same games.

The Switch has both a shitload of first-party exclusives, and a shitload of ports. They’re killing it. Their legal department can burn in hell, but the platform is clearly dominating the industry. It’s so fucking good that everyone else is rushing to compete with them.

The Switch has outsold it by an order of magnitude.

This company should fire their entire legal department.

Added chance of fire damage!

Here’s the right approach to rightsholders:

Did you get the money?

Great, fuck off.

Literally mind your business.

Sony heard about Nintendo’s blue ocean strategy and said “I am also the first one here, now.”

I expected Erwin Wurm.

Netflix didn’t do anything wrong. They got fucked over by everyone they licensed from deciding they’d steal Netflix’s business model, and then they would be the biggest fish in the pond. All of them. At the same time.

Netflix was also a preferable monopoly, because this warring fiefdom bullshit is not competition. You wanna watch a show? Fuck you, $20/mo and another password to lose.

We broke up movie theaters for that shit.

They announced a battle royale cash-in a few months ago?

And if a single house in the county has DirecTV, it doesn’t count. Right?

AT&T tended to have abundant small competitors, even since the 19th century. They just kept suing them out of existence or buying them.

All of which is really missing the fucking point - absolute monopoly is rare and weird. Most monopolies have competitors. They’re still monopolies. They command overwhelming market share, which lets them single-handedly shape the market. Having that power is what makes them a monopoly - abusing that power would make them a trust.

Wow, hopefully we’ll invent some competing way to listen to music in a car.

But y’know what, sure, my absolute was overreaching.

Yours still was too.

Standard Oil never had all the oil. AT&T never had all the phone lines. The worst, most blatantly illegal monopolies had competitors. They were still monopolies. What the word almost always means, does not require 100.0% market share. Shit gets weird well before that.