Comic for Monday 11/15 (Early High Res)
It's bananas that video games on a corporate level so routinely fumble the interaction with video games on a modding level.
These businesses have a right and a responsibility to protect their brand, of course, but often the nature by which they go about it seems so unnecessarily hostile that I wish I could sit in on some of these meetings at a higher level just to hear the rationale.
Video game publishers deciding to shut down the passion projects of modders, working for free and for the benefit of the community, is nothing new. But rarely do we see such a high profile crackdown on mods followed immediately by such a colossal fumble.
Not only did Take Two decide to DMCA a bunch of GTA mods ( a game series that has long had a very active and healthy mod community) ahead of their GTA Remastered release, but they also turned around and completely dropped the ball on the Remasters, putting out work of lower quality than the free mods they went so far to have removed.
It's full of bugs, glitches and, if you bought it on PC, completely unplayable going on three days now due to problems with the Rockstar games launcher. And now they've alienated the very community that would be the ones to swoop in and fix the games problems with tweaks and mods.
It's just such a bafflingly comprehensive fail on every front.
Comments (3)
They also delisted the old versions of the games, many of which look better in SD, as though trying to cover what was before
I think of the situation as less of a fumble, and more of a "Mooning their fans" deal. Like Kaedys said, it's clear they don't give shit anymore.
Game publishers having no compassion or insight into their customers, and not giving a rat's ass about them as long as they get that $$$? NEVER. Sadly, the days of games being labors of love, meant to entertain and delight rather than find the most efficient means to print money, are loooooong gone. Even indie games tend to go off the deep in more and more rapidly (see Wildcard deciding to release a paid DLC before they'd even officially released the game, despite having quite a number of paid backers for their pre-release and development). TBH, unless and until gamers put their collective foots down and declare that that crap won't fly, it's not going to change. And gamers as a collective won't, because there's faaaaar too many that are willing to shell out $60+ every year for literally the exact same game with some texture and text string swaps. Or drop 10 grand on a game so they can "win" it. Or continue paying out the nose to these ridiculous corporations because that game that looked good is exclusive. GTA may be screwing over its audience right now, but as soon as they kick out GTA 6 (and inevitably, GTA Online 2 with it, because why *not* make a second golden goose), they'll forget all about it and be climbing over each other to throw their wallets at Rockstar. And that's just the Rockstar side of the house. Take Two has their own line of sports games, the money-printing Civ series, and there's plenty of realms yet un-plumbed in the Borderlands series (and Borderlands 3 was clearly a test run of MTXifying a single player game). It's definitely not going to get any better, because Take Two has zero reason these days to give an eff customers, when those customers are so willing to keep throwing money in their direction regardless.