Sony is begging you: please forget about concord
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
I stopped buying anime when they bought up all the major NA distributors.
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.
So, it’s all about control, at the end.
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.
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.
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.
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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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 how can we help set up more servers to cost them even more legal fees?
I’m new to the Linux scene, but if you find a bot that does this, I’ll totally run it.
Pissing off perhaps the only fans of this failure lol
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
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.
I do, and always will. Hopefully more studios will split into smaller ones and start making small, simple games for $15 that will sell like hotcakes. Creative talent is simply wasted on this AAA slop.
It gives them excuse to shut down their servers if they can point to these.
I’m pretty sure they already shut down all their servers. They refunded everyone and try to forget the game ever happened.
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.
It all comes down to Japanese peoples’ beliefs. 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.
Are people still having anything to do with Sony? The absolutly worst compny ever, Comcast is second place. Complete shit.
more like sony is begging people to forget about sony. Even when people do something that could benefit them they punish them. (concord failed, but this way there could have been a chance people might have gotten interested in it again and they could have tried opening official servers again, with basically no risk, and start selling the game again). They rather eat up millions of losses than give ANY agency to the users. And ultimately, isnt this just people trying to make the game they paid for work? How is this different from a scam anyway? They got what little money they got and those who gave it to them got nothing for it.
Dont buy anything shitty companies like this make. By doing so you enable them and are part of the problem.
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
They could have but it’s their game they refunded all the purchased copies of it. The whole point of copyright is to protect intellectual property for its owners if they don’t want people playing it they shouldn’t be.
And keep in mind copyright protects everyone not just large corporations like Sony.
Please, tell me how it’s objectively terrible.
Look, the reason Concord crashed and burned isn’t some deep philosophical mystery. It’s because the game simply wasn’t good enough to survive in a genre that’s already stacked with better, cheaper options.
It launched with no real identity. Everything about it felt like a watered-down version of other hero shooters, same structure, same archetypes, none of the charm. Characters were forgettable, abilities didn’t mesh well with the modes, and the balance was all over the place. The movement was slow, the time-to-kill was absurdly long, and fights dragged on like you were playing in molasses. That’s not “a bold design choice,” that’s just poor pacing.
Then you add the fact that they tried to charge forty bucks for something that, by every metric, should’ve been free-to-play. On top of that, content was thin at launch. Maps were bland, the mode selection was tiny, and there wasn’t enough variety to keep anyone invested. When a live-service shooter launches with barely anything to do, the writing is already on the wall.
Players didn’t walk away because they “didn’t give it a chance.” They walked away because the game gave them no reason to stay. Sales were abysmal, concurrency numbers cratered immediately, and Sony pulled the plug in record time. That’s not player bias or community toxicity; that’s a product failing on its own merits.
You can dress it up however you want, but the reality stands: Concord entered a crowded market with nothing special to offer, priced itself like it was a premium experience, and then delivered something that felt half-thought-out and generic. It wasn’t some misunderstood masterpiece. It was just a bad game.
Those are subjective opinions about the game.
No they’re not. Those are the opinions of the majority of people that played the game and/or reviewed it. Also they’re quantifiable by the game play.
The fact that it was too expensive is not subjective, the fact that the art direction was poor is not subjective, lack of material at launch is not subjective.
I highly recommend you look up the definitions of subjective/objective.
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.
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 term endures for the life of the author plus 70 years.
• For works made for hire or anonymous/ pseudonymous works, the term is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first.
Dude. I noticed that there is a collective misunderstanding of copyright and intellectual property on Lemmy y’all need to read some wikis or something.
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.
I’ve noticed here on Lemmy that the general user base just doesn’t like copyright laws or have a complete lack of knowledge of what a copyright is how they function and why it’s beneficial to copyright works.
It’s actually really frustrating mainly because you get downvoted for supporting copyright which is insane.
“Imagine you create something that ends up being terrible, you can’t profit off it, and then people can get it for free!”
I don’t understand what the problem is here.
Here lies the core of the disconnect. The property is not yours. When someone takes or uses something that does not belong to them, against the owner’s wishes, they have committed a violation. The owner’s reasons are irrelevant; it is their property.
Consider this scenario: you write a book you do not wish to publish. Then an external entity steps in and announces that they will publish it and distribute it for free. You would rightfully feel that your autonomy had been overridden.
This is why copyright laws exist. They can be exploited, like any system, but they remain the most effective framework we currently have.
Sony isn’t giving the game away for free you’re taking it by force.
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.
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.
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…
A write-off is just a bookkeeping manouver that means
No. A write-off is nothing more than a company expense. It’s a deduction from their income.
I believe that is what I said.
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.
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.
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.
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.
they don’t even run their servers anymore, it’s not like the fan servers are competing with them…
is sony turning into another nintendo/disney? flexing their copyright muscle just because they can?
Turning into? They’ve always been this way. It’s been like 20 years since they decided it was ok to install rootkits on people’s PCs to protect their IP rights.
Sony has been shit for much longer than 20 years, kiddo.
It’s interesting. I did a quick search, and couldn’t quickly find many complaints about them before 2000, but technical people complained a lot about Sony products back then. The biggest complaint was that Sony did everything themselves. So, every component inside a piece of electronic equipment was made by Sony, and every time they could get away with it, it would have a custom footprint or custom specs, so that it was impossible to find replacement parts without getting them directly from Sony at huge markups.
I said always, I just used an example from this century. Your comment does remind me of the UMD disks and their propriety sd cards
Ahh the memory stick. What a money grab that was.
I remember owning a Sony Powershot digital camera around the time when that tech first become consumer priced (around 2000 or so) and they had proprietary memory cards. I think it even had a custom USB cable with one end that wasn’t like anything else and one end regular USB
They’ve kinda always been shit to gamers, they just hid it from console gaming; PC gamers frequently got shafted by SOE.
I don’t even think they really hid it from the console space. Their entire PS3 launch was peak hubris. They just don’t step on rakes as much as Microsoft does, and Nintendo would shoot a litter of puppies if it helped them protect their IP rights, so they look better in comparison.
They have always been this way:
Although Sony ultimately did not win any of its lawsuits against them, Bleem! had to shut down when the huge court costs became too much for the small company to handle. Bleem! shut down in November 2001…
Turning into? Sony has been worse than Nintendo or Disney for years. They’re the OG “we’re going to silently brick your machine to protect our digital assets.”
At least Nintendo had the decency to put in their EULA that they’re going to fuck you for trying to pirate content on their proprietary hardware. Sony just bricked your personal PC because fuck you and then lied about it.
It’s funny - before I actually clicked that link, I assumed it was Sony bricking PSP devices with custom firmware. I’d entirely forgotten they put ROOT KITS on their music CDs. They didn’t get in near enough trouble over that.
Happiness is value, and value must only be captured by the IP holder.
is sony turning into another nintendo/disney?
A corporation founded during the Showa era will always be anal retentive about intellectual property.
(Nintendo was and still a company making playing cards for decades before it found its bread and butter on handhelds then consoles; Disney was already in the marketing and merchandising game by the 1930s.)
The only reason you think Sony isn’t as bad as Nintendo is because they have better PR (and Nintendo is as bad as you think they are)
I think it’s more to do with its ongoing clash against Tencent. If they allow this to keep going, it may damage their chances on that side as well.
So let me get this straight… They’re still burning money on Concord through legal costs? Just walk away guys.
Sony is doing a Tax write off 100%
I don’t know a lot about the American legal system, is suing people a tax write off?
Tax write off means that the product is 100% disposable and cannot be duplicated, playable or usable in any tangible way since the corporation is declaring it an absolute loss.
It’s why BatGirl was scrapped but could never be released and also why Coyote vs. Acme initially was going to suffer the same fate before ketchup studios (day the earth blew up…which was almost a tax write off as well) bought the rights to it
I don’t believe they need to erase it from history in order to do that
They really want people to forget all about Concord.
