I don’t think the console market is okay for a variety of reasons. This particular issue however, not being able to publish whatever the fuck you want under someone else’s brand, is very much not high on them. The other reasons, the anticompetitive nature of the industry, is what makes it a problem. Most certainly not someone deciding they don’t want their product marketed with fucking around with corpses.
And relieving the developers of the agency of their own vision is specious. They made a decision. Obviously this new direction is within what they’re trying to deliver or they wouldn’t be doing it. The most salient point here is that the amount of changes they seem to be making are negligible. Dismemberment of living people fine, dismemberment of corpses gone. They claim they’ve preserved their vision through limited changes. Everybody else is playing like the loss of that is a fundamental betrayal. It’s fucking ridiculous.
Oh I don’t dispute that but my stupidity doesn’t tend to be crying about censorship over the fact that you can’t dismember bodies after they’re already dead. Company decides it wants to adapt to a particular market and people act like their personal vision of a world where you can dismember all the corpses you want was attacked.
Yeah it’s just the Catholics, with their belief in universal authority of the Pope, actually still embody that original etymology. And if there’s one group that gets hung up on the original meaning of words in other languages it’s theologians. Well, at least non evangelical theologians. Evangelicals like to invent meaning and declare the king James bible divinely inspired so who knows what’s going through their minds half the time.
EU is similarly confused about first sale doctrine as the US is. Steam was ordered to allow games reselling by a French court but eventually got it reversed on appeal, for example. https://www.bfmtv.com/amp/tech/gaming/la-justice-se-prononce-contre-le-droit-de-revendre-ses-jeux-video-dematerialises_AN-202210240308.html
This is despite the first sale doctrine being established as part of digital media in the EU with https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsessionid=A87D18058F3F93DB5719943E51D3B25F?text=&docid=121981&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=lst&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=6657274
First sale doctrine applies to some software and not to others(often having to do with possessing physical media). Their general argument that it doesn’t is when they say it’s a “license” but that license gets superseded by the first sale doctrine where applicable. It’s a general shit show.
Edit: an example of the shit show nature of this: “Can you modify a copyrighted work you were sold and then resell it without the copyright owner’s permission?” The courts are split on this with one saying yes and another saying no. And mind you that’s just pasting pictures onto things with no EULA involved. What happens if you modify a physical representation of software and resell it? If Nintendo or John Deer decided to place restrictions on the resale of consoles, forcing them to be above a certain value or in violation of their copyright license re the software inside the console/tractor, would that violate the first sale doctrine? Who knows.
I think the end goal may be to monitize the news feed, but overall the news feed sounds like it’s so poorly designed that nobody would want to use it in the first place. Being Japan, maybe the news feed was some high ranking dickhead’s pet project and they got this “feature” pushed through without anyone actually having the guts to say it was idiotic.
“The definition of simulated gambling applies to any interactive activity within a video game and does not consider how much of the game consists of simulated gambling,” reads the FAQ, which also notes the test for simulated gambling “does not consider the type of currency (in-game versus purchasable) used.”
You don’t need micro transactions to get the legal Restricted 18 label. The gacha games that you spend real money on get an M while any instance of casino games gets you an R18. I wanna know if they’re including poker in that.
I like to think of it as even worse. It’s likely that the drivetrains themselves are already electric and just running on coal gas, oil, or nuclear power plants to electric like our current locomotive engines. You’re just too dumb to figure out how to wire your powergrid to them. It’s like the US cargo train situation in a nutshell.
I’m speaking from ignorance but isn’t the server backend often licensed and they couldn’t release it if they wanted, even as binaries? Granted, going forward they’d have to make those considerations before they accept restrictive licenses in core parts of their game. And the market for those licenses will change accordingly. So there core of your argument is correct.