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Sacred Symbols+, #403 | Fine, You Can Have Your Money Back
🕑 Added 2024-09-04 16:00:12 +0000 UTCPlease welcome LSM legal analyst and friend-of-the-show Rick Hoeg back to Sacred+ for another wide-ranging conversation about a number of interesting topics. Mere hours before we began recording, we learned that Sony would be pulling Concord off of PSN and refunding all players at the point-of-sale, and thus we begin there. While we'll leave the primary conversation about this hullabaloo to Sacred Symbols itself, I (Colin) thought I'd pick Rick's brain about some of the noise surrounding such a radical choice. Why can players be forced to accept a refund even if they don't want one? What kind of stipulations and rules exist around taking a multiplayer game offline so soon? By bringing revenue back down to $0, can Sony now write Concord off even though they opted to release it? Other topics include a look at the seemingly-faux Black Myth: Wukong timed or "secret" exclusivity drama, how Vampire Survivors got away from so deeply copying Konami's Castlevania IP, and aggressive labor actions at French publisher Nacon concerning two of its key studios. Please enjoy.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:13:37 - Sony pulls Concord off of PSN
00:44:49 - Wukong's "secret" exclusivity drama
01:05:13 - Vampire Survivors copies Castlevania
01:26:42 - Labor actions at French publisher Nacon
Comments
Trent Piccicacco
Hoeg is so great. He balances his legal expertise and general gaming interest and enthusiasm so well, he always adds to the conversation thoughtfully
NinjaDC
I wonder if Concord is an example of the dangers of having a Jim Ryan run a company. Someone familiar with the numbers of an industry, but not part of it. Concord's trailer drop had a visceral reaction from every gamer. Universally all gamers knew this was going to be a dud. However, Ryan wasn't a gamer. He doesn't get the product. To him, Concord looked like Overwatch. He didn't understand the art, and why it wasn't.
