I agree with Alfonse on some parts.

However, a Bill of Rights for Gamers is certainly a positive step however many rights are in it. Firstly it acknowledges that we are people expecting something meaningful from a gaming company. Expectations and promises means certain rights for the consumers. One (read: gaming companies) cannot go about producing crud while they promised gold and then expect gamers to spend their money and be happy about it. What happens in other sectors? Electrical appliances: if it doesn't work, you return it. No questions asked! It's in the law even.

8. Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.

One of the most important in my opinion. If this is followed, then almost everything else falls into place. A mutual trust is established and constructive criticism and support follows.

This is what Microsoft should have done for Games for Windows Logo. Not just stay at the bank of the river, but flow down it. Perhaps we should also staple this multiple times on the EA Headquarters....

I must applaud for the effort Stardock puts into this "Bill of rights", and I agree on all points. If this would become a worldwide recognized bill, we will finally be able to lift the gaming industry to a higher level.

However, there is a bit of irony in this post. Especially since one of the latest capital Stardock releases "ToA" was not finished in the eyes of alot of people. I should not have to remind people that it took almost 8 weeks to patch the game making it playable as it first was. To be honost I havent touched the game anymore even since that patch, because I want to wait for 2.0, so the game will finally be finished in my eyes.

I will never say the support is not good from Stardock, because it is probably the best we have seen for most companies, however again no-one can deny with a clean consiousness that ToA wasnt rushed into launch. No matter what the reasons are, you can morally want to oblige to your own "Bill of rights" but if other factors can be more decisive in making this decisions then these rights are nothing more then a piece of paper. If you want to strive in keeping these rights, you have to change the reasons why companies are forced into an early release.

Nice list, although I expect the precise meaning of #2 could be rather vague.

What does "finished" mean? Does that mean no more features will be added? Does that mean the game is playable? Does that mean you're reached the feature set you wanted in the original design docs?

Seriously - you can add practically an infinite number of features to any given software - look at Microsoft Word, it got bloated so much they had to rethink and totally overhaul the UI.

I totally agree with everything else . I like that list.

Exactly. Who is StarDock to say that all games ought to have expansions or free updates or whatever? It's one thing to say that games should be released reasonbly bug-free; it's quite another to say that game developers should continue developing a game after they've finished making it. As far as I'm concerned, that's dealer's choice. I'd have been happy with Team Fortress 2 without the added content drops. But Valve wants to give me free stuff, and I'm happy with that too.

It just seems like there are quite a few parts of this "Gamer's Bill of Rights" that are self-serving in nature, rather than as a real standard that all game developers should hold to.

That's a good point: I totally forgot about the bungled ToA release.

For one thing, no game is perfect, so I expect at least bug fixes in the future.

For another thing, there are lots of games I love from the 95/98 and even Windows 3.11 era that were great games, but I can't play them anymore due to incompatibilities with modern OSes.

Even the occasional genre is forgotten: Anybody remember Descent, Hellbender, Fury, or Terminal Velocity? An entire genre for which there is litte equivalent today. They were fun games - I don't see why companies lost interest in making them.

That maybe true...but I'm not sure I see what the problem is?

We all need goals in life, otherwise we'd lack a reference point. By releasing this list, Stardock are only putting pressure on themselves right? If Blues News is any indication, they've certainly succeeded. Maybe they feel that external pressure is a good motivator, and that working towards keeping your word is an effective method for improvement.

It's certainly more difficult than standing around watching what everyone else does, keeping your agenda to yourself and thereby nullifiying all terms of measure. Good Luck to them I say, if they come up short then so be it...at least they've had the courage to be transparent about it.

I am glad others have noted the irony of this:

In my mind none of the GC2 games are finished.  They all crash, they all have plenty of small stupid bugs, and overall they all lack polish.   If Brad actually believed number 2, he would have put resources into cleaning these games up before releasing them.   (or at least really play tested them to realize he had problems)

The tragedy is that even in a non-complete state, GC2 is good.  It's good enough that you ignore the obvious flaws.  What gets me, is how amazing a game it COULD have been if they had just polished it rather than adding and adding complexity and features. As long as SD is somewhat successfull we'll probably never seem them release "finished" games.

PS, I hate the excuse of "we gave you free updates".  It's total BS.  I would have gladly paid 2x as much for any of these games if they were solid.  You shouldn't HAVE to update your game to get it to approach what you though you paid for a year ago.  Go back and play any of the initial releases.  They're a joke in and of themselves.   

Where the heck is edit?  I meant :

You shouldn't HAVE to update your game to get it to approach what you though you paid for a year ago.

I had no issue at all with the registration process.  I can install all the game components and expansions without any serial number information or disks.  All I have to do is install SDC and it fetches all of my registration info after prompting for my email address and password.  SDC installs the components then activates the games.  I've done this several times for various reasons.  I know other people have had trouble registering GC2 so you were probably one of the unlucky ones, but I've never had an issue.  Creating the account was a trouble free process for me.  When I bought the GC2 expansions as well as Sins of a Solar Empire, the serial numbers were automatically added to my account and retreived by SDC.

Well, you should read the GC2 post moterm published in 2006 and available here http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060405/wardell_03.shtml . It has some nice insights about testing and spotting problems

Interesting.  But if that's what really went on, why the hell did they keep adding new features?

It makes no sense.  It's like they thought they needed a million gizmos to sell this game, when all they really needed to do was clean it up.   I'm still waiting for the AI to develop it's planets and build decent ships for christ's sake...

In fact Rights #4 and #6 pretty much remove most of my objections to Impulse. If this was announced a day or two earlier it probably would have saved a bit of grief for myself and others, but such is life. Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to rush out and install Impulse this instant. However, when and if I get to the point that I have an actual need for it, I'll frankly be far less concerned about it than I previously was.

The point is that although I've basically assumed Stardock to be a responsible company and not likely to intentionally violate these points and although assurances have been independently given that Impulse didn't do such things, I see a major difference between a company publishing such a thing like this Bill of Rights which to me is an actual promise and my simply assuming that the company won't do such things. To me there’s a big difference between my assuming that the company will treat it's customers right and the company’s explicit delineation of what it is they believe to be right and their promise to abide by it.

Not that I expect everything to be instantly and always perfect. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Mistakes happen and bugs happen. But this promises that any such things will be precisely that; a mistake or bug that will in most likelihood be corrected shortly. Again I don’t believe this is anything really new in the way Stardock does business, but before it was merely my assumption, now this is a promise that Stardock has made to their customers. Like I said, I find this distinction to be *very* significant.

A few comments have been made in regard to number 2 and I have to partially agree that there have been some persistent and long term bugs that have existed in GalCiv2 but mostly these occur in the types of games that I play which are probably not the norm. I play gigantic abundant all games that intentionally push the boundaries of the game to maximize score. Often these games take me up to 6 weeks of play each. While a dedicated tester could probably finish one in a bit less time than that the total options one would have to exhaustively check is simply prohibitive. So the of out of memory and other “big” game issues really don’t bother me and in fact simply place an upper limit on how far you can push the game.

Like I said above I don’t require perfection be achieved but I do require it to be strived for. I view this Bill of Rights as a promise to always at least strive for perfection. There's not a single one of us that could promise any more than that.

However one final picky little point is that both items 4 and 6 should reference download managers, updaters *and* games. As written Games could "autoload" themselves on startup and download managers and updaters could "install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their [the Gamers'] consent." Although I'm sure that this is *not* the intent.

I have to applaud Stardock for this statement. All i can hope is that other companies adopt these too. Of course it's clear that likes of EA won't do this....

Regarding #2 and #3, this is the way I see it...

2. Games should be released in a finished state as in being fully playable and not broken. For example, in KOTOR 1, I remember an event/fight with certain conditions where an autosave would happen and the game would crash a few seconds into the fight. Upon loading the autosave, those conditions would still be present and you'd get a crash immediately after loading. I don't recall if there were multiple auto-save slots or just one - just that I made a lot of attempts and then gave up on the game for a few months. When we finally got high-speed I happened to come across a patch where it was fixed (and was able to play the entire game), but still. Point was that out-of-box, there was a pretty serious (in my opinion) issue.

3. Meaningful updates after release I see as a variety of things. Balance issues, driver issues, playability stuff, and also a little "if we had another year to work on this game, what else would we have put in" mentality. An example of this not done well: KOTOR 2. There's an oodle of content that they dropped (see the kotor restoration project for details). I understand that sometimes there are time constraints and you have to leave out some stuff, but they really should have eventually added that stuff in via patches.

An example of this stuff done well: Warcraft III. As far as I can recall, when I bought it (not long after release), it was perfectly playable. That game has also seen a pile of updates since release. Really, the expansion was released in 2003. 5 years later, they're still doing updates for it (most recent being a couple months ago).

Now I don't by any means expect every company to have the resources to provide updates to a game for 5 years after release or anything, but at the very least, make sure it's been tested throroughly before release (public betas are awesome by the way - why pay a few testers on a few pieces of hardware when you can get thousands to do it for free?), and when you release it, keep working on it for a while. At least until it's at the point where it's fulfilled the pre-we-gotta-rush-this-out-the-door vision that was had for the game.

All-in-all, I support the "gamer's bill of rights". I just recently bought GalcivII and Sins, primarily because of what I've seen/read about the games (mostly through the forums). I really think everyone should support the companies that are working to make *great* products (not simply pumping out weak stuff to make a quick buck), and who aren't making us jump through hoops (CD required, etc etc) to use them.

It's a bit preachy.