Firstly, let’s get this out of the way. When you pay for a game, you’re not actually paying for the copy of the game. In this digital world, a copy of the game is worthless. That’s because little to no labor went into making the copy of the game. So what are you actually paying for when you buy a copy of a game? You are repaying a fraction of the value of the game itself. Now the difference between “the game” and “a copy of the game” is that “the game” is not a physical or even a digital item. “The game” is the item that was created as it was developed. However, what capitalism does is make it impossible to get the labor of the game paid in full. Instead, it makes you pay for every (worthless) copy of the game. And that’s not even mentioning the surplus value that gets extracted from hardworking developers by greedy AAA companies. Socialism would solve these issues. Instead of having to release the game and then rolling the demand dice to decide what percentage of your labor gets compensated, your labor could get compensated in full as the game gets published. This is also good news for consumers, as now they can freely redistribute copies of the game without preventing labor from being compensated.
The best example is the 2003 Gearbox PC port of Halo Combat Evolved.
The port came with several downgrades compared to the original Xbox release, notably ruined textures and detail, transparent objects looking worse thanks to a file type known as
shader_transparent_genericnot working and replaced with a less advanced type known asshader_transparent_chicago, and broken AI. Worse yet Gearbox forgot to fix it to the point the PC port became the basis for the “classic” mode of Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary and its later MCC port. In fact, it took the MCC version of CEA until **SEASON 7 ** - seven years after MCC’s release and two years on PC - to restore these shaders and is now compatible with both Gearbox and Xbox graphics, all other versions of Combat Evolved except the original Xbox have these graphical issues to this day including the Gearbox portThanks to intellectual property law we folks in the Halo modding community couldn’t re-code the game to restore the Xbox graphics due to the source code locked behind intellectual “property” and are forced to use the Gearbox shaders just to “fix” them. Thankfully MCC CEA has both mod support and Xbox graphics but we now have a new problem where thousands of modded assets made for the broken PC port look outdated in comparison.
Addendum: This pointed out to me by a comrade of mine on 7:53 am here in the Philippines. Gearbox deliberately downgraded CE to run on less powerful machines but they should have fixed it in later patches down the line, especially when hardware became more powerful.