I'll never be there again, as an attendee or as a vendor; that part of my "career" has been decoupled by the charges and will be entirely consumed by re-entry. You will have to watch stock footage to know that it had ever occurred at all. Not because of stuff like this, not exactly. But I won't miss it.
Abstract but still palpable concepts like "Intellectual Property" aren't my primary concern here, which distinguishes me from the fulminations of my companion. It's my belief that sometimes we can't get to the next thing unless we start madly spinning the tumblr of the known.
What makes those shirts bad is that they are unaesthetic. William Gibson wrote a book called Pattern Recognition about a woman who is allergic to fashion and branding, and I have a similar condition. I feel incongruities like this physically; it's like pulling a piece of folded sandpaper between my teeth.
We were otherwise engaged the last couple weeks, so everybody is already done talking about Playstation Now and EA Access but me.
Let me begin by saying that I'm not renting shit. Now, you are technically renting the "Instant Game Library" or Games With Gold on Xbox One, and we know this because if you stop paying you lose access to them. Then again, Playstation Plus and Xbox Live are essentially compulsory purchases if you want access to the entirety of your game system. What I am talking about is paying a specific fee to play a specific game for a specific amount of time. I'm not doing that even if the bits are local. I have enough games, partially eaten, that I don't need to stream anything. It's not even about the pricing, which is fucked. It's just straight up not a service I want. I have a computer; I have the Humble Store and Steam. If I want to spend some arbitrary amount of money, there are ice cream trucks blaring on every street corner.
People were comparing EA Access to Playstation Now for some reason, maybe because they were sort of overlapping time wise, and I would say that's typical of the people we have entrusted with observing the industry. It makes you an asshole to say why a person is wrong by using Latin. But I could.
The problem with EA Access is 1) that's from EA, and 2) it's platform locked. We were regular purchasers of Tiger Woods, let's say, for years until eventually we realized the games didn't really work in multiplayer when you bought them. They got around to fixing Battlefield right about the time they announced the next game. It's about trust. And being platform locked means that the "vault" of games you get for Xbox One is pretty thin. If this status extended out into their Origin catalogue, or for last gen, it would be a different conversation.
As a model for a new service package, maybe we're talking about something. Early access to titles and what amounts to a global coupon for their output? Give me something like that for Devolver, for Ubisoft, for an Indie Megabooth collective, and it just became the easiest choice in the world.
(CW)TB out.
