promethea.incorporated

fnord888:

socialjusticemunchkin:

fnord888:

socialjusticemunchkin:

Unintentionally, the game is a living example of that world because it is produced by the Polish government. The Institute of National Remembrance, a state body created in 1998 to preserve memories of Poles’ struggles against Nazism and communism, gets money to produce Queue from the national budget. Overwhelming demand hasn’t induced bureaucrats to fund a production increase.

When I worked at a game story, there were plenty of popular games by private companies that were impossible to get in stock (or get enough in stock to meet demand). 

That’s why abandonware needs to be pushed into the public domain, or at least have mandatory licensing or something. Original maker not supplying the demand? Get out of the way and let someone else do it. The only reason a board game shouldn’t be manufactured is if nobody is willing to pay the printing costs, otherwise it’s just artificial scarcity.

(It would probably also help if scaling up production was more flexible, but at least private companies have a direct incentive to meet the demand. Aesthetically my brain thinks all games’ rules and basic data should be available on the internet for free and the price would be paid for the physical product, but that’s probably not enough to make it an imperative “should” even if it would be awesome and very post-scarcityish.)

I mean, I agree with you regarding copyright being an interference with the free market, and that being at least part of the problem. 

I wasn’t talking about abandonware games, though; often enough popular games (especially if they’re new and unexpectedly popular, but not always even that) were unavailable even if when they’re nominally in print.

Also worth noting, Kolejka/Queue apparently does have the rules posted on online. This does happen for privately produced games sometimes, but I’d say it’s the exception rather than the rule.

I consider drastic inability to supply the demand to be “effectively abandonware”; I don’t really see a reason why such popular games shouldn’t be licensed for production by other manufacturers, at least temporarily while production is scaled up, to satisfy the customers. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sold somewhere, if it’s realistically unavailable for most.

As long as the forcibly licensed versions note clearly that they aren’t made by the original manufacturer and there is a reasonable time for the OM to react to surprise demand (for example something like 6 months to a year; short delays make sense but having something chronically unavailable is a market failure) I think it might be close to strictly superior, even if copyrights aren’t abolished altogether.