As much as I love the CoH franchise, I think this would be the thing they deserved for fucking with their customers for almost 10 years.
If my baker made bread for his customers and everyone wanted full wheat but he always made white sandwich bread, he would be bankrupt in less than 3 months.
The problem with Relic is that they are the only bakers out there and people have to deal with their shit because of that. No one likes Relic. We just have to stick with it because there is no alternative. It's like the current US election.
So you wish that a lot of workers lose their jobs and live on the street. Wow that is really sad from you. No one forcr you to play the game. There are a lot of other games around. You dont like them, well why you like coh2 and playing it, if you wish people to lose their job.
"The real bosses [under capitalism] are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses. They are full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. They do not care a whit for past merit. As soon as something is offered to them that they like better or is cheaper, they desert their old purveyors." - Ludwig von Mises,
Bureaucracy p. 227
The market always tends towards equilibrium. FaHu, your concern is unfounded... alas, we don't live in an unhampered market, so the supply and demand for human capital are not often let reach closer to equilibrium (thanks to so many laws as minimum wage, or other cost-intensive regulations and red-tape laws that prevent competition (and, this world being imperfect, without omniscient producers, and preferences ever-changing, it'll never or for only a very short time reach actual equilibrium)), so your argument might have some merit. However, it is ill of you to transfer intent to Highfiveeee. You do not know his interior disposition; you are being presumptuous. Shame, sir.
Anyways, saying there are other games around is more akin to saying he could eat cheese or drink milk instead of eat bread. There's only one baker, largely thanks to intellectual property law. Which is a hamper on the market's tendency towards equilibrium.
Now, if such laws were removed, society as a whole would be that much richer. It is a case of what is seen (a very immediate effect on a special interest group) and what is not seen (the longer term effects on everyone as a whole), as Bastiat says in
Economic Sophisms and Hazlitt says in
Economics in One Lesson (
https://mises.org/library/bastiat-collection and
https://mises.org/library/economics-one-lesson, horray free PDFs!). This is not so far-fetched a suggestion. There are plenty, tons, of industries completely devoid of IP, such as the food industry, the furniture industry, the fashion industry, the comic industry, the magician industry. Alas, do we hear much complaining about those? Not a whit. Is IKEA or Brian Reagan out of business because someone copies their designs or jokes? No. Moreover, those high profile ones who do try to copy the jokes or reveal the magicians secrets are universally ousted and campaigned against, which is why it doesn't happen much. In fashion, people pay hand over fist understanding they could get an exact replica for cheaper but with a lesser degree of prestige. Why would it be any different with software? It wouldn't, don't be a silly. There are many routes to secure profit without IP laws, and those that say otherwise are simply uncreative (or not applying their creativity) or selfish. I will give you two small examples. Say, hardware developers would be out of business if they had no software to sell on. They have a vested interest, therefore, in funding game developers that people might buy their physical products. Another, say that a group of developers decides to "kickstart" and fully fund a project that way, and sign NDAs / contracts internally binding them all to keep things on lock until the funding goals are met.
Besides the utilitarian argument, thoroughly in favor of deposing IP law, there's also the natural law argument: if property is from the natural law, then why haven't the vast majority of civilizations throughout history acknowledged intellectual property along side it? Why is it a very recent invention? Moreover, what constitutes ownership, and how can one 'own' an 'idea'? If ideas are ephemeral universals, they must be owned by all, as one could only discover and distribute ownership: there would be no way to scarcity in the economic sense, and thus no way to lock it down as a given person's. If ideas are only present in each mind, be it as universals or as particulars or as illusions, they must be re-created in each person's mind from external stimuli. If it is their creation, and if its removal depends upon aggressing (lobotomizing) them, then it is theirs wholly simply by knowing it.
Without IP law I'd predict a much healthier games industry, and a much healthier modding community. Hardware people and alternate funding methods provide strong, flexible bases with ever expanding middleware and assets that take little more to improve or produce, and those passionate fans would tweak the games and host private services as they reached paragon status or fell by the wayside. I stand with Kinsella alongside an eminently rational position:
https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0 (with a free audiobook too!). Oh, what a joy it would be if IP law was wiped away before the next CoH.