Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Telaneo 26 days ago
Bad regulation should't be reperesentaive or regulation as a whole. If you don't get it right the first time, you're allowed to try again, and that's what should be done with regulations providing bad incentives.

Gaming has already gone though a period of pushing subscription games, and most died, since people generally didn't want to pay a fee per game they played. That only left the big players in that space, while everybkdy else went back to releasing games the normal way. I fail to see why things would go a different way this time around.

2 comments

The legal system is kind of like an evolutionary process. We try things, see if they work, and adjust over time. So far I think this has indeed led to a better legal system, but I can see why the set backs and injustices of the world make that difficult to assess.

Regulation also creates jobs, even bad regulation, so there's almost a Keynesian argument to be had about its relationship to our economic system.

Bad regulation is representative of regulation as a whole, because most of it is bad, or at least ineffectual, particularly in California.
Blanket dismissal of regulations is about as silly as a blanket dismissal of laws. Some laws are "bad", some are "good", but the point is who do they hurt, and who do they serve? Regulations are tools, like laws, and can be written to serve the needs of the people, for good things.
I'm not even saying this should be dismissed with a blanket dismissal.

First example is a reminder that regulation can be bad.

Second is an actual concern about this specific regulation. This is a concrete concern about the incentives it creates. There wasn't a single response to this comment about exactly WHY questioning effectiveness of it is irrational.

> Second is an actual concern about this specific regulation. This is a concrete concern about the incentives it creates.

Like I said in my OP comment, the problem with saying "this regulation will push devs to subscription-based game models" is that it does not explain why that would happen. It just assumes it would.

This argument to me is like saying "forcing people to wear seatbelts will push them to take the bus instead". Why would this be such a problem that people ditch their whole mode of transit? I see it that way because I can't think of a single case where designing your game server architecture with decommissioning and redistributing to your users in mind would be difficult or costly at all, and I have seen no convincing explanations

I think a study of regulatory capture would definitely support your views
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.