Item — HN Reader

> As far as we can tell, it's basically a "don't cause us problems and we won't bother you" situation.

In this case, the "problem" seems to be "we want to lazily cash in on an existing IP and you providing a better product for free on the same shelves as ours makes that difficult", with the "solution" being to agree to have the better (free) version bundled with the lesser (paid) version.

I suppose it's better than banning distribution of prebuilt executables outside Steam or suing the devs into bankruptcy (a lawsuit Atari would likely win), but at that point we're just comparing starting with a shakedown to starting with breaking kneecaps.

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> In this case, the "problem" seems to be "we want to lazily cash in on an existing IP and you providing a better product for free on the same shelves as ours makes that difficult", with the "solution" being to agree to have the better (free) version bundled with the lesser (paid) version.

At least they want to "lazily cash in". A lot of gamers like to talk about preserving history, yet are critical the moment businesses preserve that history doing it the way businesses naturally do things (i.e. by selling a product).

Besides, we do not know what went on behind the scenes here. It could be anything from the open source developers voluntarily pulling their game from the store, to the publisher requesting they pull their game from the store, to the publisher threatening legal action. Heck, the publisher may have even paid the developers of OpenTTD to bundle their engine with TTD. While some scenarios are more likely than others, we are too quick to attribute actions and motivations based upon non-existent information.

I don't think anybody is blaming Atari for putting TTD on sale for money. Heck, I was even planning to buy it until they pulled the obnoxious stunt of removing OpenTTD.

And even that could've been okay if they actually explained what was going on, but it's all very hush hush, which does not instill trust and understanding. If they were transparent about motivations and reasoning, they'd likely catch a lot less flak for what's going on right now.