Fan-games are no more or less "great" conceptually than any other fan-work, like AMVs or fan-fictions. Some creators/publishers (Bandai in particular come to mind) actually really don't like these works. Hence BYOND has had to forward copyright notices to game creators in the past.

Even if you put "ripping" to one side, there's a pretty major bias in our current listings. Importantly, you can continue to love good fan-games, they'll still be there.

You're correct with the advantages, there's no maybe about it though. As they've got the test site running, they've been able to see the effect the changes have on visibility for these more creative games with novel storylines. The effect is good, basically, very good.

Your disadvantage isn't really true, though. You'll still see those games, you just won't see them by default. Or put simply, you'll need to look for them a little. Just like you would with flash games, new console and PC games would wanted to buy etc. As most of the fan-games are actually promoted by personal recommendation (a guy tells another guy about a cool new fan-game), this isn't such a bad thing.

OrangeWeapons wrote:

Hence BYOND has had to forward copyright notices

Can you name games/people that this has happened to? I'm just interested.

DMU (Duel Monsters Unlimited) got a C&D from Konami, iirc

Funny that it got remade. And yeah, I recall that. Who actually got ahold of that letter? Was Tom given it, or the games owner?

Hopefully, there will be a section for fan-games.

If they're extremely lazy.

Dragonn wrote:

If I understood what I read, this'll be the death of byond. The players have decided what they want to play, and its fan-games. By trying to force them to play what "you" want them to play, they'll just all leave.

No one is forcing you to play anything. The anime hubs will remain, just hidden from the search. It's not that big of a deal, games that are not made with BYOND do quite well without a "hub". The authors have to go out and advertise their game, we are actually lucky.

Flame Sage wrote:

I believe you can still get a Member to submit your Hub for approval.

I don't think I saw this option anywhere in the beta. It MAY be possible for a BYOND Member who is also a helper on your hub entry to submit it for approval, but AFAIK it's not possible for random BYOND Members to submit games for approval. (I think this is cool because it became pretty annoying at times with the random members submitting (fan) games to BYOND RPG; grow up already!)

Moderators can manually change the status of games so I guess you could still do it if you write an e-mail / forum post but I'm not too sure what the policy will be on this. I think that ultimately this restriction will be a blessing in disguise since it will make people think twice before considering to submit their games for approval which should bump up the quality a notch.

As for fan games: basically they're pushed down a notch in favor of showcasing original content. I think this is to be expected since BYOND has a large quantity of fan games already.

The only thing that should affect the search is the order in which entries are shown. Only suppressed hub entries aren't visible in search.

I think that people are overreacting about this change. The only ones really affected by all of this are the "serial submitters". Try to keep in mind the BYOND Hub is a luxury.

Thing is, the topic of a rip is quite an iffy one. How do you verify the original programmer? How will BYOND know if X or Y coded it, if their old hub entries are gone?

eg. Finale is a game coded by Dragonn, but diverted to Phoenix which was then handed over to another developer. Yet, Finale was recontinued.

How would BYOND know which one was the rip?

Now as for the hub being a member only feature.. Kind of harsh, considering a large majority of games on BYOND especially fan games have no profit at all and are majorly lacking in advertising capabilities.

I am all for making things easier for people who produce their own original / influenced content, but why should it be done at the expense of the rest of us?

Also, getting members to publish it for us could basically result in lesser guilds being formed. One member account shared between multiple developers to reduce costs. Thus, BYOND would probably suffer a drop in membership rates.

Well, I doubt anyone on here gives a ****, especially the higher ups, seeing as I've been banned from BYOND about 7 times I believe.. But that's my two cents.