When I was younger, you’d still buy games in a physical store and one time I found a great sounding game “Fury” (an online PvP RPG). I went ahead and bought it with my pocket money and was super eager to play it. I even remember reading the booklet in the car while driving home, imagining how fun that game will be.
At home I then installed the game just to find out the the fuckers have shut down the game servers just about 2 years after the initial release of the game rendering the game absolutely unplayable.
I’m still kinda pissed about that, and I still have that box lying around somewhere.
I remember getting C&C 4 and was playing at my grandma’s place on my own in the campaign then I lost Internet and it threw me into the main menu. I stopped playing that day since that’s bullshit.
https://segmentnext.com/command-and-conquer-4-tiberian-twilight-offline-patch/
Probably not helpful to you, but there’s a patch if anyone else needs it
It should be law that online only games, when shut down, must release their server software, so the games community can continue to play and use the software they bought.
also make it law that buying software means you’ve BOUGHT IT. not leased access to.
Only major problem is when software is reused for future games and releasing server binaries makes attack vectors much easier to find. Apex legends has a major issue with this where a significant amount of code was reused from previous games that have server code available, and hackers have absolutely used it as a testing ground for all kinds of cheats.
Wanna know how to make that irrelevant? Make the server files available from the start. Wanna play with just your friends? Host a server. Wanna play with a dedicated group that actually bans cheaters effectively? Join a clan. Then, when the sequel comes out, who cares if the server tech is already known, because we can just host our own and collectively oust the cheaters ourselves. It’s funny because when multiplayer is handled this way, it stays active for decades. Look at the community for the old Battlefield’s, SW Battlefront’s, Call of Duty’s, Unreal Tournament’s, Quake’s, etc etc etc. They’re small, but they’re all still active and not chock full of hackers because they’re community led and community maintained. That’s a hell of a lot more consistent and reliable than trusting the studio to develop and maintain the server tech, and squash cheating long term. Eventually that system will always fail (look at every old CoD on console, where you can’t run your own servers. It’s basically a coin flip whether you end up in a game with a hacker, and I guarantee the devs will never do anything about it).
That doesn’t make the point irrelevant, it makes it even more likely to happen. Most of us don’t want to play on shitty, self-hosted servers and I’ll gladly remove that option to have a more secure game server.
Hot take, but games don’t need to be active for decades. Everything dies eventually. After 10 years there’s no need to keep running the game servers.
And it shouldn’t be just games, any time it says “buy,” that should be understood to mean complete ownership of that thing. That means:
- DRM will be stripped in a reasonable time frame (say, 2-3 years)
- for physical goods, no prevention of availability of parts
- any server components will be made available for private hosting when the vendor is no longer interested in supporting it (ideally FOSS, but any source-available license should work)
And so on. If the product is intended to be available for a limited time, they should instead say “lease,” because that’s what that means.
Agree with everything you said.
and I 100% guarantee they dont want to say lease cause they know people wont be willing to pay 70 fucking dollars for a game that they are renting for a time to be dictated by the developer/publisher, which you have no knowledge of. Is it 3 months? 6 months? 12 years? Who knows!
Yup, that’s why they hide this nonsense in the TOS or whatever. If the intent was clear upfront, they’d have to reduce prices. So that means people don’t really understand what exactly they’re buying.
I’d like to add that anything I own, I should be able to sell. Whether the platform supports it is another story, and I think it’s acceptable for the platform to take a cut since there’s work involved moving licenses, but if I own it, I should be able to lend, sell, or gift my copy to someone else.
this part of it is really frustrating for me.
step 1. purchase game that looks cool
step 2. disagree with TOS
step 3. too bad, get fucked:(
Developers? Publishers are the problem.
Plenty of games without publishers are designed to destroy themselves in this exact way, because there’s money in it.
In that case, the developers are the publishers.
Then why make the distinction when A can often be B? People like to paint a picture of the little guy being bullied by the big guy into making a decision that players didn’t like, but we’ve seen plenty of times that developers will be the ones making the decisions we didn’t like. If there’s an incentive to do the bad thing, developers will do it without being told to.
That’s a strawman argument, sorry. You’re arguing as if all developers are publishers. You just said it “A can often be B,” but A is not always B.
Publishers do this bullshit. Period. And in small shops, developers are the publishers, sure. But when they make those decisions, they don’t make them in their roles of developers. They do so in their roles of publishers. And also, not all publishers and not all developers-turned-publishers are dicks.
But I understand what you’re saying. When they are dicks, they are dicks.
Developers can and have made this decision on their own even when they’ve got a publisher, because publishing deals come in all sizes, and online connection requirements that inevitably lead to a game’s death are pervasive in the industry right now.
No, not really. You just said it, man. “Publishing deals come in all sizes.” Publishing. Publishing. So, it’s the publishers who make those decisions. Not developers. That developers must accept them is one thing. But the publishers made the decision.
All sizes meaning that those deals also come with the absence of that decision, leaving it up to the developers.
