If your game requires a server for single player content, I ain’t buying it.
I’m not paying full price and getting a rental.
Only exception to this is if I can run the server myself. Even multiplayer games I feel somewhat cautious about now.
V rising kind of does this but a single player game is just called a server it’s on your local machine though.
This is why it is so important to find exploits for current gen consoles. It is not about piracy, it is about preservation. You don’t own a game that requires the internet, or a fucking download code Nintendo.
It is not about piracy, it is about preservation.
Nice. Did you make this?
Slapped it together real fast, yup.
A PS3 with Evilnat custom firmware is truly a thing of beauty. A great era for videogame creativity and experimentation, when F2P was just a twinkle in Tim Sweeney’s eye.
I’m still upset about Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy & The Polar Night Liberator
This is true. I’ve been grieving the loss of Isekai Demon Waifu, which shut down only a few days ago on the 19th of this month. I had been playing it over 3 years, and had unlocked most of the girls, become the #1 on my server, and had grown attached to seeing my harem girls every night when I play the game before bed. I missed the server shutdown notification and I was messed up the next day. It hit me hard.
I hope there is another harem game with succubi and monster girls. IDW had a lot of charm. The music, art style, aesthetic. Amazing monster girls. I’m going to miss seeing Ephinas, Fiadum, Hastia, Scardia, Palotti, Ymir, and all the others.
It doesn’t seem fair that we can spend years of our life, hundreds or even thousands of dollars, make a game experience part of our lives, and then one day it just goes poof and it’s all gone. Part of you vanishes in that moment. It’s like a bandaid being ripped off a wound, or a light in your life going out. Because someone else decided it cost too much to keep a server running?
They should be required to transition the game into an offline mode!
Can’t you use that money to see a therapist now?
I can’t tell if this is satire or not.
Depends on whether they have heard of Josh Strife Hayes.
Given the username I’d guess not. Good username btw
They should be required to transition the game into an offline mode!
Seems to me like this would be good business sense too. Wouldn’t people be more likely to buy their next online game if you felt there was a good chance you could keep playing it after a few years? Instead they’re going to get a reputation for making products with a short shelf life.
You paid this money knowing you do not have the ability to run the game. Why does the developer have the obligation to change the user agreement you signed off on when you created your account? You chose to play a game that you cannot run yourself.
That’s weasel speak. Hiding behind a user agreement is a pathetic excuse for bad behavior on the part of the developer. The developer decides what is in that agreement. It can be changed at any time, and 'but you agreed to this" is a poor excuse for laziness and disrespect for the community that supported them for so many years.
Transitioning the game into an offline mode could be done with some development time spent on a final update. Take out the multiplayer stuff, let the game run offline, and put the game up for sale as an idler for like $5 or $10. It might not make much money but it lets players continue to play a game that they love. It shows that you as a developer care about your product and the customers who have supported you for so long.
That’s the point of agreements though. If you buy a game and don’t like the agreement you should be allowed to return it. If they change the agreement you should be allowed to return it. Agreements aren’t inherently a bad thing. There just hasn’t been enough backlash about bad agreements or the business models they create.
Weasling out of things is what separates us from the animals… except the weasel of course.
It’s astonishing to me how even right here on Lemmy so many people still misunderstand what this is about with comments saying that piracy fixes it or that downloading the game installer solves the issue. The games where those things are options aren’t what this effort is about, this is about games like Darkspore, Defiance, Tabula Rasa, and our prototypical example The Crew, where there is no one who can play them no matter where, how, or when, they acquired the game, it is impossible to play for anyone, the whole piece of art has been destroyed.
Honestly if we can’t even communicate what the movement is about to those who aught to be our base it really does not bode well for gaining any kind of wider traction.
In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they’ll never actually die, unless the server source code gets taken down and nobody archives a copy. I mean, WoW Classic only happened because a private server running vanilla got too big, despite Blizzard bullshit of “You think you want it, but you don’t” and “We don’t have the code to roll back”.
Star Wars Galaxies, Phantasy Star Online, City of Heroes, Warhammer Age of Reckoning all still exist and can be played, despite being “dead”, thanks to private/pirate servers.
Marvel Heroes Omega is one I recently discovered has private servers now. I really miss that one. The whole campaign is playable, but the server will be wiped once 1.0 of the emu comes out, possibly early next year.
I think the issue is that, as with reddit, a lot of people are only reading the headline and commenting.
Also many young people are so used to games requiring online connection and being shut down, that they can’t imagine a better way.
That does seem to be an influence, though oddly there are some modern wildly popular games, Minecraft being a prime example, that still allow you to self host your own server, so it shouldn’t really be as foreign of a concept as it appears to be to some younger folk.
The thing is when you created your account you agreed to the fact that it isn’t your game. What you agreed to was a game that they own and control and you can participate in. You might not like the results when they close the game but you chose to start playing that game to begin with.
Yeah, but a contract that you cannot negotiate before signing isn’t really a contract is it? It is a gate keeper. A gun to the head. An “agree to this or else”. In the modern world, one can do essentially nothing without signing a EULA. Want to get a job without signing one? Good luck. Want to play a game? Not many of them. Want to shop online, look at art, communicate with friends and family. Many of the most integral parts of maintaining our mental health are being put behind abusive “contracts” that strip us of any rights we think we have. Community, leisure, socialization, entertainment, all of the primary avenues in the modern world have predominantly become privatized and every one of those comes at a pretty steep nonmonetary cost.
You can choose to accept their terms or not play the game.
You are not entitled to have everything on your terms.
You can also choose to call them out on having anti-consumer practices. You are entitled to criticize shitty business practices.
I wouldn’t call this a shitty business practice. You agreed to a game they own and control. You went into the game knowing this. If they are losing money on the game why should they lose more just to “preserve” the game after shutting down?
They don’t have to. They can release the code and let people run their own servers once they’re no longer interested in doing so. This costs them nothing.
You’re damn right I don’t like it, I especially don’t like how it destroys art history, which is why I’m part of this campaign to make that practice illegal.
People aren’t used to this as a concept, especially when there are so many terms and conditions screens (that have been shown in multiple jurisdictions courts to not be legally binding) they click through on a daily basis as well as many other “as a service” models that are reliable enough that people don’t realise what the pitfalls are (people playing for Netflix are fairly certain it won’t close next week, for instance), even the more technically minded expect sunset clauses - which would be a pretty good legal baseline to improve the situation.
Or people are used to this concept and accept it as normal instead of unethical behavior that should be illegal.
I boycott single player games that require online login/validation. Rockstar and Ubisoft are on my blacklist
I returned Red Dead Redemption 2 on steam after seeing I needed an entire Shitstar account.
5 years ago I would have just forgotten about it and moved on but in today’s climate, fuck em. They don’t even deserve my $1.40.
Piracy is essentially a form of archivism. The digital age literally ended scarcity in digital media and these people were like “well that won’t do”.
For sone of these games piracy would solve nothing. How wouldI run an 8vs8 PvP mission in DCUO that players are required to do if there aren’t 16 players on the server? If Im hosting it offline that content is still dead.
Private WoW servers thrived. Much of the endgame content required 40 players to collaborate for hours at a time, and they have kept their own dream running for well over a decade.
You should have the option to find and play with others long after corporate servers are abandoned. Whether or not there are other players immediately available is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Edit - and you’re all over this thread licking boots and saying “you signed the agreement!”
Thanks. We know how license agreements work. They are included in the thing we want to change, when we talk about changing the industry. We want to stop allowing bullshit license agreements. The exact same way many of us want Right to Repair for people who bought tractors with proprietary software.
It also allows the game to revive itself. Those 40 players playing pirated WoW could introduce more people to the game. And at the very least, it allows it be run in the future if ever historians should need access.
I dont think you do know how licenses work when your complaint amounts to ” I want this the way I want it not the way I agreed to it”.
You either accept the game the way it us offered or you dont play the game. You are not entitled to get things the way you want them.
Lol swing and a miss again, my friend.
Nice use of the word “entitled” - really sums up your stance on the consumer/business relationship.
The consumer is “entitled” for protesting predatory or unethical business practices.
The consumer is “entitled” for opposing the ongoing enshittification of entire industries.
The consumer is “entitled” for wanting businesses to not be able to legally hide behind unsustainable licensing practices that provide no value to society and further entrench the ever-growing rent/subscription model that is squeezing people dry for no reason.
The entire point - the entire fucking point - is that these licenses are not okay. So, no, I don’t pay for these licenses, but I don’t think anyone should be able to pay for these licenses, because I don’t think anyone should be able to “sell” these licenses.
These licenses - like many unethical business practices - put the corporation that offers them at a financial advantage over the corporations that don’t.
Regulations - in every industry - should level the playing field. They can allow ethical business practices to be viable and competitive, instead of being liabilities and risks. The copyright/IP system is an example of those regulations instead being weaponized against the consumer, and needs a massive overhaul.
And guess what? In a functioning society, consumers are entitled to get what they want. They are entitled to oppose unethical business practices, and use their collective power to try to stop it. Why the fuck would we want it the other way around? Why are corporations entitled to get whatever they want?
We have every goddamn right to protest those business practices whether or not we do business with those companies - just as we have every right to protest unethical or discriminatory hiring practices by companies that we don’t work for. Even if plenty of people applied for those jobs and signed those contracts, we have every right to protest anyway.
But enjoy the taste of corporate boots!
Im honestly so sick of online games that should be offline. I just got a few switch games to pass time on my breaks, and half of them require internet access. One of them is literally a bubble shooter.
Out of the games I’ve been fortunate to work on, 1/7 require internet, and the 1 was my first industry job as QA. Everything else has been mobile, online required. 5/7 are no longer playable / removed from the internet.
It makes me sad because my kids will never play a bunch of things I made. I can’t revisit them nostalgically. If I had made something in the 90s, it would be preserved still.
I played the cards dealt to me to follow a dream and make a living, but I wish the industry wasn’t like this. The money has always been a role, but nowadays, it’s distorted so badly.
That’s the difference shareholders make.
Gotta save up for some hard drives to download and keep my GOG games, plus some
piratedtotally legally acquired titlesI call em full version demos. Specifically because I buy when it’s good. The 2 hour steam thing sometimes, just isn’t enough to really know. It usually is tho.
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Link to the games list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1at1k7qIo5dgPp6K1aCrYIyAgNOjY-IhF
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Link to the European Citizens’ Initiative: eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home stopkillinggames.com
Two more months to go and more than 50% left to reach 1 million signatures. It’s sad to see that with how many people game, this petition has so little reach. I guess we’ll have to wait till Fortnite is shut down, then suddenly many more will care that their childhood game is gone forever.
I don’t know if I fully agree with the petition, but I do think that there are some real problems with the status quo.
I also think that either a legislature or courts need to provide legal criteria for the good or service division with games. I think that there probably need to be “good” games, "serviceʾ games, and possibly even games that have a component of both.
But I’m not in the EU or UK.
I also am kind of puzzled by this:
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
Isn’t the law on this already settled?
A: It mostly is within the United States, but not in many other countries.
It doesn’t sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:
Of course, case law has never really been settled on whether games are goods or services. Right, Steve?
Steve Blickensderfer: No. No, I haven’t been able to figure this out one way or the other looking at the cases.
A few quick searches haven’t picked up US case law, if it’s out there.
It doesn’t sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:
The creator of the Stop Killing Games campaign did a segment about the viability of fighting it in the US in a segment here: https://youtu.be/DAD5iMe0Xj4?t=1097
tl:dr, the motivated lawyer he talked with on it eventually found a court case that set a precedent that would be extremely difficult to fight in such a pro-corporate court system without extreme amounts of legal funds. This is why the Stop Killing Games campaign is focusing on implementing laws in the EU and other non-US countries.
Unfortunately, I think it was just a lack of awareness that the petition in existed in certain countries where Ross just didn’t have enough reach, possibly due to language barriers. A big push from native speakers of those countries with large audiences, like streamers, could’ve pushed it over the edge.
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Yeah, trusting that anything Internet connected keeps working is a pipedream these days unfortunately.
Hardware and software.
I don’t even trust non-unlockable bootloaders. There’s so much planned obsolescence everywhere
Good.
that’s why i dont buy digital games on nintendo. one day the service ends and it’s gone forever.
I’m not buying Nintendo at all, so many shitty policies from that camp
i buy physical because i genuinely think nintendo is one of the last good game devs remaining. but switch 2 is just download cards. i will not be purchasing it.
“one of the last good game devs” brother there has been so much drama with nintendo being a god awful company the past year ALONE.
But just judging by quality of games they are still the best
have you seen any of their pokemon releases the past years? its actually embarassing how bad the games are in terms of quality and polish, for a game that is the biggest IP in the world.
Nintendo has not developed those. Blame gamefreak.
Check out the new pokemon snap which isn’t that dev. It is legit a 9/10 game. I play it a ton.
they do own the pokemon IP though, so even though they dont develop the game, i’d argue its still their fault if the game turns out ass. its time they put some stress on gamefreak to do better.
Their games are genuinely fun though, and they work offline
Not in 10+ years when you can’t download the rest of the game from the servers because they don’t put the whole game on the cartridge anymore. Not to mention patches and DLC aren’t on the cartridge either.
you can say that about a lot of games and their devs. tons of great indie games out there.
Can’t argue with that!
i think that’s a myth, switch 2 will have real games.
It’s already happening on other platforms. Doom dark ages only has something like 28 megabytes on the disc.
I’m not even aware of any ps3/xbox360 games that are fully contained on discord. Maybe Orange Box?
AFAIK, most PS3 (and even PS4) / Xbox 360 games will play and function with just the disc, an internet connection will just let them download updates to the game.
It was PS5 and Xbox One where the discs became glorified physical download codes, and did not actually contain the entire game.
That’s why I only buy games on GOG. After purchase I archive the installer, and it’s mine forever. On console you are really fucked.
