Games

This isnt about the official servers being online forever, this is about being able to host your own server without having to crack the game in weird ways.

I mostly play new games, but I respect admiration for old games. It’s fun to see people speedrun old SNES games - but it’s disturbing to think an entire generation will just become inaccessible to history, even if a lot of the games in question were kind of bad.

I actually agree with you in the case of online multiplayer games - I don’t think the devs can keep them available forever. But when a game is singleplayer, like The Crew, it feels like planned obsolescence.

Pure principle is the answer. People who buy a game should be able to play the game as long as they wish, sell it, give it their grandkids for all I care.

The problem with your argument is „doesnt affect me, wont bother“.

Think of anything you like or even love. Now think of it being taken away, because someone else doesnt care about it. You think thats fair?

I think Destiny is a good argument. If D1 ends, then playing starting D2 won't be the full experience. And new players can start many years into a game. D1 is also stuck on a console, while D2 is so big they removed content from it. You literally can't play the base campaign in D2, a huge part of the story is no longer there. A great game that "you had to be there" to play.

It's the extreme case but leaving games to die instead of having at least the chance for private servers is sad and a loss for everyone long term that don't get a chance to play it.

Good for you! You played a game so much you personally stopped caring. But that's just you and you alone.

There are whole communities out there that are all about retro games. You're throwing them all under the bus for being perfectly fine about something no longer being playable due to an arbitrary and otherwise avoidable reason.

This citizen initiative, if successful, has the power to change the way games are built from the ground up, and is the sort of "tide lifts all boats" thing that'll only end up benefiting everyone.

10 years seems fine, but only if they start counting the moment they sold their last copy.

What is the benefit of forcing developers to provide access to old games that require online functionality indefinitely, instead of just hard limiting them to say 10 years wich is essentially indefinite in terms of non-live service games.

In a choice between "you can play online until 2035" and "you can play online forever", the answer is pretty obvious. All things being equal, the indefinite option is better. I think the problem is that all things are not equal, and making it a legal requirement that all games with online features come with a guarantee those features work indefinitely is incredibly vague and can lead to situations that outright hurt developers.

If the devs need to provide a server binary for players to host a server, how do they ensure these servers only allow players who have purchased the game to play? If they can't ensure it, then the law is forcing companies to allow pirate servers to exist

How do they ensure people running these community servers aren't charging money for people to play? If they can't ensure it, then the law is allowing people to use a company's IP to generate money without a licence.

If the original version had an in-game shop where you can unlock things with real life money but the offline version doesn't have a shop, thus making parts of the game forever unobtainable, did they follow the law? If not, then devs would have to give out paid features for free.

Unless these kinds of details are accounted for, this vague idea is doomed to fail because no government is going to force a company to give up their copyright/IP for free. I know a lot of people have also said "fuck these giant corporations" but this also affects indie developers as well. Copyright protects small creators as much as it does large ones.

Lol, getting downvoted into oblivion because you offered a different viewpoint. Classic lemmy.

The thing is, nobody really expects the companies to keep the servers online forever ( at least according to the petition ), that would unreasonable. People ask that online games are either patched to allow offline play after delisting, or provide protocol information to allow non-official servers, again after delisting.

Normally I'd agree with you, it's the developer's prerogative to schedule games in order to maximize their profits, but for the past decade there have been A LOT of online only games, even single player games that require a connection just because ( see the recent forza motorsport, or simcity 2013 ). There's a clear tendency in the industry to force this as a form of planned obsolescence and that needs to stop.

And yes, I realize that even if the petition materializes into something the developers will find a loophole. This is why I'd advocate more towards educating gamers to recognize and avoid abusive patterns. See the crew 2, where even if they basically give it away now, it's still chock full of mtx and dark patterns, and a lot of games that are designed to be online only have those patterns ( I for one learned to recognize these and avoid the game and/or the developerr altogether ).