I really hope that something gets done about games not being playable anymore. This is really important for the sake of our hobby and clearly not acceptable.
I could understand how multiplayer games would be harder to maintain 20 years after their release, but there is no excuse for solo games.
Whats funny is that most 20 year old multiplayer games today (at least on PC) are still perfectly playable because the server tech was given to the community, at launch. Battlefield 2 hasn’t been available for purchase anywhere officially in well over a decade, there’s still a dedicated, albiet small community.
I understand that with large, persistent worlds, it’s hard to release that server tech, but at least some form of it should be published. Ie, a smaller variant that maybe just lets a couple people join up as a co-op party, rather than dozens of people running around a large map at random, like in The Crew.
Who preserves historical artwork? Who makes sure it is available for all to enjoy?
I think governments and nonprofits (like museums) need to consider that archival of an interactive artwork means allowing it to continue being accessible and interactive. That’d be the real preservation.
Laws that say if you create something like this and it reaches some metric, then you are required to turn over all resources regarding it to open source public consumption once you are done actively maintaining it.
Art restoration is actually sort of similar to cracking games. (A difference being those games are still protected by copyright so it’s technically illegal.)
Going by US laws (life + 70 years), all of Picasso’s art is all still copyright protected in the US until 2043, so it’s even less of a difference than you may realize.
I don’t know where the line is because with art restoration you’re actually modifying a physical object. I guess a better comparison would be modifying an arcade cabinet or something.
Wouldn’t be surprised if stop servicing/selling a game came with a tax write-off (small due to deprecation). If that were the case, I strongly believe they should, at least, release the server and remove all DRM. Let the community make it work again.
It’s amazing how companies only do things after a “gobernment” scare, the fight does not stop, this isn’t just about The Crew, it’s about every game that won’t work without internet.
Let me tell you, over more than a decade I’ve played a lot of Battlefield Bad Company 2, like a lot a lot.
Last year, in December the servers for it got officially shut down by EA. And you know how I felt? I barely cared. It is still one of my favorite games of all time, and while there are private servers still active, I have no intention to play. And the reason for it that is simple. I’ve played enough of that game, I feel fully unsatisfied with the time I’ve spend with it. Its like 2 people growing apart over time.
Just to play devils advocate here. 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. If you haven’t managed to get enough joy out of something during a decade of you life, then maybe the developer isn’t responsible for your personal issues.
By this time The Crew 2 would’ve been 6 years old. I agree that’s fairly short time to turn of the servers, but would people be still as frantic about the server shut down in say 2028? Wouldn’t 10 years be enough? Why straight up go for indefinite access.
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 ).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
While I like and appreciate the campaign, the issue IMO is bigger. IoT devices for example even have environmental impact when services behind them get discontinued.
I would therefore like a more general rule: whenever a product is discontinued for whatever reason, all necessary documents, sources, etc need to be released to allow third parties to take over maintenance (that also includes schematics for hardware repairs).
Even though you dislike online play, you can still play online with the PS3. Some servers are still up and running, and for other titles there are custom servers created by some fans. And the best part: you don’t need to pay the online fee that Microsoft created during the 360 days, which Sony and Nintendo followed after.
Well, and because 2 is fucking abysmal as a game. The starter car shouldn’t feel like it’s on rails regardless of speed, mostly - it’s a fucking racing game, get it right. (modern nfs is in the corner giggling but that piece of shit is always trying to force me to drift, again with an un-upgraded starter car with like 150hp, so it’s no better)
I was a closed beta tester for 1 and 2, and was very excited for both, but going from 1 to 2 is a huge step backwards in handling alone. Whereas I pre-ordered 1 and got several others to as well, I told everyone I know to avoid 2, bought it on sale a while after launch, was immediately disappointed they never addressed this, and it sits with… 13 hours on the clock. As a reference, I have 4,048 hours played in Forza Horizon 5.
I have no idea how they fucked up so badly. It’s a travesty.
(I play with keyboard/mouse out of preference but also because of physical disabilities, so while I /could/ use a controller and maybe mitigate this, grab a controller and try playing with one hand, see how great that experience is x_x) .
You worded it incorrectly. It should be any single player game that requires online to start to game should be fined. They can have multiplayer option. But single player should be able to be played even offline.
They’re not listening to consumers. Consumers are not complaining to the corporations, they’re complaining to the government. They’re only doing anything because the writing is clearly on the wall and passing new legislation will make shit way worse for them so they’re being proactive.
They’re doing this because they’ve lost so much money investors are angry and the executives want to win people back. They aren’t worried about law changes, they’re worried about their stock price and reputation.
If ECIs are to become a useful tool for civil society, campaigners would benefit from a better understanding of how to craft their demands in a way that is likely to lead the Commission to actually propose a legislative initiative. There have now been 133 ECI attempts, millions of signatures collected, a significant amount of money spent, and little to show for it.
I appreciated his take on it. Don’t trust politicians to come up with a good solution, always present the issue when you have a good solution ready. And the solution proposed by that petition was weak at best and outright dangerous for the industry at worst.
If you want to force specificity on buying v getting limited time access, that’s fine, but that’s not what the petition focused on.
If you wanna force devs to plan ahead with huge infrastructure cost to make sure servers will be online for a specific time, this might result in online games being unjustifiable for smaller studios.
If you want to shield independent people hosting unofficial servers to games, now that’s a different conversation that we first need to have to figure it out, before proposing an exact solution through a petition. Mind you this is a more complicated topic, as this gets into licensing and IP law.
And I really don’t think stop killing games is clear on those, and that makes this endeavor a lottery with the entire multiplayer games industry in limbo.
Give me another more precise initiative and I’ll join, but until then I’ll definitely not sign anything. If we change things, we should change them for the better, so let’s do our due diligence first.
I personally do not care how a policy would damage a company. I am playing the games, not developing them. If a company shuts down servers, they can at least provide players with the server binaries (difficult in the case of MMOs etc, but still better than doing nothing).
The EU can suck, but sometimes they put some pretty neat policies in place to protect consumers (e.g. the difference in USA vs EU MS Windows), so I trust them to hold publishers responsible to not cut off access to a sold product. Let’s say the EU prohibits putting Gacha mechanics in games, would you defend companies then, claiming the EU is cutting their profits (sorry, kinda strawmannish, but it feels to me this way)?
About pirate software (finally looked him up): He just seemed annoying as hell and every time YouTube pushed a short of him it was just ramblings in which huge parts were just untrue. Idk if he even codes, I only see him rambling about some shit with the voice you make when you are 14 and want to sound deeper. People on YouTube said he is a nepo baby but I don’t care too much about him to go down that rabbithole.
Sadly I doubt this was thanks to the petition itself. More likely ubi is trying to claw back some goodwill ( and make some cash too, by promoting the title that was full of mtx instead of the retired one ). They’ve also done this offline fix thing in the past ( with anno 2070 for one ) and also after a healthy dose of player backlash.
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I really hope that something gets done about games not being playable anymore. This is really important for the sake of our hobby and clearly not acceptable.
I could understand how multiplayer games would be harder to maintain 20 years after their release, but there is no excuse for solo games.
even for MP, allow people to host their own. not hard, even Minecraft offers it lol
Whats funny is that most 20 year old multiplayer games today (at least on PC) are still perfectly playable because the server tech was given to the community, at launch. Battlefield 2 hasn’t been available for purchase anywhere officially in well over a decade, there’s still a dedicated, albiet small community.
I understand that with large, persistent worlds, it’s hard to release that server tech, but at least some form of it should be published. Ie, a smaller variant that maybe just lets a couple people join up as a co-op party, rather than dozens of people running around a large map at random, like in The Crew.
Who preserves historical artwork? Who makes sure it is available for all to enjoy?
I think governments and nonprofits (like museums) need to consider that archival of an interactive artwork means allowing it to continue being accessible and interactive. That’d be the real preservation.
Laws that say if you create something like this and it reaches some metric, then you are required to turn over all resources regarding it to open source public consumption once you are done actively maintaining it.
Art restoration is actually sort of similar to cracking games. (A difference being those games are still protected by copyright so it’s technically illegal.)
Going by US laws (life + 70 years), all of Picasso’s art is all still copyright protected in the US until 2043, so it’s even less of a difference than you may realize.
I don’t know where the line is because with art restoration you’re actually modifying a physical object. I guess a better comparison would be modifying an arcade cabinet or something.
Wouldn’t be surprised if stop servicing/selling a game came with a tax write-off (small due to deprecation). If that were the case, I strongly believe they should, at least, release the server and remove all DRM. Let the community make it work again.
this is why i aint getting the crew 2 its discounted but NEVER
It’s amazing how companies only do things after a “gobernment” scare, the fight does not stop, this isn’t just about The Crew, it’s about every game that won’t work without internet.
This is a genuine invitation for disscussion.
Let me tell you, over more than a decade I’ve played a lot of Battlefield Bad Company 2, like a lot a lot.
Last year, in December the servers for it got officially shut down by EA. And you know how I felt? I barely cared. It is still one of my favorite games of all time, and while there are private servers still active, I have no intention to play. And the reason for it that is simple. I’ve played enough of that game, I feel fully unsatisfied with the time I’ve spend with it. Its like 2 people growing apart over time.
Just to play devils advocate here. 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. If you haven’t managed to get enough joy out of something during a decade of you life, then maybe the developer isn’t responsible for your personal issues.
By this time The Crew 2 would’ve been 6 years old. I agree that’s fairly short time to turn of the servers, but would people be still as frantic about the server shut down in say 2028? Wouldn’t 10 years be enough? Why straight up go for indefinite access.
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 ).
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.
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.
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.
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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.
It is 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?
10 years seems fine, but only if they start counting the moment they sold their last copy.
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.
I thought I’d see this and was surprised not to.
Please proselytize your EU brethren. Signing this Citizen’s Initiative is the best chance to fix the dead games issue globally.
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
The guy behind it has a lot of videos explaining the logic. Here is the short version (1 min vid):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHGfqef-IqQ
Call to arms!
While I like and appreciate the campaign, the issue IMO is bigger. IoT devices for example even have environmental impact when services behind them get discontinued.
I would therefore like a more general rule: whenever a product is discontinued for whatever reason, all necessary documents, sources, etc need to be released to allow third parties to take over maintenance (that also includes schematics for hardware repairs).
Remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
Hey, it’s not nothing! A small step towards to the right direction
This is why I got a PS3. Most games run off disc. One update no more than 60GB and hundreds of offline games. I hate online play
Same. And you can also purchase old gems for a really low price 😅
Yes I returned my ps4 at a vintage game store that died under warranty and traded in my games and I got a ps3 along with 13 titles. Most games were $5
Even though you dislike online play, you can still play online with the PS3. Some servers are still up and running, and for other titles there are custom servers created by some fans. And the best part: you don’t need to pay the online fee that Microsoft created during the 360 days, which Sony and Nintendo followed after.
I want Crew 1 offline more than the others because it has an actual single player campaign.
Well, and because 2 is fucking abysmal as a game. The starter car shouldn’t feel like it’s on rails regardless of speed, mostly - it’s a fucking racing game, get it right. (modern nfs is in the corner giggling but that piece of shit is always trying to force me to drift, again with an un-upgraded starter car with like 150hp, so it’s no better)
I was a closed beta tester for 1 and 2, and was very excited for both, but going from 1 to 2 is a huge step backwards in handling alone. Whereas I pre-ordered 1 and got several others to as well, I told everyone I know to avoid 2, bought it on sale a while after launch, was immediately disappointed they never addressed this, and it sits with… 13 hours on the clock. As a reference, I have 4,048 hours played in Forza Horizon 5.
I have no idea how they fucked up so badly. It’s a travesty.
(I play with keyboard/mouse out of preference but also because of physical disabilities, so while I /could/ use a controller and maybe mitigate this, grab a controller and try playing with one hand, see how great that experience is x_x) .
While Ubisoft likely isn’t going to make that happen, some dedicated fans are working on it
Yeah been keeping eye on it and they’ve been making good progress with some of the story being playable already.
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I haven’t even played my copy of The Crew. Seems like now I won’t ever be able to.
Wow who would have thought that single player games were a good thing. Oh wait I did. And so did lots of other people.
You worded it incorrectly. It should be any single player game that requires online to start to game should be fined. They can have multiplayer option. But single player should be able to be played even offline.
but but but, piracy!!!
/s
Pirates are doing God’s work of preserving the digital arts. Heroes every one of them.
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Once again. No government intervention required. Companies listen to consumers.
This was literally the threat of government intervention
They’re not listening to consumers. Consumers are not complaining to the corporations, they’re complaining to the government. They’re only doing anything because the writing is clearly on the wall and passing new legislation will make shit way worse for them so they’re being proactive.
They’re doing this because they’ve lost so much money investors are angry and the executives want to win people back. They aren’t worried about law changes, they’re worried about their stock price and reputation.
In the 12 years since European Citizens Initiatives have existed, there have been few successful campaigns even fewer actual law changes. If I were a greedy company, I wouldn’t be worried about this in the slightest.
There are a dozen reasons in this article why they’re losing money and none of them are because they’re removing games.
G*mers will lap up so much slop and malicious decisions publishers push out, we DO need governments to regulate.
The few (big) publishers that listen to consumers can be counted on one hand.
Downvoted for censoring Gamers. I will always downvote people using that stupid fucking asterisk. Don’t be a child.
Cry
The pirate something guy was the only one I saw and he’s a fraud anyway
Why is Pirate Software a fraud?
I appreciated his take on it. Don’t trust politicians to come up with a good solution, always present the issue when you have a good solution ready. And the solution proposed by that petition was weak at best and outright dangerous for the industry at worst.
If you want to force specificity on buying v getting limited time access, that’s fine, but that’s not what the petition focused on.
If you wanna force devs to plan ahead with huge infrastructure cost to make sure servers will be online for a specific time, this might result in online games being unjustifiable for smaller studios.
If you want to shield independent people hosting unofficial servers to games, now that’s a different conversation that we first need to have to figure it out, before proposing an exact solution through a petition. Mind you this is a more complicated topic, as this gets into licensing and IP law.
And I really don’t think stop killing games is clear on those, and that makes this endeavor a lottery with the entire multiplayer games industry in limbo.
Give me another more precise initiative and I’ll join, but until then I’ll definitely not sign anything. If we change things, we should change them for the better, so let’s do our due diligence first.
I personally do not care how a policy would damage a company. I am playing the games, not developing them. If a company shuts down servers, they can at least provide players with the server binaries (difficult in the case of MMOs etc, but still better than doing nothing).
The EU can suck, but sometimes they put some pretty neat policies in place to protect consumers (e.g. the difference in USA vs EU MS Windows), so I trust them to hold publishers responsible to not cut off access to a sold product. Let’s say the EU prohibits putting Gacha mechanics in games, would you defend companies then, claiming the EU is cutting their profits (sorry, kinda strawmannish, but it feels to me this way)?
About pirate software (finally looked him up): He just seemed annoying as hell and every time YouTube pushed a short of him it was just ramblings in which huge parts were just untrue. Idk if he even codes, I only see him rambling about some shit with the voice you make when you are 14 and want to sound deeper. People on YouTube said he is a nepo baby but I don’t care too much about him to go down that rabbithole.
He was a hacker for the US government and has won 3 competitions at DEFCON. Before that he was a programmer for Blizzard and Amazon Games.
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Him, ThePrimeagen, and Theo Browne were the biggest ones I saw, with various levels of bad arguments.
Sadly I doubt this was thanks to the petition itself. More likely ubi is trying to claw back some goodwill ( and make some cash too, by promoting the title that was full of mtx instead of the retired one ). They’ve also done this offline fix thing in the past ( with anno 2070 for one ) and also after a healthy dose of player backlash.
Never listen to those fucking asses.