Volunteers from the Stop Killing Games movement looked at over 700 games requiring internet to see how many are playable after support ends. The results are...
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.
An MMO i played from 1999-2007 shut down in I think 2017. I still remember the landscapes and landmarks and it is really strange knowing the shared experiences in those places are just flat gone. Inscribed items with messages to other players: deleted.
I have emulated the game world but only fragments were saved by collective efforts in the community before shutdown. Regardless there’s simply no people or things to interact with so it feels even more soullessly dead and empty.
I still love Lord of the Rings Online. It still has enough people to feel alive, to the point where they even upgraded their servers recently, and still keeps that old school feel. You can even earn LOTRO points through hunting monsters and quests, so if you put the work in you don’t even need to buy anything.
Do I miss the days before MTX? Yeah, but I feel like they are fairly less greedy about it than other games. Fairly. There’s still the VIP subscription while double-dipping into MTX that rubs me the wrong way a bit, but they still actively try to listen to the players. I’ll be sad when its gone…
Its mostly much older generations that play, though, but that really cuts down on a lot of the toxicity. I’ve had so many polite conversations in world chat with programmers and sysadmins offering advice. One of the most helpful players I met was a 72 year old vietnam veteran. He helped me get started and gave me a ton of gear just for having a nice talk with him.
I love lotro. I played it for 10 years. From release, until mordor.
I was madly inlove with lotro. It was a beautiful game. the only MMO where you actually read lore and quest text and anything else, because of how immersive it was all… and the game was perfect (before mordor). Casual, relaxing, but challenging in all the right places.
and the community was just absolutely amazing. Kind, considerate, helpful, generous. Like you said, i think the average age of lotro players was over 40… Until there was there was some issue with WoW that caused a lot of WoW players to immigrate to lotro… Then chat got less friendly, and more obnoxious, and the community got less kind, and less helpful… cause all the kind helpful people got burned by the jackholes being jackholes… Still a pleasant community overall, but no where near what it was before that WoWpocalypse.
My love and faith in the game changed with Mordor, though… Mordor broke me, It was just so pointlessly difficulty spiked on even the landscape mobs were slaughtering raid-ready players, that most of my kin, myself included, ended up just quitting the game. A few people eventually got the gang back together again for southern mirkwood, but that mordor level of difficulty was still there. No one in the kin, except for the hunters and the champions, seemed able to even 1v1 the landscape mobs. that also reflected group content… no one wanted anything but healers and hunters. was the same with mordor, but even worse with southern mirkwood. Mobs were so dumbly overpowered that only the lotro character equivalent of tactical nukes were wanted in groups… I, sadly, was not a tactical nuke class.
It really breaks my heart. I loved that game. I made great real life friends in that game… I met my Ex in that game (though in retrospect that probably shouldnt be viewed as part of the happy memories lol), Spent so many evenings bullshitting in voice chat while we did instances and group content, or just ground out old content for deeds. Was such a magical fucking experience, that I’ll probably never experience again for the rest of my life. The pre-mordor game was absolute perfection. Especially with the revamps to some less ideal/polished game areas like Moria.
And killed, to me, because devs listened to a vocal minority that wanted moar harderer.
I absolutely love LOTRO, too. I understand what you mean. The endgame content is pretty advanced, but I had this conversation with someone on Reddit years ago.
It doesn’t have to be hard. There is so much content in LOTRO to last you years of playing new classes and enjoying the world. Throw out all of your max level up items, they’re going to ruin the game for you. Just go out adventuring. I’ve had a good time during anniversary helping people through old dungeons (I hate you, Saruman).
The endgame is hard, because half the community beats endgame and complains that there’s no content, and half the community just plays casually. They don’t really have the power to keep pushing out quantity in content, so they have to make ridiculously hard and rewarding content to make up for it. It’s really a lose-lose either way, and they chose to keep the community that has been faithful for years over trying to pull in new players.
It sucks, I agree, but I think I would have made the same choice. I still love playing and wandering around; leveling new classes, and you can now get new titles for playing new difficulty modes they made. You can change the world difficulty starting at level 10, I believe.
Respectfully, I have to disagree with some of what you said… I don’t mind end game being a challenge, or even difficult.
Because the end game has always been in instances and raids. I don’t mind raids being challenging. I dont mind 3/6mans being challenging. Cause they are content you can typically choose to do or not, you need a group to do them, and they have the tier system that lets you select how difficult you actually want it.
Thats a good, healthy system to introducing challenge to the system.
And that meshed very well with the otherwise relaxed/chill nature of lotro. Because before mordor, Turbine/SSG/Whatever they are now, did a fairly admirable job at balancing and spacing out the challenging aspects amongst the fun and relaxing stuff to keep playability and fun high, while keeping a sense of satisfaction by overcoming the challenging bits.
Landscape wasnt a cake walk, unless you were ridiculously overeveled, but it wasn’t a torture session either. Any class could get through their landscape quests with an acceptable amount of challenge.
But then Mordor came in, and you couldn’t solo landscape unless you were one of the chosen classes, with Hunter being the king of them, because their DPS was insane, and they were range, so they could power down anything without taking damage. A poorly equipped hunter was solo survivable, when a very well equipped not-hunter could barely survive, if survive at all.
Mordor landscape wasn’t fun, it wasn’t a challenge. it was just naked brutality for brutality sake. They listened to a vocal minority that hadn’t played the game for long, comparatively, and wanted to turn lotro into a souls-like difficulty game, at the expense of all the people who had made lotro their evening stable for a decade+. and they lost players because of it. It really changed lotro from a fun way to spend an evening, to a way to ruin your evening because you just want to do these handful of landscape quests without having to deal with generic orc 37 that’s as strong as a 3/6 man miniboss (slight hyperbole).
I dont know if they’ve re-balanced the areas since then, or introduced mechanics to take the edge off, or what. I hope they did. I hope they’ve brought the fun and play-ability back so new players don’t hit the same wall that destroyed a generation of players, but no matter what changes they may or may not have made… ultimately, I just cant see myself ever mustering desire to play lotro again… and that saddens me as much as the state of the game that made me quit to begin with.
I don’t want to even think of how many thousands of hours i poured into lotro over a decade of almost nightly play. Thats too terrifying a number to ever think about, lol.
Ohhhh, no no. The raids and dungeons are challenging and ridiculously hard. I get what you’re saying now. It hasn’t been like that since I started up again, which was right when Gundabad released. It’s very easy to solo, and now there’s an NPC that lets you change world difficulty if you want to opt for it, making it so that the hardcore players and the casual players both get what they want.
I hear you. I haven’t touched it in a while because I will literally lose months of my life to it. Its harder for me because its one of my gf’s favorite games and when she plays I can’t help but play.
Its a depressing perspective sure, but it mirrors real life pretty closely. Nothing lasts forever, buildings change, towns die out. Still a good idea to take some pictures or videos in either case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Technically 100% do, games that require the Internet require the Internet, which means by design you’re relying on someone else hosting servers which means it may not be available, 50, 100, or even more years into the future. That’s not the case with single-player/offline-available games.
As the graph breaks down, some games are patched by companies to allow them to function offline or to enable self-hosted servers. Mostly its fan efforts to reverse engineer the server code, though.
The point of the stop killing games campaign is to legislate by law that going forward, developers/publishers would have to account for a way to allow the player to host a server or patch the game to run offline when they become unprofitable and are shut down.
You know you bring up a really great point. We’ve finally hit post-scarcity in an industry (information) and look at what it has done to us. Are we really ready for this in other areas yet. Should we use this as a chance to figure out how to integrate such a creation into society such that the next time this happens it doesn’t kill us all.
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.
Right, and the way licenses work should be illegal. If I purchase something, I should be able to do whatever I want with it, for as long as I choose to. That’s what purchase means.
If I rent/subscribe to something, that only lasts for the duration of my contract.
Sure, I’m not entitled to get things the way I want, but am entitled to get things the way they were advertised. If I buy a game, I should be able to play it even if the publisher shops selling it. They have options on how to handle that, either by releasing the server code so I can self-host it, removing the server bits so I can play offline, or continuing to keep servers online for existing owners.
If I rent/subscribe to something, that only lasts for the duration of my contract.
Just to reinforce your point, if you rent/subscribe to something, the duration should be known at the time. The fact that they can pull the plug at any time without a prior warning is what makes it a scam.
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 areentitled to get what they want. They areentitled 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.
It is entitlement. When I signed up to play Fortnite BR I agreed to a limited license to play the game as they intended to run it. If Epic kills Fortnite do I have the right to force them to make a version of BR be playable offline? No, because that isn’t what we agreed to.
Nothing about this is predatory. You simply aren’t getting what you want and are throwing a tantrum over it
Everything about the “rent/subscription” model is predatory, but we weren’t even talking about the truly fucked up stuff, like deeply unethical microtransaction marketing to children ala Fortnite.
Amazing that you think its okay for children to sign contracts where they agree that any money they give to Epic is gone forever, and that any worthless digital assets they are manipulated into purchasing can be voided and deleted at any time without any recompense!
(Lol inb4 “it’s the parents job to monitor their kids at all times in case a predatory corporation sneaks capitalism and FOMO advertising into their apparently harmless child-friendly free-to-play game or app”)
But sure, keep on defending predatory corporations! Enjoy the taste of boots!
I’ll be over here advocating for stronger consumer business protections! Sorry, I mean, I’ll be throwing an entitled tantrum lol.
“ Amazing that you think its okay for children to sign contracts where they agree that any money they give to Epic is gone forever, and that any worthless digital assets they are manipulated into purchasing can be voided and deleted at any time without any recompense!”
At no point have I said anything that would lead to this conclusion.
For the record Fortnite is rated “T” for teens because of the microtransactions.
Your “inB4” is moronic. It IS parent’s job to do this. If they don’t have the energy then dont get them a system.
You as an adult are responsible for the agreements you make. It is childish to pretend otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
MS-DOS games are pretty much what GOG built their business on, they still sell quite well. 50’s music is still listened by many (over 57 million views on that one song alone), and often used in movies, though that’s a bit of an odd comparison, almost as if old things aren’t worth keeping around. I mean, people still listen to classical music that’s hundreds of years old at this point, read ancient stories, and look at art from artists long dead. I consider games to be an art form like any other, and worth preserving.
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I still miss GhostX.
Good.
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.
An MMO i played from 1999-2007 shut down in I think 2017. I still remember the landscapes and landmarks and it is really strange knowing the shared experiences in those places are just flat gone. Inscribed items with messages to other players: deleted.
I have emulated the game world but only fragments were saved by collective efforts in the community before shutdown. Regardless there’s simply no people or things to interact with so it feels even more soullessly dead and empty.
I still love Lord of the Rings Online. It still has enough people to feel alive, to the point where they even upgraded their servers recently, and still keeps that old school feel. You can even earn LOTRO points through hunting monsters and quests, so if you put the work in you don’t even need to buy anything.
Do I miss the days before MTX? Yeah, but I feel like they are fairly less greedy about it than other games. Fairly. There’s still the VIP subscription while double-dipping into MTX that rubs me the wrong way a bit, but they still actively try to listen to the players. I’ll be sad when its gone…
Its mostly much older generations that play, though, but that really cuts down on a lot of the toxicity. I’ve had so many polite conversations in world chat with programmers and sysadmins offering advice. One of the most helpful players I met was a 72 year old vietnam veteran. He helped me get started and gave me a ton of gear just for having a nice talk with him.
I love lotro. I played it for 10 years. From release, until mordor.
I was madly inlove with lotro. It was a beautiful game. the only MMO where you actually read lore and quest text and anything else, because of how immersive it was all… and the game was perfect (before mordor). Casual, relaxing, but challenging in all the right places.
and the community was just absolutely amazing. Kind, considerate, helpful, generous. Like you said, i think the average age of lotro players was over 40… Until there was there was some issue with WoW that caused a lot of WoW players to immigrate to lotro… Then chat got less friendly, and more obnoxious, and the community got less kind, and less helpful… cause all the kind helpful people got burned by the jackholes being jackholes… Still a pleasant community overall, but no where near what it was before that WoWpocalypse.
My love and faith in the game changed with Mordor, though… Mordor broke me, It was just so pointlessly difficulty spiked on even the landscape mobs were slaughtering raid-ready players, that most of my kin, myself included, ended up just quitting the game. A few people eventually got the gang back together again for southern mirkwood, but that mordor level of difficulty was still there. No one in the kin, except for the hunters and the champions, seemed able to even 1v1 the landscape mobs. that also reflected group content… no one wanted anything but healers and hunters. was the same with mordor, but even worse with southern mirkwood. Mobs were so dumbly overpowered that only the lotro character equivalent of tactical nukes were wanted in groups… I, sadly, was not a tactical nuke class.
It really breaks my heart. I loved that game. I made great real life friends in that game… I met my Ex in that game (though in retrospect that probably shouldnt be viewed as part of the happy memories lol), Spent so many evenings bullshitting in voice chat while we did instances and group content, or just ground out old content for deeds. Was such a magical fucking experience, that I’ll probably never experience again for the rest of my life. The pre-mordor game was absolute perfection. Especially with the revamps to some less ideal/polished game areas like Moria.
And killed, to me, because devs listened to a vocal minority that wanted moar harderer.
I’m sad now.
I absolutely love LOTRO, too. I understand what you mean. The endgame content is pretty advanced, but I had this conversation with someone on Reddit years ago.
It doesn’t have to be hard. There is so much content in LOTRO to last you years of playing new classes and enjoying the world. Throw out all of your max level up items, they’re going to ruin the game for you. Just go out adventuring. I’ve had a good time during anniversary helping people through old dungeons (I hate you, Saruman).
The endgame is hard, because half the community beats endgame and complains that there’s no content, and half the community just plays casually. They don’t really have the power to keep pushing out quantity in content, so they have to make ridiculously hard and rewarding content to make up for it. It’s really a lose-lose either way, and they chose to keep the community that has been faithful for years over trying to pull in new players.
It sucks, I agree, but I think I would have made the same choice. I still love playing and wandering around; leveling new classes, and you can now get new titles for playing new difficulty modes they made. You can change the world difficulty starting at level 10, I believe.
Respectfully, I have to disagree with some of what you said… I don’t mind end game being a challenge, or even difficult.
Because the end game has always been in instances and raids. I don’t mind raids being challenging. I dont mind 3/6mans being challenging. Cause they are content you can typically choose to do or not, you need a group to do them, and they have the tier system that lets you select how difficult you actually want it.
Thats a good, healthy system to introducing challenge to the system.
And that meshed very well with the otherwise relaxed/chill nature of lotro. Because before mordor, Turbine/SSG/Whatever they are now, did a fairly admirable job at balancing and spacing out the challenging aspects amongst the fun and relaxing stuff to keep playability and fun high, while keeping a sense of satisfaction by overcoming the challenging bits.
Landscape wasnt a cake walk, unless you were ridiculously overeveled, but it wasn’t a torture session either. Any class could get through their landscape quests with an acceptable amount of challenge.
But then Mordor came in, and you couldn’t solo landscape unless you were one of the chosen classes, with Hunter being the king of them, because their DPS was insane, and they were range, so they could power down anything without taking damage. A poorly equipped hunter was solo survivable, when a very well equipped not-hunter could barely survive, if survive at all.
Mordor landscape wasn’t fun, it wasn’t a challenge. it was just naked brutality for brutality sake. They listened to a vocal minority that hadn’t played the game for long, comparatively, and wanted to turn lotro into a souls-like difficulty game, at the expense of all the people who had made lotro their evening stable for a decade+. and they lost players because of it. It really changed lotro from a fun way to spend an evening, to a way to ruin your evening because you just want to do these handful of landscape quests without having to deal with generic orc 37 that’s as strong as a 3/6 man miniboss (slight hyperbole).
I dont know if they’ve re-balanced the areas since then, or introduced mechanics to take the edge off, or what. I hope they did. I hope they’ve brought the fun and play-ability back so new players don’t hit the same wall that destroyed a generation of players, but no matter what changes they may or may not have made… ultimately, I just cant see myself ever mustering desire to play lotro again… and that saddens me as much as the state of the game that made me quit to begin with.
I don’t want to even think of how many thousands of hours i poured into lotro over a decade of almost nightly play. Thats too terrifying a number to ever think about, lol.
Ohhhh, no no. The raids and dungeons are challenging and ridiculously hard. I get what you’re saying now. It hasn’t been like that since I started up again, which was right when Gundabad released. It’s very easy to solo, and now there’s an NPC that lets you change world difficulty if you want to opt for it, making it so that the hardcore players and the casual players both get what they want.
I hear you. I haven’t touched it in a while because I will literally lose months of my life to it. Its harder for me because its one of my gf’s favorite games and when she plays I can’t help but play.
Its a depressing perspective sure, but it mirrors real life pretty closely. Nothing lasts forever, buildings change, towns die out. Still a good idea to take some pictures or videos in either case.
I’m still upset about Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy & The Polar Night Liberator
There ought to be a law…
that’s why i dont buy digital games on nintendo. one day the service ends and it’s gone forever.
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.
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.
Their games are genuinely fun though, and they work offline
you can say that about a lot of games and their devs. tons of great indie games out there.
Can’t argue with that!
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.
They do put the full game on the cartridges, for example I can play TOTK on a new switch with just the cartridge without ever going online.
https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/these-nintendo-switch-2-titles-have-the-full-game-on-the-game-card/2900-6508/
Did you read this article? It literally says this:
The only games that will be fully available on the cartridge are the ones explicitly singled out. There are 10. How is that significant?
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.
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.
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.
V rising kind of does this but a single player game is just called a server it’s on your local machine though.
And I kind of hate that
It shouldn’t require a server that I can’t control for multiplayer either.
Only exception to this is if I can run the server myself. Even multiplayer games I feel somewhat cautious about now.
Me building mega castles on my one man modded Rust server.
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.
Nice. Did you make this?
Slapped it together real fast, yup.
First original content on lemmy
Nice.
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.
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!
deleted by creator
I can’t tell if this is satire or not.
Given the username I’d guess not. Good username btw
Depends on whether they have heard of Josh Strife Hayes.
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.
Can’t you use that money to see a therapist now?
Technically 100% do, games that require the Internet require the Internet, which means by design you’re relying on someone else hosting servers which means it may not be available, 50, 100, or even more years into the future. That’s not the case with single-player/offline-available games.
As the graph breaks down, some games are patched by companies to allow them to function offline or to enable self-hosted servers. Mostly its fan efforts to reverse engineer the server code, though.
The point of the stop killing games campaign is to legislate by law that going forward, developers/publishers would have to account for a way to allow the player to host a server or patch the game to run offline when they become unprofitable and are shut down.
My point was more that games that require the Internet itself, and not just LAN-capable servers, are games that are inevitably going to disappear.
It may seem like I’m splitting hairs but what I said is technically true.
I understand, but I’m not really sure why you’re pointing out the exact problem that this campaign is actively trying to solve.
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”.
You know you bring up a really great point. We’ve finally hit post-scarcity in an industry (information) and look at what it has done to us. Are we really ready for this in other areas yet. Should we use this as a chance to figure out how to integrate such a creation into society such that the next time this happens it doesn’t kill us all.
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.
Right, and the way licenses work should be illegal. If I purchase something, I should be able to do whatever I want with it, for as long as I choose to. That’s what purchase means.
If I rent/subscribe to something, that only lasts for the duration of my contract.
Sure, I’m not entitled to get things the way I want, but am entitled to get things the way they were advertised. If I buy a game, I should be able to play it even if the publisher shops selling it. They have options on how to handle that, either by releasing the server code so I can self-host it, removing the server bits so I can play offline, or continuing to keep servers online for existing owners.
Just to reinforce your point, if you rent/subscribe to something, the duration should be known at the time. The fact that they can pull the plug at any time without a prior warning is what makes it a scam.
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!
It is entitlement. When I signed up to play Fortnite BR I agreed to a limited license to play the game as they intended to run it. If Epic kills Fortnite do I have the right to force them to make a version of BR be playable offline? No, because that isn’t what we agreed to.
Nothing about this is predatory. You simply aren’t getting what you want and are throwing a tantrum over it
Well, that’s certainly an… Interesting take on someone saying things should be better…
Everything about the “rent/subscription” model is predatory, but we weren’t even talking about the truly fucked up stuff, like deeply unethical microtransaction marketing to children ala Fortnite.
Amazing that you think its okay for children to sign contracts where they agree that any money they give to Epic is gone forever, and that any worthless digital assets they are manipulated into purchasing can be voided and deleted at any time without any recompense!
(Lol inb4 “it’s the parents job to monitor their kids at all times in case a predatory corporation sneaks capitalism and FOMO advertising into their apparently harmless child-friendly free-to-play game or app”)
But sure, keep on defending predatory corporations! Enjoy the taste of boots!
I’ll be over here advocating for stronger consumer business protections! Sorry, I mean, I’ll be throwing an entitled tantrum lol.
“ Amazing that you think its okay for children to sign contracts where they agree that any money they give to Epic is gone forever, and that any worthless digital assets they are manipulated into purchasing can be voided and deleted at any time without any recompense!”
At no point have I said anything that would lead to this conclusion.
For the record Fortnite is rated “T” for teens because of the microtransactions.
Your “inB4” is moronic. It IS parent’s job to do this. If they don’t have the energy then dont get them a system.
You as an adult are responsible for the agreements you make. It is childish to pretend otherwise.
“You want to purchase something and use it the way you want to? How entitled can you get?”
Link to the games list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1at1k7qIo5dgPp6K1aCrYIyAgNOjY-IhF
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.
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.
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
It doesn’t sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:
https://www.carltonfields.com/insights/podcasts/lan-party-lawyers/youve-been-served-legal-effects-games-as-service
A few quick searches haven’t picked up US case law, if it’s out there.
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.
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.
Are people still playing MS-DOS games or listening to the 50s music. I bet there are a numbered few. But everything will die eventually
MS-DOS games are pretty much what GOG built their business on, they still sell quite well. 50’s music is still listened by many (over 57 million views on that one song alone), and often used in movies, though that’s a bit of an odd comparison, almost as if old things aren’t worth keeping around. I mean, people still listen to classical music that’s hundreds of years old at this point, read ancient stories, and look at art from artists long dead. I consider games to be an art form like any other, and worth preserving.
Being for the destruction of all art history is certainly the wildest take I’ve ever seen on this issue.