This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.
you will own nothing and you will be happy.
It was a free ‘game’ that was little more than a tutorial 🤷♂️
It’s not like it’s never happened to paid full games before.
*cries in Battleborn*
Don’t you fucking dare say that name. I have never in my life seen a game with so much promise be self fucked so hards by it’s own devs that it kills the game in its tracks.
NO ONE FUCKING ASKED FOR A BATTLE ROYALE - AND WE SURE AS SHIT DIDNT ASK FOR PAID BATTLE ROYALE SEPARATE FROM THE MAIN GAME.
…UGH.
EDIT: I WAS THINKING OF BATTLERITE BUT MY FRUSTRATION IS STILL VERY REAL.
Ever hear of SOCOM?
So why do they need to remove it?
Because Zuck’s dreams of a post-life in his metaverse are crumbling.
Because paying for the servers to keep the game online cost more money than what they make out of it.
What servers? It probably stores a few KB of data per player.
No it’s the great cleansing where… checks notes… billionaires crush the working classes by taking away their free virtual pets?
This is the natural progression of the games-as-a-service model. Any game that relies on online support of some kind just to function will eventually cease like this.
Is it stupid that a vr game about a pet relies on online support to function? Absolutely. But it is what it is. Buy more offline games.
That’s why for the game I develop, players can request a copy of their save file and we have a singleplayer mode you can download and host yourself.
It’s not the most convenient thing, but players use it, and it’s future-proof!
You are a god among men
drg is technically game as a service right? it works fully offline are relies on local save files and steam networking for lobbies
game that doubles as a service? beats me.
DRG is also a unicorn of a game
Game preservation is dying because of DRM. You want games you can still play in 10 years, pirate that sht and donate to those keeping up the good art of game cracking. It’s either that or buying remakes a decade later that are just thinly reskinned. I can live with sht like denuvo since newer games just remove it after a year and then I can buy it. Storefronts like uplay or egs that are dependent on a malignant profit only entity are at best mid-term rentals and at worst spyware you have to pay for the privilege to use.
Furthermore, if you don’t want to pirate: Buy your games on GoG. They are DRM free and you don’t need the launcher to play (GoG Galaxy is amazing though btw)
My proposal is for a mandated label on software and hardware to indicate that it will stop working when some online service goes offline.
You touch anything from Meta with a 10 foot pole, you deserve whatever comes your way.
Or we could make shitty behavior illegal so that people don’t have to vet the ethics of every company they interact with.
This really sucks when you have to explain this kind of thing to your kids…
That’s the horrible thing about online services. You never really own it, it can be taken away from you at any time. If you want to preserve something, you need physical and/or offline access.
I’ve had that thought many times. I wish companies would release the source of games they discontinue instead of letting them completely die out.
You don’t own things anymore, you just lease them
And if you can’t own anything by paying, is game piracy even theft anymore?
I believe the founder and first queen of Carthage said that if we don’t learn to circumvent that, we deserve nothing more than we get. She went on to claim that nothing we have is truly ours.
Is it just me or was that Phoenician quite a bit ahead of her time?
Archival is extremely important and one of the side effects of copyright schemes is that they limit its viability. The less access people have, the more likely some work becomes lost forever. I’ve seen it a few times already, with recent work, but in one or two hundred years we’re talking about libraries of art that could have been preserved but are just gone.
Closed source software, that’s actually distributed to people, has all kinds of problems beyond that too. Tons has been written about that, but from an artistic perspective, I think the biggest loss is that people can’t legally expand the original work. Giant franchises with a central cultural presence get walled off and usually just go through a huge creative decline, which is crazy because there’s millions of people preoccupied with the concepts from the franchise who are barred from using them to express themselves. With software in specific, if it’s open source you can modify it, fix it, expand it, maintain it, whatever - there’s all these great resources they could use, but we won’t let them.
Pirates keep many things alive. 🏴☠️🦜
It’s pretty insane. At first I thought damn, from now on our culture will be so thoroughly documented that future historians will struggle to parse it all, but now I can’t trust anything to last for 5 years and I can’t have copies of it, either.
Piracy shmiracy, some random dude’s homegrown server is not an archive, and anything that fails without electricity to power it is not a copy.
And this is why I have trust issues
Is this made in unity?
It’s meta lol. It’s the devil.
the problem is that we’ve allowed this to happen. all mobile games function this way, the “rug” can be pulled at any time. all that money you spent on gacha pulls, was it worth it?
the problem goes back innocuously to MMO subscriptions, i think. which had a valid reason for existing, but an MMO can be “rug pulled” at any time as well, thankfully most of the greats have stayed up (wow, ffxi, eq) but ONE DAY they will be gone forever, relegated to private servers only.
This is why I always look for cartridge-based Switch ports of games I play, so they’ll be mine long after the online play ceases, they can no longer be legally purchased and my current device reaches the end of its product life. It also helps that game cards last longer than optical discs
The updates are still annoying but yeah it’s better than nothing. Of course there are some releases with the complete games all patched but those are rare and usually special/limited editions.
“don’t worry, you can form a new 3-year attachment with Bogo 2 for just $29.99!”
Unless we sell less of it than the arbitrary sales number we used a bunch of estimated pseudo math on to ultimately guess. Because if we sell less than that number we pulled out of our rectums with a faulty Excel sheet, we’ll just shut the thing down immediately. Because, you know… fuck you.
