Here is to hoping something will come out of it. Planned obsolescence is illegal for so much else, but somehow gaas get away with it.
Sure, they shouldn’t need to actively support an eol game with servers and whatnot, that would be impossible in some circumstances. Is it too much to ask companies to have a plan to transition their games into a serverless state instead of letting yet another piece of culture die though? I don’t think so.
When you bought e.g. half-life, it would come with the ability to run a server.
If a game needs a server, that functionality should be added into the game, not kept separate. I mean it might be a separate executable, but it should be part of the game “bundle” because the server is part of the game.
If we could run our own servers, we would. Publishers know that. Most of their money relies on predatory practices, including instilling a “fear of missing out.” They know that artificial scarcity is profitable and they design games with that as a base.
They have gotten away with it bc corps have lobbied for DRM, etc and consistently met success. They just tie fears of piracy into this online only bs and get a pass.
Here’s the thing though…
I’ve bought now three single-player (with online features) games on console not realizing the servers had already been shut down for whatever reason within a year or two of launch. I can’t play them, and I really wanted to.
Sure they might not have made money off me this time around, but if they put out a game in the future and I’d been able to play these, I’d be more likely to try those and give them my money. Instead, because I wasted money on these year-old games that were already trashed, I just won’t touch anything from those studios ever again, since they clearly don’t believe in their games at all. It makes me look real long and hard into how “online” they are… if I need an internet connection to solo play? Immediately not interested, which is becoming much more limiting as that gets more common.
Meanwhile, if I ever bother setting up my ps2 with an Ethernet cable, I can play with other people who have the same setup with 20+ year old games (like champions of norrath, last I played that “online” was about 10 years ago, but it seems to spin up an on-demand server for whomever is available).
There’s tons of games that still have all of their DLC listed for ridiculous amounts 15 years after the game comes out, I guess I just don’t understand why they would scrap all that work when there’s other viable options that could potentially have future returns… instead they just close the door entirely.
Remember the good old day of Ragnarok Online private servers (an MMORPG from 2002).
Even though it’s not the official intended feature (I think the game source codes got stolen and leaked).
But it’s the way things should be.
have a plan to transition their games into a serverless state
Or a way for communities to operate their own servers.
I’d vote to force them to do one of three things:
- Open source the whole game.
- Release the server components in a way where anyone tech savvy could grab them and spin up a server the game client can actually connect to.
- Make the game offline only (obviously impossible for many games these days, but…)
It should be forced upon them. Want to sell a rug pull? Get ready to not own the rug pull.
