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.

  • Seasoned_Greetings@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1383·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • emax_gomax@lemmy.worldEnglish
    756·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • sparr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    442·
    2 years ago

    My proposal is for a mandated label on software and hardware to indicate that it will stop working when some online service goes offline.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      24·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • JokeDeity@lemm.eeEnglish
    36·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • dx1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    341·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      2 years ago

      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?

  • forrest@lemmy.worldEnglish
    171·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      411·
      2 years ago

      Yup. They’re complaining about a Facebook game. No fucking shit that company will unceremoniously end support. Everyone who bought into Zuck’s vision deserves what they’re getting.

  • yokonzo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    2 years ago

    I’ll never miss a chance to shill Ross Scotts excellent video on games as a service and how wrong it is here

    My man has been personally leading the charge against this issue and has even looked into making this practice illegal