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".
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.
It's astonishing to me how even right here on Lemmy so many people still misunderstand what this is about with comments saying that piracy fixes it or that downloading the game installer solves the issue. The games where those things are options aren't what this effort is about, this is about games like Darkspore, Defiance, Tabula Rasa, and our prototypical example The Crew, where there is no one who can play them no matter where, how, or when, they acquired the game, it is impossible to play for anyone, the whole piece of art has been destroyed.
Honestly if we can't even communicate what the movement is about to those who aught to be our base it really does not bode well for gaining any kind of wider traction.
I think the issue is that, as with reddit, a lot of people are only reading the headline and commenting.
Also many young people are so used to games requiring online connection and being shut down, that they can't imagine a better way.
That does seem to be an influence, though oddly there are some modern wildly popular games, Minecraft being a prime example, that still allow you to self host your own server, so it shouldn't really be as foreign of a concept as it appears to be to some younger folk.
In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they'll never actually die, unless the server source code gets taken down and nobody archives a copy. I mean, WoW Classic only happened because a private server running vanilla got too big, despite Blizzard bullshit of "You think you want it, but you don't" and "We don't have the code to roll back".
Star Wars Galaxies, Phantasy Star Online, City of Heroes, Warhammer Age of Reckoning all still exist and can be played, despite being "dead", thanks to private/pirate servers.
That only works if the server code gets leaked or someone reverse engineers it. Both of those options shouldn't be relied on, especially for more complex or less popular games.
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
Isn't the law on this already settled?
A: It mostly is within the United States, but not in many other countries.
It doesn't sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:
Of course, case law has never really been settled on whether games are goods or services. Right, Steve?
Steve Blickensderfer: No. No, I haven't been able to figure this out one way or the other looking at the cases.
A few quick searches haven't picked up US case law, if it's out there.
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.
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.
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.
...Dead games, which means no one on Earth can currently play the game. It's not possible...
...At-risk games, which means these games are currently working, but they're designed in such a way that the second the publisher ends support, they will become dead games without some sort of intervention...
...Dev Preserved, which means the game would have died, but the publisher or developer implemented some sort of endof life plan, so now the game is safe...
...Fan Preserved, where the publisher did nothing or practically nothing to save the game, but fans managed to either hack it to remove dependencies or reverse engineer a server emulator so that the game was saved in spite of the publisher actions.
Out of curiosity what are the 16 dev preserved ones?
Why doesn't that graph show at risk games?
These are the total numbers and includes the at-risk games. Which may not be helpful to some, since the fate of those games is unknown.
Yeah, trusting that anything Internet connected keeps working is a pipedream these days unfortunately.
Hardware and software.
I don't even trust non-unlockable bootloaders. There's so much planned obsolescence everywhere
I boycott single player games that require online login/validation. Rockstar and Ubisoft are on my blacklist
Gotta save up for some hard drives to download and keep my GOG games, plus some ~~pirated~~ totally legally acquired titles
That's why the first thing I do when I buy a new game is to turn off the internet and boot the game. If it doesn't boot or work offline, I refund it. And I just don't buy games that have Denuvo.
There ought to be a law...
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.
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.
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