Seems like there’s going to be a point where people are noticing the games they spent money on don’t work as they should anymore because the servers get shut down.
How would you feel if most of the multiplayer games you spent money on suddenly stopped being multiplayer because the business decided it’s not worthwhile for them to keep the servers running?
That is. Because you stopped owning your games a while back. What you’re actually buying is a limited access license to the software.
This all started 15+ years ago.
I vaguely recall this transition with a Call of Duty game, when you could no longer host your own, for a game where that really wasn’t necessary, unlike MMORPG.
And today with the high bandwidth home connections, hardware capability, or even just using a VPS, you could still host with appropriate performance.
Meanwhile StarCraft, one of the most pervasive rts for its time and in the PC gaming sphere in general … let you have multiple people play multiplayer on a single disk. Offline. It’s kinda like it advertised itself and people went out to buy it… which influenced more people… who bought it… gasp.
Mindblowing.
And it still has a thriving competitive scene more than 25 years later.
In fact, ASL (the biggest SC tournament) is going on right now!
Legend has it the original Worms was similar. The DRM was a notepad readme that basically said “share me with your friends but buy a copy if you really like it please”
Isn’t the stop killing games movement bringing this to light?
This whole movement really highlights how hard it is to get the word out for me. Fediverse isn’t a huge place as it is, relative to other online spaces. But every time SKG related topics surfaces there are always people who have never heard about it and people talking about misconceptions that Ross has addressed many times.
Anyway for everyone else, especially if you’re in the EU, please check out https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
Unlikely to care, realistically. I play multiplayer games with friends; I cannot think of the last time I wanted to play Gears of War 2, or Forza Motorsport 3, or any number of other games I’ve played with friends in the past that I own copies of.
I get the sentiment behind this, and I do think there should be a backend set up for private lobbies through P2P connection for when the inevitable occurs. But on the scale of things I’m worried about daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, this doesn’t register at all.
Well yes. That’s why you buy other games.
