If your game requires a server for single player content, I ain't buying it.
I'm not paying full price and getting a rental.
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If your game requires a server for single player content, I ain't buying it.
I'm not paying full price and getting a rental.
Only exception to this is if I can run the server myself. Even multiplayer games I feel somewhat cautious about now.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is true. I've been grieving the loss of Isekai Demon Waifu, which shut down only a few days ago on the 19th of this month. I had been playing it over 3 years, and had unlocked most of the girls, become the #1 on my server, and had grown attached to seeing my harem girls every night when I play the game before bed. I missed the server shutdown notification and I was messed up the next day. It hit me hard.
I hope there is another harem game with succubi and monster girls. IDW had a lot of charm. The music, art style, aesthetic. Amazing monster girls. I'm going to miss seeing Ephinas, Fiadum, Hastia, Scardia, Palotti, Ymir, and all the others.
It doesn't seem fair that we can spend years of our life, hundreds or even thousands of dollars, make a game experience part of our lives, and then one day it just goes poof and it's all gone. Part of you vanishes in that moment. It's like a bandaid being ripped off a wound, or a light in your life going out. Because someone else decided it cost too much to keep a server running?
They should be required to transition the game into an offline mode!
Can't you use that money to see a therapist now?
They should be required to transition the game into an offline mode!
Seems to me like this would be good business sense too. Wouldn't people be more likely to buy their next online game if you felt there was a good chance you could keep playing it after a few years? Instead they're going to get a reputation for making products with a short shelf life.
I boycott single player games that require online login/validation. Rockstar and Ubisoft are on my blacklist
There ought to be a law...