+1. Often no reason to not push a open server option when they shutdown when they drop a game they sold. I am certain that publishers will just try to release them for free though and charge a subscription. May not be successful though.
Which is also fine. Then you haven’t bought anything that they break after the fact. They just cancel all subscriptions.
Thats not a business model we want to encourage.
Games should be buy once, play forever.
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No, the point of the Stop Killing Games initiative is to make games buy once, be playable forever somehow. If a game releases that is dependent on server infrastructure, the studio should have an end of life plan. That could look like many things, including releasing the tools necessary for anyone else to spin up a server.
Yeah, but that doesn’t actually include games like, say, World of Warcraft. You can only buy monthly subscription. You are told it will run out in a month and you will need to pay again to play. It’s not the greatest model, but it’s not the same things as games where you pay once, without being told the game is going to shut down or when, then it suddenly becomes unplayable at a random time when the publisher decides to kill it.
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How do your two sentences not contradict each other? What do you think end of life plan means? Stop Killing Games explicitly wants games to be playable forever.
No, all games should release server binaries (and the game for free if it’s a subscription model) after they close down. Same for free-to-play or whatever, we should have the right to archive games.
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Can you even play Minecraft locally if Microsoft shuts down their authentication servers nowadays ?
Yes you just don’t have a skin in game, that already happens if you try to play without an internet connection
Yes
Yeah that’s not how online games work though. Servers cost money, probably way more than you would expect, which is why online games used to use monthly subscriptions until people decided they didn’t like that so they moved to free-to-play with micro transactions instead. Guild Wars 2 is a good example of how an MMO can be run without needing a monthly sub by making everyone by each individual expansion, in the beginning you even had to buy the content for each story patch but the newer patch content is free with the expansion afaik. Online games don’t have to be predatory with their pricing but they do need to make a lot of money to keep the lights on.
But those studios could still provide tools necessary to keep the games playable after they no longer want to support it.
No one is asking for laws that force studios to foot the bill for indefinite support. But games don’t have to built in such a way that access can be entirely removed at the whim of a dev or publisher.
Lots of MMOs have private servers already. It’s not a revolutionary ask.
Yeah nah I support private servers
I think the point is more that when they decide they don’t want to run the servers anymore they should have to release the server code or in some other way allow the server to be run locally so that the game isn’t useless.
Also, until about 15 years ago, it was completely expected that you would buy a software once and they would still run their servers. That’s why windows used to cost like $350 in mid 2000s dollars, you could still reasonably expect to get online updates for it years later.
Yeah but do you think people will pay $350 up front for a video game?
People already pay that much just as a subscription. Given that that $350 came with like 10 years of support; Yes I honestly think that people would pay a couple hundred dollars for a game like RuneScape or something that came with a 10 year guarantee.
It’s not up to me to pay extra for servers, they should take the costs of them into account when deciding to make an online game.
Games like World of Warcraft make you pay for DLC and a subscription, which is ridiculous. OSRS just asks for a monthly subscription, is that a model I want to see expanded? Absolutely fucking not. On topic though, games with that model should still have to release the entire game for free after they close the official servers.
So do you think people would happily pay possibly hundreds of dollars upfront to play an MMO to “account for server costs”? Players have to pay extra no matter what, if the customer isn’t paying for the server costs who is? You also have to keep in mind that WoW expansions are massive compared to most OSRS updates and are released on a fairly short schedule, that kind of dev cycle takes a lot of money to maintain.
I do hope we get dedicated server software be normal again. I kinda want to play Overwatch 1 again. But I can’t. No server software and the game client was converted to overwatch 2.
I should be able to start overwatch 1, spin up a server and play with my friends right now. It was stolen from me.
Ross is a legend. That is all.
Open sourcing the engines should suffice.
I actively avoid purchasing games that don’t allow client hosting. And I generally try to avoid games that matchmake. I’m tired of shitty matchmaking. I’m tired of corporate hosted lobbies. I’m tired of getting kicked out after each match and having to matchmake with an entirely different group of players.
Give me dedicated client hosted servers. Let us form relationships with other players by playing in the same servers on a regular basis. Gaming is more fun that way.
I want to play FFRK and Everquest Next again.
