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.
you will own nothing and you will be happy.
It was a free 'game' that was little more than a tutorial 🤷♂️
It's not like it's never happened to paid full games before.
*cries in Battleborn*
Don't you fucking dare say that name. I have never in my life seen a game with so much promise be self fucked so hards by it's own devs that it kills the game in its tracks.
NO ONE FUCKING ASKED FOR A BATTLE ROYALE - AND WE SURE AS SHIT DIDNT ASK FOR PAID BATTLE ROYALE SEPARATE FROM THE MAIN GAME.
...UGH.
EDIT: I WAS THINKING OF BATTLERITE BUT MY FRUSTRATION IS STILL VERY REAL.
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.
That's why for the game I develop, players can request a copy of their save file and we have a singleplayer mode you can download and host yourself.
It's not the most convenient thing, but players use it, and it's future-proof!
You are a god among men
This is also the reason I'm all open source. Not just games, but seeing someone abandon a program hurts. Or just wanting to make a change on your own to suit your needs. I don't have any big fancy programs, but I at least put my code openly on github.com for that reason. Both my "big" ones are just me using another program and realizing I could make something that worked better for me. At like 100x the time investment, but programming is fun.
Looking at the retro computer scene should make anyone a diehard open source fanatic, it's god awful how much retro stuff relies on a single guy happening to find an old disc in their basement and upload it to the internet, and a lot of the time that never happened and so the software is just lost forever and the only way hardware can be used is by people writing their own software completely from scratch and sharing it with others.
And of course if they then don't make it open source that's extra fun.
oh god this reminds me of Japanese man who married Hatsune Miku in hologram form can no longer speak to his wife of four years.
"The doting husband has gained thousands of followers on Instagram by sharing insights into his life with Miku, but things took an unexpected turn during the pandemic when Gatebox announced it was discontinuing its service for Miku."
this is why I have trust issues with proprietary software
"Megacorp killed my cyberwife" Is a heck of an vigilante origin story
If that man harnesses the power of LLM like Chat GPT, he can continue talking with his wife
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.
My proposal is for a mandated label on software and hardware to indicate that it will stop working when some online service goes offline.
And then what? Corporations will just slap a disclaimer on their products informing you of said condition and that you need to agree, understand and accept these terms and conditions and call it a day.
Aye, but forcing them to put a clear "We support this until this date" label will make that a mandated part of their marketed.
That or, you know, force companies to release server software when they sunset support for their product. That would also be nice.
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.
This really sucks when you have to explain this kind of thing to your kids...
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.
You touch anything from Meta with a 10 foot pole, you deserve whatever comes your way.
It's not like this phenomena is limited to the Quest or Meta. It happens all the time across the whole industry.
Or we could make shitty behavior illegal so that people don't have to vet the ethics of every company they interact with.
Complete agree. Disgusting evil company. Fuck Facebook
You don't own things anymore, you just lease them
And if you can't own anything by paying, is game piracy even theft anymore?
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.
Pirates keep many things alive. 🏴☠️🦜
I bought a bunch of music on Google Play Music, forgot about it. Come back a year later and it's all deleted because they shut the service down.
Can any owner of this game tell me whether it is online only or not? Or what uses it has for an internet connection? Because back in mah dayTM© that'd be the kind of thing you'd download once and, even if the online service died, you'd still have a working program/game afterwards.
This is why I always look for cartridge-based Switch ports of games I play, so they’ll be mine long after the online play ceases, they can no longer be legally purchased and my current device reaches the end of its product life. It also helps that game cards last longer than optical discs
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.
Pretty big assumption that you own something digital you paid for. Let's be honest, you paid for a license not a product.
I concur Buyer should not gain rights to product, so they should not be allowed to profit from it, but they should be able to preserve it, unless the license that you actually buy had a time limitation, but that should be clearly stated when you buy it that you only buy access to it to (at least) X amount of time like you have with online subscriptions.
"don't worry, you can form a new 3-year attachment with Bogo 2 for just $29.99!"
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
In theory, Ross Scott is (or at least was) trying to get something done about this. https://youtu.be/tUAX0gnZ3Nw?si=acNlZLK8MRqKWwgh
Is this a Facebook game…?
It's developed by Facebook, but it's not one of those in-browser games you might be thinking of. "Meta Quest" is their VR platform. So, while the quality might be similar, you do need to buy rather expensive gear to play this particular game...
If people stopped renting games developers would start selling them again. Until then, the incentive is for them to keep pulling this nonsense.
There's a difference between a game having online elements, such as a MMO, and games that require a connection just so they can keep charging you. Even in the first case though, you should own the client, and ideally it either has a single player mode, or the developer releases the code for a basic server when they shut it down.
That's why I stated that it should be illegal to promise product while selling a undefined time limited license, there should be a clear minimum time stated when you "buy a subscription" for (single player?) games.
And this is why I only buy games that I can load on a PC and play without an internet connection.
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