The “Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state” petition just got a response.
The “Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state” petition just got a response.
The recent stopkillinggames campaign has been my first exposure to UK petitions.
Link to petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/659071
Link to campaign: stopkillinggames.com
Link to the campaigner’s video
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I don't think that providing never-ending service is likely practical.
Certainly not if the game doesn't have an ongoing service fee of some sort. World of Warcraft players pay a monthly fee, and so as long as they can keep the thing in the black, they can keep it going as long as they can cover costs. But outside of that sort of thing, unless a game provider who provides ongoing service can make money by extracting information from player computers and data-mining players or something like that -- not something that I'm really keen on encouraging -- there's inevitably a point in every online game's life where service is gonna end.
I could see maybe an argument for, at purchase time, clearly-designating games that have an online component and thus will stop working at some point, so that the consumer can decide what he wants. There are some genres that just don't work offline, but outside of those, it'd let a consumer more-readily choose offline games.
It was never to demand devs to support indefinitely. It's to allow the game to function in some capacity after devs stopped supporting them. It can be letting users host their own private/community servers, and offline mode, or something similar.
They can give the users the tools to host their own servers
I don’t think that providing never-ending service is likely practical.
That's...the entire point? To require them to make arrangements so that the game is still playable in some form even once they are no longer able to continue providing that service.
This might be requiring they patch out a server callback; automatically unlocking all digital-store-unlockable content; open-sourcing your server code so others can run their own servers; or some other methods.
I don’t think that providing never-ending service is likely practical.
A no longer supported but DRM-free offline game can likely still be played. You can find an old computer, or use emulation or virtual machines to run it.
But if the game uses DRM or online services it can become impossible to play once the company stops actively supporting it.