@psychicparrot42 they probably re-release them with microtransactions and whatnot. At least that's what happened to Bejewelled and some rally great Popcap games :(
@psychicparrot42 TELL this to ALL the people like "yeah streaming is ok" "yeah who needs physical copies ?" .. "yeah the server and its contents will ALWAYS be there" ... see ? SEE !!??
It's always been the downside of anything multiplayer - once the running costs outweigh the revenue, servers are obviously going to be switched off and that's just tough, but this shouldn't mean companies taking away games people have paid for.
It should just be game host etiquette that if you ever get to a point where servers need switching off, you open source them and let people spin up their own communities to keep playing at their own expense.
@psychicparrot42
Yes, people have been warning about this since Steam was introduced 20 years ago.
I had been avoiding Steam for years, until it wasn't feasible anymore (and started using it more when they released it for Linux).
I never used EA or Ubi launchers (or Epic, except for UE4/5), and never will.
I just hope Steam won't fuck us over as well.. but if all else fails, we can probably get a VPN and torrent games (that can't be bought DRM-free) ¯_(ツ)_/¯
@psychicparrot42
Though to be fair, for MMOs this problem has always existed, The Crew is not the first MMO game that factually becomes unplayable because the servers are switched off (or did it also have a SP mode?)
In a better world companies would have to release the MMO server source code when switching their own servers off
Yup if you have a movie,game, music, audiobook that relies on a service provider to allow you access it then you have never truly bought it. I am not a terribly big gamer but I don't pay for streaming for music and movies/tv. I try to source physical media if possible and put it on my NAS for local streaming.
@psychicparrot42@Doomed_Daniel
The only service I have that causes me concern is audible. I stopped my subscription many years ago but built up a large library over many years before I stopped playing. So audible have had no money from me for a long time but I still have access to my previous credit purchases. I expect at some point a TOS change to fuck me over.
@drZool@psychicparrot42 But what if, let's say, Steam would start doing it? Or requested by third parties to do it?
We never know. It is a wider discussion to have. Game preservation and all that.
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