- cross-posted to:
- accursedfarms@lemmy.ml
- stopkillinggames@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- accursedfarms@lemmy.ml
- stopkillinggames@lemm.ee
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Piracy is essentially a form of archivism. The digital age literally ended scarcity in digital media and these people were like “well that won’t do”.
For sone of these games piracy would solve nothing. How wouldI run an 8vs8 PvP mission in DCUO that players are required to do if there aren’t 16 players on the server? If Im hosting it offline that content is still dead.
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It also allows the game to revive itself. Those 40 players playing pirated WoW could introduce more people to the game. And at the very least, it allows it be run in the future if ever historians should need access.
I dont think you do know how licenses work when your complaint amounts to ” I want this the way I want it not the way I agreed to it”.
You either accept the game the way it us offered or you dont play the game. You are not entitled to get things the way you want them.
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It is entitlement. When I signed up to play Fortnite BR I agreed to a limited license to play the game as they intended to run it. If Epic kills Fortnite do I have the right to force them to make a version of BR be playable offline? No, because that isn’t what we agreed to.
Nothing about this is predatory. You simply aren’t getting what you want and are throwing a tantrum over it
How DARE you suggest things should be better for me, the consumer, instead of the way our corporate overlords feel is more profitable!
Well, that’s certainly an… Interesting take on someone saying things should be better…
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“ Amazing that you think its okay for children to sign contracts where they agree that any money they give to Epic is gone forever, and that any worthless digital assets they are manipulated into purchasing can be voided and deleted at any time without any recompense!”
At no point have I said anything that would lead to this conclusion.
For the record Fortnite is rated “T” for teens because of the microtransactions.
Your “inB4” is moronic. It IS parent’s job to do this. If they don’t have the energy then dont get them a system.
You as an adult are responsible for the agreements you make. It is childish to pretend otherwise.
You are not entitled to get things the way you want them.
“You want to purchase something and use it the way you want to? How entitled can you get?”
Right, and the way licenses work should be illegal. If I purchase something, I should be able to do whatever I want with it, for as long as I choose to. That’s what purchase means.
If I rent/subscribe to something, that only lasts for the duration of my contract.
Sure, I’m not entitled to get things the way I want, but am entitled to get things the way they were advertised. If I buy a game, I should be able to play it even if the publisher shops selling it. They have options on how to handle that, either by releasing the server code so I can self-host it, removing the server bits so I can play offline, or continuing to keep servers online for existing owners.
If I rent/subscribe to something, that only lasts for the duration of my contract.
Just to reinforce your point, if you rent/subscribe to something, the duration should be known at the time. The fact that they can pull the plug at any time without a prior warning is what makes it a scam.
Im honestly so sick of online games that should be offline. I just got a few switch games to pass time on my breaks, and half of them require internet access. One of them is literally a bubble shooter.
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.
Also many young people are so used to games requiring online connection and being shut down, that they can’t imagine a better way.
That does seem to be an influence, though oddly there are some modern wildly popular games, Minecraft being a prime example, that still allow you to self host your own server, so it shouldn’t really be as foreign of a concept as it appears to be to some younger folk.
Sure, but when the link is to a video, I don’t blame them.
Here’s a link to the Stop Killing Games campaign, of which the video is about.
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.
That only works if the server code gets leaked or someone reverse engineers it. Both of those options shouldn’t be relied on, especially for more complex or less popular games.
In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they’ll never actually die
That happened to Ragnarok Online. Iirc the early server code got leaked by hackers (it seems it’s still being developed on GitHub lol), so all throughout the game’s 20+ years lifetime it has had a flourishing private server scene with hundreds of servers still online, so I don’t think it will die in our lifetimes.
The thing is when you created your account you agreed to the fact that it isn’t your game. What you agreed to was a game that they own and control and you can participate in. You might not like the results when they close the game but you chose to start playing that game to begin with.
You’re damn right I don’t like it, I especially don’t like how it destroys art history, which is why I’m part of this campaign to make that practice illegal.
Yeah, but a contract that you cannot negotiate before signing isn’t really a contract is it? It is a gate keeper. A gun to the head. An “agree to this or else”. In the modern world, one can do essentially nothing without signing a EULA. Want to get a job without signing one? Good luck. Want to play a game? Not many of them. Want to shop online, look at art, communicate with friends and family. Many of the most integral parts of maintaining our mental health are being put behind abusive “contracts” that strip us of any rights we think we have. Community, leisure, socialization, entertainment, all of the primary avenues in the modern world have predominantly become privatized and every one of those comes at a pretty steep nonmonetary cost.
You can choose to accept their terms or not play the game.
You are not entitled to have everything on your terms.
Except… For a contract to be legal it must be agreed upon by both parties free of manipulation or coercion. Now, usually this is specified to be manipulation or coercion on the part of one of the parties, but what I argue is that in the modern era that is insufficient to encompass the growing complexity around the way society works and how it will continue moving forward.
Pulling the numbers out of my well educated ass, 40 years ago the average person would encounter EULA-like contracts a handful of times per year. Maybe for a mail order service, or a piece of software. Today we encounter them daily. The amount of information in them is intentionally made dense and overwhelming so the average person becomes numb very quickly and opts to click through on most of them without reading them. This enables all sorts of personal liberty and information abuses on the part of corporations.
40 years ago you did not have one to find a job, a lover, buy a car (still had a loan contract, but if you paid up front you had 0 contracts other than the bill of sale). You would not encounter them to work most jobs. You could go years without having to risk signing your rights over to a company and usually when you did you had negotiation power. This is not true today. You work for a company, they use Zoom, Slack, Google Workplace, a Virtual Timecard service, all of which have individual EULA that you as a private citizen, not an employer, must agree to and be bound by. Microsoft can put in their EULA that they are allowed to take a screenshot of your computer every 15 seconds and transmit it to their servers. This could be intercepted, or the servers could be hacked and have the entire database compromised and you have 0 say other than public outcry or to airgap your system, which then complains constantly that it cannot connect to the internet and becomes virtually unusable for about 80% of why you want to own it.
Being required by an employer to use software which requires that you as an individual sign a EULA is coercion. Having 0 recourse for alternatives in a marketplace which do not require signing a EULA is coercion. Having the terms which strip your rights irrevocably and transferrably buried and written in confusing ways is manipulation.
I should never have to worry that my copyright is being stripped from a piece of art I create just because I share it to a friend on some website.
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Yes, you did agree to these terms. It’s usually in the first few paragraphs. Try looking them up sometimes and look for words like “limited” and “conditional”
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Link to the games list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1at1k7qIo5dgPp6K1aCrYIyAgNOjY-IhF
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Link to the European Citizens’ Initiative: eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home stopkillinggames.com
Two more months to go and more than 50% left to reach 1 million signatures. It’s sad to see that with how many people game, this petition has so little reach. I guess we’ll have to wait till Fortnite is shut down, then suddenly many more will care that their childhood game is gone forever.
Unfortunately, I think it was just a lack of awareness that the petition in existed in certain countries where Ross just didn’t have enough reach, possibly due to language barriers. A big push from native speakers of those countries with large audiences, like streamers, could’ve pushed it over the edge.
I don’t know if I fully agree with the petition, but I do think that there are some real problems with the status quo.
I also think that either a legislature or courts need to provide legal criteria for the good or service division with games. I think that there probably need to be “good” games, "serviceʾ games, and possibly even games that have a component of both.
But I’m not in the EU or UK.
I also am kind of puzzled by this:
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
Isn’t the law on this already settled?
A: It mostly is within the United States, but not in many other countries.
It doesn’t sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:
Of course, case law has never really been settled on whether games are goods or services. Right, Steve?
Steve Blickensderfer: No. No, I haven’t been able to figure this out one way or the other looking at the cases.
A few quick searches haven’t picked up US case law, if it’s out there.
It doesn’t sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:
The creator of the Stop Killing Games campaign did a segment about the viability of fighting it in the US in a segment here: https://youtu.be/DAD5iMe0Xj4?t=1097
tl:dr, the motivated lawyer he talked with on it eventually found a court case that set a precedent that would be extremely difficult to fight in such a pro-corporate court system without extreme amounts of legal funds. This is why the Stop Killing Games campaign is focusing on implementing laws in the EU and other non-US countries.
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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.
A PS3 with Evilnat custom firmware is truly a thing of beauty. A great era for videogame creativity and experimentation, when F2P was just a twinkle in Tim Sweeney’s eye.
Out of the games I’ve been fortunate to work on, 1/7 require internet, and the 1 was my first industry job as QA. Everything else has been mobile, online required. 5/7 are no longer playable / removed from the internet.
It makes me sad because my kids will never play a bunch of things I made. I can’t revisit them nostalgically. If I had made something in the 90s, it would be preserved still.
I played the cards dealt to me to follow a dream and make a living, but I wish the industry wasn’t like this. The money has always been a role, but nowadays, it’s distorted so badly.
That’s the difference shareholders make.
…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.
Out of curiosity what are the 16 dev preserved ones?
Why doesn’t that graph show at risk games?
These are the total numbers and includes the at-risk games. Which may not be helpful to some, since the fate of those games is unknown.
Yeah, trusting that anything Internet connected keeps working is a pipedream these days unfortunately.
Hardware and software.
I don’t even trust non-unlockable bootloaders. There’s so much planned obsolescence everywhere
I boycott single player games that require online login/validation. Rockstar and Ubisoft are on my blacklist
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I can’t tell if this is satire or not.
Given the username I’d guess not. Good username btw
Depends on whether they have heard of Josh Strife Hayes.
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.
Can’t you use that money to see a therapist now?
You paid this money knowing you do not have the ability to run the game. Why does the developer have the obligation to change the user agreement you signed off on when you created your account? You chose to play a game that you cannot run yourself.
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Gotta save up for some hard drives to download and keep my GOG games, plus some
piratedtotally legally acquired titlesThat’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.
There ought to be a law…
An MMO i played from 1999-2007 shut down in I think 2017. I still remember the landscapes and landmarks and it is really strange knowing the shared experiences in those places are just flat gone. Inscribed items with messages to other players: deleted.
I have emulated the game world but only fragments were saved by collective efforts in the community before shutdown. Regardless there’s simply no people or things to interact with so it feels even more soullessly dead and empty.
I still love Lord of the Rings Online. It still has enough people to feel alive, to the point where they even upgraded their servers recently, and still keeps that old school feel. You can even earn LOTRO points through hunting monsters and quests, so if you put the work in you don’t even need to buy anything.
Do I miss the days before MTX? Yeah, but I feel like they are fairly less greedy about it than other games. Fairly. There’s still the VIP subscription while double-dipping into MTX that rubs me the wrong way a bit, but they still actively try to listen to the players. I’ll be sad when its gone…
Its mostly much older generations that play, though, but that really cuts down on a lot of the toxicity. I’ve had so many polite conversations in world chat with programmers and sysadmins offering advice. One of the most helpful players I met was a 72 year old vietnam veteran. He helped me get started and gave me a ton of gear just for having a nice talk with him.
I love lotro. I played it for 10 years. From release, until mordor.
I was madly inlove with lotro. It was a beautiful game. the only MMO where you actually read lore and quest text and anything else, because of how immersive it was all… and the game was perfect (before mordor). Casual, relaxing, but challenging in all the right places.
and the community was just absolutely amazing. Kind, considerate, helpful, generous. Like you said, i think the average age of lotro players was over 40… Until there was there was some issue with WoW that caused a lot of WoW players to immigrate to lotro… Then chat got less friendly, and more obnoxious, and the community got less kind, and less helpful… cause all the kind helpful people got burned by the jackholes being jackholes… Still a pleasant community overall, but no where near what it was before that WoWpocalypse.
My love and faith in the game changed with Mordor, though… Mordor broke me, It was just so pointlessly difficulty spiked on even the landscape mobs were slaughtering raid-ready players, that most of my kin, myself included, ended up just quitting the game. A few people eventually got the gang back together again for southern mirkwood, but that mordor level of difficulty was still there. No one in the kin, except for the hunters and the champions, seemed able to even 1v1 the landscape mobs. that also reflected group content… no one wanted anything but healers and hunters. was the same with mordor, but even worse with southern mirkwood. Mobs were so dumbly overpowered that only the lotro character equivalent of tactical nukes were wanted in groups… I, sadly, was not a tactical nuke class.
It really breaks my heart. I loved that game. I made great real life friends in that game… I met my Ex in that game (though in retrospect that probably shouldnt be viewed as part of the happy memories lol), Spent so many evenings bullshitting in voice chat while we did instances and group content, or just ground out old content for deeds. Was such a magical fucking experience, that I’ll probably never experience again for the rest of my life. The pre-mordor game was absolute perfection. Especially with the revamps to some less ideal/polished game areas like Moria.
And killed, to me, because devs listened to a vocal minority that wanted moar harderer.
I’m sad now.
I absolutely love LOTRO, too. I understand what you mean. The endgame content is pretty advanced, but I had this conversation with someone on Reddit years ago.
It doesn’t have to be hard. There is so much content in LOTRO to last you years of playing new classes and enjoying the world. Throw out all of your max level up items, they’re going to ruin the game for you. Just go out adventuring. I’ve had a good time during anniversary helping people through old dungeons (I hate you, Saruman).
The endgame is hard, because half the community beats endgame and complains that there’s no content, and half the community just plays casually. They don’t really have the power to keep pushing out quantity in content, so they have to make ridiculously hard and rewarding content to make up for it. It’s really a lose-lose either way, and they chose to keep the community that has been faithful for years over trying to pull in new players.
It sucks, I agree, but I think I would have made the same choice. I still love playing and wandering around; leveling new classes, and you can now get new titles for playing new difficulty modes they made. You can change the world difficulty starting at level 10, I believe.
Respectfully, I have to disagree with some of what you said… I don’t mind end game being a challenge, or even difficult.
Because the end game has always been in instances and raids. I don’t mind raids being challenging. I dont mind 3/6mans being challenging. Cause they are content you can typically choose to do or not, you need a group to do them, and they have the tier system that lets you select how difficult you actually want it.
Thats a good, healthy system to introducing challenge to the system.
And that meshed very well with the otherwise relaxed/chill nature of lotro. Because before mordor, Turbine/SSG/Whatever they are now, did a fairly admirable job at balancing and spacing out the challenging aspects amongst the fun and relaxing stuff to keep playability and fun high, while keeping a sense of satisfaction by overcoming the challenging bits.
Landscape wasnt a cake walk, unless you were ridiculously overeveled, but it wasn’t a torture session either. Any class could get through their landscape quests with an acceptable amount of challenge.
But then Mordor came in, and you couldn’t solo landscape unless you were one of the chosen classes, with Hunter being the king of them, because their DPS was insane, and they were range, so they could power down anything without taking damage. A poorly equipped hunter was solo survivable, when a very well equipped not-hunter could barely survive, if survive at all.
Mordor landscape wasn’t fun, it wasn’t a challenge. it was just naked brutality for brutality sake. They listened to a vocal minority that hadn’t played the game for long, comparatively, and wanted to turn lotro into a souls-like difficulty game, at the expense of all the people who had made lotro their evening stable for a decade+. and they lost players because of it. It really changed lotro from a fun way to spend an evening, to a way to ruin your evening because you just want to do these handful of landscape quests without having to deal with generic orc 37 that’s as strong as a 3/6 man miniboss (slight hyperbole).
I dont know if they’ve re-balanced the areas since then, or introduced mechanics to take the edge off, or what. I hope they did. I hope they’ve brought the fun and play-ability back so new players don’t hit the same wall that destroyed a generation of players, but no matter what changes they may or may not have made… ultimately, I just cant see myself ever mustering desire to play lotro again… and that saddens me as much as the state of the game that made me quit to begin with.
I don’t want to even think of how many thousands of hours i poured into lotro over a decade of almost nightly play. Thats too terrifying a number to ever think about, lol.
Ohhhh, no no. The raids and dungeons are challenging and ridiculously hard. I get what you’re saying now. It hasn’t been like that since I started up again, which was right when Gundabad released. It’s very easy to solo, and now there’s an NPC that lets you change world difficulty if you want to opt for it, making it so that the hardcore players and the casual players both get what they want.
I hear you. I haven’t touched it in a while because I will literally lose months of my life to it. Its harder for me because its one of my gf’s favorite games and when she plays I can’t help but play.
Technically 100% do, games that require the Internet require the Internet, which means by design you’re relying on someone else hosting servers which means it may not be available, 50, 100, or even more years into the future. That’s not the case with single-player/offline-available games.
As the graph breaks down, some games are patched by companies to allow them to function offline or to enable self-hosted servers. Mostly its fan efforts to reverse engineer the server code, though.
The point of the stop killing games campaign is to legislate by law that going forward, developers/publishers would have to account for a way to allow the player to host a server or patch the game to run offline when they become unprofitable and are shut down.
My point was more that games that require the Internet itself, and not just LAN-capable servers, are games that are inevitably going to disappear.
It may seem like I’m splitting hairs but what I said is technically true.
I understand, but I’m not really sure why you’re pointing out the exact problem that this campaign is actively trying to solve.
