Quokk.auStatement on Stop Killing Games - VIDEOGAMES EUROPE
www.videogameseurope.eu/news/statement-on-stop-…
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RmDebArc_5Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable.
Ah, so by that logic Linus shouldn’t have released Linux as he is liable for all the shit people do with it because it’s apparently impossible to limit liability in the license of software, understood
Despite the fact that limiting liability is exactly what the EULA does. You don't get to have it both ways, corpo scum!
AmbiguousPropsBS. There are plenty of community hosted servers of games that operate with no issues. This has corp written all over it.
They pretty much repeat everythibg Ross said the initiative is NOT set out to do. Just like that brat PirateSoftware... Mallicious from the get go.
We just want to know what the end of life plan is up front. If we know it will be gone completely at some future point, we can use that information in deciding whether to purchase it in the first place.
Why is this so hard to understand?
That may be what you want but that's not what stop killing games is about. You can't ask for the life plan of some software because companies will simply say that they plan to keep it up forever and then later say "we can't keep it up anymore! Too expensive! We go bankrupt uwu"
You can't demand either from them that they upkeep a game fo as long as players exist.
The initiative is about making companies guarantee that if (when?) the games EOL arrives, then they release whatever resources are needed for players to continue using what they have paid for.
If you are looking at it that way, you should not buy any game with an online component. Every single one of those will be gone at some point.
I know you are asking the "when" but that can be difficult to assess for a company that is built on pure profit.
Which is why the initiative is more about being able to make your own servers for these games, not about forcing companies to keep their servers alive indefinitely.
If you are looking at it that way, you should not buy any game with an online component.
Way ahead of you. I generally avoid games that make me rely on other people for my fun anyway.
That said, hypothetically, I still might 'buy' (i.e. lease) a game even if I know that it'll be shut down eventually. It depends on the game. I even bought into the early access for Assetto Corsa Evo, although I am slightly uncomfortable that I don't know what the EOL plan is for that. At least it has an offline mode built in.
xthexderthe industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes
They absolutely aren't. Fair notice would be telling them how long it will last before you take their money.
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Essence_of_MehHere are the board members of this organisation in case someone is curious about their relevancy/neutrality on the matter:
- Hester Woodliffe – Chair (Warner Bros. Games*)
- Canon Pence (*Epic Games*)
- Kerry Hopkins (*Electronic Arts*)
- Ian Mattingly (*Activision*)
- Klemens Kundratitz (*Embracer*)
- Qumar Jamil (*Microsoft*)
- Clemens Mayer-Wegelin (*Nintendo of Europe*)
- Cinnamon Rogers (*Sony Interactive Entertainment*)
- Matt Spencer (*Take 2*)
- Alain Corre (*Ubisoft*)
- Alberto Gonzalez-Lorca (*Bandai Namco Entertainment*)
- Karine Parker (*Square Enix*)
- Mark Maslowicz (*Level Infinite*)
- Felix Falk (*game*)
- Nicolas Vignolles (*SELL*)
- David Verbruggen (*VGFB*)
- Nick Poole (*UKIE)
You know, the people who "ensured that the voice of a responsible games ecosystem is heard and understood" (direct quote from their website).
if gabe could come out with a statement that if steam had to shut down for some reason he'd try to make sure people get to keep playing their games they have downloaded he'd probly cause these guys to have an aneurysm, but I doubt even gabe would go that far
He did say something similar years ago if I recall correctly but we never got any details and it was so long ago it's hard to guess whether that's still the plan. Reassurance or update on that wouldn't be unwelcome, that's for sure.
It was a long time ago, but I thought I heard Steam would remove their DRM and the games would not require authentication.
Though I doubt you would be able to redownload anything if their servers shut down though.
Either way it's pure speculation considering something truly massive would have to happen for Steam to even get to this point.
You can (could?) reach out to Steam Support, and this is part of the email they reply with:
"In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network, measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games."
Not sure if they ever expounded upon those details though.
My question is, what is this group as an entity, and why does their opinion matter? Are they an ngo-style advocacy group, or an actual governing body of some kind?
It's a group representing the biggest publishers in the industry, used as a front to pretend they're able to self-regulate when it comes to consumer laws vs business wants. So no, not a governing body but more of a cartel or lobbying group, I guess? One with A LOT of money on the line and enough lobbying power to push against things like the Stop Killing Games campaign the moment they feel threatened.
Okay, so more World Economic Forum, less Electronic Frontier Foundation?
Sounds like we need more EFF's of video games then.
Yeah, that tracks - it's a business organisation first and foremost. And yeah, we definitely do.
ampersandrew"Our Board":
Epic Games, Take Two, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Bandai Namco, etc.
Aielman15“many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only”
So change your design? The corporate mind cannot comprehend this.
CosmicTurtle0"many titles are designed from the ground-up to be rent seeking"
Or just let someone else host a fucking server and let the game get pointed to that one or any other they want. They could even sell the server software and make money on that. I'd love to host my own servers of some old online only games where I could play with just my friends and family.
paraphrandWhy could you turn a battle royal game into a local only split screen game for 2-4 people?
Give players a copy of the server so they can host their own, or patch the game to allow direct connections like games used to have in the 90s and 00s?
That sounds like an online only title. I thought we were going to “change the design.”
What do you mean?
Changing the design happens during the pre-production. This will not effect any games retroactively. As unfortunate as it is, until the EU parliament decides on a law or regulation all games destined to die will die.
Any games that are grandfathered in, would be done so by the good will of the corporations if they do wish to.
I mean, taking a 100 person battle royal and changing it so dramatically would be quite odd to do.
I picked an extreme example for discussion reasons.
It's possible to host your own Arma server that can handle 100 players. Ironically Arma has a Battle Royale mode. It's not rocket science.
Seems like your reading comprehension is lacking, so I'm going to encourage you to reread the entire exchange up to this point. If you can't figure it out, you're not someone worth discussing with.
I tried to pick the most obvious example of an online only title.
What’s the plan with a 100 player battle royal game?
Edit: the guy I replied to chose to quote someone saying a game is *online only*, and their suggestion was to *change that*.
And then ya’ll come in with replies about keeping it online only, and they have 55 upvotes as of this edit.
As long as people can host a server instance, does it matter?
Hypothetically, even if it costs 1000$ per hour in AWS fees to get the required hardware to run that, at least you have the option to, alternatively have a peer to peer option to play smaller version on a LAN with a max of however many players your own network can support, there could be many implementations, which at the end of the day would still allow you to play the game when the official servers (authentication or room hosts) are shuttered and inaccessible
The main point of SKG is that currently, we, as customers, are not even getting the short end of the stick, we are getting no stick, despite having paid for it.
And ultimately, at the end of the day, not our problem to try to figure this out, the point is we’re unhappy with the current situation and want things to change.
Also note that none of this is retroactive, will only apply to games released in the future, so having an end of life plan as a requirement from the get-go is pretty simple to work on when nothing was done yet.
That’s not “changing that” it’s keeping it online only.
Enabling the ability for purchasers to specify an arbitrary server to connect to would require a design change compared to how most games are recently. That feature used to be standard in the early years of online gaming.
We had online-only multiplayer games in the early 2000s with self-hosted servers supporting over 60 players per map. It's absolutely possible to do better with today's tech.
ZagorathThere are, it may surprise you to learn, different types of game that have online connectivity for different reasons. And the appropriate EOL response may differ across those games.
"Live-service" games where the main gameplay is singleplayer but an online connection is required so they can enforce achievements and upgrades (...and "anti-piracy" bs) may be best served by simply removing the online component so it can all be done locally.
Online competitive games can be switched to a direct connection mode.
MMOs and other games with large numbers of users and a persistent online server can be run on fan-operated servers, so long as (a) the server binary is made available, and (b) the client is modified to allow changing settings to choose a server to connect to (it could be something as simple as a command-line flag with no UI if the devs are being really cheap).
The initiative's issue isn't with them being online-only (though personally people hate it). The initiative aims for games to have the ability to have a reasonable state of playability past the end of life.
This is for all kinds of games - single-player, multiple player, live service, only only. The point is to keep what you paid for.
I can find a community for a fighting game from 2012 to get together every Thursday night for a 30-person tournament via Discord. 100 people in a battle royale could work much the same.
That fighting game is not online only, I bet.
I replied to someone saying that an online only game should change their design.
It's not online only, but this Thursday night get-together is online-only.
Hosting your own server and playing multiplayer games over LAN is playing offline. Is that what you're asking?
You can host the server on the same machine the game is running on, it's not uncommon during development especially the early stages.
What "online only" means is the need to authenticate to a proprietary server. After logging in, you are then (potentially) directed to a random server to play on.
If you are not online, you cannot authenticate and therefor not be directed to a server. This means you cannot play the game. When the authentication server and infrastructure behind the game is taken offline, the game becomes unplayable, because it is online only.
If a final patch were to be made where either a private authentication server would be made available for you to self-host, or authenation to be completely removed, you could play the game either offline on your device locally or LAN, or online by anyone who cares enough to host a server with the game logic. It would no longer be "online only" since you would have a choice. You can choose to play offline, or choose to play online.
If a game actually needs servers beyond the authentication part, then those should be made available too, so that anyone, again, can play locally or online.
It's logical that if game servers are made available, a game can never be "online only" again, because you could host the server on your pc and connect to localhost.
Your whole argumentation about "online only" game design falls completely flat. You are mixing concepts that have nothing to do with one another.
A game can be a battle royale by design, gameplay wise, and have the ability to host your own servers by design, technical architecture wise.
Quake Live used to be online only. You could not host your own servers. They released for steam and made it possible to host your own servers. The old authentication system was taken down, logins are no longer required, and now you just launch the game and pick a server in a built in server browser. It should be the standard and Quake Live should serve as an example of how it should be done.
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audaxdreikAbsolute trash statement, I really hope this bites them.
They're just repeating a lot of the same misinformation that Pirate Software had been saying, the exact things that had riled the gaming community and caused this latest wave of action. We're already primed to discount the points they're trying to make and it shows exactly how disingenuous they're being.
Positively, I hope this reflects some true fear on their end.
Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
As has been stated over and over and over again, private servers used to be an option until the industry decided they weren't any more. If the result of this is that it forces the industry to not make shitty, exploitative games, that's still a win for the consumers. I would rather have no game at all than something that psychologically tries to exploit my FOMO and drains my wallet.
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Tattorack... as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist...
There are third party options for this.
... and would leave rights holders liable.
Liable for what? A service everyone knows they're no longer providing? Are car manufacturers still liable for 50 year old rusty cars people still drive? Can Apple today be held liable for a software vulnerability in the Lisa or the Mac II?
In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
Then don't design games that way. Don't make games like these. This is good news, actually.
It's crazy how they act like no one else could run a server for a live service game.
We used to fucking buy and rent servers to game on our own private servers.
Its wild how this disappeared and all server structure just got consolidated into shit like AWS and Azure.
black0utMinecraft, the game that sold the most copies in history, has a huge infrastructure of community-hosted servers, some with tens of thousands of players playing at the same time. The community has created different flavors of the server software, optimized it, added mod support and even reprogrammed parts of it.
At this point, it's hard for me to believe how someone could say a community can't run game servers with a straight face.
The whole "ITS A LIVE SERVICE IT CANT JUST BECOME SINGLE PLAYER" argument fundamentally misses every single easy point about community hosted servers.
It's the most prevalent, and also most stupid argument I keep seeing pop up.
I agree, the liability for user content in community hosted games is just pure bullshit excuses.
online-only is not bad, some mechanics just work like that. that's totally fine. Just release the server code when you don't want to host any more.
I know. I like online content as well. Some of the games I spent the most hours in (Warframe, Helldivers 2) are these kinds of games. But if a corpo lobbying group is forcing the choice between "Enshittified always online" or "never any online content ever anymore" I'll choose the latter.
many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
I don't know who are these people. And they have achieved in record time that I never want to really heard them anymore.
KsinPrivate servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable
Straight fucking lie, the ones liable are the uploader and the host, which after official support ends is no longer the rights holders.
protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist
Nanny State BS. If someone runs a private server, it's their responsibility to moderate it.
and would leave rights holders liable.
No it wouldn't.
In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only
Unreal Tournament games are online or multiplayer only games. Even though Epic shut down the master servers, you can modify the .ini file to redirect to a community server. "Online-only" translates to predatory monetization models.
No
No.
NO!
All of this is bullshit. Its not how any of this will work. Its all misinterpreted on purpose and then used as propaganda against the inititive because companies ARE afraid of it. They know this has the power to stop their predatory business practices. Moderation is the hosters responsibility so if anything, private servers would make it cheaper for companies to make games. This is also NOT RETROACTIVE as any other such regulation. Companies will only have to comply with future games. Having to remove proprietary network components from the server so they can release it at end of life IS A GOOD THING. It also makes development MORE ACCESSIBLE for small developers as everyone will have to use more open infrastrucuture. And at last this only affects the end of life of games which means it DOES NOT touch live service games DURING their life and only changes their last stage in their life cycle. For fucks sake this is getting annoying but i take this as a good thing because these stupid multi-national corpos are finally feeling the pressure.
Blackmistprotections we put in place to secure players’ data
The player data that we are required to agree to share with 1643 trusted data partners in order to connect to your service? That player data?
Go fuck yourself, you ghouls.
People were upset when PirateSoftware was spreading disinformation about SKG, well get ready for incoming weapons-grade corporate Disinformation.
Luckily it's no longer in the hands of the public.
even though there are enough signatures now, they still need more to be sure. Some percentage of the signatures will be invalid(people unable to spell their own names and fakes for example) so there has to be big enough safetymargin. Ross made video about it too.
So until the time runs out, everyone should make sure the safetymargin is as big as possible.
I 100% guarantee the people who wrote that statement don't know or care how much effort it would take to build the infrastructure to run their server-side components.
I'm fairly confident that any AAA production uses Infrastructure As Code to spin up infrastructure in their dev and qa environments, so it's literally just a matter of handing over the Terraform or BICEP and some binaries for any custom code they need to use. I also highly, HIGHLY doubt that the vast majority of game servers are hosted on-prem. They're most likely either using Azure or AWS.
What they're not saying is that THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO PLAY OLD GAMES. They make nothing from it and they probably look at those people as leeches not contributing to their bottom line. Unless the government forces them, there is literally zero incentive; in fact a financial disservice for them to support legacy live service games in an offline manner
The best case scenario for them after they kill a game is for you to forget it existed and buy the next one.... Oh and engaging with the microtransaction ecosystem.
Sonotsugipaalol. Games like The Crew aren’t super hard to be turned into a single player game. Nobody is asking them to add a 20 hour single player campaign with a fleshed out storyline. Just add bots and open up the game to be driven around in without an online connection.
Just release the server code. nothing new has to be created.
The industries claim of being liable for user content in this scenario is just bull
Don’t even need to release the code. Just the server binary of the game.
This is short sighted. Architectures can and will change in the future. I'm running game servers on my aarch64 devices, if I wasn't able to compile, and sometimes even edit, the code I wouldn't have been able to run these servers. Emulation isn't always ideal, janky or even non existent.
Sure, but the point is to be realistic and not put undue weight on the developers, right? Binaries can generally be much more permissive than source code when proprietary dependencies are involved, and easier to release "clean" than source code.
Yes, of course and it's a lot better than what we have at this point, it's a great first step. I still remember the days of Id Software releasing their game (logic) under the GPL.
x00zPrivate servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable.
Incorrect. Only in a capitalist hellhole like America. In the rest of the world this would never be a problem. Just release the server code under MIT and let the community fix it. Also make sure you can manually setup a masterserver in the game itself, or implement direct connect functionality.
many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
Same answer as before. Release the online part under the MIT license. Not your problem anymore at that point. You can still require an original game license for the game itself. We're only talking about the server software here.
We welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policy makers and those who have led the European Citizens Initiative in the coming months.
We, the people, have been discussing this for at least a decade now. Get over it and stop trying you capitalist pigs.
zecgPrivate servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable.
Just make people sign one of those "I understand there's no guarantees this'll work or won't rape me" when they download the private server software, you fucking corporate snakes.
Captain AggravatedSo...here's the thing, folks: What you're REALLY going to have to do is stop buying live service video games.
If I understand this, it is a petition to get the EU government to look into maybe thinking about making some laws to...do something about live service games becoming unplayable when the servers shut down. Okay, here's how that's going to go: "We looked into it and decided not to do anything."
Has anyone tried...not buying the damn games in the first place? If you pay for these games knowing that the soulless reptilian cloacal slits that run the AAA industry can just shut down servers whenever they want, YOU are the problem.
You are basically saying that consumer protection is useless, as consumers should protect themselves.
That would be true if all consumers would have the time and understanding to be perfectly informed all the time, which is not realistic.
If the population at large is too stupid to make healthy video game purchasing decisions, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for protections to come from the representatives they elected.
I can see a stack of ways that this isn't going to work:
- The government looks at the petition and says "No we're not going to consider that."
- The government says "We've considered that and decided to do nothing."
- The government pulls an EU and the solution they come up with is to make every video game published everywhere in the world force the user to agree to the EULA every time the game launches, prompting a slew of "EULA auto-accept" mods to work around the annoying thing you now have to constantly click.
- The government puts in a law that's written decently. The industry, particularly those parts based outside the EU such as Japan and North America, ignore it, and shut down servers when they damn well please.
But let's indulge in the fantasy that democracy works for a minute and Stop Killing Games becomes a law that works perfectly as intended. The publishers will find some other way to be shifty greedy fuckpukes. Case in point: Live service games just shutting down their servers whenever they want is 100% legal right now. The government currently is not protecting consumers. It never truly will. The shadiness of business will always outrun government protection, 100% of the time.
I still maintain, if you continue to pay for live service games, you're the problem.
I mean having devs turn over the games to players after they cease development is not crazy at all.
Live service games can still absolutely be playable once development has ceased.
Anyone can run a server.
Stop killing games is a no brainer initiative
Sure. I remember when Id Software released Doom as open source. They had just released Quake II earlier that month, Doom was old news and not really a money maker for the company, so they opened the source code to let the community play with it. That was a cool thing to do, it should be done more often.
I would say yeah, you should build a game in such a way that it can be played once its abandoned. The greed vampires who are actually in charge won't let a law like that be passed. Or if it is, they'll ignore it.
Doom, Build Engine games, Marathon. I can still play those games, but even if Bungie faux-Marathon ever comes out, I wouldn't be able to play it after a few years. One of the biggest turnoffs to these As-A-Service games is time limited events. I don't want to feel nostalgic for something and not be able to replay it. Between the discussions on Hell Divers II events and the Sony fuckary, I'm glad I passed. Fuck, I remember my hype for Hawken died when I saw it was going to be f2p.
I strongly dislike the end-around that these "live service" games are trying to do around copyright law. I'm a strong proponent of the idea that intellectual property law is a compromise. You get some time to make your money on your idea, then it becomes the heritage of all mankind. Treating games as a service is an attempt to weasel out of their end of the bargain.
So I don't fucking buy them.
I miss Hawken so god damned much..
Perfect example of a game that could easily have been community hosted
SorteKanin
I’m cool with not designing games to be online-only from ground up. Your concern was noted, video game lobby.
Then it sounds like the legislation enforcing leaving private servers on the table should also move the liability to whoever is hosting the servers. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t work that way already tbh.
Since when have rights holders ever been held responsible for the actions of online players?
The only instances I can think of are when games exclusively target minors, like Roblox.
And in what crazy world would those scant responsibilities carry over to community servers after official support was ended?
What a cop out.
Yeah, it's absurd. Lots of games just warn in their licence agreement that they don't control the experience you get from user-created content and online interactions. It's all it takes for them, especially if they don't even host that content on their own servers.
One line of EULA is probably enough to state the right holder is not responsible for what happens in private servers.
Yeah this is just a defence of deep-rooted anti-consumer practices thats generalizing the issue.
There are multiple types of online-dependent games, so i will do the world a favor and categorize them here, along with viable solutions to prevent their current inevitable unplayability(sticking to PC games for simplicity):
-The dev baked in this online requirement solely to prevent piracy. There is no necessary data being exchanged with a server in order for the game to continuously operate, other than the anti-piracy measures.
This means that all a developer needs to do is patch the launcher/game files to not require the online connection, and the game will work fine.
Some examples of this anti-piracy software are Denuvo, or Games for Windows Live.
In the case of GFWL, anyone who owned a game that required that software to play, can no longer do so as the service has shut down.
When denuvo shuts down their servers, those games will be unplayable also.
The solution so far has been to pirate. The community has made their own patches, simple or not, to continue to play games without unnecessary server dependence. This effort should be on the developers.
-Examples -DRM:
---GTA V -rockstar game launcher
---Diablo 2 Resurrected -Blizzard launcher
---Resident Evil 4 Remake -Denuvo
---Gears of War(2009 PC) -GFWL (now unplayable without modifying software)
---Chronicles of Riddick, AoDA -TAGES (now unplayable without modifying software)
-Most of these games have no option to host a local server, and playing matches alone, split screen or with a friend on your network requires connection to an online server.
This has been an intentional design choice for the passed decade or so. Multiplayer games used to come with local or private server hosting baked in, which required no dev-hosted online server connection to continue playing indefinitely.
The solution is more locally/privately host-able servers for multiplayer games. This needs to become the norm again, and has to be implemented as a choice by developers. These games dont need to be redesigned from the ground up for this to work usually either
-Examples -server type:
---Halo CE -private/lan servers 👍
---Halo MCC -Dedicated servers, lan requires online connection 👎
---Battlefield 3,4,1,5,2042 -dedicated servers, bf3 was just sunset 👎
---Battlefield 2/1942/Vietnam -Lan AND bots in servers offline 👍
---Call of Duty's -up until MW2019 they all had robust offline modes that allowed offline lan play, many had bots and zombies modes too 👍 but MW2019 and after have such egregious Blizzard DRM and the game content is an absolute mess, even pirates have a hard time cracking them 👎
---Quake 1-3, CS 1.6/Source, Unreal Tournaments - the quintessential multiplayer format with private lan servers, these came out in the golden era of multiplayer games 👍
-This category clumps in MMO, Service, PvP and PvE games together. Data must be passed between players and servers in order for the game to operate properly. Again, this is merely a design choice and not the only way that game could ever be developed in many scenarios, but there are games whose data/processing cannot be hosted locally because of their complexity, such as some MMO's.
This server dependence is prevalent in Service games today because the servers tell the account/game what items they have purchased with real money, all of that is tracked and regulated by the developers in order to, you guessed it, continue to make more money.
There are 2 solutions here... Either design the game so it can also be played without server dependence from the beginning(which in many cases is entirely feasable, but devs prefer you to be always connected to their store to be able to buy more microtransactions)... Or when the game is not financially viable to justify server upkeep, a version of the game or server is released to the public.
Yes yes devs dont want to give out their source code and this option requires the most development time, but it prevents people who paid for/into a game from loosing access to it forever.
-Examples -Fixes:
---Shatterline -singleplayer version released on steam after online service was sunset 👍 (not free)
---Spellbreak -devs released files so players could run their own server once their servers were closed 👍 (free)
---World of Warcraft -they would have to do the same as spellbreak, if this game ever shuts down
---Anthem -sunset happening in a month or so, no plan to make playable offline/without EA servers, needs dev time👎
---Battleborn -servers taken offline after 4.5 years and i have missed it ever since, needed dev time to work offline 👎
---The Crew -sparked the Stop Killing Games movement with its end, Ubisoft has no plans for an offline patch 👎 (although they do with The Crew 2 👍)
It is important to remember that most(almost all) PC games today bought via Steam, Epic, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Rockstar or EA stores all require an online account to be able to play the games youve bought there, whether or not the games are then playable offline after purchase. Those games are dependent on those online stores in order to access those games if you alter your hardware or software and need to redownload those games, you will need to go through those launcher's DRM.
Some of those launchers won't let games launch offline ever, as i mentioned in section 1.
GOG and a few DRM free Steam games are some of the only ways to purchase games that have no online dependence once downloaded.
The takeaway here is that many online-only requirements function at best as a means to preserve a distributor's bottom line and at worst as a form of planned obsolescence that eventually takes away a good you paid for, leaving you with the option of buying the remake, sequel, or another game entirely(like the devs/publishers want).
Here's to hoping the EU is going to take consumer interests seriously and impose some new rules around game preservation on these money focused companies.