IMO once you delist a game and shut down servers where people cannot play anymore then it should become open source and not protected IP.
Open source is too far, but as part of a shutdown of a game and it’s servers there should be a year long period where the publisher is required to release the game without DRM, including the server software, to all customers.
I could see it going through Steam, you get a message “Delistment notification: The Crew is being delisted, get your permanent copy now!”
Worse solution, but I would accept if publishers were forced to clearly display the exact date when the game will stop functioning at the point of purchase and all advertising materials.
I see what you’re getting at but this would be difficult for a publisher to stick with in the event the game does horribly. Requiring them to keep their word to the date advertised would end up with them only guaranteeing a week, or send ramifications through all industries requiring truth in advertising.
A middle ground would be simply to legislate that when games require online connectivity for any reason, the appropriate software is released to allow a locally run server to enable online function at the time the company decides to decommission their servers. Then require them to hold these files in an accessible manner for at least as long as the servers had been active for.
That would be difficult in the event the company goes out of business, but I’m sure this would be a difficult thing to explain to most politicians so maybe not so simple after all.
If they can’t keep their committed date (or fold entirely), then the source goes open. If every copy happens to get deleted during the bankruptcy, treat it as criminal fraud by the top levels of the company and go after everyone that could have decided to improve backups and other IT methods of avoiding that but didn’t. That’s assuming it was accidental, higher penalties if it can be proven to be deliberate.
In an ideal world, the penalties you describe are suitable. Though, gaming industry aside, for the executive level of most any corporation, being a scapegoat and handed a golden parachute is the worst case scenario for them leaving. In many cases floating across the street right into another executive position.
Jail time isn’t a likely outcome. It just isn’t the world we live in, unfortunately.
Yeah golden parachutes are such a joke in this society that likes to pretend to be a meritocracy.
Though on that note, I’d love to see a law that limits golden parachutes to the lowest paid position in the company. Hell, I’d be ok with that being scaled to full time. Not because disgraced executives deserve even that much but because it would give some incentive to increase pay rates across the company. I’ve also long thought that executive compensation should also be limited by some multiple of the lowest pay. And yeah, I’d include stock options and grants in that (for both employee and executive compensation).
Agreed. The whole idea of these huge payouts could be eliminated and replaced with what exists for everyone else - severance pay. Calculated off a regulated minimum formula, based primarily on how long the person served the company.
I also agree with you that the top and bottom salaries should have a correlation. The C suite making the salary of a shelf stocker in one day should not happen. I think I could accept that the top gets somewhere around 10 or 20 times higher salary. Even 100x would be an improvement to the way it is now.
Like you point out, between stock options and whatever else, an executive salary could be a few hundred thousand, even if their total compensation is tens of millions. In fantasy land it would be nice if, once a company grows to a certain point, say a billion dollars in value, if it were required to convert to an employee owned cooperative entity.
It’s a shame things are the way they are. Maybe one day we won’t have politicians that can be bought. That’s a different discussion altogether.
Ubisoft has done a fantastic job of convincing me to never buy a Ubisoft game ever again.
Not sure that’s how a company is supposed to work, but they sure seem to think so.
Well, they aren’t alone. Blizzard and Activision is on my blacklist. As well as pretty much any studio own by Microsoft at this point… Oh, and Sony! Can’t forget about them.
The list is long.
Nintendon’t!
I purchased Rayman Legends on a big Steam sale because it is a great game and I wanted to play it again. I installed it. I hit play. It tried to install the Ubisoft launcher. I uninstalled it and refunded.
Fuck off, Ubisoft.
There’s a great initiative going on right now trying to hold Ubisoft and other game publishers accountable for shitty practices like this by trying to petition governments from a few different nations to create legal protections for people to continue to have access to their games they purchased after the publisher decides to abandon a game. If you live in an EU country especially, you might be able to help sign a petition still: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
My dream is an “internet archive” for all video games, modded to run offline. If the game becomes unavailable for purchase, the archive opens that game and makes it available for all.
The next step is for this kind of release to become law, and supported by manufacturers.
Do this with books too. How much we’ve lost.
+1 for Anna’s Archive. It’s an amazing resource for students too, since they keep research papers and textbooks.
And before someone gets up in arms about the research papers, the researchers don’t get paid by the journals for publishing with them. In fact, the researchers need to pay the journal to publish, and then the journal turns around and charges people to read it.
If you ever need to get research for free, you can usually email the researchers directly and they’ll be happy to share it for free; They hate the journals too, (because like I said earlier, they have to pay the journal thousands of dollars,) but feel obligated to use them to publish.
Even worse, that research and journal publishing was often funded by public funds and research grants. So the journal is paywalling research that taxpayers already paid for, and should be free to access.
And before someone gets up in arms about the research papers, the researchers don’t get paid by the journals for publishing with them. In fact, the researchers need to pay the journal to publish, and then the journal turns around and charges people to read it.
What you’re describing here is called predatory publishing and is not the norm. It’s the “fake news” of scientific journals. I’m not “up in arms” about the original topic of making info available to the public whatsoever, just wanted to correct this part.
Some respected, high impact journals also charge for submitting.
Lower quality journals charge more and almost guarantee publication.
What you’re describing here is called predatory publishing and is not the norm.
No, predatory publishing “is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors while only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy” without real peer review. For context reviewers aren’t paid by high impact journals either.
I just donated to them. :)
Good human.
The fast downloads 🏎🏎🏎
That sounds like a great plan for all types of media. We would better document our history and make so much human creativity accessible to those who cannot afford to indulge in what’s currently for sale.
Why do we not do this? Oh wait, it’s MONEY? Pfft, it will never happen.
Libraries are communist or something and ESA fights hard for games to stay out of them.
Education? Sounds very communist!
Translations of big text from left to right: “Our country should be most educated and cultural country”, “Study and work! Work and study!”, “To have more you should produce more, to produce more you should know more”.
The next step is for this kind of release to become law
You mean legal deposit?
It’s sad how consumers have zero rights when it comes to digital content. Companies can retroactively make changes, removing content legitimately bought by consumers with no repercussions. I get “not owning” but for a company to collect money for services provided and not actually provide those services will never not astound me.
If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.
Yarr, matey.
Right? Call it what you will, changing terms of sale or use after taking someone’s money is wrong.
Yeah I can’t even comprehend how that just passes as totally normal these days. Make it all make sense…
idk how madden players can put so much time and money into ultimate team only for the service to end after 2 years. and they do it every single year
Same way FIFA players do and have been doing, to the tune of over 1 billion dollars since 2018.
Jfc…
This is basically why I don’t buy anything that I don’t think I can protect from being fucked with.
That’s all ownership is really.
Because the FTC is toothless when it comes to EULAs. You can sign your rights away by agreeing to it (which is required to play the game).
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I learnt that over a decade ago.
Don’t buy a Ubisoft, EA, or frankly any big publisher game.
I wouldn’t trust CDPR so easily yet after how diabolical the launch of CP2077 was.
IMO a fumbled and later recovered launch is different from the enshitification of video games like P2W, MTX in general, lootboxes, releasing what should be patches as paid DLC, invasive DRM and anti-cheat. I’d file all of those under bad design, while a bad launch is more of a bad execution. There can be overlap, like if they fully intended for early players to fill the role of beta testers.
The way I approach it is I try to avoid the bad design stuff entirely but just avoid buying new games at release and definitely never pre-order. I’ll also support games in early release if I really like the concept and want to give them a better chance at being able to pull it off, but I go into those with the understanding that it’s not complete right now and there’s a chance it never will be. But I don’t see any reason to hold anything against the games that have messy launches but later recover.
Though I’ve learned to not jump on the hype train and that makes it much easier to not take any of this stuff personally.
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It’s better than what Bungie did with Destiny 2… just gutted 1/2 the content from the game, including all the story missions and the first several paid expansions.
They wanted to attract new players with a smaller download size, but the new players come in and go “WTF is going on?”
Whoa, wtf? How did I miss that drama, haha holy shit. I definitely remember downloading it a few years ago and being aghast at its absurd size (think it was around 120GB? which nowadays that’s pretty par for the course because fuck optimization). But gutting half your content just to save space… have they not heard of compression? Like what the hell were they thinking haha
They didn’t just remove story missions and quests and things, they removed entire PLANETS from the game. It was crazy!
That’s the most baffling MMO decision I’ve seen, tbh. WoW has plenty of issues but at least they aren’t just deleting the continent of Northrend to save on install space or anything
Bungie’s problem is they don’t really want to make a story based looter shooter, they want a free to play PvP gacha engine.
I would’ve been fine with that if that’s how they launched it. It wasn’t. I stopped when they sunset a bunch of shit the first time in the first game. I figured the second would be more of the same, but sunsetting entire DLCs is nuts.
Both of those things are shitty; it’s just one of them is worse.
And lots of gamers praise Microsoft for GamePass, because it’s cheap. When Microsoft’s goal with GamePass is the same as Ubisoft’s. Ms would love that you rent your games from them indefinitely. Wouldn’t surprise me that in 10-15 years you can’t buy the games made by Microsoft anymore only rent through GamePass and the subscription fee would be five times higher than now
It’s already becoming low quality crap. The GamePass model doesn’t work well with expensive games since they are going for quantity. Hi Fi Rush’s devs have been taken down along with a couple more studios. I wonder if that will make a difference, though. Gamers want it cheap, companies want max profit. I’m imagining shovelware in 5 years and many games taken off of it.
I don’t mind paying full price for a game, as long as I own it in the end and that the game is not ridiculously short.
Paying 70 euros for a game with less than 7hrs of playtime to get to the end, and artificially padded with collectibles around a open world is a ripoff especially when the game requires licensing servers to be online to play, even for single-player.
The single most problematic thing where you should start to notice how bad gamepass can be is when you unsubscribe and decide to buy one of the games you’ve played only to have your savegames in gamepass gulag.
Is that true? PC, Xbox, or both?
It was on PC. See my other reply for the specifics. Very shitty experience and the dealbreaker around game pass since I’ve managed not finish multiple games before they dropped out of the service.
Edit: Sorry, mixed it up, it was on PC
You are really making a mountain of a mole hill, to get my save from Outer Worlds gamepass to use on steam’s version was as easy as just copy pasting the files in another folder
They absolutely are not and you are lucky you were able to get your save game out. The majority of games have their config and save files encrypted and are completely unusable as far as any other platform goes.
There are some exceptions, mainly games that have official mod support tend to have areas you can access but the majority of others won’t.
I really don’t know what to say, I did this both with Outer Worlds and Code Vein. Just went to PCgamingwiki’s entries of the 2 games, saw where the save folders are, and dropped each from the microsoft one to the steam one.
Well you aren’t going to be able to pick out a trend with only testing two games. Its enough of a problem that I would double check where the save is before starting a game on gamepass.
The last game I tried to move and failed was snowrunner I believe.
Well it might depend on specific games, but for like a dragon it did not work out in the end.
You can’t move the files?
I tried to get the save game for yakuza like a dragon and first I had to hack myself into getting permission to access the specific folders ON MY PC. When I managed that I saw that the are in some weird format that supposedly doesn’t transfer to steam for example.
I’m confused. You tell me you had to “hack into your own PC” for the files (which makes absolute no sense at all), while telling someone else this was all on Xbox. Lol which is it?
Sorry it got mixed up, it was in PC. It’s the xboxapps folder or something like that, which windows locks down as a system folder.
I really hope you’re being sarcastic.
If you’re not, and you seriously are this unable to (checking notes) move files from one folder to another… You should probably stay on that Xbox you’re now saying you don’t have.
The poster isnt able to explain themselves but Microsoft encrypts most of the game files for their gamepass games which prevents copy pasting the files elsewhere.
You can move the files but they are useless for any other version, and I believe you can’t even copy and paste from gamepass to gamepass either, but I can’t say for sure on that.
I legit haven’t bought a game anywhere but steam in over a decade. I simply do not trust the motives or responsibility of any other publisher. And at this point, I’m too afraid of them yoinking their game after I’ve paid for it that I’ll likely never change.
GOG is good too.
We all should be hitting GOG up more often if we want the legit ONLY good competition for steam to not die out one day. They are as good as steam in many ways.
As soon as GOG has linux support at least 80% as good as steam, I’ll jump right over. I used to always prefer GOG over Steam but I’ve really felt that they don’t care about supporting my platform at all unless that’s changed in recent times so I’m happier giving Valve my cut.
Yes.
I’ve also been avoiding playing games that involve some third party launcher or login. I’m not perfectly consistent with this and have bought some games before realizing they had this, but even steam games can be subject to a company deciding they don’t want to support their game anymore (which IMO is fair) and just killing the game off entirely, which isn’t fair. I’d like to see a requirement that other steps be taken to keep it going without their active support. Like opening the source and relinquishing all copyrights on that code. If they want to keep parts of it, then pull it out into a library that they continue to maintain.
Meanwhile someone somewhere is having issues with steam taking too much profit. Do note that even if a game is DELISTED from steam, you still can download the game on steam. Of course it is a different story with license revocation and that is a whole different can of worms. I don’t even know if steam allows the publisher to revoke a license for a game that the player already paid for just because the game is not supported anymore (a different case with breaking ToS/EULA).
Ubisoft has been trash for a long time now. It’s a shame that they control some good IP, but the company’s too far gone to ever be trustworthy. Save your time and money and just play something else imo.
They’re sure giving EA a run for their
moneyuniversally despised revulsion…I wish more people would buy stuff on GOG, although some games there still have some sort of DRM, Kalypso published games come to mind.
Still, way, way better in terms of ownership than what other platforms offer.
I thought they had on several occasions dropped games from the store because they had DRM. Which DRM titles does GOG still have?
Last game I paid good money for was on GOG. Everything added to my steam account in the last few years has either been part of a humble bundle or a freebie from somewhere.
GOG sometimes fails to keep some offline installers up to date with what Galaxy installs, some people consider that a DRM, I consider it a service failure.
You can also find some reports checking this thread - the post in question says Beat Hazard 2 won’t run after a clean offline install on a computer without internet. Not DRM per se, as that check only happens once and it creates a savefile
The really awful part is that there’s not really any regulation that can stop this. If you ban taking away games people bought then they’ll just switch to a subscription which is even worse
If you had reasonable copyright terms like 5 years and a requirement to release code/digital artifacts for library archival once it becomes public commons?
