Choosing servers generally depends on two things: Gameplay quality (eg: latency), and the people playing on the server.

In-game monetizations are done because the market-at-large refuses and continues to refuse hiking up prices despite rising costs and inflation.

>Literally no one in this discussion is saying companies can't run their own servers.

That is not what I said at all.

>We're just saying, if at such time a company shuts their servers down, there should be a way to make new ones so people can still play the game they bought.

That potentially conflicts with safeguarding trade secrets, licensing, and so on. Would it be nice? Yes. But reality is seldom easy or ideal.

>Any sufficiently powerful server could host an MMO. This is not black magic, it's computing.

Hell no. An MMO usually has one world or environment that is consistent, one set of data that is universal to the game. The very nature of MMOs requires that someone central and singular operates the server(s), which almost always is either the devs or publishers so-concerned.

It's dead cheap and easy for anyone to run servers capable of running entire MMOs, it's practically impossible to share the pre-requisite singular data and then also process it identically between innumerable servers owned and ran by independent entities.

You cannot address social challenges with technological solutions (read: more compute).

>Yes. That's literally what this is attempting to address.

And I did not speak as to those games, what are you contesting with me?

We have seen plenty of games shut down after only a year or so to know that is not the case.

But also as I said in my response, reusing code is a thing. Maybe it relies on another internal tool that is used in some of their other games. They are not going to release that part, which would make the first part they released unusable.

Just because they are ending support doesnt mean that the some of the serverside code is not being used elsewhere or is not a shared service with another game.

> I posit the opposite question to you: why is it normal and acceptable for Blizzard to say "WoW is done and no one can play anymore" and an entire vibrant community and player-base just doesn't get to play their favorite game anymore,

I mean, I highly doubt if it was a "vibrant community" it would be shutting down at this point.

> because Blizzard decided it wasn't profitable enough? Yeah sure Blizzard made it, fine enough,

Regardless of any of our other opinions on this work, that is exactly it. They own it, they run the servers, they update it, it is their creation and with the example of an MMO it has always been clear that it relies on an online connection to work since that is the very basis of the game.

> but that's not the sum total of all work involved. Probably millions of hours at this point of streams, guides, explainers, millions of wiki pages, guides, all kinds of shit that tons of people have invested thousands of hours into. What right does Blizzard have to simply take all of that and turn it off? What about people who make their own living in turn with WoW?

You could say that about anything. Even if Blizzard did nothing, the popularity of WoW going down would still impact all of those people.

What about people that covered a tv show for several seasons just for it to be canceled (or just ending)? Maybe they made a living covering that show, are they somehow owed something because they no longer have new episodes that come out? No of course not.

Are people that made a living on Instagram or whatever owed something if those platforms shut down?

No, they boxed themselves in instead of diversifying. That should be a normal practice and recognize the risk to your livlyhood of relying on a single platform, game, tv show, or whatever other niche.

Also should be worth mentioning that all of that content that was made, won't be disappearing. There obviously won't be new content, but it would still be there and likely for a while there will be people looking it up for nostalga.

I "have additional information" in that I've watched the videos that have led up to the petition(s), and although the goals are stated within the petition page, it's more of a condensed semi-legalese which might be difficult for a random reader to extrapolate (and it may be too condensed).

>why do games like WoW get an exception?

Again, payed expansions for subscription games are a tricky area. If you bought additional content beyond a monthly fee, imo a good compromise might be issuing a refund within a certain time period. That's an issue for government to debate though. If I ONLY signed up for Wow's base subscription and bought nothing else, it's pretty clear-cut that I'm only entitled to service for the payed period and nothing else.

>If somehow we can make an exception that WoW is fine, clearly consumers understand online only games...

Most consumers clearly understand how a subscription works, that you stop paying and stop getting service.

Most consumers also understand that if you buy something as a one-time payment only, it shouldn't be taken away arbitrarily, this is how most multiplayer games have worked for the last... 30 years or so? If Wow's payed expansions get a pass here, it's ONLY because running a server might require unreasonable hardware for an individual (believe me, I'd prefer not to give them a pass).

Anyway, here's a list of fully-dead games on pc. This includes a bunch of F2P games, which may or may not be a subject of this regulation depending on the game specifics

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Category:Unplayable_games

And here's a list of physical-copy games that can be considered at-risk: https://www.doesitplay.org/index

Anything that lists "no" under offline mode is pretty much going to die, anything with "download required" is potentially dead unless someone figures out a patch when the server shuts down.

> The game is unplayable without an internet connection

That was not my question. It is still actively playable. I even gave an example of another game that I know in that situation clearly showing that I do in fact know of games that work this way and I have had my own annoyances with them.

My original question:

> How many games actually only phone home and have been rendered unplayable for that reason?

Unless I am mistaken, that game is in fact still playable.

As it is currently written this petition does nothing about that. It is not banning phoning home, just that a patch is required if/when you shut down your servers. It is talking about games that did not get that patch.

They provided an example of a game that could fit what this is proposing to stop in the future, but does not fit it at the moment.

Frankly I would support a ban on phoning home, but that is not what we are talking about.

See my other comment to the person that mentioned NFS Underground, that is an example of a game that fit the question I was asking and this petition.

Code doesn't get thrown away because a game isn't being used anymore. The networking code for one game will not be completely different for the next game.

Simple, they use that tech in their next game that they hope brings more steady revenue. if you think about it as opportunity cost instead of absolute valuee the logic lines up.

Scapegoating is always how these laws are justified. It's always "billionaires this or that" but the laws always include small to medium sized businesses and high income professionals that are not billionaires or mega corporations.

These laws hurt mega corporations but they are fatal to everything smaller.

Shocker but most people don't want to give all their IP away. Most others literally cannot because most tool licenses don't give you permission to distribute.

>Just say you'd prefer it to be legal for these corporations to defraud customers as a regular business practice rather than it be mandated that they can't do that and move on.

rules:

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

We used to buy games and get a server.exe alongside it! In my experience, the tide started turning around 15 years ago, every big release started getting infested with in-game payments, always-online components, and most titles took away our ability to self-host servers.

With those changes, their profits skyrocketed - but greedy bastards running the show never seem to have enough, so they kill unprofitable games to get everyone to move to their new product.

Personally I don't buy AAA games anymore - partially due to these hostile practices, partially because their creators have lost any semblance of taste. Indie games and smaller studios are still pumping out real gems that don't implement any of these predatory practices at the cost of $20-50.

That's not my argument. My argument is that it's wrong to claim this law is different from any other type of law in that it requires people to do additional labor. Unless a law literally has no requirements (is that even a law?), it has to require some people to do additional work.

> I think it's bad we have to mandate people to do things ever but in certain situations we should do it because the alternative is terrible.

Many of us do think it's terrible for people to have a product they paid for become inoperable because a company decided they would take their authentication servers offline without releasing a patch first. This erodes consumer trust and can lead to a market of lemons.

> Also keep in mind, we are talking about video games

We're talking about laws, which are serious things and deserve serious discussions. The proposed legislation is likely a test balloon for other consumer protections, so reasoning through the effects is a good exercise.

For a third example, consider right-to-repair laws which mandate that a company must provide usable manuals and parts at a reasonable cost.

The lifetime of the game depends on profitability to the company, which is only somewhat correlated with popularity. Companies even stop products which are profitable, but not profitable enough.

When does the timer start? Minecraft has been around for well over 6 years, yet it gets new players every year.

Plenty of games come out, don't do well overall and then get shutdown despite a loyal fanbase. Just because something didn't meet its sales forecast doesn't mean the people who bought it don't want to play it. A game being popular doesn't mean it's a good game, and a game being unpopular doesn't mean it's a bad game.

> If a game shuts down in 6 years (past most typical warranties), clearly you got more than enough enjoyment out of it.

First: that's not a given. Plenty of people buy games well past the launch date. If I buy a game five years, eleven months, and two weeks after launch and the auth servers are shut down two weeks later should I lose access to it?

> Digital warranties don't make much sense since popularity is generally proportional to lifetime. If it was a good game it wouldn't shut down quick enough for people to complain.

Studios close, and companies don't make decisions based on what's popular, they do it based on what makes them money. A game might have a long tail where people keep playing and buying it but substantial numbers of new customers aren't coming in anymore.

Again, this is the literal thing that's being debated. Companies are currently allowed to treat game sales as such and this group is arguing the law should stop them from doing so.

And maybe we can also mandate that companies release detailed server specifications when they turn down a game. Everything that might be needed for someone to rewrite the server. Then someone else might step into a breach - a different company, an open source project - and continue providing the service.

Again, you're taking as a given one of the things which some people want to change. Why shouldn't the developers of the newest matchmaking-based shooter be required to release the binary for a dedicated server when they shut the game down? Obviously this won't be feasible for some games, but I can imagine plenty of games where it seems like it should be reasonable to factor it into development costs.

I don't think you can get to a much more foundational definition of democracy than "decisions are made because a lot of people agree they should". You might disagree with the results, but it's an excellent argument for something becoming law.

> Unless stated by the law your rights are what you agreed to when signing the terms of service for the game.

Laws make contract provisions unenforceable all the time. This is not a new thing, and I have a hard time imagining the effect of laws if you couldn't invalidate agreements with them.

> Stop acting like people were duped when servers were shut off for a game that doesn't get played.

But people do feel like they got duped when that happens. That's why people get upset. You might disagree with it, but just saying "don't feel that way" isn't a good argument. Why shouldn't I feel that way? It's how games worked in the past. Games that have been shut down in the past and rendered unplayable have been made playable by fans before. Why shouldn't we expect companies the companies who made them to make an effort to do so as well?

> Right now when you play games online you don't pay for dedicated servers (which are very expensive), with this law expect that to change. Expect to also have to pay for a team of software engineers to manage the games into eternity.

I'm not entirely clear why you're taking this as a given, but I trust you'll elaborate. But humoring your (I suspect flawed) premise: personally I think it would be great if we went back to player-run dedicated servers. Some of the games I've played the most lately (Valheim, Minecraft, V Rising) are ones I've rented dedicated servers for. Hosting dedicated servers these days is extremely easy and quite cheap. Further on this tangent: I think we've lost a lot of online community because most games pour everyone into the same matchmaking buckets. This means you don't get as many small communities centered around specific servers popping up like you did back in the late 90s or early 2000s.

> Expect to also have to pay for a team of software engineers to manage the games into eternity.

Could you explain which part of the legislation requires this?

or take rights from people, which seems to be in vouge as of late.

I simply think this is a foolish direction. Preservation is important but you can't mandate entertainment to keep servers up and running. If this focused on actual single player cases there may be a point here, but I feel trying to fit in cases like WoW is just asking this bill to fail.

And to recognize my bias: I have also been in enough gamer circles to know that any talk of preservation is just wolf whistles for enabling piracy. I lot of people don't actually care about ownership (look at how they praise gamepass, a system that will actually end games ownership as we know it), they care about getting games they like for free.

The world will quickly go to shit if people stopped creating and building new things. Literally everything you own was built by someone's labor. Maybe stop mandating that these people do more for you?

> If Blizzard updates their user agreement and sneak a clause in there where I agree to give away my house

Where are you going with this argument? In what way does being biased mean I just agree with everything a group decides?