Comment by NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de on Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp will end service in Nov 28 - but will transition to a paid offline app

“A single company does this and while the other 99 won’t, saying pretty please will certainly work. See? No intervention required!”

Bootlicker indeed.

Who are the 99 other companies? Which games have they taken away?

Looks like some of those are games that were cancelled, some were online multiplayer games that had the servers shutdown, some were simply removed from the Microsoft Store and some were single player games with always online DRM for which they shut the servers down. So it’s not all super scummy nonsense

Taking away a game you bought because the game was intentionally made to rely on a server is always scummy behavior. That’s the whole point.

If it’s a game like an MMO (which several on that list are) they’d have to publish the server software in order to avoid fully killing the game. And to publish the server software that was only ever expected to run in their own datacenters they’d then have to publish documentation, dependencies, etc. and this is all assuming that it can be contained in a single installer for a single machine without relying on additional services they host, and assuming it has reasonable system requirements for average users to self host.

That’s also assuming playing an MMO alone/with only 1-2 people doesn’t suck. Play some 2009scape single player without adventure bots. It feels lonely as all heck

Plus there’s all of the legal and PR hurdles to ensure you’re not exposing yourself to undue risk.

Basically a million reasons for a company to not spend a thousand work hours ensuring their crappy MMO (I’ve tried out a couple of the listed MMOs, they were unsuccessful for a reason) can continue to be played after they’ve divested from it

Licenses and middleware can be chosen more proactively to preserve and distribute the server if they know during development that it’s a requirement. There are tons of people who functionally play MMOs single player already, when the server is already running. And I play a 12 year old fighting game that’s easily able to coordinate 20-100 people to play it multiple times per week with nothing but Discord; there’s no doubt in my mind you’d be able to get 40 people together for a raid on a private server.

The other answer from @ampseandrew@lemmy.world already covers most points, so I’ll just a few things:

Most game servers out there are already built in a way to allow for easy deployment. After all, devs have to have way to test changes, so being able to run a small server locally for debugging purposes is hugely beneficial to development.
I also can’t imagine that there’s any game server out there that shouldn’t be able to run on a single system. The heaviest one game I can imagine is Minecraft, due to the whole open world terrain generation, world streaming and physics calculations, and even that can be run off a Raspberry Pi for a small number of players.

With the possible exception of games that were canceled, those are all examples of super scummy nonsense.

Oh no! Not Microsoft Bingo! That’s a list of D list games nobody has ever heard of that all shutdown years ago. I don’t think the world would be a better place if the devs of Radical Heights, a free to play arena shooter that was launched and shutdown a month later in 2018 were forced to give their game out to everyone for free after.

Hello, sole arbiter of a game’s worth.

Of course not every game is a certified banger, but there’s more than enough notable games on that list that made an impact on the industry and should’ve been preserved for that fact alone.

You didn’t create those games. Games are products people work to produce. Radical Heights was a free to play game that was shutdown in a month. What would you force them to do? Release their server code for free so anybody can run a Radical Heights server that people can connect to and play? So a whole bunch of people who never gave the developers a cent have the right to demand the game be given to them simply because it existed for 1 month?

If a game asks for money in any kind of way: Yes. That should be the cost of (trying to do) business.
Alternatively, a full refund for everyone involved, even Kickstarter backers, would also be acceptable.

When I buy a product, I expect it to continue to work unless I break it myself.

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