This should be illegal

kolorafa@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 661 points –

This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.

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This is the natural progression of the games-as-a-service model. Any game that relies on online support of some kind just to function will eventually cease like this.

Is it stupid that a vr game about a pet relies on online support to function? Absolutely. But it is what it is. Buy more offline games.

That's why for the game I develop, players can request a copy of their save file and we have a singleplayer mode you can download and host yourself.

It's not the most convenient thing, but players use it, and it's future-proof!

This is also the reason I'm all open source. Not just games, but seeing someone abandon a program hurts. Or just wanting to make a change on your own to suit your needs. I don't have any big fancy programs, but I at least put my code openly on github.com for that reason. Both my "big" ones are just me using another program and realizing I could make something that worked better for me. At like 100x the time investment, but programming is fun.

Looking at the retro computer scene should make anyone a diehard open source fanatic, it's god awful how much retro stuff relies on a single guy happening to find an old disc in their basement and upload it to the internet, and a lot of the time that never happened and so the software is just lost forever and the only way hardware can be used is by people writing their own software completely from scratch and sharing it with others.

And of course if they then don't make it open source that's extra fun.

drg is technically game as a service right? it works fully offline are relies on local save files and steam networking for lobbies

game that doubles as a service? beats me.

DRG is also a unicorn of a game