This should be illegal
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.
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.
you will own nothing and you will be happy.
It was a free 'game' that was little more than a tutorial 🤷♂️
It's not like it's never happened to paid full games before.
*cries in Battleborn*
Don't you fucking dare say that name. I have never in my life seen a game with so much promise be self fucked so hards by it's own devs that it kills the game in its tracks.
NO ONE FUCKING ASKED FOR A BATTLE ROYALE - AND WE SURE AS SHIT DIDNT ASK FOR PAID BATTLE ROYALE SEPARATE FROM THE MAIN GAME.
...UGH.
EDIT: I WAS THINKING OF BATTLERITE BUT MY FRUSTRATION IS STILL VERY REAL.
Ever hear of SOCOM?
So why do they need to remove it?
Because Zuck's dreams of a post-life in his metaverse are crumbling.
Because paying for the servers to keep the game online cost more money than what they make out of it.
What servers? It probably stores a few KB of data per player.
And that isn't making them money, so they scrap it.
No it's the great cleansing where... checks notes.. billionaires crush the working classes by taking away their free virtual pets?
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!
You are a god among men
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.
God bless the 8-bit guy and his dream come true, Commander X16.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRGszw0KubQ
oh god this reminds me of Japanese man who married Hatsune Miku in hologram form can no longer speak to his wife of four years.
"The doting husband has gained thousands of followers on Instagram by sharing insights into his life with Miku, but things took an unexpected turn during the pandemic when Gatebox announced it was discontinuing its service for Miku."
this is why I have trust issues with proprietary software
"Megacorp killed my cyberwife" Is a heck of an vigilante origin story
Or, you know, supervillain.
"Ultraweeb's Revenge: Coming this Fall!"
I’d read it! :D
If that man harnesses the power of LLM like Chat GPT, he can continue talking with his wife
Until ChatGPT is shut down. Have control over your waifus, people!
At least the general idea behind language models isn't proprietary and fairly well available in ooen source. Sure, GPT is better, but it could change.
Let's take back the means of waifus!
One could say you must seize the means of reproduction.
Representative Boebert has been a commie all along! 🤯
Don't think reproduction has anything to do with this.
Well, Llama 2 then.
hmm not sure if that would work as the model that he was using would be different from what's available so he'd probably notice some differences which might cause a mix of uncanny valley and surrealism/suspension of disbelief where the two are noticably not the same
plus using a chat-only model would be real tragic as it's a significant downgrade from what they already had
his story actually feels like a Romeo and Juliet situation
Doesn't even take a change of service provider to get there.
Replika had what had very obviously become a virtual mate service too, until they decided "love" wasn't part of their system anymore. Probably because it looked bad for investors, as happened for a lot of AI-based services people used for smut.
So a bunch of lonely people had their "virtual companion" suddenly lobotomized, and there's nothing they could do about it.
I always thought replika was a sex chatbot? Is/was it "more" than that?
It's... complicated.
At first the idea was it'd be training an actual "replica" of yourself, that could reflect your own personality. Then when they realized their was a demand for companionship they converted it into virtual friend. Then of course there was a demand for "more than friends", and yeah, they made it possible to create a custom mate for a while.
Then suddenly it became a problem for them to be seen as a light porn generator. Probably because investors don't want to touch that, or maybe because of a terms of servce change with their AI service provider.
At that point they started to censor lewd interactions and pretend replika was never supposed to be more than a friendly bot you can talk to. Which is, depending on how you interpret what services they proposed and how they advertized them until then, kind of a blatant lie.
LLM is capable of role-playing, character.ai for example can get into the role of any character after being trained. The sound is just text-to-speech, character.ai already includes that, though if a realistic voice is desired, it would need to be generated by a more sophisticated method, which is already being done. Example: Neuro-sama, ElevenLabs
Geez.....that guy really needs
to get laid bya Miku Robot.Next thing you know, he doesn't read the fine print, ther "brain" is internet connected and, sooner or later, he won't have a Miku talking back to him again
Game preservation is dying because of DRM. You want games you can still play in 10 years, pirate that sht and donate to those keeping up the good art of game cracking. It's either that or buying remakes a decade later that are just thinly reskinned. I can live with sht like denuvo since newer games just remove it after a year and then I can buy it. Storefronts like uplay or egs that are dependent on a malignant profit only entity are at best mid-term rentals and at worst spyware you have to pay for the privilege to use.
Furthermore, if you don't want to pirate: Buy your games on GoG. They are DRM free and you don't need the launcher to play (GoG Galaxy is amazing though btw)
My proposal is for a mandated label on software and hardware to indicate that it will stop working when some online service goes offline.
And then what? Corporations will just slap a disclaimer on their products informing you of said condition and that you need to agree, understand and accept these terms and conditions and call it a day.
Aye, but forcing them to put a clear "We support this until this date" label will make that a mandated part of their marketed.
That or, you know, force companies to release server software when they sunset support for their product. That would also be nice.
And then products without that label would gain at least a little a bit of market share. Most people still buy inefficient fridges because they are shinier, but at least a few read those yellow labels mandated by law and choose the more efficient ones.
Ironically Nintendo sort of did that on physical boxes for their consoles that was actually just a download key in a cartridge
I've had that thought many times. I wish companies would release the source of games they discontinue instead of letting them completely die out.
This really sucks when you have to explain this kind of thing to your kids...
That's the horrible thing about online services. You never really own it, it can be taken away from you at any time. If you want to preserve something, you need physical and/or offline access.
And in addition to that sentiment, compression from moving or sending a copy of a copy is known to very slowly degrade digital media, so physical is almost always preferred.
As long as you are very serious about your backup system, digital can outlast physical.
I have a folder on my D: called OLDINSTALL.
It's my entire hard drive from 1996, including DOS.
I think it's a couple hundred megabytes in size, but the vast majority of the files and games were exclusively in floppy disk format.
I don't have a floppy drive or any disks anymore.
Sure, it's possible, but it's unlikely. A properly kept laserdisc compared to, for example, a YouTube Video isn't even a competition. Physical media not exposed to radiation or impact can last decades if not centuries. Don't even get me started on Vynil.
Piracy is a pretty great backup system for everyone. You're welcome.
Somebody somewhere is archiving it or it has the same problem.
Literally every seeder is part of that archive. You can look at individual trackers in the microcosm as individual archives and indices, but it's the culture of piracy that causes the wide scale collection and preservation of media.
We're actually at this kind of interesting cross-generational point of guerilla archival where it's become easier to find certain obscure pieces of media history. I suspect this is in large part due to things like bounties, where suddenly a forgotten VHS of a 35 year old HBO special that aired once or twice could be a step toward a higher rank and greater access to a wider range of media.
Modern piracy has a strong incentive toward finding lost material that's no longer readily available. Zero day content is great, but have you seen the RADAR pilot or both seasons of AfterMASH?
They belong in a museum. Indie would be proud, even if Harrison wouldn't. Not that I know his perspective on piracy.
Constantly moving compressed files are not the same as a physical media archive, literally the entire point of this discussion.
Are you here to repeat that nonsense about file transfer being lossy?
Are you here to repeat that nonsense that parity loss doesn't exist in your world?
Th s is hila ious. Wait, w t' ap e i g? c n't ead y r p st!
Err, no. Lossless compression is lossless and there are a bunch of techniques to ensure that a copy is bit-for-bit identical to the original
It is literally the other way around.
There is no way for digital media to degrade, unless it is the physical media.
Compression and transmission of data causes loss of parity. We lose or flip some 1s and 0s. Over time the effects become very noticeable. The best visual example I can think of are experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times, it very quickly degrades. In a more reasonable scenario, near lossless file types and compressions would degrade much more slowly.
That just means Youtube's software uses lossy compression, that is a Youtube problem, not a digital media problem. Are you familiar with the concept of file hashing? A short string can be derived from a file, such that if any bit of the file is altered, it will produce a different hash. This can be used in combination with other methods to ensure perfect data consistency; for example a file torrent that remains well seeded won't degrade, because the hash is checked by the software, so if anyone's copy changes at all due to physical degradation of a harddrive or whatever other reason, the error will be recognized and routed around. If you don't want to rely on other people to preserve something, there is always RAID, a 50 year old technology that also avoids data changing or being lost assuming that you maintain your hardware and replace disks as they break.
Here's the fundamental reason you're wrong about this: computers are capable of accounting for every bit, conclusively determining if even one of them has changed, and restoring from redundant backup. If someone wants to perfectly preserve a digital file and has the necessary resources and knowledge, they can easily do so. No offense but what you are saying is ignorant of a basic property of how computers work and what they are capable of.
It's the most obvious example of a digital media problem. Computers might be able to account for every bit with the use of parity files and backups with frequent parity checks, but the fact is most people aren't running a server with 4 separately powered and monitored drives as their home computer, and even the most complex system of data storage can fail or degrade eventually.
We live in a world of problems, like the YouTube problem, compression problems, encoding problems, etc. We do because we chose efficiency and ease of use over permanency.
Yes, and this can be done through mostly automatic or distributed processes.
I wouldn't describe it as complex, just the bare minimum of what is required to actually preserve data with no loss. All physical mediums may degrade through physical processes, but redundant systems can do better.
It isn't hard to seed a torrent. If a group of people want to preserve a file, they can do it this way, perfectly, forever, so long as there remain people willing to devote space and bandwidth.
All of these problems boil down to intent. Do people intend to preserve a file, do they not care, do they actively favor degradation? In the case of the OP game, it seems that the latter must be the case. Same with Youtube, same with all those media companies removing shows and movies entirely from all public availability, same with a lot of companies. If someone wants to preserve something, they choose the correct algorithms, simple as that. There isn't necessarily much of a tradeoff for efficiency and ease of use in doing so, disk space is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, the technology is mature and not complicated to use. Long term physical storage can be a part of that, but it isn't a replacement for intent or process.
I think you didn't read correctly on the statement about the most complex system failing. I'm not saying that is the most complex system, I am saying the most complex system will fail.
LMAO at the idea of comparing every bit of every portion of every seeder's copy with each other simultaneously and then cross referencing every parity file to be doubly safe, and then failing to see the chance of loss of parity during transmission of said files even after that. I will admit it would take a lot longer for a torrented file to degrade than some other forms of file distribution, but it's not going to last for a thousand years, mate.
And I am saying complexity has little to do with it and also that a system can exist that will not fail.
Specifically why not? What is unrealistic about this scenario, assuming enough people care to continue with the preservation effort? All nodes must fail simultaneously for any data to be lost. The probability of any given node failing at any given time is a finite probability, independent event. The probability of N nodes failing simultaneously is P^N. That is exponential scaling. Very quickly you reach astronomically low probabilities, 1000 years is nothing and could be safely accomplished with a relatively low number of peers. Maybe there are external factors that would make that less realistic, like whether new generations will even care about preserving the data, but considering only the system itself it is entirely realistic.
Read the above conversation to find out.
This has nothing to do with copying a file. YouTube re-encodes videos whenever they are uploaded.
A file DOES NOT DEGRADE when it is copied. That is something that happened to VHS and cassette tapes. It does not happen to digital files. You can even verify this by generating a hash of a file, copy it 10,000 times, and generate a new hash and they would be 100% identical.
You should perform that exact experiment with a sufficient number of bits, you'll be surprised.
No I won't be, because I've done this before for various reasons, but not a single but was changed.
Let me put it this way. A computer stores programs and instructions it needs to run in files on a drive. These files contain exact and precise instructions for various components to operate. If even a SINGLE bit is off in just a couple of the OS files, your computer will start throwing constant errors if not just crashing entirely.
And this isn't just theory. It's provable. Cosmic rays have been known to sometimes hit a drive and cause a bit-flip. Or another issue is a drive not being powered on for a long time causing bit-rot
At this point I'm starting to think you're a troll. There's no way someone believes what you're saying.
Edit: autocorrect
I'm going to stop responding to you few left in this thread because I don't think you're trolls, I know you are.
Then you're not a troll, just completely deluded and frankly stupid. You've been getting so many genuine responses trying to help you learn, but you keep digging in your heels and doubling down on being confidently wrong.
Believe whatever you want, just keep it to yourself.
They want to "help me learn" that a form of media storage invented and refined within a couple of decades will outlast all other forms, because they've deluded themselves that the things they rely on are perfect and that failure is impossible.
You're referring to a video codec degrading as it keeps rendering the video again, not just copying and pasting the bits. There is no degradation from copying and pasting a file as-is.
No, I am not referring to that. YouTubers have the option to download their own videos. Not steal it with a video downloading tool.
That's YouTube's processed video not the original.
And when you download the processed video and reupload it, it's a 1 to 1 conversion of the same video codec, and every generation it gets worse. That example is a low hanging fruit, but the concept applies to everything.
That 1:1 conversion through the same codec is very likely lossy. However that's not a straight file copy which is what you originally said causes degradation.
You really jumped in here to tell me exactly the contents of a comment I made just below it in the thread, as if I didn't already know it.
I jumped in to point out the flaw in the YouTube experiment you're referring to.
No, this is because YouTube compresses every file before distributing it. This happens even when downloading on the creator side.
Literally every file distribution method compresses the media first. A better argument was that YouTube re-encodes the video during the re-upload with a particularly lossy method to save on bandwidth and server space.
Games don't get lossy compressed when sent. They aren't films or photographs.
Also even if you're using lossy compression you don't recompress things every time lol.
If you use most digital formats for media and compress them with something like .7z or Winrar, then it might take years or decades to noticeable degrade, but it is still a matter of when not if.
Holy crap. File compression is not the same thing as lossy media compression.
File compression uses mathematical algorithms to create definable outcomes. Meaning it doesn't matter how much you compress/uncompress a file, it will always be exactly the same.
5 X 2 will always give you 10 and 10 ÷ 2 will always give you 5.
Nah
You touch anything from Meta with a 10 foot pole, you deserve whatever comes your way.
It's not like this phenomena is limited to the Quest or Meta. It happens all the time across the whole industry.
Google
Or we could make shitty behavior illegal so that people don't have to vet the ethics of every company they interact with.
Complete agree. Disgusting evil company. Fuck Facebook
You don't own things anymore, you just lease them
And if you can't own anything by paying, is game piracy even theft anymore?
I believe the founder and first queen of Carthage said that if we don't learn to circumvent that, we deserve nothing more than we get. She went on to claim that nothing we have is truly ours.
Is it just me or was that Phoenician quite a bit ahead of her time?
Archival is extremely important and one of the side effects of copyright schemes is that they limit its viability. The less access people have, the more likely some work becomes lost forever. I've seen it a few times already, with recent work, but in one or two hundred years we're talking about libraries of art that could have been preserved but are just gone.
Closed source software, that's actually distributed to people, has all kinds of problems beyond that too. Tons has been written about that, but from an artistic perspective, I think the biggest loss is that people can't legally expand the original work. Giant franchises with a central cultural presence get walled off and usually just go through a huge creative decline, which is crazy because there's millions of people preoccupied with the concepts from the franchise who are barred from using them to express themselves. With software in specific, if it's open source you can modify it, fix it, expand it, maintain it, whatever - there's all these great resources they could use, but we won't let them.
Pirates keep many things alive. 🏴☠️🦜
It's pretty insane. At first I thought damn, from now on our culture will be so thoroughly documented that future historians will struggle to parse it all, but now I can't trust anything to last for 5 years and I can't have copies of it, either.
Piracy shmiracy, some random dude's homegrown server is not an archive, and anything that fails without electricity to power it is not a copy.
Archival projects like ours !2009scape@kbin.social
I bought a bunch of music on Google Play Music, forgot about it. Come back a year later and it's all deleted because they shut the service down.
laughs in yo-ho-ho
Never buy from the cloud, only rent.
Your purchases didn't migrate over to YouTube music?? I still have all the music I bought
I did find that some of my uploaded library got changed to different versions of songs, which I didn't like.
Spotify did that too. Got to listen to THE definitive worst cover of Hotel California I've ever heard. I don't trust cloud services with my music anymore. Mp3's forever.
This is why hard copy is refusing to die.
You had a limited time window to manually do that. I didn't get the memo.
It's still on your YouTube Music account, if you clicked that button.
Should be automatic, but...
Sadly there was a pretty short grace period to do so. It should have indeed been automatic.
Yep, I was sent one email to an old email address I do not use.
And this is why I have trust issues
This is why I don’t touch anything fucking Facebook does
It's meta lol. It's the devil.
Is this made in unity?
Wouldn't be surprised.
Partner found out about the unity crap when a bunch of steam library games published updates about changes in development, at least one of which stated they're transitioning from free to paid
Can any owner of this game tell me whether it is online only or not? Or what uses it has for an internet connection? Because back in mah dayTM© that'd be the kind of thing you'd download once and, even if the online service died, you'd still have a working program/game afterwards.
Why would they want you to have a working program? How does that help sell you more stuff?
This is why I always look for cartridge-based Switch ports of games I play, so they’ll be mine long after the online play ceases, they can no longer be legally purchased and my current device reaches the end of its product life. It also helps that game cards last longer than optical discs
The updates are still annoying but yeah it's better than nothing. Of course there are some releases with the complete games all patched but those are rare and usually special/limited editions.
the problem is that we've allowed this to happen. all mobile games function this way, the "rug" can be pulled at any time. all that money you spent on gacha pulls, was it worth it?
the problem goes back innocuously to MMO subscriptions, i think. which had a valid reason for existing, but an MMO can be "rug pulled" at any time as well, thankfully most of the greats have stayed up (wow, ffxi, eq) but ONE DAY they will be gone forever, relegated to private servers only.
Pretty big assumption that you own something digital you paid for. Let's be honest, you paid for a license not a product.
I concur Buyer should not gain rights to product, so they should not be allowed to profit from it, but they should be able to preserve it, unless the license that you actually buy had a time limitation, but that should be clearly stated when you buy it that you only buy access to it to (at least) X amount of time like you have with online subscriptions.
That’s why pirating is completely based.
"don't worry, you can form a new 3-year attachment with Bogo 2 for just $29.99!"
Unless we sell less of it than the arbitrary sales number we used a bunch of estimated pseudo math on to ultimately guess. Because if we sell less than that number we pulled out of our rectums with a faulty Excel sheet, we'll just shut the thing down immediately. Because, you know... fuck you.
I'll never miss a chance to shill Ross Scotts excellent video on games as a service and how wrong it is here
My man has been personally leading the charge against this issue and has even looked into making this practice illegal
Is this a Facebook game…?
It's developed by Facebook, but it's not one of those in-browser games you might be thinking of. "Meta Quest" is their VR platform. So, while the quality might be similar, you do need to buy rather expensive gear to play this particular game...
Yup. They're complaining about a Facebook game. No fucking shit that company will unceremoniously end support. Everyone who bought into Zuck's vision deserves what they're getting.
I hope you get the help you need.
Well, I don't use Facebook, so I don't need help with that at least.
https://www.gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-users-dumb-fucks
In theory, Ross Scott is (or at least was) trying to get something done about this. https://youtu.be/tUAX0gnZ3Nw?si=acNlZLK8MRqKWwgh
If people stopped renting games developers would start selling them again. Until then, the incentive is for them to keep pulling this nonsense.
There's a difference between a game having online elements, such as a MMO, and games that require a connection just so they can keep charging you. Even in the first case though, you should own the client, and ideally it either has a single player mode, or the developer releases the code for a basic server when they shut it down.
That's why I stated that it should be illegal to promise product while selling a undefined time limited license, there should be a clear minimum time stated when you "buy a subscription" for (single player?) games.
Fair, stating a time-to-live when you're paying might make some people think twice. At this point though, I think people need to just not be paying unless they get to keep it permanently. Paying for access to the online portion is fine, but the rest should keep working and you should be able to get your data out of the developer's system.
And this is why I only buy games that I can load on a PC and play without an internet connection.
Why should a developer be forced to forfeit their source code just because they don't want to sell their game any longer?
If people focused on DRM-free games instead, this wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
Don't let Meta metastasize.
I think illegal might be a little bit too far
I read more, and I changed my mind. I think it's fair to require games to state a minimum time frame of support. Like say, a year. And if they cancel the game before then, you get a full refund including microtransactions etc.
"You know that thing you legally purchased? We're taking it away and you're not getting your money back."
Someone is very addicted to Facebook games rofl
Image Transcription:
A message from Meta Quest with a picture of quadrupedal orange alien with purple spots down its spine and large green eyes named Bogo from the Oculus Quest experience of the same name. Below the image is the text:
"Hi Kolorafa,
We are reaching out to let you know that Bogo will no longer be supported as of Friday, March 15, 2024. You may continue to wave at, pet, and feed Bogo on your Quest device until 11:59 PM PT on that date.
We admit we've gotten attached to the little guy too! There's still time to grab that just-slightly-out-of-reach fruit one last time. Bogo will appreciate it. And so will we. 🐾 🎆
Thanks,
The Meta Quest team"
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
But then how can they force you to buy a new one?
I appreciate the sentiment around preservation, but there's an argument to be made that if you make something, you should get to decide if you want to destroy it. Banksy did something like this recently by destroying one of his pieces of art when it went up for auction.
@Kushan so you're saying they should be able to take your money and then destroy what you bought with out any sort of warning or compensation right? I strongly disagree with you if that's what you're saying.
This is more like if it was successfully sold at auction, and THEN banksy destroyed it after taking the money.
No no, not at all - I agree with you, if you sell something to someone you shouldn't be able to just take it back arbitrarily.
However, OP is talking about forcing companies to open source something they created - and while I love open source and am a big supporter of it, I don't think that's necessarily right either.
I don't believe in that at all, human lives and the feelings associated with them are finite, the appreciation of art lasts as long as the canvas does which can be hundreds to thousands of years depending on what it is. The feelings they feel as the artist aren't significant on that time-frame and whatever respect I have for them is irrelevant in that context. I believe in preservation even against the will of creators because it benefits future generations, for the same reason historical knowledge does and their feelings today do not.
People have told me I'd feel different if it was my art but not really (I find that argument incredibly presumptuous and condescending which is why I'm acknowledging them here before anyone has the chance to make them as some kind of comeback), I recognize the value of art and the fact that just like these other artists I won't be around forever either.
I agree with your sentiment that a creator should have control over their work. However. I do feel that an art piece which can only exist in one form is different from commercial mass media. Mainly because you start getting in to an "original vs a copy" territory. While I believe an owner of something should have control over copyrights...once someone legally owns a "copy" of something that copy should be theirs since the owner made the mass media thing for the public to consume I believe the public should, at some point, have a say in the future trajectory of the product, after all it is still the public who "decide" if a product is good and will be remembered, and they even "decide" the value of the product as well.
Art is usually only made for a select few to own...it is "artisanal"...meanwhile video games are made for a much larger group...
The Banksy example is also bad because they didn't take anything away from anyone, just sold something that would change form after sale. And they knew that this stunt would only increase the art's value going in.
Do you really defend that kind of right?
That's not what I'm defending at all.
That's completely different? Also the owner still had an art piece. Just a destroyed one. That was arguably worth more.
Motor City Online all over again
I concur
wtf is this this is impossible
Edit2: Jesus people, please engage with the actual argument... not some strawman argument I didn't make.
I must be missing something here.
Edit: I do think that abandonware should be opensourced at some point... but I don't understand this level of entitlement.
Maybe I'm just missing some crucial info, but an amusement park seems like a fundamentally different thing than software.
It's the designs and schematics part that makes them equivalent.
It still doesn't seem entirely equivalent to me. We're not talking about them giving out the source code. We're talking about how shit it is that something like software already installed on your computer just no longer will work.
Or let's use your analogy; why not just abandon the facility instead of shutting it down and chasing everyone away?
Like, don't get me wrong. I understand that this is the nature about always online stuff and that it can always be closed down like a theme park, but I feel the conversation is more about "why did they design this like a theme park without an abandonment clause instead of a shut-down clause. Historically, most other theme parks have been fine with being abandoned"
And I mean, I'll agree with you that it's nothing new, we saw it with Overwatch 1 and countless others, but I feel it's a conversation one should be able to have without it being dismissed?
(I may have read too much into your comment, but it felt like it was dismissing it as a non-issue since theme parks work like this, when this is not a theme park)
Just in case you missed it in the op:
After reading the rest of your comment, you are reading the wrong thing from it, the physical parts of the amusement park would be the extant binaries you already have. They still run the same as they did before, but without maintenance they will deteriorate and become non-functional or only partially operational. In an online system there are server bits that might not be available to the end user and those pieces also need an operator.
To make a slightly more specific analogy, with a water park we could imagine a separate water treatment facility that would need to be run to keep the water in the water park safe. That treatment facility could also have plans and schematics.
The actual facilities in these cases are not independently valuable in the software case. It's the plans and schematics (the source code) that has value... but in both cases you only need the facilities and operators/maintenance to allow people to attend the water park/play the game.
Could the game company also give away a physical treatment plants so that an independent organization could buy their own servers and run their own game servers so that they could still play in their own private water parks? Sure.
Should they? Maybe. But it's specifically the entitlement to the plans/schematics that gets me...
I understand the point now. Thank you! Good explanation!
You can't compare a one time ticket to an amusment park to a purchased product tho, that's just a bad analogy...
I didn't.
Good analogy. The battle shouldn't be about forcing abandonware to be opensource. We should focus on DRM, it makes games almost impossible to play when servers shut down.
OP should have compared it to other medias such as movies. When you buy a box copy, you expect it to work long after the authors/studios/etc. are gone.
The issue is about the lack of legal ways to play older games as time moves on. It will only grow bigger in the next few years with even more games relying on DRM and online servers.
This is a good distinction.
Online only play models are difficult for the consumer. I personally don't play that many online only games for partly this reason... and partly because I don't play many online games at all.
It's not a good analogy. Buying a one time use ticket to an amusement park is a very different thing than purchasing a game.
A better analogy would be buying a season pass to an amusement park, which then abruptly shuts down 3 months later.
That's not the analogy I gave.
That's my point, your analogy was a bad one so I made a new one.
No. I didn't make the analogy you claimed I did. You strawman'd my argument and made one you like.
Well then, whatever argument you're making, which I note you refuse to elaborate on, you're missing the point.
Why would I need to elaborate on an argument I didn't make? I don't understand? I made my argument, if you don't understand it, I don't know what you don't understand?
What are you misunderstanding?
It doesn't matter. Whatever argument you're making, you're missing the point of the OP.
Because the analogy I drew was in line with the OP. And you said you were making a totally different argument. So whatever argument you're making is irrelevant.
What?
My argument directly engaged with the original post that game developers should be forced to open source their software. The analogy you made has nothing to do with open source software, it has to do with payment models...
Edit: and ops position doesn't make any claims about payment models...
The underlying analogy was totally wrong though because it misses the point of why people are so angry about it. The payment model is integral to understanding the entire point of the discussion.
What?
You are even more wrong.
Bogo is a free game. What is wrong with you?
There are two kinds of people in this world
Those who are able to extrapolate from incomplete data