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All online games should have an offline function added 60 days before end.
Alternatively, self-hosted server option.
They should have this option upon release, that way people can play older builds and if the company goes bankrupt, the customers won’t be left with nothing.
Is there a reason why any new launch shouldn’t have a self host option from the start? Company servers can be used for tournaments, events, ranked matchmaking, anti-cheat, cross platform, etc. But why can’t self-hosted servers be an option in parallel? Then it would be a non-issue for when the studio servers go eol.
Money and control. There is no technical reason, and in fact it would be easier to just let people host their own servers.
Allowing self-hosting used to be the norm for online games. Businesses realized a long time ago that gamers stopped having standards and would accept any abuse to not be left out of the hype.
Because people would use the self-hosted servers to route around the company’s rent seeking and control, and they might make less money. The compromise here is, if the game would be deleted anyway, they don’t even have that much of a justification.
I get that that is how management types think, but Minecraft clearly demonstrates that both can exist side by side very profitably.
Right. It can and has been done before while still turning a profit. People can, did, and still do use self-hosting as a way to play things for free. It has never been the reason for why a game failed financially, though. Most people just don’t have the knowledge or the interest to go through the extra steps required to play for free. A lot of them buy things because they genuinely wanted to support the developers.
The abuse is the point. The people in charge spend every day figuring out more ways to take power away from people and give it to the corporation. It’s an art and a science at this point.
Doesn’t Minecraft have its own controversies with Microsoft imposing various forms of direct control over ostensibly private servers? Anyway it’s obviously a special case regardless because of the unusually expansive modding community. It’s hypothetically possible for games to have a private server friendly business model, but the trend has been for the biggest successes to have a freemium business model which arguably would make less money if they offered private servers (because people would use them as a way to avoid the exploitative bullshit the game is trying to profit from).
Not to say that such a requirement would be bad for videogames. It’s just clearly a much bigger fight if companies have reason to believe a law is a potential financial threat to them, and they would have much more reason to think that with a private server requirement that isn’t limited to EOL games.
Probably because
Both of these things are tracked server-side, and so could be spoofed by a 3rd party server.
The headline was a real rollercoaster