This is true. I've been grieving the loss of Isekai Demon Waifu, which shut down only a few days ago on the 19th of this month. I had been playing it over 3 years, and had unlocked most of the girls, become the #1 on my server, and had grown attached to seeing my harem girls every night when I play the game before bed. I missed the server shutdown notification and I was messed up the next day. It hit me hard.

I hope there is another harem game with succubi and monster girls. IDW had a lot of charm. The music, art style, aesthetic. Amazing monster girls. I'm going to miss seeing Ephinas, Fiadum, Hastia, Scardia, Palotti, Ymir, and all the others.

It doesn't seem fair that we can spend years of our life, hundreds or even thousands of dollars, make a game experience part of our lives, and then one day it just goes poof and it's all gone. Part of you vanishes in that moment. It's like a bandaid being ripped off a wound, or a light in your life going out. Because someone else decided it cost too much to keep a server running?

They should be required to transition the game into an offline mode!

[–] slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 6 points 40 minutes ago (1 children)

I can't tell if this is satire or not.

[–] Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net 2 points 8 minutes ago

Given the username I'd guess not. Good username btw

[–] Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 8 points 2 hours ago

They should be required to transition the game into an offline mode!

Seems to me like this would be good business sense too. Wouldn't people be more likely to buy their next online game if you felt there was a good chance you could keep playing it after a few years? Instead they're going to get a reputation for making products with a short shelf life.

[+] RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works -13 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

You paid this money knowing you do not have the ability to run the game. Why does the developer have the obligation to change the user agreement you signed off on when you created your account? You chose to play a game that you cannot run yourself.

[–] isekaihero@ani.social 12 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

That's weasel speak. Hiding behind a user agreement is a pathetic excuse for bad behavior on the part of the developer. The developer decides what is in that agreement. It can be changed at any time, and 'but you agreed to this" is a poor excuse for laziness and disrespect for the community that supported them for so many years.

Transitioning the game into an offline mode could be done with some development time spent on a final update. Take out the multiplayer stuff, let the game run offline, and put the game up for sale as an idler for like $5 or $10. It might not make much money but it lets players continue to play a game that they love. It shows that you as a developer care about your product and the customers who have supported you for so long.

[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 3 points 44 minutes ago

Weasling out of things is what separates us from the animals... except the weasel of course.

[–] Ksin@lemmy.world 24 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

It's astonishing to me how even right here on Lemmy so many people still misunderstand what this is about with comments saying that piracy fixes it or that downloading the game installer solves the issue. The games where those things are options aren't what this effort is about, this is about games like Darkspore, Defiance, Tabula Rasa, and our prototypical example The Crew, where there is no one who can play them no matter where, how, or when, they acquired the game, it is impossible to play for anyone, the whole piece of art has been destroyed.

Honestly if we can't even communicate what the movement is about to those who aught to be our base it really does not bode well for gaining any kind of wider traction.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 1 points 34 minutes ago

In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they'll never actually die, unless the server source code gets taken down and nobody archives a copy. I mean, WoW Classic only happened because a private server running vanilla got too big, despite Blizzard bullshit of "You think you want it, but you don't" and "We don't have the code to roll back".

Star Wars Galaxies, Phantasy Star Online, City of Heroes, Warhammer Age of Reckoning all still exist and can be played, despite being "dead", thanks to private/pirate servers.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I think the issue is that, as with reddit, a lot of people are only reading the headline and commenting.

[–] AgentRocket@feddit.org 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Also many young people are so used to games requiring online connection and being shut down, that they can't imagine a better way.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 53 minutes ago)

That does seem to be an influence, though oddly there are some modern wildly popular games, Minecraft being a prime example, that still allow you to self host your own server, so it shouldn't really be as foreign of a concept as it appears to be to some younger folk.

[–] RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works -3 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

The thing is when you created your account you agreed to the fact that it isn't your game. What you agreed to was a game that they own and control and you can participate in. You might not like the results when they close the game but you chose to start playing that game to begin with.

[–] Ksin@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago

You're damn right I don't like it, I especially don't like how it destroys art history, which is why I'm part of this campaign to make that practice illegal.

[–] Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 2 hours ago

People aren't used to this as a concept, especially when there are so many terms and conditions screens (that have been shown in multiple jurisdictions courts to not be legally binding) they click through on a daily basis as well as many other "as a service" models that are reliable enough that people don't realise what the pitfalls are (people playing for Netflix are fairly certain it won't close next week, for instance), even the more technically minded expect sunset clauses - which would be a pretty good legal baseline to improve the situation.

[–] atlien51@lemm.ee -5 points 3 hours ago

Good.

[–] heyWhatsay@slrpnk.net 14 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I boycott single player games that require online login/validation. Rockstar and Ubisoft are on my blacklist

[–] docmark@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

I returned Red Dead Redemption 2 on steam after seeing I needed an entire Shitstar account.

5 years ago I would have just forgotten about it and moved on but in today's climate, fuck em. They don't even deserve my $1.40.

[–] randomaside@lemmy.dbzer0.com 65 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Piracy is essentially a form of archivism. The digital age literally ended scarcity in digital media and these people were like "well that won't do".

[–] RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

For sone of these games piracy would solve nothing. How wouldI run an 8vs8 PvP mission in DCUO that players are required to do if there aren't 16 players on the server? If Im hosting it offline that content is still dead.

[–] Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Private WoW servers thrived. Much of the endgame content required 40 players to collaborate for hours at a time, and they have kept their own dream running for well over a decade.

You should have the option to find and play with others long after corporate servers are abandoned. Whether or not there are other players immediately available is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Edit - and you're all over this thread licking boots and saying "you signed the agreement!"

Thanks. We know how license agreements work. They are included in the thing we want to change, when we talk about changing the industry. We want to stop allowing bullshit license agreements. The exact same way many of us want Right to Repair for people who bought tractors with proprietary software.

[–] cheers_queers@lemm.ee 80 points 15 hours ago

Im honestly so sick of online games that should be offline. I just got a few switch games to pass time on my breaks, and half of them require internet access. One of them is literally a bubble shooter.

[–] Fandangalo@lemmy.world 29 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Out of the games I’ve been fortunate to work on, 1/7 require internet, and the 1 was my first industry job as QA. Everything else has been mobile, online required. 5/7 are no longer playable / removed from the internet.

It makes me sad because my kids will never play a bunch of things I made. I can’t revisit them nostalgically. If I had made something in the 90s, it would be preserved still.

I played the cards dealt to me to follow a dream and make a living, but I wish the industry wasn’t like this. The money has always been a role, but nowadays, it’s distorted so badly.

[–] Sunsofold 1 points 50 minutes ago

That's the difference shareholders make.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 19 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Gotta save up for some hard drives to download and keep my GOG games, plus some ~~pirated~~ totally legally acquired titles

[–] Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 7 points 10 hours ago

I call em full version demos. Specifically because I buy when it's good. The 2 hour steam thing sometimes, just isn't enough to really know. It usually is tho.

[–] CubitOom@infosec.pub 43 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Link to the games list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1at1k7qIo5dgPp6K1aCrYIyAgNOjY-IhF
Link to the European Citizens' Initiative: eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home stopkillinggames.com

[–] Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works 15 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Two more months to go and more than 50% left to reach 1 million signatures. It's sad to see that with how many people game, this petition has so little reach. I guess we'll have to wait till Fortnite is shut down, then suddenly many more will care that their childhood game is gone forever.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

I don't know if I fully agree with the petition, but I do think that there are some real problems with the status quo.

I also think that either a legislature or courts need to provide legal criteria for the good or service division with games. I think that there probably need to be "good" games, "serviceʾ games, and possibly even games that have a component of both.

But I'm not in the EU or UK.

I also am kind of puzzled by this:

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

Isn't the law on this already settled?

A: It mostly is within the United States, but not in many other countries.

It doesn't sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:

https://www.carltonfields.com/insights/podcasts/lan-party-lawyers/youve-been-served-legal-effects-games-as-service

Of course, case law has never really been settled on whether games are goods or services. Right, Steve?

Steve Blickensderfer: No. No, I haven't been able to figure this out one way or the other looking at the cases.

A few quick searches haven't picked up US case law, if it's out there.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 7 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

It doesn’t sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:

The creator of the Stop Killing Games campaign did a segment about the viability of fighting it in the US in a segment here: https://youtu.be/DAD5iMe0Xj4?t=1097

tl:dr, the motivated lawyer he talked with on it eventually found a court case that set a precedent that would be extremely difficult to fight in such a pro-corporate court system without extreme amounts of legal funds.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 9 points 12 hours ago

Unfortunately, I think it was just a lack of awareness that the petition in existed in certain countries where Ross just didn't have enough reach, possibly due to language barriers. A big push from native speakers of those countries with large audiences, like streamers, could've pushed it over the edge.

[–] rabber@lemmy.ca 20 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

that's why i dont buy digital games on nintendo. one day the service ends and it's gone forever.

[–] leave_it_blank@lemmy.world 9 points 12 hours ago

That's why I only buy games on GOG. After purchase I archive the installer, and it's mine forever. On console you are really fucked.

[–] pdqcp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not buying Nintendo at all, so many shitty policies from that camp

[–] SpaceDuck@feddit.org 26 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, trusting that anything Internet connected keeps working is a pipedream these days unfortunately.

Hardware and software.

[–] Quill7513@slrpnk.net 16 points 14 hours ago

I don't even trust non-unlockable bootloaders. There's so much planned obsolescence everywhere