• @qjkxbmwvz@startrek.websiteEnglish
    23•2 months ago

    Unfortunately, I think there is no real way around companies killing games. Because as shitty as this is, is it worse than every game which doesn’t intend to comply simply selling the game as a service instead? I doubt that could realistically be made illegal.

    In other words, one way of complying would simply be to only sell a 1-mo. “lease” to your game. You don’t own it, and at some point they stop selling more leases, and then kill the game. You never owned it to begin with, so you didn’t lose anything; you are no longer a customer. Of course…this is just describing a shitty subscription system.

    That said: I think it would be a good start for companies to be required to list earliest end-of-support date. You already get this with many hardware vendors (enterprise network gear won’t be supported forever).

    • @big_slap@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22•2 months ago

      one way of complying would simply be to only sell a 1-mo. “lease” to your game. You don’t own it, and at some point they stop selling more leases, and then kill the game.

      I prefer this route, to be completely honest with you. it will be easier for me to tell which games are just trying to suck dollars out of me and which games want me to just have fun.

    • @s12@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      16•2 months ago

      Yeah. Having to make it clear that they’re services would be great.

      It would make people more informed about what they’re getting, and give games that the devs intend to be sold and kept a way to stand out as such.

    • @LwL@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2•2 months ago

      I’d be fine with a minimum support time if an end of life date is not made clear when buying. Say a game has to be able to run for at least one more year after purchasing unless there is an explivit warning about the planned shut down date. That would at least seem reasonable to me.

      Of course the optimum would be requiring either offline functionality, or, even better, enabling fans to host their own servers once the official ones shut down. That way games could be preserved for much longer.

      But at the very least, people shouldn’t lose access after an unreasonably short time.