this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
360 points (99.2% liked)
Games
32473 readers
1105 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I really hope that governments, especially the EU, recognise the isse server shutdowns and games being lost to history poses. It should be illegal for companies to make your already purchased games unplayable if not community hosted alternatives exist.
On that note it should also be fully legal to emulate and freely distribute any game that isn't on sale anymore. Years of cultural history are being destroyed for corporate profit.
I don't really expect a business to be forced to run a game in perpetuity, but at least they shouldn't be allowed to C&D you from doing it if they aren't.
They would never have such expectation if they simply allowed players to host it to begin with. This used to be the norm, until companies figured out that it's easier to control, monetize and force obsolescence to push players into a newer product if they are the only ones hosting servers.
I'm a developer. It's work to do anything, code doesn't grow on the LLM tree yet. That's a feature that would have to be implemented. Anything you ask the business to put effort in is a negative to the cause (and the cause is good), something for the businesses to latch onto to stop the law from changing.
The best argument you can make is 'let us figure it out, just don't sue us'. Anything else you get is a blessing.
It's work to do anything, but we routinely see small indie studios managing to release player-hosted games just fine, while large studios don't bother. Even though it also costs them more to run all the servers on their own. So I'm not so sure it's just a matter of saving costs.
I agree. Hell, older games could be put on digital stores right now. The PS3 had a ton of PS1 emulated classics, and even then there were a bunch left off for unknown (or licensing) reason.
What any corporation hears: