>Frustratingly, despite a large portion of the game being doable in singleplayer, The Crew remained an online-only endeavour throughout its decade-long lifespan.
This is the part which is most relevant and a reason to stay clear of "online only" releases if your main interest is single-player.
Somewhat related: GoG had to withdraw the recent games of the (singleplayer) Hitman series when customers realised many important features depended on Internet connectivity.
How things progressed to the point that they released it in that state, I don't know.
as the article alludes to this should be next thing on the agenda for the EU. Users should have a guarantee that access to any software that runs offline can't be revoked and it'd probably be a good idea, just like with the gatekeeper legislation, have a requirement for publishers over a certain size to keep old software available, or if they can't do this or go out of business having to open source it.
I hope the EU also applies this law retroactively and with fines that are a percentage of global revenue. Also it’s worth piercing the veil of limited liability for fraud.
I'm pretty sure this is already covered by DIRECTIVE (EU) 2019/770. You purchase "Digital content" from the company; regardless of how they word it (like saying it is a license) while you are making your purchase this law defines it. You may also purchase digital service with an ongoing subscription fee. They render your content unusable, putting them in violation of Article 5, 7 and possibly 8. The preferred remedy is that they make it usable again or failing that provide a refund.
The only real way around this is for the game to be free to play, or fully subscription based from the beginning. Then it is classified by this directive as a digital service. However, if they sell digital content like skins or other items then it again is covered as a digital good even if only used within the service (unless the purchase is actually declared time limited at the moment of purchase). In any case they would need to tell you the length of time for which you are purchasing service.
If you are in the EU, demand a refund under this directive or that they supply you with the content you purchased. If you don't get a refund, issue a chargeback if your credit card company is willing.
"acting as a stark reminder of how volatile digital ownership is"
Okay I'm gonna say out loud what people are thinking, just pirate videogames.
These companies are comfortable with taking away ownership of a product we paid for when they feel like, they broke the social contract, just take their shit.
This is wrong, digital ownership isn't volatile at all. I have software I can do whatever I want with, including copy it. The problem is when we're actually renting but it's being marketed as ownership.
We need laws that say "if your software can stop functioning if a company goes under, without a technical reason, you can't say 'buy', you can only say 'rent'".
The point is these companies should legally be restricted from using terms like “buy” or “purchase” wherever their game is sold. Instead they should be required to use terms like “lease” or “rent”. The common understanding of terms like “buy” or “purchase” is that you own the item. This is clearly not the case for nearly all games consumers lease today.
I'm not sure I see a difference between renting and subscribing, with regards to software. I do know, however, that I hate both models because both seek to milk the user for all they are worth.
That clarity is the point, though not the ultimate goal. If you understand from the start the ways in which you can be screwed, then you’ll think harder before giving them money and may refrain from doing so. Which in turn hurts their profit, which in turns makes them reconsider the business model.
But it translates to "real world" writing very poorly. "Pay for this game now!" "Revocably license for $N". Hope these examples aren't too contrived, in my head they all sound so if I replace the standard "Buy" as a call-to-action.
Is it? I know cancerous companies like EA and Ubisoft do that, but are they actually the majority? I’m not a mainstream gamer, so I really can’t tell. None of the games I play require an internet connection.
I've been saying for years that copyright should have a mandatory escrow, just like patents. If you want to apply for long-term copyright, an original copy should be stored somewhere like a national library. That copy is not allowed to be encrypted or otherwise protected either (at least not with a key that's not available to the escrow party).
> We need laws that say "if your software can stop functioning if a company goes under, without a technical reason, you can't say 'buy', you can only say 'rent'".
No, we really don't, because the only thing this will accomplish is make them change the "buy" button to a "rent" or "subscribe" button. People will pay for it anyway, because most of them don't care. Things like Game Pass have already gone a long way in normalizing the renting of digital games, and digital media in general is slowly moving towards a subscription-only future. Almost nobody buys music and movies anymore, for example.
If the problem is to actually be solved, we need to stop this shift towards an online-only subscription-based future entirely. Unfortunately, I don't think that's ever going to happen.
How do you make that assumption? I dodn't expect one of a comic collection or classic transformers to disappear in a few years, other than theft. Which is what this more closely resembles in practical terms.
I don’t find that clear at all. “My collection” implies I own it so it’s back to square one. Plus your wording is too long for a button and doesn’t make it clear at all that money will exchange hands.
There's a non-zero chance that a mandatory change in the user-facing language allows them to set reasonable expectations after parting with some of their money will result in more users choosing to support content which they actually will own
The medical industry often has contractual obligations to post the source code, dependencies and instructions for building the software to a third party escrow service. In case of bankruptcy this source code is then released to the customers.
Maybe software copyright should expire when a company dies, making all source code they owned public domain.
> Maybe software copyright should expire when a company dies
Why just bankruptcy? I'd say any software copyright should cease when the owner cannot or will not continue supporting the software to work to the level of functionality from purchase or at discontinuation, whichever is higher.
So even if a company still operates but isn't keeping your purchased software working (as-is operation, not security patches or new features) at least at the level from when you bought it or when it was discontinued, then the software should become open under reasonable conditions. Free for personal use, maybe a reasonable licensing cost for companies who want to keep supporting it commercially.
There are probably many corner cases that would need to be addressed to not become a vehicle for abuse but it would be a good start towards not making software unnecessarily obsolete.
The counter-argument would be that game code includes valuable IP including frameworks, models, and so on, some of which might still be in use in other games.
Software is inherently fragile and dependent on surrounding technology. Buy a hammer, get a hammer. Buy (rent) software, you get something that only works on a specific combination of hardware and OS, perhaps only with certain libraries, packages, and other extras installed.
So even with open code the game will still stop being supported on new platforms, probably quite quickly.
How do they ensure the posted build instructions and software actually work? In case of release, if it turns out to not work, you’re still out of luck. I don’t think this is practical unless “can be made to work independently” is already publicly verifiable when the software is first issued. Which of course won’t happen because it would immediately be pirated.
That's what "digital ownership" is these days. The companies will outright tell you that you are "purchasing an item" and that you "own it" in your library. But will bury deep in ToS that it's a revocable license. That is the status quo of digital ownership. This is what it means in the context of reality.
If you contort the "digital ownership" definition to mean that you properly own things, you are right. But that is not the definition we go by.
And that's the issue. The word "ownership" has a very long history, it existed long before "digital" did. We need to get rid of the twisted terms and go back to calling a spade a spade.
Well, hate to be a devils advocate but the entirety of The Crew was designed from the very start as an MMO-like experience with your session hosted on a server. It's not like the game was built as a single player experience and then Ubisoft HQnsaid "you know what guys, make it online only because that will make us more money". Ivory Tower wanted to build a permanently online car MMO-like game from the start. Arguably they didn't have to build it that way, but if that's the creative vision then I wouldn't say it's wrong. What's wrong is shutting down the servers.
> I can now confirm that local save data functionality is indeed built into all our copies and is not absent from the game, we have even obtained a sample save data file. This + the fact that we literally see offline mode in action in the prologue means that there 100% is an offline mode, if anyone was doubting at this point.
Not only would most of the game not require an internet connection to function, but people actually found out that the game already contains an official offline mode but Ubisoft couldn't even be bothered to make it available.
The fact that the word "piracy" is somehow re-used for copyright infringement is one of the largest victories in language wars of the 20th century. It's Orwellian double speak at its best. Everyone know we are not talking about actual pirates raiding someone goods, but we use it none the less.
The intense irony of this is that piracy was often sanctioned by nations during times of war in the 18th and 19th century. It gave them an option to conduct commerce raiding without the need for an explicit expansion of their navy. It could even be considered patriotic.
I see some (including RMS) get hung up on the term "piracy", even though for most people the word pirate is not really associated with real-world crime and criminals, its a fun cartoonish thing, Jolly Roger hat, eyepatch, hook hand, wooden leg, parrot on the shoulder, arrr etc. They don't think of pirates on the Somalian coast holding AK47s.
Digital "ownership" isn't really ownership even when the companies aren't being assholes because you can't resell the thing. Hardly anyone noticed this ability being taken away, but back in the day, the secondary market for games on physical media, especially console games, was huge. It was much more affordable to buy a pre-owned game than a new one, with no downsides.
This has also led to the preservation of many of the games I grew up with. There's still a market for NES and Atari consoles and a market for the cartridges because you can still play and use them.
It's going to be a very different story for modern consoles.
All current-generation consoles do still take physical media, but yeah, there already are some smaller games that only come as digital. For those, I guess, piracy is the only way they could be preserved.
If you should ever bother too look into your end user license agreements (EULA), you'd know you never owned anything to begin with. Nothing was ever sold to you. You acquired a license to use the product under the specified terms set forth in the EULA. If the terms of this license agreement don't sit right with you, I suggest you don't take the deal.
And what exactly have you bought then? I mean beyond hopefully a physical medium, the right to use that software in perpetuity and to transfer that software to others?
Every time this comes up someone in the comments pops up to smugly remind us that the EULA says we, as consumers, don't have rights. Why are you like this? Everyone knows we don't have rights. That's why we're complaining.
You clearly have rights and you clearly have a choice: You can for example say no to this kind of software and not license it. You could also accept that you will only be able to use the software fully for a limited time and be fine with paying for that.
What is striking me as quite disingenuous though is the loud complaining when the manufacturer does what was made clear right from the start. As if somehow a betrayal or theft was happening here which clearly isn't the case.
Could you please not break the site guidelines like this? We have to ban accounts that post this way. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.
Ahh yes, EULAs are known for their stark clarity and ease of reading and understanding. They totally do not employ any dark patterns or intentionally mislead people. That would never happen.
Any agreement can't supersede laws. At least in my country. So I don't really care whatever EULA says, when I have bought something, and it was taken from me, I want it back or a refund.
Is it the EU? A lot of people feel that the particular action of Ubisoft of shutting down their online service and thus making their game unplayable should violate some EU law, but I can't find anyone actually pointing to a particular law.
If the law ever changes you may have a better chance. Or such games will not be published in the first place.
I haven't read it, but someone else here mentioned Directive (EU) 2019/770 (... on certain aspects concerning contracts for the supply of digital content and digital services)
It's kind of buried in the article, so probably worth pointing out the "Stop Killing Games" campaign, which will tell you what you can do[0] depending on where you live and whether you own "The Crew": https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
(Admittedly, if you live in the US and don't own "The Crew", what you can do is not much. But if you live in, say, France or Australia and own it, they have a fair bit for you to do!)
[0]In terms of stopping this sort of thing legally, rather than in terms of keeping your own copy playable via cracking, etc.
It is not fucking with video games. It is governments forcing companies to respect customers, it is literally the job of governments. The same way car makers were forced to put seatbelts in all cars.
I completely agree. OP probably doesn't want governments meddling, like forcing companies to provide _clean_ drinking water. Or provide citizens with housing rights. Or stop companies dumping toxic waste...
There are very few laws that protect the average person, and they should be embraced where ever possible. Who cares that a billion dollar company has to keep a few GB available to download and patch their game to remove DRM when they've themselves decided to stop supporting the game (and thus surely don't care about sales?). That's all it would take to not be complete dicks to consumers.
>like forcing companies to provide _clean_ drinking water. Or provide citizens with housing rights. Or stop companies dumping toxic waste...
Unlike those, vidja gaemz don't cause physical harm upon anyone. It's one thing to regulate asbestos, it's another to suggest regulating something of ultimately no consequence.
The way I see it, someone is going to meddle with your freedom either way. The only choice you have is if that's going to be the government (which would hopefully lean more towards your side) or private profit-driven companies (which are happy to sacrifice you for every penny).
Somehow I cannot really match "stronger consumer rights" with "authoritarian government". If anything, experience tells us that real authoritarian governments care very little for the consumer and a whole lot for big corp.
I'm waiting for the day that a company decides that prolonging the usability of an old game on physical media is robbing them of income they would make if you bought the new version.
Eg, a game developer suing people who make patches or utilities to run old games on new hardware - or even to provide say, multiplayer support, for old hardware. Or whatever.
Like, Nintendo would love to sell you the same game over and over again every 5 years. Could they consider it "theft" if I decided I wanted to keep playing my NES copy of Mario instead of buying a Nintendo Switch and the Switch version? XD
That's unlikely to occur but you're forgetting that every platform, including Nintendo is trending towards online shops... And these can simply remove the option to download the games, making the devices effectively e-waste.
So yes, they're going to make playing games on old platforms you've bought them on impossible unless they're already installed, forcing users to purchase them again.
It's just a side effect of phasing out physical media that store the game in favor of digital marketplaces
Worth noting is that playing these reverse-engineered versions of the game still required the original assets which would be obtained by buying the broken games on Steam.
R* Games, which is owned by Take-Two, shortly after released the remastered "Definitive Edition" versions of the games, which today sell for $59.99, as opposed to about $2 per game before ($6 in total).
So effectively that's what they've been doing, but no one in the games industry or adjacent can stand up to T2's legal bullying, which goes beyond this.
> Eg, a game developer suing people who make patches or utilities to run old games on new hardware - or even to provide say, multiplayer support, for old hardware. Or whatever.
Fun fact: in Russia it's totally legal and there's a law that explicitly allows "adaptation" of software to run on your hardware.
I heard that this deletion was done to remove game files from people’s computers - maybe so they don’t hack the game to make it playable offline??
But they aren’t the first.
Bungie (then part of Activision) famously deleted the original campaign Destiny 2 shipped with and did the same to subsequent expansions one by one, claiming that older content took up too much space on people’s drives or some other excuse.
> claiming that older content took up too much space on peoples drives or some other excuse.
Well which is it?
I've worked on games where we've stripped old content in a patch. Like code, content has a cost to maintain it. If we update an Uber shader do we need to keep a branch for ever for that one edge case of an asset that we know 11 people out of our 1 million players use?
The flip side is that when we don't strip content, we get accused of being lazy or incompetent - see any thread on patching or updating games here for what I'm talking about.
> If we update an Uber shader do we need to keep a branch for ever for that one edge case of an asset that we know 11 people out of our 1 million players use?
Yes, I would think you do need to keep it. It’s content people paid for already.
Ubisoft for me turned from a corp I'd describe as: "don't have any opinion on them, but sometimes their logo shows up in a game I enjoy" to a corp: "actively avoid their products even if I think I might get some joy out of them".
But I guess that is the fate of all business MBAs: To reach the short term gains they need to get those bonuses, you think you have to exhaust some less easily quantifiable resource, be it quality, reputation, nature, workers, health, safety or whatever — until one day that intangible debt stacks high enough for it to collapse in catastrophic fashion. But guess what: Just make sure that you are no longer working there by that point and nobody will hold you accountable, and you got your bonuses for selling the contents of the first aid kit.
The MBA theory is a limited take. The broader take is that these companies have become bloated with mediocre talent in the era of highly leveraged investment in the games industry, when "money was cheap".
It made good business sense (MBA or otherwise) to churn out safe mediocre games that have modest returns, like 250mil game would return 400mil. Although arguably the same game could have been made for 50mil in a smaller team with more exceptional talent, like in the 2000s where ROI on games was much higher on average. But the low ROI method was low-risk and repeatable. That is why around 2010, after the financial crisis when the world was showered in low interest rates, the games industry largely stopped innovating.
The "brute force" method for making games with very large teams where managing them has become almost impossible (most people in the AAA companies know what I'm talking about) is no longer sustainable now that money is no longer cheap. What is worse, executives in game companies have leaned into this model over the years, laying off expensive, very experienced talented staff and replacing each with 3-5 graduates. The 3-5 graduates can pump out more content for a mediocre game, the 1 experienced developer with decades of institutional knowledge could make a game that would perform exceptionally well, but not as reliably (this industry used to be called "hit-driven"). Layoffs did target the most expensive staff in many companies, by the way. This will come to light eventually.
So what can a game company that's all bought into this model do now? Many managers weren't even around in the 00s when the previous model worked. They don't know what to do. So they're panicking in various ways. Doing more layoffs, rushing games, upping the game prices, cutting support for old titles even if supporting them didn't cost that much.
But the industry has been over this once or twice. Notably in the 80s there was a shovelware games crash, then a lot of new small companies like Activision sprung up with small veteran teams and made great games in the 90s. This became the norm in the 00s, which saw the inception of many of the game titles we play today. The 10s paralleled the 80s, and we are heading towards a sort of crash or a soft crash now where the industry makes a lot of rushed shovelware. And those in games already know that many of their veteran colleagues are starting their own studios and working on very ambitious new projects that break the mould. None of this is new. Some of it is just new for people who haven't been around long enough.
But all in all, the MBA stuff is not seeing the forest for the trees. In the bigger picture, it's just a cycle. You can see it in all sorts of graphs, like ones that show average game quality over the last decades, and how the indie game sector is suddenly growing. Exactly like during and after the 80s crash.
I say, vote with your wallet. Buy more games from Ubisoft, I'm sure they have learned their lesson, and won't do any similar shenanigans again. Just like they did the last time. And the time before that. And...
Yeah, I'm always surprised that there are people that still buy Ubisoft games with the kind of reputation they not only have now, but had already for more than a decade now !
People need to realize that most of the things they buy are actually rented.
Same goes for Facebook pages, Spotify/Apple songs, Amazon books, Google/Apple developer accounts. If you don't really own it and can control it, it's not yours ;-)
This will get more ruthless over the years as the attention economy isn’t growing anymore.
It’s only a matter of time until publishers decide they can’t afford leaving people waste time that could be monetized by new titles on older, no longer monetizable titles
It’s as inevitable in capitalism as is making worse appliances to ensure future sales - Games operate in a weird state where competition isn’t possible - nobody can just offer a better version of the game
There are people in this thread equating consumer protections to "authoritarian governments". This is patently ridiculous. Consumer rights and protections (along with environmental protections) are probably the single greatest thing our governments provide citizenry. This is also being championed by the EU the most. Frankly I want my government to mandate I can't be screwed by the handful of hundred billion dollar companies more than I already am. "Market forces" are completely irrelevant when the entire industry is a one giant racketeering exercise.
Fortunately I can choose to only buy DRM free ebooks, and DRM free games, but this is < 1% of media available and certainly never the most popular titles.
This needs to change. There needs to be laws in place to protect consumers from this shitty behaviour - with or without DRM. Steam for all it's faults have said since day 1 than there is a mechanism in Steam to unlock all of your games should Valve go bankrupt: I'm not sure if this is true now they sell mainly over peoples' games. Steam also never remove the ability for you to download and play a game you have bought - even when the publishers have delisted and removed it from Steam.
As opposed to the tech industry as a whole where the biggest companies are basically data collection agencies subsidising
VC backed loss leading subscriptions?
We got a law here in Norway in 2021 that states that if you lose access to digital goods you have paid for the seller needs to fully refund you.
Now the laws here are not retroactive, so it only applies to digital goods bought after 2021.
It's also worth noting that any agreement that gives the consumer less rights than the law are invalid, so you can't just slap something in the eula to get around it. This also applies to things like forced arbitration etc.
I think this type of regulation is the only way to curb the practice.
I'm European, and generally support the idea of these kinds of regulations, but this is onerous if it is what you say. You're forcing people to indefinitely support an app against a moving target - that's fine on windows, but Mac has had two architecture changes in my career, browsers are ever moving targets. If a chrome update breaks my paid extension that you've used for 3 years, then im forced to refund you?
Yes you will refund him and then sue Google for breaking compatibility and damaging you in the process. Suddenly we will have incentive to keep backwards compatibility on all systems.
This sounds awful for everyone involved. No breaking APIs ever. How many man hours have been wasted supporting platforms that are dead for 20 years. Look at C++'s modules - they've taken 15 years to get to where we are now - they're still not usable because we're hamstrung by not ever breaking compatibility.
which is about when the seller revokes access to content you bought, it's not about what happens when your ability to consume the content is prevented by technical problems.
I think support is different. If you buy a game that requires a particular machine spec and OS, and then come back 10 years later with a different OS, that's not the developer failing to meet their "contract", it's you failing to run the game on a system of the required spec.
Now I do think there should be a carve out in the law to explicitly allow emulation, i.e. developers should not be allowed to prevent you using emulation, so that you have a reasonable path to continue using your content in the future.
134 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadThis is the part which is most relevant and a reason to stay clear of "online only" releases if your main interest is single-player.
How things progressed to the point that they released it in that state, I don't know.
https://www.eurogamer.net/gog-pulls-hitman-from-its-own-stor...
TBH if you give money to the likes of Ubisoft and EA you deserve your fate. I've stopped ages ago*.
* I don't even pirate their games. I have a backlog of legit bought games that will probably last me more than my natural life time.
The only real way around this is for the game to be free to play, or fully subscription based from the beginning. Then it is classified by this directive as a digital service. However, if they sell digital content like skins or other items then it again is covered as a digital good even if only used within the service (unless the purchase is actually declared time limited at the moment of purchase). In any case they would need to tell you the length of time for which you are purchasing service.
If you are in the EU, demand a refund under this directive or that they supply you with the content you purchased. If you don't get a refund, issue a chargeback if your credit card company is willing.
Okay I'm gonna say out loud what people are thinking, just pirate videogames. These companies are comfortable with taking away ownership of a product we paid for when they feel like, they broke the social contract, just take their shit.
We need laws that say "if your software can stop functioning if a company goes under, without a technical reason, you can't say 'buy', you can only say 'rent'".
which is the primary form of videogame ownership now.
Purchasing a subscription very clearly conveys the ultimately temporary and ephemeral nature of the purchase.
Note: I'm not saying this is necessarily a good or bad thing nor whether we should like or hate it, I'm merely pointing out a shift in market trends.
In theory.
But it translates to "real world" writing very poorly. "Pay for this game now!" "Revocably license for $N". Hope these examples aren't too contrived, in my head they all sound so if I replace the standard "Buy" as a call-to-action.
They’re advertising one transaction, but then holding you to another and hoping you won’t notice the legalese.
If this is the language they use then the “Buy” button in the online store should say “License” instead.
I'd agree with the parent in letting business models break, instead of people's sanity. Changing labelling laws would be more of a bandaid.
Also, being obliged to archive the whole thing properly.
No, we really don't, because the only thing this will accomplish is make them change the "buy" button to a "rent" or "subscribe" button. People will pay for it anyway, because most of them don't care. Things like Game Pass have already gone a long way in normalizing the renting of digital games, and digital media in general is slowly moving towards a subscription-only future. Almost nobody buys music and movies anymore, for example.
If the problem is to actually be solved, we need to stop this shift towards an online-only subscription-based future entirely. Unfortunately, I don't think that's ever going to happen.
Maybe software copyright should expire when a company dies, making all source code they owned public domain.
Why just bankruptcy? I'd say any software copyright should cease when the owner cannot or will not continue supporting the software to work to the level of functionality from purchase or at discontinuation, whichever is higher.
So even if a company still operates but isn't keeping your purchased software working (as-is operation, not security patches or new features) at least at the level from when you bought it or when it was discontinued, then the software should become open under reasonable conditions. Free for personal use, maybe a reasonable licensing cost for companies who want to keep supporting it commercially.
There are probably many corner cases that would need to be addressed to not become a vehicle for abuse but it would be a good start towards not making software unnecessarily obsolete.
Software is inherently fragile and dependent on surrounding technology. Buy a hammer, get a hammer. Buy (rent) software, you get something that only works on a specific combination of hardware and OS, perhaps only with certain libraries, packages, and other extras installed.
So even with open code the game will still stop being supported on new platforms, probably quite quickly.
If you contort the "digital ownership" definition to mean that you properly own things, you are right. But that is not the definition we go by.
This or else don't sell the software implying people own it
> [...] despite a large portion of the game being doable in singleplayer [...]
> despite a large portion of the game being doable in singleplayer, The Crew remained an online-only endeavour throughout its decade-long lifespan.
So it didn't have to be online if it wasn't for corporate greed.
> Update
> I can now confirm that local save data functionality is indeed built into all our copies and is not absent from the game, we have even obtained a sample save data file. This + the fact that we literally see offline mode in action in the prologue means that there 100% is an offline mode, if anyone was doubting at this point.
Which results in:
> https://steamcommunity.com/app/241560/discussions/0/43060751...
> Save Game Dumper now available
> However, you only have a limited time, after 31 march the servers will go down and your save file will be forever lost.
It's copyright infringement.
The intense irony of this is that piracy was often sanctioned by nations during times of war in the 18th and 19th century. It gave them an option to conduct commerce raiding without the need for an explicit expansion of their navy. It could even be considered patriotic.
(I do pay for it but only after I'm sure I can take it)
It's going to be a very different story for modern consoles.
If you should ever bother too look into your end user license agreements (EULA), you'd know you never owned anything to begin with. Nothing was ever sold to you. You acquired a license to use the product under the specified terms set forth in the EULA. If the terms of this license agreement don't sit right with you, I suggest you don't take the deal.
What is striking me as quite disingenuous though is the loud complaining when the manufacturer does what was made clear right from the start. As if somehow a betrayal or theft was happening here which clearly isn't the case.
If the law ever changes you may have a better chance. Or such games will not be published in the first place.
(Admittedly, if you live in the US and don't own "The Crew", what you can do is not much. But if you live in, say, France or Australia and own it, they have a fair bit for you to do!)
[0]In terms of stopping this sort of thing legally, rather than in terms of keeping your own copy playable via cracking, etc.
There are very few laws that protect the average person, and they should be embraced where ever possible. Who cares that a billion dollar company has to keep a few GB available to download and patch their game to remove DRM when they've themselves decided to stop supporting the game (and thus surely don't care about sales?). That's all it would take to not be complete dicks to consumers.
Unlike those, vidja gaemz don't cause physical harm upon anyone. It's one thing to regulate asbestos, it's another to suggest regulating something of ultimately no consequence.
This is of course setting aside the absolutely asinine comment that France and Australia are “authoritarian governments.”
Eg, a game developer suing people who make patches or utilities to run old games on new hardware - or even to provide say, multiplayer support, for old hardware. Or whatever.
Like, Nintendo would love to sell you the same game over and over again every 5 years. Could they consider it "theft" if I decided I wanted to keep playing my NES copy of Mario instead of buying a Nintendo Switch and the Switch version? XD
So yes, they're going to make playing games on old platforms you've bought them on impossible unless they're already installed, forcing users to purchase them again.
It's just a side effect of phasing out physical media that store the game in favor of digital marketplaces
Maybe people need to be sufficiently inconvenienced to demand a modicum of change to current non-ownership.
Worth noting is that playing these reverse-engineered versions of the game still required the original assets which would be obtained by buying the broken games on Steam.
R* Games, which is owned by Take-Two, shortly after released the remastered "Definitive Edition" versions of the games, which today sell for $59.99, as opposed to about $2 per game before ($6 in total).
So effectively that's what they've been doing, but no one in the games industry or adjacent can stand up to T2's legal bullying, which goes beyond this.
Fun fact: in Russia it's totally legal and there's a law that explicitly allows "adaptation" of software to run on your hardware.
But they aren’t the first.
Bungie (then part of Activision) famously deleted the original campaign Destiny 2 shipped with and did the same to subsequent expansions one by one, claiming that older content took up too much space on people’s drives or some other excuse.
> claiming that older content took up too much space on peoples drives or some other excuse.
Well which is it?
I've worked on games where we've stripped old content in a patch. Like code, content has a cost to maintain it. If we update an Uber shader do we need to keep a branch for ever for that one edge case of an asset that we know 11 people out of our 1 million players use?
The flip side is that when we don't strip content, we get accused of being lazy or incompetent - see any thread on patching or updating games here for what I'm talking about.
Yes, I would think you do need to keep it. It’s content people paid for already.
But I guess that is the fate of all business MBAs: To reach the short term gains they need to get those bonuses, you think you have to exhaust some less easily quantifiable resource, be it quality, reputation, nature, workers, health, safety or whatever — until one day that intangible debt stacks high enough for it to collapse in catastrophic fashion. But guess what: Just make sure that you are no longer working there by that point and nobody will hold you accountable, and you got your bonuses for selling the contents of the first aid kit.
It made good business sense (MBA or otherwise) to churn out safe mediocre games that have modest returns, like 250mil game would return 400mil. Although arguably the same game could have been made for 50mil in a smaller team with more exceptional talent, like in the 2000s where ROI on games was much higher on average. But the low ROI method was low-risk and repeatable. That is why around 2010, after the financial crisis when the world was showered in low interest rates, the games industry largely stopped innovating.
The "brute force" method for making games with very large teams where managing them has become almost impossible (most people in the AAA companies know what I'm talking about) is no longer sustainable now that money is no longer cheap. What is worse, executives in game companies have leaned into this model over the years, laying off expensive, very experienced talented staff and replacing each with 3-5 graduates. The 3-5 graduates can pump out more content for a mediocre game, the 1 experienced developer with decades of institutional knowledge could make a game that would perform exceptionally well, but not as reliably (this industry used to be called "hit-driven"). Layoffs did target the most expensive staff in many companies, by the way. This will come to light eventually.
So what can a game company that's all bought into this model do now? Many managers weren't even around in the 00s when the previous model worked. They don't know what to do. So they're panicking in various ways. Doing more layoffs, rushing games, upping the game prices, cutting support for old titles even if supporting them didn't cost that much.
But the industry has been over this once or twice. Notably in the 80s there was a shovelware games crash, then a lot of new small companies like Activision sprung up with small veteran teams and made great games in the 90s. This became the norm in the 00s, which saw the inception of many of the game titles we play today. The 10s paralleled the 80s, and we are heading towards a sort of crash or a soft crash now where the industry makes a lot of rushed shovelware. And those in games already know that many of their veteran colleagues are starting their own studios and working on very ambitious new projects that break the mould. None of this is new. Some of it is just new for people who haven't been around long enough.
But all in all, the MBA stuff is not seeing the forest for the trees. In the bigger picture, it's just a cycle. You can see it in all sorts of graphs, like ones that show average game quality over the last decades, and how the indie game sector is suddenly growing. Exactly like during and after the 80s crash.
People need to realize that most of the things they buy are actually rented.
Same goes for Facebook pages, Spotify/Apple songs, Amazon books, Google/Apple developer accounts. If you don't really own it and can control it, it's not yours ;-)
Lifetime being the life out minimum life of the lease. You shutdown the servers before a player got N years, full cash refund to those players.
What happened now is clearly deceptive practice.
It’s the perpetrators that are at fault, not the victims.
It’s only a matter of time until publishers decide they can’t afford leaving people waste time that could be monetized by new titles on older, no longer monetizable titles
It’s as inevitable in capitalism as is making worse appliances to ensure future sales - Games operate in a weird state where competition isn’t possible - nobody can just offer a better version of the game
See Yuzu yoo
Fortunately I can choose to only buy DRM free ebooks, and DRM free games, but this is < 1% of media available and certainly never the most popular titles.
This needs to change. There needs to be laws in place to protect consumers from this shitty behaviour - with or without DRM. Steam for all it's faults have said since day 1 than there is a mechanism in Steam to unlock all of your games should Valve go bankrupt: I'm not sure if this is true now they sell mainly over peoples' games. Steam also never remove the ability for you to download and play a game you have bought - even when the publishers have delisted and removed it from Steam.
Every sector has its dodgy folks but the % here seems way off. Most of the big names seem to be steeped in scandal
Obviously entirely subjective
Now the laws here are not retroactive, so it only applies to digital goods bought after 2021.
It's also worth noting that any agreement that gives the consumer less rights than the law are invalid, so you can't just slap something in the eula to get around it. This also applies to things like forced arbitration etc.
I think this type of regulation is the only way to curb the practice.
which is about when the seller revokes access to content you bought, it's not about what happens when your ability to consume the content is prevented by technical problems.
Now I do think there should be a carve out in the law to explicitly allow emulation, i.e. developers should not be allowed to prevent you using emulation, so that you have a reasonable path to continue using your content in the future.
IANAL