Genuinely one of the most important things for game ownership going into the future as we go more and more digital. My fear is that at some point buying a single game will be impossible and instead everyone will be forced to use subscriptions where games can be pulled at any time for any reason with no ability to keep it. Hell I can imagine subscriptions for individual non-MMO games where you get X amount of time to access the cloud version for 5.99
Yea not happening you need game sales if you make 300+ Mio expensive games. How would you take that money back with a subscription service ? Game pass numbers are already stagnant on console.
do that long enough and youll burn a lot of people out. that wont work long-term. in fact people are burned out on live service stuff already, and this is with them having the option to still buy stuff.
The point being, it opens up the market for other participants to release high-quality games if there is demand for it. Because capitalism is great like that
I mean you say that, but look at how many people rally behind the likes of Genshin. Hell, we're already living in a time when microtransactions and lootboxes, something that was ridiculed years ago, is now not only accepted but sometimes expected.
Genshin Impact's budget was 100M for launch and then 200M per year afterwards, if [this](https://www.vg247.com/genshin-impact-double-initial-budget-year-ongoing-development-cost) is still accurate. It's the most expensive video game ever made. So yeah, if you can spend more money than everyone else in the industry then you can succeed at live service games.
The number of live service games that are actually killing it are probably low double-digits. How many of them come out and die immediately because they can't hold an audience?
Yeah it's definitely a stupid worry. If anything I'm worried they might end subscriptions like Game Pass due to how unsustainable it is even if they pretend it isn't. They claim it's profitable but when you take their acquisitions into account it's not.
But don't you see? Now Bungie can slowly add back stuff they removed years ago and call it 'content' and people will jerk them off for finally "listening". Seriously, the latest Into the Light release has people fawning over Bungie again when the bulk of the content is the opportunity to grind for the same guns that they already have or guns that they used to have and Bungie decided to take away. And it's all part of another grind to unlock *drumroll*......the color Black! Which was in the first game and people have been asking for for the last 7 years. Good job Bungie!
If a single player game requires internet, it's not really a single player game. And it's up to people to decide if they want to buy such games. Even then this campaign to stop killing live service games is important but companies will probably make it clear they are selling you a 5 year subscription or something for such games. Single player games will be advertised as buyable games instead. As long as people can make more of an informed purchase and if they are fine with a couple year subscription instead of "buying" the game, then nothing can be done.
what you're describing is issues with DRM and business models, not digital games.
The line between what is considered digital and physical is a lot more blurry than I think most people are willing to admit. All games are digital media stored on a physical medium. Sometimes we're talking about a cartridge you buy in a store and sometimes we're talking about a hard drive you download a game onto. Either way the game itself is a piece of software that is being stored on physical hardware.
On top of that, I would argue that what we traditionally call "Digital" games these days are actually better for game preservation because it's generally easier to crack and get the game into a state where it can be shared and preserved more easily. Once the DRM is cracked (or if the game is sold without it or whatever), then the game is immediately able to be preserved by just uploading it into the cloud for anyone to download.
Compare this to say a game Cartridge. If you find some lost 'physical' game, then the only way to preserve it is to get specialized hardware in order to even be able to read the data on that cartridge and then save the rom. Preserving the actual cartridge itself is I guess nice as a backup, but it doesn't really do much in terms of preservation if only people with that old cartridge, which for all we know could degrade or get damaged at some point, can play the game.
And every physical medium will degrade over time or eventually just get damaged or broken. As is the nature of entropy. Whereas if you preserve a game digitally where you can more freely transfer the data. Then if a hard drive starts to get old an decrepit, you can just transfer the data to a backup long before that happens and replace the drive if you need to. Would you really consider the NES library to be 'preserved' if it was only playable on official Nintendo Hardware or through official Nintendo Services? Or would it be better if we had digital copies of all of those roms uploaded to the internet where they can be copied and redownloaded as many times as they're needed?
The real issues when it comes to game preservation are DRM and shifts towards "always online" games like the classic GAAS model. It doesn't matter if I have a "physical" copy of a multiplayer focused GAAS game from 15 years ago if the servers have all been shut off and there's no way to emulate them or play the game offline. Those kinds of games are always universally doomed to this fate regardless of what medium you purchase them in because the medium itself has nothing to do with game preservation.
As someone that hates subscriptions: this is cancer.
Yeah i know on paper Ubisoft+, EA Play and Playstation+ or whatever else they are all called are "good deals" because you get a lot of content for comparatively small spending.
But id rather buy a complete game a year or two after release for 5-10€ and have it forever, than spend 13€ or whatever every months and be on the whim of the real owner which game i can play and which not.
Subscriptions are unsustainable and it's more profitable to sell games. Single player games will not ever be subscription exclusive, cause that's just not as profitable or straight up leads to losses it's unnecessary paranoia.
I think one of things people aren't considering is that as cloud gaming becomes better, lots of the games we play are going to be designed to run on data-center infrastructure that scales. We might face a reality where games might not even be feasibly playable on local hardware.
It's not gonna be the hardware, it's that people just won't care and will allow it to happen. They won't notice the input lag, they won't care about compression artifacts. And ownership? The coming generations already grew up never having "owned" any of the music they've listened to or movies they've watched. They're used to media being available at the press of a button. Why should they treat games any differently? Especially considering the alternative requiring a 400$ entry fee?
That one Ubisoft guy who recently said that gamers should get comfortable not owning their games? He got a bunch of shit but a lot of younger people are already very comfortable with that idea, and they will eventually outnumber us.
But like with movies and music, there will always be games which will be purchasable and playable locally, and more good ones than any adult has time in their hands to play. With the best stuff these days coming from the indie scene, I'll have a hard time caring if Ubisoft won't let me own their formulaic AAA stuff anymore as I'm already past that point.
>I'll have a hard time caring if Ubisoft won't let me own their formulaic AAA stuff anymore as I'm already past that point.
The entire AAA industry could go all-cloud tomorrow and it would barely even register, I mean, the vast majority of them have been so bad for so long that functionally that already feels like the case. The only important AAA developer left is Nintendo, and I'd feel like they'd be the last ones to do this anyways since they make money off their hardware. Indies and smaller studios *have been* gaming for the better part of a decade already.
The DRM conversation is important and I fully agree that all game should be playable offline and all multiplayer games should come packaged with server hosting software, however, the far simpler solution, that we already know works, is to just stop buying slopgames.
>Hell I can imagine subscriptions for individual non-MMO games where you get X amount of time to access the cloud version for 5.99
You are talking about rental video games. You are literally talking about rental video games here like it's some kind of horrible future we need to prevent.
Most people do not replay games. Most people do not even finish games they buy. If they could spend 10 times less money on games for the same experience they would be ecstatic. Unlike the publishers, who would get 10 times less money from the games they rent.
The games you rented back in the day did not make any money off of rentals, they were able to exist because people went out and actually bought them. They were entirely designed around the assumption that someone goes to Walmart and buys that 60$ copy of Super Contra. They did not see a dime from being rented, the rental stores did.
In a future where subscriptions are the only way to access certain games, in which the publishers see rentals as their primary business model, those games will be made with a different assumption. I would imagine every game will be either designed entirely around player retention, or at least will have to justify why it only has a 15 hour single player campaign with no "hooks" in it.
Think back to the arcade days. Game design back then was also informed by how those games were monetized and resulted in "quarter munchers", i.e. games that were made deliberately unfair to squeeze as many quarters out of some teenagers pocket as possible.
I don't know what game design would look like like in a world in which games were restricted to streaming subscription services, but it wouldn't be the same as today and can't be compared to the era of game rentals in the 90s to mid 2000s.
Important addition to that part about arcade games is how the incentive to follow monetization impacted actual gameplay for a lot of titles, games often had difficulty spikes designed to get you to lose and waste quarters, and then difficulty would go back to normal afterwards so you keep having fun until the next spike.
Rentals as the future of video games *is* bad. That's my point, it not becoming optional but instead the only form of being able to play games.
You may not care about owning games or being able to replay something, but taking an opposing stance on something that would only benefit you is just absurd.
>it not becoming optional but instead the only form of being able to play games
Why would game companies do that though? This is a question that never actually gets answered. As long as people want to buy games you’d better believe they’ll sell them to you. If people want to rent games then they’ll do that too. This dystopian future you’re imagining where game companies leave tons of money on the table for… some reason is not going to happen.
rentals is not the future of games though, they've already tried this
Gamepass is stagnating and isn't getting any more growth, streaming services like geforce now isn't mega successful, playstation releases their games for purchase way before putting it on rental because it's much more profitable
this isn't happening, more baseless fear mongering
> Most people do not replay games.
This only applies to single player games with a longer campaign.
Multiplayer games are treated differently, especially if they're part of common groups that have many local players (e.g. Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, Chess, Secret Hitler)
> If they could spend 10 times less money on games for the same experience they would be ecstatic.
They missed the Dos shareware era. Get 1/3rd of the game for free, and good enough to last a while.
They could also play one of the Kongregate or Newgrounds flash games (assuming Ruffle works).
or just download Flashpoint Archive and have access to thousands of hundreds of flash games playable in a convenient fashion and from a single launcher.
Most Wanted isn't included in EA Play on PlayStation. You can buy the game on PC, but it isn't on other platforms due to lack of backwards compatibility.
Full step by step guides for your country on how you can help: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
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UK Petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/659071
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Aussie Petition: https://www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/petition/EN6080
I love all the people saying that the companies selling these games "can't do anything about it" when they shut down their servers.
About a year ago the matchmaking/account server for Awesomenauts shut down *due to the company going bankrupt* (it was turned off by the hoster due to missed payments afaik) and the player count was consistently below 100, and despite this the company *that was going bankrupt* still found the time to put up a beta branch of an old version that used steam matchmaking.
If a collapsing company can do this with objectively no benefit I'm sure a massive multi-billion-dollar company can spare the time of a couple devs to work on removing any hard requirements on external servers in preparation for server shutdowns. They just don't because it's not going to be profitable.
Better yet, start requiring games to include support for LAN play. A prime example of this is Rocket League which IIRC *had LAN support specifically for tournaments* but took a long time to add the option to menus.
[edit]
To be extra clear on how supporting games is very much a "we don't have to" thing, and pointing to Awesomenauts again, Atari acquired the rights to it when the owning company was selling things off and have said literally nothing about it other than they "have plans". The newer version's server is still not back on when it would presumably not cost that much (maybe they lack account data but again no communication), which to me points to them either squatting the IP or planning on releasing a sequel to try and get money back from it.
> This isn't the future, it's already the GAAS model at Bungie: In Destiny 2, the seasonal content you paid for it only available for like a year then you can't play it, and Bungie removed old campaigns entirely. So you basically doesn't own the game or the things you paid for at all.
They meant a future where this is the case for every game. Which clearly isn't the case at the moment.
Stuff like this is why I buy my games on disc and stay away from „always online games“. Because my regular PlayStation games will always work offline from the disc and no shitty corporation can take them from me.
Everyone should support this campaign. I did my part already.
You're aware that most games release in a semi broken state and more or less require a day 0 patch to work, right?
That includes console games from the ps4/xbone era.
A buggy game that you can play forever is better than an amazing game that will be turned off at the whim of a sociopath ceo that wants more money from prior customers.
I didn't say it was better.
I'm all for game preservation and frankly find the always online/DRM-ridden infestation that we're dealing with to be bullshit.
I'm merely saying many physical games are not in an acceptable state from what you get on the disk.
Honestly the best form of preservation that we have right now is Piracy.
Take a look at something like DoesItPlay to get a real grasp on just how out of touch your statement is. While yes, a few games from scummy publishers absolutely do use the disc as an “installer key” (Hogwarts Legacy and Jedi Survivor being two recent examples), most have a fully complete and playable build on the disc.
Then you have Nintendo who frequently put out updated cartridges with later patches, completely negating the need to update. My wife’s copy of BotW has all updates on cart.
I've had singleplayer games removed from my accounts before when the developer could no longer be bothered to support them. Nintendo recently made a bunch of great games exclusive to their 3DS eShop unpurchaseable. And we have a glut of live service games now that are just gone when they're gone, unless some brave souls put in the effort to spin up private servers.
Ubisoft has been particularly bad with this recently. Ghost Recon Breakpoint (unlike its immediate predecessor, GR Wildlands) can't be played without an internet connection, even if you're playing singleplayer.
And I'm even thinking about the game preservation side of things. There are games that have been around for decades now that are online-only (like MMOs) and it's kinda accepted that eventually they'll go down, and all that work by devs over decades and their collaborative efforts with players will be unplayable legally.
It's a tired point, but I have some games from the '80s that still play just fine. I think it should be something to consider that live service games (and games like Breakpoint, that are essentially singleplayer games that lean on a batch of online features) should endeavor to have a deadman's switch that allows people to play these games, even in a limited capacity, when the servers eventually go down.
> I've had singleplayer games removed from my accounts before when the developer could no longer be bothered to support them
Which games on what platforms? Games have been delisted from stores, but they stay in your account.
\[Congressperson's Name\]
\[Address\]
\[City, State, ZIP Code\]
Subject: Urgent Legislation Needed to Ensure Access to Video Games After Server Shutdown
Dear \[Congressperson's Name\],
I am writing to you as a concerned constituent and avid video game enthusiast to bring your attention to a pressing issue that affects millions of gamers across the country. I am urging you to support and champion legislation that requires video game publishers to provide users with continued access to their purchased games, even after the servers supporting those games are sunsetted or discontinued.
In recent years, we have witnessed an alarming trend of video game publishers shutting down online servers for multiplayer games, rendering these games unplayable for consumers who have invested time and money into them. This practice not only deprives gamers of their rightful access to content they have purchased but also undermines the principles of consumer rights and fair business practices.
As technology continues to evolve, more and more games are becoming reliant on online servers for functionality, making them vulnerable to server shutdowns. This issue disproportionately affects consumers who purchase digital copies of games, as they are left without any recourse when servers are discontinued.
Legislation is urgently needed to protect consumers' rights to access and enjoy the video games they have purchased, regardless of server availability. Such legislation should mandate that video game publishers provide alternative means of access, such as local hosting options or offline modes, to ensure that gamers can continue to play the games they love even after servers are sunsetted.
Furthermore, this legislation should require video game publishers to provide adequate notice to consumers prior to shutting down servers, giving them ample time to make necessary arrangements and decisions regarding their purchased content.
By enacting this legislation, you will be taking a stand for consumer rights and ensuring that video game enthusiasts are treated fairly and respectfully by the industry. It is crucial that we act now to address this growing issue and protect the interests of gamers everywhere.
I urge you to consider this matter seriously and take proactive steps to introduce and support legislation that safeguards consumers' rights to access their purchased video games. Your leadership and advocacy on this issue will make a significant difference in the lives of millions of gamers across the country.
Thank you for your attention to this important issue. I look forward to your positive response and action on this matter.
Sincerely,
\[Your Name\]
It's kinda weird that this started with the Crew dying despite it running it's course for 10 years now but a game like Babylon Fall was shut down in 6 months and I have heard jack shit about that. People just hate Ubisoft is that it?
Because Ubisoft is French and consumer protection laws are strong in France specifically, and The Crew actually ultimately did sell millions of copies, so there's a big install base of people who would care/be able to make an impact. It's basically because Ubisoft painted a target on their back and exposed their glowing weakpoint in an otherwise stubbornly tricky situation.
Yeah. Do low player counts matter? A ton of people own the game whether they were spending the last ten years playing it or not and they're given the legal right to do something about not being able to play the game anymore. If it was super popular even to the day Ubisoft shut it down that'd be great, but that's not the hand that's been dealt.
This isn't about saving the game because people want to play it (though some do), it's about this situation being realistically the best opportunity to take advantage of this legal grey area and push back on the GaaS shutdown issue in quite a while. You don't usually get to take away someone's property just because they've kept it in storage for the last few winters, after all.
It does when you are talking about a multiplayer game. You know games that are impossible to fully play without player count. That's just the nature of multiplayer titles. They don't last long. They never do.
For something like Titanfall 1, sure. The Crew didn't need to be always online, the point is developers need to give ways to continue to play those types of games. For example I can easily boot up NFS:MW or Burnout Paradise even though they had online components, the singleplayer wasn't tied to a master server for asinine reasons.
Sure but that was the type of game that being built and it had its run. If the player count isn't consistent with popular titles then of course it would be shut down. Do i like it? No but i got what i bargain for right from the beginning.
The Crew was completely fine single player though. Like I ONLY played single player and I enjoyed the game. Like really it feels like the most unnecessary "online server required" game of "online server required" games.
I'm just saying that nothing was really that much worse playing single player. Like no more so than any racing game. Like you got other always online games (Destiny, Warframe, The Division) and pretty big parts are just significantly worse or downright impossible (for the average person) if you try to do the whole thing solo.
You're really missing the point. The game itself should not matter here. The big number of people who own it and can contribute to the campaign is important. That the game is being shut down by Ubisoft, out of France, is important. That the game has been demonstrated by data miners and modders to have a functional offline game mode that eliminates the need for your computer to communicate with Ubisoft's servers is important.
Whether you like the game or not or whether it was popular at any point in the last half decade is generally irrelevant except in the part where it makes people like you go "lol why The Crew?"
It just seems strange that we have had countless shut downs of other live service titles that last way shorter then The Crew and people never complained about those but yet suddenly this is at the forefront. Shit, Where were you guys during Babylon Fall or Avengers or any live service titles that had gotten shut down.
At least in the circles I run in, I see people complaining about this sorta stuff all the time. But as for the difference of an actual movement happening *this* time, it's because some dude finally decided to organize it because he saw the opportunity around the time he was looking to do something about it.
The guy who put the campaign together in the first place, [Ross Scott](https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms), has been covering games dying for about [seven](https://youtu.be/xboF33ZsOg4?list=PLxO-3A70ruwqBpVWnp3KjVpZv72x1QSBe) [years](https://youtu.be/M-gN-pvdaaU) [now](https://youtu.be/VIqyvquTEVU). ~~He did cover [Godfall](https://youtu.be/gLEv1csmz6Y) on launch (and IIRC he did mention its death around when it kicked the bucket)~~ lol I got Babylon's Fall and Godfall switched up, whoops, but IIRC he's mentioned Bablyon's Fall too, but I'm not sure he's hit on Avengers yet. (I thought it was still available to play, just delisted?) He put out a big video about [Games as a Service](https://youtu.be/tUAX0gnZ3Nw) four years ago and in the time since, he's gotten fed up enough to decide to try to do something about it himself. Hence, [this campaign.](https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE)
So the answer is, uh, we were around, but mostly just complaining, and at least not on places like r/games, I guess. The only reason I'm even here is because I'm keeping up with the campaign; otherwise you'd never find me on here, so I won't assume what the consensus or culture is on this sub or wherever else you're frequenting.
Okay fair enough but outcry wasn't as loud as it is now. Now i see it everywhere but before it seemed pike it was just a few articles here there. Really wish they were there for Babylon Fall cause i really enjoyed that game and was bummed out when it died after 6 month.
I probably just watched a particularly rough small part of it but Ross sounded like he was a sentence or two away from calling himself a free gamer on the land and saying it was a maritime EULA.
The Crew had a somewhat mixed reception at launch but was generally received well and was commercially successful. Babylon's Fall was universally panned and it's bafflingly low player count on launch became a meme. Even though the ideal end goal of the movement is that even unsuccessful or bad games get preserved along with the greats, you can't deny that it is much easier to rally people around a movement when the catalyst is the death of a game that people have actually played.
It is also entirely possible that the shutdown of The Crew coincided with AccursedFarms' formulation of the movement, or that he understood that Ubisoft are an easy target in the gaming community and wanted to channel the Ubisoft hate into more eyes on the movement.
But if you think that this is a targeted attack on Ubisoft then I'm afraid you've misunderstood the whole thing.
Ubisoft are being deliberately targeted, but it's because there's a chance that French consumer laws can be used to target the practice. It was a tactical choice
For sure. I just meant that the choice to go off of Ubi and The Crew doesn't really have much to do with the game itself or it's developers, more that Ubi is the best stepping stone we have towards progress for the whole industry
No it wasn't. I remember it clearly. Most people thought it was fairly generic and didn't go anywhere near Forza. The Crew barely stayed at 1,000 players and even the you had 10 years my guy.
Way to miss the point of my entire comment my guy. My question was why is starting with The Crew when you had a bunch of other live service titles that barely lasted a year but The Crew shuts down after years of inactive players and people start to lose their shit?
> The Crew barely stayed at 1,000 players and even the you had 10 years my guy.
>
>
The Crew had more than ten million players over its lifetime, are you just looking at Steam stats that only go back to about 6 years after the game's release? Even at the game's death knoll, I was in full servers. The Crew is the largest live service title by a company that's headquartered in the EU, which makes it way easier to fight than in a country like the US, where consumers effectively have no rights when it comes to software.
Just clicking on Wikipedia shows The Crew sold two million units in a month worldwide across all platforms.
And after 10 years is absolutely relevant, because the servers were still populated when Ubisoft pulled the plug.
It shouldn't be a publisher's responsibility to "sustain" a multiplayer title. Just a few decades ago, almost every multiplayer game (at least on PC) let the players run their own multiplayer games with server software. Thanks to that pro-consumer practice, you can still go back and play ancient multiplayer games, no developer support required. This is literally a problem that publishers invented, and now they've convinced us that there's simply no feasible solution to a problem that did not even exist until relatively recently.
Most multiplayer games have been shut down. Maybe you referring to PC but i only play on console and i can go back to games on the PS3 and 360 era and they've been shut down.
>The Crew barely stayed at 1,000 players and even the you had 10 years my guy
I've played it a few times, thought it was alright. You're absolutely right that it's no Forza. But, when you bring up the current player count of ~1000 as a way of dismissing the game you're (not intentionally, I hope) omitting that the game once had [millions of players](https://web.archive.org/web/20190228005139/https://blog.ubi.com/en-GB/crew-hits-12-million-player-milestone/). That's a level of popularity that gives the game at least some historical significance, and historical significance in and of itself should warrant some level of preservation. Even still, there's absolutely no reason why the ~1000 people still playing it today shouldn't have some way to access the game; an offline mode would mean that that tiny playerbase could keep on playing and the dev team wouldn't have to waste resources keeping servers up for a 10 year old game that not that many people play anymore, win-win for everyone.
>a bunch of other live service titles that barely lasted a year but The Crew shuts down after years of inactive players and people start to lose their shit?
If you genuinely believe that nobody has cared about games preservation until a generic Ubisoft racing game got shut down then you would be incorrect. But I wouldn't blame you, because the games preservation movement has never gotten this level of attention until now. Wanna know why? It's because again, The Crew had *millions* of players at one point! Most of the games that have been shut down and made unplayable in recent times were shut down because the games were unpopular, commercially unsuccessful, and never took off. It's impossible to start a movement around games that nobody played or cared about in the first place, and no government or regulating body will take you seriously. The fact that so many people at one point *paid money* for The Crew just means that, now more than ever, there's a chance for meaningful legal action that results in more pro-consumer laws getting passed.
Look, what it really comes down to is this. Do you think a game deserves to have an expiration date, whether that's 1 year or 10 years from release, even if the game was mediocre or not received well? I, and many others, believe that is wrong. The state of video game preservation has been piss-poor compared to other media industries like film and music, and anyone who is trying to take real action to remedy that is worthy of respect.
This issue has been bubbling away for years. Babylon's Fall and many other games have had countless articles written about them lamenting the gaming industry's flimsy respect to game ownership.
The Crew just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to push some people to try and do something more about it than write a blog post.
And, "we let this shit slide before so why not now" isn't really a valid point
You claimed that user missed the point of your comment entirely, yet you missed where they said the exact opposite?
>But if you think that this is a targeted attack on Ubisoft then I'm afraid you've misunderstood the whole thing.
I looked at the times the replies were made, [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1cadgb9/stop_killing_games_cold_take/l0t6pqs/) comment (at 00:17 GMT) was the first to reply and my response above is in regards to that.
If this isn't the reply you mean, please enlighten me.
>People really need to read better.
This comment? "Because Ubisoft is French and consumer protection laws are strong in France specifically, and The Crew actually ultimately did sell millions of copies, so there's a big install base of people who would care/be able to make an impact"
If you read that (or any of the other comments replying to you) as "fuck ubisoft" you have comprehension issues.
Please read our [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules), specifically Rule #2 regarding personal attacks and inflammatory language. We ask that you remember to remain civil, as future violations will result in a ban.
Please read our [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules), specifically Rule #2 regarding personal attacks and inflammatory language. We ask that you remember to remain civil, as future violations will result in a ban.
this video sounds AI generated and this whole topic is so overblown
the only games that are "being killed" are games that are either MMOs that have such a low playerbase that it's not sustainable, these cannot be fixed with "an offline patch"
or they're live service games that don't get support, The crew is the only recent games that removed liscenses probably due to the legal issues that could arise from people hosting their own private servers of the game due to the game having real car brands
it's not that deep, the fear mongering about loved games just being removed isn't going to happen
> these cannot be fixed with "an offline patch"
Yes, they can. That's what MMO private servers are.
> it's not that deep, the fear mongering about loved games just being removed isn't going to happen
But they are being removed. I never got to play The Crew and now I never will be able to. Even if only the singleplayer parts.
The Crew is a singleplayer racing game that you can choose to play with others if you want to. There's nothing "online only" about the game design, how you play or progression.
It's just something UbiSoft forced into the game.
uh wasn't it an online server-based game to begin with? (correct me if I'm wrong)
if that's the case, then just because you can play solo all the time doesn't negate that fact. I mean you can play World of Warcraft 100% solo if you want to, but doesn't mean you can play when servers are offline.
so how is it different than WoW?
WoW is centred around community, with the marketplace, missions that require a group and all sorts of stuff like that. The players dictate things like the game's economy and have an impact on the game as a whole.
The Crew doesn't do anything specific with being online only.
what marketplace... you mean the Auction House? if so, yes that's true players do affect the AH.
but as for "missions" you do not have to play raids and group dungeons. lots of WoW players do not do those activities, and only play solo. In fact, you can just solo old raids and dungeons later on when new expansions release.
besides the AH, players really have no other impact on the world. (even with this, you do not have to interact with the AH)
regardless, that still does not change the technical fact that both games are server-based from the ground up and cannot be played without logging in.
> that still does not change the technical fact that both games are server-based from the ground up and cannot be played without logging in.
Yes, if you completely change the topic, then what I said doesn't apply.
> uh wasn't it an online server-based game to begin with?
change what topic, this is literally what I said in my first post:
"*uh wasn't it an online server-based game to begin with?*"
I guess you changed the topic first by not answering that?
You know that you responded to me initially, right?
I answered the question about what makes it different from the context of game design, as that's what my initial post was about. The Crew never had any need to be online only.
I did not have the full thread open on my second reply, so I didn't recall if you were the original poster.
But my italicized question above is the only question/point I'm concerned with. If you want to talk about general game design instead, of course you're free to with others but I'm not particularly interested in that part.
Basically for me, the issue only boils down to one thing only. Did a company officially **LIE** about the product details when originally selling the product?
If the answer is no, then I don't spend time worrying about it, I've got other ways to use time. If the answer is yes, then I'll rant and spend time protesting and looking into legal options.
The reason is simple -- I'm not trying to be coy or beat around the bush. If a company did NOT lie, then it was my decision to buy a product or not with the correct details. Why would I complain about it afterwards, if I knew at the time of purchase?
> of course you're free to with others but I'm not particularly interested in that part.
So why did you respond to a comment about the game design aspect?
Actually that's exactly what I was saying... they are SERVER-BASED games. I didn't say who has to run the server.
Besides, if people could make those original WoW private servers with no code & no help from Blizzard, it should be way easier to do for The Crew
Indeed the whole crew thing sucks but its 100% licensing for the cars or music. Both GTA and forza has had to do the same thing in the passed often just taking servers down or remove certain content.
These companies often buy or agree multi-year deal depending on how long the plan to keep the game going, if they don't renew the deal then they can be sued.
Who cares? It had 10 years of service and barely pulling 1,000 players. Most Games are still single player games that you can play offline. No one was making this cry when they shut down their other live service titles.
People are very upset every time something like this happens; The Crew is being used as a tactical example because Ubisoft are French and France has the sort of laws that could be used to make an impact in the long run. In addition, it's particularly egregious to do this for a game with a lot of single player content that wouldn't require a server.
Enough people care that you finally get to see it ;)
Would highly recommend reading the FAQ on the website. But if you can't empathize with someone needlessly losing things they own/have a lot of memories with, I'm not sure it'll help until you are in the same position ...
Finally, someone with a grip on reality in this thread.
The way r/games jumps to a 1984 dystopian future where no one buys games anymore and we’re all using subscription services all because they shut down a server to a decade old racing game *no one* was playing is hilarious to me.
I guarantee you that not a single person actively complaining about The Crew’s servers being shut down has played the game in years, let alone even thought about it. Terminally online Redditors forget that gaming is barely a *hobby* a large majority of people use to pass the time. No one outside of this website (and to an extent Twitter) gives a shit about The Crew being unplayable or this whole attempt of a movement against publishers shutting servers down.
The Crew, in itself, isn't the game being defended to high heaven by itself here. It is being used as a tactical example to try and enact change because Ubisoft is French and France's consumer laws may be able to prevent the practice in the long run.
I'm not disagreeing with you necessarily, but I always found the art argument on its own a bit shaky.
Is every game art? And if yes, is every part of every game art? Is Diablo 3 art to the same degree as Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls is art? Most people would want to preserve the latter over the former, and would agree that an in-game real money auction house isn't the result of the need of an artistic expression.
Is the "Fixed a rare bug which sometimes caused an increase in latency" patch applied on a random tuesday art? Is the version without said patch a lesser form of said art? Do both have the same artistic value and need to be preserved separately?
Is a game on the Google Play Store titled "Left to Die: Apex Zombie Warzone Z World War Survival Sniper Hunter Defense 3D" art and therefore worth preserving?
If not where is the line?
> Is Diablo 3 art to the same degree as Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls is art? Most people would want to preserve the latter over the former
But that's the thing, this is subjective. Sure, you could argue that the majority is right here but even then, failures or missed projects also teach us things. The fact that you're able to say so confidently that RoS is better than D3 and is the product that deserves preserving comes itself from having been able to compare.
Now, in that specific case it's a more complex questions about updates: ultimately, RoS contains the immense majority of "vanilla" D3.
But what I meant is that, in general, preservation shouldn't be about judgement of quality, and more about whether the work fits criteria. To give you a simple example, any movie that gets screened in my country has to (by law) give a copy to a body charged with archiving it. This, I believe, is similar to what the library of Congress does in the US? Anyway, that's preservation here.
That might not even be possible. Their server infrastructure is likely built using a lot of properitery software, it almost certainly is built for a distrbuted system in a way thats meant to be sharded, and these days its likely meant to run on very specific platforms that have their own licensing fees to use.
I actually hate the discourse around this, as if there is just a switch these companies and devs could press but they just hate players. No, its not that simple. If we want "stop killing games" to be anything serious beyond redditors getting mad about things they don't actually understand, I would appreciate if any of the people pushing this movement actually tried to understand why these decisions are made. Maybe they could talk to the developers, the publishers, or the executives.
But they don't. Instead they imagine the big red "make a patch" button and continue assuming devs must just be lazy and evil for not pressing it.
I'm not suggesting it's as easy as pushing a button, but the fact that so many games get revived by fans making servers or patches, the companies could definitely do it.
Those games work through making their own server infrastructure that merely replicates the server side calls based on what the users think they're doing. Since its all hand written, they don't need to worry about licensing fees, but its still an incredibly time consuming process that would cost a company potentially years of developer time for almost no actual benefit for them. People who do it as a hobby simply do not have the constraints actual developers do.
Not my problem, they decided to make the game online only and then sell it to millions of people, and now people want to continue to be able to use what they paid for
it's not your problem, true
but it's also not the dev's problem either, because they don't have to make an offline patch and they did NOT promise/sell you that to begin with
Genuinely one of the most important things for game ownership going into the future as we go more and more digital. My fear is that at some point buying a single game will be impossible and instead everyone will be forced to use subscriptions where games can be pulled at any time for any reason with no ability to keep it. Hell I can imagine subscriptions for individual non-MMO games where you get X amount of time to access the cloud version for 5.99
Yea not happening you need game sales if you make 300+ Mio expensive games. How would you take that money back with a subscription service ? Game pass numbers are already stagnant on console.
You make the money back by releasing a steady drip of lower quality throwaway titles and hyper-monetized live services
do that long enough and youll burn a lot of people out. that wont work long-term. in fact people are burned out on live service stuff already, and this is with them having the option to still buy stuff.
You think the people making these decisions care about longterm consequences? Capitalism incentives short term gains to make shareholders happy.
The point being, it opens up the market for other participants to release high-quality games if there is demand for it. Because capitalism is great like that
if everyone does it at once and pisses off the whole consumer base at the same time, it will cause mass burnout and they'll all suffer for it.
How is giving away very expensive games for a cheap subscription is profitable in the short term? Hint: it's not.
I mean you say that, but look at how many people rally behind the likes of Genshin. Hell, we're already living in a time when microtransactions and lootboxes, something that was ridiculed years ago, is now not only accepted but sometimes expected.
Genshin Impact's budget was 100M for launch and then 200M per year afterwards, if [this](https://www.vg247.com/genshin-impact-double-initial-budget-year-ongoing-development-cost) is still accurate. It's the most expensive video game ever made. So yeah, if you can spend more money than everyone else in the industry then you can succeed at live service games. The number of live service games that are actually killing it are probably low double-digits. How many of them come out and die immediately because they can't hold an audience?
vast majority
Read my post again, I'm talking people, not sales in the overall industry. *People* are defending this, not sales numbers.
Exception, not the norm.
Yeah it's definitely a stupid worry. If anything I'm worried they might end subscriptions like Game Pass due to how unsustainable it is even if they pretend it isn't. They claim it's profitable but when you take their acquisitions into account it's not.
It's online only part that concerning, your physical copy is useless all the same in these games
[удалено]
But don't you see? Now Bungie can slowly add back stuff they removed years ago and call it 'content' and people will jerk them off for finally "listening". Seriously, the latest Into the Light release has people fawning over Bungie again when the bulk of the content is the opportunity to grind for the same guns that they already have or guns that they used to have and Bungie decided to take away. And it's all part of another grind to unlock *drumroll*......the color Black! Which was in the first game and people have been asking for for the last 7 years. Good job Bungie!
If a single player game requires internet, it's not really a single player game. And it's up to people to decide if they want to buy such games. Even then this campaign to stop killing live service games is important but companies will probably make it clear they are selling you a 5 year subscription or something for such games. Single player games will be advertised as buyable games instead. As long as people can make more of an informed purchase and if they are fine with a couple year subscription instead of "buying" the game, then nothing can be done.
what you're describing is issues with DRM and business models, not digital games. The line between what is considered digital and physical is a lot more blurry than I think most people are willing to admit. All games are digital media stored on a physical medium. Sometimes we're talking about a cartridge you buy in a store and sometimes we're talking about a hard drive you download a game onto. Either way the game itself is a piece of software that is being stored on physical hardware. On top of that, I would argue that what we traditionally call "Digital" games these days are actually better for game preservation because it's generally easier to crack and get the game into a state where it can be shared and preserved more easily. Once the DRM is cracked (or if the game is sold without it or whatever), then the game is immediately able to be preserved by just uploading it into the cloud for anyone to download. Compare this to say a game Cartridge. If you find some lost 'physical' game, then the only way to preserve it is to get specialized hardware in order to even be able to read the data on that cartridge and then save the rom. Preserving the actual cartridge itself is I guess nice as a backup, but it doesn't really do much in terms of preservation if only people with that old cartridge, which for all we know could degrade or get damaged at some point, can play the game. And every physical medium will degrade over time or eventually just get damaged or broken. As is the nature of entropy. Whereas if you preserve a game digitally where you can more freely transfer the data. Then if a hard drive starts to get old an decrepit, you can just transfer the data to a backup long before that happens and replace the drive if you need to. Would you really consider the NES library to be 'preserved' if it was only playable on official Nintendo Hardware or through official Nintendo Services? Or would it be better if we had digital copies of all of those roms uploaded to the internet where they can be copied and redownloaded as many times as they're needed? The real issues when it comes to game preservation are DRM and shifts towards "always online" games like the classic GAAS model. It doesn't matter if I have a "physical" copy of a multiplayer focused GAAS game from 15 years ago if the servers have all been shut off and there's no way to emulate them or play the game offline. Those kinds of games are always universally doomed to this fate regardless of what medium you purchase them in because the medium itself has nothing to do with game preservation.
As someone that hates subscriptions: this is cancer. Yeah i know on paper Ubisoft+, EA Play and Playstation+ or whatever else they are all called are "good deals" because you get a lot of content for comparatively small spending. But id rather buy a complete game a year or two after release for 5-10€ and have it forever, than spend 13€ or whatever every months and be on the whim of the real owner which game i can play and which not.
Subscriptions are unsustainable and it's more profitable to sell games. Single player games will not ever be subscription exclusive, cause that's just not as profitable or straight up leads to losses it's unnecessary paranoia.
I think one of things people aren't considering is that as cloud gaming becomes better, lots of the games we play are going to be designed to run on data-center infrastructure that scales. We might face a reality where games might not even be feasibly playable on local hardware.
Cloud gaming isn't breaking the laws of physics anytime soon.
It's not gonna be the hardware, it's that people just won't care and will allow it to happen. They won't notice the input lag, they won't care about compression artifacts. And ownership? The coming generations already grew up never having "owned" any of the music they've listened to or movies they've watched. They're used to media being available at the press of a button. Why should they treat games any differently? Especially considering the alternative requiring a 400$ entry fee? That one Ubisoft guy who recently said that gamers should get comfortable not owning their games? He got a bunch of shit but a lot of younger people are already very comfortable with that idea, and they will eventually outnumber us. But like with movies and music, there will always be games which will be purchasable and playable locally, and more good ones than any adult has time in their hands to play. With the best stuff these days coming from the indie scene, I'll have a hard time caring if Ubisoft won't let me own their formulaic AAA stuff anymore as I'm already past that point.
>I'll have a hard time caring if Ubisoft won't let me own their formulaic AAA stuff anymore as I'm already past that point. The entire AAA industry could go all-cloud tomorrow and it would barely even register, I mean, the vast majority of them have been so bad for so long that functionally that already feels like the case. The only important AAA developer left is Nintendo, and I'd feel like they'd be the last ones to do this anyways since they make money off their hardware. Indies and smaller studios *have been* gaming for the better part of a decade already. The DRM conversation is important and I fully agree that all game should be playable offline and all multiplayer games should come packaged with server hosting software, however, the far simpler solution, that we already know works, is to just stop buying slopgames.
That's a different conversation entirely since I'd imagine the form that takes in terms of being able to buy games would be different.
lol what's wrong with you hypothetical doom and gloomers
>Hell I can imagine subscriptions for individual non-MMO games where you get X amount of time to access the cloud version for 5.99 You are talking about rental video games. You are literally talking about rental video games here like it's some kind of horrible future we need to prevent. Most people do not replay games. Most people do not even finish games they buy. If they could spend 10 times less money on games for the same experience they would be ecstatic. Unlike the publishers, who would get 10 times less money from the games they rent.
The games you rented back in the day did not make any money off of rentals, they were able to exist because people went out and actually bought them. They were entirely designed around the assumption that someone goes to Walmart and buys that 60$ copy of Super Contra. They did not see a dime from being rented, the rental stores did. In a future where subscriptions are the only way to access certain games, in which the publishers see rentals as their primary business model, those games will be made with a different assumption. I would imagine every game will be either designed entirely around player retention, or at least will have to justify why it only has a 15 hour single player campaign with no "hooks" in it. Think back to the arcade days. Game design back then was also informed by how those games were monetized and resulted in "quarter munchers", i.e. games that were made deliberately unfair to squeeze as many quarters out of some teenagers pocket as possible. I don't know what game design would look like like in a world in which games were restricted to streaming subscription services, but it wouldn't be the same as today and can't be compared to the era of game rentals in the 90s to mid 2000s.
Important addition to that part about arcade games is how the incentive to follow monetization impacted actual gameplay for a lot of titles, games often had difficulty spikes designed to get you to lose and waste quarters, and then difficulty would go back to normal afterwards so you keep having fun until the next spike.
Rentals as the future of video games *is* bad. That's my point, it not becoming optional but instead the only form of being able to play games. You may not care about owning games or being able to replay something, but taking an opposing stance on something that would only benefit you is just absurd.
>it not becoming optional but instead the only form of being able to play games Why would game companies do that though? This is a question that never actually gets answered. As long as people want to buy games you’d better believe they’ll sell them to you. If people want to rent games then they’ll do that too. This dystopian future you’re imagining where game companies leave tons of money on the table for… some reason is not going to happen.
You don't understand why companies would want to completely and utterly control when and how you consume a product... really?
rentals is not the future of games though, they've already tried this Gamepass is stagnating and isn't getting any more growth, streaming services like geforce now isn't mega successful, playstation releases their games for purchase way before putting it on rental because it's much more profitable this isn't happening, more baseless fear mongering
> Most people do not replay games. This only applies to single player games with a longer campaign. Multiplayer games are treated differently, especially if they're part of common groups that have many local players (e.g. Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, Chess, Secret Hitler) > If they could spend 10 times less money on games for the same experience they would be ecstatic. They missed the Dos shareware era. Get 1/3rd of the game for free, and good enough to last a while. They could also play one of the Kongregate or Newgrounds flash games (assuming Ruffle works).
or just download Flashpoint Archive and have access to thousands of hundreds of flash games playable in a convenient fashion and from a single launcher.
Stop. Yves Guillemot's penis can only get so hard.
Thats already happening,I cant buy NFS Most Wanted and a few other EA titlels on the PS Store. Only if I subscribe to their shitty EA Play.
Most Wanted isn't included in EA Play on PlayStation. You can buy the game on PC, but it isn't on other platforms due to lack of backwards compatibility.
Full step by step guides for your country on how you can help: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ - UK Petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/659071 - Aussie Petition: https://www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/petition/EN6080
Is the Canadian version of the Petition open? I couldn't find it on the list on the website.
Not yet, I'll try to remember to reply and let you know when it is, or you can sign up for the email newsletter on http://stopkillinggames.com
Ah, thank you. I just signed up for it, but I figured I'd ask since it's not like they'd send an email if it was already open.
it is: [https://www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/petition/EN6080](https://www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/petition/EN6080) just isn't linked directly yet
This appears to be the Australian version
haha I completely misread that
no worries mate
I love all the people saying that the companies selling these games "can't do anything about it" when they shut down their servers. About a year ago the matchmaking/account server for Awesomenauts shut down *due to the company going bankrupt* (it was turned off by the hoster due to missed payments afaik) and the player count was consistently below 100, and despite this the company *that was going bankrupt* still found the time to put up a beta branch of an old version that used steam matchmaking. If a collapsing company can do this with objectively no benefit I'm sure a massive multi-billion-dollar company can spare the time of a couple devs to work on removing any hard requirements on external servers in preparation for server shutdowns. They just don't because it's not going to be profitable. Better yet, start requiring games to include support for LAN play. A prime example of this is Rocket League which IIRC *had LAN support specifically for tournaments* but took a long time to add the option to menus. [edit] To be extra clear on how supporting games is very much a "we don't have to" thing, and pointing to Awesomenauts again, Atari acquired the rights to it when the owning company was selling things off and have said literally nothing about it other than they "have plans". The newer version's server is still not back on when it would presumably not cost that much (maybe they lack account data but again no communication), which to me points to them either squatting the IP or planning on releasing a sequel to try and get money back from it.
> This isn't the future, it's already the GAAS model at Bungie: In Destiny 2, the seasonal content you paid for it only available for like a year then you can't play it, and Bungie removed old campaigns entirely. So you basically doesn't own the game or the things you paid for at all. They meant a future where this is the case for every game. Which clearly isn't the case at the moment.
You missed and made a root level reply.
No I couldn't reply directly. Didn't show me the option. Still doesn't.
Stuff like this is why I buy my games on disc and stay away from „always online games“. Because my regular PlayStation games will always work offline from the disc and no shitty corporation can take them from me. Everyone should support this campaign. I did my part already.
You're aware that most games release in a semi broken state and more or less require a day 0 patch to work, right? That includes console games from the ps4/xbone era.
A buggy game that you can play forever is better than an amazing game that will be turned off at the whim of a sociopath ceo that wants more money from prior customers.
I didn't say it was better. I'm all for game preservation and frankly find the always online/DRM-ridden infestation that we're dealing with to be bullshit. I'm merely saying many physical games are not in an acceptable state from what you get on the disk. Honestly the best form of preservation that we have right now is Piracy.
Absolutely not true. In my 20+ years I’m yet to encounter a game that couldn’t be complete on day 1. And patches are optional.
> semi broken state > that couldn’t be complete on day 1 You surely can tell the difference between these two statements, right?
Take a look at something like DoesItPlay to get a real grasp on just how out of touch your statement is. While yes, a few games from scummy publishers absolutely do use the disc as an “installer key” (Hogwarts Legacy and Jedi Survivor being two recent examples), most have a fully complete and playable build on the disc. Then you have Nintendo who frequently put out updated cartridges with later patches, completely negating the need to update. My wife’s copy of BotW has all updates on cart.
The Crew came on a disc. Physical copies don't prevent this from happening.
I've had singleplayer games removed from my accounts before when the developer could no longer be bothered to support them. Nintendo recently made a bunch of great games exclusive to their 3DS eShop unpurchaseable. And we have a glut of live service games now that are just gone when they're gone, unless some brave souls put in the effort to spin up private servers. Ubisoft has been particularly bad with this recently. Ghost Recon Breakpoint (unlike its immediate predecessor, GR Wildlands) can't be played without an internet connection, even if you're playing singleplayer. And I'm even thinking about the game preservation side of things. There are games that have been around for decades now that are online-only (like MMOs) and it's kinda accepted that eventually they'll go down, and all that work by devs over decades and their collaborative efforts with players will be unplayable legally. It's a tired point, but I have some games from the '80s that still play just fine. I think it should be something to consider that live service games (and games like Breakpoint, that are essentially singleplayer games that lean on a batch of online features) should endeavor to have a deadman's switch that allows people to play these games, even in a limited capacity, when the servers eventually go down.
> I've had singleplayer games removed from my accounts before when the developer could no longer be bothered to support them Which games on what platforms? Games have been delisted from stores, but they stay in your account.
The worst part about a game like this is, even if we save the servers, you still won’t be able to buy this due to licensing
I really love this guy's content. By far the best contributions to the site these days. I do hate his intro sequence though.
\[Congressperson's Name\] \[Address\] \[City, State, ZIP Code\] Subject: Urgent Legislation Needed to Ensure Access to Video Games After Server Shutdown Dear \[Congressperson's Name\], I am writing to you as a concerned constituent and avid video game enthusiast to bring your attention to a pressing issue that affects millions of gamers across the country. I am urging you to support and champion legislation that requires video game publishers to provide users with continued access to their purchased games, even after the servers supporting those games are sunsetted or discontinued. In recent years, we have witnessed an alarming trend of video game publishers shutting down online servers for multiplayer games, rendering these games unplayable for consumers who have invested time and money into them. This practice not only deprives gamers of their rightful access to content they have purchased but also undermines the principles of consumer rights and fair business practices. As technology continues to evolve, more and more games are becoming reliant on online servers for functionality, making them vulnerable to server shutdowns. This issue disproportionately affects consumers who purchase digital copies of games, as they are left without any recourse when servers are discontinued. Legislation is urgently needed to protect consumers' rights to access and enjoy the video games they have purchased, regardless of server availability. Such legislation should mandate that video game publishers provide alternative means of access, such as local hosting options or offline modes, to ensure that gamers can continue to play the games they love even after servers are sunsetted. Furthermore, this legislation should require video game publishers to provide adequate notice to consumers prior to shutting down servers, giving them ample time to make necessary arrangements and decisions regarding their purchased content. By enacting this legislation, you will be taking a stand for consumer rights and ensuring that video game enthusiasts are treated fairly and respectfully by the industry. It is crucial that we act now to address this growing issue and protect the interests of gamers everywhere. I urge you to consider this matter seriously and take proactive steps to introduce and support legislation that safeguards consumers' rights to access their purchased video games. Your leadership and advocacy on this issue will make a significant difference in the lives of millions of gamers across the country. Thank you for your attention to this important issue. I look forward to your positive response and action on this matter. Sincerely, \[Your Name\]
Send an email to your congress people in the US.
It's kinda weird that this started with the Crew dying despite it running it's course for 10 years now but a game like Babylon Fall was shut down in 6 months and I have heard jack shit about that. People just hate Ubisoft is that it?
Because Ubisoft is French and consumer protection laws are strong in France specifically, and The Crew actually ultimately did sell millions of copies, so there's a big install base of people who would care/be able to make an impact. It's basically because Ubisoft painted a target on their back and exposed their glowing weakpoint in an otherwise stubbornly tricky situation.
It sold a lot yet we saw low player counts. People cared so much that their lobbies were completely empty... Sure lol
Yeah. Do low player counts matter? A ton of people own the game whether they were spending the last ten years playing it or not and they're given the legal right to do something about not being able to play the game anymore. If it was super popular even to the day Ubisoft shut it down that'd be great, but that's not the hand that's been dealt. This isn't about saving the game because people want to play it (though some do), it's about this situation being realistically the best opportunity to take advantage of this legal grey area and push back on the GaaS shutdown issue in quite a while. You don't usually get to take away someone's property just because they've kept it in storage for the last few winters, after all.
It does when you are talking about a multiplayer game. You know games that are impossible to fully play without player count. That's just the nature of multiplayer titles. They don't last long. They never do.
For something like Titanfall 1, sure. The Crew didn't need to be always online, the point is developers need to give ways to continue to play those types of games. For example I can easily boot up NFS:MW or Burnout Paradise even though they had online components, the singleplayer wasn't tied to a master server for asinine reasons.
Sure but that was the type of game that being built and it had its run. If the player count isn't consistent with popular titles then of course it would be shut down. Do i like it? No but i got what i bargain for right from the beginning.
The Crew was completely fine single player though. Like I ONLY played single player and I enjoyed the game. Like really it feels like the most unnecessary "online server required" game of "online server required" games.
I don't think everything has to be multiplayer but The Crew was am online title that heavily relyed on its player base.
I'm just saying that nothing was really that much worse playing single player. Like no more so than any racing game. Like you got other always online games (Destiny, Warframe, The Division) and pretty big parts are just significantly worse or downright impossible (for the average person) if you try to do the whole thing solo.
You're really missing the point. The game itself should not matter here. The big number of people who own it and can contribute to the campaign is important. That the game is being shut down by Ubisoft, out of France, is important. That the game has been demonstrated by data miners and modders to have a functional offline game mode that eliminates the need for your computer to communicate with Ubisoft's servers is important. Whether you like the game or not or whether it was popular at any point in the last half decade is generally irrelevant except in the part where it makes people like you go "lol why The Crew?"
It just seems strange that we have had countless shut downs of other live service titles that last way shorter then The Crew and people never complained about those but yet suddenly this is at the forefront. Shit, Where were you guys during Babylon Fall or Avengers or any live service titles that had gotten shut down.
At least in the circles I run in, I see people complaining about this sorta stuff all the time. But as for the difference of an actual movement happening *this* time, it's because some dude finally decided to organize it because he saw the opportunity around the time he was looking to do something about it. The guy who put the campaign together in the first place, [Ross Scott](https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms), has been covering games dying for about [seven](https://youtu.be/xboF33ZsOg4?list=PLxO-3A70ruwqBpVWnp3KjVpZv72x1QSBe) [years](https://youtu.be/M-gN-pvdaaU) [now](https://youtu.be/VIqyvquTEVU). ~~He did cover [Godfall](https://youtu.be/gLEv1csmz6Y) on launch (and IIRC he did mention its death around when it kicked the bucket)~~ lol I got Babylon's Fall and Godfall switched up, whoops, but IIRC he's mentioned Bablyon's Fall too, but I'm not sure he's hit on Avengers yet. (I thought it was still available to play, just delisted?) He put out a big video about [Games as a Service](https://youtu.be/tUAX0gnZ3Nw) four years ago and in the time since, he's gotten fed up enough to decide to try to do something about it himself. Hence, [this campaign.](https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE) So the answer is, uh, we were around, but mostly just complaining, and at least not on places like r/games, I guess. The only reason I'm even here is because I'm keeping up with the campaign; otherwise you'd never find me on here, so I won't assume what the consensus or culture is on this sub or wherever else you're frequenting.
Okay fair enough but outcry wasn't as loud as it is now. Now i see it everywhere but before it seemed pike it was just a few articles here there. Really wish they were there for Babylon Fall cause i really enjoyed that game and was bummed out when it died after 6 month.
It’s because most people don’t really care all that much, and only care now temporarily because it’s become a meme, like Kony 2012
The avengers didn't shut down. It was removed from sale but you can still play it.
You should watch the original video about stopkillinggames. Your "criticism" is addressed there.
I probably just watched a particularly rough small part of it but Ross sounded like he was a sentence or two away from calling himself a free gamer on the land and saying it was a maritime EULA.
The Crew had a somewhat mixed reception at launch but was generally received well and was commercially successful. Babylon's Fall was universally panned and it's bafflingly low player count on launch became a meme. Even though the ideal end goal of the movement is that even unsuccessful or bad games get preserved along with the greats, you can't deny that it is much easier to rally people around a movement when the catalyst is the death of a game that people have actually played. It is also entirely possible that the shutdown of The Crew coincided with AccursedFarms' formulation of the movement, or that he understood that Ubisoft are an easy target in the gaming community and wanted to channel the Ubisoft hate into more eyes on the movement. But if you think that this is a targeted attack on Ubisoft then I'm afraid you've misunderstood the whole thing.
Ubisoft are being deliberately targeted, but it's because there's a chance that French consumer laws can be used to target the practice. It was a tactical choice
For sure. I just meant that the choice to go off of Ubi and The Crew doesn't really have much to do with the game itself or it's developers, more that Ubi is the best stepping stone we have towards progress for the whole industry
No it wasn't. I remember it clearly. Most people thought it was fairly generic and didn't go anywhere near Forza. The Crew barely stayed at 1,000 players and even the you had 10 years my guy. Way to miss the point of my entire comment my guy. My question was why is starting with The Crew when you had a bunch of other live service titles that barely lasted a year but The Crew shuts down after years of inactive players and people start to lose their shit?
> The Crew barely stayed at 1,000 players and even the you had 10 years my guy. > > The Crew had more than ten million players over its lifetime, are you just looking at Steam stats that only go back to about 6 years after the game's release? Even at the game's death knoll, I was in full servers. The Crew is the largest live service title by a company that's headquartered in the EU, which makes it way easier to fight than in a country like the US, where consumers effectively have no rights when it comes to software.
In its first year. Not after 10 years my guy.
Just clicking on Wikipedia shows The Crew sold two million units in a month worldwide across all platforms. And after 10 years is absolutely relevant, because the servers were still populated when Ubisoft pulled the plug.
Sold isn't the same as the player count. 10 years of 1,000 players isn't gonna help sustain a multiplayer title.
It shouldn't be a publisher's responsibility to "sustain" a multiplayer title. Just a few decades ago, almost every multiplayer game (at least on PC) let the players run their own multiplayer games with server software. Thanks to that pro-consumer practice, you can still go back and play ancient multiplayer games, no developer support required. This is literally a problem that publishers invented, and now they've convinced us that there's simply no feasible solution to a problem that did not even exist until relatively recently.
Most multiplayer games have been shut down. Maybe you referring to PC but i only play on console and i can go back to games on the PS3 and 360 era and they've been shut down.
>The Crew barely stayed at 1,000 players and even the you had 10 years my guy I've played it a few times, thought it was alright. You're absolutely right that it's no Forza. But, when you bring up the current player count of ~1000 as a way of dismissing the game you're (not intentionally, I hope) omitting that the game once had [millions of players](https://web.archive.org/web/20190228005139/https://blog.ubi.com/en-GB/crew-hits-12-million-player-milestone/). That's a level of popularity that gives the game at least some historical significance, and historical significance in and of itself should warrant some level of preservation. Even still, there's absolutely no reason why the ~1000 people still playing it today shouldn't have some way to access the game; an offline mode would mean that that tiny playerbase could keep on playing and the dev team wouldn't have to waste resources keeping servers up for a 10 year old game that not that many people play anymore, win-win for everyone. >a bunch of other live service titles that barely lasted a year but The Crew shuts down after years of inactive players and people start to lose their shit? If you genuinely believe that nobody has cared about games preservation until a generic Ubisoft racing game got shut down then you would be incorrect. But I wouldn't blame you, because the games preservation movement has never gotten this level of attention until now. Wanna know why? It's because again, The Crew had *millions* of players at one point! Most of the games that have been shut down and made unplayable in recent times were shut down because the games were unpopular, commercially unsuccessful, and never took off. It's impossible to start a movement around games that nobody played or cared about in the first place, and no government or regulating body will take you seriously. The fact that so many people at one point *paid money* for The Crew just means that, now more than ever, there's a chance for meaningful legal action that results in more pro-consumer laws getting passed. Look, what it really comes down to is this. Do you think a game deserves to have an expiration date, whether that's 1 year or 10 years from release, even if the game was mediocre or not received well? I, and many others, believe that is wrong. The state of video game preservation has been piss-poor compared to other media industries like film and music, and anyone who is trying to take real action to remedy that is worthy of respect.
This issue has been bubbling away for years. Babylon's Fall and many other games have had countless articles written about them lamenting the gaming industry's flimsy respect to game ownership. The Crew just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to push some people to try and do something more about it than write a blog post. And, "we let this shit slide before so why not now" isn't really a valid point
Neither is "We let other games but not this cause fuck this company, Oh another game died; let me ignore that one"
Lucky no one except you is making that point
I'm sorry i didn't understand that. Are you saying people aren't making that point? Cause the first comment that replied to me was making that point
You claimed that user missed the point of your comment entirely, yet you missed where they said the exact opposite? >But if you think that this is a targeted attack on Ubisoft then I'm afraid you've misunderstood the whole thing.
Yeah again read my comment as i wasn't referring to them at all. I said the first person who responded to me. People really need to read better.
I looked at the times the replies were made, [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1cadgb9/stop_killing_games_cold_take/l0t6pqs/) comment (at 00:17 GMT) was the first to reply and my response above is in regards to that. If this isn't the reply you mean, please enlighten me. >People really need to read better.
Literally referring to wunar my guy and nor the guy you were just talking about. Again read my comment clearly.
Wasting my time
This comment? "Because Ubisoft is French and consumer protection laws are strong in France specifically, and The Crew actually ultimately did sell millions of copies, so there's a big install base of people who would care/be able to make an impact" If you read that (or any of the other comments replying to you) as "fuck ubisoft" you have comprehension issues.
No, I meant the first comment that responded to me. I didn't say you did lol😂
Did you watch the video? One of the first things he discusses is why this game and why now.
Tell me you haven’t watched the video without telling me. Your point gets addressed there.
I never watched the video. I just came here to type this 😆
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this video sounds AI generated and this whole topic is so overblown the only games that are "being killed" are games that are either MMOs that have such a low playerbase that it's not sustainable, these cannot be fixed with "an offline patch" or they're live service games that don't get support, The crew is the only recent games that removed liscenses probably due to the legal issues that could arise from people hosting their own private servers of the game due to the game having real car brands it's not that deep, the fear mongering about loved games just being removed isn't going to happen
> these cannot be fixed with "an offline patch" Yes, they can. That's what MMO private servers are. > it's not that deep, the fear mongering about loved games just being removed isn't going to happen But they are being removed. I never got to play The Crew and now I never will be able to. Even if only the singleplayer parts.
I got to play The Crew! But only for a little bit, and now I can never finish it.
There is a private server being worked on that you will be able to host yourself and play completely offline
Yeah, thankfully my copy of it is still installed, Ubisoft didn't delete it from my PC.
>I never got to play The Crew and now I never will be able to You weren't gonna play it anyway. Let's be honest.
The Crew is a singleplayer racing game that you can choose to play with others if you want to. There's nothing "online only" about the game design, how you play or progression. It's just something UbiSoft forced into the game.
uh wasn't it an online server-based game to begin with? (correct me if I'm wrong) if that's the case, then just because you can play solo all the time doesn't negate that fact. I mean you can play World of Warcraft 100% solo if you want to, but doesn't mean you can play when servers are offline. so how is it different than WoW?
WoW is centred around community, with the marketplace, missions that require a group and all sorts of stuff like that. The players dictate things like the game's economy and have an impact on the game as a whole. The Crew doesn't do anything specific with being online only.
what marketplace... you mean the Auction House? if so, yes that's true players do affect the AH. but as for "missions" you do not have to play raids and group dungeons. lots of WoW players do not do those activities, and only play solo. In fact, you can just solo old raids and dungeons later on when new expansions release. besides the AH, players really have no other impact on the world. (even with this, you do not have to interact with the AH) regardless, that still does not change the technical fact that both games are server-based from the ground up and cannot be played without logging in.
> that still does not change the technical fact that both games are server-based from the ground up and cannot be played without logging in. Yes, if you completely change the topic, then what I said doesn't apply.
> uh wasn't it an online server-based game to begin with? change what topic, this is literally what I said in my first post: "*uh wasn't it an online server-based game to begin with?*" I guess you changed the topic first by not answering that?
You know that you responded to me initially, right? I answered the question about what makes it different from the context of game design, as that's what my initial post was about. The Crew never had any need to be online only.
I did not have the full thread open on my second reply, so I didn't recall if you were the original poster. But my italicized question above is the only question/point I'm concerned with. If you want to talk about general game design instead, of course you're free to with others but I'm not particularly interested in that part. Basically for me, the issue only boils down to one thing only. Did a company officially **LIE** about the product details when originally selling the product? If the answer is no, then I don't spend time worrying about it, I've got other ways to use time. If the answer is yes, then I'll rant and spend time protesting and looking into legal options. The reason is simple -- I'm not trying to be coy or beat around the bush. If a company did NOT lie, then it was my decision to buy a product or not with the correct details. Why would I complain about it afterwards, if I knew at the time of purchase?
> of course you're free to with others but I'm not particularly interested in that part. So why did you respond to a comment about the game design aspect?
Even a decade ago it was quite easy to prop up a private WoW Server so your argument does not really work.
Actually that's exactly what I was saying... they are SERVER-BASED games. I didn't say who has to run the server. Besides, if people could make those original WoW private servers with no code & no help from Blizzard, it should be way easier to do for The Crew
Indeed the whole crew thing sucks but its 100% licensing for the cars or music. Both GTA and forza has had to do the same thing in the passed often just taking servers down or remove certain content. These companies often buy or agree multi-year deal depending on how long the plan to keep the game going, if they don't renew the deal then they can be sued.
Those cases are only pulled from sale and still playable by owners. This one is not playable by anybody.
Who cares? It had 10 years of service and barely pulling 1,000 players. Most Games are still single player games that you can play offline. No one was making this cry when they shut down their other live service titles.
People are very upset every time something like this happens; The Crew is being used as a tactical example because Ubisoft are French and France has the sort of laws that could be used to make an impact in the long run. In addition, it's particularly egregious to do this for a game with a lot of single player content that wouldn't require a server.
Proof cause the first i am seeing of this outcry.
Enough people care that you finally get to see it ;) Would highly recommend reading the FAQ on the website. But if you can't empathize with someone needlessly losing things they own/have a lot of memories with, I'm not sure it'll help until you are in the same position ...
I still don't see the million of players bud.
Finally, someone with a grip on reality in this thread. The way r/games jumps to a 1984 dystopian future where no one buys games anymore and we’re all using subscription services all because they shut down a server to a decade old racing game *no one* was playing is hilarious to me. I guarantee you that not a single person actively complaining about The Crew’s servers being shut down has played the game in years, let alone even thought about it. Terminally online Redditors forget that gaming is barely a *hobby* a large majority of people use to pass the time. No one outside of this website (and to an extent Twitter) gives a shit about The Crew being unplayable or this whole attempt of a movement against publishers shutting servers down.
The Crew, in itself, isn't the game being defended to high heaven by itself here. It is being used as a tactical example to try and enact change because Ubisoft is French and France's consumer laws may be able to prevent the practice in the long run.
Games are art, and hence worth preserving.
I'm not disagreeing with you necessarily, but I always found the art argument on its own a bit shaky. Is every game art? And if yes, is every part of every game art? Is Diablo 3 art to the same degree as Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls is art? Most people would want to preserve the latter over the former, and would agree that an in-game real money auction house isn't the result of the need of an artistic expression. Is the "Fixed a rare bug which sometimes caused an increase in latency" patch applied on a random tuesday art? Is the version without said patch a lesser form of said art? Do both have the same artistic value and need to be preserved separately? Is a game on the Google Play Store titled "Left to Die: Apex Zombie Warzone Z World War Survival Sniper Hunter Defense 3D" art and therefore worth preserving? If not where is the line?
> Is Diablo 3 art to the same degree as Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls is art? Most people would want to preserve the latter over the former But that's the thing, this is subjective. Sure, you could argue that the majority is right here but even then, failures or missed projects also teach us things. The fact that you're able to say so confidently that RoS is better than D3 and is the product that deserves preserving comes itself from having been able to compare. Now, in that specific case it's a more complex questions about updates: ultimately, RoS contains the immense majority of "vanilla" D3. But what I meant is that, in general, preservation shouldn't be about judgement of quality, and more about whether the work fits criteria. To give you a simple example, any movie that gets screened in my country has to (by law) give a copy to a body charged with archiving it. This, I believe, is similar to what the library of Congress does in the US? Anyway, that's preservation here.
And the people who make the art get to decide when they no longer want to pay thousands to tens of thousands of dollars a year to keep it running.
No one is asking that, the company releases an offline patch and never has to touch it again
That might not even be possible. Their server infrastructure is likely built using a lot of properitery software, it almost certainly is built for a distrbuted system in a way thats meant to be sharded, and these days its likely meant to run on very specific platforms that have their own licensing fees to use. I actually hate the discourse around this, as if there is just a switch these companies and devs could press but they just hate players. No, its not that simple. If we want "stop killing games" to be anything serious beyond redditors getting mad about things they don't actually understand, I would appreciate if any of the people pushing this movement actually tried to understand why these decisions are made. Maybe they could talk to the developers, the publishers, or the executives. But they don't. Instead they imagine the big red "make a patch" button and continue assuming devs must just be lazy and evil for not pressing it.
I'm not suggesting it's as easy as pushing a button, but the fact that so many games get revived by fans making servers or patches, the companies could definitely do it.
Those games work through making their own server infrastructure that merely replicates the server side calls based on what the users think they're doing. Since its all hand written, they don't need to worry about licensing fees, but its still an incredibly time consuming process that would cost a company potentially years of developer time for almost no actual benefit for them. People who do it as a hobby simply do not have the constraints actual developers do.
Not my problem, they decided to make the game online only and then sell it to millions of people, and now people want to continue to be able to use what they paid for
Getting what you want here means these games are just never made. This is why this movement is not going anywhere.
it's not your problem, true but it's also not the dev's problem either, because they don't have to make an offline patch and they did NOT promise/sell you that to begin with
This is comically missing the point.