I'm tired of modern video games being shut down from pointless server requirements and wanted to help the cause to spread the word that we might be able to d...
  • ashinadash [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    18·
    3 months ago

    I have so many classic 00s PC games whose discs are useless because of Safedisc, Securom or Starforce. It fucks me up though that the first game to ever go offline and become unplayable forever is the 1991 online game Neverwinter Nights. It foretells all of this.

    Also though, this kind of “campaign against publishers killing games!”, consumer advocacy within the bounds of capitalism stuff, it kind of makes my eyes glaze over. For one I’ve always held that if a publisher can’t even bother ensuring that their game will be playable in a decade, their game is not worth playing. But also, you wanna do what, contact regulatory bodies about DRM and server connections? Is that like a call-your-senator thing? What if we had a Maoist uprising against game publishers instead?

    mao-shining the-doohickey freeze-gamer

    • save_vs_death [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      3 months ago

      Of course, if you live in the US, the stop killing games thing doesn’t matter because you genuinely cannot do anything about it. The only reason the campaign has teeth is because Ubisoft is headquartered in France, and France has strong consumer protection laws where if a product stops working after a while, they have to clearly tell you that upon purchase. Of course, no gamer ever checked because who wants to call up a government authority. So this is all an unsettled legal gray area as it pertains to French law. Publishers however don’t want to segment their product line so usually once a consumer right is upheld in one jurisdiction, everyone else gets it for free.

    • doublepepperoni [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      7·
      3 months ago

      I have to assume a big part of the reason why people are becoming aware of how bad the situation is because many games are finally starting to become uncrackable

      Before you didn’t need to give a fuck about licensing or delisting since you could just go grab a cracked copy from your nearest torrent site

    • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      One thing I noticed in the video that started this recent round of contacting regulatory bodies about publishers shutting down games is that he totally wrote off the US immediately as having especially worthless consumer protection laws.