and I’ve got my fingers tightly crossed that the new owners will be able to keep it running long into its twilight years—even if they’ve got little planned in the way of fresh content

The Borderlands games made billions of dollars, and no one needs to keep them running.

I don’t really follow Ross Scott outside of this campaign, but I believe he’s a US citizen married to a Polish woman, living in Poland. It sounds like it would take an act of Congress to change things here in the US. My e-mails to my representatives have gone functionally unanswered, which doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.

Pardon me. That’s an assumption on my part that the people in this community are the types that are so ingrained in this stuff that you’ve seen that video, and a link to this petition, a dozen times at this point. This is a campaign organized by Ross Scott at Accursed Farms. The main video pitch is here, and the super short version is here. And here’s the video that came along with the launch of the EU petition.

Once they discontinue it, they dust their hands clean and their work here is done. That’s all that means. Releasing whatever they have to do to allow it to continue to operate is up to and including the moment that it’s supported. Discontinuing support and leaving people with something they can’t play is what the petition is asking to fix. If they did the work to make The Crew playable after the server was shut down, then they are still not providing any additional resources once they discontinue it; that work would have been done in advance. Once again, the petition can’t ask for how they’d like the problem to be legally solved or how the government should define the rules. In the video that typically comes attached to this with a more verbose problem statement and what we should expect as consumers, you can buy a digital horse, but turning the game off removes your ability to access the horse you paid for, so it’s asking to retain the ability to use everything you bought. That’s more than just a phone home if your game client doesn’t contain the multiplayer mode where you would use the horse (or CoD mulitplayer skin).

In a game like an MMO or most free to play games, multiplayer is all that exists. The game as it exists on your computer doesn’t even have everything that it needs to function. It’s asking for the game to continue functioning. As for CoD, the petition is not allowed to be prescriptive, so it would be to the government to determine specifically what must happen. In most cases, the shortest path to honoring what this petition asks for is to provide the server code, but I agree that plenty of games make that distinction very blurry.

What the petition is strictly asking for is to leave the game playable. If that means the game requires multiplayer, then there should be some way to play multiplayer without the server on the other end. I’d certainly prefer that they just make the server executable available. I personally don’t care what the architecture is. People have gotten pirate MMO servers running. Even if it’s something the layman won’t know how to do, we need to have the option to run the server ourselves.

That’s a bit reductive. Perhaps plenty care but don’t know to even look for this thing to sign, or are too young to know how games used to be made, or didn’t get the message about this petition in their own language. 1M signatures is an absurdly high threshold to clear; that’s one out of every 450 people in the EU.

It means that the publisher needs to provide the player with the server executable, which is a one time expense for them to prepare, rather than continually paying for humans and machines to keep a server running on their end.

I meant binaries. Open source would be great, but it’s a tough sell for some reason, even though Doom’s been open source for decades and still sells copies to this day.

Cool, then give me the server code to run it myself.

Also it opens up the ability to play network multiplayer regardless of the presence of someone else’s server on the other end. The lack of LAN or direct IP connections is just DRM by another name.

This does not include the multiplayer. I’m sure it wasn’t the selling point for most, but I hate how the multiplayer use case isn’t well taken care of on GOG. I don’t want Galaxy required; I just want developers to put a bit of work into putting LAN into their games again.

DRM-free is one thing, and it’s something that GOG offers universally, with an asterisk for some multiplayer games, and I wish that asterisk was handled better. You want DRM-free. Your physical copy quickly becomes out of date when new patches come out, and patch cycles are frequent for modern games, even when they ship relatively bug-free out of the gate. Speaking for myself, I have no desire to have physical games anymore. I have a bunch of old PC game boxes that I just put up on my shelves yet again after moving for the fifth time in 14 years. Many of them have GOG versions, and I’m looking to replace those games with the GOG equivalent during the summer sale so I can finally eBay my physical versions away and be done with them.

A mandatory physical version is a cost for a market that hardly exists anymore, but we could all benefit from DRM-free games.

Nintendo does not have a monopoly on fun video games without “aggressive enshitification”, which I’m guessing you mean microtransactions and battle passes. I’m drowning in a deluge of great stuff to play, and none of it is Nintendo lately.

Buying a blind box, loot crate, card pack, etc. with a random chance for items is something that we as people have a high chance of finding addictive, like some kind of misplaced survival instinct. Genshin monetizes their game that way, and you may be lucky like me and not have whatever gene causes us to become crippling gambling addicts, but Mihoyo became a multibillion dollar company off of exploiting those people the same way you might find someone at a corner store playing scratch-off lottery tickets all day, or someone seated at a slot machine with a jar of quarters, mindlessly pulling the lever over and over again.

That’s quite different than if you say, “I’m selling item X. It costs Y.” Digital items that are arbitrarily only available for a limited time, more often than not through battle passes these days, are like gacha, similarly manipulative. I wouldn’t call MMORPGs some bastion of morality, either. I’m sure you saw the same stories I did back in WoW’s heyday of parents neglecting their children because they were helplessly addicted to WoW. Whether by accident or design, WoW took the addictiveness in Diablo’s design and, thanks to a lucrative monthly subscription fee, created an incentive for their developers to pursue avenues to keep players playing longer.

I wish you the best of luck. I don’t know what that threshold is where the smaller communities make sense, but for me, we haven’t met it yet.

I saw so many people in another instance relating this to shaming people for avocado toast rather than these games exploiting gambling addiction.

Consoles just have a dwindling list of use cases, so trying to create problems that furthers their use is going to have much the same effect as cable companies trying to pretend that streaming video services don’t exist.

Personally, I’m at the point of “fuck walled garden ecosystems”, not to mention all the legal work they’re doing to ruin video games.

Yes, the two hour limit affects game design. Based on what I’ve read about Blue Prince, it probably didn’t affect that one much at all. The business model always affects the game design. When games were expecting to be rentals, the first few levels would be front loaded with the best that the game had to offer, and then later levels would be more phoned in. In the arcades, games would be louder to catch more attention, they’d be harder to make you put in another quarter, they’d reduce downtime to get the next person on the machine, etc.