If your game requires a server for single player content, I ain't buying it.
I'm not paying full price and getting a rental.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Only exception to this is if I can run the server myself. Even multiplayer games I feel somewhat cautious about now.
V rising kind of does this but a single player game is just called a server it's on your local machine though.
This is why it is so important to find exploits for current gen consoles. It is not about piracy, it is about preservation. You don't own a game that requires the internet, or a fucking download code Nintendo.
It is not about piracy, it is about preservation.
Nice. Did you make this?
Slapped it together real fast, yup.
A PS3 with Evilnat custom firmware is truly a thing of beauty. A great era for videogame creativity and experimentation, when F2P was just a twinkle in Tim Sweeney's eye.
I’m still upset about Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy & The Polar Night Liberator
This is true. I've been grieving the loss of Isekai Demon Waifu, which shut down only a few days ago on the 19th of this month. I had been playing it over 3 years, and had unlocked most of the girls, become the #1 on my server, and had grown attached to seeing my harem girls every night when I play the game before bed. I missed the server shutdown notification and I was messed up the next day. It hit me hard.
I hope there is another harem game with succubi and monster girls. IDW had a lot of charm. The music, art style, aesthetic. Amazing monster girls. I'm going to miss seeing Ephinas, Fiadum, Hastia, Scardia, Palotti, Ymir, and all the others.
It doesn't seem fair that we can spend years of our life, hundreds or even thousands of dollars, make a game experience part of our lives, and then one day it just goes poof and it's all gone. Part of you vanishes in that moment. It's like a bandaid being ripped off a wound, or a light in your life going out. Because someone else decided it cost too much to keep a server running?
They should be required to transition the game into an offline mode!
Can't you use that money to see a therapist now?
I can't tell if this is satire or not.
Depends on whether they have heard of Josh Strife Hayes.
Given the username I'd guess not. Good username btw
They should be required to transition the game into an offline mode!
Seems to me like this would be good business sense too. Wouldn't people be more likely to buy their next online game if you felt there was a good chance you could keep playing it after a few years? Instead they're going to get a reputation for making products with a short shelf life.
It's astonishing to me how even right here on Lemmy so many people still misunderstand what this is about with comments saying that piracy fixes it or that downloading the game installer solves the issue. The games where those things are options aren't what this effort is about, this is about games like Darkspore, Defiance, Tabula Rasa, and our prototypical example The Crew, where there is no one who can play them no matter where, how, or when, they acquired the game, it is impossible to play for anyone, the whole piece of art has been destroyed.
Honestly if we can't even communicate what the movement is about to those who aught to be our base it really does not bode well for gaining any kind of wider traction.
In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they'll never actually die, unless the server source code gets taken down and nobody archives a copy. I mean, WoW Classic only happened because a private server running vanilla got too big, despite Blizzard bullshit of "You think you want it, but you don't" and "We don't have the code to roll back".
Star Wars Galaxies, Phantasy Star Online, City of Heroes, Warhammer Age of Reckoning all still exist and can be played, despite being "dead", thanks to private/pirate servers.
Marvel Heroes Omega is one I recently discovered has private servers now. I really miss that one. The whole campaign is playable, but the server will be wiped once 1.0 of the emu comes out, possibly early next year.
I think the issue is that, as with reddit, a lot of people are only reading the headline and commenting.
Also many young people are so used to games requiring online connection and being shut down, that they can't imagine a better way.
That does seem to be an influence, though oddly there are some modern wildly popular games, Minecraft being a prime example, that still allow you to self host your own server, so it shouldn't really be as foreign of a concept as it appears to be to some younger folk.
I boycott single player games that require online login/validation. Rockstar and Ubisoft are on my blacklist
I returned Red Dead Redemption 2 on steam after seeing I needed an entire Shitstar account.
5 years ago I would have just forgotten about it and moved on but in today's climate, fuck em. They don't even deserve my $1.40.
Piracy is essentially a form of archivism. The digital age literally ended scarcity in digital media and these people were like "well that won't do".
For sone of these games piracy would solve nothing. How wouldI run an 8vs8 PvP mission in DCUO that players are required to do if there aren't 16 players on the server? If Im hosting it offline that content is still dead.
Private WoW servers thrived. Much of the endgame content required 40 players to collaborate for hours at a time, and they have kept their own dream running for well over a decade.
You should have the option to find and play with others long after corporate servers are abandoned. Whether or not there are other players immediately available is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Edit - and you're all over this thread licking boots and saying "you signed the agreement!"
Thanks. We know how license agreements work. They are included in the thing we want to change, when we talk about changing the industry. We want to stop allowing bullshit license agreements. The exact same way many of us want Right to Repair for people who bought tractors with proprietary software.
It also allows the game to revive itself. Those 40 players playing pirated WoW could introduce more people to the game. And at the very least, it allows it be run in the future if ever historians should need access.
I dont think you do know how licenses work when your complaint amounts to ” I want this the way I want it not the way I agreed to it”.
You either accept the game the way it us offered or you dont play the game. You are not entitled to get things the way you want them.
Lol swing and a miss again, my friend.
Nice use of the word "entitled" - really sums up your stance on the consumer/business relationship.
The consumer is "entitled" for protesting predatory or unethical business practices.
The consumer is "entitled" for opposing the ongoing enshittification of entire industries.
The consumer is "entitled" for wanting businesses to not be able to legally hide behind unsustainable licensing practices that provide no value to society and further entrench the ever-growing rent/subscription model that is squeezing people dry for no reason.
The entire point - the entire fucking point - is that these licenses are not okay. So, no, I don't pay for these licenses, but I don't think anyone should be able to pay for these licenses, because I don't think anyone should be able to "sell" these licenses.
These licenses - like many unethical business practices - put the corporation that offers them at a financial advantage over the corporations that don't.
Regulations - in every industry - should level the playing field. They can allow ethical business practices to be viable and competitive, instead of being liabilities and risks. The copyright/IP system is an example of those regulations instead being weaponized against the consumer, and needs a massive overhaul.
We have every goddamn right to protest those business practices whether or not we do business with those companies - just as we have every right to protest unethical or discriminatory hiring practices by companies that we don't work for.
But enjoy the taste of corporate boots!
Im honestly so sick of online games that should be offline. I just got a few switch games to pass time on my breaks, and half of them require internet access. One of them is literally a bubble shooter.
Out of the games I’ve been fortunate to work on, 1/7 require internet, and the 1 was my first industry job as QA. Everything else has been mobile, online required. 5/7 are no longer playable / removed from the internet.
It makes me sad because my kids will never play a bunch of things I made. I can’t revisit them nostalgically. If I had made something in the 90s, it would be preserved still.
I played the cards dealt to me to follow a dream and make a living, but I wish the industry wasn’t like this. The money has always been a role, but nowadays, it’s distorted so badly.
That's the difference shareholders make.
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