On 7/17/2022 at 7:16 PM, Shaddy said:But the point isn't about whether the server will have a bunch of people on it, it's about being able to run it at all. Plenty of games will go unplayed whether a publisher kills them or not, but the focus is that publishers shouldn't be able to kill them regardless. You can't predict whether a game will stay popular, but you can choose whether to deny anyone the right to ever play it again, and that's a shitty thing to do which shouldn't be allowed, at least if they paid for any part of it.
But like, what if no one is even willing to run such a server in the first place? I mean, we're not talking about erasing the full game, but just the multiplayer aspects of a game you can still play. The company can't run the servers forever, so the proposed other option is to turn multiplayer servers over to the fans. But someone will have to run and pay for those servers. That's just not going to happen every time even if the company does allow it.
On 7/17/2022 at 6:01 PM, Blizzaga said:That is true, a lot of people will move on after enough time passes. This was addressed in the "GaaS is Fraud" video. This boils down to the company deciding what games we still get to play not the actual players. So in this case, the players have decided that they don't want to play that game right now, but maybe in a couple years when a new game in that series is announced people will go back to the older ones. It never went away and is always there waiting. If a game is terrible and nobody wants to preserve it, then it doesn't get preserved. That is not because nobody could preserve it but because nobody wanted to, there is a massive difference between those two.
I'm not saying I agree but if this scenario happened, "but maybe in a couple years when a new game in that series is announced people will go back to the older ones", the companies would argue, "If such a demand appeared we would reopen the servers."