I purchased a toy that I expect to be able to continue playing with long after the company that made that toy loses interest in it. I don't expect the company to run servers for my toy, I can do that if they gave that opportunity.

The way the industry currently operates is you show up to an all you can eat buffet, pay your $10, and then they give you a 30 page contract that you have to sign before you can start eating. You are further SOL if you sign that contract at 4:40 and they decide "well, today we are going to close at 5pm because there's not enough people here. This isn't profitable to us".

Once upon a time, all games operated like this. I could buy half life and run a half life server locally and all my friends could play half life together without valve ever getting in the middle. That didn't cost valve anything to support that. It was all part of the price of purchase of half life.

Heck, for games like Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2, 3rd parties like MSN hosted their own 3rd party services for matching players together. We still hosted the servers, but MSN did the match making. And when they stopped that service, it didn't matter. We can still host and play DF2. Theoretically another 3rd party could start up to match make again.

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0xy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Games explicitly do not promise online features remain available perpetually. No reasonable consumer would assume perpetual access, either.

I also completely disagree that "it doesn't cost Valve anything to run Half Life". Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone. Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all. Newsflash, Steam games have CEG DRM and will not function for long periods of time without Steam.

Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.

	▲	Telaneo an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> No reasonable consumer would assume perpetual access, either. I expect perpetual access to my game the same way I expect access to my books. Most of my multiplayer games can still be played without involving a clown server somewhere (either by hosting one myself, or by playing over LAN). This is somewhat skewed by me not having bought many of the offending games, but it's clearly not an impossible feat. It's not even a big ask. And yet it's still not done. > Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed. The mere existence of that workaround means I still get to play my game. There aren't any workarounds for most of the games Stop Killing Games care about, since developing them requires enormous amounts of man-hours reverse engineering, while the devs could do the same in a fraction of the time (or at the very least give people a head start!).
	▲	cogman10 an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Games explicitly do not promise online features remain available perpetually. No reasonable consumer would assume perpetual access, either. Explicitly through a contract you HAVE to sign AFTER the purchase. That's a big problem I have with this model. It's not made explicit until after the purchase. And, it is reasonable to expect because, as I said and other old game players can attest to, this was the status quo for games ~15 years ago. This was a change in living memory. > Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone. How about Quake 1/2/3? I pulled half life just as an example. Valve is making those updates because they want to, not because they have to. > Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all. Ok, Again Quake or Dark forces 2. But also, it's only technically incorrect today. It wasn't when HL was originally released. Valve had to backport in it's integration to the valve servers. That is, they technically had to put in effort to make the game tie to their servers. But also, I can still dust off my old HL cds, install it, and play it without the steam integration. I can even patch it to a pre-steam version and game with people that aren't using the pre steam version. > Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed. That's really only because steam has gone out of it's way to install DRM on top of the games. They have purposely broken my games to be dependent on their services. None of this makes your argument better, in fact it's a highlight of the broken nature of the games industry.
	▲	Rohansi an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed. Not true. Some games distributed via Steam will continue to work because they do not use (or require) Steamworks.