The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

ryandrake 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The goal is a good one, but it's too specific. It should not be allowed for a developer or device manufacturer to kill or nerf any product remotely, once it was bought and paid for. This problem is sneaking into other non-game software, and even physical devices! If you buy a thing you shouldn't need to tether that thing to the manufacturer, and it shouldn't be possible to make it useless when they decide to turn down a server.

As a developer or manufacturer, if your software or device absolutely requires a server that costs money to maintain, then your business plan should take that into account: You should be charging customers monthly to keep that service running. You shouldn't promise a one-time payment, take the customer's money and then yank the service away on a whim.

Nobody is asking for free labor to keep services running. I'm asking that you 1. only tether your product to a server if you absolutely need to, and 2. charge for that kind of product monthly so that you can leave it running while you still have customers. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.

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dpcan 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m a devils advocate on this argument.

Yes, a big company can take it away, but I think they have to leave it online long enough to get your money’s worth.

So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.

	▲	elondaits 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not everything is economic value. For gamers, an online game can be a community hub, part of their identity, a hobby. It’s not about whether they got their money’s worth, it’s about destroying a virtual “place” they’re emotionally and socially invested, and the specific skill they posses when they’re there.
	▲	jayd16 28 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Certainly we'll just move the fig leaf so the free online component of games are now part of a subscription. Ideally a free subscription through packed in keys and such but we'll probably end up being nickel and dimed even further.

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superkuh 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Good cause, but society has rapidly moved passed them just switching off games after people bought them. Now the hardware production companies for gaming are winding down and not producing gaming computer parts because megacorp datacenter parts have a much higher margin. The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud; a context in which these "stop killing games" arguments will have much less leverage.

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nkrisc 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Then I will simply stop purchasing games and continue to play old ones that I can run on my computer as I please, online server or just do something better with my time.

The whole thing seems absurd when you remember that no one needs video games. This doesn’t need to be legislated. Let them kill video games and then stop buying their video games if they’re just going to kill it off. Why are people still buying games that cash be killed off?

If enough people are still buying these games then clearly the game being killed off is not an important factor. If it was, they wouldn’t buy them.

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mpyne 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud

That might be your future. But as long as there are computing platforms that users can run in their own home there will be games for them.

Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud, and their customers have proven willing to pay higher prices for the types of gaming experience Nintendo will deliver.

	▲	xpct a few seconds ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Judging by the amount of people saying they've used and enjoyed cloud gaming I'm not as confident as you to make that claim. If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease. I enjoy low-latency competitive games, and I'd say those are unlikely to get replaced by cloud, because many players notice latency spikes immediately. But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by people who like the feeling of owning their own hardware, or feel the need to have lower latency in games. I'm sure if someone built a data center within two blocks of my home and I was able to stream from it, many of these issues would disappear as well.
	▲	jayd16 25 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Consoles already make you pay for online services. They already sunset games so I think even under the new rules they have the ability to stop that service at any time.
	▲	superkuh 34 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud, Consoles might as well already be cloud for all you control them. But I guess I should've specified PC gaming. I thought it was indicated from the context of "stop killing games". Also, to be clear, I'll never "cloud" game or use consoles. I'll just remain in the past with old hardware and old (and new indie) games. But the "PC gaming industry" as an economic block larger than movies is dying and that's a shame.

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tancop 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

we still got newer companies out of china like moore threads working on gaming gpus, they had to pause new production because of the whole ai shortage but it looks like they might restart. is it usable for any serious gaming right now? no. but its already fighting the nvidia/amd monopoly together with intel.

as long as there is a market the producers will come, even in a super capital intensive industry like this. and it looks like nvidia is partially going back on the whole data center push with rtx spark. its just one high end product but it shows they know a lot of people want local gaming and local inference.

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trumpdong 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a phase and data center parts are usable for gaming. (Yes even with all the rasterizer and texture units chopped off, we'll have a wrapper that does that work in compute shaders)