servers ain’t free. I know ubisofts are a bunch of pricks but if you run servers indefinitely without generating income you’ll eventually run out of money.
Not every game is an MMO. A game like the crew 1 that is past it’s prime is not expensive to keep a few servers running for. It’s a negligible cost.
They could also put in the time to give players the tools to host their own servers, or simply allow offline play. This used to be standard for all PC games. They chose to do neither of these things in an obvious effort to force players towards the sequel or their other games. They should not be permitted to do anti-consumer things like this.
Even MMOs have been run by amateurs. If you make the servers available, someone will figure out how to run it.
yes scaling past a couple hundred users becomes an engineering nightmare
Depends on the game for what point scaling further gets difficult. I think Factorio can do near infinite with the clusterio mod and from a server host perspective it’s very easy to setup. You just need enough servers, the mod allows cross server interaction.
Uhoh, the widdle baby corporation can’t handle hosting their game!
They should be forced to give people the tools they need to host.
Good point, thats why we should be able to run servers ourselves after the game dies
that’s a good point too. however it’s very possible they’re using proprietary code that’s used in other IP. Especially the core game engine, which you’d have to open source too.
The server code could also be released as a binary blob under a proprietary license. No different from distributing any other piece of software.
It could be but it wouldn’t take long before it’s replicated in a way thats not propriety or just stolen by devs in countries where that means nothing.
They are a giant shitty conglomerate they will find 10,000 reasons
I agree with this, however, I also don’t think they should be allowed to call it purchasing. If you don’t own something, then you didn’t purchase it. The button for games like these should be “long-term rental” or something to that effect.
I’m okay with servers being shut down eventually, my issue is we don’t know when. If they want to call it a license and that it will be revoked later, well fucking plan it out and tell people. Did the game get cheaper as the clock ran down? Did the people buying 10 years of access pay more than people that only got to play it once? I’m pissed for the people like me that sometimes take a few years to get to playing their games only to find the servers are gone and they thought they were buying something (or at least licensing something) they would get to use.
Of course they would probably find that if they told people how long they could use it, a lot of people wouldn’t pay them for it (i.e. their business would fail without intentionally deceiving their customers).
Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Sure, but in that case they need to make the server code open source so game owners can run their own servers.
Or they need to include a lan / offline mode