This is probably obvious, but:
The reason those businesses so consistently distort what SKG is about is to mislead the public, into not supporting SKG. They want their “remote kill switches”, even if they’re an unfair market practice - because if you’re playing a 10yo game, you aren’t buying whatever slop they released in the current year.
Weird, somehow we still have media from hundreds of years ago. And games from half a decade ago. Yet modern games, with much more options to store and emulate, won’t last as long? Most peculiar.
Games from half a decade ago
Pretty sure Brood War and Counter Strike never stopped working. In the past on PC, developers released the files needed to host your own servers for online games. Ubisoft has been gleefully trying to kill offline single player games for over a decade though. The best we can hope for is that Ubisoft fades go irrelevance or even fully close shop so money can flow to better gaming companies
Stop Killing Games is about online components, relevant or not to the core gameplay, requiring the presence of a company server and acting as a remote kill switch. It’s not about putting the burden of preservation on the studios, but of reasonable “preservability”.
The argument that actually preserving video games is easy because we have preserved other forms of media does not hold. Digital data is problematic to preserve because most physical supports have ridiculously low shelf life compared to, say, paper. Storing it on computers which age even faster isn’t any better. Furthermore we have lost to time countless works from other media, some critical. Fortunately this all has little to do with what Stop Killing Games is about.
Paraphrasing from Frost here; It’s the “stop killing games” movement, Yves. It’s not the “stop games from dying”-movement.
It’s fine if you no longer want to support a game, but you can still make it available offline if you have a lan. Trackmania is a good example, since ubi now owns that. The original is still being played in lans the world over!
So yeah, fuck you, Ubi. It’s a choice to be like this.
Especially, Trackmania nations forever (the old stadium one) online features do work on Nadeo servers but are not relying on it for everything. The nadeo servers are still up, but if they ever go down the whole community has already tons of solutions to keep the gamme running. Games should not be relying on the master servers for every single thing and allow localhost and LAN servers too
Completely agree! It makes for a game that’s still super healthy to this day, and I love that
“I don’t want to release the server portion of the games my studios make.”
Yes, we know.
Because they make nothing when you play their old games. No retention metrics they can blow their load on the shareholders and zero monetization opportunities
They probably talk shit about players like us in meetings because we are “dead weight” to them
He should probably read what the Stop Killing Games campaign is trying to establish before responding. But he probably “has people for that”. And it shows.
The miscaracterization of the movement by all the companies and groups of companies is no mistake, it’s intentional to push their agenda that they are the reasonable ones and to take it down.
Yup. This is purposeful mischaracterization from one of the biggest boosters of games-as-a-streaming-product. Ubisoft doesn’t want you to have the ability to play things at your whim, but exclusively at theirs. They sure as fuck don’t want you spending your time on something they sold you 10 years ago.
It’s well known on the games industry that their largest competitor is now themselves - 10 years ago. You’re not just selling a new game, but you’re selling a new game that people need to choose to spend money on or replay an old one they love.
They have a real motive to kill games. If we can’t play the good ones from a decade ago then we’ll have to buy the new ones!
Purposely misrepresenting the SKG movement for their gain? Gee, where have I heard that before?
It really does. On the other hand, you can spin this as Ubi CEO is literally, just a little illiterate.
release the source code or the server software and you won’t need to worry about it.
cs 1.6 is still playable online for this reason.
Nothing is eternal if you purposely limit the ability to preserve things.
It’s not about making something eternal, it’s about letting the public be able to maintain it once the company ceases
In other words don’t trash, donate
Shut up and declare bankruptcy so fromsoft can have Assassins Creed.
I’m a big fan of the AC games. It’s my favorite series. I also avoid soulslike games, as I don’t understand the appeal. Aren’t they all about doing the same thing over and over again “to get better”? If so, that’s definitely not what I play games for, as it’s more like work.
They’re more difficult than average but like elden ring and skyrim weren’t known for being grinds. You know what has a grind rep? AC Valhalla. No one finished it. AC was great but it feels like it’s been down hill since Origins.
My impression might be skewed because I’ve only played from the first through Syndicate so far. Based on those, yes, there’s a lot of pointlessness even there. After finishing all quests in Rogue, I had to spend as many hours to open all the chests and collect everything for achieving 100% completion. Still, I got to explore new places and see more of the game world. I also could just abandon that and still see the game as finished, but you can’t do these things if you’re stuck trying to beat a boss in a souslike, or at least how I understand those games.
You would have to look up strategy for boss fights but fromsoft usually leaves a cheese build in the game if you want to play more for story. It’s the attention to detail and solid design fundamentals that make set them apart though. Nintendo does similar quality work on Mario and Zelda where you can tell the team cares about the game.
Half of the soulslike appeal is the world design and exploration, which I assume AC is all about, as I haven’t played any. Elden Ring also explicitly gave people summons which make the game easier for almost every fight, so they can be approached by more casual players, and it worked.
Lastly, Dark Souls fans are tryhards that will tell you you’re playing the game wrong for using magic, summons, or sometimes even a shield. Dark Souls 1 for instance is way easier early if you have the Heal spell, and the game’s practically begging you to learn it by giving you all you need before the first real area. The “Prepare to die” slogan was introduced after DS1 hit mainstream.
Yeah no shit Sherlock, in 5 billion years the sun will expand enough to engulf the earth in its flames and then even stop killing games can’t do anything to preserve games, lets just scrap it /s
They’re so fucking desperate, it’s the ultimate sign that skg is the correct way
If SKG get what they want I’ll be even better off when buying games on sale 8 years after release.
Imagine it’s already unsupported and thus:
- Time-limited FOMO events are disabled or left in a predictable cycle
- Can decide to play with friends instead of forced to play with cheaters the publishers can’t seem to keep out of official servers
- Related to previous point but toxic players usually follow the bigger player bases to have more harassment targets and you can ban them yourself if it’s private server or p2p
- Offline play and LAN: play with your travel companions on handheld devices without internet or during outages
- Cash shop shutdown if one existed
Games are ironically going to get better, like a fine wine, as they age and lose support. The alternative is that publishers make them as good at release so people don’t wait until end of life too buy it.
Downer take: I don’t know if this has been addressed by SKG but my biggest fear related to this is that publishers will push controversial updates that fundamentally change the game like EoC in RuneScape or disable core features before shutdown. That way they can say they left it on the newest patch. The game works, but nobody who enjoyed it before is going to want to play it. Even in this scenario the added regulation is a net positive though.
I understand why a company and the people who run it want to be pieces of shit. I also don’t give a shit about what they want.
Open source the server/game codebase motherfucker! Your copyrights should end when support does.
Games aren’t developed in a silo, for example XDefiant shares its engine with The Division and probably back-end services with most other Ubisoft games, so releasing its code could expose vulnerabilities to be exploited in games that are still running. They could still be forced to release a closed source server application though.
TIL. Maybe that’s a very good reason to release the code; fix the vulns.
I mean, from a business/greed point of view I totally understand why they dont support this.
But then I remember I don’t give a shit about soulless mega corporations that only exist to please shareholders. And I don’t shed a tear for shitty business practices that shouldn’t be allowed in the first place. Like mandatory online for single player games and removing local play capability for every multiplayer game.
Me reading the Epic of Gilgamesh 4000 years later
