Honestly I don’t see it as the developers losing anything. They still make the same products, they still sell the same products, and when they’re done with those products forever they have to give hosting capability up to the public.
What are they afraid of? That we won’t play their new games if they can’t shut the old games down?
So, a shitton of game developers just got laid off from Microsoft, another in a string of “restructuring” nonsense that’s been rampant in the industry.
That’s a lot of people with gaming expertise who could be put to work helping companies transition their games to single player experiences or at least making them accessible to customers after support stops. If the EU ends up pushing this forward, there’s a decent business opportunity in there.
I have played Stardew Valley before but it was a pirated copy. I have it wish listed on steam but I only purchased two games on steam and I find the payment process to be a bit tedious. I may look into buying it someday but if I win this giveaway, then I don’t have to buy it. 🙂
“curtail developer choice” is such a weak argument because you could equally apply it to literally every piece of regulation ever passed. Of course it curtails choice, that’s almost the dictionary definition of an industry regulation.
We saw the depths a nepo baby from Blizzard would go for this initiative to fail, can’t imagine what could happen with a body comprised of people from the biggest worms in the industry (Epic, EA, Activision, Microsoft, Ubi et al.)
The only choice it really limits from the publisher is the choice to decide to stop supporting a game out of nowhere. This new plan would just make it so you have to eventually plan to sunset the game from its “live” elements.
It also means there will never be another F2P game. They have to make their money upfront from every user. They can't just turn it off when the profit slows and/or stops.
Genshin Impact is a F2P game that makes stupid amounts of money. If it stopped making money, they could very well just stop developing for it and let it be as it is.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne