Unfortunately, my friends play it and I’m often roped into playing it with them. My advice: The game is greatly improved if you disable all forms of interaction with other players. Chat is muted by default now, but I’d also recommend muting pings and emotes. No form of interaction is ever positive in that game.
Even then, their matchmaking algorithm seems to be designed to hand an easy win to one team and just switches up which side you’re on enough times that you won’t quit.
Games sold on Steam are not required to use Steam’s DRM. There are lots of DRM free games on Steam. Steam is only required to be installed to purchase/download them but not to run them. After download, the game files can be copied and ran on any computer without any verification.
It’s crazy that they released it. They had early access and preorders and those only attracted something like 1,000 players. This is a game that had a $100 million budget. So few players during the early stages should have told the studio to cancel it while it was still in production. Apparently they thought they’d release it and would just jump from 1,000 players to 100,000 overnight with no changes.
In the “other references” they link to the bulbapedia article for Pokemon box so I figured thats what the whole thing was about, but yeah it does read like accessing data on a server
What is the benefit of forcing developers to provide access to old games that require online functionality indefinitely, instead of just hard limiting them to say 10 years wich is essentially indefinite in terms of non-live service games.
In a choice between “you can play online until 2035” and “you can play online forever”, the answer is pretty obvious. All things being equal, the indefinite option is better. I think the problem is that all things are not equal, and making it a legal requirement that all games with online features come with a guarantee those features work indefinitely is incredibly vague and can lead to situations that outright hurt developers.
If the devs need to provide a server binary for players to host a server, how do they ensure these servers only allow players who have purchased the game to play? If they can’t ensure it, then the law is forcing companies to allow pirate servers to exist
How do they ensure people running these community servers aren’t charging money for people to play? If they can’t ensure it, then the law is allowing people to use a company’s IP to generate money without a licence.
If the original version had an in-game shop where you can unlock things with real life money but the offline version doesn’t have a shop, thus making parts of the game forever unobtainable, did they follow the law? If not, then devs would have to give out paid features for free.
Unless these kinds of details are accounted for, this vague idea is doomed to fail because no government is going to force a company to give up their copyright/IP for free. I know a lot of people have also said “fuck these giant corporations” but this also affects indie developers as well. Copyright protects small creators as much as it does large ones.
They’re doing this because they’ve lost so much money investors are angry and the executives want to win people back. They aren’t worried about law changes, they’re worried about their stock price and reputation.
If ECIs are to become a useful tool for civil society, campaigners would benefit from a better understanding of how to craft their demands in a way that is likely to lead the Commission to actually propose a legislative initiative. There have now been 133 ECI attempts, millions of signatures collected, a significant amount of money spent, and little to show for it.
A gacha game asking money for something useless? That’s the entire model!
Players that buy stuff in these games usually see it as a donation to devs making a good game. If nobody bought any of the useless stuff the game would shutdown. That’s how I treat the $10 a month I spend on Reverse 1999. Or they’re a gambling addict and can’t stop themselves from spinning the wheel.
This is so important to you that the government must be petitioned to act but you don’t have a single example? Did you purchase Concord? Have you ever purchased a game that no longer works? Why do you think you have the right to tell the devs what they should be doing if you didn’t buy their game?
Literally how would this change anything? Nobody played the game because it’s bad. Everyone who bought it got a refund. Why would you want a law forcing them to give people a game they don’t want?