That’s a bit reductive. Perhaps plenty care but don’t know to even look for this thing to sign, or are too young to know how games used to be made, or didn’t get the message about this petition in their own language. 1M signatures is an absurdly high threshold to clear; that’s one out of every 450 people in the EU.
It means that the publisher needs to provide the player with the server executable, which is a one time expense for them to prepare, rather than continually paying for humans and machines to keep a server running on their end.
I meant binaries. Open source would be great, but it’s a tough sell for some reason, even though Doom’s been open source for decades and still sells copies to this day.
Also it opens up the ability to play network multiplayer regardless of the presence of someone else’s server on the other end. The lack of LAN or direct IP connections is just DRM by another name.
This does not include the multiplayer. I’m sure it wasn’t the selling point for most, but I hate how the multiplayer use case isn’t well taken care of on GOG. I don’t want Galaxy required; I just want developers to put a bit of work into putting LAN into their games again.
DRM-free is one thing, and it’s something that GOG offers universally, with an asterisk for some multiplayer games, and I wish that asterisk was handled better. You want DRM-free. Your physical copy quickly becomes out of date when new patches come out, and patch cycles are frequent for modern games, even when they ship relatively bug-free out of the gate. Speaking for myself, I have no desire to have physical games anymore. I have a bunch of old PC game boxes that I just put up on my shelves yet again after moving for the fifth time in 14 years. Many of them have GOG versions, and I’m looking to replace those games with the GOG equivalent during the summer sale so I can finally eBay my physical versions away and be done with them.
A mandatory physical version is a cost for a market that hardly exists anymore, but we could all benefit from DRM-free games.
Nintendo does not have a monopoly on fun video games without “aggressive enshitification”, which I’m guessing you mean microtransactions and battle passes. I’m drowning in a deluge of great stuff to play, and none of it is Nintendo lately.
Buying a blind box, loot crate, card pack, etc. with a random chance for items is something that we as people have a high chance of finding addictive, like some kind of misplaced survival instinct. Genshin monetizes their game that way, and you may be lucky like me and not have whatever gene causes us to become crippling gambling addicts, but Mihoyo became a multibillion dollar company off of exploiting those people the same way you might find someone at a corner store playing scratch-off lottery tickets all day, or someone seated at a slot machine with a jar of quarters, mindlessly pulling the lever over and over again.
That’s quite different than if you say, “I’m selling item X. It costs Y.” Digital items that are arbitrarily only available for a limited time, more often than not through battle passes these days, are like gacha, similarly manipulative. I wouldn’t call MMORPGs some bastion of morality, either. I’m sure you saw the same stories I did back in WoW’s heyday of parents neglecting their children because they were helplessly addicted to WoW. Whether by accident or design, WoW took the addictiveness in Diablo’s design and, thanks to a lucrative monthly subscription fee, created an incentive for their developers to pursue avenues to keep players playing longer.
Consoles just have a dwindling list of use cases, so trying to create problems that furthers their use is going to have much the same effect as cable companies trying to pretend that streaming video services don’t exist.
Yes, the two hour limit affects game design. Based on what I’ve read about Blue Prince, it probably didn’t affect that one much at all. The business model always affects the game design. When games were expecting to be rentals, the first few levels would be front loaded with the best that the game had to offer, and then later levels would be more phoned in. In the arcades, games would be louder to catch more attention, they’d be harder to make you put in another quarter, they’d reduce downtime to get the next person on the machine, etc.