The fourth movie was written by one of the Wachowskis as a metaphor for their own transition, as a creative outlet during a grieving period after the death of their parents.
and I’ve got my fingers tightly crossed that the new owners will be able to keep it running long into its twilight years—even if they’ve got little planned in the way of fresh content
The Borderlands games made billions of dollars, and no one needs to keep them running.
I don’t really follow Ross Scott outside of this campaign, but I believe he’s a US citizen married to a Polish woman, living in Poland. It sounds like it would take an act of Congress to change things here in the US. My e-mails to my representatives have gone functionally unanswered, which doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.
Pardon me. That’s an assumption on my part that the people in this community are the types that are so ingrained in this stuff that you’ve seen that video, and a link to this petition, a dozen times at this point. This is a campaign organized by Ross Scott at Accursed Farms. The main video pitch is here, and the super short version is here. And here’s the video that came along with the launch of the EU petition.
Once they discontinue it, they dust their hands clean and their work here is done. That’s all that means. Releasing whatever they have to do to allow it to continue to operate is up to and including the moment that it’s supported. Discontinuing support and leaving people with something they can’t play is what the petition is asking to fix. If they did the work to make The Crew playable after the server was shut down, then they are still not providing any additional resources once they discontinue it; that work would have been done in advance. Once again, the petition can’t ask for how they’d like the problem to be legally solved or how the government should define the rules. In the video that typically comes attached to this with a more verbose problem statement and what we should expect as consumers, you can buy a digital horse, but turning the game off removes your ability to access the horse you paid for, so it’s asking to retain the ability to use everything you bought. That’s more than just a phone home if your game client doesn’t contain the multiplayer mode where you would use the horse (or CoD mulitplayer skin).
In a game like an MMO or most free to play games, multiplayer is all that exists. The game as it exists on your computer doesn’t even have everything that it needs to function. It’s asking for the game to continue functioning. As for CoD, the petition is not allowed to be prescriptive, so it would be to the government to determine specifically what must happen. In most cases, the shortest path to honoring what this petition asks for is to provide the server code, but I agree that plenty of games make that distinction very blurry.
What the petition is strictly asking for is to leave the game playable. If that means the game requires multiplayer, then there should be some way to play multiplayer without the server on the other end. I’d certainly prefer that they just make the server executable available. I personally don’t care what the architecture is. People have gotten pirate MMO servers running. Even if it’s something the layman won’t know how to do, we need to have the option to run the server ourselves.
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.