The roster they launched with was pretty robust even without him. Personally, after how shoto-heavy past rosters have been, I hope Akuma is the last one, unless they add Dan years from now.
Judging by how Sony is doing even though they clearly “won” with the PS5, it looks like consoles as we know them are not long for this world, and that seems to be the idea Microsoft is pivoting around.
It sucks that I don’t trust this game to be playable offline. I’m also not a fan of hitstun decay, but at least there were a few points in this video where there appeared to be tech traps; if you’re going to have hitstun decay, it needs to keep the other player engaged too, rather than just holding a button and waiting for your opponent to maybe screw up.
In the Paradox case, nothing is live, and they aren’t pretending it’s a service. They just put goods out at a rapid clip that you choose to buy or not. That’s why live service games are always online. If Paradox counts, then so do board games, and that’s absurd.
My second paragraph is mostly solved by the first paragraph. If every game lives forever, guaranteed by law, then I hardly have to care, but mostly I was stressing that there’s not even a free market solution to this problem. The point of this campaign is to give us these rights, because it’s truly stupid that we’ve gotten away without having them. Perhaps with the right legal challenge in the right country, it will be seen to already violate some consumer protection law currently on the books. That’s one of the things we’re hoping for, and this campaign is our best shot. I’d strongly encourage you to follow whatever steps on the web site you’re able to based on where you live and/or whether or not you own a copy of The Crew.
Great. It should come at great risk to build a product for customers that’s designed to self-destruct. It reduces the number of multiplayer games that we’ll be able to play in a decade. Even bad games should be playable indefinitely, but plenty of these are very good games that simply go through the natural ebb and flow of popularity. The solution is to allow me to host the server, connect to a host directly via IP, play over LAN (which means VPNs work too), etc. If you haven’t seen the Accursed Farms video, the root of this campaign, you should watch that. He sets the bar pretty low just so we have the absolute minimum. The go-to example for this is The Crew for the purposes of this campaign.
And honestly, I’m pretty regularly on the side of free market, let people do what they want with their money, but even if this didn’t bother me because of what this means for preserving the history of an art form, it’s become extraordinarily difficult for me, the consumer, to even know what I’m buying. Games with online requirements often hide it in fine print italics in the Steam page; in the case of games like Palworld, that disclaimer is actually wrong, and you can play offline just fine. Games with LAN often don’t advertise it on the list of features, and I have to either ask an existing owner of the game about it or hope the developer answers my question in the Steam forums. We need consumer protections for this stuff codified into law.
I think your last paragraph highlights exactly how I figured it would work. If you couldn’t provide the servers when you ran out of money, it would show you weren’t complying with the law when you built it. Remember, online multiplayer games existed for a long time without requiring the use of company servers. The Game Awards’ multiplayer game of the year last year is playable via direct IP connection and LAN. Nightingale requires a connection to official servers and was slammed in reviews for not offering the ability for customers to run them themselves like most of Nightingale’s competitors do.