But perhaps a good community rule would be to make threads that are conducive to discussion rather than single answers that can be found with a quick web search.
Nah, France and Spain. We only need 7 countries to pass their thresholds, and after that, only raw numbers matter. We need the big population centers, and France and Spain are way behind Germany.
I just tried GZDoom from Flathub to try to see if these things were there, because they weren’t last I checked (which was admittedly a long time ago). The game couldn’t find my WADs after a few tries of trying to get it to work, even after using Flatseal. Flathub reviews indicate that those who managed to get it running were having trouble getting the game to recognize their controller. The Steam version just works. Having community source ports is great, but there’s value in the company updating their official version.
I think he also did Doom 3, but I don’t think he was involved in Doom 2. Doom 1 was mostly just playing fast and loose with copyright law. The iconic E1M1 theme song is just a MIDI version of some song from Slayer.
The community updates for these sorts of things never seem to be interested in controller support and split-screen, so when those things are well supported, that’s when I get excited.
They did to me too, but maybe it’s one of those things where you can’t talk about the deal for X, Y, and Z reasons, especially since it might not go through.
If this deal went through in time to save Tango, as the press release states, this just must have been how long it took for the paperwork to go through.
even those that are often do have a way to continue to run after the service ends
I’m going to guess you use a different definition than the rest of do if you came to this conclusion. Even still, we’ve got an enormous graveyard of games rendered nonfunctional once the servers were taken offline, and we can objectively measure those and see no way it’s going to slow down. Sony’s about to push out Concord this month. The two RTS games pushing themselves most as successors to StarCraft are both online-only. All three of these games will be completely unplayable and lost to time in just a few short years.
To the question about “why not boycott companies selling games this way?” he explains boycotts don’t work. But when Bud Light ran a pro LGBT ad, so many bigots switched beer that Bud Light had to apologize and fire their executives. It fell from #1 beer to #3 and the parent company is now switching their flagship beer from Bud Light to Michelob. Boycotts work.
I agree with you. A lot of people don’t realize the power they have in the marketplace. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is very obfuscated. Why would they tell you clearly that the game is going to stop functioning at some point in the future if they don’t have to? It would be terrible for business. They’ll put it in their EULAs, the things you only see after you’ve already purchased the game, and declining it means you can’t use the thing you bought. It might be in some small italics text on the store page that’s difficult to find. But if you’re looking at Diablo IV next to Titan Quest II, you as the consumer have very little indication that one of those games will live forever while the other lives on borrowed time.
Plus, yes, games are art that are worth preserving.
Helldivers said everyone would need a PSN account to play the game on PC and it got so much backlash that the company changed course in a few days.
It’s worth noting that, because this game can’t exist offline, this is a change they could impose on you after you’ve already bought it.
The response is “Shut down your game and never make another online-only game ever again”. He spends a lot of time talking about how games are works of art that need to be preserved for the sake of humanity and the good of consumers, and then he tells devs to shutdown their game and never make another one.
There was a gaming VPN program called Tunngle that I would use when Hamachi would fail me. It was surely collecting untold quantities of my personal data without my knowledge. When the GDPR passed, Tunngle decided to just close up shop rather than finding another way forward. That was a casualty of consumer protections, but it doesn’t mean that consumers aren’t worth protecting. He acknowledges the very real scenario that this is a non-starter for a lot of current games’ business models, and they’ll sooner shut down than comply, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth making sure that people get what they expect to receive when they pay for a game: actual ownership.
This isn’t preservation of games anymore than…
I’m not touching that metaphor for all sorts of reasons that could derail this discussion, but yes, requiring that a game remains playable after the servers are shut down is preservation. Requiring them to put a label on it, like a surgeon general’s warning on a pack of cigarettes, describing exactly what it is they’re selling to me; that would be consumer protection. I’ll still happily take the preservation as one step further than that.
I honestly think that the better way of handling this is an awareness campaign (like is currently happening, keep the conversation going!) and boycott against the worst offenders, not a petition to create a new law.
Awareness is a huge problem, because, much like I stated earlier, games aren’t even required to inform me that I wouldn’t want to buy them, and it takes me a lot of work to find that out.
If a free market solution (which I like and prefer, by the way) was going to solve this, it would have done it by now.
It’s not exactly an advertised feature when a game is DRM free on Steam, so this list may not be comprehensive or accurate for every game. DRM is optional on Steam. You can copy these game directories out of Steam and run them on a totally separate computer with Steam not even installed, and they’ll still work.
And I’d have just made my username &rew if they let me, but this is the one I use when that one is taken or they have limitations on special characters. With the special character, it has the benefit of fitting in old-school four character clan tags as well as Smash Melee names (and I don’t like going by Drew).