As you are not a gamer, I’ll try to make it simple.
If a game ask for an online connection, is usually for three reasons:
multiplayer, or some kind of social interaction
drm, to make it harder to cheat, or redistribute cracked versions of said game
telemetry, either to know how players plays their game, or to sell you as an ad target
When the publisher decide to stop the online component, to save a buck, it often mean the game stops working altogether because of the DRM part, as it basically refuses to start without the proper authorization from the now defunct server.
The petition do not ask them to keep running the server indefinitely, but rather to
make it possible to bypass the DRM always online part to be able to play the single player part, if there is one. In most case, it is a simple change to do, a function to modify in order to always return “true” (game can be played)
allow the end user to self host the server. It doesn’t mean open-sourcing it, just to release the server software and allow to point to another server than the defunct ones
In both case, the code already exist, and the changes required are minimal, so why not do it? It costs barely anything to the devs/publisher, and gives the game a second life, even without official support.
But they don’t. Mostly out of greed, to push people to buy the newest, micro-transaction infused game they wish to sell, sometimes even the same game with half the content replaced by micro-transaction (Overwatch 2 being the perfect example).
They don’t want an older, maybe better game to overshadow their new shiny cash grab.
I’m a gameboy era dude, I don’t have that high expectations from a portable console.
To this day I managed to play to most AAA game I throwed at the Deck at an OK quality (low to medium) with good fps (40-45 fps).
But E33 just didn’t want to, and some area looked a lot different than on my 5 year old computer.
The manor, as an example, looks washed out and overexposed, almost white and grey, while on the computer it looked oldish, but acceptable. And I was on low settings on the computer 😅. So either it is currently bugged, or there is an hidden “very low” setting specially made for the Deck.
Honestly, and I say that as a 98% Deck player (according to last year Steam Recap), it is starting to lack horsepower.
I really hope the Deck 2 will allow for external GPUs when docked, because E33 really did put it on his knees 😅. Even at “optimized” settings (which you cannot change on the Deck), I was at 20-30 FPS unless I enabled XeSS. And even then it looked like shit 😅.
Journey is an Art masterpiece, but one that you need to already appreciate Art to enjoy.
I got friends to try it, some of them enjoyed the experience, others found it boring as hell.
And then you have Clair Obscure: Expedition 33, an AA indy gem that goes for what, 50€ ?
80€ games are a symptom of the marketing cancer that plagues modern AAA games. No need for a 1000 person team, what they need is passion for the medium, and a dedicated team that isn’t impeded by executive greed.