• 5 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • On that our opinion differs.

    Games, like movie, are a way to make art. It allows ways of expression that other medias cannot.

    Of course not all games are made with the artistic value in mind, like not all movies are, but those are nontheless pieces of our collective culture, be it something like a racing game, or a little platformer.
    All thoses are the result of hundred, if not thousands of hours of work, from programmers, to musician, with all others support tasks in between.

    For a movie, imagine if you had to constantly be connected to a server, and that suddenly, for nobother reason than saving a buck for the company owning the movie, no one could watch it anymore. Countless masterpieces would be lost to time, not because the original band was lost in a fire like many did through time, but because of someone greed and refusal to make them readable without that punny server.

    That petition ask just that same treatment for video games, nothing more. We are not asking for remaster, nor a continued support on new consoles, just a way to preserve the shared memories we hold dear.
    Memories of friends who played with us, friends that may not be of this world anymore. Memories of stories told and lived.
    To not forget what was, what could have been, and what can be.


    1. Well, I don’t. It doesn’t void my freedom to express my opinion on the matter.
    2. I also maintain server (my own, sometime other people server when asked to), and even worked with an open sourced MMO server (Ryzom). Those don’t need to be hard to maintain, except if the architect is a idiot that followed the tend of “microservices”, which does’t make much sense for an MMO.

    If they aren’t good enough to make software that makes sense, we’ll find a way to make them work. Don’t underestimate a band of hyperfocussed nerd.
    Some guy already programmed a whole unofficial MMO server from scratch, which ended up to be even better than the official one. Unfortunately is wasn’t ever released for obvious copyright infringement reasons, but still.









  • 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.