Thanks a bunch for taking a look at this! I've actually only seen clips of you with Path of Exile stuff before, but I'm glad for any and all exposure on this! The more people that get involved, the more we're going to get answers one way or another. Also, I made a 50 second version on the shorts section of the channel.
The main issue publishers worry is that people staying playing old games on their own takes away their market. If 12 million people stayed playing crew, new racing games would have way less people to buy and publishers won't let that happen.
@@chrisysk91 thats how they view it but thats bullshit because they sold the original game. it just shows they are bad at their jobs. if everyone is still playing then make expansions like the witcher 3 did. in your example of the crew the only reason people wouldnt play new racing games is that they are worse. if the game is good people will play it. its just a way to sell cheap garbage games while erasing the memory of what a good game is for the new generation.
Also believe that if a game needs official servers to run and the game is shutting the servers down they need to make the software available to make private servers that people can host their own lobbies. I know it isn't a perfect solution but to even make it possible if someone had enough resources to revive the servers to do so it should be their choice.
@@remrem-gx3ml You've got to keep in mind man, there are people that still play Morrowind or even abandonware. These corporate shitheads would force subscriptions on people for going outside to play catch. They're literally hoping to destroy as much access people have to alternative entertainment as possible. They'd force you into paying subscription at gunpoint if they could. We know that's true given the recent vid Admin did around Smart TVs forcing people to agree to ads and being stored in before using a HDMI input. There's only one thing that would cause the corpos to back off would be if they ended up suffering their own personal consequences.
I've used the argument with classic cars. The car company no longer has an obligation to offer replacement parts for maintenance and upkeep, but they release the blueprints of the cars so other companies can provide those parts for enthusiasts and collectors. There's no reason the gaming industry can't be held to a similar standard.
a car airbag can be replaced after its gone off even if the owner didnt have an accident, or because other owners who got in accidents found theirs not going off, but i cant replace the apple home button even if it fails on its own? thats assuming the part didnt get confiscated at the port by apples bounty program
There's a reason. You only bought a temporary license to play the game online as long as the service is available. It's in the terms of service. Game companies are legally covered. You never bought the game itself. It's like a used ticket to a theme park.
The theme park ticket says specifically "one day admission" on it. When you "buy" a video game there is no mention of how long your "ticket" lasts. Just because it is legal does not make it ethical.
it's not just Ubisoft doing this. EA has removed games I've purchased from my library. I can look at the notice and it says "Game was removed for unlisted reason." I lost both Battlefront 1&2, and Battlefield V from my library, all on February 20th of this year, and I can't find anything about it online.
@@notthatkindofsam not that i am aware of... but wouldn't be surprised with as many times as i've said EA is shit for ruining so many good games just by getting involved.
Ross is absolutely right whenever he mentioned that gamer's attention span is too short. Asmon was 15 minutes in the video and people were already complaining about it being too long, if they cant handle a 30 minute vid, expecting them to wait 2 weeks is virtually impossible
Asmons 45 minute videos are the best. I don’t watch streams so I love when he stretches something out so I’m not constantly finding stuff to watch. Twitch viewers are a ton of kids who consume 90% of content in 60 second videos now
No Asmon, I bought a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 and they have shut the the master servers down for it. I still own a copy of the game, I can install that copy of the game whenever I want, I can play that copy of game whenever I want both singleplayer and multiplayer. Thats because you can still manually add server IP's to the server list, and you can even change which master server you wish to use so you can just change it to a modern community hosted one and the game will then have all its functionality. Thats owning a game. Buying a game that then forces me to use a microsoft account to then forcefully play on their servers with no alternatives available if that no longer works is not owning a game. The argument was never about them being forced to keep selling the game, the argument is about the existing copies remaining functional.
It's cause the more people you are talking about. The majority. Are too young to have experienced that or have minimal exposure. They have no reference to this. The ones who do. Have families and responsibilities and don't have time to push back. That is especially if they have experienced and tried doing anything against government. They don't listen bro. The best politician you can ask for usually isn't even in a position to change anything on their own. So that type. That does listen and represent their constituents will still be able to do nothing. I have written letter to MLAs and house members on all levels about a variety of issues. I have given up doing that since. Only one of them ever responded cordially, with urgency and sincerity. The rest may have well responded with AI. It's a useless fight.
@@vonborgah You own the right to drive that copy of your car, but you don't own the make. You'll have to buy a new one once it breaks down, can't get the same car back for free. 🤷 See, it does work. 🤦
The easiest way for this to be resolved would be to Simply have the company upon announcement of server shutdowns tohave to release the server side code or have them integrate server side code into the final patch and make it stand alone.
It would be better if there was a 3rd party [either unrelated, or the platform holders] who they had to regularly give copies of the code to, so that if they went belly up, they couldn't just disappear with the code. At a minimum though, any singleplayer game with always online DRM should get a final patch to bipass any server checks. I remember trying to play The Mercenaries 2 after the servers were shut down. If your system was online the game would just lock up during the check, but it you were offline [having pulled the ethernet cable out of the 360 XD] then it would skip the check and be playable.
If they don't find it economically viable to host the game anymore they should cut the online portion and allow people to keep playing single player modes. Always online single player games that kick you off for losing an Internet connection are fucking abysmally evil.
That's the reason I haven't bought Himan: World of Assassination. I REALLY WANT TO PLAY IT, but I'm not buying it until servers are taken completely out of the the equation when it comes to me playing my SINGLE PLAYER GAME.
Some games rely on data from the server regarding NPC locations, etc. So these would not work offline. So the server side components would have to be provided to users to play the game. This is even more important for multiplayer games where you cannot do anything by yourself.
I don't understand your point. maybe you can explain it further? for me it is still a product versus a serves sitation. Why should it matter whether it is digital or physical. It is still a product or a service. what you pay for.
@@sten260 Not sure how because you ain't pay shipping and distribution costs at all. Their point is completely invalid because they actually saved money not doing physical copies. If publisher needs to break the bank like that, tear your contract up and get a new publisher, or do it yourself. Obviously not every studio can afford to do it, but if you can, you absolutely should be self publishing because those dick bags take a lion share of the profits and provide almost nothing that they could do themselves.
@@m16dude967 it would make games more expensive just because they have to deal with this shit, all kinds of rules and regulations make things more expensive
Elden ring had an online only item (the white mask) they updated the game so you can get it offline, now the game is future proof with all of its content
Well as long as those Platforms where you bought it don't go down. Isn't that the case with everything besides GOG ? If the digital distribution service goes down, you lose the license. Steam, Origin, Ubiplay, Rockstar etc
@@Hoenirmy hacked ps4 can hold that game forever as long as the hardware lasts. no internet connection. and because i can dump all my discs they can also sit forever in a hdd. In the end piracy is the only way to preserve games
@@Hoenir That is an interesting question that I do not know the answer to... If steam suddenly died, what would happen to our game libraries? Probl gone haha
Bought The Crew through Amazon Luna about a year ago. It's not even in my library anymore. It's nowhere on Luna. If I had purchased on Ubisoft, I would understand, but Amazon got a cut of my money along with Ubisoft and now I can't even stare at the game cover in Luna. They just took my money and ran. Feels really scummy.
I wonder if the higher-ups of a Lot of these evil companies Would feel if they're not allowed to own house not allowed To own a car not allowed to own a life and Are told to be happy With it there'll probably be upset And Maybe They will get a Taste of their own medicine on how we gamers feel if we are not allowed to own games anymore
Actually this is more true than satire. For example with Blizzard games like Overwatch and Wow. You only own a revokeable license to the game. Similar to Adobe Photoshop, etc...
Guild Wars 1 is still online to this day. They're hosting it on a relatively tiny machine, since it's so old and the traffic went down a lot in the last 20 years. Costs them pennies. There's no reason not to keep old games.
Thats cool! But that is not really the issue that they are talking about. Lets say this last server shuts down and Guild Wars 1 will be completely inaccessible and nobody could ever experience it for them self ever again. This is the issue he wants to prevent. As he said in the video "The game should be left a functional state after the company decides to shut down the servers" meaning that the game and all the effort the artist and developers put in to it will not be permanently lost
@@the12221 Yeah, on a business level its illogical to force a business to run servers infinitely in house. But if they want to drop service, for an online game, it should be forced to make it public and allow the public to run the game. If I as a owner of something, decide to throw something out, it should be completely resonable for someone else to use it and even at a level make money off it. If I as a owner want to keep it up thats different. Not to mention, as a copyright/trademark issue, it allows a company to completely shutdown and not allow A) competition B) the service to be continued unless only they allow it. When "games as a service" is moving more and more, its sucks. Companies locking out others just cus is hateful and spiteful. Gamers need to start showing out with their wallet, sadly though I don't think they will overall. Its just a suck sandwich all round.
@@the12221 Point is, they don't need to shut it down since they automated all its maintenance and the hosting fees are minimal. You have years and years before you ask yourself if you have to shutdown the servers, by then tech most likely has advanced enough that it's almost nothing to keep it on. For examlle today Diablo 4 needs a fuckton of servers, but in 2044 to entertain the remaining crowd it could probably be hosted on what Raspberry Pi will be in that year.
Guild Wars 1 is fairly unique , it's instanced maps are almost all generated client side and are only accessed by those inside of them, with the exception of townhubs which are shared locations, they designed the game really well so that it needs minimum upkeep, for a larger fully accessible multiplayer world e.g. WoW, GTA online or Club penguin it's not really possible . Also Arenanet still hires 2 people I think helping provide tech support, so it's not really pennies , more equal parts passion, the ability to gain more money from rare new customers for DLC/Storage space, and advertisements for GW2.
The Guild Wars Devs said they keep it running since the game only takes a fraction of the server capacity they have for GW2 anyway so there isn’t really a reason not to. But that also means if GW2 is shutting down it will take GW1 with it
People were warning about this back when diablo 3 came out. That since it was always online, if Blizz decided to they could kill the servers and the game would just be unplayable for everyone, for no reason at all. But we were called doomsayers and were dismissed/ridiculed back then. And look at where we are now... On top of that I'll also keep repeating: "If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing."
This recently happened with Blizzard's Launcher. Under their current (newest) terms of service. If you tried to log in, but hadn't been on for a bit prior to the change it gave you a popup to agree to the new terms. There was no dis-agree button, rather if you didn't click agree it just prevented you from logging in. If you were logged in if forced you to agree or it logged you out of the service & wouldn't let you login until being forced to agree. But under the new term all the games that you previously owned are now a subscription only, not only do you not own any of the games but it says you NEVER DID in the first place. They have changed the contract you agreed to when you bought it & are actively removing products you already paid for. Louis Rossman calls this EULA Roofie-ing where these companies have the mindset of a grapeist. You will agree, even if you don't want to, or they will hold something hostage from you. In this case it's your right to own or play any of those games.
Regardless if SYOu agreed or not You can still sue them despite theTOS forbidding it because they cant legally bind you to wave away your right for that
@@laszloneumann500 And yet they have already done it. Roku & LG did something similar recently & they changed in their TOS that you agree to Forced Arbitration- meaning you can no longer sue them. You didn't accept- "Your" TV no longer worked. couldn't even switch over to HDMI inputs. To opt out you had to send a reply via certified mail within 7 days of not accepting the terms, & the way our postal system is it probably wouldn't arrive within @ least 2 wks. Their pulling similar shady cancellation BS like Planet Fitness, LA Fitness gyms etc. And remember even if you sue them they don't have to win- they just have to stall indefinitely, until you run out of $$ or settle, because what you'd recoup would be less than what you lose after paying the court costs. And although there are organizations to help, like the Institute for justice (IJ.ORG) & Pacific Legal Foundation, that's only if they are willing to take your case, & compared to Abortion, Civil Asset Forfeiture cases & other blatant violations of your rights I expect something like this would be left on the back burner.
@@elvendragonhammer5433 Forced Arbitration clauses are cute. You can still take them to court. Any good lawyer will get that out of the way. Its part of our rights. Yeah it sucks doing it but thats the world we live in. we could change it but we got no unity
@@TheMetroidblade Yes, you can take them to court- but taking them to court is NOT THE SAME AS SUING. You MUST prove that you have a VALID reason to sue, AND that the grounds are legitimate. In Arbitration, only if you can prove that they broke the provisions of the contract that forces you to adhere to. (In other words; they must have broken the provisions that specifically bind you to that provision of the agreement- AND YOU must prove that they did it first. That makes that portion of the contract un-enforceable by them) That will release you from that part of the contract & THAT PART ONLY. All other tenets or provisions are still enforceable by them. If you broke any other tenets or provisions they can then counter-sue you over your breach of contract. Otherwise, any competent judge will throw it out of court because you couldn't meet the burden of proof. Aside from that, it is settled by an arbiter- (that they pick) that's exactly what forced arbitration means. And I Quote: "In forced arbitration, a company requires a consumer or employee to SUBMIT ANY DISPUTE that may arise to binding arbitration as a condition of employment or buying a product or service. The employee or consumer is REQUIRED to waive their right to sue, to participate in a class action lawsuit, or to appeal the decision of the arbiter" This works just like you waiving your right to sue for damages, injuries etc, if you were on a game show, in the military They are & have been stoutly enforced. "Any good lawyer will get that out of the way. " No, any GOOD lawyer who's been through this against a corporation & their teams of lawyers, won't lie to your face. He will tell you you've got an ice-cubes chance in hell, cause he might not be able to get you out of the fire you jumped in. You missed the part where you waive the right to sue, which just like waiving your right to a jury, waived you right to represent yourself, or waived your right to speak at a trial means you gave up those rights; you cannot take those rights back, nor can someone use those rights on your behalf; You cannot instruct someone else on these rights either. THIS INCLUDES YOUR LAWYER. HE CANNOT DEFEND RIGHTS YOU DO NOT HAVE. This has to do with Ex Pre Facto laws. You can't defend against something you did knowingly. This is why if you murdered somone (but no one else knew & you hid it & pleaded innocent) your lawyer would be oath-bound to recuse himself from your case. For instance In a recent case an 18yo was driving a Mustang @ 155mph, she hit a motorcyclist & he died on scene. Dash cam footage from her car was used in trial. She could not plead "not guilty" because her guilt was never in question. A jury decides facts. She killed a man- FACT. She did get a lesser sentence, because she called for an ambulance & tried to give him CPR. So instead of getting 65 years she got 35. It might be around 18 w/ a good behavior release. I do however agree that we need more unity on matters like this. This hasn't been passed yet but if it does it will at least help. Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act The Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act is proposed legislation in the US Congress. The comprehensive legislation would prohibit pre-dispute, forced arbitration agreements from being valid or enforceable if it requires forced arbitration of an employment, consumer, or civil rights claim against a corporation.
The fact that there are even people here in the comments completely missing the point or just being contrarian genuinly surprises me. This guy is doing an impressive amount of legwork to improve the consumer's position in the gaming industry. What he's doing is beneficial for every single person that clicked this video.
you can blame asmon, he's constantly being contrarian and purposefully missing the point. Also people secretly love being treated like garbage, you can blame those people too
"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
I bought the "The Crew" solely on the assumption it would not rely on servers, cause on Steam it is marked as "single player". And they just refused to switch off the server dependancy, although the game already contains at least parts of this offline, single player mode.
It's really simple: this is why we invented the Public Domain. If a company abandons a game completely without releasing the source code, the only thing that needs to happen is completely decriminalizing the reverse engineering or hacking of the games so that they can be played by those most passionate about it. It doesn't need to be about punishing a company for finding a product no longer profitable, just about taking away that company's right to sue those who put the effort in to keep the games and their servers running.
Reverse engineering an entire server (once the server is offline and no longer exists) would be incredibly complicated though. Depending on the game it could be borderline impossible.
Yeah, we honestly just gotta revisit the Public Domain laws, 70 years might’ve sounded ok when they were writing those laws a 100 years ago but they are not okay in today’s society with today’s media
I believe I read somewhere that even our hard copies, PHYSICAL copies of games also already had clauses where it essentially reads that while the customer owns the material thing, we have no ownership rights of the contents within the CDs. It's just that now as internet connection is very fast and stable, they can release games 'as service' so that they can either milk us on DLCs, only to completely take the game away from us to encourage/force us to switch to a new game project.
You have ownership rights of the software that was sold to you, but you do not have the right to modify it tamper with it or resell additional copies of it, but you own your one for one copy of said an intellectual property, and after the point of sale, the company has no authority over that thing
What annoys me about this: Really old games usually take up a miniscule amount of server power, compared to what modern games eat up. But companies like Ubisoft have been cutting server support for many of their older games "to cut costs" regardless.
I really want a lawsuit or a state enforcement to give actual objective reasons from the company with proofs on why such a service or in this disservice is done to the customer.
yeah sure they probably don't take too much compute, but I'm sure keeping them secure for decades would be a headache. That said, they should make the server software publicly available so someone else can deal with it.
@@sharpangus8538 Most games these days would only require a server handshake to get past the usual "always only DRM", that's basically a simple ping. And even games with actual multiplayer are pretty easy to handle, if we are talking about older ones. A good example for this are games like Diablo 1, it only takes a single potato at Activision Blizzards HQ to run everything involving that game after all. MMO's are probably the hardest to keep online long time, but even those can be put into effective hibernation with zero support (still better than nothing).
How about this, Bungie DELETED entire parts of main game plus a bunch of DLC’s for Destiny 2 which were all PAY TO OWN but were removed because Bungie said they they wanted to make room for new stuff including going LIVE SERVICE and because most people didn’t play the original stuff. I haven’t bought anything from Bungie since.
all of the loot/rewards for those dlcs is still 100% available though so that doesn’t really matter, no one who plays destiny cares about the 6 year old content lol the dungeons are the relevant content. You exposed that you never actually played the game by saying it went live service, it was live service since day one in 2014
Bungie has been doing this since 1999 or so when they stopped hosting servers for their Myth series, which is like playing any Halo game with no multiplayer outside of direct system link available
My take simple. If you want to pay EA ,Microsoft, Nintendo or what have you a subscription fee to play any game but not own it. Great do that. People do that with cars all the time. But if I pay market price for my game I expect to own it just like the car I bought. If a company cheats me - well I have no issue getting there games through other means.
53:34 The reason that's different is because on a streaming service you are renting an ENTIRE LIBRARY of content for about $10-15 and it is understood that it is monthly. If I spend $70 for a SINGLE GAME I expect that I can keep that.
I had that exact thought when it came up....Luke game pass for example would be a "streaming" platform comparison where you pay a monthly subscription for a library that the end user has zero control or say over, unlike a single purchase item.
Several months back Epic games removed Unreal, Unreal 2, and Unreal Tournament. You cannot get them. They are single player, or peer to peer multiplayer, games. There's no reason they should be removed from purchase anywhere.
When a company shuts down an "online only" game, they should either have to: A. Release a fully working build for free public use B. Refund the non-subscription costs associated with the game (e.g. box price, MTX costs, etc.) Companies can decide which hurts worse. The third option being, keep their servers running in maintenance mode AND have limited ability to raise sub fees.
With MTX you can't really. Bc if you buy premium currency that has/can have a refund value. However, the moment you spend it on a skin/boosts the currency can't be redeemed. Ex.: In Valorant you have to agree that it’s a permanent transaction when buyign a skin. So in the best case, your leftover coins would return to your wallet, when the game shuts down.
Second option sounds too dangerous as it may force AAA devs to fully move to a subscription-only model, and once they disable the servers everything is gone
The "Always on-line" revolution ruined gaming for me. I live in a rural area with limited to no quality Internet. New game choices for me is a very small amount.
17:46 Like with any contract, if the content is against the law you can say yes till the cows go home it's not allowed. "by clicking yes you allow us to murder you" is never binding, since murdering you is against the law.
What annoys me about this is that people have been begging developers for dedicated servers in everything for years. Back in the cod blops 1 days (last time I really played) there would be constant host changes in games. I am not one of those people and I've been sad about it. Especially since I'm in a region that's almost never supported by dedicated servers.
If they did that they couldn't sell you the "new TM" game that is the same as the old game with marginally improved graphics and content cut from the previous game.
I don't buy games if there is no private dedicated servers, especially because I know that once they don't want to pay for the servers anymore, they will just kill it. The best option is to have a mix with "official servers/private servers". And some games allow you to host servers, but you still rely on their servers to get stats and information about your character, and if they want to kill it, you lose all the progress and there is it.
The publishers have been selling us COPIES of the games since Atari games. Copy is the keyword here. Go find something else to do video games are fast becoming unsustainable. Time to go outside and enjoy the world again.
@@ghostblackmormor8120 Or perhaps the developer initially has dedicated servers for the game and upon deciding the game and dedicated servers are no longer profitable they can update it to more easily allow private servers and then abandon it.
this is basically planned obsolescence but for video games, try using that angle to campaign, there is already movements for phones, cars, farm equipment etc
I used to repair shit for a living. I know for a fact that companies design their electronics with increasing levels of propriety tech so they can control the lifespan of the product. That and so all the repairs are forced to go thru the company, but it's worse, the flaws and failures are PART OF THE DESIGN. This includes the conversation about tractors... And every other piece of heavy equipment. I know for a fact that Cummins and caterpillar designed their computers (for heavy equipment/big rigs/ whatever), to break by using substandard parts known to fail. Now imagine every company is doing it. In every industry. So yes, publishers of games are following in the planned obsolescence pattern. You're exactly correct that it's all by design, too.
@@Mattfreeman89 john deere has models of tractors and combines that will go into limp mode if the farmer hasnt kept up their GPS subscription, zero to do with the mechanical operability of the equipment and even if the farmer does keep up with the subscription, when that gps provider goes defunct, that equipment turns into multimillion dollar lawn ornament simply from a third party's software.
@@briancollins7296 And that can cause farmers to go bankrupt. Nasty stuff. I had Verizon back when they did that to our phones. They would do an update that forced your phone to slow down. It wasn't an old phone, it was designed to act laggy and slow. Customer service would excitedly suggest you upgrading and buy a new phone.
17:00 agreed, the way to do it is indeed to make new laws to force games to give some sort of offline/Lan mode for any game discontinued/ways to continue playing. Or refunds.
You should probably keep doing those halo theme song videos dude. They’re in the millions of views when all your other videos are in the 10k views range. Make that cheddar.
I recall purchasing Dungeon Siege to play co-op with a friend on Steam. We learned that the game had shut down its multiplayer element, but we also recalled from our youth that the game never actually seemed to use servers of its own, it was always players connecting to players. Ingame, clicking the Multiplayer button just told you the function was disabled. This, however, was a *lie.* If you went into the steam settings, you could change the game so that instead of launching on the main menu, it launched directly into the multiplayer menu, bypassing the need to click the multiplayer button. Beyond that disabled button was... An entirely functioning multiplayer section! We connected and played just fine! I have no idea why it was like this. It seems like an entirely pointless change. Players could get around it if they wanted just fine, with a little knowhow.
4:00 "Theres a survivorship bias of games we know well... Nobody cares about the other games because nobody wants to buy them." The quality is irrelevant. Imagine if every bad book was kept out of libraries. Artwork shouldn't be destroyed, and some effort should be made to preserve it.
This isn't just about online games. This is also about almost every single game you ever buy nowadays. Back in the day, you DID own your own physical copy of the game. You could even burn copies of it for yourself if you wanted to. Same with movies. If you had the disk, and it was undamaged, and you owned the hardware to run it, then even if you bought that game two decades ago or more, you could still play that game or watch that movie. NOW though, almost no games come on a physical medium. Even console games don't have all of the data needed to install and play the game on their disks. They usually have to phone home to the company's servers to download the last 10 to 20% of the game and then install all the day 1 patches. Thats if the console game box you purchased even HAS a disk in it at all, and doesn't just contain a little slip of paper with a download key. On PC (and the digital stores on consoles), every single game you buy is through some kind of platform service like Steam. If most of the PC games you own are on Steam, and Steam shuts down tomorrow, you've effectively lost access to all of your games regardless of whether they were online games or singleplayer. The only way you might be able to recover them is if you just so happened to have them installed to your PC when the shutdown happened. Or they could just ban your account, or it could get hacked, etc. If you lose that account for any reason, you're essentially screwed out of possibly thousands of dollars of product you "purchased"
Emulation is legal and so is backing up the Romchip and clean room reverse engineering. Its distribution of the Rom File that is always the sore point or now the BIOS or the Encrypted KEY
The precedent was already set in 2017 (could be wrong on the year) when Apple lost it's court case in deliberately and purposely slowing down iPhone performance so consumers would be more compelled to buy a new one. They lost. Precedent set. Shutting down a game or server or service with no alternative for the consumer is illegal in the US. It's different, but it's the same.
Gaben said it well. "We realized that people are spending a thousand dollars, even two thousand dollars, on their PC. If they're pirating it's not a cost issue, it's a service issue." At the time of that quote they were just starting anti- piracy always online things, like codes on the box you had to enter every month. If devs keep this SaaS model up they should not be surprised when sales go down. Maybe you should focus on making a product people actually want rather than trying to squeeze people for their money like a tube of toothpaste.
Please help Ross Scott (The creator of Freeman's Mind)! He's been working on this for years, please spread the message to other streamers and TH-camrs.
I agree too. They are art. They are independent game worlds that should be appreciated. You know in archaeology, there are laws to protect artifacts, features. Maybe at least some old games could get some of those same protections?
As a developer I greately appreciate the option to be able to get the games working myself. First of all there are many people/communities that would walk the extra mile and secondly it would support the insentive to consumers gaining a better understanding of technology. The lack of technological understanding that I'm talking about is the #1 reason large companies are able to rip us off in the first place.
They did this for the old battlefield games. Sunset all the login servers despite having thousands of people still playing those old games. To force you to buy or play the newer battlefield games even if the newer ones lacked some of the core features they liked. When a bunch of nostalgic gamers got together and rebuilt those login servers on their own EA came in and sued the revival project into oblivion for copyright infringement or some such bullshit.
The older battlefields were not planned to go offline, they just sorta happened when gamespy went under. But yeah still kind of annoying no secondary measure was introduced post game deth.
Honestly Ross is a very good content creator, and this "Holding the companies accountable" problem is a recent thing he's been talking about for MAAANY years ! If anything, i respect such determination that got him to advance this much ! I'm sure that if things manage to get better (GOG style), he'll be one of the unsung heroes !
The SNES examples are ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS! Were talking about games that CANNOT BE PLAYED PERIOD due to ONLINE SERVICES being shut down. Not “ohhhh does nintendo owe us to still sell their old games”
It is also about old Nintendo games, because if they don't sell the roms of old games themselves, it should be perfectly legal for others to distribute those roms for free
17:04 ToS don't always hold up in court, if the ToS can be deemed as primarily predatory or monopolistic, there is legal grounds to absolve the ToS under that litigation. They're not just made to protect the company legally, but also to prevent people from attempting to fight them in the first place legally. It is not illegal to make an illegal contract, it is only illegal to try to enforce the illegal contract. Not a legal expert, but I remember this was a thing that's been said in a court before.
I'm also not a legal expert by any means but I was under the impression if a clause in the contract is found to be illegal the entire contract can be voided as bad faith, not just that part of it. Very likely I could be wrong.
It’s funny because I actually knew someone similar to Ross in my neighborhood. He only really played on the Super Nintendo and he was curious about playing on the newer consoles. I ended up teaching him about Emulators for his PC and helped him pick out an Switch on sale. He was real surprised when I explained to him what a “Live Service” game was and he immediately said it sounded like they were just selling you an idea and trying to extort more money for a “Finished” product. If an technologically illiterate person was able to see Live Service for what it is, then it frankly should have been regulated if not outright restricted.
This has nothing to do with government tech literacy. This is due to corporate regulatory capture. Which is why as a consumer, you have no rights in the USA.
i had this happen to me and it was heart breaking, the game White Knight Chronicles, it was a jrpg/monster hunteresc game. and shutting down the servers was bs because the online was basically small lobbies anyways if people wer just able to host and post their own lobbies the game wouldnt of died
One of the problems with physical media now is that with the day 1 patch of 50+ GB once those servers stop hosting those patches. That disc still becomes dead.
It will be solved if we can download updates from a dedicated website. For example, when I format my console I must download the latest version of the system in a USB key, then plug it in the console
That very much depends on the game - Xbox are unfortunately the worst for it. And it's certainly going to get worse going forward. However, currently most PS4 and even PS5 games do have a fully playable version on the actual disc. No download required. See DoesItPlay.
The huge thing asmon is missing here is that the VAST MAJORITY, like >95% of games that don't allow play with loss of a connection... DON'T have true/justified online dependencies, but rather simply online-DRM put in for control and maximizing profitability, having little to nothing to do with the core game design concept. The percentage is so high because of mobile and browser-based gaming where the practice is insanely common, as mobile games are most often solitary experiences as connections aren't good enough to support high bandwidth low latency server response, so server requirements are only there to push and validate the MTX purchasing and prevent workarounds. If only considering things that shipped on discs, the number would be lower but still very high, as it is still very rare for games to have dedicated servers that do a ton in a multiplayer match, as they would in say Valorant/Apex/Overwatch... most multiplayer games that exist are more P2P, using servers only for matchmaking that could just have easily done by the game itself on LAN or self-hosted server software, that they don't allow at all because again the #1 goal is MTX and protecting/forcing those transactions.
Yes, there is game Gran Turismo 7 on Playstation. There is HUGE single player content in it but the game requires constant internet access to connect with sony servers so you could play SINGLE PLAYER GAME against AI while everything runs on your LOCAL console. Without internet access game will play only arcade rece with about 95% single player content missing. Fantastic game design!
@@Voldrim359 But the games and microtransactions are presented/advertised and sold AS IF they are perpetually ownable goods/software-licenses NOT as a subscriptions (like Netflix) even though that's exactly what MTX are... undisclosed software subscriptions, but with no guarantees or protections or user recourse of any kind... MTX are and have always been blatant fraud, already not legal in almost all other industries, but allowed here because most people are technologically illiterate and morally bankrupt (via the lobbying org the ESA/ESRB)... which is also why the space is a haven for completely and totally unregulated/unrestricted/unprotected gambling that rakes in many dozens of billions a year.
I think this is a very good cause. I am a developer and I think this is doable fairly: If a game is not playable from official sources / publishing for 5+ years it needs to be considered abandoned at that point + if you shut down servers you should at least at that point make it possible to host ones own servers - if you are not planning to do this, sell your game with a red warning sign or under term "borrowing". I would let them do this but with a sign similar to ESRB.
I think it should become a trend for devs to release dedicated servers if they close their own. Hell, maybe even make it an EU Law for bigger companies that could easily add it.
The crew is 99% offline, there is a whole single player game. The online stuff is only for the DLC part calls the summit. So the base game is 100% offline and the DLC is the only online part. Ubisoft could very easy make the game playable offline.
@@buttermilk5364 that' s not planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is when something is meant to break BY DESIGN of the product itself and no longer work generally to force consumers to buy the product again and again, which means product only lasts a short period of time aka a lot less than 10 years (when the Crew was released). Planned obsolescence isn't the result of something outside of the product deciding to no longer support it (like an entire game studio) especially after its worked for 10 years.
That's not correct. If the product is intentionally designed so that it requires active manufacturer support, then it doesn't matter if the planned lifespan is 10 years or 10 months. It was always intentionally planned to be obsolete.
@@IanSlatas you just described every piece of software ever launched, doesn't make sense, its a term that actually is intended to mean something pretty specific, not a general term for things that eventually become broken/not supported. The term is being bastardized.
@@Jairoe03 Except, I didn't describe every piece of software, just most software from the last decade, some from 15 years and some software from over 20 years ago. You must be young. No one is requiring endless support from a company, just that they not be the ones in control of the off switch. For example, I can still run every NES game I ever purchased that isn't physically broken. I can still run all of my old RTS games and Need For Speed games from the 90's and early 2000's...except for Motor City Online that EA specifically shut down less than 2 years after launch (this is the problem). I can still play Unreal. My mirrors of my old windows 2000 server still run. On and on. Software "requiring" constant connectivity to run is a design choice and an anti-consumer one. I think a lot of people are far too comfortable with the current paradigm and don't know what it was like prior to this shift. Some market sectors still don't tolerate handing control to the software companies (ie. some analytical software for engineering) but the pressure from Autodesk to comply is strong.
"In any other industry it would be illegal to destroy what they sold you" Yeah right, ask Louis Rossmann about that one. TVs, security cameras, baby monitors, smartphones, vehicles, etc. It happens every industry where cloud service is involved and it's terrible.
It's so good that Asmon watched this video so more people wouls become aware. Keep in mind that there are also single player games that are just DEAD because they require authentication from a now out of commission server. Ross is a great guy and his videos are top notch. He's been reporting on this stuff for ages now and it's good he's getting all the help to spread awareness of this stupid practice.
Single player games can be so misleading these days. Sure you can play the game completely offline, but before you can do that, It's a requirement to download a day one patch to even start the game. Practices like this is completely bullshit. I should be able play games straight off the disk like advertised. I paid for the game, the console downloaded gigabytes of data so that the game works, and now your saying I can't access anything unless I connect online?
In Australia it's illegal and just illegitimate for a company to get you to sign away any of your statutory consumer rights. So much so that any company who still had a warranty card violating this law after the final compliance date got fined like $5k per instance.
Asmond IS correct that a publisher shouldn't be obligated to keep their games working. The main point is that a lot of these self-contained games continue to work to this day *because we have access to the code*. That's where emulators, ROMs, Abandonware, etc all come from - access to the code. Without full access to the code (i.e. "online only" requiring connection to company net-code blackboxes), we don't have the ability to do any of those things at all; once a game is gone, it's *gone forever*. The thing is, this can also extend to self-contained games such as NES titles. This would allow titles that Nintendo or SEGA or EA or whoever don't care about to become available for preservation, modification and (non-monetized) sharing without having to worry about an army of lawyers ramming the door down with cease and dissists in patent troll fashion. If they don't care about a game, why should that game be lost forever to those who do and are willing to maintain it?
Anybody that argues "you just want the company to run the game forever ur stupid lol" have not only lost the plot, they've dropped the plot on the floor jelly side down.
When they make the games they design them to stop working when the server goes offline, they could design it so it doesn't require their server, or a server at all. But they don't do that.
I remember seeing games back in the 90s that had a label on the cover of box indicating that an online connection is required to play the game. Haven't seen that label in a long time.
Older generations would understand if you word it properly. Imagine you bought a blender, the blender works for 30 ish years, the company makes a new blender and wants you to buy the new blender by coming to your house and taking the old blender away with no refund.
I work for Incredible Technologies the makers of Golden Tee Golf among other things. We made a PC version of Golden Tee Golf, and we hosted the online server. But after a long while, we decided to shut the server down. We had so many players still playing the game, that we put out a patch that allowed them to serve themselves peer to peer. It's been well over a decade now, and I still occasionally get tech support emails from some old guy who still lives for the PC version who doesn't realize they can still get the patch.
"How does France affect the whole world?" Omg you werent paying attention. Smh Ubisoft is uniquely vulnerable BECAUSE they are in France. He addressed that at the beginning of the video!
I'm french, so this will be from a french PoV, knowing one of the guys that work at the national french library and is responsible for the video games section. The major problem with online only games is that it is nearly impossible to preserve those games in the state that they were played at the time. At first, the problem was there for multiplayer games... But as nowadays games tend to have more and more "online" features or "online only" even for single player, it's becoming really impossible to preserve games as they were when they were played. Without the internet service, most of those games cannot be played again as they were years ago. Of course, not every "online" game is made equal to this : counter strike when it was still an half-life mod can still be played by hosting a server on the local network. same with games like diablo 2, warcraft 3, starcraft, battlefield 1942... Try doing that with a now old game like battlefield bad company 2. EDIT : About France officials, the problem has been known for more than a decade now, at least in the librarian crew, like those who are in charge of the conservation of video-games. About laws that apply to abandonware : at least in France, publishers are obligated to send a copy of everything they publish to the national library for safe-keeping. In fact, it was passed into law dating back to the 1500s by king François I, and the law then was sufficiently vague enough to apply to everything : "any document that's destined to be made available to the general public should be also sent to the national library". So, it applies to books, newspapers, magazines, billboards, tracts of any kind, music, movies, photographies, video-games... PS : by the way, the law, as it is, should also apply to web published articles of any kind as well... but safekeeping that is hell, as the goal is exactly what's the internet archive / wayback machines have been trying to do The problem is that the game publishers, at least the french ones like ubisoft, will send the game... so they'll say "look, we sent the game, we've fullfilled our obligations". The game won't be able to run without their servers ? not their problem. By the way, fun fact about ubisoft : their biggest income generator was / is the Just Dance series (coming from a girl friend that worked in the Just Dance team, she was a data analyst for the game)
This was always publishers plans from the beginning, starting with controlling online mp games, they took away our ability to run our own private servers, so they could shutdown support for that game whenever they wanted, which is generally when the next version of that game comes out, so they can force people to pay for the new game. Then they started pushing for "games as a service" Singleplayer titles that are always online, have to connect to a server to authenticate and so on, so they can once again shutdown support for it whenever they want and force gamers to pay for the newly released sequel. They want to control what we play, how we play, when we play and ultimately, if we can play.
This happened to me with Battlefield 2142. An AMAZING game from the past. Servers discontinued. No longer sold. Something from 2000s. Online only basically. Someone decided to modify the code a bit and set up their own servers FOR FREE for others to play on. Tried it and loved it! Shortly after I found out about this and started playing it… Battlefield 2042 was announced. The new one. Completely different game. Not at all similar. They came after the modifiers with a cease and desist. Nothing they could do without risking being sued. EA killed 2142 leftover corpse in the hopes that more people would be enticed to go play 2042… gross jerk move EA.
Unofficial WoW servers were very much a thing, until Blizzard got them shut down. People were playing the original WoW(lvl 1-60) on them, while Blizzard said that feat would be impossible.
On a private Wotlk server right now as I type, waiting for this RS 25 to fill. I had so many high end geared chars on this server I had no reason to play Wotlk classic. Whats the purpose. Do it again? And pay for it? Gtfo
the funny thing is the crew was given away in 2016 by ubisoft for their 30th anniversary. most of the people i played with got the game for free. the only reason i bought the crew 2 was because of this. never buying a ubisoft game again
My kids still install old games like Warcraft 3 because we have the physical disks. We still play old Playstation 2 Wii games. Online games expire and can’t be played any more. That isn’t really right.
I still own Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast, I can run the game and play it but all the online functions are unavailable because the servers have been shut down, the difference between it and The Crew is that the former disabled the entire game without even giving you the option to play offline and that's unfair.
And even after those 15 years, they don't come to your house and take your car. They let you keep it and tell you "you're on your own!" Unlike Ubisoft, where they yank your copy of The Crew when they're done supporting it and say "haha I'm taking it back, good luck playing it"
@@Thelastetherbornyes and no. Software can “wear out” if the system architechture changes. Let’s say the majority of today’s processor uses x86, but imagine if 16-20 years down the line they switch to the new LEG architecture, there’s a chance that the software will stop working That is not accounting for changes in the operating system over the years and the availability of its dependencies
Fun fact: When you pirate a game, you own it, because the developers can't take it away :D Also I don't think Asmon understands, if you buy something; you're supposed to own it, hence the reason you bought it. They don't tell you that you're buying a temporary service when you buy the game. It's like if I buy a TV, and then after a year the company walks into my house and smashes the tv, melts it down and throws it out the window, then tells me it's fine because they have a new TV coming out for me to buy.
When they decide to shut down game servers, they should tweak the code of the game to allow offline play, or even enable self-hosted dedicated servers by players. Just make it explicit in the terms that the game is no longer supported by the company for any technical issues, and cheating/hacking is the responsibility of the player to address. Counter Strike Source is still alive to this day, decades later, because of this functionality.
Honestly we should have the option to download the game in it's packed form to take less space. So you can open that packed (iso, zip, rar whatever file) that you actually should own when you bought the game. If steam goes ballistic a lot of people will lose a lot of games :D
Let me start by saying that I totally agree in principle, and I hope we can at least move in the right direction. One big issue that we will face, however, can be seen by looking at Classic WoW and how these laws would address that. Pre classic launch, would such requirements apply to Vanilla/TBC/etc. since technically WoW was still online and supported. What about games where the changes aren't as clearly demarcated as they are in WoW expansions? Or does the new purchase of an expansion qualify it as a separate product? That would have to all be addressed making the law pretty complex which could create big loopholes. Next we have the definition of supported/accessible. If WoW wanted to end support and not "go public", fhey could increase the sub fee to $1000/mo and presumably be just fine. The final concern I have is a legitimate concern that companies will undoubtedly raise - if they end support for, for example, Doom in order to begin making Doom 2 which will likely share code and some assets with Doom, how is that addressed in a fair way where the studio can develop the sequel without giving up rights to the original? Then finally, the "Madden problem". It seems this would basically kill the business model of most sports games that release every year. And since a huge amount of money is made from that model, the pushback and lobbying payments to regulators mignt just be insurmountable.
@@fuhkerzConsidering that Cataclysm just dropped for the classic wow, I was paying for wrath of the Litch King. I have no issue with Cataclysm, but if I did, why wouldn't I be able to play the game I payed for on a server not hosted by them? If we look at Minecraft, each update is a separate instance of the game. The launcher allows you to choose a specific version of said game. Nevermind that they can shut down the servers of the launcher and ruin it all, but I can still play the exact version of the game I downloaded when I bought it. BTW it's 1.2.5 I'm talking about. I can still play that if I wanted to and I still do. Why can't WoW do that? Maybe because they are setting up more p2w mechanics and want to force the players to interact with them despite it killing off the old instance of their game without a way to enjoy it later. And in all fairness, most laws are jumbled messes that get more complex the further you read, and harder for the average joe to understand. Most in office are too old to understand that their time is up, nor what they make laws on anymore. A law to protect consumers from this predatory practice that the gaming industry is doing won't be much different. If written correctly, publishers/developers won't be held liable for shutting their own servers down, but can be liable for breaking contract of ownership....the whole point of consumer goods. The law could very well add sections to include penalties to the pubs/devs for not upholding that fundamental agreement, but also liable if they choose to take consumers to court for trying to host their own instance to be able to access/use the product they bought. Car companies obviously don't sell car parts to their old discontinued cars and have no obligation to, but they release blueprints so non OEMs can produce them for those who still use them......Game companies, if they made cars, are literally breaking and entering garages (software storage) to reclaim the car (digital goods) that you bought in the past just because they no longer support the infrastructure of said car(servers). We have rights to restore and repair our property and belongings the way we see fit. Whether it'd be from OEM, non OEM, or ourselves. There's no right to sue or go to court to keep people from enjoying their ownership of the copy of the consumer good they bought. Whether it'd be a car, a toaster, a board game, or a video game. They won't own the IP, but you legally own the copy of it, Just like I can't own 68' Dodge Charger, but I can own A 68' Dodge Charger. I don't own the name, but an instance of it. I can still enjoy that 68' Dodge Charger that I (theoretically) bought, and I can do with it as I please, provided I'm not breaking laws that would warrant my ownership obsolete.....like putting others lives at risk because I may drink while doing so. So with WoW. In the old days, you bought each expansion or instance. It was all physical, and the pay per month is for the online services. Why can't I play a single player/local co-op with the version I bought? I still own it and could install it, but can't play it despite owning it. I drive a truck older than the first WoW, and my key to start that truck still works unlike my key to the old WoW. It's still a consumer good, no matter how you slice it.....especially if digital goods/services can be patented and copyrighted just like physical goods. TBH, we don't need a new law, but a revision of consumer goods law to include digital goods would be the way, with provisions specific to digital goods. Once digital goods get into the library of congress for cultural preservation, it would be game over for the predatory TOS these companies make for their products.
A little like with old cars, you cant get any original parts from the manufacturer anymore but you can get parts made in original quality but from a third party manufacturer.
the only problem i see with the petitions is if we do get them all signed up - the major companies are just gonna lobby the governments to prevent what we're trying to do
7:15 I'm so glad someone told a larger audience what I've been thinking for decades. I personally believe PC games are the highest level of art because it involves graphic design, sound design, music and narrative design. Actually movies, paintings, books and music together ++ edit: + The most important: Interactivity, of course
It's a creative effort of an individual or individuals, it's art, it's obviously a fiscal endeavour first and foremost but it's still art, Leonardo da Vinci didn't work for free and it didn't diminish the value of his art, anyone who says it isn't is just a snob, by any metric it stands as an artistic endeavour regardless of the reason for it's creation.
Yeah, in fact the unique potential of the audience being able to interact with the art. Words can help you imagine it, and if clever it can make you imagine the experience (House of Leaves being one of the best examples of this). Music and video can open the door to more experiences you might not have been able to imagine. But video games can make you experience these elements directly. While a book or movie might make you question yourself, a video game can actually gaslight you. The difference between understanding (externally being informed), and knowing (actually living the experience). I feel like "video games" as a medium for art has the opportunity to be one of the most complete forms of art. Written word, paint, sculpture.. these forms of art have had many years and cultures to develop their legitimacy.
True. It's like a final stage of evolution for artistic expression. An amalgamation of everything in interactive form. Like how story telling evolved into theatric plays, then written books, then motion picture (theatric plays with elaborate sets and recorded music)
It's not just an issue with online multi-player, if a game uses some kind of drm with a server to verify the game you cant even play it at all even if you have the disc after the servers are taken down, unless someone's done "something" to get around it
A law or regulation needs to be built that does 2 things: 1. Make a provision for the Library of Congress to house and preserve video games that exceed a certain threshold of sales. This is to preserve objects of cultural relevance for future academic study and availability to the public, especially after the copyright has expired. 2. Game developers/publishers must create an End of Life (EOL) plan for all products that sell over a certain number of copies, licenses, subscriptions, etc. This must define an exit strategy where a playable game and server program are released to a public archive service when the company makes the decision to pull the plug. Regardless of whether the publisher retains the copyright, the EOL game and server package should be usable by the public as long it is not done for profit. This should be reversable in the event that the company wants to sell their product again. This will not save games that disappear due to bankruptsy but should catch most of them.
This'll definitely turn every beloved game into what black ops 2 is now: hacked to hell with people shooting hellstorm missiles out of their pistols, holding stealth choppers as melee weapons, and so on.
It's not closing the book, it's not even opening the book, it's really just trying to even get people to read the damn cover of the book. I hope this gets the traction it needs to get people to read the damn book.
There should be a LAW in NA, EU or worldwide to explicitly make it clear that those Publishers are not selling you a product but leasing/renting a service. We either "Own a copy of a game" OR we "Own a LICENSE to play the game". That should be made very clear in every "Purchase" especially Online.
I think the only acceptable thing would be to force these companies to put a big disclaimer on the box, along the lines of cigarette packs, that says 'Access to online servers may be terminated at any time.' The same should be true for online game purchases for a digital copy; there should be a mandatory 'accept - decline' window that must be clicked through with the same warning. The way it is now, it's like buying a new car and three years later someone from the dealership comes without notice and puts a governor in it. And I don't want to hear anything about fine print disclaimers on the back of the box saying something like - 'online service may be interrupted' or 'you are only buying a license'. Ambiguous disclaimers like these shouldn't even be allowed, and they should legally have to be at least half the font size of the largest text on the box or contract.
Thanks a bunch for taking a look at this! I've actually only seen clips of you with Path of Exile stuff before, but I'm glad for any and all exposure on this! The more people that get involved, the more we're going to get answers one way or another. Also, I made a 50 second version on the shorts section of the channel.
Thank you for pursuing this.
Hell yeah!
God speed good sir
Gamers rise up ✊
Thank you, Ross
My problem is when companies make single player games, that doesn't work offline.
That’s called fraud
"If youre not selling the game anymore, who cares if someone steals it?"
Now you hit the nail on the head.
The main issue publishers worry is that people staying playing old games on their own takes away their market.
If 12 million people stayed playing crew, new racing games would have way less people to buy and publishers won't let that happen.
@@chrisysk91 thats how they view it but thats bullshit because they sold the original game. it just shows they are bad at their jobs. if everyone is still playing then make expansions like the witcher 3 did. in your example of the crew the only reason people wouldnt play new racing games is that they are worse. if the game is good people will play it. its just a way to sell cheap garbage games while erasing the memory of what a good game is for the new generation.
Also believe that if a game needs official servers to run and the game is shutting the servers down they need to make the software available to make private servers that people can host their own lobbies. I know it isn't a perfect solution but to even make it possible if someone had enough resources to revive the servers to do so it should be their choice.
Fun fact: it was Nintendo shutting down the 3DS eShop that made me feel comfortable finally Homebrewing it.
@@remrem-gx3ml You've got to keep in mind man, there are people that still play Morrowind or even abandonware. These corporate shitheads would force subscriptions on people for going outside to play catch. They're literally hoping to destroy as much access people have to alternative entertainment as possible.
They'd force you into paying subscription at gunpoint if they could. We know that's true given the recent vid Admin did around Smart TVs forcing people to agree to ads and being stored in before using a HDMI input.
There's only one thing that would cause the corpos to back off would be if they ended up suffering their own personal consequences.
This is getting out of hand, now there are two of Asmons!
It's like watching CERN in its infancy. Observing them firing atoms at eachother, waiting for the reaction black hole the proliferate.
one takes a shower
the other one doesn't
Twice the pride, Double the canc3l.
there is more than two Asmons.....be afraid....
The only difference is that one has a microphone and headphones on, and the other doesn't. 😂
I've used the argument with classic cars. The car company no longer has an obligation to offer replacement parts for maintenance and upkeep, but they release the blueprints of the cars so other companies can provide those parts for enthusiasts and collectors. There's no reason the gaming industry can't be held to a similar standard.
a car airbag can be replaced after its gone off even if the owner didnt have an accident, or because other owners who got in accidents found theirs not going off, but i cant replace the apple home button even if it fails on its own? thats assuming the part didnt get confiscated at the port by apples bounty program
There's a reason. You only bought a temporary license to play the game online as long as the service is available. It's in the terms of service. Game companies are legally covered. You never bought the game itself. It's like a used ticket to a theme park.
The theme park ticket says specifically "one day admission" on it. When you "buy" a video game there is no mention of how long your "ticket" lasts. Just because it is legal does not make it ethical.
@@Magnarmisyou literally cannot play the game without agreeing to a licensing contract. EULA is an acronym not just a buzz word
@@Magnarmis So, a game company can just say: 1 year admission granted and you will be happy? Ok.
it's not just Ubisoft doing this. EA has removed games I've purchased from my library. I can look at the notice and it says "Game was removed for unlisted reason." I lost both Battlefront 1&2, and Battlefield V from my library, all on February 20th of this year, and I can't find anything about it online.
Did you say something naughty online and have to get your social credit score up a bit before they’ll let you play them again 😂
@@notthatkindofsam not that i am aware of... but wouldn't be surprised with as many times as i've said EA is shit for ruining so many good games just by getting involved.
@@thetattoodmini you tell no lies! I’m done buying anything they touch!
Ross is absolutely right whenever he mentioned that gamer's attention span is too short. Asmon was 15 minutes in the video and people were already complaining about it being too long, if they cant handle a 30 minute vid, expecting them to wait 2 weeks is virtually impossible
We can find other things to keep our attention occupied
Sorry, I zoned out after the first sentence. What did you say, again? (starts zoning out immediately)
Asmons 45 minute videos are the best. I don’t watch streams so I love when he stretches something out so I’m not constantly finding stuff to watch. Twitch viewers are a ton of kids who consume 90% of content in 60 second videos now
The real gamers are the Bidens we met along the way.
Not me though...
No Asmon, I bought a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 and they have shut the the master servers down for it.
I still own a copy of the game, I can install that copy of the game whenever I want, I can play that copy of game whenever I want both singleplayer and multiplayer. Thats because you can still manually add server IP's to the server list, and you can even change which master server you wish to use so you can just change it to a modern community hosted one and the game will then have all its functionality. Thats owning a game.
Buying a game that then forces me to use a microsoft account to then forcefully play on their servers with no alternatives available if that no longer works is not owning a game. The argument was never about them being forced to keep selling the game, the argument is about the existing copies remaining functional.
Yeah exactly. I wish more people would understand this.
It's cause the more people you are talking about. The majority. Are too young to have experienced that or have minimal exposure. They have no reference to this. The ones who do. Have families and responsibilities and don't have time to push back. That is especially if they have experienced and tried doing anything against government. They don't listen bro. The best politician you can ask for usually isn't even in a position to change anything on their own. So that type. That does listen and represent their constituents will still be able to do nothing. I have written letter to MLAs and house members on all levels about a variety of issues. I have given up doing that since. Only one of them ever responded cordially, with urgency and sincerity. The rest may have well responded with AI. It's a useless fight.
I also can still play my old games, funnily enough, this includes Mario brothers on the NES. 😂🤦
You own the right to play with that copy. You dont own the game tho.
@@vonborgah
You own the right to drive that copy of your car, but you don't own the make. You'll have to buy a new one once it breaks down, can't get the same car back for free. 🤷
See, it does work. 🤦
The easiest way for this to be resolved would be to Simply have the company upon announcement of server shutdowns tohave to release the server side code or have them integrate server side code into the final patch and make it stand alone.
It would be better if there was a 3rd party [either unrelated, or the platform holders] who they had to regularly give copies of the code to, so that if they went belly up, they couldn't just disappear with the code.
At a minimum though, any singleplayer game with always online DRM should get a final patch to bipass any server checks.
I remember trying to play The Mercenaries 2 after the servers were shut down. If your system was online the game would just lock up during the check, but it you were offline [having pulled the ethernet cable out of the 360 XD] then it would skip the check and be playable.
If they don't find it economically viable to host the game anymore they should cut the online portion and allow people to keep playing single player modes.
Always online single player games that kick you off for losing an Internet connection are fucking abysmally evil.
That's the reason I haven't bought Himan: World of Assassination.
I REALLY WANT TO PLAY IT, but I'm not buying it until servers are taken completely out of the the equation when it comes to me playing my SINGLE PLAYER GAME.
And yet they’re happy to lose money hosting suicide squad vs justice league
OR, hear me out, let others host these severs like they did in the 90s.
Some games rely on data from the server regarding NPC locations, etc. So these would not work offline. So the server side components would have to be provided to users to play the game. This is even more important for multiplayer games where you cannot do anything by yourself.
@@colinstewart3531single player games should not require servers.
Software should not be exempt from basic consumer protections just because it isn't a physical good. Plain and simple.
I don't understand your point. maybe you can explain it further?
for me it is still a product versus a serves sitation. Why should it matter whether it is digital or physical. It is still a product or a service. what you pay for.
well that would add at least 30 bucks to every game out there
If ubisoft loses this, they will just relocate to the u.s. its a race to the bottom, just like corporate taxes
@@sten260 Not sure how because you ain't pay shipping and distribution costs at all. Their point is completely invalid because they actually saved money not doing physical copies. If publisher needs to break the bank like that, tear your contract up and get a new publisher, or do it yourself. Obviously not every studio can afford to do it, but if you can, you absolutely should be self publishing because those dick bags take a lion share of the profits and provide almost nothing that they could do themselves.
@@m16dude967 it would make games more expensive just because they have to deal with this shit, all kinds of rules and regulations make things more expensive
I miss the time when computers had a CD reader integrated and when physical copies were a thing.
Elden ring had an online only item (the white mask) they updated the game so you can get it offline, now the game is future proof with all of its content
Well as long as those Platforms where you bought it don't go down. Isn't that the case with everything besides GOG ? If the digital distribution service goes down, you lose the license. Steam, Origin, Ubiplay, Rockstar etc
@@Hoenirmy hacked ps4 can hold that game forever as long as the hardware lasts. no internet connection. and because i can dump all my discs they can also sit forever in a hdd. In the end piracy is the only way to preserve games
@@shib5267 Yup. We will see if they go after emulators.
@@Hoenir That is an interesting question that I do not know the answer to... If steam suddenly died, what would happen to our game libraries? Probl gone haha
@@fosphor8920Then the 2020 riots would look like a picknick, nothing is more dangerous than millions of pissed off nerds.
Bought The Crew through Amazon Luna about a year ago. It's not even in my library anymore. It's nowhere on Luna. If I had purchased on Ubisoft, I would understand, but Amazon got a cut of my money along with Ubisoft and now I can't even stare at the game cover in Luna. They just took my money and ran. Feels really scummy.
Yeah I have been doing my best to avoid online only games. Just from you saying this I’m going to avoid Luna. That’s super shady.
EA did this to like three of my battlefield games because I argued with a support agent who got butthurt and removed my account.
Ubisoft is actively stopping me making a complaint about the crew.
You can still go to France after 1 week of ubisoft refusing to respond or help resolve your issue, just a heads up.
How?
“You will own nothing and be happy”- they told us
Nah not with the current AAA gaming studios. Boycotted most of them already before gamergate 1. 80's & 90's were the golden age for gaming!
Damn you Klaus Schwab!
Wait you forgot your bug protein, the cicadas are outta control and we need you....
I wonder if the higher-ups of a Lot of these evil companies Would feel if they're not allowed to own house not allowed To own a car not allowed to own a life and Are told to be happy With it there'll probably be upset And Maybe They will get a Taste of their own medicine on how we gamers feel if we are not allowed to own games anymore
Actually this is more true than satire. For example with Blizzard games like Overwatch and Wow. You only own a revokeable license to the game. Similar to Adobe Photoshop, etc...
Guild Wars 1 is still online to this day. They're hosting it on a relatively tiny machine, since it's so old and the traffic went down a lot in the last 20 years. Costs them pennies. There's no reason not to keep old games.
Thats cool! But that is not really the issue that they are talking about.
Lets say this last server shuts down and Guild Wars 1 will be completely inaccessible and nobody could ever experience it for them self ever again. This is the issue he wants to prevent.
As he said in the video "The game should be left a functional state after the company decides to shut down the servers" meaning that the game and all the effort the artist and developers put in to it will not be permanently lost
@@the12221 Yeah, on a business level its illogical to force a business to run servers infinitely in house. But if they want to drop service, for an online game, it should be forced to make it public and allow the public to run the game. If I as a owner of something, decide to throw something out, it should be completely resonable for someone else to use it and even at a level make money off it. If I as a owner want to keep it up thats different. Not to mention, as a copyright/trademark issue, it allows a company to completely shutdown and not allow A) competition B) the service to be continued unless only they allow it. When "games as a service" is moving more and more, its sucks. Companies locking out others just cus is hateful and spiteful. Gamers need to start showing out with their wallet, sadly though I don't think they will overall. Its just a suck sandwich all round.
@@the12221 Point is, they don't need to shut it down since they automated all its maintenance and the hosting fees are minimal. You have years and years before you ask yourself if you have to shutdown the servers, by then tech most likely has advanced enough that it's almost nothing to keep it on. For examlle today Diablo 4 needs a fuckton of servers, but in 2044 to entertain the remaining crowd it could probably be hosted on what Raspberry Pi will be in that year.
Guild Wars 1 is fairly unique , it's instanced maps are almost all generated client side and are only accessed by those inside of them, with the exception of townhubs which are shared locations, they designed the game really well so that it needs minimum upkeep, for a larger fully accessible multiplayer world e.g. WoW, GTA online or Club penguin it's not really possible . Also Arenanet still hires 2 people I think helping provide tech support, so it's not really pennies , more equal parts passion, the ability to gain more money from rare new customers for DLC/Storage space, and advertisements for GW2.
The Guild Wars Devs said they keep it running since the game only takes a fraction of the server capacity they have for GW2 anyway so there isn’t really a reason not to. But that also means if GW2 is shutting down it will take GW1 with it
People were warning about this back when diablo 3 came out. That since it was always online, if Blizz decided to they could kill the servers and the game would just be unplayable for everyone, for no reason at all. But we were called doomsayers and were dismissed/ridiculed back then. And look at where we are now...
On top of that I'll also keep repeating: "If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing."
This recently happened with Blizzard's Launcher. Under their current (newest) terms of service. If you tried to log in, but hadn't been on for a bit prior to the change it gave you a popup to agree to the new terms. There was no dis-agree button, rather if you didn't click agree it just prevented you from logging in. If you were logged in if forced you to agree or it logged you out of the service & wouldn't let you login until being forced to agree. But under the new term all the games that you previously owned are now a subscription only, not only do you not own any of the games but it says you NEVER DID in the first place. They have changed the contract you agreed to when you bought it & are actively removing products you already paid for. Louis Rossman calls this EULA Roofie-ing where these companies have the mindset of a grapeist. You will agree, even if you don't want to, or they will hold something hostage from you. In this case it's your right to own or play any of those games.
Such contracts by definitipn are void
Regardless if SYOu agreed or not You can still sue them despite theTOS forbidding it because they cant legally bind you to wave away your right for that
@@laszloneumann500 And yet they have already done it. Roku & LG did something similar recently & they changed in their TOS that you agree to Forced Arbitration- meaning you can no longer sue them. You didn't accept- "Your" TV no longer worked. couldn't even switch over to HDMI inputs.
To opt out you had to send a reply via certified mail within 7 days of not accepting the terms, & the way our postal system is it probably wouldn't arrive within @ least 2 wks.
Their pulling similar shady cancellation BS like Planet Fitness, LA Fitness gyms etc. And remember even if you sue them they don't have to win- they just have to stall indefinitely, until you run out of $$ or settle, because what you'd recoup would be less than what you lose after paying the court costs.
And although there are organizations to help, like the Institute for justice (IJ.ORG) & Pacific Legal Foundation, that's only if they are willing to take your case, & compared to Abortion, Civil Asset Forfeiture cases & other blatant violations of your rights I expect something like this would be left on the back burner.
@@elvendragonhammer5433 Forced Arbitration clauses are cute. You can still take them to court. Any good lawyer will get that out of the way. Its part of our rights. Yeah it sucks doing it but thats the world we live in. we could change it but we got no unity
@@TheMetroidblade Yes, you can take them to court- but taking them to court is NOT THE SAME AS SUING.
You MUST prove that you have a VALID reason to sue, AND that the grounds are legitimate. In Arbitration, only if you can prove that they broke the provisions of the contract that forces you to adhere to. (In other words; they must have broken the provisions that specifically bind you to that provision of the agreement- AND YOU must prove that they did it first. That makes that portion of the contract un-enforceable by them)
That will release you from that part of the contract & THAT PART ONLY. All other tenets or provisions are still enforceable by them. If you broke any other tenets or provisions they can then counter-sue you over your breach of contract.
Otherwise, any competent judge will throw it out of court because you couldn't meet the burden of proof.
Aside from that, it is settled by an arbiter- (that they pick) that's exactly what forced arbitration means.
And I Quote: "In forced arbitration, a company requires a consumer or employee to SUBMIT ANY DISPUTE that may arise to binding arbitration as a condition of employment or buying a product or service. The employee or consumer is REQUIRED to waive their right to sue, to participate in a class action lawsuit, or to appeal the decision of the arbiter"
This works just like you waiving your right to sue for damages, injuries etc, if you were on a game show, in the military They are & have been stoutly enforced.
"Any good lawyer will get that out of the way. " No, any GOOD lawyer who's been through this against a corporation & their teams of lawyers, won't lie to your face. He will tell you you've got an ice-cubes chance in hell, cause he might not be able to get you out of the fire you jumped in.
You missed the part where you waive the right to sue, which just like waiving your right to a jury, waived you right to represent yourself, or waived your right to speak at a trial means you gave up those rights; you cannot take those rights back, nor can someone use those rights on your behalf; You cannot instruct someone else on these rights either. THIS INCLUDES YOUR LAWYER. HE CANNOT DEFEND RIGHTS YOU DO NOT HAVE. This has to do with Ex Pre Facto laws. You can't defend against something you did knowingly. This is why if you murdered somone (but no one else knew & you hid it & pleaded innocent) your lawyer would be oath-bound to recuse himself from your case. For instance In a recent case an 18yo was driving a Mustang @ 155mph, she hit a motorcyclist & he died on scene. Dash cam footage from her car was used in trial. She could not plead "not guilty" because her guilt was never in question. A jury decides facts. She killed a man- FACT. She did get a lesser sentence, because she called for an ambulance & tried to give him CPR. So instead of getting 65 years she got 35. It might be around 18 w/ a good behavior release.
I do however agree that we need more unity on matters like this.
This hasn't been passed yet but if it does it will at least help.
Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act
The Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act is proposed legislation in the US Congress. The comprehensive legislation would prohibit pre-dispute, forced arbitration agreements from being valid or enforceable if it requires forced arbitration of an employment, consumer, or civil rights claim against a corporation.
The fact that there are even people here in the comments completely missing the point or just being contrarian genuinly surprises me. This guy is doing an impressive amount of legwork to improve the consumer's position in the gaming industry. What he's doing is beneficial for every single person that clicked this video.
you can blame asmon, he's constantly being contrarian and purposefully missing the point. Also people secretly love being treated like garbage, you can blame those people too
Asmon is as anti-consumer as it gets. He hates normal people.
"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
@@christianalanwilson434I’d rather know the truth, knowing it probably will be dark and depressing. Lies are comforting but not real.
@@TheMetroidblade Well since AAA companies are working with SBI, more lies revealed 😂
I bought the "The Crew" solely on the assumption it would not rely on servers, cause on Steam it is marked as "single player". And they just refused to switch off the server dependancy, although the game already contains at least parts of this offline, single player mode.
It's really simple: this is why we invented the Public Domain. If a company abandons a game completely without releasing the source code, the only thing that needs to happen is completely decriminalizing the reverse engineering or hacking of the games so that they can be played by those most passionate about it.
It doesn't need to be about punishing a company for finding a product no longer profitable, just about taking away that company's right to sue those who put the effort in to keep the games and their servers running.
Reverse engineering an entire server (once the server is offline and no longer exists) would be incredibly complicated though. Depending on the game it could be borderline impossible.
Yeah, we honestly just gotta revisit the Public Domain laws, 70 years might’ve sounded ok when they were writing those laws a 100 years ago but they are not okay in today’s society with today’s media
@@speedyx3493 they have been revisited, and further extended. I think it was 60 years just not long ago.
Oh you missed the old news. Thank in part Disney. @@speedyx3493
They use to be much shorter, Disney changed that with bribes@@speedyx3493
tech savvy or not everyone will understand that a product shouldn't stop working because the manufacturer decided so.
Actually
I believe I read somewhere that even our hard copies, PHYSICAL copies of games also already had clauses where it essentially reads that while the customer owns the material thing, we have no ownership rights of the contents within the CDs.
It's just that now as internet connection is very fast and stable, they can release games 'as service' so that they can either milk us on DLCs, only to completely take the game away from us to encourage/force us to switch to a new game project.
Ross talked about it in his follow up video. If I remember correctly, it is the case in the US.
You have ownership rights of the software that was sold to you, but you do not have the right to modify it tamper with it or resell additional copies of it, but you own your one for one copy of said an intellectual property, and after the point of sale, the company has no authority over that thing
What annoys me about this:
Really old games usually take up a miniscule amount of server power, compared to what modern games eat up. But companies like Ubisoft have been cutting server support for many of their older games "to cut costs" regardless.
I really want a lawsuit or a state enforcement to give actual objective reasons from the company with proofs on why such a service or in this disservice is done to the customer.
Nobody should play any EA games at this point, agenda driven bad quality games for over a decade now.
yeah sure they probably don't take too much compute, but I'm sure keeping them secure for decades would be a headache.
That said, they should make the server software publicly available so someone else can deal with it.
@@eafesaf6934i dont think u even know what lawsuits are with this comment damn..
@@sharpangus8538 Most games these days would only require a server handshake to get past the usual "always only DRM", that's basically a simple ping.
And even games with actual multiplayer are pretty easy to handle, if we are talking about older ones.
A good example for this are games like Diablo 1, it only takes a single potato at Activision Blizzards HQ to run everything involving that game after all.
MMO's are probably the hardest to keep online long time, but even those can be put into effective hibernation with zero support (still better than nothing).
How about this, Bungie DELETED entire parts of main game plus a bunch of DLC’s for Destiny 2 which were all PAY TO OWN but were removed because Bungie said they they wanted to make room for new stuff including going LIVE SERVICE and because most people didn’t play the original stuff. I haven’t bought anything from Bungie since.
D2 was the first thing that came to mind as I watched this video. I'll always be super salty about what they did.
It was always live service. Still salty about this but their game their consequences
all of the loot/rewards for those dlcs is still 100% available though so that doesn’t really matter, no one who plays destiny cares about the 6 year old content lol the dungeons are the relevant content. You exposed that you never actually played the game by saying it went live service, it was live service since day one in 2014
I’ll never play D2 it’s the epitome of “free” to play games
Bungie has been doing this since 1999 or so when they stopped hosting servers for their Myth series, which is like playing any Halo game with no multiplayer outside of direct system link available
My take simple.
If you want to pay EA ,Microsoft, Nintendo or what have you a subscription fee to play any game but not own it. Great do that. People do that with cars all the time.
But if I pay market price for my game I expect to own it just like the car I bought.
If a company cheats me - well I have no issue getting there games through other means.
Hell yes. Ross is fucking doing it. I usually dont fanboy. But holy shit seeing big youtubers watch this makes me happy
53:34
The reason that's different is because on a streaming service you are renting an ENTIRE LIBRARY of content for about $10-15 and it is understood that it is monthly. If I spend $70 for a SINGLE GAME I expect that I can keep that.
I had that exact thought when it came up....Luke game pass for example would be a "streaming" platform comparison where you pay a monthly subscription for a library that the end user has zero control or say over, unlike a single purchase item.
@chrisboddie2782 Right, Game Pass makes sense because it is billed as temporary and in effect as long as you're paying a subscription.
Asmon just defends every single bad practice the industry does be it from developers, publishers or game"journos". It's just sad.
@@mothbreeder641He gets reviewcodes an early access, what do you expect 😂
The buggest gaming sites and channels are in the pocket already
well obviously you expect something that isn't there and change your expectations.. you can't just expect the companies to change their products lol
Several months back Epic games removed Unreal, Unreal 2, and Unreal Tournament. You cannot get them.
They are single player, or peer to peer multiplayer, games. There's no reason they should be removed from purchase anywhere.
I have all of them on Steam tho
When a company shuts down an "online only" game, they should either have to:
A. Release a fully working build for free public use
B. Refund the non-subscription costs associated with the game (e.g. box price, MTX costs, etc.)
Companies can decide which hurts worse. The third option being, keep their servers running in maintenance mode AND have limited ability to raise sub fees.
With MTX you can't really. Bc if you buy premium currency that has/can have a refund value. However, the moment you spend it on a skin/boosts the currency can't be redeemed. Ex.: In Valorant you have to agree that it’s a permanent transaction when buyign a skin.
So in the best case, your leftover coins would return to your wallet, when the game shuts down.
Second option sounds too dangerous as it may force AAA devs to fully move to a subscription-only model, and once they disable the servers everything is gone
The "Always on-line" revolution ruined gaming for me. I live in a rural area with limited to no quality Internet. New game choices for me is a very small amount.
Been in the same boat for a few years, sucks
And some people say "tough cookies" to those that can't connect online. Apparently it's a *you* problem!
its for datamining so they can milk you more. you probably know it of course
I pivoted to indie games to avoid that, too. But indies are doing it now, too.
on the plus side, you are not yet conditioned into the new normal and probably you are much more sane still than the rest of us! :)
17:46 Like with any contract, if the content is against the law you can say yes till the cows go home it's not allowed. "by clicking yes you allow us to murder you" is never binding, since murdering you is against the law.
What annoys me about this is that people have been begging developers for dedicated servers in everything for years. Back in the cod blops 1 days (last time I really played) there would be constant host changes in games. I am not one of those people and I've been sad about it. Especially since I'm in a region that's almost never supported by dedicated servers.
If they did that they couldn't sell you the "new TM" game that is the same as the old game with marginally improved graphics and content cut from the previous game.
Yeah but, pay to run it on a server system host that is not going to fold it up like Valve servers.
I don't buy games if there is no private dedicated servers, especially because I know that once they don't want to pay for the servers anymore, they will just kill it. The best option is to have a mix with "official servers/private servers". And some games allow you to host servers, but you still rely on their servers to get stats and information about your character, and if they want to kill it, you lose all the progress and there is it.
The publishers have been selling us COPIES of the games since Atari games. Copy is the keyword here. Go find something else to do video games are fast becoming unsustainable. Time to go outside and enjoy the world again.
@@ghostblackmormor8120 Or perhaps the developer initially has dedicated servers for the game and upon deciding the game and dedicated servers are no longer profitable they can update it to more easily allow private servers and then abandon it.
this is basically planned obsolescence but for video games, try using that angle to campaign, there is already movements for phones, cars, farm equipment etc
I used to repair shit for a living. I know for a fact that companies design their electronics with increasing levels of propriety tech so they can control the lifespan of the product. That and so all the repairs are forced to go thru the company, but it's worse, the flaws and failures are PART OF THE DESIGN.
This includes the conversation about tractors... And every other piece of heavy equipment.
I know for a fact that Cummins and caterpillar designed their computers (for heavy equipment/big rigs/ whatever), to break by using substandard parts known to fail.
Now imagine every company is doing it. In every industry.
So yes, publishers of games are following in the planned obsolescence pattern. You're exactly correct that it's all by design, too.
@@Mattfreeman89 john deere has models of tractors and combines that will go into limp mode if the farmer hasnt kept up their GPS subscription, zero to do with the mechanical operability of the equipment and even if the farmer does keep up with the subscription, when that gps provider goes defunct, that equipment turns into multimillion dollar lawn ornament simply from a third party's software.
@@briancollins7296 And that can cause farmers to go bankrupt. Nasty stuff.
I had Verizon back when they did that to our phones. They would do an update that forced your phone to slow down. It wasn't an old phone, it was designed to act laggy and slow. Customer service would excitedly suggest you upgrading and buy a new phone.
Vehicles are important. Games are digital toys for entertainment.
@@OilFreeFeathers
Games are art.
17:00 agreed, the way to do it is indeed to make new laws to force games to give some sort of offline/Lan mode for any game discontinued/ways to continue playing. Or refunds.
YOOO ITS THE DUDE FROM FREEMANS MIND!!!
Bro thank you! I was sitting here like "I know this voice, who are you?!?!"
Yeah I recognized that voice.
He still makes videos! Lots of videos!
Glad Ross is getting noticed from this video. I sent to some of my YT's I sub to and hope they spread the word
You should probably keep doing those halo theme song videos dude. They’re in the millions of views when all your other videos are in the 10k views range. Make that cheddar.
I recall purchasing Dungeon Siege to play co-op with a friend on Steam. We learned that the game had shut down its multiplayer element, but we also recalled from our youth that the game never actually seemed to use servers of its own, it was always players connecting to players. Ingame, clicking the Multiplayer button just told you the function was disabled.
This, however, was a *lie.* If you went into the steam settings, you could change the game so that instead of launching on the main menu, it launched directly into the multiplayer menu, bypassing the need to click the multiplayer button. Beyond that disabled button was... An entirely functioning multiplayer section! We connected and played just fine!
I have no idea why it was like this. It seems like an entirely pointless change. Players could get around it if they wanted just fine, with a little knowhow.
4:00 "Theres a survivorship bias of games we know well... Nobody cares about the other games because nobody wants to buy them."
The quality is irrelevant. Imagine if every bad book was kept out of libraries. Artwork shouldn't be destroyed, and some effort should be made to preserve it.
This isn't just about online games. This is also about almost every single game you ever buy nowadays.
Back in the day, you DID own your own physical copy of the game. You could even burn copies of it for yourself if you wanted to. Same with movies.
If you had the disk, and it was undamaged, and you owned the hardware to run it, then even if you bought that game two decades ago or more, you could still play that game or watch that movie.
NOW though, almost no games come on a physical medium.
Even console games don't have all of the data needed to install and play the game on their disks. They usually have to phone home to the company's servers to download the last 10 to 20% of the game and then install all the day 1 patches. Thats if the console game box you purchased even HAS a disk in it at all, and doesn't just contain a little slip of paper with a download key.
On PC (and the digital stores on consoles), every single game you buy is through some kind of platform service like Steam. If most of the PC games you own are on Steam, and Steam shuts down tomorrow, you've effectively lost access to all of your games regardless of whether they were online games or singleplayer. The only way you might be able to recover them is if you just so happened to have them installed to your PC when the shutdown happened. Or they could just ban your account, or it could get hacked, etc. If you lose that account for any reason, you're essentially screwed out of possibly thousands of dollars of product you "purchased"
If the company doesn't want to sell the old game anymore. Then emulation should be legal. Period end of story do not pass go.
Emulation is legal and so is backing up the Romchip and clean room reverse engineering. Its distribution of the Rom File that is always the sore point or now the BIOS or the Encrypted KEY
The precedent was already set in 2017 (could be wrong on the year) when Apple lost it's court case in deliberately and purposely slowing down iPhone performance so consumers would be more compelled to buy a new one. They lost. Precedent set. Shutting down a game or server or service with no alternative for the consumer is illegal in the US. It's different, but it's the same.
Gaben said it well. "We realized that people are spending a thousand dollars, even two thousand dollars, on their PC. If they're pirating it's not a cost issue, it's a service issue." At the time of that quote they were just starting anti- piracy always online things, like codes on the box you had to enter every month.
If devs keep this SaaS model up they should not be surprised when sales go down. Maybe you should focus on making a product people actually want rather than trying to squeeze people for their money like a tube of toothpaste.
Please help Ross Scott (The creator of Freeman's Mind)! He's been working on this for years, please spread the message to other streamers and TH-camrs.
Well as long as he is also against dei too I'll help him
Freemans mind is funny AF!
Since I have a copy of The Crew, I'm going to follow the instructions on the site.
Get this to SBI Detected! Those gamers are rallying hard these days!
Same@@KingKrouch
I agree too. They are art. They are independent game worlds that should be appreciated.
You know in archaeology, there are laws to protect artifacts, features. Maybe at least some old games could get some of those same protections?
As a developer I greately appreciate the option to be able to get the games working myself. First of all there are many people/communities that would walk the extra mile and secondly it would support the insentive to consumers gaining a better understanding of technology. The lack of technological understanding that I'm talking about is the #1 reason large companies are able to rip us off in the first place.
BTW Palworld let people host their own servers 😀.
Yeah but Palworld Devs are based AF. Of course they're going to do consumer-friendly practices.
@@jazzyjswift like that is a bad thing?
Doesn't every game in that genre do the same thing? Like Ark and Valheim?
Now we only have to force everyone to do so by law. No more bullshit!!!
@@MrAngryMonkey100 Are you sure you've read that comment correctly?
They did this for the old battlefield games. Sunset all the login servers despite having thousands of people still playing those old games. To force you to buy or play the newer battlefield games even if the newer ones lacked some of the core features they liked. When a bunch of nostalgic gamers got together and rebuilt those login servers on their own EA came in and sued the revival project into oblivion for copyright infringement or some such bullshit.
The older battlefields were not planned to go offline, they just sorta happened when gamespy went under. But yeah still kind of annoying no secondary measure was introduced post game deth.
In their defense, when you buy Battlefield 2024 they give you access to the multiplay portions of many of their old games.
Honestly Ross is a very good content creator, and this "Holding the companies accountable" problem is a recent thing he's been talking about for MAAANY years !
If anything, i respect such determination that got him to advance this much !
I'm sure that if things manage to get better (GOG style), he'll be one of the unsung heroes !
If buying is not owning then piracy isn’t stealing.
Well would be cool if buying was owning, then we didnt have to pirate anymore.
I don't think that is what this is about. This is about online games from what I can tell.
underrated comment.
spot on.
yea, piracy was never stealing, but yea
Amen
The SNES examples are ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS! Were talking about games that CANNOT BE PLAYED PERIOD due to ONLINE SERVICES being shut down.
Not “ohhhh does nintendo owe us to still sell their old games”
It is also about old Nintendo games, because if they don't sell the roms of old games themselves, it should be perfectly legal for others to distribute those roms for free
17:04 ToS don't always hold up in court, if the ToS can be deemed as primarily predatory or monopolistic, there is legal grounds to absolve the ToS under that litigation. They're not just made to protect the company legally, but also to prevent people from attempting to fight them in the first place legally.
It is not illegal to make an illegal contract, it is only illegal to try to enforce the illegal contract.
Not a legal expert, but I remember this was a thing that's been said in a court before.
I'm also not a legal expert by any means but I was under the impression if a clause in the contract is found to be illegal the entire contract can be voided as bad faith, not just that part of it. Very likely I could be wrong.
It’s funny because I actually knew someone similar to Ross in my neighborhood. He only really played on the Super Nintendo and he was curious about playing on the newer consoles. I ended up teaching him about Emulators for his PC and helped him pick out an Switch on sale. He was real surprised when I explained to him what a “Live Service” game was and he immediately said it sounded like they were just selling you an idea and trying to extort more money for a “Finished” product.
If an technologically illiterate person was able to see Live Service for what it is, then it frankly should have been regulated if not outright restricted.
This has nothing to do with government tech literacy. This is due to corporate regulatory capture. Which is why as a consumer, you have no rights in the USA.
It doesn't matter if a game is "bad" they shouldn't be destroyed.
agreed. imagine how many obscure classics we lost already. like silcon valley or clay fighter.
Mostly because it's a good learning experience!
Either have the people host or let games have an Offline mode
This is one of the reason years ago why i was so against games running on Dedicated servers and moving away from Peer2Peer.
@@xLionsxxSmithyx its not like p2p is any worse than dedicated anyway its just different target same game.
Will every person on planet her promise they wont ever cheat, pirate, modify etc the game. No 100% certainty, no go.
i had this happen to me and it was heart breaking, the game White Knight Chronicles, it was a jrpg/monster hunteresc game. and shutting down the servers was bs because the online was basically small lobbies anyways if people wer just able to host and post their own lobbies the game wouldnt of died
One of the problems with physical media now is that with the day 1 patch of 50+ GB once those servers stop hosting those patches. That disc still becomes dead.
It will be solved if we can download updates from a dedicated website.
For example, when I format my console I must download the latest version of the system in a USB key, then plug it in the console
blame the developers who cant seem to be able to release a finished game on lauch
@@dav786Publishers are mostly to blame for pushing pre-mature releases.
That very much depends on the game - Xbox are unfortunately the worst for it. And it's certainly going to get worse going forward. However, currently most PS4 and even PS5 games do have a fully playable version on the actual disc. No download required. See DoesItPlay.
that patch is an UPDATE you DOWNLOAD it. as long as you dont delete it you still have it downloaded.
The huge thing asmon is missing here is that the VAST MAJORITY, like >95% of games that don't allow play with loss of a connection... DON'T have true/justified online dependencies, but rather simply online-DRM put in for control and maximizing profitability, having little to nothing to do with the core game design concept. The percentage is so high because of mobile and browser-based gaming where the practice is insanely common, as mobile games are most often solitary experiences as connections aren't good enough to support high bandwidth low latency server response, so server requirements are only there to push and validate the MTX purchasing and prevent workarounds. If only considering things that shipped on discs, the number would be lower but still very high, as it is still very rare for games to have dedicated servers that do a ton in a multiplayer match, as they would in say Valorant/Apex/Overwatch... most multiplayer games that exist are more P2P, using servers only for matchmaking that could just have easily done by the game itself on LAN or self-hosted server software, that they don't allow at all because again the #1 goal is MTX and protecting/forcing those transactions.
Ok, this is the thing... You are not owing the game, you were just allowed to play it...
Yes, there is game Gran Turismo 7 on Playstation. There is HUGE single player content in it but the game requires constant internet access to connect with sony servers so you could play SINGLE PLAYER GAME against AI while everything runs on your LOCAL console. Without internet access game will play only arcade rece with about 95% single player content missing. Fantastic game design!
@@Voldrim359 But the games and microtransactions are presented/advertised and sold AS IF they are perpetually ownable goods/software-licenses NOT as a subscriptions (like Netflix) even though that's exactly what MTX are... undisclosed software subscriptions, but with no guarantees or protections or user recourse of any kind... MTX are and have always been blatant fraud, already not legal in almost all other industries, but allowed here because most people are technologically illiterate and morally bankrupt (via the lobbying org the ESA/ESRB)... which is also why the space is a haven for completely and totally unregulated/unrestricted/unprotected gambling that rakes in many dozens of billions a year.
Those kind of games are way too toxic
What games? There are quite a few but 95%? Let’s not be crazy.
I think this is a very good cause. I am a developer and I think this is doable fairly:
If a game is not playable from official sources / publishing for 5+ years it needs to be considered abandoned at that point + if you shut down servers you should at least at that point make it possible to host ones own servers - if you are not planning to do this, sell your game with a red warning sign or under term "borrowing". I would let them do this but with a sign similar to ESRB.
I think it should become a trend for devs to release dedicated servers if they close their own.
Hell, maybe even make it an EU Law for bigger companies that could easily add it.
Yup
The crew is 99% offline, there is a whole single player game.
The online stuff is only for the DLC part calls the summit.
So the base game is 100% offline and the DLC is the only online part.
Ubisoft could very easy make the game playable offline.
Planned obsolescence.
@@buttermilk5364 that' s not planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is when something is meant to break BY DESIGN of the product itself and no longer work generally to force consumers to buy the product again and again, which means product only lasts a short period of time aka a lot less than 10 years (when the Crew was released). Planned obsolescence isn't the result of something outside of the product deciding to no longer support it (like an entire game studio) especially after its worked for 10 years.
That's not correct. If the product is intentionally designed so that it requires active manufacturer support, then it doesn't matter if the planned lifespan is 10 years or 10 months. It was always intentionally planned to be obsolete.
@@IanSlatas you just described every piece of software ever launched, doesn't make sense, its a term that actually is intended to mean something pretty specific, not a general term for things that eventually become broken/not supported. The term is being bastardized.
@@Jairoe03 Except, I didn't describe every piece of software, just most software from the last decade, some from 15 years and some software from over 20 years ago. You must be young. No one is requiring endless support from a company, just that they not be the ones in control of the off switch. For example, I can still run every NES game I ever purchased that isn't physically broken. I can still run all of my old RTS games and Need For Speed games from the 90's and early 2000's...except for Motor City Online that EA specifically shut down less than 2 years after launch (this is the problem). I can still play Unreal. My mirrors of my old windows 2000 server still run. On and on. Software "requiring" constant connectivity to run is a design choice and an anti-consumer one. I think a lot of people are far too comfortable with the current paradigm and don't know what it was like prior to this shift. Some market sectors still don't tolerate handing control to the software companies (ie. some analytical software for engineering) but the pressure from Autodesk to comply is strong.
Imagine you buy a new car and the manufacturer decides that there are no more spare parts available a year later.
"In any other industry it would be illegal to destroy what they sold you"
Yeah right, ask Louis Rossmann about that one. TVs, security cameras, baby monitors, smartphones, vehicles, etc. It happens every industry where cloud service is involved and it's terrible.
In any country where consumers have rights, that is.
It's so good that Asmon watched this video so more people wouls become aware. Keep in mind that there are also single player games that are just DEAD because they require authentication from a now out of commission server.
Ross is a great guy and his videos are top notch. He's been reporting on this stuff for ages now and it's good he's getting all the help to spread awareness of this stupid practice.
Single player games can be so misleading these days. Sure you can play the game completely offline, but before you can do that, It's a requirement to download a day one patch to even start the game. Practices like this is completely bullshit. I should be able play games straight off the disk like advertised. I paid for the game, the console downloaded gigabytes of data so that the game works, and now your saying I can't access anything unless I connect online?
In Australia it's illegal and just illegitimate for a company to get you to sign away any of your statutory consumer rights. So much so that any company who still had a warranty card violating this law after the final compliance date got fined like $5k per instance.
Also, Steam has a refund policy because Australia sued them for violating our consumer law. Now everyone has refunds on Steam.
Asmond IS correct that a publisher shouldn't be obligated to keep their games working. The main point is that a lot of these self-contained games continue to work to this day *because we have access to the code*. That's where emulators, ROMs, Abandonware, etc all come from - access to the code. Without full access to the code (i.e. "online only" requiring connection to company net-code blackboxes), we don't have the ability to do any of those things at all; once a game is gone, it's *gone forever*.
The thing is, this can also extend to self-contained games such as NES titles. This would allow titles that Nintendo or SEGA or EA or whoever don't care about to become available for preservation, modification and (non-monetized) sharing without having to worry about an army of lawyers ramming the door down with cease and dissists in patent troll fashion. If they don't care about a game, why should that game be lost forever to those who do and are willing to maintain it?
I can agree with this
Anybody that argues "you just want the company to run the game forever ur stupid lol" have not only lost the plot, they've dropped the plot on the floor jelly side down.
It’s actually Asmon*, not Asmond. His name is Asmon-gold. There’s no D there after the N. Just “Asmon”.
When they make the games they design them to stop working when the server goes offline, they could design it so it doesn't require their server, or a server at all. But they don't do that.
@@XenoSpyro exactly what i was thinking. its not about keeping the servers running its losing access entirely to a games you spent money on.
It wasn't clear in the video but The Crew is basically a single player game with an online requirement.
i assume it wont let the user press play from the main menu now that the online check doesnt pass.
I wonder if Ubisoft will pretend that The Crew is still "functional", because you can still launch the game and go to the main menu
I remember seeing games back in the 90s that had a label on the cover of box indicating that an online connection is required to play the game. Haven't seen that label in a long time.
Older generations would understand if you word it properly. Imagine you bought a blender, the blender works for 30 ish years, the company makes a new blender and wants you to buy the new blender by coming to your house and taking the old blender away with no refund.
hmmmmmmmmmmm big brain
You can't guarantee a blender will work for 30 years. It's crazy to expect a video game to work FOREVER
I work for Incredible Technologies the makers of Golden Tee Golf among other things. We made a PC version of Golden Tee Golf, and we hosted the online server. But after a long while, we decided to shut the server down. We had so many players still playing the game, that we put out a patch that allowed them to serve themselves peer to peer. It's been well over a decade now, and I still occasionally get tech support emails from some old guy who still lives for the PC version who doesn't realize they can still get the patch.
"How does France affect the whole world?"
Omg you werent paying attention. Smh
Ubisoft is uniquely vulnerable BECAUSE they are in France. He addressed that at the beginning of the video!
I'm french, so this will be from a french PoV, knowing one of the guys that work at the national french library and is responsible for the video games section.
The major problem with online only games is that it is nearly impossible to preserve those games in the state that they were played at the time. At first, the problem was there for multiplayer games... But as nowadays games tend to have more and more "online" features or "online only" even for single player, it's becoming really impossible to preserve games as they were when they were played. Without the internet service, most of those games cannot be played again as they were years ago.
Of course, not every "online" game is made equal to this : counter strike when it was still an half-life mod can still be played by hosting a server on the local network. same with games like diablo 2, warcraft 3, starcraft, battlefield 1942... Try doing that with a now old game like battlefield bad company 2.
EDIT : About France officials, the problem has been known for more than a decade now, at least in the librarian crew, like those who are in charge of the conservation of video-games.
About laws that apply to abandonware : at least in France, publishers are obligated to send a copy of everything they publish to the national library for safe-keeping. In fact, it was passed into law dating back to the 1500s by king François I, and the law then was sufficiently vague enough to apply to everything : "any document that's destined to be made available to the general public should be also sent to the national library". So, it applies to books, newspapers, magazines, billboards, tracts of any kind, music, movies, photographies, video-games...
PS : by the way, the law, as it is, should also apply to web published articles of any kind as well... but safekeeping that is hell, as the goal is exactly what's the internet archive / wayback machines have been trying to do
The problem is that the game publishers, at least the french ones like ubisoft, will send the game... so they'll say "look, we sent the game, we've fullfilled our obligations". The game won't be able to run without their servers ? not their problem.
By the way, fun fact about ubisoft : their biggest income generator was / is the Just Dance series (coming from a girl friend that worked in the Just Dance team, she was a data analyst for the game)
TIL there are videogames in national french libraries
Thanks for some insight
This was always publishers plans from the beginning, starting with controlling online mp games, they took away our ability to run our own private servers, so they could shutdown support for that game whenever they wanted, which is generally when the next version of that game comes out, so they can force people to pay for the new game.
Then they started pushing for "games as a service" Singleplayer titles that are always online, have to connect to a server to authenticate and so on, so they can once again shutdown support for it whenever they want and force gamers to pay for the newly released sequel.
They want to control what we play, how we play, when we play and ultimately, if we can play.
This happened to me with Battlefield 2142. An AMAZING game from the past. Servers discontinued. No longer sold. Something from 2000s. Online only basically. Someone decided to modify the code a bit and set up their own servers FOR FREE for others to play on. Tried it and loved it! Shortly after I found out about this and started playing it… Battlefield 2042 was announced. The new one. Completely different game. Not at all similar. They came after the modifiers with a cease and desist. Nothing they could do without risking being sued. EA killed 2142 leftover corpse in the hopes that more people would be enticed to go play 2042… gross jerk move EA.
ToS is not binding especially if they update it every month, which is another point for investigation.
Unofficial WoW servers were very much a thing, until Blizzard got them shut down.
People were playing the original WoW(lvl 1-60) on them, while Blizzard said that feat would be impossible.
On a private Wotlk server right now as I type, waiting for this RS 25 to fill. I had so many high end geared chars on this server I had no reason to play Wotlk classic.
Whats the purpose. Do it again? And pay for it? Gtfo
the funny thing is the crew was given away in 2016 by ubisoft for their 30th anniversary. most of the people i played with got the game for free. the only reason i bought the crew 2 was because of this. never buying a ubisoft game again
My kids still install old games like Warcraft 3 because we have the physical disks. We still play old Playstation 2 Wii games. Online games expire and can’t be played any more. That isn’t really right.
"I AM CAPTAIN DOCTOR GORDON FREEMAN OF THE INTERGALACTIC HOUSE OF PANCAKES, ORDERING YOU TO OPEN!"
I still own Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast, I can run the game and play it but all the online functions are unavailable because the servers have been shut down, the difference between it and The Crew is that the former disabled the entire game without even giving you the option to play offline and that's unfair.
TOS is a decent argument but you pay before you sign. You also pay one party (the store, etc) and sign with another, the devs/producers.
Car manufacturers have to provide parts for cars for something like 15 years even if they go defunct or stop making the car model.
And even after those 15 years, they don't come to your house and take your car. They let you keep it and tell you "you're on your own!"
Unlike Ubisoft, where they yank your copy of The Crew when they're done supporting it and say "haha I'm taking it back, good luck playing it"
Cars wear out through use. When purchasing a digital game it’s largely understood that it “shouldn’t” wear out because its software.
@@Thelastetherbornyes and no. Software can “wear out” if the system architechture changes. Let’s say the majority of today’s processor uses x86, but imagine if 16-20 years down the line they switch to the new LEG architecture, there’s a chance that the software will stop working
That is not accounting for changes in the operating system over the years and the availability of its dependencies
@@KhangNguyen-ij4xh emulators fix that just fine
Fun fact: When you pirate a game, you own it, because the developers can't take it away :D
Also I don't think Asmon understands, if you buy something; you're supposed to own it, hence the reason you bought it. They don't tell you that you're buying a temporary service when you buy the game. It's like if I buy a TV, and then after a year the company walks into my house and smashes the tv, melts it down and throws it out the window, then tells me it's fine because they have a new TV coming out for me to buy.
When they decide to shut down game servers, they should tweak the code of the game to allow offline play, or even enable self-hosted dedicated servers by players. Just make it explicit in the terms that the game is no longer supported by the company for any technical issues, and cheating/hacking is the responsibility of the player to address. Counter Strike Source is still alive to this day, decades later, because of this functionality.
Honestly we should have the option to download the game in it's packed form to take less space. So you can open that packed (iso, zip, rar whatever file) that you actually should own when you bought the game. If steam goes ballistic a lot of people will lose a lot of games :D
Let me start by saying that I totally agree in principle, and I hope we can at least move in the right direction.
One big issue that we will face, however, can be seen by looking at Classic WoW and how these laws would address that.
Pre classic launch, would such requirements apply to Vanilla/TBC/etc. since technically WoW was still online and supported. What about games where the changes aren't as clearly demarcated as they are in WoW expansions? Or does the new purchase of an expansion qualify it as a separate product? That would have to all be addressed making the law pretty complex which could create big loopholes.
Next we have the definition of supported/accessible. If WoW wanted to end support and not "go public", fhey could increase the sub fee to $1000/mo and presumably be just fine.
The final concern I have is a legitimate concern that companies will undoubtedly raise - if they end support for, for example, Doom in order to begin making Doom 2 which will likely share code and some assets with Doom, how is that addressed in a fair way where the studio can develop the sequel without giving up rights to the original?
Then finally, the "Madden problem". It seems this would basically kill the business model of most sports games that release every year. And since a huge amount of money is made from that model, the pushback and lobbying payments to regulators mignt just be insurmountable.
@@fuhkerzConsidering that Cataclysm just dropped for the classic wow, I was paying for wrath of the Litch King. I have no issue with Cataclysm, but if I did, why wouldn't I be able to play the game I payed for on a server not hosted by them?
If we look at Minecraft, each update is a separate instance of the game. The launcher allows you to choose a specific version of said game. Nevermind that they can shut down the servers of the launcher and ruin it all, but I can still play the exact version of the game I downloaded when I bought it. BTW it's 1.2.5 I'm talking about. I can still play that if I wanted to and I still do. Why can't WoW do that? Maybe because they are setting up more p2w mechanics and want to force the players to interact with them despite it killing off the old instance of their game without a way to enjoy it later.
And in all fairness, most laws are jumbled messes that get more complex the further you read, and harder for the average joe to understand. Most in office are too old to understand that their time is up, nor what they make laws on anymore. A law to protect consumers from this predatory practice that the gaming industry is doing won't be much different. If written correctly, publishers/developers won't be held liable for shutting their own servers down, but can be liable for breaking contract of ownership....the whole point of consumer goods. The law could very well add sections to include penalties to the pubs/devs for not upholding that fundamental agreement, but also liable if they choose to take consumers to court for trying to host their own instance to be able to access/use the product they bought.
Car companies obviously don't sell car parts to their old discontinued cars and have no obligation to, but they release blueprints so non OEMs can produce them for those who still use them......Game companies, if they made cars, are literally breaking and entering garages (software storage) to reclaim the car (digital goods) that you bought in the past just because they no longer support the infrastructure of said car(servers).
We have rights to restore and repair our property and belongings the way we see fit. Whether it'd be from OEM, non OEM, or ourselves. There's no right to sue or go to court to keep people from enjoying their ownership of the copy of the consumer good they bought. Whether it'd be a car, a toaster, a board game, or a video game. They won't own the IP, but you legally own the copy of it, Just like I can't own 68' Dodge Charger, but I can own A 68' Dodge Charger. I don't own the name, but an instance of it. I can still enjoy that 68' Dodge Charger that I (theoretically) bought, and I can do with it as I please, provided I'm not breaking laws that would warrant my ownership obsolete.....like putting others lives at risk because I may drink while doing so.
So with WoW. In the old days, you bought each expansion or instance. It was all physical, and the pay per month is for the online services. Why can't I play a single player/local co-op with the version I bought? I still own it and could install it, but can't play it despite owning it. I drive a truck older than the first WoW, and my key to start that truck still works unlike my key to the old WoW. It's still a consumer good, no matter how you slice it.....especially if digital goods/services can be patented and copyrighted just like physical goods.
TBH, we don't need a new law, but a revision of consumer goods law to include digital goods would be the way, with provisions specific to digital goods. Once digital goods get into the library of congress for cultural preservation, it would be game over for the predatory TOS these companies make for their products.
A little like with old cars, you cant get any original parts from the manufacturer anymore but you can get parts made in original quality but from a third party manufacturer.
the only problem i see with the petitions is if we do get them all signed up - the major companies are just gonna lobby the governments to prevent what we're trying to do
7:15 I'm so glad someone told a larger audience what I've been thinking for decades. I personally believe PC games are the highest level of art because it involves graphic design, sound design, music and narrative design. Actually movies, paintings, books and music together ++
edit: + The most important: Interactivity, of course
The same can be said about movies. However games can have multiple different endings depending on the game. It's essentially an interactive movie.
@@Quickloaded Yes definitely. Interactivity is another crucial factor that I have forgotten.
It's a creative effort of an individual or individuals, it's art, it's obviously a fiscal endeavour first and foremost but it's still art, Leonardo da Vinci didn't work for free and it didn't diminish the value of his art, anyone who says it isn't is just a snob, by any metric it stands as an artistic endeavour regardless of the reason for it's creation.
Yeah, in fact the unique potential of the audience being able to interact with the art.
Words can help you imagine it, and if clever it can make you imagine the experience (House of Leaves being one of the best examples of this).
Music and video can open the door to more experiences you might not have been able to imagine.
But video games can make you experience these elements directly.
While a book or movie might make you question yourself, a video game can actually gaslight you.
The difference between understanding (externally being informed), and knowing (actually living the experience).
I feel like "video games" as a medium for art has the opportunity to be one of the most complete forms of art.
Written word, paint, sculpture.. these forms of art have had many years and cultures to develop their legitimacy.
True. It's like a final stage of evolution for artistic expression. An amalgamation of everything in interactive form. Like how story telling evolved into theatric plays, then written books, then motion picture (theatric plays with elaborate sets and recorded music)
I'm so happy you're signal boosting this
Hell yea
Shame he's defending the publishers.
It's not just an issue with online multi-player, if a game uses some kind of drm with a server to verify the game you cant even play it at all even if you have the disc after the servers are taken down, unless someone's done "something" to get around it
Ross and Asmon is actually a match made in heaven.
both are goblins that like games and fight mold on a daily basis.
Oh yeah, Ross had a black mold problem that delayed his videos, I remember that!
He looks like Asmon's twin brother
As a City of Heroes player, both retail and homecoming, this is a conversation that is FAR more important than most consumers realize.
A law or regulation needs to be built that does 2 things:
1. Make a provision for the Library of Congress to house and preserve video games that exceed a certain threshold of sales. This is to preserve objects of cultural relevance for future academic study and availability to the public, especially after the copyright has expired.
2. Game developers/publishers must create an End of Life (EOL) plan for all products that sell over a certain number of copies, licenses, subscriptions, etc. This must define an exit strategy where a playable game and server program are released to a public archive service when the company makes the decision to pull the plug. Regardless of whether the publisher retains the copyright, the EOL game and server package should be usable by the public as long it is not done for profit. This should be reversable in the event that the company wants to sell their product again. This will not save games that disappear due to bankruptsy but should catch most of them.
ross: im not the perfect person to do this (...) i have limited reach
asmon: lets change that part
If anyone can signal boost Ross, its Asmon. The look-alike memes will get peoples attention, then they'll be made aware of this campaign.
Its not just multiplayer.
once the login server delists the game, you wont be able to install to just play single player.
This'll definitely turn every beloved game into what black ops 2 is now: hacked to hell with people shooting hellstorm missiles out of their pistols, holding stealth choppers as melee weapons, and so on.
It's not closing the book, it's not even opening the book, it's really just trying to even get people to read the damn cover of the book. I hope this gets the traction it needs to get people to read the damn book.
There should be a LAW in NA, EU or worldwide to explicitly make it clear that those Publishers are not selling you a product but leasing/renting a service.
We either "Own a copy of a game" OR we "Own a LICENSE to play the game". That should be made very clear in every "Purchase" especially Online.
I think the only acceptable thing would be to force these companies to put a big disclaimer on the box, along the lines of cigarette packs, that says 'Access to online servers may be terminated at any time.' The same should be true for online game purchases for a digital copy; there should be a mandatory 'accept - decline' window that must be clicked through with the same warning. The way it is now, it's like buying a new car and three years later someone from the dealership comes without notice and puts a governor in it.
And I don't want to hear anything about fine print disclaimers on the back of the box saying something like - 'online service may be interrupted' or 'you are only buying a license'. Ambiguous disclaimers like these shouldn't even be allowed, and they should legally have to be at least half the font size of the largest text on the box or contract.
It’s not just online games, it’s digital only release games too