Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer has asked the European Commission for an opinion on the decision by French computer game manufacturer Ubisoft to make the popular computer game "The Crew 1" unusable from April 2024. In Breyer's opinion, this measure could violate EU law. Meanwhile an initiative centr
  • dsemy@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    I don’t think there’s any chance the outcome of this will be allowing the communities of orphaned games to maintain them.

    However, I think a good middle ground would be requiring publishers to state ahead of time (and inform customers clearly before they make a purchase) how long they will support their game. They should then be able to extend this period, but also be required to refund customers if they drop support before the initial support period they announced ends. Also, there should be a mandatory minimal length to the support period (like some countries have a mandatory warranty period for some products).

    • ieatpwns@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      What’s stopping the foss community from making servers where the games can communicate? There’s already a project in the works for wiiU and 3ds after those console servers shut down.

      https://pretendo.network/

      I might not be able to work on this myself due to my own ineptitude but I know there are people out there smarter than me and more passionate than me who could possibly do it

      • dsemy@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        Nothing is stopping them.

        I’m just saying his proposal to allow the community to maintain and develop the games further (which to me sounds like giving them the source code) probably won’t be put into law anytime soon.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.deEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    Was it too much to add some line about the customers who have already paid for the game being locked out? My guess is that the Comission won’t even know what the actual problem is.

    At least it’s a first step in the right direction.

  • waigl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    Honestly, this should be a bigger discussion, and not limited to just games. If a software company sells a software license for perpetual use to someone, they should not be allowed to use copy protection mechanisms that prevent the licensee from using it in perpetuity.

    If there’s some other technical reason why the software won’t run any more after ten or twenty years, that’s another story. But if they just can’t be bothered to keep running the licensing servers, then they need to bloody well remove the stinking copy protection.

  • ieatpwns@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    I don’t see why developers can’t just make a game that works with or without the internet. There’s no reason a game can’t just connect to another copy of the game and communicate console to console. If there’s a reason beyond greed that this can’t happen please enlighten me.

    • Tibi@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      Peer2peer connections are very difficult. Mainly because clients are behind a NAT which allows only connections from inside to outside. So when a client wants to connect to another client one connection comes from outside and is blocked. There is a “bug” called NAT holepunching to still connect but that’s not a trivial task and doesn’t work on all setups. I recently tried out webRTC for a multiplayer game but I still don’t know what to do with people where that connection can’t be established. SteamAPI has a P2P feature as well, and when they can’t establish a p2p connection they just silently route the packets over their servers.