This is the best summary I could come up with:
The developers at Ubisoft Ivory Tower announced on December 14th that as of March 31st, 2024 the servers would be shut down and so it will no longer be playable for anyone.
So now YouTuber Ross Scot of Accursed Farms, has launched the Stop Killing Games campaign to try and better highlight the issue.
As noted on the campaign website: "An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends.
It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media.
It’s definitely an interesting and often frustrating issue, especially for games that could seemingly continue to let you play offline without too much trouble.
Definitely a campaign I can get behind though, because I’ve said for years it’s a really poor situation for consumers to have your purchase suddenly stop working forever that you’ve not just put money into but often a ton of your time.
The original article contains 344 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 50%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Had this happened with an MMO, completely drove me away from the publisher of that and other MMOs it held. Good guy shitty MMO publisher, helping you to overcome MMO addictions.
Guessing NCSoft? They’ve shut down more released MMOs than pretty much any other MMO company has released total.
If studios want to commit to this games as a service model they need to really tighten up their language Don’t “sell” games, since they can’t be owned by customers. Don’t promote replayability if you have no plans to make the game available indefinitely. Sell it like an experience, like going to a theme park or getting a massage, and be crystal clear about how much usage the license purchased will get players, support window, updates and patches included etc.
Studios keep wanting things both ways by saying they want to sell games but then don’t let customers use them how they want after purchase, and pull the rug out as if customer should have expected it.
Then for this singular “experience” I would expect it to cost much less than the competing games I get to keep and replay, just like renting and buying movies used to be. Normally, it’s the opposite, and those “experiences” are being sold for much more. That word play you are trying to suggest just sounds like an EA quote that’s going to be making the rounds and getting mocked in the future, if they ever tried to sell it as such.
Exactly, and this should be the case in other industries as well. For example:
- phones - don’t lock the bootloader and don’t lock to a network if I own it
- cars - don’t give me hardware that requires a software unlock if I own it
- computers, appliances, etc - don’t prevent manufacturers from selling parts to products I own (right to repair)
And so on. If you’re going to sell me a product, I should be able to whatever I want with it, whenever I want, with no artificial restrictions or control by the manufacturer or rights holder. This should probably extend to DRM as well, though I’m okay with a lockout period (e.g. DRM will be removed X years after sale, or a contracted full refund).
If companies don’t want to actually sell products, they should be honest and lease them.
…And charge pennies on the dollar!
Or, as soon as the mfgrs stop making parts for my car, I should get a refund of a certain amount of the purchase price of the car.
When my phone goes out of support, I get a refund of %x of the cost. The mfgrs can keep the money in the mean time and earn interest.
Disincentivise planned obsolescence.
