The press release sure read as though it was an inconceivable notion that they could build a multiplayer game that wasn’t going to get updated forever. It made me so angry.

They don’t do that. They have re-releases that are available for purchase for a month before they’re gone, and then they rent you the old emulated games forever, on worse emulators, with no option to buy them.

What if we still lived in the era where games could have single player and multiplayer modes without worrying about constantly updating the multiplayer mode and monetizing it in perpetuity?

If memory serves, they prototyped the first Horizon as a multiplayer game, which makes sense given the Monster Hunter inspiration; and the Killzone games had multiplayer. Horizon would make a great multiplayer game, but I want to play mulitplayer Horizon, not live service Horizon.

I’m still making my way through Divinity: Original Sin II, and it’s largely giving me more of what I love about Baldur’s Gate 3, especially by comparison to the first D:OS. There are some crucial systems that I think D&D handles better, but I’m having a great time.

Any money you spend that saves you money could be considered investing. You can get creative with considering time to be money or what you would have spent on consoles when competition doesn’t exist to bring down prices long-term.

The movement is two months in to a year-long campaign, and that’s just the EU. Ross Scott’s also likely pushing 40, if I had to guess. The clearest messaging of what they’re asking for is to prevent remote disabling of games, which is right in the petition.

This is a completely different position than saying that it expects games to be forced to be updated forever, so I’m not sure why you said that unless you heard someone else summarizing it incorrectly, like Thor, and didn’t verify it yourself.

First off, this is not a piece of legislation. They’re not allowed to do that. They’re petitioning for legislation and stating the problem. More specificity is for parliament to decide.

Second, legislation like this is basically never retroactive. If it does apply to games that have already been made, there would be a grace period for actively supported games. There always is.

Third, Ubisoft sure seems to find it to be worth the effort for The Crew games they haven’t killed yet, as they’re staring down the barrel of this potential legislation. And if you’re building a game with this requirement in mind from the beginning, it’s substantially less work. This used to be how more or less all online games worked, until they found out that a dependence on their servers was potentially more lucrative.

It sure looks properly written to me, and I’m struggling to figure out how this person misinterpreted it.

No, that is not something the petition aims to do, stated clearly in their FAQ, and I don’t think I could arrive at that interpretation even without it. From the petition:

Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher. The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.

And in the FAQ on the Stop Killing Games site:

Q: Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?

A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:

‘Gran Turismo Sport’ published by Sony

‘Knockout City’ published by Velan Studios

‘Mega Man X DiVE’ published by Capcom

‘Scrolls / Caller’s Bane’ published by Mojang AB

‘Duelyst’ published by Bandai Namco Entertainment

etc.

Kind of a bummer that this ended up basically being an ad for 2XKO, a game that functionally requires the installation of a rootkit in order to play.

Forcing companies to do what forever? The scope of what the petition can ask for is limited, and it’s up to EU parliament to find a solution. The problem statement is that you bought a game that can be remotely disabled. If you agree that that’s a problem, I’d encourage you to sign it.

If California can pass their law about what counts as “buying” a digital good, then I hope we can take that as motivation here in the US to try for similar. I wrote my representative about it (she’s an R, so she didn’t care), and I’ll see who I can write at the state level.

Even in the opening pitch, Ross acknowledges that things like this come in waves. The first wave was his call to action. The next ones, if we’re so lucky, will come from other influencers giving it a bump. And honestly, 1M is an absurd benchmark to clear. That’s one signature out of every 450 citizens. They need to know this campaign exists in the first place and care about it.

Wargroove introduces hero units and changes a few mechanics to speed the game up, but this appears to be more meat and potatoes Advance Wars without Nintendo.

I finished up Divinity: Original Sin, finally. The game stops and makes you just find something a lot, and I was definitely getting tired of it by the end of the game. Then the ways that they intended you to solve some puzzles on the critical path toward the end were a lot of “did they really intend for me to solve it this way?” kinds of things that made me break out a walkthrough, especially since they went out of their way to make more intuitive answers impossible, as the game gets fairly finicky with where you can throw something or what counts as being visible from your perspective. Still, I enjoyed it enough to immediately boot up the sequel.

I’m now in the early hours of Divinity: Original Sin II, and they sure did close a lot of the gap between D:OS1 and BG3 when they made this one, especially in graphics, art style, and tone. The way they reworked the action points and armor systems caught me off guard, but I think they’re likely to be net positives as I spend more time with the game.

I started playing Phantom Fury, and despite some middling reviews, this is exactly the kind of FPS game that I wish more companies would make. For the better part of 7-8 years now, this kind of game mostly disappeared. When I’m playing it, I’m transported back to 2003 console first person shooters.

UFO 50 has been a really good time so far. I do really wish the game featured manuals though. The simple games are holding my attention more than the complex ones, largely because the era these games came from would have had manuals to help get you started. As it stands, I have far less patience for figuring those games out.

Multiple sources disputing:

https://80.lv/articles/multiple-sources-dispute-concord-s-usd400-million-budget/

They’re typically some of my favorite stories. And after everyone stopped trying to chase GTA, we don’t get all that many crime stories anymore either.

It was free in an open beta, and hardly anyone took the opportunity to play it then. Chances are they burn through more money than they make by making it free to play. I’d happily pay $40 if that same game had split-screen, private servers, and LAN deathmatch, but no one makes that kind of game anymore.

You claimed it got attention for reasons other than being a game many people just plain enjoyed despite critical evidence to the contrary, you strangely expected them to go back and change non-trivial things in a non-live-service game that had no beta tests or public demos, backed up your opinion with numbers that completely ignored real world context and did not support your points, and then somehow took that to mean that criticism isn’t allowed?