It's finally up! Please sign it if you're in the UK :) Petition: Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state.
Petition: Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state
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if it's a 100% online game what to do? They would be forced by law to keep servers online in perpetuity? The workaround could be to create a shell company that would bankrupt the day they want to discontinue the game and turn off the servers
100% online games in the past were perfectly playable even after developers / publishers ended support. Online only games dying is a relatively recent invention. This petition is asking for consumer protection to return to the norm where a purchaser of an online game always has the choice of being able to play it in some fashion.
A game developer could do this by releasing a server application. They could even do this at the barest minimum by releasing documentation describing how the server ought to work, to allow for reverse engineering.
The Stop Killing Games campaign as a whole isn't asking for perpetual server access, just to ensure that games stay in some sort of playable state.
I think a minimum would be open sourcing the server backend, or at least a compatible one, once servers reach EOL.
They could keep the servers up, or open source them so people can host the servers themselves
They would not even need to open source the servers. Just making the server available for users to run (even under a proprietary license) would be enough.
Or a patch to strip out the online portion. If developers know they'll need to create that patch eventually, then they can design the game around it. Offline/LAN play/local servers were the norm until ubiquitous high-speed internet.
There's no technical reason why Diablo 4 needs to be online only. It was a design decision made for DRM and microtransactions. D2 still works great and has thousands of active players.