I’m playing D:OS2 now, and it’s most of the way to BG3. I’d also highly recommend the Wasteland games.

That actually came out last year.

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.

The unanimous game of the year last year is a turn-based RPG, and I can promise you Metaphor: ReFantazio this year will do well critically and commercially, just like Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth did earlier this year. There are plenty of turn-based RPGs to go around. If you meant turn-based tactics or strategy, same thing; plenty of those to go around as well.

RTS sort of peaked with StarCraft II, at least in terms of popularity, but you find some here and there. Battle Aces and Stormgate are both from ex-Blizzard devs chasing that high, and both are live service, so those two will soon be dead, but there are others out there that are less popular that come out from time to time.

That may be true, but you can also see, for instance, that there are a ton of Chinese users who only play Dota 2 or only play PUBG. You’ll see the percentage of Simplified Chinese users ebb and flow with a similar cadence to just those two games.

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.

20 years ago, we paid for online because it was better than what you got for free on PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo. Now an online subscription is probably one of several reasons that people are moving to PC.

GTA V is second only to Minecraft in copies sold across all of video games, and it still appears in the top 10 for copies sold on most months, 11 years after its initial release. It’s also available on other stores and consoles, so Steam is not a complete picture.

Those games are played by a demographic that only plays that game, or close enough. They’d consider themselves a Dota player before they consider themselves a video game player in general. These games aren’t played exclusively by that type of person, but a large part of their audience is the type of player who just plays that game. I’m having trouble digging it up, but the person who created Steamspy a number of years ago, before privacy laws made public profiles opt-in and interfered with its ability to collect data, found that the majority of Steam accounts only had a single game in their libraries.

Half of Halo 4 was the best Halo story. The other half of it was the worst Halo story.

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.

Well, that also saves money on localization costs, when you’re selling to people across many different languages.

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.