[0xy]

Games explicitly do not promise online features remain available perpetually. No reasonable consumer would assume perpetual access, either.

I also completely disagree that "it doesn't cost Valve anything to run Half Life". Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone. Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all. Newsflash, Steam games have CEG DRM and will not function for long periods of time without Steam.

Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.

[cogman10]

> Games explicitly do not promise online features remain available perpetually. No reasonable consumer would assume perpetual access, either.

Explicitly through a contract you HAVE to sign AFTER the purchase. That's a big problem I have with this model. It's not made explicit until after the purchase.

And, it is reasonable to expect because, as I said and other old game players can attest to, this was the status quo for games ~15 years ago. This was a change in living memory.

> Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone.

How about Quake 1/2/3? I pulled half life just as an example. Valve is making those updates because they want to, not because they have to.

> Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all.

Ok, Again Quake or Dark forces 2. But also, it's only technically incorrect today. It wasn't when HL was originally released. Valve had to backport in it's integration to the valve servers. That is, they technically had to put in effort to make the game tie to their servers.

But also, I can still dust off my old HL cds, install it, and play it without the steam integration. I can even patch it to a pre-steam version and game with people that aren't using the pre steam version.

> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.

That's really only because steam has gone out of it's way to install DRM on top of the games. They have purposely broken my games to be dependent on their services.

None of this makes your argument better, in fact it's a highlight of the broken nature of the games industry.

[ryandrake]

> And, it is reasonable to expect because, as I said and other old game players can attest to, this was the status quo for games ~15 years ago. This was a change in living memory.

I fear an entire generation is growing up thinking that it is normal and acceptable that products you buy can be remotely disabled by the developer, manufacturer or vendor when it suits them, with no recourse to the person who bought the product.

This is one of those tech nerd debate hills I'm willing to die on: It should be totally unacceptable/illegal for someone else to remotely nerf or destroy a product you bought and paid for.

[0xy]

You just finished praising Steam, the company responsible for the proliferation of DRM technology that does exactly what you claim to hate.

If Steam goes offline, billions and billions of dollars of games go with it. The online ones, the offline ones, all of it. Gone forever. Some will not function at all without Steam servers.

Steam pioneered remote DRM attestations for PC gaming, remote product key validation, always-online dependencies on Steamworks and more.

[ryandrake]

You might be thinking someone else. I never praised Steam. It should be totally unacceptable that Steam shutting down would cause the disappearance of billions of dollars of people's games.

[Telaneo]

> No reasonable consumer would assume perpetual access, either.

I expect perpetual access to my game the same way I expect access to my books. Most of my multiplayer games can still be played without involving a clown server somewhere (either by hosting one myself, or by playing over LAN). This is somewhat skewed by me not having bought many of the offending games, but it's clearly not an impossible feat. It's not even a big ask. And yet it's still not done.

> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.

The mere existence of that workaround means I still get to play my game. There aren't any workarounds for most of the games Stop Killing Games care about, since developing them requires enormous amounts of man-hours reverse engineering, while the devs could do the same in a fraction of the time (or at the very least give people a head start!).

[ianburrell]

I have books that link to online content. I've had one that had printable workbook that that no longer worked because the site had disappeared.

Are you going pay the extra money to the developers to keep the servers running? What will people choose, the 5 year support for game that might never play again, or the forever support? Game companies will raise prices, by a lot, if forced to maintain or release games.

[Telaneo]

The web archive kind of solves this problem.

Beyond that, I think the authors of your books are idiots for not making whatever content they have online not just a bundled part of the book (throw in a CD or thumb drive or whatever, not my problem. Solve it however you want. Just™ actually solve it). I've had the same happen with a quiz book I found, which had the answers online, with just a QR code in the book, which then lead to a 404 page. They could have just printed a few extra pages of answers in the back, but they didn't, and I mock them for it. They're fucking morons. Thankfully quiz questions tend to be easily googleable.

> Are you going pay the extra money to the developers to keep the servers running?

No, because you don't need to do that to have a playable game.

> Game companies will raise prices, by a lot, if forced to maintain or release games.

Good thing they don't need to do that then.

[cwillu]

> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.

That's funny, because most of my steam games will happily run with the network cable unplugged

[Rohansi]

> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.

Not true. Some games distributed via Steam will continue to work because they do not use (or require) Steamworks.

[throwaway85825]

Maybe the product stops working tomorrow maybe 10 years from now. Consumers shouldn't have to gamble. If sellers don't like it they need to tell consumers the end date like a subscription does. That's at least honest.