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by skotobaza 7 days ago
No, the moral argument is "I want to be able to (re)play the experience ten years from now". If the servers aren't available in any form (so I can't event self-host), then it's an issue. That is the moral part, not the financial one.
1 comments

“What you want” isn’t a moral issue. It’s an entitlement issue. I want a Ferrari. $70 doesn’t buy a Ferrari just like it doesn’t buy unlimited expense running a server or the intellectual property of that server.

Fascinating to me that, on the one hand, so many people up in arms about AI stealing work from poor devs but then here you are demanding free use of their work because you made a one time payment ten years ago.

"Well, just make it open source, so anyone can run it". Ok, and someone sets up a server and modifies it to be "Nazi world" still using my recognizable assets. Do I have any rights there, to stop my IP from bieng used for that purpose? Is "IP" a dirty word? Isn't IP what we're up in arms about AI stealing?

You haven't thought it through.

When I buy a game, I do not expect the developer or the publisher to keep the servers open for unlimited time. But since I paid for the game, I expect to be able to play it. Like it always has been. You see it as entitlement, I see it as a normal thing. If you buy a Ferrari and it stops working just because some servers got closed, I expect you to be "entitled" as well. It's absolutely normal to expect things that you paid for to keep working. And knowingly disable the servers rendering a game (or a car) unplayable is immoral. It already happened multiple times. And it will happen again.

Regarding the argument about modification of the assets - I don't see the issue. Nobody will hold the publisher responsible for what other people do. You can already do that with e.g. Counter Strike - host your own server, take an official Valve map and replace some textures with something inappropriate. No one will blame Valve for this, since they do not host those servers.

So I have thought it through. Also, AI has nothing to do with this, not sure why you bring it up...