| I am mixed here. On the one hand there is the decision part from a game publisher, on the other hand the player. Subscription businesses is simply a usage over time. That's the troubling thing here. You don't really own games physically as we did during the 80th and 90th. Update-mania and buggy games were introduced first as consequence of the internet, then came the registration phase and after that the subsciption model. Why am I mixed? Did I keep my machines from back then? The SNES, the i486 etc? What if the hardware has an defect 30 years after? Eternal rights? They are in no way guaranteed, in either reality. I was a semi-pro gamer for some time around 99-01, being in the top 50 of the Age of Empires II: AoK ladder at the legendary ZONE in RM games. I had several smurf accounts leveled up into the ladder, to sneak into games without being tied to my clan and even clans (CN, Myll, ZXK just to name a few). I had to cut ties, because of the impact on my university curriculum. I remember the huge fallout it took on DBD_Jinx who kind of quit the game from one day to another without notice due to - if I remember correctly - being even kicked out of university due to being to heavily involved with the game all day. He was a notorious FLUSHER everywhere and every time which was unimaginable at the time but beat almost everyone being really an excellent executioner and top notch player even in late castle, on water etc. - and this took time and a toll. After AoK I never touched a game with any potential to being addicted. Never. I didn't play Warcraft, which I was a top notch player when it was called Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and came on a CD in 1995, and this lead me to AoK - an online game. People should consider, what they are doing online. A sarcastic colleague once put it this way: People changing bytes on a server in a cloud, wow... He had a point. Games are fun, but not for ever, sadly. I would love to play AoK like back then and while there is the chance now, I still refuse to take part in any online action at all. I took part in a few LAN party games - yes, we brought our laptops and played like it is 1998! But that's it. So I am mixed. Online gaming feeds more and more addiction and that's why I sometimes think: a server that gets shut down is like a cold turkey for some. |
For this you have options: emulators, FPGAs, fixing the original hardware. So as long as you have your copy of the game, there is a way for you to play it.
But with modern games that is not the case anymore. Publisher can decide on a whim that they don't want to support their game and shut down the servers, which renders the whole game unplayable. It even happens with singleplayer games. This is not OK and should not be accepted as the norm.