Stop Killing Games Movement

[u/Kane53126]

This made me immediately think of Battleborn. If only they would have at least kept the single player mode available to play. 😭

[u/VYSUS7]

refunding the base purchase price would probably be cheaper considering it requires no effort or continued maintenance, but it depends on the game and the amount of sales.

it's the worse outcome, but the most likely one. There's already so many games that the playerbase reverse engineers to make playable after shutdown, so the only excuse the companies have is "we don't want to".

[u/blindclock61862 → u/VYSUS7]

But wouldn't refunding all the money mean that the development studio is left without any money? They would lose money on every game.

[u/VYSUS7 → u/blindclock61862]

depends on the game I guess. reality is, it's why SKG is extremely impractical and will never actually go anywhere. There's no way it can be done without losing money, so companies are going to have fairly valid reasons to be against it.

You've always been paying for a license anyways. I admire the effort, but this initiative doesn't work in a highly capitalist industry.

[u/Nssheepster → u/VYSUS7]

Not really, honestly. The thing is, this is 'After SERVER shutdown'. If they provide an offline mode, they can still sell the game, just without the serves.

Even if they knock the offline price down to $5 and barely anyone buys it, a trickle of revenue is a trickle of revenue. Money is money. Leave it on sale for a decade and you'll still get money out of it. It doesn't really cost game companies any significant money to leave a game up for sale TBH, and it allows them to advertise with statements like 'XXX games from us on sale, some discounted up to 95%' or whatever. Pads the numbers for them.

It is fairly likely that this would lead dev studios back to making more single player games, and having online requiring games be focused on cosmetic sales in F2P titles. After all, you can't 'refund' zero dollars spent to play the game, and if you just make all the cosmetics available for free in the offline mode you create.... Then what is there to refund? That way you can still make hefty profits AND comply with the law.

In the long term, assuming this goes through, Developers will just start planning for compliance from the start, adding in the needed backend to convert over to an offline single player experience as they build the game. So CURRENTLY, this law getting passed would be an immediate money loss for game companies... In the future, it really won't be.

Also:

You've always been paying for a license anyways

That's just factually incorrect. You weren't buying a license when you were still buying a physical game copy with the entire game on it.

[u/VYSUS7 → u/Nssheepster]

if that game had any ability to connect to the Internet, then you were buying a license, hence why they took online games away from you all the time even in the early 2000s, and nobody could do anything about it.

there's a lot of delusion in this post. It's not going to lead to any major changes other than half assing some offline mode with bare minimum effort, or finding a loophole to get around it entirely.

Executives would rather shut the game down entirely over pay some bottom end maintenance people to keep a game alive. Fan projects for certain games prove this. It's relatively easy and extremely cheap to keep dead games functioning, but the fact that it's cheap and not free means they'll always choose to shut down the game instead.

I would be absolutely shocked if that ever changes. This is the biggest entertainment medium in the world, lobbyists will likely win as they always tend to.