Exactly. If you implement DRM that will make the software unusable if it can’t phone home, you should be legally required to have a plan in place for when your servers shut down.

MMO servers get a bit more complicated since they often rely on third-party components that aren’t releasable.

Only if the publisher has taken steps to stop individuals from preserving them through more traditional means.

Kerbal Space Program 2

Video games have a very different production flow to film. The same people editing dialog recording are also doing other sound work. The people cleaning mocap also do hand animation. It’s not like film where you hit a brick wall for 90% of your crew if your filming isn’t on schedule.

Things in the short term are done recording and aren’t impacted. Things in the long term can move the resources to other tasks. If a strike goes for six months or a year, they will start seeing issues.

Check out the demo if you have a chance. The game is a lot of fun and it has some pretty funny demo-exclusive writing.

Factorio is the best manufacturing/logistics sim by a huge margin. Some of that is technical things, but the biggest contributor is game balance and the complexity curve. They spent years iterating to find a sweet spot.

They specifically used it to make major players blatantly cheat during a tournament so that it would be taken seriously and fixed quickly.

There are a couple of decent reasons. One is that your servers may be a network of services that can’t operate independently. Another is that they may rely on things you don’t have a license to distribute.

Yeah, I got most of the way through DoS2 and gave up. Every fight was a giant mess of surfaces. Reducing that makes BG3 far more enjoyable.

It gets thrown around a lot as a buzzword, but it really just means “intended to get post-release updates that go beyond bug fixes.” Nearly every game released these days, good or not, classifies as GaaS. It’s functionally meaningless.

Petroglyph had Grey Goo and the 8-Bit family, but those are decently old now. They’ve been pretty much the only game in town for quite a while, sadly.

My wife and I had the same opinion. Magical to run around the castle for a few hours and do the early classes, surprisingly good combat mechanics, but then… Nothing.

It is really hurt by the inclusion of brooms. They necessitate a huge world so you can’t cross it in a minute, but then it’s too spread out and empty. At least in Ghost Recon my world-design-crippling flying devices have rockets and gattling guns.