We are talking about the company that installed rootkit back in the age of CDs.

Just don’t play them at all. Pirating still gives their games attention that will lead to extra sales when compared to a complete flop.

Or, for that matter, just making a new game with a similar genre.

A lot of those multiplayer games aren’t really designed for people who like variety though if you have to compete with people who have played nothing but that game for 1000 hours a year for the last 7 years.

Not sure what you mean. Guilds were basically run by egotistical 14yo with too much free time back in the old days you describe too.

10 hours is a huge time investment in a game that feels like shit to play.

What do you mean Skyrim? Morrowind was clearly the best game they ever made.

I would assume people with lots of friends and little time will like them even less.

Would be interesting to see but I would assume most people won’t even make it to 10 matches in a game they don’t enjoy. The people who spend thousands of hours on a single game are a tiny minority of the tiny minority of people who have the free time to play dozens of a hours a week.

Are you sure that that is not just the people who are left since all the others left the game?

Multiplayer games offer a neverending challenge. There’s always a better opponent.

But that is exactly the problem with it. The vast majority of people don’t have the free time to spend on a given game to compete with those who do spend most of their time on it.

while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.

This, right here, is the insane bit that shows no understanding for the complexities of either hosting servers or programming. Now if they had limited that in any way to games that require the online component only for some sort of license check that would make sense but they haven’t. They expect the publisher to somehow turn a game from a state that requires online servers into one that does not and 99% of the comments in this thread and others on the initiative show that gamers do not understand the amount of effort that requires.

Now if they had demanded a removal of any online license check/DRM mechanism from games that only require the online connection for that, sure, that would have been fine.

Or, more aimed at the cultural preservation aspect, if they had demanded that game publishers should release all source code and assets before killing off a game so the community can develop some solution to keep it running, that would have made sense, even if it would have been hard to achieve politically.

However none of that nuance is in there, the whole initiative seems to be developed and supported by gamers who have never written a line of code or run a server that wasn’t specifically designed to be run by laymen.

Forcing companies to update their games for any new OS or hardware forever. Which would be an insane demand, thus, no signature from me. If you want support, spend some effort phrasing it properly before you present it to non-experts in the field.

I agree that that is a problem but unfortunately this petition wasn’t phrased in a way to deal with that problem.

What I read was the actual statement on the EU petition site. If that is not representative of the actual demands of the lawmakers maybe they should have iterated a few more times before posting it there.

From what I remember of the past posts about this I did not sign it because it had some stupidly amateurish phrasing in there that did not make any distinctions between companies doing something actively to sabotage continued use (e.g. DRM), simply not selling it while copyright prevents anyone else from archiving it, simply turning off the servers for some multiplayer title, forcing always online for singleplayer titles and companies not doing something actively to change it to run on new hardware and operating systems. The way it read it was basically demanding companies do the last one forever which is never going to happen.

True, I actually misremembered Halflife as being from earlier in the 90s than it really was.

If anything trying to make out fine detail on a TV screen that is far away sounds bad for the eyes, not having the screen as close as a regular PC screen.

In my experience very few people replace a PC, even an old one, with a console. At most people might buy a console in addition to their PC and that just becomes less and less viable as each console generation is more expensive and closer to the price of a new PC anyway.

Tolerance is not quite the right word for this. These kinds of games are power fantasies and you need the player to want to be the character, for that they can’t just be different in every way at the same time because every difference increases the chances that some players say “I wouldn’t want to be that character” and also the chances that other players will say “I know how to bully the players choosing that character”.

It is sort of surreal to see someone so young they don’t know what burning a CD is in an article about a game older than CD burners.