This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.
This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.
Edit2: Jesus people, please engage with the actual argument… not some strawman argument I didn’t make.
I must be missing something here.
Edit: I do think that abandonware should be opensourced at some point… but I don’t understand this level of entitlement.
Maybe I’m just missing some crucial info, but an amusement park seems like a fundamentally different thing than software.
It’s the designs and schematics part that makes them equivalent.
You can’t compare a one time ticket to an amusment park to a purchased product tho, that’s just a bad analogy…
It still doesn’t seem entirely equivalent to me. We’re not talking about them giving out the source code. We’re talking about how shit it is that something like software already installed on your computer just no longer will work.
Or let’s use your analogy; why not just abandon the facility instead of shutting it down and chasing everyone away?
Like, don’t get me wrong. I understand that this is the nature about always online stuff and that it can always be closed down like a theme park, but I feel the conversation is more about “why did they design this like a theme park without an abandonment clause instead of a shut-down clause. Historically, most other theme parks have been fine with being abandoned”
And I mean, I’ll agree with you that it’s nothing new, we saw it with Overwatch 1 and countless others, but I feel it’s a conversation one should be able to have without it being dismissed?
(I may have read too much into your comment, but it felt like it was dismissing it as a non-issue since theme parks work like this, when this is not a theme park)
Just in case you missed it in the op:
Good analogy. The battle shouldn’t be about forcing abandonware to be opensource. We should focus on DRM, it makes games almost impossible to play when servers shut down.
OP should have compared it to other medias such as movies. When you buy a box copy, you expect it to work long after the authors/studios/etc. are gone.
The issue is about the lack of legal ways to play older games as time moves on. It will only grow bigger in the next few years with even more games relying on DRM and online servers.
This is a good distinction.
Online only play models are difficult for the consumer. I personally don’t play that many online only games for partly this reason… and partly because I don’t play many only games at all.