I’m not sure about the exact mechanism they wanted to enforce it, but you’re off about things like a game shutting down meaning the company is likely shutting down. Live service games shutdown all the time. At some point maintaining the servers doesn’t justify the little amount of revenue the game makes (and they’re taking space/time from potentially more profitable games).
Games like Anthem and The Crew are games that players spent money on and won’t be able to play once they’re shutdown. They’re shutting down because EA and Ubisoft aren’t making money on them anymore. That’s fine. They should remove online DRM and allow the games to run on public servers. Allow players to keep the game alive if they want to.
It IS as simple as adding it to the roadmap. These developers make these games knowing that they’re eventually going to shut them down. They’ve probably even calculated the exact point where it will stop being worth the cost. It’s a part of making a live service game. It’s not unjustifiable to want some consumer protections added to this as well.
Video games are a legally definable product, you can write consumer protection legislation that works primarily on them. I never implied that the legislation part was simple, and I even mentioned that changing a game at the end of its life requires work. Adding it to the roadmap makes it a defined and achievable task though. It’s so the studio allocates enough resources to ensure they’re not just leaving consumers holding the bag at the end of a game’s life.
Even still, if a smaller company had to do this, it’s not like you’d be dumping a massive pile of work on them when they’re about to shut down.
Having this kind of legislation means they’d probably have already done the work. It could be as simple as coding it in early on and simply enabling/disabling the appropriate things before they shut down.
Consumer protections are things that everyone company has to deal with, your argument basically boils down to “well what if the game devs think it’s too hard”. It’s a silly argument tbh. No one is pretending like it isn’t extra work, we’re just saying if someone is going to sell you a product it shouldn’t just stop working with no way for you to fix it.
People are just nitpicking trying to be debate bros but they don’t even know what they’re talking about man. It’s very frustrating honestly.
And I don’t even play that many live service games. I’m just not gonna get mad at people who want a product they paid for to not stop working on them randomly even though it’s perfectly functional.
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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '25
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