I think the company should also be required to clearly state the amount of time they'll keep supporting the game and will operate the servers for. If they decide to shut them down early, everybody should be given the choice to either receive a full refund or the non DRMd version of the game + the server software like you suggested.

In general I think all paid games should be required to clearly state the amount of time they'll keep providing feature updates for, as well as support for new hardware, major bug fixes, and minor bug fixes. Although games that aren't online and just reach EoL are still playable for quite some time, eventually there'll be some breaking operating system or hardware change that will force the use of a virtual machine, compatibility software, or other types of emulation to keep playing. That might not happen for 50 years, at which point you probably don't care, but still. I'd give more leniency to indie Devs and games made as passion projects, though.

Although obvious once you think about it, I don't think most people realise or even think of the fact they will eventually not be able to play the game they're buying. And these mega companies need to stop making games they dump 6 months after launch.

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 weeks ago

I get what you mean but that is not feasable, however, if we look back at the old multiplayer experience like in Unreal Tournament 2004, the company runs a master server, and the community runs the game servers.

The master server just lists the game servers and allows for a server browser. That is WAY less resource intensive and can be run almost indeffinately.

The master server for UT2004 ran continously for almost 20 years, and when Epic announce it was shutting down, a fan server was created and after a quick edit of the config file you can play UT2004 multiplayer exactly like it was in the past.

So let's go back to that model of multiplayer, it requires a bit of skill to set up your own server securely, but you'll have way more choice and less commitment of resources from the publisher making it available for longer at less cost.

[–] uis@lemm.ee 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

eventually there'll be some breaking operating system or hardware change that will force the use of a virtual machine, compatibility software, or other types of emulation to keep playing.

I still can play Unreal from 1998 on modern Linux. Faust bless Torvalds and his "never break userspace".