Morally, shouldn't it clearly be Zynga's fault, since the game was designed so that it only runs on top of a technology stack that can not be replicated by third parties and only they are technically capable of changing this design?
1. Should Zynga buy back those items at a lower price because they are used items?
2. What happens to cars (because we love car analogies) when the manufacturer stops building spare parts? In this case they are either collected from old cars or somebody else build those parts. Maybe should Zynga at least try to sell the game infrastructure with data? That would be like relying on third party spare parts but the car keeps going. Of course if nobody buys the game, maybe even for free, that's it
3. Other ideas?
By the way, this isn't the first time an online game shuts down and players lose everything, right?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a27021744/micros...
They probably had different terms of sale; buying books contingent on an external service is less attractive than buying in-game items contingent on the game.
> This was the correct response to shutting down servers.
Depending on the terms of sale, it may have been the minimum legally required response.
Zynga could offer to it's user to give their users credits to use in an alternate game, if they want.
To illustrate, if FarmVille were an offline game that costed $1000, I could still set up a Windows XP computer, install Flash, and play it. It's not trivial, but it's very doable and legal.
But instead, actual FarmVille is designed so that it needs an online infrastructure (so far so good, it's a core part of the game after all), but by design this infrastructure can only be provided by Zynga. You can't replicate it even if you want to.
In this case, I would say the moral fault lies mainly in Roblox, since they are the ones providing the platform and hence making the decision to exclusively provide the servers (and that moral fault has not yet happened, it would only happen if when they shut down they don't provide an alternative).
If you are someone building on top of Roblox, I don't think you deserve the same amount of fault, but it's certainly something you have to consider. It's also a risk in that building on top of this design leaves you open to being de-platformed (like, for example with the iOS Store if Apple doesn't like your application).
For what it's worth, I don't think Roblox or Zynga are immoral because of this, just that on this particular topic they are morally faulty.
My bar for what should be acceptable as a recourse is also not very high. Providing any form of alternative like LAN play, closed-source server software, specifications or interoperability with other software would be enough for me. The problem I see with the current situation is the "last resort recourse" there is now in most cases, reverse engineering, is legally shaky, generally against the terms of service, terribly complicated and expensive and not guaranteed to succeed if critical parts of the application are server-side.
Because they don't. A friend had to source BIOS chips for fried ones for an out of warranty CNC machine from around the world just to not have it fail completely.
I'm not saying companies should port their software to new operating systems and software stacks (presumably forever). The user would be responsible for providing whatever operating systems and software stack the program was built to work on.
What I'm saying is that it that companies should provide some way for users to continue using the product they bought, on the same software stack they were already using, when the company decides to shut it down. Anything better than the current situation where the online servers just go down and nothing is offered as an alternative would be much better. One pretty good way (but not the only one) they could do this is by releasing their server-side software, as it is. They don't need to open source it, they don't need to port it, and the user would be responsible for providing whatever underlying software stack it was designed to work on.