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keyle

What annoys me about this the most is the message from Steam, that sort of plays along with this.

"This game is no longer available for sale on Steam". No big deal, right.

Ok, fine, but it doesn't imply the servers going down and the title becoming unplayable...

Then 2nd message:

"Please note this title won't be accessible from <date>..."

Once again, accessible doesn't imply "the game won't start, thanks for the monies".

It's a bloody shame that I can start any games from the 90s on an emulator and they run just as fine, even content heavy. While these titles are completely riddled with DRM and screw you over after X years.

Publishers need to come clean, and after years of milking the cow, they must have a plan allowing paying customers to play the title they've been enjoying all these years. Otherwise, they should be forced to include the verbiage at release date "This title will stop working as of <date in the future>".

This kind of nonsense only promotes cracked games.

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Expecting publishers to behave isn't the answer, since there will always be those who won't behave as well as those that simply disappear.

What is needed is laws that classify games in situations such as this as abandonware and grant users who have paid for the game carte blanche to get it operating. If copyright holders want to maintain control of a title, then there must be certain consumer expectations met under the law.

That would be such a limp remedy. It's basically just what can be done right now without the legal blessing.

Rather what we really need is that in order to qualify for copyright protection at all, source code (ie the original creative work) should be put in escrow. When the copyright expires or the work is abandoned, then the source code gets published as part of the public domain.

And it's at that point the escrow code is found to be incomplete.

Fines, losing the ability to copyright things going forward, bonding/insurance, verification that the published works are derived solely from what's in escrow. There are many ways to regulate enforcement. It's very odd to point out the possibility of attempts to skirt the law as a reason to not consider such law to begin with.

For software, you’d need to archive the whole build process too. The dependencies have their own issues with bit rot.

Sure, but ideally copyright terms should also be short enough for that to not be a big issue.

Lol if you've dealt with the NPM ecosystem at all, you've seen builds break in months, and even the most avid copyright reformers don't want terms that short.

> What is needed is laws that classify games in situations such as this as abandonware

This will never happen as long as they can milk games and keep on making money on 40 years old games. Mario 1 is still not abandon-ware. Its Disney's Mickey Mouse all over again.

That's not totally accurate, is it? The US LoC has made administrative exemptions [1] to things like the 'circumvention' teeth of the DMCA for the sake of archive/curation of historical works. While not a total reclamation of the copyright or a mandate for companies to support preservation, it's also not a complete denial of some games' abandonwarw status.

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...

If they're still "milking the game" it's not abandonware?

The original release of Mario 1 still starts up and plays just fine.

This, 100%. I already act like this is the law because it only seems fair.

This really doesn't feel like an important enough area to demand fresh government regulation. Consumer protection laws are meant to be a last resort when a broad chunk of the population are being actively screwed over by monopolies or entire industries. If losing access to a game originally released a decade ago fits that bill the consumer protection agency is going to be very busy.

Think of it this way - if you learn you don't like a company's practices and chose not to buy their next video game release, does that really derail your life? If not, or if a big chunk of the population wouldn't say yes, we really don't want Uncle Sam rolling in with even more reach than he already has.

That argument makes no sense. Just because something only affects those that enjoy a particular hobby does not mean that those consumers don't deserve protection. This also isn't really just about games as other forms of copyrighted content also often disappear when the would-be owners can't be bothered to keep it available.

Remember that copyright which is only allowed to exist because we think it will result in more creative works that will eventually be part of the commons. If a company is taking active steps to take something away then they are abusing this deal and should forfeit any copyrights.

I think it is a very underappreciated point. Those anti-consumer actions are only fueling future piracy ( and for a good reason too.. cracked games don't suffer from the DRMs and so on ). I accepted Steam and they won a lot of goodwill from me based on their work on Proton ( although I still try to throw some money GOG way ).

But instances like these heavily undermine my getting more comfortable in Steam walled garden.

Edit: And I think am pretty deep in already. I just ordered Steam Deck. Stuff like this makes me question that decision.

Steam isn't the guilty party in this nonsensical bullshit, Ubisoft is. Steam allows you to list titles with zero DRM, zero Steamworks integration, or zero online components just fine.

Valve could use their market power to prevent this kind of rug-pulling behavior by publishers. Customers expect Valve to ensure that the software they provide is free of viruses, spyware, and harmful defects; this seems like a similar type of defective and/or malicious software that they should prohibit from sale.

Valve don't have the market power with the big players you think. Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft all sell a subscription service and their games & DLC directly. Epic have a competing store, and pumped in enough money that people have gotten used to having their owned games in multiple wallets. The small and medium players are who Valve has power over, and even they get to choose between Valve's large cut or accepting a bribe from Epic for exclusivity. I see a remarkable change from when your game was on Steam or it didn't exist.

I worked for 6 years at Ubisoft.

Valve has enormous power and uses it often, even at one point de-listing our entire catalog without warning because we had an additional asset in a game which was granted based on region. (and we got blamed in the media for it).

Ubisoft games are still on Steam despite this, though the big publishers despise this amount of power, and sometimes valve does come across as bullying when you’re on the receiving end.

You took away "expired" my hard earned ubi points that could be used to lower purchase prices. Since then I'm not spending money on your platform anymore

HA!

Those ubi points exist to give people the discounts we aren't allowed to directly give because of Steam licensing terms. :D

The fact they even exist is a symptom of what I'm talking about.

(also: I never worked on uPlay, I worked in the same building)

I think the reasonable thing Valve could do is to allow refund for products that stop working. It is one thing for multiplayer servers being turned off, but single-player game stopping working should allow refund from anytime in past 20 years.

Yes and no. Ultimately, I primarily blame Ubisoft ( and I do not buy anything that bears their name ), but I am not going to pretend that a platform that sells me something is completely off the hook. They have a lot of market power. They could have put their weight behind it and put Ubi in their place. They chose the path of least resistance.

So they might not be the guilty party, but they are sure not innocent. They are taking the cut of the money. It better be going towards protecting me. If they are not protecting me from bad actors then why am I using Steam?

Right, but Ubisoft's actions here still undermine trust in Steam. It sucks because it's not Steam's faint, but I think OP is right. This may ultimately be training people to distrust platforms like Steam and return to piracy.

I paid my money to Steam for a particular product, if they want to revoke it, they can refund my money.

If Steam is legally required to do that, their contracts with developers will inevitably have the same clauses about refunds if you disable the product.

Steam also gave you a clear notice that there was additional third party DRM on the product before you licensed it. They are also not the ones who are shutting it down.

Another reason games get cracked: the anti-piracy functions significantly impact performance. Time and time again there are benchmarks showing that when Denuvo and other anti-piracy stuff is striped out (the publisher has to pay to license it, per time period), performance dramatically rises.

I remember that some DRMs in the pre-Steam era of low internet access basically acted like viruses. They'd slow the computer down and get flagged as viruses.

Steam made it clear that piracy wasn't the enemy - people who pirate might not even buy the game, and people who buy games might not even play it. But back in the old days, this wasn't as clear.

Before the heavy online verification thing, I had a copy of a game which I bought (I think it was one of the Elder Scrolls games or perhaps a Prince of PErsia) which required the original DVD to start to the game even after I'd installed it.The DVD was not very high quality and shattered inside my drive (thereby destroying the drive too). I wanted to play the game but couldn't thanks to the verification thing. Finally, I downloaded a cracked version which didn't demand this of me and was able to play just fine.

It's tragic but it genuinely feels like that pirated games have better user experience than clean ones.

In the early 2000s I got an Adaptec SCSI card and a bunch of SCSI CD-ROM drives for free somewhere; I had a stack of 6 CD drives with discs for the games I was playing in them all the time.

This went wrong when I was cleaning my desk and I lifted them while I was playing Baldur's Gate II, creating a big scratch on the disc. I polished it up with some toothpaste and it worked fine after that (even used that same disc to install the game later, IIRC).

Kinda ridiculous really, but it was good fun playing around with these sort of things when I was young.

Seems quite complicated when the rest of us just used NoCD patches. Unless you didn't have the disk space to fully install the games - IIRC BG2 had the option to load some parts directly from the CD instead of installing them.

Not sure about TES, but all the Prince of Persia games had the same behaviour of needing the game disc inserted to even start. Was a very irritating countermeasure, presumably against people who used their disc to install the game on multiple devices.

We shouldn't wait for publishers to self-regulate. We should have legislation prohibiting software lockouts like this.

However, the industry will always find ways around it. For example, some games force online multiplayer gameplay in order to advance your character or unlock stuff. This is 'great' when the game is popular because it encourages people to play the multiplayer, but even a year or two later if the server are up, there may not be enough people to play with/against.

So, the legislation would have to prohibit limiting/locking content or gameplay options, say, if the multiplayer options become unavailable or unusable.

> It's a bloody shame that I can start any games from the 90s on an emulator and they run just as fine, even content heavy.

Eh, not exactly true. A lot of older Windows 90s games need some tweaks to their binaries to run. See what GOG.com did.

Even a more recent game, relatively, like Fallout 3 had issues with multi-core processors that required a tweak to get past the birth scene or you would hard crash. GOG includes this and plays out of the gate. As it should be for a game that is still sold on Steam, but the publisher/dev does not bother.

Personally I just avoid games like that and stick with indie titles for new games.

The key word in the GP being "emulator" so for PC games that would be DosBox or Wine (to some extend), not expecting everything to just work in current Windows versions. Even for multi-core issues the "fix" should be as simple has pretending you only have one or a small number of cores.

> As it should be for a game that is still sold on Steam, but the publisher/dev does not bother.

Yes, selling sofware that does not work on current systems is something that Steam needs to crack down on although I fear that the result for many titles would just be that they are no longer sold at all. In a better world, copyright would either not exist, be much shorter so that such compatibility issues are not a big problem and/or would be forfeit when not continuing to sell the software in a functioning state.

> Personally I just avoid games like that and stick with indie titles for new games.

That is a sensible strategy for you as an individual and probably the extend of what you can enact on your own. But we as a society should not just accept that more and more of a shared culture is controlled by corporations and lost when they don't deem it profitable to keep it available anymore. Copyright is a deal between creators and everyone, which is supposed to encourage more creation so that more things will be available to us all. If that deal is being abused or shown to not be a net positive for society then we CAN alter it.

Gone are the days when you could just oen software after paying a one time fee, read a purchase price. Or any content as far as that is concerned. No idea why a single player game would need a server to be playable in the first place so...

Remember GameSpy? 100s if not 1000s of games online play destroyed over night with no means of remedy. No source released or leaked.

That was the 1st online "DRM".

I dearly miss playing Battlefield 2142 and Neverwinter Nights just to name 2, on official servers.

But I can't do it anymore because... how did it even shut down? And no one was held accountable for it. No legal repercussions.

NwN did have workarounds for online play after GameSpy went poof and I believe Beamdog's Enhanced Edition does restore official online support - no idea if it is any more future poof than GameSpy was.

They don’t know when it will stop working.

The solution is to convert the sales model to subscription only. If it is clear you are renting it is clear that access is limited.

It’s not great as you’d want to play after end of support, but publishers are not interested for a multitude of reasons. They want a central server for control. Control of gameplay and control of cheaters and control of pirates.

No, they don't know when they will decide to turn off their DRM server.

We're not talking ongoing fixes/support here - just the ability to start up this single player game at all. This action encourages future piracy.

Keeping a server up is implying ongoing work though. At the very least you need someone with domain knowledge to keep it properly online and then also to keep everything up to date and fix stuff like vulnerabilities.

Not that I'm shedding a single tear for them.

Very true, I was thinking they should remove the dependency on it.

I'm going to be honest if I bought a game that said it would stop working in 10 years I'd just end up being mad when I buy it as well as when it stops working, that wouldn't really make me any happier

I'd want a refund

Then the editor will generate both an "average number of hours" indicator and a "replayability multiplier", and you'll be entitled to a refund based on the number of hours you played since you bought it.

Why?

If you destroy my property, you should pay to replace it. If it is no longer available then the lowest valid amount I can think of would be the purchase price.

Unless you want to argue that an official working copy on this game (now unique) would be worth less than the original steam price.

Also if you went to the cinema and watched 90% of a film before the management turfed every one out. Do you think a 10% refund would make it right?

So you're saying if the average number of times a Friends collection DVD is watched is approximately 1, nobody is entitled to watch it more often, even if they're a superfan?

That sounds like a valid proposal for EU legislation

Whats the matter? Don't you like interpreting PR-speak? \s

People who are buying Unisoft games deserve this

Games were already cracked before companies like Valve started pulling them from players' libraries. If games are cracked anyway, why would studios and publishers care one way or another?

I think in many cases, movies and video games piracy is a matter of convenience. If pirated media is more convenient -- not just as in "free", but because it's less encumbered and doesn't pull this crap on you -- then paying for legal media will become less appealing.

There's a baseline of piracy, sure, but there's also making the lives of paying customers more difficult so that piracy becomes the preferred option.

Exactly. Steam is more convenient than manually maintaining a large gaming library and keeping it up to date, and collecting titles on sale. However if it develops a reputation of killing games once a publisher decides to (???), the value-add is greatly reduced. I have a probabilistic expectation that my Steam library will work ten years from now, and stuff like this GREATLY reduces my estimation of the probability.

Can Valve legally keep distributing a game a publisher has retired and killed? I would not think so.

They can demand contracts that would allow them to. We have no way of knowing what exactly valve's distribution contracts allow them but so far games have (AFAK always) remained available for download if you purchased them before they were removed from the store. Key activations generally also still work - e.g. you can hunt down a physical copy of the original Prey and activate that on Steam and download it there (unless you get scammed and are sold a copy with a key that was already activated). And it is very much in Steam's interest to keep the pretense that what you are doing is buying something like a physical product that you can keep forever (*).

The difference for this game is probably that in addition to Steam the game requires Ubisoft-hosted DRM servers which Valve has no control over.

(*) For as long as you live, unless someone forces Steam to allow transferring subscriptions to other people.

If a pay for a title I shouldn't have to crack it to play it.

Game companies want to avoid people downloading cracked games. If every game someone wants is available legally, then that person might decide to be 100% legal. But if some stuff isn't available legally, that person might turn to cracks for those, and then once on the cracks, continue using cracks in other situations.

Fallout 3 best example. I bought the CD from the UK, shipped to Germany. Disc was defective. With tricks I managed to install it, barely. Returning wasn't an option. Years later I see it on Steam and buy it, to find out it's the German version, no English text or audio and censored too. Valve didn't have a refund policy back then. So I threw away money because of this. I them downloaded the Gog version off the internet. I already paid for this game, twice. Another reason is the 2 hour no refund policy. If I spend a lot of money for a virtual product and those 2 hours are absolutely not enough to see if I like a game or not, I expect a lot more time than 2 hours to be able to evaluate if a game is worth the purchase. That's why I download a pirate copy 1st because most games are not worth the money. Most games are lazy, optimized for marketing and the 2 hour period and after that the quality drops hard. If there are no pirate releases I won't buy it. Guardians of the Galaxy for instance. 60 eur. Recently cracked. I'm glad I didn't give in and spend 60 eur for this. I played it for 2 days and uninstalled. Warhammer Total War 3. Bought it from a Hong Kong shop. It was released unfinished and I bought it ONLY because I bought the 1st and 2nd iteration on Steam. I don't have all the DLCs. TCO of the trilogy including the DLCs which are for the most part nothing but reskins with minor changes is over 250 eur. For what's essentially one game. Last time they got my money. That's a scam in my book. I'm still waiting on them to release the grand map called Immortal Empires. It will eventually get cracked. And then I'll download the while thing including all DLCs. I already paid 190 eur for the 3 and some DLCs. My freaking 10 year old Samsung Pro 840 SSD cost that much and still serves me well. It's a lot of money. No one was interested in playing part 1 once part 2 was out, likewise no one will be interested in parts 1+2 once they release IE. Fool me once...

If you buy a lot of brand new AAA games with all the DLC it'll be expensive. If you buy a few games, old games, games on sale, and play them for a long time, it's a lot less expensive. You also don't need as expensive of hardware to play old games.

https://xkcd.com/606/

Even if it happens both ways, that doesn't mean that it happens with equal frequency in both cases.

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