Then release a container image of your last working server software so that anyone can host it privately. And release a patch to the games to allow pointing at a private server.
It's really not realistic to do what your saying.
Then again my feature is only a part of the game and I designed it so you'd get 80% only hosting parts of it statically on S3.
Provided as context. The amount of effort the company (not ubi) has given to keep the servers running since 2011 and through gdpr is surprising given how few people actually use the feature. It's be way cheaper to refund the 10s of people actually playing their full price game license. many more people than actually playing would be offended though that we shut the feature down.
Even just half-assing it and asking the community to help would make a lot of people happy. People reverse-engineer closed games/consoles/services all the time. That's what a lot of cheat patches are anyways.
Otherwise, it's the kind of thing that usually ends up as a positive feedback loop: "We need more money" -> "Cripple some old games" -> "Users are buying less of our games" -> We need more money" -> "Cripple more old games" -> ...
We've seen it before with DRM, we've seen it before with microtransactions. When there's no organic way to complain other than "don't buy", execs don't get the message.
Asking for additional development work on a game that is being shutdown obviously won't work, as that that amount of time spent on a dead product is just a waste of money for the business. For example, asking the company to dockerizing the server software, or split their code from the licensed third party tools like speedtree, RAD Game tools, etc and release it open open-source just wont work.
However, I do think most companies could justify asking one of their developers to spend just a single hour to document/copy+paste the _bare basics_ of the network logic for the good PR alone.
They could literally copy+paste their network serialization logic (whether it's something high level like protobuf, or just a raw C++ enum for associating the packet ID's with descriptive names). That's it. Just that one thing alone would immediately raise my opinion of any company that has to shut down an online game service. Just that single thing alone would save their fanbase hours of time spent on reverse engineering the networking for server emulator development.
And as I pointed out that still won't work without hacking the actual console game because the console game has pined ca certificates and dependencies on the game network authorization that relies on crypto that just cannot be released. So to make the actual game work you'd actually have to make a change to and recompile the game.
Note this is running on a console so there are limited ways to hack/alter the game.
Grow a fucking brain and consider the implications of this little "stunt" where a user who has been playing an old game suddenly cannot play anymore. Why do you think that user will spend their hard earned money to pay you for a new game when they know the company will shut down their servers after a few years?
There are limited ways to fuck this up and the company is looking like doing the absolutely worst in terms of looking bad to their "target audience".
Cool I guess if that saves them a week or a month of a full time Devs time. That's worth more than the clusterfuck of PR nightmare it is going to cause. Nice.
I don't know man. The technical limitations you mentioned should not be difficult for the company that built the darn thing in the first place.
Again, I'd say its a matter of priorities.
Software isn’t a bunch of prepackaged recordings cut together and copied over and over again. You need the binary, the assets, and the environment it can be hosted in. Server software needs maintenance because it lives on a network and networks attract people who will screw around with it if vulnerabilities are known to exist (and there will always be vulnerabilities); and if the entity maintaining it decides that it is no longer worth the expense, they stop maintaining it. That’s their goddamn right so the onus is on you to know what you’re buying and who you’re buying it from and what kind of commitment you can expect from them because more often than not it is not if they will shut it down, but when and what you can expect afterwards. A $60 game you bought once probably doesn’t entitle you to full service for the rest of your natural life. Even a subscription has a time limited term of service.
I understand how the cost-benifit analysis today favours shutting down servers and retroactively taking away recently sold products. This is probably why the previous comment suggested the need for legislation.
What you don’t own are the servers running the server side features or the software not on the disc you bought.
It is true that the players do not own the servers, but it should also be illegal for game companies to abuse their customers using that asymmetry.
This is true even though Dark Spore was apparently a pretty dull game (I never played it myself).
If you’re buying a game with a substantial single player game, LAN-based multiplayer, and online multiplayer, the part you don’t get to keep is the latter portion when the game ends. You’ve effectively bought a game and a ticket, and you should know you bought a ticket because business entities don’t have the obligation to keep existing or to continue owning their assets beyond whatever their contracts require (and there’s even ways to sell those out depending on the contract). But you still own the rest.
In the case of a MMORPG or live service game, all you own is a ticket. And even then it’s not as if you can’t be banned from accessing the servers effectively at-will but usually for cheating or harassment. You have to know the difference, because an online game is an experience in entertainment terms where as an offline game is a re-runnable piece of media. That’s not to discount the scummy things software shops can do, but check the original article; they’re shutting down the servers mostly for games 9+ years old, one that’s only a few years old but is online-only (never heard of it, must not have been too successful), and I have no idea what Ubisoft is doing with the access to DLC part in some of those titles. The article didn’t explain that part very well which is basically what I expect from game journalism, but is this DLC that is intrinsically part of the online experience? Is it offline DLC you can still keep, but not redownload? Is this a little bit of column A or a little bit of column B?
Point is, for some things that you “buy”: when the music stops, the band goes home and the stage gets taken down.
I will note the DRM server shenanigans are something I think should be illegal (on the basis that’s it’s a kind of fraud, but different than what you wrote about) though, and I’m surprised you didn’t bring that up.
Darkspore just didn’t have the cachet that SimCity did, so it didn’t attract as much attention.
that opinion is pretty convenient for the game publisher considering I've yet to see a single one who made it possible for a consumer to know the date they would pull the plug before purchasing the game.
How generous that it's our responsibility to do what we cannot do, but misguided to expect game publishers to do what they can do because it would be more expensive for them. Ubisoft makes billions in revenue. They can afford to not be deceptive and to make sure that players have an opportunity to access and continue to use their purchases for as long as the company has purchases on offer.
How you spend your money is up to you, but unconsidered legislating has much broader implications for society. If you think companies are not upfront enough now, or that it is not completely bleeding obvious that services with a cost component to them can be shut down at will after some length of time, then maybe that’s something to be arbitrated in court before we start flippantly talking about Acts of Congress for every paper cut we experience in life and it’s a meme at this point that like clockwork, somebody can go into some level of detail in what is involved for what people are asking for and you’ll almost immediately find someone saying “we need legislation” in nearly those exact words to the point that I don’t even think it is said in good faith; it just a reflex some people seem to have.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but the multiplayer and live services components of games are more like an experience that you buy a ticket to than an ongoing game you can always return to. When the music stops, the band goes home and the stage gets torn down.
Those are the requirements for making it easy to host it in an alternative location. Laws for incompatibility don't need nor usually require it to be easy, only possible.
Microsoft was able to release the network protocol for smb without releasing the binary, the assets, or the environment for their Microsoft server. They were able to release the network protocol without needing to be responsible for the development and maintenance of samba. Microsoft is not in any form responsible for security vulnerabilities in samba.
If Ubisoft released the protocol for Assassin's Creed 2 multiplayer then the only person responsible software updates would be the group implementing that protocol. A law requiring that minimum disclosure would not be expensive nor take a lot of work (unless the protocol documentation is conveniently deleted).
The biggest issue would be certificates, but if companies know before hand that protocol and authorized keys need to be published by the end of the product life, then companies will plan ahead to make those things easy for them. People who run companies can plan ahead when they are required to do so.
Counterpoint: No it's fucking not.
(It's not much of an argument in either case is it?)
We are talking about games that do like $150M+ in their first week of sales.
They have the money to put a dev on this for a week and shepherd it through legal or whatever. They could put a dev on it for a month.
There is no excuse, they're just being cheap and seeing if they can get away with it.
Why don't you go write your own open source game?
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/RagnarokOnline/comments/dj3l9c/so_t...
Release the binaries and installation instructions.
I used to play on a pirated WoW server. I was not in the community long enough to know /how/ there were rogue instances of a Blizzard hosted server software in the wild, but it was fun.
The same should go legally for games that age out of company support.
That's why Blizzard has such a hard time doing anything about them. There's no violation of IP with the server.