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Comment by hot_gril | Hacker News Reader

What singleplayer game has exercised a remote kill switch?

Is being only singleplayer the defining feature? How about games with both singleplayer and multiplayer sections?

The recent one that really kickstarted this would be Ubisoft's The Crew, which shutdown the servers a few months ago and is no longer playable at all, even the singleplayer story portions that have no need for multiplayer.

The petition is worded generally. Just says video games should stay in a working state.

The comment above talks about a remote killswitch in particular, which suggests a portion of the game that doesn't reasonbly require online access is being disabled. Anything multiplayer understandably might not work forever. If The Crew had a singleplayer mode that got disabled (idk, never heard of this game) and was a one-time purchase with no refund, that's pretty scummy imo. Even then, if that were outlawed, that'd push them to put everything online instead of giving a local copy out at all.

Also, I know Steam updates cannot be disabled or reversed. GTA IV is a local game, but they released an "update" that deleted some soundtracks. Sure you can run Steam in offline mode, but not if you have any multiplayer games in your library.

Doom Eternal (which would turn out to be a deeply ironic name and which I was only playing singleplayer) had some botnet layered over it that tried to "update" whenever you started the game. There was a bug where the little startup dialog that would say "updating" or whatever instead said nothing, and it just hung there, and there was no way to bypass it. It effectively bricked the game because not even reinstalling got rid of it. You couldn't do anything to play the game anymore. Research revealed this happened on all platforms, and nobody had a fix. Awesome to be in the future with all this fancy technology, where my game rips me off on accident, WAY BEFORE end of life (this was like a year or two from its release). :D Meanwhile, I can fire up Doom 1 and 2 via gzdoom in less time than it took that dialog to finish when it was still working. And you can play Doom 3 in the browser! https://wasm.continuation-labs.com/d3demo/

Yeah, stuff like this is why I wouldn't feel the urge to play new video games even if I had time. Even if everything works fine, I don't want to wait on updates.

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