Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

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What's different is that new games increasingly incorporate planned obsolescence as a business strategy. The game won't function unless it can phone home, stream assets etc. from their server, and they can and do plan to shut that server off at some point, forcing you to move on and buy new games.

Now what's really troubling is you can conceivably employ this approach with any form of digital entertainment. I think Netflix and the streaming industry in general aspires to convert movies into a planned obsolescence business model; in the beginning Netflix's selling point was that they had an archive of every DVD ever made, but now increasingly they're conditioning us to expect that stuff's going to leave the platform sooner or later. Why? If all we watch are the classics there's not much point to keep subscribing to a streaming service, just download/buy the classics, and then you're done. They are having trouble with this however because the movies they put out just aren't as good as the older stuff; I've read the data indicates that people are mostly watching 90s stuff on Netflix, so they can't purge it from the platform just yet. But they will try.

The games publishers on the other have us over a barrel. They switched to a planned obsolescence model one day and we just went along with it.

If you care about this, vote with your wallet. If you don't like a game's phone-home or planned-obsolescence "features," don't buy it (or wait for a deal and don't pay full price).

I personally buy very few games on Steam, I spend like 5 times as much on GOG.

> If you care about this, vote with your wallet

Much of the gaming population are not following this stuff as closely, and get burned once or twice before they realize what's happening. I think it's good to pressure companies ahead of time, and vote with your wallet when you can.

Much of the gaming population doesn't replay games. Why should I care if Major Game doesn't work any more, I've been playing Major Game 2. I had no intention of playing Major Game 1 again. The fact that their old game doesn't work anymore doesn't "burn" them, and they genuinely might not even notice. As long as they keep the game servers up and running long enough for the vast majority of people to get their enjoyment out of the game, no one feels robbed, and no one stops buying games as a result. The average person is not that savvy of a consumer.

Can I play CoD4 on xbox 360 anymore? Single AND multiplayer? I genuinely don't know the answer to that because I haven't tried within the past decade(+). Should I be able to? Absolutely yes. But I have a sneaking suspicion all the multiplayer servers are shut down.

Frankly, there is not much difference - gog is already part of the problem.

> If you care about this, vote with your wallet.

While I'm not going to say you can't vote with your wallet.

You can also just vote with a vote ... Companies group up together all the time to create trade unions to advance legislation in their favor. There's nothing wrong with individuals grouping together for a non-commercial interest.

With games, it's even worse because once the servers are gone, the whole thing can literally stop functioning. At least with movies you can still rip a Blu-ray or buy a DVD. And it's not just about making money anymore, it's about shaping consumer habits so we accept losing access as the default.

Planned obsolescence doesn't account for games like Concord

Live service shooters usually have a very short lifespan unless they can displace Overwatch, Valorent, Fortnite, or Destiny

Even Halo (Infinite) couldn't manage it

Stop buying this kind of game if you are expecting game preservation from one of the worst studios running.

Concord was dead even at the conceptual stage. The problem is these big AAA studios are always chasing the hottest new thing, never innovating for themselves.

It's the same problem with movies. They're so unbelievably expensive that nobody will dare pay for something that isn't already proven. But if you do something that's proven, there's a good chance it's just gonna come up second best. Worst case scenario, it comes out as uninspired slop, destined for the bargain bin, like Concord.

The article is not radiating original narrative and some mistakes can be made, but it is missing very big issue that modern game developers are able to solve with live games. All the old games became popular because they were heavily pirated. Sometimes that was the only reason. Up till 2010s I only played pirated games - even when they were on steam. The only reason why some of those games are in my steam/gog account now is because I had played those games as pirated copies. Not all of them were good games, though, but at least I can launch them and try again.

Those games are the paper plates of the industry. Disposable crap not meant to last. They're rarely good in the first place because that same mindset leads to bad decisions for gameplay too.

RimWorld, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Terraria, Minecraft are new(ish) games that have already lasted and will last longer.

>The games publishers on the other have us over a barrel

A barrel entirely of your own creation. Just don't buy their games and done. I've never subscribed to a game in my life and never gave a shit about the difference. Anyone at all can do this. You describe these games as if they were some vital service like email or cloud storage (and even those have solutions against companies that become abusive).

Final Fantasy was on release #11 by the time Steam was initially released in 2003.

> new games increasingly incorporate planned obsolescence as a business strategy

It's not this. It's simply that the level of quality and features and competition in modern games is so insanely high that developer time is devoted to other things and custom servers and modding is relatively niche and doesn't move the quality needle enough.

Time is limited and focusing on custom servers means less time spent elsewhere.

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