Hacker News Reader

Comment by pointlessone | Hacker News Reader

Saas offerings are safe as they don’t let you Buy a thing. They’re very transparently a service. Same with timed licenses. It’s clear what you’re paying for. Most of the time.

With games it’s often not the case. You buy them and then at unspecified moment you might lose a significant portion of functionality or the whole game. At the time you buy a game you don’t know if it’s for a time, what time, or what will stop working.

View on HN

When I bought WoW it was very clear to me I was buying a service. If blizzard decided after 2 years it wasn’t sustainable and to shut down the game at no point would I be entitled to own it. It was clearly a license to access their service, as long as it exists. Same for any other MMORPG

You can host offline servers of older mmos easily. I had my own lineage 2 private server in middle school. Private online servers too. Wow classic became a thing because private vanilla servers were incredibly popular.

You should be able to do this for any game. I understand them fighting it during the games lifetime.

And what about a single-player game that relies on the company's server being online in order to allow you to play it?

The dev, having access to source code, issues the final patch that disables that feature. Better yet, the dev, having access to source code, never implements this feature in the first place as it doesn’t improve the player experience in any shape or form.

Well thats more or less what people are asking for with this.

Yea I think the problem is that people don't realize how expensive the upkeep of live games are.

Most new releases rely on Multiplayer, the publishers have to come up with creative ways to monetize it.. so they introduce cosmetics, stores, etc in order to fund the ongoing development and cost.

This causes a backlash and eventually the game gets dropped because people don't want to pay a subscription.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com