If you aren't already aware of it (and in the EU) please sign the stopkillinggames.com petition so companies can't just drop "support" (that these days means kill) games when they feel like it.

The worst part, the demo was actually pretty good.

They literally could have released this game with mod support, and sold it for $20 and it would have been a fun party game.

Instead, they kept going on with BS games as a service.

Same here. There’s been a few games I’ve seen on here recently that look interesting, even some “indie” titles, but as soon as I get to the Steam page and it lists online only, I’ve lost all interest.

Miss me with that bullshit.

The business model isn't terrible, it makes money, but it is terrible for the consumer

I am aggressively opposed to anything that is profitable at the expense of the consumer. That is a terrible business model.

It's not my game. I only wanted to talk about what they did wrong. Kinda just doing armpit farts at the funeral, yanno?

Were any characters in the game not owned by Warner Bros?

Potentially, I don't exactly know all the rights owners.

But just looking at the roster, I'd assume Arya Stark might be the most complicated. While HBO falls under WB, unsure if ol' George signed away all rights to the character. And there's always future deals too, since rights holders can change hands.

Lol i like that phrasing. Yeah i hear ya

You don't pay anything to steam other than the initial 100 bucks or so, and the cut they take

What are you suggesting? That on once a game goes online it'll require the company by law to keep it running forever?
How many companies would still release games that requires backend if they knew it's a never ending endeavour even if they'll lose money from it?

Running the infrastructure to host the game's baceknd requires money, and releasing the server code as binary or open source is not something that'll happen.

So what is the end goal?

Required games and games studios to build the game to be played offline or have the ability to self host the server.

The companies could shut down their servers, if they at the same time would release the software needed to run the servers.
This would allow the creation of community servers, without any costs or responsibilities for the companies

There was a time when multiplayer games all came with dedicated server binaries.

It will never work

Valve hosts it for "free" (30 to 15% of every sale), yes.

I'm guessing this game has some phone-home DRM or something, and maybe it's only required the first time it's executed after installation ? They could of course just give the game a patch that removes it but I guess they don't want to anger the line investors and make it go down by working even a second on a "discontinued" game.

It would require devs to start planning for indefinite support during development. Wether that means releasing server software and the source code or not making the game reliant on servers in the first place is up to them.

Oh for fuck sake, this has never been a good argument, and people who keep repeating these argument-questions (almost like they're a copy paste) either never read what Stop Killing Games demands, or lack the reading comprehension necessary to understand it.

The third option would be malicious sabotage, but I'm hoping it's just one of the two stupidity options.

Yeah, they've just ensured the only way a person can play it is through piracy. Very smart move, WB, very smart...

It's not just limited to games...

We see it most prevalently in games because the gaming industry is massive. But this can also happen to your car... Or your fridge...

Here's a fun story:

There were these few blind people who volunteered to have cybernetic implants that would help them (partially) see. The company went under, the patent is held by a patent troll, but the people still have those implants in their head... Which have now either shut down or are malfunctioning...

Another problem is the game director overhyping and saying "any character is possibile" and he wasn't limiting it to warner bros's IPs but if you're going to do that, then they honestly should have made the game launch with at least one 3rd party character.

Better service for the community. Take a look over towards Spellbreak for a second and you'll see a community that has taken what Proletariat had given them after an acquisition by Blizzard and started doing private servers to keep their game functional. I think there's much to learn from this End-of-Service model, perhaps we could have more privately hosted servers to reduce their overhead if companies truly loved their fanbase; might even be feasible to follow that model from the start for f2p games so the official servers are more capable for tourneys and the like. Either way the goal is end user satisfaction, so if those means are preservation or archival like with Yu-Gi-Oh! Cross Duel, then so be it the fanbase does what they want ultimately, but we just ask companies to offer their olive branch so that all their precious arts don't drown in the ever expanding sea of data.