heywood on 7/7/2025 at 22:13

---

I don't agree with Ross that people expect video games to last indefinitely. Video games are software + art, and software becomes obsolete, sometimes rather quickly. During the heyday of PC gaming in the 90s and early 00s, the PC landscape was changing fast and it wasn't uncommon for games to become unplayable after hardware or OS upgrades. Some popular games continued to get patched (or hacked) and remained playable as the typical target system evolved, while other games that maybe didn't sell as well got one post-release bug fix patch and that was it, nothing for compatibility. These days, you have to worry about cyber in addition to platform obsolescence. The software stack the game is built on probably has vulnerabilities in it, possibly something that could cause it to get pulled/blacklisted/etc.

It takes continuing effort to keep an old game playable and I've never expected game publishers and developers to continue spending money to keep a game going if they're not getting revenue from it anymore.

Briareos H on 8/7/2025 at 06:19

---

I think it's between the two. It's about releasing the game in a playable state when support is discontinued and servers are shut down, which implies that it would be kept playable indefinitely in the same runtime environment, for instance a VM. Once it is in that state, publisher support would end once and for all.

Obsolescence and cyber security are non-issues if you look at the initiative as being more about archival and continued availability for enthusiasts than being about playability in a fully functional state.

Server-side reliance on specialised middleware and cloud infrastructure is held up as a smoking gun against the initiative but it would only affect a small fraction of the games it is trying to protect, and may even be handled through explicit legislation exempting some games-as-a-service from the law.

heywood on 8/7/2025 at 13:06

---

Games have a finite lifespan as a viable economic product. Once sales drop beyond a point, the publisher and/or developer will lose money keeping game servers running and rolling out patches. Games that are substantially online are dead at that point.

All I hope for is that single player games with locally stored game content are playable offline and will continue to function when the servers go down. Online features won't work offline, but if the game content is predominantly local, the game should remain playable minus those features. I don't want to be in a situation where everything the game needs to run is on my SSD but it won't start because it can't phone home. Games that don't require online content shouldn't be remotely disabled by the publisher when they "retire" the product. I think that goes without saying. But how many examples are there of that happening?

The bigger picture is that entertainment media are changing delivery methods. The old method was to deliver complete copies of a work to consumers who would store their copies and play them when desired. The new method is to stream it on demand. The petition seems rooted in the pre-high speed internet past when everything a game needed was on an optical disk.

Starker on 8/7/2025 at 14:22

---

Games are shut down way before publishers start losing money. Losing money is the absolute worst case scenario. They are shut down as soon as profits fall beyond a certain point the publisher is uncomfortable with or even when they feel that its competing with another of their products too much and they would like players to migrate over to the other, newer one. The shutdown could be a few months from launch or even in as soon as (https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/sep/11/sonys-hero-shooter-concord-failed-spectacularly-heres-where-it-went-wrong) two weeks (though in cases where the shutdown happened that quickly, the players have gotten refunds so far). But the game itself, even if it's dead financially, does not have to die physically. It's not about forcing publishers to support a game indefinitely, it's about leaving a game accessible to players who have already purchased the game after the support ends.

Games as service or rental or subscription is definitely a model that is desired and pushed by the publishers. Ubisoft has stated, for example, that they need players to get comfortable with the idea of not owning games before a subscription model can truly take off and their EULAs require people to destroy all existing copies of their game when the EULA ends or is breached. Even console makers reserve the right to (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/05/why-console-makers-can-legally-brick-your-game-console/) brick the console when the owner violates their terms of agreement.

However, from the player point of view, the way people consume the games, they definitely still like to own them even in the age of stream everything. The reason is there are so many games and life is so fast, people buy games on sale expecting to play them at their leisure whenever they have time for it (which may be never). If you asked a roomful of game players who among them has a backlog of games, I bet you would see a massive sea of hands. And a lot of people absolutely don't like the idea of losing access to games when they are rotated out of the subscription list, as many people like to revisit their favourite games from time to time. Games as service is simply incompatible with the currently ingrained player behaviour and you would see a massively reduced video game market when people one day aren't able to buy games for their backlog any more.

Pyrian on 9/7/2025 at 23:08

---

My suggestion: Once the rights holder ceases selling a game, they lose the right to sue other people who do get it running.