Ross Scott talking about The Crew’s future server shutdown making the game unplayable for people who bought it or received it for free. He wants to see if a lawsuit is possible because of how fast technology is outpacing the law and needs help with who to contact.
Good luck.
You’d need new legislation to have any legal case (for future games obviously). There aren’t laws that entitle you to access to the servers forever or for the game to work without servers.
I’d be all for “you must release all necessary code (or at least all the technical details to replicate the interactions) to replace the server when you shut it down, or make the entire game fully playable without server interaction”, but even writing those laws in a comprehensive way would be hard, let alone getting them passed or enforcing them.
There’s no way a company is going to attempt to release all that information and potentially fail to release all details and set themselves up for a lawsuit. I think it’s more likely that these laws would kill server-based games if they were implemented as suggested.
Instead, I could see that there might be a minimum server support length after the last sale of the product. Even then, service would be spotty for that time and there’d be no uptime guarantee. Fixes for problems and hacks would be incredibly slow and the game would basically be unplayable in short order, unless that guaranteed time was short, like 1 year.
Killing unnecessary always online horseshit would be a huge benefit by itself.
Companies wouldn’t stop making multiplayer games. There’s too much money.
But MMOs can be fun?
Also that includes any competitive MP FPS.
That’s not unnecessary?
And it’s not remotely possible that even one game would not exist as a result of laws requiring companies provide the capability to continue to play them when they stop hosting. The burden is less than negligible compared to the revenue those games provide.
Please make this a thing that is happening!
