6 ms·

I know folks on this site don't like it, but in the wider gaming community, there is essentially no demand among legitimate buyers for an always offline gaming

I know folks on this site don't like it, but in the wider gaming community, there is essentially no demand among legitimate buyers for an always offline gaming option. We have access to the internet almost no matter where we are, or can easily get it. Why should we care if a game needs to check in periodically? What harm is it likely to do to any given legitimate buyer? It's almost certainly worth it to Blizzard to lose the tiny fraction of sales from people who care about this issue to prevent the buy-offline-return pattern that some folks might opt to use without this check in place. Yes, it won't prevent all piracy, but it's probably a net positive for revenue.

lmilcin 5y ago
The problem isn't requirement of being online. The problem is forcing people to be playing the game regularly or loose whatever they have "accomplished".
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  > The problem is forcing people to be playing the game regularly or loose whatever they have "accomplished". That problem isn't the one documented in the link we are discussing. Can you point me to some kind of citation that shows this is happening? I've not heard about it and a brief google search does not reveal anything.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  That's the worst part of playing Diablo 2 "classic" over Battle.net (rather than open Internet) : after 6 months of inactivity, your character and all the items you had stored on them are deleted from Blizzard's servers ! (And you don't get to keep an open copy of them.)
salamandersauce 5y ago
What happens when Activision decides its no longer worth keeping the server up? Or some other problem occurs keeping it from checking in, e.g. death of Nintendo Switch Online. I can still play Gameboy games I bought 20+ years ago with no problems besides maybe replacing the save battery and the occasional contact clean. Will I be able to do the same with Switch games I bought? For some titles that already seems to be a no.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  For the tiny tiny tiny fraction of users who will still be playing the game at that point, it will be a sad day. Most gamers do not make purchasing decisions based on something that might happen twenty years from now, since >99.9% of them will have moved on from the game by that point. > I can still play ... But do you? I mean, perhaps you do, but most folks don't. That's why I emphasized the question of harm a gamer is likely to suffer.
  - Kalium 5y ago
    It's pretty rough for historians, archivists, and curators too. Can you imagine if books became unreadable twenty years after publication because >99.9% of readers will have moved on from the book by that point? Or if every painting, sculpture, photograph, or musical recording self-destructed in the same time period? At this point I think it's fair to say that games are cultural artifacts. We should be at least a token amount of interested in making it possible to preserve them.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      I suppose. I can't say that the interests of these groups are particularly close to my heart. Certainly if I was a game dev I wouldn't be willing to pass up a chance to substantially increase revenue to make life easier for an archivist. To the extent that there is any value in the history of this game, I think most of it will be sufficiently captured in the large amount of video content being produced about it.
      - Kalium 5y ago
        There is, perhaps, room to question the tradeoff here. How sure are we that it was substantially increased revenue vs archivability? What if this sort of every-30-days check only increases costs without boosting revenue and hurting archivability? As is spelled out in context, this DRM check is not required for the game to function, and the ease with which it has been bypassed raises significant questions about how useful it is for boosting revenue. Indeed, DRM historically isn't noted for actually boosting revenue. Perhaps we are discussing a false belief here, similar to people who claim that end-to-end encryption enables drugs/guns/CSAM/money laundering. Both feel true and seem obviously true, but lots of truth-y and obvious things are false upon close examination. This does not diminish the sincerity of anyone's belief, only its factual basis. It may also be worth considering that videos about games as a substitute for the actual artifacts might be like keeping reviews of plays instead of preserving the text. Useful and important cultural artifacts and context, but perhaps not the same as having the originals. Video game museums exist today, and I found it fascinating to be able to play games from decades past.
hungryforcodes 5y ago
The problem is OBVIOUSLY that it tethers you to servers or some such application somewhere that needs to validate your game. And it could (and will) be turned off at some point. So the game is CLEARLY not yours. We can run games from the 90s and 2000s, because there is no need for servers.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  > So the game is CLEARLY not yours. What's important to me, and to most gamers, is whether I can play a game for the duration of time that I desire to do so. So when I'm looking at D2 resurrected, I'm thinking something like this: "If I buy this game, the longest I'd probably play it for is about a year. In future years I may return to it for briefer and briefer windows, asymptotically decreasing toward zero minutes per year as time approaches infinity. I think it's likely that Blizzard will keep the servers running for at least 20 years based on past performance. What is the area under the curve outside of twenty years proportional to the total value I intend to extract from the game?" For me, I estimate the area at around 0. Even if I thought that a tenth of my total playtime would occur outside the initial 20 year window (extremely unlikely and generous estimate -- probably nobody exists like this), what is the present value of that future enjoyment? At a 4% discount rate and a fifty dollar initial purchase, the present value is $3. There's just not enough there for most people to be bothered about.
  - feoren 5y ago
    I've recently started playing Morrowind again. I was pleasantly surprised to see a healthy modding community that's still adding lots of new content, fixing bugs, and improving graphics. The UI is still clunky, but better than it used to be (with these mods), and the story is still one of the best games ever. It came out in 2002. I would argue that many gamers are wrong if they think they're never going to want to revisit one of their favorite games. In fact the primary market for D2: Resurrected seems to be gamers who want to revisit one of their favorite games from 20 years ago.
f6v 5y ago
It’s just that people put up with a fact that offline-first games started requiring logging in with an account. Why do I have to do that for Doom Eternal? And this enabled publishers to push even more rediculous online handicaps. Their wet dream is to make every game “a service”.
rhino369 5y ago
I think its a fairly reasonable requirement if: 1) you advertise in bold/black letters that internet service is required every X days. No bait and switch. 2) you are required to release an update disabling the call home feature if you plan to take down the activation server.
hydrok9 5y ago
Probably it's an issue more with older people who remember when this kind of thing was unheard of. In the modern day people are online all the time anyways, it doesn't make a big practical difference, which makes the ethical issues seem overblown. Regardless, I paid for my "license" to use the software on my personal machine, I shouldn't have to rely on someone else's machine to make that happen.
mdp2021 5y ago
> there is essentially no demand And? You remove the 'Z' key from the keyboard because it is the least used letter? > we have access to the internet almost no matter where we are, or can easily get it No, not everywhere - secondarily. Primarily, some people keep some devices airgapped, and only specialized ones online. > Why should we care if a game needs to check in periodically? Because it is absurd - the worst sin.

lmilcin 5y ago

The problem isn't requirement of being online. The problem is forcing people to be playing the game regularly or loose whatever they have "accomplished".

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
> The problem is forcing people to be playing the game regularly or loose whatever they have "accomplished". That problem isn't the one documented in the link we are discussing. Can you point me to some kind of citation that shows this is happening? I've not heard about it and a brief google search does not reveal anything.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
That's the worst part of playing Diablo 2 "classic" over Battle.net (rather than open Internet) : after 6 months of inactivity, your character and all the items you had stored on them are deleted from Blizzard's servers ! (And you don't get to keep an open copy of them.)

salamandersauce 5y ago

What happens when Activision decides its no longer worth keeping the server up? Or some other problem occurs keeping it from checking in, e.g. death of Nintendo Switch Online. I can still play Gameboy games I bought 20+ years ago with no problems besides maybe replacing the save battery and the occasional contact clean. Will I be able to do the same with Switch games I bought? For some titles that already seems to be a no.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
For the tiny tiny tiny fraction of users who will still be playing the game at that point, it will be a sad day. Most gamers do not make purchasing decisions based on something that might happen twenty years from now, since >99.9% of them will have moved on from the game by that point. > I can still play ... But do you? I mean, perhaps you do, but most folks don't. That's why I emphasized the question of harm a gamer is likely to suffer.
- Kalium 5y ago
  It's pretty rough for historians, archivists, and curators too. Can you imagine if books became unreadable twenty years after publication because >99.9% of readers will have moved on from the book by that point? Or if every painting, sculpture, photograph, or musical recording self-destructed in the same time period? At this point I think it's fair to say that games are cultural artifacts. We should be at least a token amount of interested in making it possible to preserve them.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    I suppose. I can't say that the interests of these groups are particularly close to my heart. Certainly if I was a game dev I wouldn't be willing to pass up a chance to substantially increase revenue to make life easier for an archivist. To the extent that there is any value in the history of this game, I think most of it will be sufficiently captured in the large amount of video content being produced about it.
    - Kalium 5y ago
      There is, perhaps, room to question the tradeoff here. How sure are we that it was substantially increased revenue vs archivability? What if this sort of every-30-days check only increases costs without boosting revenue and hurting archivability? As is spelled out in context, this DRM check is not required for the game to function, and the ease with which it has been bypassed raises significant questions about how useful it is for boosting revenue. Indeed, DRM historically isn't noted for actually boosting revenue. Perhaps we are discussing a false belief here, similar to people who claim that end-to-end encryption enables drugs/guns/CSAM/money laundering. Both feel true and seem obviously true, but lots of truth-y and obvious things are false upon close examination. This does not diminish the sincerity of anyone's belief, only its factual basis. It may also be worth considering that videos about games as a substitute for the actual artifacts might be like keeping reviews of plays instead of preserving the text. Useful and important cultural artifacts and context, but perhaps not the same as having the originals. Video game museums exist today, and I found it fascinating to be able to play games from decades past.

hungryforcodes 5y ago

The problem is OBVIOUSLY that it tethers you to servers or some such application somewhere that needs to validate your game. And it could (and will) be turned off at some point. So the game is CLEARLY not yours. We can run games from the 90s and 2000s, because there is no need for servers.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
> So the game is CLEARLY not yours. What's important to me, and to most gamers, is whether I can play a game for the duration of time that I desire to do so. So when I'm looking at D2 resurrected, I'm thinking something like this: "If I buy this game, the longest I'd probably play it for is about a year. In future years I may return to it for briefer and briefer windows, asymptotically decreasing toward zero minutes per year as time approaches infinity. I think it's likely that Blizzard will keep the servers running for at least 20 years based on past performance. What is the area under the curve outside of twenty years proportional to the total value I intend to extract from the game?" For me, I estimate the area at around 0. Even if I thought that a tenth of my total playtime would occur outside the initial 20 year window (extremely unlikely and generous estimate -- probably nobody exists like this), what is the present value of that future enjoyment? At a 4% discount rate and a fifty dollar initial purchase, the present value is $3. There's just not enough there for most people to be bothered about.
- feoren 5y ago
  I've recently started playing Morrowind again. I was pleasantly surprised to see a healthy modding community that's still adding lots of new content, fixing bugs, and improving graphics. The UI is still clunky, but better than it used to be (with these mods), and the story is still one of the best games ever. It came out in 2002. I would argue that many gamers are wrong if they think they're never going to want to revisit one of their favorite games. In fact the primary market for D2: Resurrected seems to be gamers who want to revisit one of their favorite games from 20 years ago.

f6v 5y ago

It’s just that people put up with a fact that offline-first games started requiring logging in with an account. Why do I have to do that for Doom Eternal? And this enabled publishers to push even more rediculous online handicaps. Their wet dream is to make every game “a service”.

rhino369 5y ago

I think its a fairly reasonable requirement if: 1) you advertise in bold/black letters that internet service is required every X days. No bait and switch. 2) you are required to release an update disabling the call home feature if you plan to take down the activation server.

hydrok9 5y ago

Probably it's an issue more with older people who remember when this kind of thing was unheard of. In the modern day people are online all the time anyways, it doesn't make a big practical difference, which makes the ethical issues seem overblown. Regardless, I paid for my "license" to use the software on my personal machine, I shouldn't have to rely on someone else's machine to make that happen.

mdp2021 5y ago

> there is essentially no demand And? You remove the 'Z' key from the keyboard because it is the least used letter? > we have access to the internet almost no matter where we are, or can easily get it No, not everywhere - secondarily. Primarily, some people keep some devices airgapped, and only specialized ones online. > Why should we care if a game needs to check in periodically? Because it is absurd - the worst sin.