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While I understand the annoyance at a game shutting down and you can no longer play it. I also strongly oppose this from a technical prospective. It costs mone

While I understand the annoyance at a game shutting down and you can no longer play it. I also strongly oppose this from a technical prospective. It costs money to run servers, it costs money to maintain servers. It costs engineering effort to keep servers updated and secure. The idea that you can't shut down your servers is just wrong. (However an argument that a single player game does not work without being online is completely valid, but seems to not be the point of this). So no will not be signing and if there was a government requirement to keep servers running, I guarantee you the result will be less games released. It just would not be worth the risk. Edit: I misunderstood the point is not to keep servers running but to provide a way to run the servers ourselves. Which while my point above is about a different problem I still fundamentally disagree with that requirement.

_dain_ 3y ago
They aren't arguing for the servers to be kept up indefinitely. They are arguing that publishers should release an end-of-life patch to allow players to host their own servers. Read the FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
- nerdjon 3y ago
  So first that requires additional engineering effort to do, which if they are making the decision to shut down the game it likely means it isn't making money so that's a waste of effort on their part. It may also not be an easy task, especially if it isn't a simple single service you start up and it's microservices or whatever. That is before getting into the question on whether or not there are certain parts of the system that are shared with other games that simply can't just be put out for release.
  - _dain_ 3y ago
    A "waste of effort" to make it so paid customers can continue to play the games they bought? Oh no, it might not be an "easy task" to undo all their planned obsolescence. Shucks. Maybe they should have thought of that before they planned the obsolescence in the first place. Seriously, in most cases it will be completely trivial to do, especially single-player games. (Yes, single-player games are routinely getting killswitched by spiteful publishers. It's a fucking outrage.) ------ [It seems I'm rate-limited so I can't reply further, but I have noticed in this thread a lot of people who don't seem to understand all the context behind this, making a lot of naive and ill-informed points. There are dozens of examples of publishers killing games for arbitrary/spiteful reasons, that have nothing to do with the cost it would take to provide an alternative. Ross Scott has many documented cases on his channel, see here https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms/search?query=dead%20game%20news https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms/search?query=dead%20... We're not just talking about always-online multiplayer games here. It's also games with single-player campaigns that are rendered unplayable by the deactivation of a central auth server. Or games with a co-op component that are now unplayable because it's gated behind a centralized matchmaking system that shut down. Or games with libraries of shared player-created levels that are now inaccessible, like Super Mario Maker. Also I have to say, I'm flabbergasted at the unthinking deference being shown to enormous conglomerate publishers in this discussion, and the focus on one side of the ledger to the exclusion of the other. People are saying that this will impose a cost on corporations, and this is in and of itself a reason to reject it. Like ... yes, of course regulations impose a cost on businesses! Obviously! The idea is that this small cost will be offset by a larger increase in consumer welfare. Just saying "this will impose a cost on business" is a fully-general counterargument against any kind of consumer-protection regulation. Nevermind the ethics of it -- people should fucking own what they pay for and they shouldn't have the rug pulled out from under them! As for the idea that it is too complicated to self-host a modern multiplayer game: this is Hacker News, not Never-Bother-To-Even-Try News. Mod communities have done impressive feats in reverse-engineering game servers. It can be done.]
    - nerdjon 3y ago
      > undo all their planned obsolescence. In no way is a game shutting down planned obsolescence. If the Fortnite servers are shut down that's not planned obsolesce, that game does not work and makes zero sense as a single play game. A publisher is not going to spend a ton of money working on a game with a plan to shut it down, they hope to milk it for money as long as they can. I agree with single player games requiring always online, but I have not seen an example of this actually being the case that there was not a patch put out at the last moment to make the game not connect to a server anymore. There is a major difference between a game requiring an online connection for a 100% single player game and an online games servers shutting down. The first is bad and I agree and should never be a practice. The second is just reality.
      - neurostimulant 3y ago
        > that game does not work and makes zero sense as a single play game. Why not? Just unlock all in-game contents, replace other players with offline bots, then shutdown the servers. Many online games have chosen this route in the past.
        nerdjon 3y ago
        > Just unlock all in-game contents. This assumes that the content is all client side and some of it is not server side. As is the case with many games. > replace other players with offline bots. That requires work to make the bots know how to play the game, something that even actively supported games suck at. Many bots are really bad with objective based gameplay. and testing. Which is a cost if they are shutting down the game. If the game was built around the assumption that it will always have an internet connection, there may also need to be a lot of changes to the game itself to operate that way.
        neurostimulant 3y ago
        > If the game was built around the assumption that it will always have an internet connection, there may also need to be a lot of changes to the game itself to operate that way. Then such games shouldn't be sold as goods like the the petition mentioned. They should be sold as services like WoW, so their customers know what to expect at the end of the service. Selling them as goods is worse than selling "lifetime" membership for an SaaS, then closing the SaaS after 3 years, because the customers may not know that the game would become unplayable in a few years when they purchased it.
- golergka 3y ago
  OK, here are 6 different git repositories that our different systems were built with, without custom scripts and setup that our devops team have built over 8 years of operation. And it also requires an Oracle license to run. Good luck figuring it all out! P.S.: We forgot a couple of third-party libraries in there, so we'll be hit by a bunch of lawsuits because our private licenses for these libraries absolutely did not cover open-sourcing them for the whole world.
Night_Thastus 3y ago
It doesn't need to be keeping servers running forever, and if that's what anyone is proposing that's dumb. However, it is not impossible to develop games with an offline mode for when the day comes that the servers do go down. It is a bit more work (depending on the game) but it's very doable and many, many games have done so. In their example, The Crew could have easily been made with an offline mode. Or allow the creation of private servers. Anything. There was nothing technical preventing it. It would have cost a small amount more to develop, but would have helped preserve the game for the future.
- TylerE 3y ago
  > It is a bit more work In the sense that building a cathedral is a bit more work than building a house. Most indie games FAIL. You want them to spend a minimum of an extra 20-30% upfront just so some dude who either outright pirates or only buys stuff on deep discount can play it in 20 years?
  - DerArzt 3y ago
    Do most indie games do this though, or is it more of an issue for larger corp's?
  - sph 3y ago
    We are not talking about indie games. This is a common practice of AAA studios, making hundreds of millions from games sold at $70 apiece. Apples and oranges.
  - uaserussia 3y ago
    [dead]
- nerdjon 3y ago
  > However, it is not impossible to develop games with an offline mode for when the day comes that the servers do go down. It is a bit more work (depending on the game) but it's very doable and many, many games have done so. Yes and no, in a lot of situations (like MMO's) much of the data is stored server side and is not client side. That would take a fundamental shift in how the game was built in the first place to just make it work locally. Regarding the Crew, I honestly don't know that game so I can't speak for it. So I would like to see whether or not it could have been an easy switch or if it was something else fundamental to the design of the game. Like what I mentioned above.
sph 3y ago
This is a common rebuttal but does not pass the sniff test. Alternatives to shutting the servers down: - patching the game so it does not require a server. Many GaaS are single player games, and are online-only as a form of DRM - release a closed source binary of the server so that people can run it themselves - release documentation so people can implement their own backend - release the server as open source - be legally required to put a large sticker on the box saying "THIS GAME WILL EXPIRE. BUYER BEWARE." Some games require servers, like World of Warcraft, but that is a moot point as well because people have been able to reverse engineer and create their own unofficial WoW servers. If Blizzard shuts down tomorrow, WoW will keep chugging along. Not all games benefit from having a dedicated community of nerds to do what the company should have been doing all along, hence this campaign.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  These are "alternatives" in the same way that "drive a car" is an alternative to a cross-country flight on a jet. Sure, you could theoretically do it...
  - rangerelf 3y ago
    There's nothing "theoretical" about driving cross country. Your comment reeks of personal bias.
    - kevingadd 3y ago
      My personal bias is that given the choice between a 2-3 hour flight between Sacramento, CA and Seattle, WA, and a very long drive that might have to cross snowy mountain passes - I've done both, and the difference between them is vast. People love to say that difficult things are easy. I've also driven cross-country from the US west coast to the east coast. Flying is much, much easier. It's a completely different "can I take this trip" equation.
  - watwut 3y ago
    I am able to drive the car very very practically. It is an actual alternative.
wadefletch 3y ago
Or games just shift online-first game pricing to subscriptions. (Fortnite and others have done this already to great success.) The issue here is in a disconnect between pricing model and access model. Mandated uptime seems impractical and unlikely for reasons you listed.
bilekas 3y ago
> The idea that you can't shut down your servers is just wrong. That's not what's being asked. What's being asked is that the game must be left on a playable state without the publishers or affiliated parties input. If that involves making available the API of the server side then fine. The game can be patched before sunsetting from the publisher. Or if the game is patched out to be offline only, then fine. The fact that people are okay with not owning games especially that you pay for is ludicrous.
CoopaTroopa 3y ago
>I guarantee you the result will be less games released Best case would be that it results in less games that are reliant on a public server to connect to. I don't really think we need any more 4-5 person team deathmatch shooter games
jstanley 3y ago
If it's not economically viable to keep the servers running then it shouldn't be a problem to release the code for the server so that others can run it.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  There are usually real legal and procedural obstacles to doing this. Games often contain third-party code that the studio doesn't have the rights to open-source, and may rely on privately licensed middleware binaries or NDA'd SDKs that you can't redistribute. For a basic example, even Unreal Engine - which is practically open at present - still restricts its github repos to people who've agreed to their access terms. Let's imagine you've jumped through all the hoops and have the legal right to release all the code for your game servers. The servers were probably designed to run in a particular environment with access to particular resources - your login servers, your user account database, etc. Do you need to open-source those too? Let's imagine we're talking about a game like Destiny or Guild Wars where the server also needs access to a big collection of data files. Are you now going to dump a 50gb .tar.gz on a CDN and pay to host it for everyone who wants to download it? How long do you keep that up? Do you rely on the community to host a torrent for you, or rely on the Internet Archive to host it for free? At the end of the day what you probably get is a bundle of c/cpp files where 75% of the headers they need are there, all the dll/lib files are missing, and once you start the server it's trying to connect to a bunch of services that don't work, and there's no documentation for any of it so the community needs to spend a year plus trying to reverse engineer all of this from what they have. If a game is well-loved, the community will probably make do and eventually get it working, but it's very much not a "just release the code" situation if you want everyone to be happy. It's expensive and difficult.
  - nerdjon 3y ago
    Add too that, that there may be shared code bases. Maybe a major part of the server side code is something used between multiple games at your company. Maybe it has references to unreleased games, comments when the assumption was the code was not leaving the company, etc. This is a great ideal that doesn't line up with reality.
jdasdf 3y ago
>The idea that you can't shut down your servers is just wrong. Personally i find the idea of deceptive advertising and breach of contract with no recourse to be wrong too. How about we meet in the middle? No one is forced to keep any servers online any longer than they want to, but if a game is reliant on such a thing, then they must provide such information and state upfront the exact date in which the game will stop working before selling a single copy. That way would be buyers can decide whether it is worth it with that information in mind.
- nerdjon 3y ago
  > Personally i find the idea of deceptive advertising and breach of contract with no recourse to be wrong too. How is it deceptive marketing? It's an online game. It should be well understood in today's world that something that is Online and requires online functionality to work may shut down at some point. If it is truly an online game, something that does not work single player. I would agree with you if we are only talking about single player games that require an online connection to play. Those are wrong. But that isn't what this seems to be focusing on.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - sph 3y ago
    This is exactly what this is focusing on. The Crew, shut down in March 31, is a single player game with a whole campaign already installed on your hard drive, with an online component. Gamers are OK with losing online play, but why are they also losing the single player campaign? Honestly, I feel some comments here are from people that haven't played a game in 20 years, and believe there is an actual technical reason for the online DRM. We are not talking about MMOs. This issue affects single player games as well.
    - nerdjon 3y ago
      That is the problem, it is not clear exactly what it is we are talking about with this campaign. We have online DRM which I agree with is a bad thing. But if you look at the FAQ they are also clearly talking about online servers for games. So this is conflating 2 very distinct issues here. Regarding the Crew, do we know for a fact that it is 100% installed on your hard drive? Or are we making assumptions. Edit: > We are not talking about MMOs. There is literally a FAQ entry for MMO's. Edit again: Just realized that you are the one that posted it here. Assuming you are also the person that made the website, this is way too broad. If we actually want to talk about online DRM than yeah, I stand behind it completely. it is stupid that I can't play Kingdom Hearts without being online. But the moment that you start mixing that with actually online games that may require an online connection for the actual gameplay itself, than your argument completely falls apart. Those are 2 very different issues and I would recommend not only making the home page clear on what exactly it is you are talking about (I should not have to go to the FAQ to understand your point) but also make sure that we are talking about a core issue of online DRM. GaaS is not online DRM. I don't know of a single actual single player game that could be considered GaaS. The Crew doesn't even seem to fit this idea. Maybe it has a GaaS component, like Halo Infinite, but the single player part of Halo Infinite is not a GaaS. So this entire thing is confusing because we are mixing 2 distinct problems and hoping for a single solution to both which is not realistic.

_dain_ 3y ago

They aren't arguing for the servers to be kept up indefinitely. They are arguing that publishers should release an end-of-life patch to allow players to host their own servers. Read the FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

nerdjon 3y ago
So first that requires additional engineering effort to do, which if they are making the decision to shut down the game it likely means it isn't making money so that's a waste of effort on their part. It may also not be an easy task, especially if it isn't a simple single service you start up and it's microservices or whatever. That is before getting into the question on whether or not there are certain parts of the system that are shared with other games that simply can't just be put out for release.
- _dain_ 3y ago
  A "waste of effort" to make it so paid customers can continue to play the games they bought? Oh no, it might not be an "easy task" to undo all their planned obsolescence. Shucks. Maybe they should have thought of that before they planned the obsolescence in the first place. Seriously, in most cases it will be completely trivial to do, especially single-player games. (Yes, single-player games are routinely getting killswitched by spiteful publishers. It's a fucking outrage.) ------ [It seems I'm rate-limited so I can't reply further, but I have noticed in this thread a lot of people who don't seem to understand all the context behind this, making a lot of naive and ill-informed points. There are dozens of examples of publishers killing games for arbitrary/spiteful reasons, that have nothing to do with the cost it would take to provide an alternative. Ross Scott has many documented cases on his channel, see here https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms/search?query=dead%20game%20news https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms/search?query=dead%20... We're not just talking about always-online multiplayer games here. It's also games with single-player campaigns that are rendered unplayable by the deactivation of a central auth server. Or games with a co-op component that are now unplayable because it's gated behind a centralized matchmaking system that shut down. Or games with libraries of shared player-created levels that are now inaccessible, like Super Mario Maker. Also I have to say, I'm flabbergasted at the unthinking deference being shown to enormous conglomerate publishers in this discussion, and the focus on one side of the ledger to the exclusion of the other. People are saying that this will impose a cost on corporations, and this is in and of itself a reason to reject it. Like ... yes, of course regulations impose a cost on businesses! Obviously! The idea is that this small cost will be offset by a larger increase in consumer welfare. Just saying "this will impose a cost on business" is a fully-general counterargument against any kind of consumer-protection regulation. Nevermind the ethics of it -- people should fucking own what they pay for and they shouldn't have the rug pulled out from under them! As for the idea that it is too complicated to self-host a modern multiplayer game: this is Hacker News, not Never-Bother-To-Even-Try News. Mod communities have done impressive feats in reverse-engineering game servers. It can be done.]
  - nerdjon 3y ago
    > undo all their planned obsolescence. In no way is a game shutting down planned obsolescence. If the Fortnite servers are shut down that's not planned obsolesce, that game does not work and makes zero sense as a single play game. A publisher is not going to spend a ton of money working on a game with a plan to shut it down, they hope to milk it for money as long as they can. I agree with single player games requiring always online, but I have not seen an example of this actually being the case that there was not a patch put out at the last moment to make the game not connect to a server anymore. There is a major difference between a game requiring an online connection for a 100% single player game and an online games servers shutting down. The first is bad and I agree and should never be a practice. The second is just reality.
    - neurostimulant 3y ago
      > that game does not work and makes zero sense as a single play game. Why not? Just unlock all in-game contents, replace other players with offline bots, then shutdown the servers. Many online games have chosen this route in the past.
      - nerdjon 3y ago
        > Just unlock all in-game contents. This assumes that the content is all client side and some of it is not server side. As is the case with many games. > replace other players with offline bots. That requires work to make the bots know how to play the game, something that even actively supported games suck at. Many bots are really bad with objective based gameplay. and testing. Which is a cost if they are shutting down the game. If the game was built around the assumption that it will always have an internet connection, there may also need to be a lot of changes to the game itself to operate that way.
        neurostimulant 3y ago
        > If the game was built around the assumption that it will always have an internet connection, there may also need to be a lot of changes to the game itself to operate that way. Then such games shouldn't be sold as goods like the the petition mentioned. They should be sold as services like WoW, so their customers know what to expect at the end of the service. Selling them as goods is worse than selling "lifetime" membership for an SaaS, then closing the SaaS after 3 years, because the customers may not know that the game would become unplayable in a few years when they purchased it.
golergka 3y ago
OK, here are 6 different git repositories that our different systems were built with, without custom scripts and setup that our devops team have built over 8 years of operation. And it also requires an Oracle license to run. Good luck figuring it all out! P.S.: We forgot a couple of third-party libraries in there, so we'll be hit by a bunch of lawsuits because our private licenses for these libraries absolutely did not cover open-sourcing them for the whole world.

Night_Thastus 3y ago

It doesn't need to be keeping servers running forever, and if that's what anyone is proposing that's dumb. However, it is not impossible to develop games with an offline mode for when the day comes that the servers do go down. It is a bit more work (depending on the game) but it's very doable and many, many games have done so. In their example, The Crew could have easily been made with an offline mode. Or allow the creation of private servers. Anything. There was nothing technical preventing it. It would have cost a small amount more to develop, but would have helped preserve the game for the future.

TylerE 3y ago
> It is a bit more work In the sense that building a cathedral is a bit more work than building a house. Most indie games FAIL. You want them to spend a minimum of an extra 20-30% upfront just so some dude who either outright pirates or only buys stuff on deep discount can play it in 20 years?
- DerArzt 3y ago
  Do most indie games do this though, or is it more of an issue for larger corp's?
- sph 3y ago
  We are not talking about indie games. This is a common practice of AAA studios, making hundreds of millions from games sold at $70 apiece. Apples and oranges.
- uaserussia 3y ago
  [dead]
nerdjon 3y ago
> However, it is not impossible to develop games with an offline mode for when the day comes that the servers do go down. It is a bit more work (depending on the game) but it's very doable and many, many games have done so. Yes and no, in a lot of situations (like MMO's) much of the data is stored server side and is not client side. That would take a fundamental shift in how the game was built in the first place to just make it work locally. Regarding the Crew, I honestly don't know that game so I can't speak for it. So I would like to see whether or not it could have been an easy switch or if it was something else fundamental to the design of the game. Like what I mentioned above.

sph 3y ago

This is a common rebuttal but does not pass the sniff test. Alternatives to shutting the servers down: - patching the game so it does not require a server. Many GaaS are single player games, and are online-only as a form of DRM - release a closed source binary of the server so that people can run it themselves - release documentation so people can implement their own backend - release the server as open source - be legally required to put a large sticker on the box saying "THIS GAME WILL EXPIRE. BUYER BEWARE." Some games require servers, like World of Warcraft, but that is a moot point as well because people have been able to reverse engineer and create their own unofficial WoW servers. If Blizzard shuts down tomorrow, WoW will keep chugging along. Not all games benefit from having a dedicated community of nerds to do what the company should have been doing all along, hence this campaign.

kevingadd 3y ago
These are "alternatives" in the same way that "drive a car" is an alternative to a cross-country flight on a jet. Sure, you could theoretically do it...
- rangerelf 3y ago
  There's nothing "theoretical" about driving cross country. Your comment reeks of personal bias.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    My personal bias is that given the choice between a 2-3 hour flight between Sacramento, CA and Seattle, WA, and a very long drive that might have to cross snowy mountain passes - I've done both, and the difference between them is vast. People love to say that difficult things are easy. I've also driven cross-country from the US west coast to the east coast. Flying is much, much easier. It's a completely different "can I take this trip" equation.
- watwut 3y ago
  I am able to drive the car very very practically. It is an actual alternative.

wadefletch 3y ago

Or games just shift online-first game pricing to subscriptions. (Fortnite and others have done this already to great success.) The issue here is in a disconnect between pricing model and access model. Mandated uptime seems impractical and unlikely for reasons you listed.

bilekas 3y ago

> The idea that you can't shut down your servers is just wrong. That's not what's being asked. What's being asked is that the game must be left on a playable state without the publishers or affiliated parties input. If that involves making available the API of the server side then fine. The game can be patched before sunsetting from the publisher. Or if the game is patched out to be offline only, then fine. The fact that people are okay with not owning games especially that you pay for is ludicrous.

CoopaTroopa 3y ago

>I guarantee you the result will be less games released Best case would be that it results in less games that are reliant on a public server to connect to. I don't really think we need any more 4-5 person team deathmatch shooter games

jstanley 3y ago

If it's not economically viable to keep the servers running then it shouldn't be a problem to release the code for the server so that others can run it.

kevingadd 3y ago
There are usually real legal and procedural obstacles to doing this. Games often contain third-party code that the studio doesn't have the rights to open-source, and may rely on privately licensed middleware binaries or NDA'd SDKs that you can't redistribute. For a basic example, even Unreal Engine - which is practically open at present - still restricts its github repos to people who've agreed to their access terms. Let's imagine you've jumped through all the hoops and have the legal right to release all the code for your game servers. The servers were probably designed to run in a particular environment with access to particular resources - your login servers, your user account database, etc. Do you need to open-source those too? Let's imagine we're talking about a game like Destiny or Guild Wars where the server also needs access to a big collection of data files. Are you now going to dump a 50gb .tar.gz on a CDN and pay to host it for everyone who wants to download it? How long do you keep that up? Do you rely on the community to host a torrent for you, or rely on the Internet Archive to host it for free? At the end of the day what you probably get is a bundle of c/cpp files where 75% of the headers they need are there, all the dll/lib files are missing, and once you start the server it's trying to connect to a bunch of services that don't work, and there's no documentation for any of it so the community needs to spend a year plus trying to reverse engineer all of this from what they have. If a game is well-loved, the community will probably make do and eventually get it working, but it's very much not a "just release the code" situation if you want everyone to be happy. It's expensive and difficult.
- nerdjon 3y ago
  Add too that, that there may be shared code bases. Maybe a major part of the server side code is something used between multiple games at your company. Maybe it has references to unreleased games, comments when the assumption was the code was not leaving the company, etc. This is a great ideal that doesn't line up with reality.

jdasdf 3y ago

>The idea that you can't shut down your servers is just wrong. Personally i find the idea of deceptive advertising and breach of contract with no recourse to be wrong too. How about we meet in the middle? No one is forced to keep any servers online any longer than they want to, but if a game is reliant on such a thing, then they must provide such information and state upfront the exact date in which the game will stop working before selling a single copy. That way would be buyers can decide whether it is worth it with that information in mind.

nerdjon 3y ago
> Personally i find the idea of deceptive advertising and breach of contract with no recourse to be wrong too. How is it deceptive marketing? It's an online game. It should be well understood in today's world that something that is Online and requires online functionality to work may shut down at some point. If it is truly an online game, something that does not work single player. I would agree with you if we are only talking about single player games that require an online connection to play. Those are wrong. But that isn't what this seems to be focusing on.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sph 3y ago
  This is exactly what this is focusing on. The Crew, shut down in March 31, is a single player game with a whole campaign already installed on your hard drive, with an online component. Gamers are OK with losing online play, but why are they also losing the single player campaign? Honestly, I feel some comments here are from people that haven't played a game in 20 years, and believe there is an actual technical reason for the online DRM. We are not talking about MMOs. This issue affects single player games as well.
  - nerdjon 3y ago
    That is the problem, it is not clear exactly what it is we are talking about with this campaign. We have online DRM which I agree with is a bad thing. But if you look at the FAQ they are also clearly talking about online servers for games. So this is conflating 2 very distinct issues here. Regarding the Crew, do we know for a fact that it is 100% installed on your hard drive? Or are we making assumptions. Edit: > We are not talking about MMOs. There is literally a FAQ entry for MMO's. Edit again: Just realized that you are the one that posted it here. Assuming you are also the person that made the website, this is way too broad. If we actually want to talk about online DRM than yeah, I stand behind it completely. it is stupid that I can't play Kingdom Hearts without being online. But the moment that you start mixing that with actually online games that may require an online connection for the actual gameplay itself, than your argument completely falls apart. Those are 2 very different issues and I would recommend not only making the home page clear on what exactly it is you are talking about (I should not have to go to the FAQ to understand your point) but also make sure that we are talking about a core issue of online DRM. GaaS is not online DRM. I don't know of a single actual single player game that could be considered GaaS. The Crew doesn't even seem to fit this idea. Maybe it has a GaaS component, like Halo Infinite, but the single player part of Halo Infinite is not a GaaS. So this entire thing is confusing because we are mixing 2 distinct problems and hoping for a single solution to both which is not realistic.