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paladin181: Thankfully, this failed before it got to a point where the failure could be codified. The damag is minimal for those who cxome after, if they want to try a similar movement on a smaller scale, there is no precedent to rebuke it.
Though I also note, he did sit on his buns for 10 months instead of actively campaigning. Imagine if Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kerensky of Battletech, after designing the Atlas Battlemech decided to just have it sit in the mechworks for a whole 10 months while the Inner Sphere is in danger.
What Ross said about gamers, is that we have a set of preassumptions when we are confronted with the topic, i.e. we overthink the matter, where it's actually quite simple - future games should have end-of-life plan, that's it.

What we should focus on is the issue itself - games are getting disabled and there's no consumer law to turn to. We can't save the current titles (apart from the older ones that you can still run without server support), but we have a chance of changing how it will look like in the future - this is the initiative.
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Tuthrick: What Ross said about gamers, is that we have a set of preassumptions when we are confronted with the topic, i.e. we overthink the matter, where it's actually quite simple - future games should have end-of-life plan, that's it.

What we should focus on is the issue itself - games are getting disabled and there's no consumer law to turn to. We can't save the current titles (apart from the older ones that you can still run without server support), but we have a chance of changing how it will look like in the future - this is the initiative.
Again he likely meant that but his phrasing did not convey it as that .. thus he did in fact intentionally or not did call gamers stupid
Well - GOG letting developers 'update' old games to only run on Windows 10 and 11 is going to kill them off anyway. They aren't helping at all.

EDIT: Ohhhhh. That's why: GOG.com is operated by GOG sp. z o.o., a wholly owned subsidiary of CD Projekt, based in Warsaw, Poland
Post edited June 25, 2025 by Losferwords
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Losferwords: Well - GOG letting developers 'update' old games to only run on Windows 10 and 11 is going to kill them off anyway. They aren't helping at all.

EDIT: Ohhhhh. That's why: GOG.com is operated by GOG sp. z o.o., a wholly owned subsidiary of CD Projekt, based in Warsaw, Poland
Not really as updating games to run on newer operating systems don't kill them off.. all that the updating does is kill off compatibility with older Operating Systems and older hardware at a point do to at a point operating systems won't support specific gpus and have requirements that prevent older cpus and the like from running the newer OS's
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Losferwords: Well - GOG letting developers 'update' old games to only run on Windows 10 and 11 is going to kill them off anyway. They aren't helping at all.

EDIT: Ohhhhh. That's why: GOG.com is operated by GOG sp. z o.o., a wholly owned subsidiary of CD Projekt, based in Warsaw, Poland
It’s not that GOG is merely allowing it - GOG is actively doing it themselves. Since day one, GOG’s ethos has been to make old games playable on modern computers. That also means as old operating systems are phased out and new ones come in, GOG will adapt accordingly.

At the end of the day, GOG is a store that sells games. They operate in a way that maximizes profit, otherwise they risk going bankrupt. This means their target audience will always be the largest viable market. If your concern is game preservation, that responsibility lies with nonprofit organizations that aren’t driven by profit and can focus solely on preservation.
Ross did not sit and do nothing, while the petition was ongoing - you have not watched his video, and you have not followed the topic. Ross was actually raising the issue many years ago (his "Games as a service is fraud" video for example) and he listed what he has done to support the cause.

If you are bothered by Ross and his approach, you can ignore him. It's the initiative and the issue of games being destroyed what matters.

I have no clue why some you are looking at the issue from the publisher's perspective. Don't worry guys they will try to push back against it, they don't need your help. We are the consumers here, there's no law to protect us against the practice of disabling games.
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Time4Tea: 2) Your use of the term 'infighting' is interesting. I don't see the 'gaming community' as united in any sense. I don't see Ross or others like him (who have been buying/supporting DRMed products over the past 20 years) as 'one of us' or part of our community. Gamers who buy DRMed products are literally the problem, since they are the ones who have enabled and normalized these pernicious design practices.
No. DRM is not necessarily the same as forced end-of-life of games. You can still use and play any of the ancient DRMd DVDs. Only through the abuse of the internet for DRM purposes has it become an actual problem, in which, funnily, indeed the thief is the company, and the victim is the buyer (and, in the original sense of thief even, because, contrary to the classic "software piracy", there now is one party losing something they used to own, not just get a copy of something). Looks like "online piracy" has been reversed and now it is us who need to combat this new form of corporate piracy. And this initiative tried to, but was made to fail by the nay- and doomsayers among us. Let's just hope there will still be some nuclear-bomb-style legislation, like what the DMCA is for the corps, that mandates and enforces our rights, in the end.

Of course DRM in all its forms presents uneccessary problems, and ultimately cost, but none of that were as grave (quite literally) as those inherent with internet-based DRM schemes. So don't think I'm "on the pro-DRM side" just because I don't consider abolishing DRM to be the panacea to game ownership and preservation. In fact, if a workable end-of-life plan would be mandated by law, DRM would end up removed after the games "useful service life" on reasons of cost alone (no corp would want to keep paying 25k/month for leaving DRM in their abandoned games), so this might actually have turned into a win-win, if it had only worked out.
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Time4Tea: 3) As soon as you start saying things like 'DRM is ok', 'developers should be free to design their games how they choose', you are immediately going to lose the entire DRM-free community. Anyone who is part of the DRM-free community could have told Ross that, but he apparently failed to understand this.
Yes, but at the same time you remove an easy opportunity for anti-campaigners to insta-destroy your political credibility by labeling you as "commie nutjob who wants to legalise piracy". Sadly, the anti-DRM crowd took up the pitchforks and did the discrediting themselves.
Post edited June 26, 2025 by Dawnsinger
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Dawnsinger: No. DRM is not necessarily the same as forced end-of-life of games. You can still use and play any of the ancient DRMd DVDs.
That's not true.

For example, I had to re-buy Painkiller: Black Edition on GOG, and also some of the Hitman games - even though before I did that, I had already purchased physical disc copies many years earlier - because Microsoft disabled the ability for them to work with Windows 10 due to their DRM.

So DRM did indeed force the end-of-life of those games, except for customers who have been pseudo-forced to double-dip and re-pay for those same games a second time (which is a scam), with the second versions being in a different format.

These things are some of the many reasons as to why Ross' plan never had any possibility to achieve anything, since he is fine with DRM and he wasn't even trying to stop it, which would need to be the first & foremost, most important #1 goal of any such plan, if it was going to be potentially viable.

His lax stance about DRM means that his plan had zero credibility in the first place.
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Dawnsinger: No. DRM is not necessarily the same as forced end-of-life of games. You can still use and play any of the ancient DRMd DVDs.
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Ancient-Red-Dragon: That's not true.

For example, I had to re-buy Painkiller: Black Edition on GOG, and also some of the Hitman games - even though before I did that, I had already purchased physical disc copies many years earlier - because Microsoft disabled the ability for them to work with Windows 10 due to their DRM.
It is true. This is one of the many compatibility issues that arise with old games and new OS. This one is caused by DRM and therefore artificial and beyond unnecessary, but there are lots of similar issues even without DRM, and if you had held on to your old machine / OS, you could still have played it (I think, because I honestly didn't ever even look at these games so I don't know the exact DRM schemes used). Anyway: yes, it stinks, and yes, it is similar in effect, but it is not the same degree of evil and unrecoverable as shutting down servers, which makes something unusable even on the very same hard- and software.

Edit: but of course I get what you mean, and I am still not trying to defend DRM.
Post edited June 26, 2025 by Dawnsinger
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Dawnsinger: It is true. This is one of the many compatibility issues that arise with old games and new OS. This one is caused by DRM and therefore artificial and beyond unnecessary, but there are lots of similar issues even without DRM, and if you had held on to your old machine / OS, you could still have played it (I think, because I honestly didn't ever even look at these games so I don't know the exact DRM schemes used). Anyway: yes, it stinks, and yes, it is similar in effect, but it is not the same degree of evil and unrecoverable as shutting down servers, which makes something unusable even on the very same hard- and software.

Edit: but of course I get what you mean, and I am still not trying to defend DRM.
If you pay for an online game, you can't honestly whine that you didn't know it would one day go away. THe people who buy the drivel are their own problem. If you don't buy online guarded shit excpecting it to always be there, then you don't get disappointed when it goes away. I still don't get why people who have every reason to KNOW the game they're "buying" is going to die one day are bitching and moaning because the game they paid for closed up shop. It was right there on the tin that it would happen one day, and they still spent their money on it, and now want to whine because what they knew would happen, happened.
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dnovraD: Intellectual property is a different beast.
Oh so for example the authors of books can tell you to burn their books because they feel like that now ?

Or if you own original 1960s recordings of say The Beatles, Paul McCartney can decide nah you can no longer listening to my music ?

You use a completely idiotic line of thinking thats extremely easily disproveable.
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paladin181: It was right there on the tin that it would happen one day, and they still spent their money on it, and now want to whine because what they knew would happen, happened.
I suppose you're arguing against where I wrote "it's evil to shut down servers", because this really doesn't differentiate between, say, MMOs (fleeting by definition and obviously so) and single-player titles that still rely on online whatever, even if only activation of newly installed copies.
The latter is, however, not easily percieved, with everyone and everything being constantly connected, and getting worse every day, and us being deliberately made to feel like its somehow normal and even natural, or at least totally OK. So it is easy to dismiss or disregard any such issues brought before you with these titles, just like it is all too easy to disregard and dismiss any privacy intrusions since you don't usually get to notice their detrimental effects. Only once you get hit by them, you start to care, and this probably happened to Ross and friends with TC. And even though TC was an MMO, it might have come accross as something else unless you bothered to question things (which we're incentivized not to do).

Anyway, I still think that our differences in view on what exactly is the fundamental flaw are mere nuances when compared to the general issue of games, being both a paid product and a form of art, and therefore needing legal protection from being deliberately and needlessly destroyed by anyone except the buyer.
Post edited June 26, 2025 by Dawnsinger
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Geromino: Oh so for example the authors of books can tell you to burn their books because they feel like that now ?

Or if you own original 1960s recordings of say The Beatles, Paul McCartney can decide nah you can no longer listening to my music ?

You use a completely idiotic line of thinking thats extremely easily disproveable.
Not disprovable. Digital services withdraw music, TV, books, and music all the time because they do indeed (or their studios) say, "Nah."

And the example was about maintainership, and how the onus of ownership changes that.
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Tuthrick: Ross did not sit and do nothing, while the petition was ongoing - you have not watched his video, and you have not followed the topic. Ross was actually raising the issue many years ago (his "Games as a service is fraud" video for example) and he listed what he has done to support the cause.

If you are bothered by Ross and his approach, you can ignore him. It's the initiative and the issue of games being destroyed what matters.

I have no clue why some you are looking at the issue from the publisher's perspective. Don't worry guys they will try to push back against it, they don't need your help. We are the consumers here, there's no law to protect us against the practice of disabling games.
It's because of the law things are the way they are. This is what Ross is dealing with and failed to prep for. The mosst traction he ever got was the last few months/weeks since making the video of him throwing in the towel despite doing nothing. The random streams on his channel is barely a promotion.