vv221: I’m not going to waste my time with YouTube content, but if you explain what is said in there I’ll read that.
See the attached images
The 2nd link shows the spokesman for the EU Initiative on the GOG YT channel talking about their progress and is ~20 seconds
1st link: "It would also require no connection to the publisher or affiliated parties in order for it to continue functioning. So it would need to be patched to either be offline, or have private hosting only. It's the only way. Anything less and the game dies. And, yes, this would include DRM that needs to connect to the internet."
3rd link: "Now some of you may know that I'm a huge advocate against killing games. By "killing games," I mean the practice of a company's actions leaving a game completely unplayable by anyone who bought it. This is also known as "bricking" a game. Well, killing games, and Games as a Service are handcuffed together. You almost don't have one without the other.
See, all Games as a Service depend on you connecting to a server controlled by a company. That's fine while the game is running, but eventually most companies decide they're not making enough money on the game anymore to justify the server running. So they shut it down. Once THAT happens, every single person who bought the game can never play it again. If I sold you a copy of a game on disc - then next month while you were sleeping I snuck into your house and broke the disc - I would go to jail. In practical terms, that's almost exactly what Games as a Service is.
Companies engaged in this practice almost always destroy your product AFTER they've sold it to you.
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I'm calling this fraud because of the reality, and the intent. Just because your game doesn't run doesn't make it fraud. There could be bugs, the hardware could go bad. I'm not talking about quirks, accidents, forces of nature. But with Games as a Service, the product is DESIGNED to fail as soon as they shut down the server. The fraud begins once they purposefully
take away access to your product.
Games as a Service is fraud because it involves selling perpetual licenses that are in practice, NOT perpetual. The decision-making authority over the product is being removed from the buyer.
Customers buy games with the expectation that they will function. If 100% of all copies sold of a game cease to function because of deliberate interference from the seller AFTER the point of sale, how can that be considered an honest practice?
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If somebody sells you a bike, and then later you get a flat tire yes, your product no longer works, and it takes some effort to repair it. But that's something the average person can be reasonably expected to do. Or hey, take it to a repair shop! More importantly the company that sold you the bike didn't come to your house and puncture the tire. I see that as an important distinction.
Now when a Game as a Service stops working - which again, I want to emphasize is a deliberate act - NO ONE on EARTH could be "reasonably expected" to fix that.The reason for that is two-fold.
First, it takes specialized programming knowledge in order to recreate the portions of the server that were lost. Again, the way these games work is most of the data is on the customer's computer. But the company hosting the game has key information about how to run it. Where things spawn, logic routines, and so on. If you want, you can almost think of this as the "body" and this as the "brain". When they shut the "brain" down here a large portion of the game is now missing, and it's unplayable. In order to run the game again, the person would have to write a new "brain".
I mean--server! Now that is an exhorbitant amount of work, and takes a lot of specialized knowledge.
I would estimate only 5% of the population is even capable of doing that. However, it is possible. Whether that's a reasonable expectation of buyers to repair their product is debatable. I think it isn't, but that is NOTHING compared to the next part.
Programming a new server is difficult enough. But companies will also encrypt their data in order to protect against hackers and piracy. This is known as "Digital Rights Management," or DRM. Now that's reasonable while the product is still being sold, but once it's shut down, then
this is the equivalent of locking things up and throwing away the key.
I've talked to a developer for a resurrected game server emulator, and he said they had a cryptography expert helping them decrypt the code and even then, it took them years. So if you were qualified to crack codes like what the Nazis were using and win World War II in Europe, then yes, you might be qualified to "repair" your game. I'm really not exaggerating. Not only is that such a small percentage of the population capable of doing that, but even for them that in no way can be considered reasonable.
For most people - I'm talking 99.9% or more - it is IMPOSSIBLE for them to repair their game after shutdown. So, not literally impossible, but, again, I'm rounding."
