This should be illegal

https://lemmy.world/post/5215953

This should be illegal - Lemmy.world

This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own. [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2a01418c-4a48-43e0-8134-413f174fd211.png]

you will own nothing and you will be happy.
It was a free 'game' that was little more than a tutorial 🤷‍♂️
No it’s the great cleansing where… checks notes… billionaires crush the working classes by taking away their free virtual pets?

It’s not like it’s never happened to paid full games before.

*cries in Battleborn*

Don’t you fucking dare say that name. I have never in my life seen a game with so much promise be self fucked so hards by it’s own devs that it kills the game in its tracks.

NO ONE FUCKING ASKED FOR A BATTLE ROYALE - AND WE SURE AS SHIT DIDNT ASK FOR PAID BATTLE ROYALE SEPARATE FROM THE MAIN GAME.

…UGH.

So why do they need to remove it?
Because paying for the servers to keep the game online cost more money than what they make out of it.
What servers? It probably stores a few KB of data per player.
And that isn’t making them money, so they scrap it.
Because Zuck’s dreams of a post-life in his metaverse are crumbling.

oh god this reminds me of Japanese man who married Hatsune Miku in hologram form can no longer speak to his wife of four years.

“The doting husband has gained thousands of followers on Instagram by sharing insights into his life with Miku, but things took an unexpected turn during the pandemic when Gatebox announced it was discontinuing its service for Miku.”

this is why I have trust issues with proprietary software

UNILAD

Akihiko Kondo married his fictional wife in 2018

UNILAD
If that man harnesses the power of LLM like Chat GPT, he can continue talking with his wife
Until ChatGPT is shut down. Have control over your waifus, people!
Well, Llama 2 then.
At least the general idea behind language models isn’t proprietary and fairly well available in ooen source. Sure, GPT is better, but it could change.
Let’s take back the means of waifus!
One could say you must seize the means of reproduction.
Representative Boebert has been a commie all along! 🤯
Don’t think reproduction has anything to do with this.

hmm not sure if that would work as the model that he was using would be different from what’s available so he’d probably notice some differences which might cause a mix of uncanny valley and surrealism/suspension of disbelief where the two are noticably not the same

plus using a chat-only model would be real tragic as it’s a significant downgrade from what they already had

his story actually feels like a Romeo and Juliet situation

Doesn’t even take a change of service provider to get there.

Replika had what had very obviously become a virtual mate service too, until they decided “love” wasn’t part of their system anymore. Probably because it looked bad for investors, as happened for a lot of AI-based services people used for smut.

So a bunch of lonely people had their “virtual companion” suddenly lobotomized, and there’s nothing they could do about it.

I always thought replika was a sex chatbot? Is/was it “more” than that?

It’s… complicated.

At first the idea was it’d be training an actual “replica” of yourself, that could reflect your own personality. Then when they realized their was a demand for companionship they converted it into virtual friend. Then of course there was a demand for “more than friends”, and yeah, they made it possible to create a custom mate for a while.

Then suddenly it became a problem for them to be seen as a light porn generator. Probably because investors don’t want to touch that, or maybe because of a terms of servce change with their AI service provider.

At that point they started to censor lewd interactions and pretend replika was never supposed to be more than a friendly bot you can talk to. Which is, depending on how you interpret what services they proposed and how they advertized them until then, kind of a blatant lie.

LLM is capable of role-playing, character.ai for example can get into the role of any character after being trained
Geez…that guy really needs to get laid by a Miku Robot.
Next thing you know, he doesn’t read the fine print, ther “brain” is internet connected and, sooner or later, he won’t have a Miku talking back to him again
“Megacorp killed my cyberwife” Is a heck of an vigilante origin story
Or, you know, supervillain.
“Ultraweeb’s Revenge: Coming this Fall!”

This is the natural progression of the games-as-a-service model. Any game that relies on online support of some kind just to function will eventually cease like this.

Is it stupid that a vr game about a pet relies on online support to function? Absolutely. But it is what it is. Buy more offline games.

That’s why for the game I develop, players can request a copy of their save file and we have a singleplayer mode you can download and host yourself.

It’s not the most convenient thing, but players use it, and it’s future-proof!

We need to talk about the comments on yesterday's Amazon video...

YouTube
This is also the reason I’m all open source. Not just games, but seeing someone abandon a program hurts. Or just wanting to make a change on your own to suit your needs. I don’t have any big fancy programs, but I at least put my code openly on github.com for that reason. Both my “big” ones are just me using another program and realizing I could make something that worked better for me. At like 100x the time investment, but programming is fun.

Looking at the retro computer scene should make anyone a diehard open source fanatic, it’s god awful how much retro stuff relies on a single guy happening to find an old disc in their basement and upload it to the internet, and a lot of the time that never happened and so the software is just lost forever and the only way hardware can be used is by people writing their own software completely from scratch and sharing it with others.

And of course if they then don’t make it open source that’s extra fun.

God bless the 8-bit guy and his dream come true, Commander X16.
drg is technically game as a service right? it works fully offline are relies on local save files and steam networking for lobbies

game that doubles as a service? beats me.

DRG is also a unicorn of a game

Pretty big assumption that you own something digital you paid for. Let’s be honest, you paid for a license not a product.
I concur Buyer should not gain rights to product, so they should not be allowed to profit from it, but they should be able to preserve it, unless the license that you actually buy had a time limitation, but that should be clearly stated when you buy it that you only buy access to it to (at least) X amount of time like you have with online subscriptions.
That’s why pirating is completely based.

If people stopped renting games developers would start selling them again. Until then, the incentive is for them to keep pulling this nonsense.

There’s a difference between a game having online elements, such as a MMO, and games that require a connection just so they can keep charging you. Even in the first case though, you should own the client, and ideally it either has a single player mode, or the developer releases the code for a basic server when they shut it down.

That’s why I stated that it should be illegal to promise product while selling a undefined time limited license, there should be a clear minimum time stated when you “buy a subscription” for (single player?) games.
Fair, stating a time-to-live when you’re paying might make some people think twice. At this point though, I think people need to just not be paying unless they get to keep it permanently. Paying for access to the online portion is fine, but the rest should keep working and you should be able to get your data out of the developer’s system.
“don’t worry, you can form a new 3-year attachment with Bogo 2 for just $29.99!”
Unless we sell less of it than the arbitrary sales number we used a bunch of estimated pseudo math on to ultimately guess. Because if we sell less than that number we pulled out of our rectums with a faulty Excel sheet, we'll just shut the thing down immediately. Because, you know... fuck you.
wtf is this this is impossible
But then how can they force you to buy a new one?
And this is why I have trust issues
This is why I don’t touch anything fucking Facebook does
I’ve had that thought many times. I wish companies would release the source of games they discontinue instead of letting them completely die out.
In theory, Ross Scott is (or at least was) trying to get something done about this. youtu.be/tUAX0gnZ3Nw?si=acNlZLK8MRqKWwgh
"Games as a service" is fraud.

YouTube
Motor City Online all over again
It’s meta lol. It’s the devil.
And this is why I only buy games that I can load on a PC and play without an internet connection.
I think illegal might be a little bit too far
Someone is very addicted to Facebook games rofl