HunOL

Launchers aren't necessarily a problem when they are held to reasonable standards on data privacy, refunds, and durability among others. There is unique value that they can offer which is typically lessened by not being interoperable with one another. Many of the norms were hard won via EU and other national regulations. On the other hand, far too many companies want a piece of the data pie without even attempting at interoperability and egress. The Helldivers 2 debacle is an indication that clearly something is wrong.

The markets are still highly polluted with things that should be a violation of our norms even though things are getting better.

If a game has a functioning single player and a company chooses to shutdown multiplayer/matchmaking after some time I think that's fair. Sure, it would be nicer if the servers were open sourced or an alternative was provided, but at least there is some way to still play.

However, there are also games that only have multiplayer - here a company can just take away your ability to play the game completely. A prominent recent example is "The Crew".

It's also not 100% clear when buying, "The Crew" certainly had a large story aspect to it and it wasn't common in 2014 for such games to be "always online". It's quite a difficult path to find a solution to all of this as we can't force companies to operate servers indefinitely; on the other side we are loosing consumer rights and history.

Okay fine then, abolish the copyright laws that forcibly prevent us from solving the problem ourselves. This is like expecting full rights to a patent with none of the responsibility of publicly documenting your innovation. Make it legal to leak the source code of abandoned games.

This does not work with video games, unless you were a whale to begin with. Whales spend magnitudes more money on games than the average players [1]. Companies know this and exploit this weakness in the human psychology.

Just because you decided to not buy a game for $60, that will not stop a whale from dropping thousands and more.

[1]: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/whales-games-genshin-impact-compet...

I'm kidding (and kinda not), it's a valid complaint.

- https://changedetection.io/#features

- https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io

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