purchasers have legitimate moral and legal grounds to demand that they be informed that they are buying a license, or renting, the game; they are not owning a functional copy of the game outright.
I’m pretty sure that’s already the case, if you read the ToS of most games.
Not that it makes this any better.
NeilBru@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The typeface must be 16pt, bold, and the copy itself should be on the front page and be required on the cover description(s).
My beef isn’t even with a games-as-a-service premise at all. It’s the corporatist trend in arguing that single-player experiences need perpetual online connectivity, or that releasing self-hosted PvP server functionality is prima fascia “unrealistic in every scenario”. Some games, like WoW, no way. I get the depth of the server stack for MMOs. Other games that are PvP-competitive could easily be self-hosted. These companies could still make money Off of these old competitive online games, even though they’ve deprecated their own self-hosted server stack. They’re just too short-visioned and run by assholes who don’t give a shit about games.
“Stop Killing Games” needs more refined language about what it’s asking for, no doubt. There are many scenarios where blanket statements about demanding source code are just not feasible.
However, let’s not pretend that the industry is not pushing enshittification tactics used by almost every business that’s publicly traded. That’s the spirit in which this movement is fighting against.