Comment on Louis Rossmann's response to harsh criticism of "Stop Killing Games" from Thor of @PirateSoftware
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 4 months agoIf you sell someone a game that relies on a server you own, and did not advertise clearly that you were selling a service, not a good (something you own), and then break that product for the customer without any possibility of them repairing their good, and you delete the code that could’ve fixed it, you’d be sorta commiting fraud.
If you abandon a product that was sold as a good, and it became inoperable due to forces unrelated to you, you’d be in the clear.
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Right, so an MMO charging a monthly fee shouldn’t need to make their game available to everyone if they stop charging people the fee and shut it down? Because that’s what I think too.
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
Yes, legally an mmo would not be targeted.
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
But the FAQ on the stop killing games site specifically says this applies to MMOs. That’s why I disagree. Specifically for the part about MMOs.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 4 months ago
A few things. People use MMOs as an example of a thing that cannot be run by users, and the FAQ calls out that this is demonstrably false. Second, there’s the idea of a good and a service, and games have been happy to blur this line over the past decade and change. When you pay a monthly subscription fee, there’s no question that you’re paying for a service; your service ends when that month is up. The problem comes from selling you things as though they’re goods but then revoking access to them at some unknown time in the future as though it were a service or lease that you had no idea when it would expire. So this campaign also demands that if you’re selling microtransactions like a cosmetic mount in an MMO, you need to be able to use that mount after the servers are no longer supported, and as we’ve already proven, it is definitely actually possible for ordinary people to run MMO servers, even if they’re hosting them for a few hundred or a few thousand people rather than hundreds of thousands or millions.
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
The question on the FAQ is asking if it’s possible, which it is. But in his big video on this topic, he says that subscription based MMO’s really don’t count (even if he’d like it to).
ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
In the ideal world they could release the code open source, there’s no money lose on that.