Neither is a fridge, yet people would be pretty upset if the fridge they bought a few years ago stopped working because the manufacturer shut down the servers "required" to make it work.
II wish people stopped using analogies for the sake of using analogies. Just because you can think of a random household product doesn't mean you got a point. You're actually proving my point. If you buy a fridge and it needs a server to run basic cooling functions, that’s a bad product design. The fix isn’t to force the company to run servers forever, it’s don’t buy a fridge designed with unnecessary server dependence in the first place.
Same for games: if people hate always-online DRM or server-locked single-player, stop buying those games. Vote with your wallet - the same way you’d pick a fridge that actually works offline. That’s market discipline.
For one, no one is asking them to keep the servers running forever, since all they would need to do is to make public the bits of code that would allow people to either disable the online checks, or to create their own private servers.
Secondly, what do you mean "open up source code forever"? All they would need to do is to release the source code once.
They're not making money off the product either way, and the goodwill they'd garner would go a long way.
You can’t just yank it out and toss it on GitHub with zero risk or effort.
‘opening it up once’ is forever: once code is out, it creates legal, security, and competitive risks, plus real costs to vet and clean it before release.
And on the ‘goodwill’ point, I agree — sometimes they do choose to do this when it makes sense (look at my original example about id Software with Doom, Epic with Paragon’s assets, or Bungie with Halo’s mod tools). But it has to be voluntary. It's a potential smart move for them, not an obligation under threat of law.
But we all know you're not arguing in good faith here.
I am. I'm pissed off because I disagreed with the petition in the Jason Hall thread and I got banned and it was unfair. But I'm arguing in good faith I think this petition is absolutely ridiculous and I think it fundamentally does not understand what it is implying. It's just gamers being upset about games. Nothing new, it has nothing to with seat-belts or fridges or the moon cycle. It's the same as gamer-gate, it's probably something that Jim Sterling would make a big long video about and it pisses me off because the more regulation you get, the less games you get. Nobody wants to look at it that way because it's the big crusade that we are all embarking today to win video games and own the gross furry and nobody is taking a minute to think about it other than to re-assert the lines.
Yeah cool
