Die britische Regierung antwortet auf eine Petition, in der sie aufgefordert wird, Verlage dazu zu verpflichten, Spiele „in einem funktionsfähigen Zustand“ zu halten.

Consumers: we think current legislation is lacking
Government: current legislation does not require studios/publishers to do what you want

We know, that’s what we said.

For those out of the loop.
The gaming industry has moved towards “always online” for basically everything. Even many singleplayer games cannot be played unless you are connected to the server. Usually, there’s nothing really going on on the server, it’s just checking that your copy of the game is legit, or it’s so they can sell things to you for real money. Eventually, the server is shut down or such, and now the game is dead. You have all the files, but you can’t run the game, because you can’t reach the server.

What people are asking for is either new legislation, or changes to existing legislation, to require *reasonable* steps to keep games playable *after support ends*. No one is asking that Blizzard be forced to keep the WoW servers turned on until the end of time. But if we take our generic singleplayer game that needs a server connection, a simple (final) update to disable that requirement would keep the game playable after support ends. To point at another Blizzard game, Diabolo II: Resurrected needs you to log into Blizzard’s “Battle.net” server every 30 days to play offline. One day, that won’t be possible, and the game will no longer run; but, the original Diablo 2 will still work – that only requires an internet connection for multilayer. Which means the “improved” version game will die whilst the old version will remain playable until there’s no one left with compatible hardware. And it’s demonstrably not difficult to patch these sorts of requirements out in many cases: Helldivers 2 initially required you to sign into PSN to play, but that was patched out on day 2 due to server issues, Diablo 3 can be played offline on console, but not on PC.

It’s also possible for multiplayer to survive the end of support. Fans have kept Supreme Commander’s multilayer alive for years since the studio went bust and the server went dark. But there are also many instances where that’s not reasonable, as making that kind of information public could lead to data security concerns.

There should be a requiment for games to work in offline mode after servers have been switched off, or to loudly announce before purchase that this won’t be the case (eg because the game is inherently multiplayer).

Games that depend on servers should not be allowed to charge for “buying” the game. You could perhaps charge people to buy an engine that works both on and offline in some capacity then charge a subscription for the online functionality or make it clear that the one functionality is a free extra. But if the thing you bought a perpetual license for is not available for use in perpetuity you should be entitled to a refund.

I guess you could have a lifetime subscription like some VPNs offer but you’d need a minimal service period of maybe 10 years otherwise you get a refund.