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SuperNova on 05 July 2025
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Norion said:

This has potential to do good but there are genuine concerns since something like the recent Flight Simulator games are just not feasible without enough infrastructure to handle the high amount of data streaming. Flight Simulator 2020 for example has literal petabytes of data involved so unless Microsoft is expected to keep the game running for the rest of time eventually they'll stop supporting it leaving it unplayable. They could severely gimp the game and let it remain in that form but that wouldn't truly be preserving it.

In general games where aspects of them require things like external hardware could be at risk if a poorly written law gets passed so instead I'd prefer if it was required for games with an expiration date to openly disclose that and give a lifespan expectation from the get go for example over 10 years so people know what they're buying into and can request refunds if it gets shut down before then. I'm not a fan of governments regulating art but that seems like it could be a good solution that benefits consumers without overly burdening game developers. Temporary experiences happen with all sorts of things and not just video games so I don't think it's inherently a bad thing but stuff like The Crew situation is definitely shite. If not governments platforms like Steam should step in and require something like the above.

We‘re talking about a EU directive. The individual laws are up the countries within the EU once the EU releases a directive in the first place. The EU itself doesn’t really make laws. Just guidelines the countries within have to write into law, wich can look quite different from county to county.

The EU also consults with the petitioners about the possible directive too and if you actually read what the petition says, you‘ll notice that they leave several possibilities for publishers to sunset their games, from options for private servers, to single player modes. One possibility is for publishers to just slap a big fat sticker on their games stating that you’re actually acquiring a license for a service, not a product on the game box. There‘s many ways of making this happen and they’re all more honest for the consumer than the current situation.