This whole article sucks. Here were the choices for player preference:

• PVE
• Couch co-op
• Online PVP
• Single player

Is it true that most players prefer single player games? Maybe. Last year’s unanimous game of the year was largely considered a “single player game”, but while it’s definitely not live service, it also won the award for best multiplayer. What does Halo count as? Halo 2 and 3 are single player, couch co-op, online co-op, couch PVP (not an option in this survey), and online PVP. If Halo 2 is your favorite game, it could be for any of those reasons, but they also all play off of one another to form a richer game as a whole. I wouldn’t want to exclude one of those things in favor of another.

Single-player games are a safer bet for new games…Make no mistake: the costs to make AAA single-player, non-live service games have inflated to astronomic levels. Leaks from Insomniac showed that PlayStation’s AAA flagship games, like Spider-Man 2, have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But there is a growing opportunity for AAA studios to make leaner single-player games.

Look, especially when you factor in costs, like the paragraph after this does, it’s correct to say that a safer bet is the one that can be made more cheaply, but even these examples of successes are cherry-picked. I could just as easily bring up Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Immortals of Aveum, or Alone in the Dark to show why offline single player games are risky.

I don’t know how much this form factor is catching on over there, but there’s also a mini PC category these days. For $500 and change, you can have a gaming PC that fits in the palm of your hand and is more powerful than a PS4 Pro.

There’s more than little details that I appreciate in BG3 over D:OS2, but I think that’s just a team that got better at their craft.

Ah, that reads a little different than your previous comment. Yeah, I’m looking forward to what they do next, but especially given that this was their best game yet, I definitely don’t agree that they were held back in any way.

Sure, but playing through D:OS2 right now, there’s still quite a bit more in BG3 that was special.

There’s no reason to believe that there was anything special about one of the highest reviewed games of all time?

Which is a bummer, because 6 years of development time shouldn’t happen every game. There was a previous interview where they said something like, without a new war in Eastern Europe or a pandemic, we think we can get the next game done in three years, which means we’ll probably have it done in four. BG3 is one of the best games ever made, but development time has to start trending back down.

I like how they revised their action point system in D:OS2, and I like getting attribute points every level up, but 20 hours in, I think I prefer everything else from D&D so far. Still, the D:OS system isn’t bad.

I don’t see how that market was better than what we have now. We still get games like those, but you can play them anywhere. You just have to stop expecting to find them from the publishers you recognize from 20 years ago. Ubisoft and EA don’t really make games for us anymore.

The press release sure read as though it was an inconceivable notion that they could build a multiplayer game that wasn’t going to get updated forever. It made me so angry.

They don’t do that. They have re-releases that are available for purchase for a month before they’re gone, and then they rent you the old emulated games forever, on worse emulators, with no option to buy them.

What if we still lived in the era where games could have single player and multiplayer modes without worrying about constantly updating the multiplayer mode and monetizing it in perpetuity?

If memory serves, they prototyped the first Horizon as a multiplayer game, which makes sense given the Monster Hunter inspiration; and the Killzone games had multiplayer. Horizon would make a great multiplayer game, but I want to play mulitplayer Horizon, not live service Horizon.

I’m still making my way through Divinity: Original Sin II, and it’s largely giving me more of what I love about Baldur’s Gate 3, especially by comparison to the first D:OS. There are some crucial systems that I think D&D handles better, but I’m having a great time.

Any money you spend that saves you money could be considered investing. You can get creative with considering time to be money or what you would have spent on consoles when competition doesn’t exist to bring down prices long-term.

The movement is two months in to a year-long campaign, and that’s just the EU. Ross Scott’s also likely pushing 40, if I had to guess. The clearest messaging of what they’re asking for is to prevent remote disabling of games, which is right in the petition.

This is a completely different position than saying that it expects games to be forced to be updated forever, so I’m not sure why you said that unless you heard someone else summarizing it incorrectly, like Thor, and didn’t verify it yourself.

First off, this is not a piece of legislation. They’re not allowed to do that. They’re petitioning for legislation and stating the problem. More specificity is for parliament to decide.

Second, legislation like this is basically never retroactive. If it does apply to games that have already been made, there would be a grace period for actively supported games. There always is.

Third, Ubisoft sure seems to find it to be worth the effort for The Crew games they haven’t killed yet, as they’re staring down the barrel of this potential legislation. And if you’re building a game with this requirement in mind from the beginning, it’s substantially less work. This used to be how more or less all online games worked, until they found out that a dependence on their servers was potentially more lucrative.

It sure looks properly written to me, and I’m struggling to figure out how this person misinterpreted it.

No, that is not something the petition aims to do, stated clearly in their FAQ, and I don’t think I could arrive at that interpretation even without it. From the petition:

Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher. The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.

And in the FAQ on the Stop Killing Games site:

Q: Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?

A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:

‘Gran Turismo Sport’ published by Sony

‘Knockout City’ published by Velan Studios

‘Mega Man X DiVE’ published by Capcom

‘Scrolls / Caller’s Bane’ published by Mojang AB

‘Duelyst’ published by Bandai Namco Entertainment

etc.

Kind of a bummer that this ended up basically being an ad for 2XKO, a game that functionally requires the installation of a rootkit in order to play.