Item — HN Reader

Tell gamers how many months, for the advertised price, they will receive a guaranteed level of service and features for.

Then let gamers decide.

Example: If I'm reminded, at purchase time, that this $70 game will work online for 24 months and single-player offline for 36 months, then I can make an informed decision before I buy. Studios would be forced to bring their business plan into visibility and be held to a level of service, and then gamers can't complain when a game is "switched off" according to plan.

This is already implied, just not explicit and quantified in advance.

Personally, I wouldn't buy a game that had early expiry of online already contemplated. And offline play should be rich and complete indefinitely. But I still live in the glorious console cartridge era in my head and in my emulators.

2 comments

> Tell gamers how many months, for the advertised price, they will receive a guaranteed level of service and features for.

Companies would just default to saying "we reserve the right to shut off online connectivity at any time."

Well, then prevent that via regulation, too. It fatalistic to say "Well, we just can't possibly regulate companies, because they will surely find loopholes and avoid the regulation!" The answer is to write better, more thorough regulation that prevents loopholes. That shouldn't be such a tall order!

Just write a regulation that every game developer has to make a great game, not charge too much, support it for years, and give it away for free as soon as it's not popular. That way, we'll only have great games and archives of great free games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM

'Great' is neither a legal or commercial term.

Then just regulate the term Great. You can regulate everything. Just send in the troops to force gamedevs to only make Red Alert 2, objectively the government derived best possible game. Any deviation from Red Alert 2 will be severely punished.

Not sure what point this exaggeration is supposed to make. Just let companies do whatever they want and Buyer Beware?

Force them to list an effective annual subscription fee more prominently displayed than any “purchase” price. If they can’t guarantee any level of service, the license is assumed to be valid for one day, and their game ‘costs’ thirty thousand dollars.

That's fine if "gamers" are my age, but 3 years for a 12 year old is an eternity. This isn't a thing which can be handled like the cookie consent popups.

Maybe the parental unit of said 12 year old should be involved in there somewhere