Daniel Saner (3503) on 1/7/2015 9:17 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

I'd rather they don't, so people lose access to all the games they thought they bought for thousands of dollars, finally realise what "requires online verification" means to them as paying customers, stop buying such products all together, let the companies that release them in that state go out of business, and nobody ever use such a pointless and crooked scheme again. One can dream.

It's basically happening anyway, usually a few hours after (or before) release of the game, done by some clever teenagers, and is called "cracking". I'm not a big fan of either solution because it justifies publishers being lazy and releasing deliberately broken software, and leave it to others to fix it. What would be supposed to happen in a fair world would be for customer support enquiries to become so overwhelming that it drives the publisher out of existence.

I'm really with you on the MMORPG idea though. Rightsholders should be urged to release server software code and content data for online games that they intend to no longer operate. The more popular games usually have their server software reverse-engineered and work quite well on inofficial servers, but the copyrighted in-game content is usually very important to these games, and is what these projects cannot legally replicate. So they're left spending countless hours building their own content databases which might be cool, but won't make those happy who want to get the authentic experience of the original game.

Indra was here (20756) on 1/9/2015 5:03 AM · Permalink · Report

We already have that. It's called pirate servers. That's how I can play World of Warcraft once upon a time.