I don’t expect to be right all the time. There’s always more to learn. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to respond. I appreciate hearing your perspective on the matter, even if we do have differing opinions.

I think you might have replied to the wrong comment or thread.

And if every car manufacturer starts to do the same thing with their vehicles, then you won’t be left with much of a choice. And no amount of slashing tires or smashing windows will actually change anything.

At that point the only option you have left is to go through the legal system. That’s where real change can happen.

Side note, technically I’m not on Lemmy, I’m on PieFed. But we’re all connected, so I’m assuming you actually meant to talk about Fediverse users in general.

I think the refrigerator example is a much more accurate representation of what’s happening here.

It’s not about whether you can find friends to play with, its about a company remotely disabling something you bought which should be able to work whether it’s connected to the internet or not.

What if a bunch of car manufacturers start requiring an internet connection just to turn on your car (for security/safety reasons). Then after 5 years they shut down those servers and say, “buy a new one”. You’re telling me that, rather than supporting a law to deter the practice, you would rather just avoid buying cars from that company?

The way I see it, a refund is a last resort if they are unable to follow through on the other 2 options.

Using your analogy, asking for a refund at an arcade would be more like asking for a refund for a subscription based online only game. In both of those cases you’re paying to play for a limited amount of time. This bill has an exclusion for that already, so it’s not an issue here.

Think of it this way: Imagine you bought a kitchen appliance (like a refrigerator) that has a screen on the door for creating timers, leaving notes, and checking the weather.

One day, the company says they’re shutting down the servers so that your refrigerator will no longer be able to check the weather, sync notes, etc. However, along with this update the refrigerator will no longer be able to keep food cold.

Wouldn’t you want a refund at that point so that you could buy a new one? Or better yet, maybe we need a law to tell these companies that shutting down their servers shouldn’t affect the core features of the appliance.

This is basically what’s started happening to a large number of games. Instead of just losing access to a few online features, companies are locking us out of the entire game, even if they are mainly a single player game. Just look at what happened to The Crew.

You’re right that there should be concerns about connecting old games to a random server that can push software updates.

However, I think you’re misunderstanding what the SKG movement is as well as what this legislation is asking for.

It’s not asking for companies to leave the servers running indefinitely. It’s definitely not telling them to just allow a 3rd party to take over the databases with all of the information there.

It’s telling companies to provide information upfront about what consumers can expect when the game servers are officially shut down. It’s telling them to have a plan for shutting the game down.

It provides some options for what those plans could look like:

• Offline mode (and communicate what features will no longer be available)
• Allow private servers
• Refunds

The current version of this bill has an exception for free games and subscription only based games.