Stop Killing Games
110 comments
·July 5, 2025bambax
pjmlp
When I was a 70's kid growing up into the 1980's, repair shops were all over the place, for any kind of electronics.
Then suddenly we got into this throw away garbage culture at the slightest sign something stops working.
The only way back is rebooting the system, or having governments step in.
jhbadger
Some of them even lasted in the 1990s (in the US). I had a CRT monitor blow a capacitor in the mid 1990s and took it to a repair shop. It cost me something like $100 to have it fixed, but that was still way cheaper than buying a new monitor. But yeah, after that everything became throw-away because 1) the cost of someone spending a half hour or so figuring out what the problem was and then repairing it would be more than the item cost to replace 2) greater and greater miniaturization meant that discrete components that could be repaired were few and instead it was just a "black box".
the_biot
That's a bit of a myth. Lots of electronics can still be repaired just fine. Check out some electronics repair channels on youtube. I've repaired plenty of electronics myself.
Replacing instead of repairing really is mostly a cultural thing.
scotty79
Appliances got so cheap there was no more value to extract by repair shops so they shut down. Government could step in with 200% tax on new appliances and the repair ecosystem would regrow, but pretty much no one wants that.
TacticalCoder
Same thing, thankfully to a lesser extent so far, for cars. Everybody's applauding the move to lots of tech and EV batteries for car but meanwhile my german car from 1988 is still running strong.
People shall complain that it's a gas guzzler but 38 years old is easily twice the lifetime any EV shall ever see. I don't see that taken into account much when talking about the lifetime CO2 of cars.
I have nothing against EVs: tried a Porsche Taycan and loved it and someone I know has a little BYD (chinese) SUV and it's very fine car for its price.
But sadly EVs seems to rhyme with "we can (and shall) remotely modify your car's software" and that's very close from "we'll remotely disable your car for good at some point in the future, when we consider it's time to upgrade to a new model".
As for car mechanics: those at official dealerships seems mostly clueless. They read the diagnostic and the diagnostic says: "Replace the entire braking system for the front right wheel". While if you go to a proper, old-school, mechanic, the dude shall happily find what's wrong and replace only what's necessary.
Gearbox noisy? Under warranty? Leave us the car for a few days and we'll replace the entire gearbox. Been there with my daily.
They're not really car mechanics anymore: they just swap complete parts, following procedures written by the car engineers.
Meanwhile you go into a shop taking car of oldtimers and youngtimers and you still get to see the actual proper mechanics, who can troubleshoot and fix only what's necessary.
tetris11
Same with ovens. Stopped heating? Check the heating coil either at the back, top, or bottom of the oven.
You won't even need to pull the oven out, chances are you can unscrew it right there from within.
£20 replacement coil for 10 minutes of work, or pay for a whole new oven?
(The retailer assured us over the phone that they could not repair it, but had great discounts on new ovens...)
derbOac
That post about the dishwasher hits home because I bought that same dishwasher recently and have had the same reaction.
After reading it, I was parsing why I don't return it, and remembered that the other options in our area had their own problems. But now I'm wanting to reconsider.
tomw1808
shhhhush, corporates hate this trick :P
pinoy420
[dead]
smusamashah
I have lots of games on steam (epic and Gog) too. I fear death of these platforms or removal or games that I 'own' already. I only recently started buying games, even bought the games out of guilt that I previously played pirated.
I think best is to buy a game from these platforms, and as a permanent backup, download a pirated copy of that game.
PufPufPuf
On GOG, you can just download the standalone installers, they are all DRM-free. That's why I prefer buying there.
coffeebeqn
Don’t many of them still phone home to fetch your player data when you log in etc. often when the servers go down even if you they’re not core to the experience no one thought to make a “offline” mode work
nottorp
Most games are still single player.
It's the big predatory names that tend to go multiplayer first, or require players being online even for single player.
Fuck you rockstar btw, for lying on the steam page that a rockstar club account isn't required for max payne 3 single player.
seydor
i bought GTAV and some assassin's creed. I dont want to play, i just like to roam around the virtual world to relax. But i can't relax anymore because every time they launch they need to download 1 full day of updates that i dont need.
tetris11
The only way to play these games are through the tireless work of the Amelie-clad repackers.
I own these games, but I still use the repacked games instead just because they allow me to actually play it fully offline
tomw1808
same here.
It's actually relaxing to just drive around with different cars into the sunset, turn the radio on and occasionally overrun some pedestrians.
I knew I can't be the only one finding it relaxing, yet the anxiety before starting the game if I can play it or not because of yet another update is really a downturn.
pinoy420
[dead]
elric
This is not a new phenomenon. Back in the late 90s, Virgin Interactive released my all time favourite game: Subspace. I bought the boxed edition. Not long after, they shut down their servers leaving a lot of people disappointed.
The community stepped up and started running their own servers. Eventually the game client proper was also rewritten (by one of the guys who would go on to create Kazaa and Skype).
I don't think anyone expects companies to keep servers running for free forever. But if a community steps up, the IP holders should let it.
Frenchgeek
The community can't help every game unfortunately. Having a proper end-of-life plan from the start would solve that particular issue (Either by having documentation to keep the game alive, or a clearly stated expiration date, depending on games being sold as goods or services.)
matt3210
They can’t release source code because 70% of it is stolen from previous employers or open source
firesteelrain
As much as a I like older games for the nostalgia sake, are there any other industries where this is an issue?
I don’t think passing laws is the right thing to do
wtcactus
From what I’ve been seeing lately: “If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing.”
I holeheartedly agree with it. I used to have a Netflix subscription until about 3 years ago. Then, the quantity and quality of content got so bad, I’ve reverted back to a trusty radarr + sonarr + BitTorrent solution.
Not only it’s faster to have it all hosted locally, but I also don’t go through mindless binge watching as the only content available is that I’ve previously willingly tag it for download.
Now, the only content I pay is when I go to the cinema sometimes when a movie really seems worth it.
raincole
Yet, when buying WAS owning (when physical copies of games were prevalent), it didn't stop pirating. Quite the opposite.
You can have your own moral compass. But most people who pirated games didn't do that out of spite. They didn't do that to protest against game-as-a-service or microtransaction or whatever "unethical" practices that the industry adopted.
ozlikethewizard
UK Government already denied the UK petition :(
dandersch
The original petition died because Parliament dissolved. This is the new one that the UK Parliament has to consider for a debate as of right now.
ozlikethewizard
If you scroll to the bottom of the petition it's already been considered, the consideration was "no".
thrance
I mostly play solo games. I "obtain" a DRM-free copy of every game I own and put them in a private S3 for posterity. Just like I inherited a massive collection of SciFi books from my dad, I hope to pass everything I enjoyed to my kids, if I ever have some.
jl6
Out of the frying pan (DRM-free), into the fire (S3)? Would your dad’s book collection have passed as easily to you if its existence was dependent on paying a monthly bill to a bookstore that can’t be completely trusted?
bob1029
S3 is my go-to hoarder system now too. I trust that AWS can provide more resilient storage than I can. How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
One thing I would suggest is using local encryption of anything you store in AWS. Plausible deniability is useful for all parties involved.
imiric
> How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
Excluding power outages that are out of my control, during which I couldn't do any work anyway, I've had practically zero downtime of my homelab services in the many years I've been running them. Even the dozen hard drives in my NAS with several years of power on time have given me zero issues. I know that I've been lucky, and according to SnapRAID the probability of one failing in the next year is 82%, but so far I haven't had a failure yet. Even when it does happen, I'm fairly confident that the interruption will be minimal and my data will be safe.
All this is to say that running and managing services yourself doesn't require much effort at all, assuming that you're technically inclined and enjoy tinkering. The idea that cloud services are inherently more robust is a myth.
Most service interruptions happen because of two reasons: large scale distributed systems are very difficult to run and maintain, and the constant churn of large engineering teams introduces many operational risks. Essentially, it's all due to complexities of scale. These are not problems that a machine in a closet serving a few users will ever have, especially if you're smart about choosing simple and robust technology.
jl6
In the given scenario, it’s not the 9s you need to worry about, it’s the monthly bill. Unless you’ve trained your kids to be sysadmins and they have credentials and a handover plan in place, their dad’s S3 account is going to be the last thing on their mind when dealing with bereavement and estate windup. It would be very easy for the credit card to be frozen, nonpayment alert emails to go unread, and then to miss the 90 day window before AWS deletes everything.
poisonborz
Anything you don't own can go black any time regardless of how many 9s they write in the contract. You don't own it, you have a revokeable right of access.
magicalhippo
> How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
Far, far better than my residential internet connection, that's for sure.
Of course, I have offsite backup of important stuff in case of fire.
That said, ease of use is likely a lot better with S3 for those who don't like to tinker or have a box sit and hum.
denkmoon
Is this not wildly expensive? Even on s3 glacier the cost per TB month is quite high.
klabb3
> How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
Nobody cares about the 9s. If Amazon wants to they can render the service inoperable legally, over time. Fortunately, S3 is semi-standardized so it’s ”migratable” in a real sense.
The real issue is getting locked out of your account for any arbitrary reason. This happens a lot with big tech and it can be impossible to get help by a human. That’s what scares me the most but more so with Google than Amazon (at the moment).
thrance
Few things:
1. I'm not going with Amazon, I live in France so I chose a french cloud provider. Laws are a bit different here.
2. I believe whatever could happen to my data, I'll see it coming and have time to move it all.
3. It's dirt cheap, and doesn't require me to manage my own storage.
jbc1
Is s3 a generic term for cloud storage in France?
justsomehnguy
> I'll see it coming and have time to move it all.
Thanks for the laughs.
glimshe
Whenever a game is available on Steam and GOG, I buy the GOG version for that reason. Everything guaranteed to be DRM-free.
stanac
I do the same. Today I found out that humble bundle also has DRM-free games. There was a post about baba is you today. That game is not available on GOG but it is available on humble bundle.
kemotep
If you didn’t know about itch.io the creator of Baba is You publishes all their games there (ones not even on Steam too), you can get DRM free copies there.
CyMonk
there are alot of drm free games released on steam. you can check this in advance by looking up the depots on steamdb and if the steamworks api files are included.
bakugo
>I "obtain" a DRM-free copy of every game I own and put them in a private S3 for posterity
What do you do for games that don't have "DRM-free copies", such as Denuvo games, or the increasingly large number of online-only singleplayer games?
m-schuetz
Not OP, but since Diablo3 and its server issues that often locked my out of what's supposed to be a single-player game, I absolutely refuse to buy online-only-single player games. And anything from Blizzard.
thrance
If I can't obtain a DRM-free copy of a game I already paid for, I'll seek "alternative ways". I mostly play indie games though, and I haven't had much trouble with my archiving endeavors.
nkrisc
Does “videogame” have a specific, legal definition in the EU?
When does software become a videogame?
wvbdmp
At least in Germany this seems to be based on a combination of market incentives, case law and “I’ll know it when I see it”. I believe theoretically, a govermnent agency could just decide to argue that e.g. Microsoft Word qualifies as a game. This would mean that it couldn’t be advertised or sold over-the-counter anymore, until Microsoft gets an age rating for it. There doesn’t seem to be an explicit legal definition, but the usual criteria are something like
– it’s intended for entertainment
– it isn’t intended for productive use.
In practise, publishers must get an age rating or stores can’t have the game on the floor and may only sell it to adults, so it’s kind of up to the publisher. You could probably just tie a preservation responsibility to that.
But really, all software should be preserved, so the distinction is kind of pointless anyway.
xeonmc
Also, what should be the regulation on “service portal” softwares? Where the functionality is inherently the server side service rendered and the software is just a remote control, some might argue their games qualify under that category to shirk responsibility, e.g. Roblox
scotty79
It doesn't have to be only about video games. I'm hoping it's gonna be about all software and all software vendors will be obligated to leave their software in working condition after they sunset it. The best take on this I read is that companies must prepare a way to transfer the product to the community after they no longer find it profitable. And that would be wonderful for all products. Not just software.
TylerE
I don't understand the idea that imposing some sort of infinite future obligation on an organization that can be easily made to not exist can possibly be viable.
Frankly I think this whole "movement" is kinda dumb and deeply misguided.
wvbdmp
It’s not that hard to just publish your stuff when you’re done with it. I guess you could put it in escrow for, say, 10 years, in case you decide to do something with it later.
politelemon
I wonder if the author sees the dichotomy of the title, while preserving games for a platform that can choose to lock you out at their discretion.
That aside it's surprising to hear about the features-behind-an-app behaviour from Bosch, they've normally been a trusted name in appliances for a long time and it seems even that is no longer going to be true.
gxd
They seem to be old Mac games. Old Macs are already being emulated and out of Apple's reach of you own an old copy of the OS. You can play these games forever even if Apple or the game makers go out of business.
zeroCalories
I am much more sympathetic to the concerns about classic appliances becoming IOT slop, GNU, and stuff like right-to-repair, as these concern expensive, nearly non-negotiable, things you have to interact with.
But I honestly just don't care about video games. If a game company pisses me off, I'm just gonna not play it, and opt for one of the thousands of other games that came out this year. This is needless regulation, and will probably be counterproductive to your interests in the long run.
Not only that, this is such a small problem in the grand scale of things, that I don't know why we're giving it breath. Law makers have far more important things to concern themselves with. This feels like a South Park parody of hand-wringing nerds crying about video games because they have nothing else worthwhile in their life.
> I bought a Bosch 500 series because our old one broke, and we needed one quick.
Slightly OT (or maybe not) older dishwashers are usually not very hard to fix (depending on the problem). My dishwasher is over ten years old. The pump broke: I replaced it. It was easy and cheap (EUR 60).
It wasn't even the pump that was broken, just the heating resistance attached to it that had fried. You can replace only the resistor if you're skilled enough to reattach a new one. I couldn't: removing the old one was easy, but I couldn't put it back in place so I bought a whole pump instead.
Likewise, my laundry machine is over 15 years old. I just replaced the carbon brushes: they last for something like 10 years and cost less than EUR 10 a pair.
I don't think I will buy a new machine any time soon, or if I have to, it will be a used one.