this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Games

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[–] osprior@lemmy.world 109 points 3 days ago (38 children)

If you aren't already aware of it (and in the EU) please sign the stopkillinggames.com petition so companies can't just drop "support" (that these days means kill) games when they feel like it.

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[–] missingno@fedia.io 115 points 3 days ago (5 children)

They're patching it to be playable offline, but only if you've previously downloaded the game.

Why not just leave that version up instead of delisting it? They could even sell it. Would be seen as a success story for preservation instead of another loss, and it's especially baffling because it's a fully avoidable loss.

[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

Yeah, they've just ensured the only way a person can play it is through piracy. Very smart move, WB, very smart...

[–] fluxion@lemmy.world 40 points 3 days ago (3 children)

According to the bean counters this will save them $17/month in hosting costs

[–] golli@lemm.ee 25 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Do you even have to pay hosting costs, if you put a game on steam or does valve not distribute your game for free?

If I'd have to guess the bigger issues with a game like this would be licensing or that delisting allows some form of tax advantageous asset depreciation.

[–] Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 2 days ago

Valve hosts it for "free" (30 to 15% of every sale), yes.

I'm guessing this game has some phone-home DRM or something, and maybe it's only required the first time it's executed after installation ? They could of course just give the game a patch that removes it but I guess they don't want to anger ~~the line~~ investors and make it go down by working even a second on a "discontinued" game.

[–] pipe01@programming.dev 14 points 2 days ago

You don't pay anything to steam other than the initial 100 bucks or so, and the cut they take

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[–] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 114 points 3 days ago (13 children)

It's really gross how people's games can just be disappeared these days. GaaS is a terrible business model.

[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's not just limited to games...

We see it most prevalently in games because the gaming industry is massive. But this can also happen to your car... Or your fridge...

Here's a fun story:

There were these few blind people who volunteered to have cybernetic implants that would help them (partially) see. The company went under, the patent is held by a patent troll, but the people still have those implants in their head... Which have now either shut down or are malfunctioning...

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[–] warm@kbin.earth 28 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It's not going anywhere until people stop playing the games.

[–] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 36 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm not playing them as hard as I can.

Live service games have been failing constantly, so unless the change is happening already I don't think they're deterred. That perpetual revenue stream is some exec's idea of a lottery ticket.

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[–] simple@lemm.ee 18 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It's not going anywhere until people stop ~~playing the games~~ spending ridiculous amounts of money in them.

Fixed that for you. The problem isn't the casual players, it's the people spending $500+ worth of skins and battle passes on one game. Those are the reason GaaS are so successful.

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[–] epicsninja@lemmy.world 80 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This game leaves behind a legacy of extremely funny poor decisions and mistakes, culminating in becoming one of the few games that got to be shut down twice.

[–] VitoRobles 38 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The worst part, the demo was actually pretty good.

They literally could have released this game with mod support, and sold it for $20 and it would have been a fun party game.

Instead, they kept going on with BS games as a service.

[–] epicsninja@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Games as a Service wasn't even the fatal flaw here. Brawlhalla is another platform fighter that is doing just fine off that model. The dev team for MultiVersus just couldn't handle the project, for one reason or another.

A lot of speculation on the specifics of what went wrong, plenty of players looking for who to blame, but there will probably never be any reliable or concrete info on what exactly happened.

[–] simple@lemm.ee 40 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Multiversus was one of the most mismanaged projects I've seen. Released in open beta for months, shut down for a year, re-released as literally the same game but worse and with more microtransactions, then quickly died.

Shame. It was fun to play for a while.

[–] Zarxrax@lemmy.world 22 points 3 days ago (4 children)

It really sucked because Smash Bros is basically the only other big platform fighter on the market. Multiversus was set up to actually be a viable alternative to smash, it was massively popular at first, and they had such an amazing library of characters to pull from. The game had everything going for it. And they just blew it. So badly.

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[–] VivianRixia@piefed.social 28 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This game could have easily been another Marvel Rivals. An absolute success using its strong IPs in a game type that is underrepresented. There's no other big name doing Smash Bros style combat, and definitely not outside of Nintendo's platform. The elements were all there to make this a successful game, but they completely blew the execution.

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[–] Goretantath@lemm.ee 14 points 3 days ago (2 children)

The reason that games are even hosted on "official" servers like these is to ensure the company can take the game down once the devs run out of time o the contract they made for all the IP's they use in said game. Otherwise its possible AND has been done before to let the players machines spin up a server each match.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 points 1 day ago

That could be one reason, at least in a game such as MultiVersus with different IPs being used.

But they still lock down servers to their own shit when they own it all anyway and it's because they also sell you crap to have in the game. If you had your own server, you could just give yourself the stuff they sell since all those things are still in the game somewhere and the only barrier between you and the content is their servers checking to see if you paid for them.

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