Stop Killing games or how the developers stop caring about users.

Today I am going to write about the initiative Stop Killing Games, which is against the trend of some game developers to implement an always online mode in single-player games and how it makes no sense for the player, and how it is used to create an expiration date for a product that you have bought.

For me, that I was born in the late 80s and had enjoyed a lot of videogame consoles, from the Spectrum, Megadrive, Dreamcast and PlayStation 1 to 3 (and pc games too 😀), this is absolutely ridiculous and an abuse. If I connect my old console to the TV and introduce the game, I can play it. No waiting times no downloads, no weird history. Plug and play, period. Obviously, if an old game had an online part and the servers are closed, then that part will not work, however, you can still play the offline mode. So for me, the video game consoles have changed since the PlayStation 3, which introduced updates to the games. This was good in some way, but we started to see games that were released without being finished, and with bugs, trusting that someday it would be fixed. Sometimes fix it, sometimes not, but they got full money from you. After that, PS4, which introduced monthly pay for playing online, almost with the same experience that we had on PS3, but paying a monthly fee. That moment I stop considering as an option and just switched more to PC.

This problem does not affect the console only, I also remember a SimCity game released in 2013, which I bought on day 1, but introduced a mandatory online game to an obviously single-player game. However, it was the successor of the legendary SimCity 4, so the hype was high, and I just bought it. Aside from that, I could not play until a few days later due to server overload on a single-player game, they introduced always online mode. That was the first time that I told myself that this would never happen again, I would never buy until some time after the release.

However, nowadays it is even worse, some games stop working after the server goes offline, because they remove the offline mode, so it is not your game (or copy of the game, all games have never been yours if you read the agreement) anymore, it is just rented for some years, just when a company decides to close it and make you pay for the succesor.

This is why the Stop Killing Games initiative appeared in Europe, they basically want the European parliament to make a law to stop this. You can find it on the link below. For me, the companies have the right to do this. However, as a consumer, I have the right to blacklist them and never buy a game with these policies.

Source: Stop Killing Games