One of the things that drives me nuts about the Stop Killing Games movement, which is stupid and immoral and the guy who started it is a lunatic, is that they keep saying the game companies that sold them games are destroying those games by turning the servers off, which harms the consumer.
No it doesn’t? What harm have you suffered? You bought a game, You played the game. And eventually, the game was shut down and you couldn’t play it anymore. You are not harmed by not getting more. The critical issue for SKG was Ubisoft’s “The Crew,” which operated the multiplayer service at no cost to the player for ten years.
What you are is hurt. You imagined that you could have another year or two or even ten, and you didn’t get it. And you don’t like that! You wanted that, and you did not get it, and you are feeling something about this state of affairs. That is being hurt. You are feeling pain. And that pain is real and valid and not only is it okay for you to feel it, you don’t actually get a choice.
Just like if someone stuck you with a pin, it would hurt, and you would feel that pain and react to it. You do not control whether you feel the pain. That is not how it works. That’s not how anything works. All you can control is what you do about what you feel; how you react.
And if you are a fucking lunatic, you start a petition to demand that the government make a law, so you don’t ever get stabbed with a pin again. Almost two million people have signed this paper that says “we don’t like getting stabbed with pins,” so obviously the government must Do Something to protect the consumer from the predatory corporate activity of pin-sticking.
But being stuck with a pin doesn’t harm you. When players went to log onto the servers and couldn’t play their game anymore, no actual damage was done. They were just… unhappy. They didn’t like that they couldn’t play their game.
But an awful lot of them have represented that something they purchased had now been destroyed. Which it hasn’t; they still have it. If they bought a physical disc with the game on it, they still have that disc and that disc still contains the same data. If they bought it on a digital service, they might still have the original installation file they downloaded — nobody has stopped them from saving it. The shutdown of the server has not destroyed anything.
Bluntly speaking, Ubisoft took their ball and went home, and now the other players are standing around realising they can’t play the game without a ball. But the ball was never theirs in the first place. It belonged to Ubisoft, and everybody knew that. It has their name on it and everything. Everybody knew that if Ubisoft wasn’t there and didn’t bring the ball, they couldn’t play.
Ubisoft didn’t harm anyone by taking their ball and going home. Some feelings were hurt. There was a general sense of “aww, man” throughout the group. But nobody needed first aid. Nobody needed to go to the hospital. Nobody died.
They just, you know, felt bad for a bit.
And we have a fairly large contingent of people among the world population who think it should be a crime for someone else to make them feel bad. That whenever they feel bad, someone else is at fault. If they feel bad, someone has done this to them, and that someone is a terrible awful no-good very bad person who must be punished.
It is fairly easy to convince these people that little Joey did not mean to hurt their feelings and he is very very sorry, but MegaCompany Inc. is kind of a different story. It’s immensely difficult, for some reason, to convince a couple of million people that Ubisoft took down the servers for a reason that was definitely not “LOL players boutta be big mad, and that will be a good joke on them.”
Because at the core, the reason isn’t that Ubisoft doesn’t want to hurt players’ feelings, and is very very sorry, and will not do it again. It’s that Ubisoft doesn’t give a shit. They were not thinking about how mad players would be about it, because they didn’t think about players at all. The human cost and consequence was not in the equation.
What was in the equation was almost certainly a simple metric. How much money does it cost to run this game, and how much money do we make from running it?
Notice the distinct lack of any accounting here for how much money the game made in the past. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t count. They don’t care. Once the game costs more to run than you make from it, that’s when you want to shut the game down.
This is also a fairly good indication that the community isn’t going to keep it running. There’s no money in it. You can’t even recoup the cost of running the servers. We’ve had community-run servers in the past, sure. They were much smaller and simpler. I used to run a MUSH with a few hundred players while working a full time job.
I would not and indeed could not run a modern MMO. Anyone who thinks they could, and would be willing to do so in their spare time, almost certainly doesn’t know what the fuck they are talking about.
That’s harm. When you say some poor schmuck who cares about his online multiplayer community needs to volunteer hundreds of hours a month to keep that community running, you’re harming that person. And everyone saying “the community could do it” when they actually mean “someone else could do it for me” are the people who actually need to be punished.
And I believe the most appropriate punishment is to take away their game until they know how to play well with others.