Comment by jt2190 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jt2190 | Hacker News Reader

> Even the singleplayer components [of Ubisoft’s “The Crew (2014) were unusable when the servers were turned off]: [Y]ou just wanting to race around cars in a world with you and other NPCs in it, is no longer viable. Essentially, you didn't "buy" the game, but in a sense were "renting" it for an indeterminate amount of time, a lease that expired due to the publishers and developers no longer wanting to provide that service for you.

Probably true! There is likely some additional revenue that the publisher gets from running servers, even for single-player mode. The question then is what will change in these games if that revenue is no longer there to fund them? Will the quality be lower? Will the price be higher? Will the publishers release new games less frequently? Maybe they just don’t make single-player games anymore?

Maybe they just stop adding hard requirements for online connectivity to their single-players games, which is something which takes more effort to do in the first place?

I worry that they just stop completely shipong single-player mode as that seems easiest.

That is fine. Other companies will fill that void. There are plenty of small indy companies that make great single-player games, that could benefit from the attention.

This might happen to so extent but a big part of the market is single player games, so those companies would also lose a large portion of their profit

Ok, but the context of the article (which I quoted) is multi player games with a single player mode. Of course single player games don’t need and often don’t have a server, so whether or not they make up a large part of the market is irrelevant here.

Honestly? I think we can do without these predatory practices even at the cost of some games.

And I somehow doubt there’s revenue to make off these single player games being online dependent, because the most probable ways simply wouldn’t fly in Europe due to consumer protections.

Most likely it’s just “anti-piracy” or something like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com