What part of that petition says that it's to support games indefinitely? It explicitly requests action to protect customers after support ends. That inherently means it won't be supported indefinitely.

The one from Accursed Farms that set off this entire campaign. It's not about supporting a game forever. It's about not killing them intentionally when support ends.

Watch the video again. That's not what this is about.

Now those online services are supported by digital sales, like on PC storefronts. Digital makes up the majority of console purchases now too, but they still continue to charge for online, so it's no wonder PC market share grew in the interim.

There are so many viable alternatives. I've got an increasingly long list of things I won't tolerate in games anymore, and I'm nowhere near running out of games to play. The big problem is being able to identify which of those checkboxes are checked or not; PC Gaming Wiki is working for this purpose lately, though it shouldn't be necessary.

Gotcha. As I said in the original blurb, I'd prefer some way to play the game LAN that it seems like they're not doing. V Rising and most survival games, for all that I can tell, preserve all of those elements of MMOs or MMO lites, and it exposes how unnecessary it is to take away the ability for the player to host their own servers. Even in a best-case scenario where the game is super successful, you can run into things like login queues or server maintenance, so having the ability to play the game no matter what is a must for me. Survival games tend to lean into the use case of people who want to PVP and grief other players, which isn't for me, and I'd much rather co-op with some friends, but since I control the server, I absolutely have the ability to tune it that way. And since these games account for dozens of players on the same instance (Factorio goes up to 255), you're capable of replicating all of those random interactions, for as rare as they actually are in a game like Destiny or Warframe, which are my frame of reference for MMO lite games, because they have you spend most of your time in instances for only a few players.

Have you played Wayfinder before to say how much of the game up to this point was built on those larger scale random interactions as opposed to small instances with a few players?

No, I meant things that people would miss. I guess matchmaking fits that bill, but we'll have to see what it looks like outside of direct invites once this new version exists. Each platform provides free matchmaking services, so I'd be surprised if it didn't exist at all.

You are asking if it could be same experience as an MMO-lite without being online. Think about it.

No, I'm asking if it could be the same experience without running it on someone else's machine. V Rising does not have an online requirement, but you can play it online on a server you control, perhaps even the same machine you use to play yourself, with up to like 60 players. Destiny is an MMO lite, is it not? For the most part, you're only playing that game 3 players at a time too, just like this one. Is there something that this game was already doing that it won't be able to do now that it's peer to peer?

But could it not still be the exact same game except without a server requirement?

Is there anything that was there before that is for sure not going to be there now as a result of this?

You can plug them in, but PS4 format controllers don't work on PS5 games; they only work on PS4 versions of games. You know, for all of that fancy rumble that's meaningless when you're playing Guilty Gear on a fightstick.

Well, let me take a little bit of credit away from them then, because those controllers are needlessly mandatory, even for games that don't make use of its features! How do you think fighting game players felt about that right as Sony bought the world's biggest fighting game tournament and made all tournaments run on PS5? lol

We're in such uncharted territory that I don't think I'll be able to predict it, but if Microsoft nails their next box, with its multiple stores and a bespoke version of Windows, which would make it capable of running Sony's games that aren't on "Xbox" today, I don't know how Sony will be able to compete by being second to market. Anything can happen though, it just won't involve PlayStation 6 succeeding by doing what PlayStation 5 did.

There's overhead to making consoles the way that they're made now; not just R&D and manufacturing cycles, but think about the cert process, for instance, that doesn't exist on PC. That overhead only makes sense at a certain scale. Economic factors are just changing how feasible it is to make a console the way that they've always been made, plus multiple countries' legislation is finally breathing down these companies' necks to destroy walled garden ecosystems, and Microsoft is attempting to get out ahead of it. The Steam Deck isn't quite as easy as a traditional console, but it's damn close for a competitive price, and it's just a computer. I think we're all expecting Microsoft's next box and potential handheld to just do that but with Windows, and I honestly don't know how Sony will adapt, but they're in the process of adapting.

I'm well aware of how consoles typically make money. So is Sony. The thing is, their games are getting more expensive to make and take longer too. That means there are fewer of them, which means there are fewer reasons to buy a PlayStation, which means there are fewer games sold to profit from. They historically haven't published on other platforms, because their bread is buttered when you feel like you need a PlayStation and buy your games there, even the ones available elsewhere. There's always demand for an easy-to-use box you can buy for less than a PC, but in the past decade, consoles have become more complex, PCs have become easier (and/or the know-how for using them became more commonplace), and the gap in price between the two has shrunk, especially when you consider long-term costs like subscriptions for online play or having to buy remasters of games that you could just have on PC and run at better resolutions and frame rates, things that consumers have become to savvy to.

Oh yeah, and of course Microsoft is doing even worse, sounding like their next console will just be a dressed-up Windows PC.

Well, I didn't stretch that one piece of information into that conclusion. Sony's basically telling their investors that. Their expensive exclusives are not fueling growth in adoption of the platform the way they used to, making their margins far slimmer, even when their competition in Xbox is basically squeezed out of the market. I believe Circana estimated that peak spending on console hardware was all the way back in 2009, when there were three extremely successful consoles in healthy competition with one another. If their old model was still working, they wouldn't have broken into the PC market to begin with. With the PC sales of Helldivers 2, that game is 7th in revenue for PlayStation published games; without the PC sales, it doesn't crack the top 20. New management at Sony is embracing these market realities. Consoles used to be the dominant platform for AAA games, and they no longer are, and that makes plenty of sense when you realize how many of consoles' advantages have been eroded over the years.

Missing its sales target means that Sony expected it to sell more by this point in its cycle. The console model is breaking down.

I just finished up Titan Quest with a friend, and we moved on to V Rising. That game feels very good to play. The controller support is a tad wonky in menus, and I wish that the opening minutes were better at facilitating co-op play, but it seems like a very cool loop between base building/survival and action.

The story changes are, to me, some of the most interesting parts of remaking this game in the first place.

Hopefully the last game Id makes before Microsoft closes them is a good one.