News EFF fights the ESA for abandonware DMCA exemption

It'll happen weather it's legal or not. All they can achieve is push legitimate gamers underground.

 

Let them do what they want, the DMCA is doing more harm than good and should be scraped imho, I'm all for protecting copyrighted works but these organisations are abusing the copyright laws.

 

All the US Copyright Office needs to do is add a provision that circumventing the server access is illegal while those servers are still active, but legal once those servers are taken offline for good.

 

Game developers/publishing houses don't care about what happens 10 years into the future. It is all about profit now.
Everybody knows that multiplayer games will be shut down sooner or later. Only subscription based games have a chance of lasting more than 10 years.

Ea tried to do the good thing with Battlefield 2 and the rest of the games from that era but they passed the torch to the wrong company.
Luckily there are independent people creating their own gaming network to support BF2. There is also a Nexus network in place for Bad company 2 and soon Battlefield 3 (in closed beta).
Still I don't see many players on these network. It is the die hard fans that also has the technical knowhow to use these networks. So in reality not a big threat to any games developers. The majority still rush to buy the next great game anyways.

 

I agree on this point, once the official servers are down why would you want to crush the community? You're no longer making money on it so it needs no protection. In fact, this could boost sales on older games if people are willing to get legitimate copies to play with friends.

 

You pretty much answered that yourself.

Companies are generally obsessed with money, the larger ones more so and even then some still stand out. So they don't want to compete with old games people are no longer paying for especially if it's their own old game.

EA is, as usual, a prime example. On more than one occasion they've shut down servers for one game as a sequel is released, think it's any coincidence that LAN/direct connect support was killed in favour of online via those servers.

They want the ability to completely lock people out of older games so they can force them to pay for the newer one rather than hope people buy the newer one due to its own merits. They have been moving steadily towards that for ages because they couldn't do it outright without a major backlash, or the control online requirement grant them.

Now the pattern is obvious, though it was obvious what they were doing and where they were going back then too especially if you ever listened to their excuses or reasoning, somehow they aren't much better at it today with SimCity's online nonsense being an example.

I haven't given EA a cent since they started this crap back around the Need for Speed Underground days.

Using EA as an example here is actually a perfect example especially since you mentioned "community". EA is very anti community, infact to EA community is competition. Do you think EA would be able to charge people for DLC that added a few meshes or texture to a game if the "community" was expanding that game with mods. Do you think EA would be able to sell something as simple as a balloon as DLC if they let the community add things to the game. Go and have a look at how much something like The Sims 3 costs, including all those addons. At this point locking people out of old games entirely when they release a sequel, isn't far off.

This kind of behavior is only possible thanks to control, which brings us to DRM. DRM is not about stopping piracy, it's about control and not just in games but in all media just like with movies, music and software in general. It's the kind of control where they can force you to pay for the same thing again just so you can use it on a different or newer device, music is an obvious goto here, but it applies to movies and games just as much.