vetz wrote on 2021-06-01, 08:52:

Also why remove them at all? Couldn't they just keep selling them at reduced price with single player enabled?

Far be it for me to defend EA on any issue, as they are a truly terrible company. But if those games contain licensed music (as in contemporary pop/rock/rap songs) it could be that the license expired and they are no longer allowed to sell the games due to that.

IIRC, something similar happened to certain GTA titles a while ago, but they just patched out the licensed songs from the digital versions of the game, instead of removing them from the stores.

https://www.pcgamer.com/rockstar-confirms-tha … -being-removed/

not that long from now I suspect many if not most games will be streamed 'at' the customer with nothing much stored locally, a netflix for games - it is starting already

at that stage the gamer truly will recognise that they do not own games, they rent games entirely at the mercy of the copyright holder with whom they agreed (eula)

so it will go more and more in other areas of life too

media as a service
software as a service
transport as a service
accommodation as a service (even housing eventually?)
etc

this is the current direction and it is enabled by the very technology whose roots we enjoy here

I'm music producer, hopefully games will feature less Sync music licenses like this. Mostly you pay $1000-$2000 for one song license, but I think it should be unlimited in time. If this is the real case, then I hope game companies will start to hire real producers and compose real soundtracks like Rom Di Prisco and original Need For Speed series. He cannot release the music on Spotify because of that, but we have the games, haha 😁

Was Carbon even on online stores? I looked several times to check if I could buy it and Carbon or if I could activate my copy of Carbon on Origin or somewhere, but I never found anything. Also, I thought the multiplayer was provided through GameSpy so it was dead for years.

Did people actually play multiplayer on those games? My guess is that the servers were sitting mostly idle and it didn't make sense for them to keep them up.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-06-01, 14:44:

Did people actually play multiplayer on those games? My guess is that the servers were sitting mostly idle and it didn't make sense for them to keep them up.

Yes, that is correct, EA said the amount of people playing were so low that it didn't make sense to keep the servers up. These would not have been the first games to have MP servers shut down, but if EA wanted to be on the side of the consumer they could've released the server software to the community.

Licensing issues were not mentioned as an issue. It could be an issue in the future, but the way they worded it seemed more like they didn't want to sell an incomplete product without MP.

Different publisher but something similar happened to Test Drive Unlimited 1 and 2. That was Infogrames aka "Atari" which they bought the right to call themselves.

I really wanted TDU1 but it was pulled from sale before I started using Steam.
There was a very long period (probably a couple years) when TDU2 was still available but it's multiplayer servers were chronically down. They'd randomly come up for about 2 days every several months. It appeared that the server software was accidentally getting restarted when somebody would reboot a server somewhere, and then get shut down a few days later when it got noticed.
Obviously the game was getting lots of bad reviews during that time. That was when I bought it because I was willing to pay just for the single player mode.

After a long time they pulled TDU2 from Steam so now both games are gone.
TDU2 is in my Steam library and I can still play it single player, but I'm not sure I could successfully install it again on a new PC. Infogrames had their own DRM so getting a new install to activate seems iffy.

I could be totally wrong here but for me licensing is like region coding on DVDs (and Blu-Rays)...
Yes I understand you want control
Yes you should be compensated
But by limiting (geographically, term [time] or otherwise) you are limiting sales.
When DVDs first came out it was common for a movie to be out on DVD in the US a full year before it came out in Europe so I could see the point as there was a thin chance you picked up the DVD in the US and then never went to the cinema to see it when it came out in Europe....
But for the most part I can't see that being such a big deal today.
There are a few TV shows from the 70s, 80s and 90s that you can't really see because of the music used....
All a bunch of money grabbing nonsense that hurts everyone in the end...

My tin-foil hat side things that HD-DVD partially lost because it had no region coding,..

Carrera wrote on 2021-06-08, 10:07:

My tin-foil hat side things that HD-DVD partially lost because it had no region coding,..

Sony as a game console manufacturer didn't region lock their physical PS3 games and supported BD.
Microsoft as a console manufacturer region locked their physical Xbox 360 games and supported HD-DVD.

Though it could be different for the film industry where Sony is also a major player.

As a non-console player I didn't know that....
😀