alt Hacker NewsSo this only really applies to games you have to purchase once but are online-only? That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
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This is really about Ubisoft's The Crew, a one-time-paid mostly-singleplayer car race game about infights and revenges in an illegal street racing group, that required Internet connection, which server got shut down. So yeah.
The required connection and authentication was likely an anti-piracy measure, so kind of doubly yeah.
Diablo 3 and 4 would be massive examples? Hell Divers. Monster Hunter, perhaps?
Online head to head games like Street fighter? Maybe RTS games like Dawn of War?
Pay Day.
Seems like all of these would be hit and will move to freemium or subscription.
> Continuous cost without continuous revenue
That would be the case if the publisher had any intent to actually keep the service online. Empirically they do not, hence the law.
> That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
Eh, it sounds unintuitive, but in practice it's extremely common. Almost every first-person shooter (well, you could really expand that to "almost every competitive multiplayer game") made by major studios is either a one-time purchase or entirely free. The ongoing revenue comes from cosmetics and other in-game goodies.
This sort of economy makes sense when you consider consoles (especially back in the day), where it's easy to get people to buy a disc but hard to get people to sign up for a subscription.
It also covers games with any form of MTX, even if the base game is free. So most live service games.
I assume you're actually a gamer, and not just an economist speculating on a market you're not exposed to? Because I don't know how to reconcile your comment with my reality. There are tons of live-service single-purchase games, I would even say they the overwhelmingly default model in 2026 compared to WoW-style subscription games.
If you want an answer to your "continuous cost without continuous revenue" riddle, the answer is in-game purchases, DLC, attracting new accounts over time, and the unspoken unadvertised promise "we can cut our losses at any time and shut down servers." This lattermost incentive is what is unhealthy for the market and what should be regulated to no longer be an incentive (short of having peer- or community-hosted servers, at least).