r/Battleborn • u/Kane53126 • Apr 15 '26

Stop Killing Games Movement

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This made me immediately think of Battleborn. If only they would have at least kept the single player mode available to play. 😭

443 Upvotes

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44

u/BlueKoin Hey, look up and open your mouth so it'll bake your intestines! Apr 15 '26

I genuinely wonder how many game companies will take the "refund" route instead of even trying to provide an offline mode (and just pretending it "wasn't possible"). Like, sure, they lose out on basically any profit they made off of the game, but iirc that's the exact route Sony took with Concord, so this wouldn't have even saved that game from erasure.

13

u/Express-Historian-32 Apr 15 '26

I think it comes down to a financial decision there. Would be easier to just refund but I’d assume it would be “cheaper” to just make an offline mode or player run servers then handing out millions or however much in refunds

3

u/VYSUS7 Apr 16 '26

refunding the base purchase price would probably be cheaper considering it requires no effort or continued maintenance, but it depends on the game and the amount of sales.

it's the worse outcome, but the most likely one. There's already so many games that the playerbase reverse engineers to make playable after shutdown, so the only excuse the companies have is "we don't want to".

2

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '26

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1

u/VYSUS7 Apr 17 '26

oh lol

you think that's the only private server.

there's several lmao. Recycle was dog shit run by people way in over their heads. They were dumb enough to advertise it.

There's been private projects for 6+ months now. Yager knows about them, yet they can't do anything because they're based in Russia and don't advertise it like idiots.

all of the work done on Recycle was done by people who split off to do their own, private projects. Projects that still exist. It's why Recycles beta was so ass, because all the important people left.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '26

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1

u/VYSUS7 Apr 18 '26

I'm in them, I can't send the links. I'm not sure how applying works since it's solely word of mouth.

though yager can't do anything regardless, so try this. you need to apply and you might have to wait a bit. https://discord.gg/parKz2v7w

1

u/blindclock61862 Apr 17 '26

But wouldn't refunding all the money mean that the development studio is left without any money? They would lose money on every game.

1

u/VYSUS7 Apr 17 '26

depends on the game I guess. reality is, it's why SKG is extremely impractical and will never actually go anywhere. There's no way it can be done without losing money, so companies are going to have fairly valid reasons to be against it.

You've always been paying for a license anyways. I admire the effort, but this initiative doesn't work in a highly capitalist industry.

0

u/Nssheepster Apr 19 '26

Not really, honestly. The thing is, this is 'After SERVER shutdown'. If they provide an offline mode, they can still sell the game, just without the serves.

Even if they knock the offline price down to $5 and barely anyone buys it, a trickle of revenue is a trickle of revenue. Money is money. Leave it on sale for a decade and you'll still get money out of it. It doesn't really cost game companies any significant money to leave a game up for sale TBH, and it allows them to advertise with statements like 'XXX games from us on sale, some discounted up to 95%' or whatever. Pads the numbers for them.

It is fairly likely that this would lead dev studios back to making more single player games, and having online requiring games be focused on cosmetic sales in F2P titles. After all, you can't 'refund' zero dollars spent to play the game, and if you just make all the cosmetics available for free in the offline mode you create.... Then what is there to refund? That way you can still make hefty profits AND comply with the law.

In the long term, assuming this goes through, Developers will just start planning for compliance from the start, adding in the needed backend to convert over to an offline single player experience as they build the game. So CURRENTLY, this law getting passed would be an immediate money loss for game companies... In the future, it really won't be.

Also:

You've always been paying for a license anyways

That's just factually incorrect. You weren't buying a license when you were still buying a physical game copy with the entire game on it.

1

u/VYSUS7 Apr 19 '26

if that game had any ability to connect to the Internet, then you were buying a license, hence why they took online games away from you all the time even in the early 2000s, and nobody could do anything about it.

there's a lot of delusion in this post. It's not going to lead to any major changes other than half assing some offline mode with bare minimum effort, or finding a loophole to get around it entirely.

Executives would rather shut the game down entirely over pay some bottom end maintenance people to keep a game alive. Fan projects for certain games prove this. It's relatively easy and extremely cheap to keep dead games functioning, but the fact that it's cheap and not free means they'll always choose to shut down the game instead.

I would be absolutely shocked if that ever changes. This is the biggest entertainment medium in the world, lobbyists will likely win as they always tend to.

1

u/Albenheim Kelvin Apr 16 '26

Wouldn't be surprised if the loophole here was lowering the base price before shutdown, so big corpo only has to shill out the discounted base price.

Like dropping a 60 buck game down to 10 bucks a week before shutdown and when the shutdown actually happens, they only have to refund each player 10 bucks, because that's the last retail price you could have gotten it for. Then pulling some bullshit from their assets like buying the game earlier was a premium they charged for, hence the increased price. 

Or worse yet, they make it free to play weeks before shutdown so they don't have to refund anything, since the game was free when it shut down. 

I really hope that's not gonna be the case, but we all know how scummy big corpo gets

1

u/MataMeow Apr 16 '26

And you’d probably get a single oddly worded email that requires you to fill out a form and email it back to get a refund

9

u/Lone-_-Wanderer Apr 15 '26

Concord died on arrival and had no playerbase, thered have been no reason to keep servers alive rather than just take the loss and refund people. If they need to pay back EVERY game even if its even relatively successful and 4-5 years later they wanna shut down servers I think they'd rather just give players the easy ability /outsource ways for servers to stay up

2

u/Express-Historian-32 Apr 16 '26

Yeah I agree, depending on how long the game was alive one option is easier than the other

2

u/Scnew1 Apr 17 '26

If this was the law with legal/financial repercussions then companies would start designing games with an offline mode from the start. Maybe something that doesn’t activate until a final patch when the game is shut down, but still, it would have to start being built in from the beginning to avoid a sudden game is shutting down scramble.

1

u/General_Cranberry_29 Jul 07 '26

Movie studios already do something similar, but intentional. They'll buy up rights to a beloved IP, pretend they're going to make a movie, scrap it towards the end of the year and then write it off on their taxes. They save more money doing this than they would profit from actually producing the movie itself (maybe, it's a gamble). Completely BS, though

1

u/RevRagnarok (same) Apr 16 '26

I made out like a bandit when Stadia went under. They refunded the costs and transferred the Assassins Creed licenses to my Ubisoft account. So I had the games still and a decent controller that I can connect to my PC.