NCSoft To Close North American Lineage Servers 91
NCSoft announced yesterday that they plan to shut down all North American servers for their long-running Lineage MMORPG on June 29th. The game came out in 1998 and gradually became one of the most successful MMOs of all time, reporting over a million subscribers as much as a decade after launch. Account creation on North American servers has been disabled, subscriptions for coming months have been refunded, and existing accounts have been reactivated for free.
"We will not be making any additional content updates, but we do have US Ruleset changes and lots of great events planned for the next two months. We want to give you every opportunity to make all of your remaining Lineage dreams come true. We hope that everyone will stick around to have fun with the game you love in the time we have left. We know that we have incredibly loyal fans that have stood by us for the past ten years. As painful as it was, as a business, we had to make a very difficult, but necessary, decision."
Re:I hate it when this happens (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you actually, you know, like MMOs. Which are pretty much known for needing an online server to function. This isn't like refusing to buy games that have DRM requiring online authentication; this is a genre that functions only on the basis of large, centralised servers.
I've been "clean" for over a year now, but prior to that, I spent almost 7 years playing first Final Fantasy XI and then World of Warcraft. And I don't particularly regret it. I had some good times, met a few friends and then moved on when I got tired of it. For the average MMO-gamer, their initial purchase and monthly subs represent spectacularly efficient spending on an hours per dollar basis compared to pretty much any other form of entertainment purchase.
Having a moral objection to offline games that require online authentication for copy-protection is one thing. Objecting to a game that is fully online by its very nature for requiring players to be online just makes you look silly.
Re:I hate it when this happens (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I hate it when this happens (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, this was was part of the entire point behind the creation of copyright law. In the US, the 'for a limited' clause was there so that the author could benefit by monetizing a short term monopoly on their work, and then the copyright would expire and it would revert into the public domain.
Of course, this was in the days of hand written scribes and latter of movable type presses. The concept of digital information transmission did not yet exist, nor with it the idea that information could be shared near instantly at a fraction of the cost.
Since then, copyright laws have increased in duration from the original 'Statute of Anne' which provided 14 years, with an additional 14 years of the copyright was renewed. Compared to the current US version which protects from 70 years after the death of the author, or for corporate owned works, 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication.
We've also moved away from the publication of plain text works, to the new age of computer binary code. So even if the copyright on a computer program would expire, there are no provisions that the author need also provide the original source code. So the US copyright on Lineage should expire in 2093 (should no further extensions be added, and NCSoft is South Korean, so foreign copyrights can get even tricker) then we would be freely able to distribute the compiled client code... but without access to the never published source code or server software... well, doubtless 95 year old software would only be of any interest to historians anyways. Who could freely view the copyright code all that wanted, even during the duration of the copyright... just as long as they didn't distribute it amongst themselves for study.