What the heck?

"Writin_Reg;c-17000512" wrote:
I have plenty of games that I could no longer play because companies (or microsoft) update their systems - and never gave us a way to use the older games - in fact even updating our own systems did not make these games playable because the companies did not update the game itself. You were just flat out of luck.

I don't have an issue with companies updating - it is always a benefit for the games they produce. My issues are with companies who update and don't even try to help players be able to play the games. All of them need to make Legacy systems to play their games - but most never do.

I will say EA has offered ways to play many of their outdated games though over the years - some of which were even made by other companies that EA took over long after these games were out there, and EA was able to give me a game update to make that game work. I have not had the same help from many of the other big game companies though. So having faced this experience many times - I do think they are being a lot more generous than many other game companies. Not all mind you - I have had good luck with a few companies - like the one who first took over Sierra games they were good at making the games work - then Activision/Blizzard took them over and they wouldn't help at all. So they ended up in my trunk of hundreds of unplayable games - which proves a lot of companies don't make it possible to even play the games you paid for.

I guess it depends on how you look at it. When a multi-billion-dollar company is dealing with the fanbase for one of its flagship franchises that keeps it afloat as a company and enables it to make billions of dollars in profit, I'm going to be wary of applying the term "generous" to things they do that make paying customers happy. Certainly I'd believe some individuals in the company are trying to be kind where they can and those individuals may at times deserve credit where it is due, but a decision like this one, I don't think it's a generous act, though I would imagine it's meant to be viewed in a positive light by the community and reflect positively on the company as a result.

I might be ok with calling it "good business practice" or "proper treatment of the customer's interests"; what you'd expect from a good customer-business relationship. I feel like "generous" is a stretch. I'm hesitate to nod along with applying terms we usually reserve for kindness between individual human beings being applied to how a business interfaces with its paying customers (and the money customers put into this series can be quite a lot).

If other companies are poor at legacy support, I would argue they are managing their customer-business relationship poorly, not that EA is being generous in this instance. Though in many cases of legacy support, I suspect it's simply a case of the company not being prepared to handle the evolution of technology, along with things intellectual property possibly changing hands if a company went under, or was consumed by another company. And then there are problems, of course, like how to actually go about providing the legacy support. If it's a game that was never a "live service" to begin with, how do you go about distributing it to people who paid in a way that it can still work and is it worth the money to try? Or if it was a game that is old and needs to be adapted to new systems, how much time and money is involved working that out, and how doable is it? I have a version of KOTOR on steam that was updated to work on more recent technology (I paid, but I think it was much much cheaper than the original). But even though it works, there are little things where it can throw a fit (last I checked anyway), like it struggles to deal with widescreen monitor settings in fullscreen. The UI just wasn't designed to adapt to that at all.