If you buy a game and they stop updating, maintaining or even keeping the mandatory online services, the publishers are making your game worse. The quality of a digital product shouldn’t degrade over time. You should get what you paid for. It wouldn’t hurt those companies to make people able to run servers themselves.
There really has to be some warranty for digital products, like you have for tangible products. Software companies shouldn’t be above the law.
None of that applies here, FC6 is just going into maintenance mode. Online services remain up, no degradation of service, the game is available and playable.
From the article:
It’s also unlikely to get many more glitch or bug fixes unless something significant emerges.
I’d bet that rather than fixing a glaring security hole they’ll just stop the online service. It would be way more beneficial at the end of online services’ lifetimes (this game is 2 years old, mind you!) to open source or at least publish the server parts of the game.
But that would require laws which benefit the end users and not corporations, as they’ll never do it themselves if they’re not forced to.
