Lots of bad takes in this thread. The whole idea behind this is just to stop defrauding customers that buy your software and then are left holding the bag. Nobody is asking for developers to keep running server infra for eternity.
Any of the following options are enough to satisfy this proposal:
- Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.
- Have your server source code (stripped down of proprietary stuff) ready for public release at EoL.
- Allow customers to reverse engineer the binaries and communication protocol after EoL.
- Package dedicated server binaries with the game and allow customers to connect to it via a LAN or direct IP option.
It's like people forgot what multiplayer gaming was like pre-2005. Everyone ran their own servers. You could run your own Half-Life game server and other users merely pointed their game client to your IP address.
The only exceptions back then were the MMORPGs.
There's no reason we can't go back to the way it used to be. I used to run multiplayer Starcraft on a LAN without an Internet connection. Why can't I do that with Starcraft II? We used to play Quake on custom servers. Some servers had fun communities. All that is gone in favor of live services that can be shut down on a whim.
I don't even think requiring server source code to be disclosed should be necessary. Merely the binaries with some basic instructions on setting it up (which could easily be based on internal documents for setting up test servers) would be sufficient.
Yeah, pre-console-ization of PC releases, devs would produce server binaries that would allow you to host your own servers. You could tweak rules, give preferential slots, etc. It allowed you to create a real community around your self-hosted server.
It's really difficult to create a cohesive gaming organization without controlling your own multiplayer servers. It's a sad state of gaming that every game has centralized servers. If anything, I'd love to see requirements that decentralize multiplayer hosting. The devs can release their own servers, but they'd be alongside the community ones, as well.
World of Warcraft actually made it very easy to use a custom server, since you'd just need to change a hostname in a single text file and the client would connect to it instead. Not that it was allowed but from a technical perspective it was quite supportive. I think it's no longer as simple but there's still private server projects around.
As a broke college student, I had a great time playing on third-party servers. The experience was janky, of course, but it was hilarious. I made some good friends there.
Then I had to stop playing because it was eating into my study time too much.
I've tried going back to MMOs a couple of times since then, but nothing seems to have the charm of a smaller community like that.
I developed a few commercial games on unity a while ago, here's why some of what's proposed is harder than you think,
- The original developper is not working on the game anymore, another company is maintaining it and has no capacity for making significant changes to it.
- You can't release your server source code because you will be using a lot of proprietary add ons that can't be released, and those are usually absolutely essential.
- Your server is going to be built against a now unsupported version of the engine, that you probably can't even install on current year operating systems
- stripping the source code of 'proprietary stuff' is significant work, there's no package management, code is copy pasted.
- Your protocol is based on third party commercial code and that other company doesn't like reverse engineering
- Changing the way the networking works to remove the lobby is significant development work, the networking framework is out of date, not maintained, and the devs are most likely not available anymore.
1. Not a problem because it's not being applied retroactively, but it should be included in the design from the start for new games
2. It is a problem now, but the license for those can and will change if the law mandates it. Unless addon authors don't want to make any money, that is.
3. I don't get the argument. If it works at the time of release - you're good. You're not expected to keep updating it to work on modern systems.
4. This is just point 2 repeated.
5. This is still just point 2 repeated and reverse engineering is allowed in EU, whether they like it or not.
6. Why do you need to change the way networking works?
If your game uses matchmaking or is multi region or crossplay it’ll be depending from a lot of different services, and tightly integrated with them.
Latency concerns, for example, might be handled at several points in the flow that would stop existing for a standalone server. None of the code involved is reusable because it was written for a completely different context.
There is nothing preventing you from writing an abstraction that supports both the fancy middleware as well as direct IP connections.
I can say this with certainty because I've also worked on multiplayer in several shipped multi-region cross-platform games, and this sort of arrangement is precisely what we have shipped. Granted, Direct IP connections are usually only supported on PC, but they are there, they do work, and our PC players appreciate that piece of mind.
The initiative is not even asking you to provide the full functionality of your online-components.
All you should have is a "reasonable effort" EOL plan that allows customers to continue using the parts that can work without the developers support. They even call out "Gran Turismo Sport" as a good example. Sony announced the EOL a year before, and stopped selling micro-transactions. Then they removed the online services while retaining offline support for add-ons and in-game items.
A reasonable EOL plan might be: We'll support the online matchmaking for 3 years. After that we retain the rights to shut down the services providing at least a one year notice. All in-game items and add-ons will be made downloadable for all players 6 months before shut-down. All offline game modes will remain playable using those items as before.
> You can't release your server source code because you will be using a lot of proprietary add ons that can't be released, and those are usually absolutely essential.
This hard from the developer perspective, but its solvable at the regulation level.
The rule won't apply retroactively to all games ever released, you know. All of these requirements can - and should - be met when new games are designed and architectured to satisfy the law.
That would require a complete re-architecture of game engines and complete rework of how the games are developed and published. If I had to satisfy those requirements next year, I just wouldn't release in Europe, and I say that as an European.
Then just keep doing things the same way, but add a disclaimer that says you are only selling a license to play the game, and it's not guaranteed to work after a certain date.
Then like what happened with the cookie banners, everybody is going to put the minimum date, and the only winners will be the lawyers selling consulting in EU regulation compliance with the publishers.
You are begging the question, the question being whether consumers care. You believe they don't (e.g. that the expires-on date won't affect sales) and the creators of this petition believe people will care and will prefer games that do not have that expiry date.
So no, it's not inevitable that every game will just sprout an expiry date. It's possible but only if you're right that consumers don't care about owning versus renting games.
I'm more and more baffled the more I go through this thread.
It is as easy as saying, "this game you're buying won't run after 2030"
Or publishing the bare minimum APIs you'd need to simulate to get the game to function. We have great people in the community that will make stuff work on their own, no instructions required.
Just don't go out of your way to destroy your game.
> - Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.
This software is not guaranteed beyond 0 Unix time.
> - Have your server source code (stripped down of proprietary stuff) ready for public release at EoL.
This isn't viable, and i would expect anyone on this site to understand that. it's roughly equivalent to saying "just make facebook stripped of proprietary code and ready for the public to run"
> - Allow customers to reverse engineer the binaries and communication protocol after EoL.
This is a reasonable path forward, but likely a non-starter in the US for political reasons. I understand that "stop killing games" is an EU thing.
> - Package dedicated server binaries with the game and allow customers to connect to it via a LAN or direct IP option.
No. Because any explanation will come from someone invested in the subject, so will all sound completely reasonable and may even contain aspects of truth.
I want to play games with my friends, not consider how the landscape of always-online services have distributed brokerage connectivity services, global banlists, and whatever powers microtransactions into what should be a game with four little dudes running a kitchen badly. I especially don’t want to consider how rising requirements for stability and cross-platform connectivity which have prompted these services means that P2PoverIP simply won’t work in the face of CGNAT or Sony’s distribution policies or fucking Comcast not having IPv6 yet; and I especially don’t want to think of the lower average technical acumen of the individual gamer has caused dedicated servers to completely fall out of fashion due to user confusion.
I really don’t want to think about the “paradox of polish”, where smaller games can get away with such things like dedicated servers and p2p networking that don’t work sometimes; whereas everything in an AAA title has to work flawlessly out of the gate or it’ll be panned despite the horse’s left testicle contracting appropriately in cold water.
Man, I don’t wanna be sad about market forces encouraging centralization for the efficiency necessary to stay competitive. I just wanna play dead or alive 2 with my bros even tho the dreamcast server’s offline.
Isn't that exactly how these companies scale across multiple data centers?
They write the code once, package it all together, and host it in multiple areas?
Getting back to games, I still don't see why allowing users to host private servers with their friends is impossible. If anything, it seems like its strictly a DRM issue...but at EOL for a game you no longer find profitable enough to keep the servers online, who really cares about DRM
Wat? E-trade is not an application, it's probably dozens of coordinated services. Meanwhile, a game usually has a single binary and another one for the server.
Well, this is about software you bought in advance. The Facebook comparison doesn't really work because you're not paying in advance to use it.
> This software is not guaranteed beyond 0 Unix time.
Grandma goes to the store to buy a game for their grandkid. She sees two game boxes. One says in the front "This game will stop working tomorrow and you will not get a refund" and the other says "This game will stop working in 2030". Which one does she pick?
Or if I understand right if you have some online component make final version of the game to operate without it. So you might lose multiplayer, but single player components of game should still continue to function.
Which to me doesn't sound huge ask. Unless you have overly strictly coupled the game with online. Which for single player games is likely bad design anyway.
I guess the bad takes are unavoidable. I couldn't find a clear and succinct explanation of the mission anywhere on that site and had to read your post to have any idea what are they even arguing for and against.
> Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.
Why wouldn't everyone just say "its not guaranteed to continue working after 0 seconds from release", which is basically the current situation, and be done with it?
I'm really glad there was an effort by streamers and influencers (shout-out to Asmongold and Penguinz0) to back Ross up and push back on PirateSoftware's incorrect take on this initiative. For a while it looked like the UK wasn't going to get 100k votes and that the EU initiative wasn't going to hit the million mark. Then about a week ago content got uploaded and this initiative got a much needed boost.
The console wars are no longer company vs company, it is company vs consumer. So much anti consumer shenanigans are going on in the video game industry a message needs to be sent.
If you care about video games, even in passing as a complete casual, please sign the petitions. I've done my dash for the UK.
The obvious case where this makes sense are single-player games that require internet access before they even launch, like when you need to link a Microsoft account to play Forza.
But it's less obvious to me how the legislation should work for a multiplayer-only game that goes out of business. I suppose it should require a refund at some point. But at what point?
Steam only lets you refund a game that you played for less than two hours.
And if you think that's not long enough, there's surely some time period where you can agree that you've got your money's worth. Kind of like how you lose the ability to say "I didn't like it" after you ate your whole dinner at a restaurant.
Yet in the comments here someone gives an example of three years of online support which is insane. Why is multiplayer special? Should Steam also let you refund any game until three years elapse?
> But it's less obvious to me how the legislation should work for a multiplayer-only game that goes out of business
The idea is to force the companies to provide an end-of-life plan that leaves the game in a "reasonably playable state". Depending on the game the approach can differ. Releasing the binaries along with instructions for hosting dedicated servers is one approach (that some games already take). I was playing on a (pirated, but it was a long way ago and I was a child) Lineage 2 server way back in 2007 on my local ISP network, so even something like MMORPGs can be covered if it's included in the discussion at the design stage of the game.
But even if the backend is very complex and vendor-locked, releasing something like a set of Cloudformation templates and saying "you can only host this on AWS and it's going to be restrictively expensive but there you go" is also an option that would satisfy the requirements. It's still better then having nothing at all to dig at (although some fans still do reverse-engineer and spin up community servers even without having access to any of this).
The problem is that you can easily create negative effects that hurt all developers while only imagining the impact on profitable AAA games which seems to be how most of these discussions go since people always bring up blockbuster games like Lineage 2 and World of Warcraft.
Ensuring that the multiplayer server component of your game is a standalone end-user distributable is a huge task to impose on every game that wants to have a multiplayer component. Especially once you consider the vast majority of games that never even get traction much less turn a profit.
So, the second someone buys your prerelease indie slither.io game, what exactly does this checklist look like? It needs to also day 1 launch with a self-hostable standalone server distro instead of the crappy spaghetti mess you live coded on an EC2 machine?
I fail to see the impact it would cause on a smaller studio - a lot of the times the games from those are usually are already pretty simple to self-host, as they don't want to bear the load of maintaining servers besides maybe a master-server (e.g. Valheim and the like).
> Especially once you consider the vast majority of games that never even get traction much less turn a profit.
Which is the whole point. Believe it or not - people who slave away on the game for years want people to maybe get to play it and enjoy it? Cause it's also art and not just business and there's a preservation angle to all of it?
> It needs to also day 1 launch with a self-hostable standalone server distro instead of the crappy spaghetti mess you live coded on an EC2 machine?
Not by day 1 launch, by day "we shut everything down". Not on an EC2 machine - as I mentioned in the thread above, even dumping your cloudformation templates and saying "enjoy all these queues" will satisfy the requirements.
I think the fact that you used the word "studio" kinda betrays a disconnect here. What about all the games that aren't built by "studios" and don't have "cloudformation templates" and have barely any sales?
They also need to have had invested in the extra work so that hypothetical players can have the opportunity to self-host the server on day 1 for a game that never caught on in the first place?
Fair enough, but that's a huge imposition on everyone for what probably comes from a very specific instance in your life of a single game that you loved having its server die after a while, long after you got your money's worth.
Nobody is even asking you to maintain the code.
You had it working when I purchased the product that required the code.
Just share that code. I'll even fiddle around with hard-coded paths or whatever you think is making this impossible
IMO, I'd be content with "dump the server binaries in a file server somewhere" as an adequate, if less than ideal, option. If the binaries are available, it'd take work, but not that much work, to wrangle them into something hostable by me. Some containerization here, some packet redirection proxies there, I can make it work.
In many cases, this means you would have to design the server significantly differently as you may use proprietary first or third-party technology in your server that you cannot redistribute.
THAT is exactly why this whole thing is best solved by law, rather than consumer action, because that is a coordination problem. To be compliant with the law, you would have to not use software that you can't redistribute to make games that will be available to citizens of the EU (or, at the very least, that consumers can't reasonably get their own license to). Which in turn means that third party library developers would have to figure out a licensing model that works under the new legal framework.
Even if the company's file server is only available for a fixed period of time, as long as they announce it some fraction of the playerbase will pick it up. Or release it as a torrent, if you really want to cheap out.
If you mean the servers to actually host the self-hosted solution, then "me" is a perfectly reasonable option. Server hosting is far from an insurmountable hobby expense.
> Ensuring that the multiplayer server component of your game is a standalone end-user distributable is a huge task to impose on every game that wants to have a multiplayer component.
Is it? Your hosting it somehow? No one is asking for a 1-click installer. What do you do? Let us do that.
The requirement is not to be standalone end-user distributable, the requirement is that it be somehow possible for an end user to set it up, which is a lot easier, unless the developers don't even know how to set up the backend. But that's a low bar still.
I've built a couple multiplayer browser games and getting the server component to a state where it's end-user distributable probably involves another 50% of the work that I put into building it in the first place since I'm just rsyncing code onto a VPS.
It's like thinking that just because the code exists, then it's in a state that could be pushed publicly to github, and that's not the case for almost any codebase.
To think that I would need to do all that the second I charge $1 seems unreasonable. And I think you underestimate how true this is for most games you see on Steam.
I mean, this covers it. Put that code out, and some one else can rysnc it to a VPS. The ask here in not that it's nicely bundled up into a single click deploy. It's that a path exists at all. If I need a fleet of servers and some technical know how, that's fine. Even expected for many games.
This is a proposal for new games, not existing games. If the requirement for this is there in the design stage then it incentivizes developers to design it in from the start and pushes the implementation costs down signficantly.
If a developer decides to not take that requirement in the design stage then that is their prerogative, but not even doing it would be like not following any other EU consumer protection law.
> It needs to also day 1 launch with a self-hostable standalone server distro instead of the crappy spaghetti mess you live coded on an EC2 machine?
If you can't meet these very achievable goals, perhaps the game isn't at a point where it should be sold for money. What are you going to do when that ec2 instance gets randomware and becomes inaccessible, just tell all the people who paid you money to go home and forget about it?
I love indie developers, but if one can't have a modicum of professionalism, then they shouldn't ask people to pay for a product.
Why not apply this only to AAA games, if that's your objection? You could say that only companies with annual revenue over $100 million have to follow the rule.
(Usually I don't like regulations that blatantly favor small businesses like this, because they're coming from a misguided place. But in this case, the benefit of the regulation scales with the number of customers of a given firm, while the costs are fixed per firm, so applying it to large firms but not large ones won't much encourage fragmentation and could capture most of the benefits of applying it to everyone without most of the costs.)
If you're buying a time limited license then the guaranteed time should be part of the license and considered part of the budget.
You are buying a license for 2 weeks sounds a lot less appealing than just "buying", but that would have been the reality for Concord had they not issued refunds. Is a year that much better? Maybe, but have it in writing.
These "we sell you a license we may terminate at any point for any reason" terms are absolute bullshit.
If you buy something, that will be yours, you can use it as long as you want, you can sold it or it can be inherited from you. (In copyright terms that's a perpetual, irrevocable license.)
If there is only a limited duration you can use something, that's called renting and the duration must be known before you enter into a contract.
No it isn't. People buy movie tickets, annual passes, and other things all the time that are not "rented". These are things you buy, and you may lose access to them if something happens to the business.
The terms of the purchase of an online game that might shut down are quite clear and known ahead of time. It's just not a fixed amount of time.
In that case you buy a ticket and not a movie / game. People buy movies on DVD / BR and they will be able to play them forever. This should be the same if you buy the same movie (with a one time payment) on a website, too.
There is a different valid business model, where you subscribe for eg. a monthly / yearly fee and can watch movies form a catalog or play games from a catalog as long as you keep paying and the service is working.
> The terms of the purchase of an online game that might shut down are quite clear and known ahead of time.
On a ticket or a pass there is a clear date or deadline printed on them. Do the same for games (buy thins game 10 EUR for 1 year) and that would be fine, too, (it is the same subscription model just with yearly duration).
>But you’re not renting or subscribing to it so that is inaccurate
If the game can be taken away from you st any time then "buying" is definitely inaccurate too then. "Licensing for a limited time" might be the most accurate, but something like "Lease for X years" might be more concise and accurate enough.
If that's the plan, then you should attach an expiration date to it. Tell the consumers how long you plan to keep things running, and commit to it. Don't just shrug and go "I dunno".
I think bankruptcy is clearly its own category here. This is targeted at companies who release something then shutter it because they didn't sell enough copies.
I've been reading the FAQ on the stop killing games website - they are not arguing for refunds, they're arguing for a EOL plan to be put in place for games
> No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way.
Modifying the game so that it runs offline is supporting the game. Three years after releasing a game, the devs who made it are usually long gone, busy on other projects, the libraries and framework used are out of date, out of support, etc. at that point making any change (or even building the project!) is a significant effort.
It's a "significant effort" only because it was made this way. You can design it to be easy hostable. It's just that there is no reason to do so currently. Stop killing games tries to give some legal reason.
The points you're raising would be valid if they weren't complete straw men.
Publishers aren't required to keep servers up, nor do they need to release the server binaries/code. It just demands that the publisher thinks about the end of life for their game. A great way to do that for online games would be to publish the server, definitely... But it's not required.
These kinds of gotchas and knowitall armchair analysis is way too premature. This isn't an actual legal document, it's a draft that would then become a legal document.
Why does it have to be a refund? Private servers have been a thing for a long time, with people even running them for MMOs like World of Warcraft or City of Heroes.
Do you just mean it should be legal to reverse engineer and cleanroom impl your own server if the developer's official servers are closed? I can agree with that.
But anything more than that I probably don't agree with.
Nah, if I pay for the game, I should get to keep it. If it's a monthly subscription only (not sure the current state, but WoW didn't us to be) then there's an argument to be made here that I was just buying access to those servers. But if I've plopped down 70 bucks and you don't feel like running your backend anymore, then the least you can do is provide the tools for others to do so.
Correct. It also used to require an upfront purchase of the game and every expansion. I'm not sure if it still does. Those who paid bought the game and should be able to continue playing it, even if Blizzard wants to shut down the servers.
It still does require a purchase, though now all expansions except the latest one are included in the base game and you can purchase the expansion with the base game at little markup over the expansion itself so the base game might as well be free.
They should be required to publish either the full spec that is sufficient for such a server to be written, or barring that, the complete source code for the server (and all resource files necessary to run it, if any of them don't come with the base game).
3 years of online support for what? a brand new game? I'm okay with this, otherwise fully refund it. If its a game that's been on for 15+ years, then whatever, not many are buying new copies presumably.
I would love for companies to allow people to host private servers when they abandon MMOs.
I would say requiring an online game be required to either support their players from 3 years after public release, and/or release the server code would be a reasonable expectation.
It may not always be possible, especially if you aren't actually charging in some way... but the money soak that some games are is ridiculous and the massive corporate decision making interfering with the game design in that direction deserve to have to fulfill that requirement.
I'm honestly mixed in a lot of ways as I do see and understand the need/desire for some decisions without malice or greed behind them. But in the end, it's a balancing act. Actual online driven games should probably have a monthly fee, if they don't they're bound to get taken offline sooner than later. It doesn't need to be a huge fee even $20/year to keep the lights on. For offline games, maintaining a license api server shouldn't be an undue burden, and there's almost no reason to ever turn such a thing off... If the game isn't that widely used a $5/mo VPS can probably handle it.
Aside: I really miss gamespy and the like for self-hosting the server side for interactive games, lan party play, etc. Wish more games would go back to that.
Is that you Pirate software? Your takes are as equally misinformed.
> But it's less obvious to me how the legislation should work for a multiplayer-only game
It should. If the game is made after the Stop Killing Games law is passed, you have to have A Plan. Open source engine? Not prosecute private servers? Pick your poison.
> Why is multiplayer special?
It's not. Multiplayer wasn't special ten years ago. Only insistence on always online DRM and micro transactions changed this.
I’m curious how this can be enforced. If a game requires centralized servers, and the company goes out of business, you can’t force a bankrupt entity to keep the system running. Even if they published an expiration date, if there is no money left to run the servers, there’s nothing to sue for, nobody to fine, and no money to run the server.
You could force the company to release their code upon bankruptcy, but what if another company wants to buy those assets? What if some other IP that they might use on other games is mixed in there and required for the game to work?
You could make a prohibition on live service games to begin with. You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset. The problem here is economic.
Game companies can’t go back to the old model of lumpy cash flow. You can’t have one huge pile of money come in when the game launches, and then a long miniscule tail. That doesn’t keep people employed. It’s also super risky when a game with a huge budget and long development time flops. You have to have some kind of constant revenue stream from subscriptions or micro-transactions to stay afloat. If users can run their own servers, that can never happen.
> You could make a prohibition on live service games to begin with. You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset. The problem here is economic
This sounds purely like a technical and legal problem, not an economic one. Even if a company wants to run their game as a live service they can be required to design it in such a way that the server portion is portable and self-hostable, but not release the server until they shut down their own.
This requires companies to have an end-of-life plan for their games should the company wish to take down their servers. It does not require source code for the centralized servers, only the binaries. In the case of bankruptcy, the end-of-life plan would be part of the assets sold with the game.
Nope! Do I need a fleet of servers to run it? No problem! Do I need a specific release.minor.patch of FreeBSD? No problem! Do I need your proprietary kernel patches? Yeah you need to release those.
Or do you have tooling that allows your devs to run it on their machines without the server components (most online games do)? Releasing that instead is also an option.
The petition doesn't ask for the company to keep the servers up, only that it's possible to keep playing locally (either a LAN setup or private servers like Minecraft)
Developers originally released server applications so people could host their own multi-player games [0]. They often would release both a Windows and Linux server application. Games even came packaged with server hosting a player could host a multi-player game [1]. Allowing the communication protocol to be re-verse engineered so people can build and run their own servers [2].
Even if the law only covered non-bankrupt companies, it would already help, because most game companies don't go bankrupt (and IIRC there already are reasonably effective laws against intentionally planning to use bankruptcy to get out of your obligations, so creative company structure design shouldn't be as big of a problem).
If you really wanted to make sure, you could require the company to deliver the corresponding assets to the national library within N days of release.
If the company doesn't have any money to run the servers then they should allow users/communities to run their own servers. The company can have subscriptions and/or microtransactions, but the moment they stop providing the servers (preventing the game running) then they would need to allow users to run their own servers (even if they reverse engineer the server protocol) -- so DMCA would not apply in this case.
Alternatively (e.g. if the server is an authentication check) then they can release a patch that removes that check.
I wonder if a decently sized tax on games which "expire" or aren't sustainable is a path forward. It would allow live games to continue existing, but give those made sustainably a market advantage.
Why bother? If consumers care they will just prefer games that don’t have this issue and games that might die will be taxed implicitly. It would probably very often be worth it to just pay the tax for any of the big games people care about with this.
You could pose the same argument against any form of warranty. Why provide/require any warrant for anything if the company might go bankrupt?
Yeah, then it gets messy. That's what the legal system and insolvency procedures are for.
> You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset
That's the strawman going around. You might not even have to provide EOL support for all online-components. Just use reasonable effort to make offline content playable. The law-making process hasn't even started and people already are arguing against the worst-case, least nuanced regulation possible.
This would be enforced on a timeline far enough in the future that the backup plan wouldn't be an afterthought, but part of the live service concept. I bet it'd help out a lot of studios to ensure their entire infra can be hosted on a developer machine anyway.
Worst case you don't get what you want, but usually such bankrupt entities have successors that take on the liability the same way you'd take on liability for a lack of good data hygiene practices under GDPR.
This is one of the few places where the USA has a sensible solution. In 2015, my org (Themade.org) worked with Archive.org, MIT, the EFF, and Harvard Law to obtain a DMCA 1201 exemption for legal DRM circumvention for the case of single player games where online validation servers have ceased operations.
Thanks to the hard work of these organizations, the US market, at least, allows for those who purchased these games to continue to play them with a third party patch to their client. See below:
Happens ALL the time. Players even figure out how to emulate MMO servers by sniffing network traffic. When people want to play the game, they will find a way.
You are talking about the attempted exception in 2024. The 2015 exemption expires every 2 years and has to be renewed and to my knowledge it was renewed during this last effort, as it had been every 2 years since it was granted. The article you linked has nothing to do with the 2015 exemption. It only has to do with a proposed exemption that was not given in 2024.
I think this initiative sounds great, it's curious to me in a legal sense why this would strictly pertain to gaming software and not one-time bought software licensing models as a whole. This issue is pretty prevalent in software in general. Software vendors should have some accountability for EoLing these things in a graceful manner.
I think a legal remedy here won't work. It can't magically produce money or desire to keep something runnable indefinitely. And any regulation that tries to compel work without payment seems like it will just hurt indie developers more.
These days, indie devs seem to be the only ones to still allow self-hosting of servers. Take for advantage New World Interactive (makers of Squad, Squad 44, etc). Their servers are self-hosted, though, there is an "official" license you can apply for given an application form. So there are dev "blessed" servers, but no centralization. It's what PC gaming should still be.
An attempted legal remedy is still better than the nothing we have now.
For indie games, would an exclusion like "games with less than 1 million lifetime players" be enough? That's not an unsolvable issue, especially as indie games are not the main games people are worried about being killed. Most indie games will not be 'killed' by the developers because they're not releant on servers that the developer cannot afford to host.
Lots of indie games I see just use the storefront's APIs for multiplayer matching, not even requiring a matchmaking server.
Bunk. Nobody expects you to do unpaid work. Just don't make the game depend on the availability of your server, or other forms of planned obsolescence.
When I buy the game, tell me, "this won't exist after 2030". Done!
Or allow the community to build and host reverse engineered servers after your game is dead. Don't go out of your way to sue and destroy community efforts.
You realize that APIs can be reverse-engineered and new clean-room servers created? It has been done for a bunch of old games.
Or even just binaries. As big of a radical copyleft OSS advocate as I am, I think it'd help this particular movement to steer clear of "just release your source code" as a solution.
I hope this will pass. Video games are an important medium, and it's distressing to the degree they are overwritten or completely destroyed when they are no longer profitable.
Look at Concord. It was turned off immediately, because there was no players interest and Sony decided to cut the losses right away. Under the proposed rules they wouldn't be able to just kill a game they had high hopes for but ended up unneeded.
The only financially viable solution for online games is to release in Europe later, after the project popularity in other markets was established.
I don't think that should apply. The issue as they put it is "effectively robbing customers of their purchases". A full refund fixes that. But most games are not doing that.
As others have noted, the problem is often with keeping servers running. It's impossible to predict how successful a game will be in the long term, so the publisher can't make any claims to it's longevity. And, it doesn't make any sense to keep servers running if there's not enough income flow. Where this is really an issue is MMOs. Games like Forza already have some solutions: online features are eventually disabled, but you can still play the core game.
Don't keep the server running. Let others put up servers.
Either release the server binary or code or publish the bare minimum API spec so others can build a server from scratch. Strip away any proprietary stuff. And don't sue when other people have server up and playing your game.
This won’t require companies to keep servers running, just that they have an end of life plan, eg: releasing a version of the server that can be self hosted for multiplayer games
MMOs don't often have a profitability problem, they even tend to overstay their welcome compared to any other game. While it would be nice to get a server binary to self host after they're EoL it's gonna be unfeasible to run it anyway.
The issue is really more with lazy implementations where a server check is required to play something that's fully single player as you say, which has become standard for major publishers now and is far too common for indie games too. It's not too much to ask to do the bare minimum and keep that single instance auth server online or just remove the requirement entirely by commenting out a few lines.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. Add an expiration date on the "box" (I dunno what you call it in modern times):
"Online-only: This game will be playable until 2028-06-30"
This forces the publisher to put their money where their mouth is. If the game is successful, like WoW, by all means extend the time it's playable for. If it 'flops', you're on the hook to support it for 3 years, since you shouldn't be putting out made-to-fail slop.
Also, storefronts should have a button that says "Rent" or "Subscribe" instead of buy, if the EULA has clauses like "we have the right to remove access for 'any reason, or no reason'.
The word 'buy' implies some level of ownership (not to the rights to IP or anything, but at least to the product being purchased).
I think having expiration dates is very reasonable and I wish their FAQ would cover this. Current FAQ entries seem to suggest companies must make the games playable forever, and suggest this is somehow possible without ongoing support or divulging intellectual property. I am not sure this is always possible to satisfy in the most general sense.
It isn't with the status quo, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. The EU as a market has enough sway to solve every vendor insisting on restrictive licensing. And we'd only be talking about already sold copies anyway.
Yes, I suggest they divulge the intellectual property. Games are an art form similar to paintings or music, and we as a society should be able to experience previous art.
Keep the IP while you run the servers and sell the game, when you are no longer interested in running the servers, drop a tarball of code. It doesn’t need to be simple, it just needs to be possible and complete. The community can take care of it. If the IP is valuable, then you have your incentive to keep the game playable until it isn’t valuable to you.
There can be a lot of interwoven licensing with games. fmod, speedtree, SDK terms, music... you can't just open source it in most cases and call it good.
Publishers could just put "Guaranteed playable until 2026-07-02", and then extend those games that are profitable.
You really need either a minimum term of support in law, or a requirement to publish a docker of the server into escrow, to be released if the company fails or decides to discontinue.
> Publishers could just put "Guaranteed playable until 2026-07-02", and then extend those games that are profitable.
A one-day warranty would almost certainly run afoul of the EU's merchantability laws.
Edit: Misread the date (sorry, American here -- we write dates weird). However, the point still stands: selling a product to consumers involves some warranty of merchantability, and breaching that entitles consumers to refunds (and can even get the publisher in trouble with regulators).
I wouldn't be concerned with publishers going the "guaranteed playable until" route because there's already consumer protections that discourage this type of thing.
An expiration date could be hard to estimate, but a minimum level of support based on sales might be worth thinking about.
As I understand it, that's not the main focus of this initiative though. It's mostly about opening up dead games for stuff like private servers, so we are not forced to lose access to all the art within when the developer pulls the plug.
It seems like a relatively small ask to at least _allow_ hardcore fans to keep something alive. I can imagine publishers that have a great connection with their community (like Coffeestain) actually benefitting from handling stuff like this in a decent way.
Yeah, this level of uncertainty is annoying. It gets extra annoying when we are talking about games like BF2 and the like, that have zero real reason to not have the ability to be played on lan or similar.
The game has millions of pokestops, gyms, and players. A game of this scale CAN'T run on one server.
Even if you could host it on just one or a few machines, if you sign up for one server and your buddy joins another, you can't do raids or anything together. And each of these player hosted servers has a player limit.
Anti-cheat that isn't being actively updated is next to useless. Community servers would be botted to hell.
The game requires a maps tile service. Expecting Niantic to provide map tiles for anyone to download is insane. They might not even own the rights to do that.
It's virtually impossible for Pokémon go to remain in a "reasonably playable state" after the servers shutdown.
Adding a blurb about "guaranteed to continue working through yyyy/mm/dd" to its app store page would likely be sufficient to satisfy what this is asking for.
I don't know where you and other people in this thread are getting that idea from. That's not what the petition says, and that's definitely not what Ross Scott says in his videos.
The game that sparked this movement was shutdown 9 years after it came out, and had 3 months notice.
This seems very silly to me. Why would it apply only to games? It specifically is trying to apply to free games also. Should any product or service you ship with a client have to allow you to self host it if you don’t want to support it forever? What if your backend is extremely complex like WoW or Fortnite? That’s months or years of work to make that self hostable. How do you broker access to what you actually purchased? Does everyone just get to be Peter Griffin?
This seems like a lot of hullabaloo over an issue that most people don’t care about, isn’t a major problem, has large technical and financial hurdles.
It seems to me if it’s important to consumers the large size and diversity of the gaming market would make this a non issue because you could just select a game without this restriction, of which many are available in every genre.
> What if your backend is extremely complex like WoW or Fortnite?
WoW private servers have been a thing for a long time now. It's not like the initiative is asking for the ability to run the game on any set of minimum hardware. If the backend is released and a fleet of servers is needed to run it, that fulfills the ask.
Pretty much any game of this type also has some ability for the developers to run it on their own machines too, usually with some simplified backend. Releasing those developer tools would also meet the bar.
The primary difference is that games are art, and that the needless destruction of art is a harm to humanity, even if you can just look at other pieces of art.
If you publish a book, in most countries, you explicitly don't have that right. In fact, you usually have to deliver a copy or several, often at your own cost, to the local national library (e.g. Library of Congress), to ensure it is preserved.
I am very surprised that people read this and think: "HoW CaN yOu SuppORT GaME AFter BANkRUPCY! THIS WILL KILL MMOS"
Jeez, learn to fucking read. If a company kills a game with multiplayer-online requirement, release the goddamn server or let people make and host servers. this is the only thing that is being proposed.
No but anyone reading this should check out his two recent vids on using Arch linux and De-Googling. He is doing this community a huge favor and it is very entertaining.
Millions of essentially rich middle upper class banding together effortlessly to petition the government to save their entertainment. Meanwhile there are people spending their whole lives to get even a tiny sliver of support for things like human rights violations.
> Meanwhile there are people spending their whole lives
This is just relative privation fallacy speaking. You are welcome to try and create your own initiative and get popular streamers to talk about it. The fact that horrible things are happening in the world does not mean we shouldn't also care about other relatively bad things.
Games aren't exactly restricted to "upper middle class", they're mainstream entertainment (just look at Brazilians complaining about regional pricing). And if you want to make caring about things (art in this case; incidentally also entertainment) a competition, I got some lobbyists up the EU's bottom you can get upset about first.
Gaming really is global. Basically everywhere that can afford the devices which now include the "middle income" countries. So only ones really left out are really the poorest of the poor. If you can afford smartphone you can get on some gaming. Or even cheap computers including second hand ones.
1. In my view, video games that stop working are a part of a larger problem with consumer tech right now, and you've got to start somewhere. Gaming is a hobby for a lot of people now, and therefore the most visible example.
2. Games are artefacts of our modern culture, examples of artistic expression (more or less). I don't think that every game, every song and every movie is worth saving, but who am I to disparage what someone else likes.
Well don't you worry citizenpaul, this legal issue has already been settled in the United States and no one has any recourse to save their entertainment at all.
It's not like we are donating anything besides a minute or two of our time... It's just a signature.
If that was all that was needed to force law makers to fix human rights violations, I'll sign that as well, but most of those problems are not as easy to fix.
Lots of bad takes in this thread. The whole idea behind this is just to stop defrauding customers that buy your software and then are left holding the bag. Nobody is asking for developers to keep running server infra for eternity.
Any of the following options are enough to satisfy this proposal:
- Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.
- Have your server source code (stripped down of proprietary stuff) ready for public release at EoL.
- Allow customers to reverse engineer the binaries and communication protocol after EoL.
- Package dedicated server binaries with the game and allow customers to connect to it via a LAN or direct IP option.
> Lots of bad takes in this thread.
Seriously.
It's like people forgot what multiplayer gaming was like pre-2005. Everyone ran their own servers. You could run your own Half-Life game server and other users merely pointed their game client to your IP address.
The only exceptions back then were the MMORPGs.
There's no reason we can't go back to the way it used to be. I used to run multiplayer Starcraft on a LAN without an Internet connection. Why can't I do that with Starcraft II? We used to play Quake on custom servers. Some servers had fun communities. All that is gone in favor of live services that can be shut down on a whim.
I don't even think requiring server source code to be disclosed should be necessary. Merely the binaries with some basic instructions on setting it up (which could easily be based on internal documents for setting up test servers) would be sufficient.
Yeah, pre-console-ization of PC releases, devs would produce server binaries that would allow you to host your own servers. You could tweak rules, give preferential slots, etc. It allowed you to create a real community around your self-hosted server.
It's really difficult to create a cohesive gaming organization without controlling your own multiplayer servers. It's a sad state of gaming that every game has centralized servers. If anything, I'd love to see requirements that decentralize multiplayer hosting. The devs can release their own servers, but they'd be alongside the community ones, as well.
StarCraft was amazing, you could have a link local network, just launch the game, hit multiplayer and the instances would find eachother.
> Why can't I do that with Starcraft II?
Because Blizzard wanted to skin the golden goose by controling SC2 pro-scene. It went about as well as any modern Acti-Blizz idea. Poorly.
World of Warcraft actually made it very easy to use a custom server, since you'd just need to change a hostname in a single text file and the client would connect to it instead. Not that it was allowed but from a technical perspective it was quite supportive. I think it's no longer as simple but there's still private server projects around.
As a broke college student, I had a great time playing on third-party servers. The experience was janky, of course, but it was hilarious. I made some good friends there.
Then I had to stop playing because it was eating into my study time too much.
I've tried going back to MMOs a couple of times since then, but nothing seems to have the charm of a smaller community like that.
I developed a few commercial games on unity a while ago, here's why some of what's proposed is harder than you think,
- The original developper is not working on the game anymore, another company is maintaining it and has no capacity for making significant changes to it.
- You can't release your server source code because you will be using a lot of proprietary add ons that can't be released, and those are usually absolutely essential.
- Your server is going to be built against a now unsupported version of the engine, that you probably can't even install on current year operating systems
- stripping the source code of 'proprietary stuff' is significant work, there's no package management, code is copy pasted.
- Your protocol is based on third party commercial code and that other company doesn't like reverse engineering
- Changing the way the networking works to remove the lobby is significant development work, the networking framework is out of date, not maintained, and the devs are most likely not available anymore.
1. Not a problem because it's not being applied retroactively, but it should be included in the design from the start for new games
2. It is a problem now, but the license for those can and will change if the law mandates it. Unless addon authors don't want to make any money, that is.
3. I don't get the argument. If it works at the time of release - you're good. You're not expected to keep updating it to work on modern systems.
4. This is just point 2 repeated.
5. This is still just point 2 repeated and reverse engineering is allowed in EU, whether they like it or not.
6. Why do you need to change the way networking works?
Not op but worked on multiplayer.
If your game uses matchmaking or is multi region or crossplay it’ll be depending from a lot of different services, and tightly integrated with them.
Latency concerns, for example, might be handled at several points in the flow that would stop existing for a standalone server. None of the code involved is reusable because it was written for a completely different context.
There is nothing preventing you from writing an abstraction that supports both the fancy middleware as well as direct IP connections.
I can say this with certainty because I've also worked on multiplayer in several shipped multi-region cross-platform games, and this sort of arrangement is precisely what we have shipped. Granted, Direct IP connections are usually only supported on PC, but they are there, they do work, and our PC players appreciate that piece of mind.
The initiative is not even asking you to provide the full functionality of your online-components.
All you should have is a "reasonable effort" EOL plan that allows customers to continue using the parts that can work without the developers support. They even call out "Gran Turismo Sport" as a good example. Sony announced the EOL a year before, and stopped selling micro-transactions. Then they removed the online services while retaining offline support for add-ons and in-game items.
A reasonable EOL plan might be: We'll support the online matchmaking for 3 years. After that we retain the rights to shut down the services providing at least a one year notice. All in-game items and add-ons will be made downloadable for all players 6 months before shut-down. All offline game modes will remain playable using those items as before.
> You can't release your server source code because you will be using a lot of proprietary add ons that can't be released, and those are usually absolutely essential.
This hard from the developer perspective, but its solvable at the regulation level.
The rule won't apply retroactively to all games ever released, you know. All of these requirements can - and should - be met when new games are designed and architectured to satisfy the law.
That would require a complete re-architecture of game engines and complete rework of how the games are developed and published. If I had to satisfy those requirements next year, I just wouldn't release in Europe, and I say that as an European.
fair enough, don't release it on europe and lose access to a market of 700 million people from the first world who pay the highest prices
maybe your game can live only by the sales of the US
If that would be true, there were no new games that would comply with this proposal.
But there are many.
Then just keep doing things the same way, but add a disclaimer that says you are only selling a license to play the game, and it's not guaranteed to work after a certain date.
Then like what happened with the cookie banners, everybody is going to put the minimum date, and the only winners will be the lawyers selling consulting in EU regulation compliance with the publishers.
You are begging the question, the question being whether consumers care. You believe they don't (e.g. that the expires-on date won't affect sales) and the creators of this petition believe people will care and will prefer games that do not have that expiry date.
So no, it's not inevitable that every game will just sprout an expiry date. It's possible but only if you're right that consumers don't care about owning versus renting games.
I'm more and more baffled the more I go through this thread.
It is as easy as saying, "this game you're buying won't run after 2030"
Or publishing the bare minimum APIs you'd need to simulate to get the game to function. We have great people in the community that will make stuff work on their own, no instructions required.
Just don't go out of your way to destroy your game.
But why would anyone buy battlefield of war 2028 if I dont destroy previous version?
> - Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.
This software is not guaranteed beyond 0 Unix time.
> - Have your server source code (stripped down of proprietary stuff) ready for public release at EoL.
This isn't viable, and i would expect anyone on this site to understand that. it's roughly equivalent to saying "just make facebook stripped of proprietary code and ready for the public to run"
> - Allow customers to reverse engineer the binaries and communication protocol after EoL.
This is a reasonable path forward, but likely a non-starter in the US for political reasons. I understand that "stop killing games" is an EU thing.
> - Package dedicated server binaries with the game and allow customers to connect to it via a LAN or direct IP option.
See point 2. This is nonsensical.
How is a dedicated server nonsensical? There’s a fuckton of games, ancient and modern, with them.
Shoot, how is peer-to-peer nonsensical? Elden Ring (seamless multiplayer) got it tacked on as a mod. It’s insanely doable.
I don’t accept that these are nonstarters. In the slightest.
> I don’t accept that these are nonstarters. In the slightest.
It’s a subject you know nothing about and you’re not even curious?
No. Because any explanation will come from someone invested in the subject, so will all sound completely reasonable and may even contain aspects of truth.
I want to play games with my friends, not consider how the landscape of always-online services have distributed brokerage connectivity services, global banlists, and whatever powers microtransactions into what should be a game with four little dudes running a kitchen badly. I especially don’t want to consider how rising requirements for stability and cross-platform connectivity which have prompted these services means that P2PoverIP simply won’t work in the face of CGNAT or Sony’s distribution policies or fucking Comcast not having IPv6 yet; and I especially don’t want to think of the lower average technical acumen of the individual gamer has caused dedicated servers to completely fall out of fashion due to user confusion.
I really don’t want to think about the “paradox of polish”, where smaller games can get away with such things like dedicated servers and p2p networking that don’t work sometimes; whereas everything in an AAA title has to work flawlessly out of the gate or it’ll be panned despite the horse’s left testicle contracting appropriately in cold water.
Man, I don’t wanna be sad about market forces encouraging centralization for the efficiency necessary to stay competitive. I just wanna play dead or alive 2 with my bros even tho the dreamcast server’s offline.
Ok; package up Cloudflare, Facebook, or E-Trade and let people host it.
Isn't that exactly how these companies scale across multiple data centers? They write the code once, package it all together, and host it in multiple areas?
Getting back to games, I still don't see why allowing users to host private servers with their friends is impossible. If anything, it seems like its strictly a DRM issue...but at EOL for a game you no longer find profitable enough to keep the servers online, who really cares about DRM
Wat? E-trade is not an application, it's probably dozens of coordinated services. Meanwhile, a game usually has a single binary and another one for the server.
Well, this is about software you bought in advance. The Facebook comparison doesn't really work because you're not paying in advance to use it.
> This software is not guaranteed beyond 0 Unix time.
Grandma goes to the store to buy a game for their grandkid. She sees two game boxes. One says in the front "This game will stop working tomorrow and you will not get a refund" and the other says "This game will stop working in 2030". Which one does she pick?
Either the one little Timmy wanted, or the one the clerk tells her is selling fast (whether or not it's selling fast).
> This is nonsensical.
Nope. This has been done for many "dead" games. Servers have been reverse engineered from nothing. Private servers are a common thing.
> This software is not guaranteed beyond 0 Unix time.
Imagine Apple says that about iOS. Wouldn't you want consumer protection so Apple doesn't do that? Why should anything else be any different?
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[0] https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
Or if I understand right if you have some online component make final version of the game to operate without it. So you might lose multiplayer, but single player components of game should still continue to function.
Which to me doesn't sound huge ask. Unless you have overly strictly coupled the game with online. Which for single player games is likely bad design anyway.
I guess the bad takes are unavoidable. I couldn't find a clear and succinct explanation of the mission anywhere on that site and had to read your post to have any idea what are they even arguing for and against.
Will that really solve anything then? Everyone will just put an expiration date of ~1 year and consumers will go with it, like they do every time.
Thank you for this very good summary. I'm frustrated at the really really bad takes on this by people I thought were very smart.
this is very close to what i'm advocating for EOL phones.
give proper documentations on how to write/adapt firmware.
no need to opensource everything, but at least document it fully.
and of course, allow rooting
> Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.
Why wouldn't everyone just say "its not guaranteed to continue working after 0 seconds from release", which is basically the current situation, and be done with it?
I'm really glad there was an effort by streamers and influencers (shout-out to Asmongold and Penguinz0) to back Ross up and push back on PirateSoftware's incorrect take on this initiative. For a while it looked like the UK wasn't going to get 100k votes and that the EU initiative wasn't going to hit the million mark. Then about a week ago content got uploaded and this initiative got a much needed boost.
The console wars are no longer company vs company, it is company vs consumer. So much anti consumer shenanigans are going on in the video game industry a message needs to be sent.
If you care about video games, even in passing as a complete casual, please sign the petitions. I've done my dash for the UK.
Giving Asmongold of all people a shout-out feels so wrong... Guy is a creep to say the least, but I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Not disagreeing but do you have anything to back that up for those of us who aren't in the loop?
The obvious case where this makes sense are single-player games that require internet access before they even launch, like when you need to link a Microsoft account to play Forza.
But it's less obvious to me how the legislation should work for a multiplayer-only game that goes out of business. I suppose it should require a refund at some point. But at what point?
Steam only lets you refund a game that you played for less than two hours.
And if you think that's not long enough, there's surely some time period where you can agree that you've got your money's worth. Kind of like how you lose the ability to say "I didn't like it" after you ate your whole dinner at a restaurant.
Yet in the comments here someone gives an example of three years of online support which is insane. Why is multiplayer special? Should Steam also let you refund any game until three years elapse?
> But it's less obvious to me how the legislation should work for a multiplayer-only game that goes out of business
The idea is to force the companies to provide an end-of-life plan that leaves the game in a "reasonably playable state". Depending on the game the approach can differ. Releasing the binaries along with instructions for hosting dedicated servers is one approach (that some games already take). I was playing on a (pirated, but it was a long way ago and I was a child) Lineage 2 server way back in 2007 on my local ISP network, so even something like MMORPGs can be covered if it's included in the discussion at the design stage of the game.
But even if the backend is very complex and vendor-locked, releasing something like a set of Cloudformation templates and saying "you can only host this on AWS and it's going to be restrictively expensive but there you go" is also an option that would satisfy the requirements. It's still better then having nothing at all to dig at (although some fans still do reverse-engineer and spin up community servers even without having access to any of this).
The problem is that you can easily create negative effects that hurt all developers while only imagining the impact on profitable AAA games which seems to be how most of these discussions go since people always bring up blockbuster games like Lineage 2 and World of Warcraft.
Ensuring that the multiplayer server component of your game is a standalone end-user distributable is a huge task to impose on every game that wants to have a multiplayer component. Especially once you consider the vast majority of games that never even get traction much less turn a profit.
So, the second someone buys your prerelease indie slither.io game, what exactly does this checklist look like? It needs to also day 1 launch with a self-hostable standalone server distro instead of the crappy spaghetti mess you live coded on an EC2 machine?
I fail to see the impact it would cause on a smaller studio - a lot of the times the games from those are usually are already pretty simple to self-host, as they don't want to bear the load of maintaining servers besides maybe a master-server (e.g. Valheim and the like).
> Especially once you consider the vast majority of games that never even get traction much less turn a profit.
Which is the whole point. Believe it or not - people who slave away on the game for years want people to maybe get to play it and enjoy it? Cause it's also art and not just business and there's a preservation angle to all of it?
> It needs to also day 1 launch with a self-hostable standalone server distro instead of the crappy spaghetti mess you live coded on an EC2 machine?
Not by day 1 launch, by day "we shut everything down". Not on an EC2 machine - as I mentioned in the thread above, even dumping your cloudformation templates and saying "enjoy all these queues" will satisfy the requirements.
I think the fact that you used the word "studio" kinda betrays a disconnect here. What about all the games that aren't built by "studios" and don't have "cloudformation templates" and have barely any sales?
They also need to have had invested in the extra work so that hypothetical players can have the opportunity to self-host the server on day 1 for a game that never caught on in the first place?
Yes?.. It does not have to be pretty. If you're able to deploy it, your community will be able to deploy it.
If you really don't want to bother with that - don't sell the game, sell timed access and shut it down once the last subscription runs out.
Fair enough, but that's a huge imposition on everyone for what probably comes from a very specific instance in your life of a single game that you loved having its server die after a while, long after you got your money's worth.
It seems short sighted.
> It seems short sighted.
In my opinion it's the other way around. It's short sighted to throw away so much of the medium's history with no way to preserve it.
How is dumping your server files in a file upload server somewhere a "huge imposition"?
Nobody is even asking you to maintain the code. You had it working when I purchased the product that required the code. Just share that code. I'll even fiddle around with hard-coded paths or whatever you think is making this impossible
IMO, I'd be content with "dump the server binaries in a file server somewhere" as an adequate, if less than ideal, option. If the binaries are available, it'd take work, but not that much work, to wrangle them into something hostable by me. Some containerization here, some packet redirection proxies there, I can make it work.
In many cases, this means you would have to design the server significantly differently as you may use proprietary first or third-party technology in your server that you cannot redistribute.
THAT is exactly why this whole thing is best solved by law, rather than consumer action, because that is a coordination problem. To be compliant with the law, you would have to not use software that you can't redistribute to make games that will be available to citizens of the EU (or, at the very least, that consumers can't reasonably get their own license to). Which in turn means that third party library developers would have to figure out a licensing model that works under the new legal framework.
Who pays for that server's continued availability?
Even if the company's file server is only available for a fixed period of time, as long as they announce it some fraction of the playerbase will pick it up. Or release it as a torrent, if you really want to cheap out.
If you mean the servers to actually host the self-hosted solution, then "me" is a perfectly reasonable option. Server hosting is far from an insurmountable hobby expense.
> Ensuring that the multiplayer server component of your game is a standalone end-user distributable is a huge task to impose on every game that wants to have a multiplayer component.
Is it? Your hosting it somehow? No one is asking for a 1-click installer. What do you do? Let us do that.
The requirement is not to be standalone end-user distributable, the requirement is that it be somehow possible for an end user to set it up, which is a lot easier, unless the developers don't even know how to set up the backend. But that's a low bar still.
I've built a couple multiplayer browser games and getting the server component to a state where it's end-user distributable probably involves another 50% of the work that I put into building it in the first place since I'm just rsyncing code onto a VPS.
It's like thinking that just because the code exists, then it's in a state that could be pushed publicly to github, and that's not the case for almost any codebase.
To think that I would need to do all that the second I charge $1 seems unreasonable. And I think you underestimate how true this is for most games you see on Steam.
> since I'm just rsyncing code onto a VPS.
I mean, this covers it. Put that code out, and some one else can rysnc it to a VPS. The ask here in not that it's nicely bundled up into a single click deploy. It's that a path exists at all. If I need a fleet of servers and some technical know how, that's fine. Even expected for many games.
This is a proposal for new games, not existing games. If the requirement for this is there in the design stage then it incentivizes developers to design it in from the start and pushes the implementation costs down signficantly.
If a developer decides to not take that requirement in the design stage then that is their prerogative, but not even doing it would be like not following any other EU consumer protection law.
> It needs to also day 1 launch with a self-hostable standalone server distro instead of the crappy spaghetti mess you live coded on an EC2 machine?
If you can't meet these very achievable goals, perhaps the game isn't at a point where it should be sold for money. What are you going to do when that ec2 instance gets randomware and becomes inaccessible, just tell all the people who paid you money to go home and forget about it?
I love indie developers, but if one can't have a modicum of professionalism, then they shouldn't ask people to pay for a product.
Why not apply this only to AAA games, if that's your objection? You could say that only companies with annual revenue over $100 million have to follow the rule.
(Usually I don't like regulations that blatantly favor small businesses like this, because they're coming from a misguided place. But in this case, the benefit of the regulation scales with the number of customers of a given firm, while the costs are fixed per firm, so applying it to large firms but not large ones won't much encourage fragmentation and could capture most of the benefits of applying it to everyone without most of the costs.)
It seems like it should be legal for your end of life plan for the game to be “it is over and no one gets to play it anymore”.
Only if they change the wording of the game purchasing experience to be along the lines of 'Rent' or 'Subscribe' instead of 'Buy'.
But you’re not renting or subscribing to it so that is inaccurate and confusing for a one time upfront payment business model.
If you're buying a time limited license then the guaranteed time should be part of the license and considered part of the budget.
You are buying a license for 2 weeks sounds a lot less appealing than just "buying", but that would have been the reality for Concord had they not issued refunds. Is a year that much better? Maybe, but have it in writing.
These "we sell you a license we may terminate at any point for any reason" terms are absolute bullshit.
That's exactly the goal of this.
If you buy something, that will be yours, you can use it as long as you want, you can sold it or it can be inherited from you. (In copyright terms that's a perpetual, irrevocable license.)
If there is only a limited duration you can use something, that's called renting and the duration must be known before you enter into a contract.
No it isn't. People buy movie tickets, annual passes, and other things all the time that are not "rented". These are things you buy, and you may lose access to them if something happens to the business.
The terms of the purchase of an online game that might shut down are quite clear and known ahead of time. It's just not a fixed amount of time.
In that case you buy a ticket and not a movie / game. People buy movies on DVD / BR and they will be able to play them forever. This should be the same if you buy the same movie (with a one time payment) on a website, too.
There is a different valid business model, where you subscribe for eg. a monthly / yearly fee and can watch movies form a catalog or play games from a catalog as long as you keep paying and the service is working.
> The terms of the purchase of an online game that might shut down are quite clear and known ahead of time.
On a ticket or a pass there is a clear date or deadline printed on them. Do the same for games (buy thins game 10 EUR for 1 year) and that would be fine, too, (it is the same subscription model just with yearly duration).
Then companies should town down the "buy" language.
If not, then buying is not owning and piracy is not stealing.
>But you’re not renting or subscribing to it so that is inaccurate
If the game can be taken away from you st any time then "buying" is definitely inaccurate too then. "Licensing for a limited time" might be the most accurate, but something like "Lease for X years" might be more concise and accurate enough.
If that's the plan, then you should attach an expiration date to it. Tell the consumers how long you plan to keep things running, and commit to it. Don't just shrug and go "I dunno".
I think bankruptcy is clearly its own category here. This is targeted at companies who release something then shutter it because they didn't sell enough copies.
If it's rented and not sold - sure.
And the people who bought something are just...shit outta luck?
I've been reading the FAQ on the stop killing games website - they are not arguing for refunds, they're arguing for a EOL plan to be put in place for games
> No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way.
Modifying the game so that it runs offline is supporting the game. Three years after releasing a game, the devs who made it are usually long gone, busy on other projects, the libraries and framework used are out of date, out of support, etc. at that point making any change (or even building the project!) is a significant effort.
It's a "significant effort" only because it was made this way. You can design it to be easy hostable. It's just that there is no reason to do so currently. Stop killing games tries to give some legal reason.
It's asking for server file access. And its asking for it to be planned out from day 1, so the "devs no longer here issue" isn't an issue.
The points you're raising would be valid if they weren't complete straw men.
Publishers aren't required to keep servers up, nor do they need to release the server binaries/code. It just demands that the publisher thinks about the end of life for their game. A great way to do that for online games would be to publish the server, definitely... But it's not required.
These kinds of gotchas and knowitall armchair analysis is way too premature. This isn't an actual legal document, it's a draft that would then become a legal document.
Why does it have to be a refund? Private servers have been a thing for a long time, with people even running them for MMOs like World of Warcraft or City of Heroes.
Do you just mean it should be legal to reverse engineer and cleanroom impl your own server if the developer's official servers are closed? I can agree with that.
But anything more than that I probably don't agree with.
Nah, if I pay for the game, I should get to keep it. If it's a monthly subscription only (not sure the current state, but WoW didn't us to be) then there's an argument to be made here that I was just buying access to those servers. But if I've plopped down 70 bucks and you don't feel like running your backend anymore, then the least you can do is provide the tools for others to do so.
>not sure the current state, but WoW didn't us to be
WoW has always required a monthly subscription since release
Correct. It also used to require an upfront purchase of the game and every expansion. I'm not sure if it still does. Those who paid bought the game and should be able to continue playing it, even if Blizzard wants to shut down the servers.
It still does require a purchase, though now all expansions except the latest one are included in the base game and you can purchase the expansion with the base game at little markup over the expansion itself so the base game might as well be free.
They should be required to publish either the full spec that is sufficient for such a server to be written, or barring that, the complete source code for the server (and all resource files necessary to run it, if any of them don't come with the base game).
3 years of online support for what? a brand new game? I'm okay with this, otherwise fully refund it. If its a game that's been on for 15+ years, then whatever, not many are buying new copies presumably.
I would love for companies to allow people to host private servers when they abandon MMOs.
I would say requiring an online game be required to either support their players from 3 years after public release, and/or release the server code would be a reasonable expectation.
It may not always be possible, especially if you aren't actually charging in some way... but the money soak that some games are is ridiculous and the massive corporate decision making interfering with the game design in that direction deserve to have to fulfill that requirement.
I'm honestly mixed in a lot of ways as I do see and understand the need/desire for some decisions without malice or greed behind them. But in the end, it's a balancing act. Actual online driven games should probably have a monthly fee, if they don't they're bound to get taken offline sooner than later. It doesn't need to be a huge fee even $20/year to keep the lights on. For offline games, maintaining a license api server shouldn't be an undue burden, and there's almost no reason to ever turn such a thing off... If the game isn't that widely used a $5/mo VPS can probably handle it.
Aside: I really miss gamespy and the like for self-hosting the server side for interactive games, lan party play, etc. Wish more games would go back to that.
Is that you Pirate software? Your takes are as equally misinformed.
> But it's less obvious to me how the legislation should work for a multiplayer-only game
It should. If the game is made after the Stop Killing Games law is passed, you have to have A Plan. Open source engine? Not prosecute private servers? Pick your poison.
> Why is multiplayer special?
It's not. Multiplayer wasn't special ten years ago. Only insistence on always online DRM and micro transactions changed this.
I’m curious how this can be enforced. If a game requires centralized servers, and the company goes out of business, you can’t force a bankrupt entity to keep the system running. Even if they published an expiration date, if there is no money left to run the servers, there’s nothing to sue for, nobody to fine, and no money to run the server.
You could force the company to release their code upon bankruptcy, but what if another company wants to buy those assets? What if some other IP that they might use on other games is mixed in there and required for the game to work?
You could make a prohibition on live service games to begin with. You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset. The problem here is economic.
Game companies can’t go back to the old model of lumpy cash flow. You can’t have one huge pile of money come in when the game launches, and then a long miniscule tail. That doesn’t keep people employed. It’s also super risky when a game with a huge budget and long development time flops. You have to have some kind of constant revenue stream from subscriptions or micro-transactions to stay afloat. If users can run their own servers, that can never happen.
> You could make a prohibition on live service games to begin with. You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset. The problem here is economic
This sounds purely like a technical and legal problem, not an economic one. Even if a company wants to run their game as a live service they can be required to design it in such a way that the server portion is portable and self-hostable, but not release the server until they shut down their own.
This requires companies to have an end-of-life plan for their games should the company wish to take down their servers. It does not require source code for the centralized servers, only the binaries. In the case of bankruptcy, the end-of-life plan would be part of the assets sold with the game.
Do the binaries have to be usable forever? Or for how long? What if some system update breaks them?
They don't, they just need to be usable at end of life. The proposal is purposefully very lenient
Can they include a dead man's switch so they become unusable one day later?
I think so, as long as it's not reliant on a central server!
Nope! Do I need a fleet of servers to run it? No problem! Do I need a specific release.minor.patch of FreeBSD? No problem! Do I need your proprietary kernel patches? Yeah you need to release those.
Or do you have tooling that allows your devs to run it on their machines without the server components (most online games do)? Releasing that instead is also an option.
The petition doesn't ask for the company to keep the servers up, only that it's possible to keep playing locally (either a LAN setup or private servers like Minecraft)
The solution can easily be found in the past.
Developers originally released server applications so people could host their own multi-player games [0]. They often would release both a Windows and Linux server application. Games even came packaged with server hosting a player could host a multi-player game [1]. Allowing the communication protocol to be re-verse engineered so people can build and run their own servers [2].
[0] https://wiki.unrealadmin.org/Server_Install_linux [1] https://wolffiles.de/etmanual/en/Tech%20Help/Information/Ser... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/05/activision-kills-fan-...
Even if the law only covered non-bankrupt companies, it would already help, because most game companies don't go bankrupt (and IIRC there already are reasonably effective laws against intentionally planning to use bankruptcy to get out of your obligations, so creative company structure design shouldn't be as big of a problem).
If you really wanted to make sure, you could require the company to deliver the corresponding assets to the national library within N days of release.
If the company doesn't have any money to run the servers then they should allow users/communities to run their own servers. The company can have subscriptions and/or microtransactions, but the moment they stop providing the servers (preventing the game running) then they would need to allow users to run their own servers (even if they reverse engineer the server protocol) -- so DMCA would not apply in this case.
Alternatively (e.g. if the server is an authentication check) then they can release a patch that removes that check.
If a company goes bankrupt and dissolved (usually) it's assets are sold to cover it's liabilities.
The code of server would be a perfect match to cover the company's liabilities of keeping the game playable.
If someone wants to buy the bankrupted company, they gets it's liabilities including "keep the game playable", too.
I wonder if a decently sized tax on games which "expire" or aren't sustainable is a path forward. It would allow live games to continue existing, but give those made sustainably a market advantage.
Why bother? If consumers care they will just prefer games that don’t have this issue and games that might die will be taxed implicitly. It would probably very often be worth it to just pay the tax for any of the big games people care about with this.
You could pose the same argument against any form of warranty. Why provide/require any warrant for anything if the company might go bankrupt?
Yeah, then it gets messy. That's what the legal system and insolvency procedures are for.
> You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset
That's the strawman going around. You might not even have to provide EOL support for all online-components. Just use reasonable effort to make offline content playable. The law-making process hasn't even started and people already are arguing against the worst-case, least nuanced regulation possible.
This would be enforced on a timeline far enough in the future that the backup plan wouldn't be an afterthought, but part of the live service concept. I bet it'd help out a lot of studios to ensure their entire infra can be hosted on a developer machine anyway.
Worst case you don't get what you want, but usually such bankrupt entities have successors that take on the liability the same way you'd take on liability for a lack of good data hygiene practices under GDPR.
AGPLv3
This is one of the few places where the USA has a sensible solution. In 2015, my org (Themade.org) worked with Archive.org, MIT, the EFF, and Harvard Law to obtain a DMCA 1201 exemption for legal DRM circumvention for the case of single player games where online validation servers have ceased operations.
Thanks to the hard work of these organizations, the US market, at least, allows for those who purchased these games to continue to play them with a third party patch to their client. See below:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exempt...
> continue to play them with a third party patch to their client
so hoping that a third party patch can fix the issue. hoping it does. sounds like a very hopeless "legal" workaround
Happens ALL the time. Players even figure out how to emulate MMO servers by sniffing network traffic. When people want to play the game, they will find a way.
That exception expired in 2024 and was not renewed.
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/legally-weird/u-s-copyrig...
Please do not spread misinformation like this.
You are talking about the attempted exception in 2024. The 2015 exemption expires every 2 years and has to be renewed and to my knowledge it was renewed during this last effort, as it had been every 2 years since it was granted. The article you linked has nothing to do with the 2015 exemption. It only has to do with a proposed exemption that was not given in 2024.
Unofficial but it is fun to watch live as the tracker numbers go up https://stopkillinggamestracker.pages.dev/
Another, much more flashier tracker: https://stop-killing-games.keep-track.xyz/
Making it a competition between EU nations is in HN title speech ”unreasonably effective”.
(I mean, Denmark, come on, show your northern neighbors that our assumptions about you are wrong! Etc.)
I think this initiative sounds great, it's curious to me in a legal sense why this would strictly pertain to gaming software and not one-time bought software licensing models as a whole. This issue is pretty prevalent in software in general. Software vendors should have some accountability for EoLing these things in a graceful manner.
I think a legal remedy here won't work. It can't magically produce money or desire to keep something runnable indefinitely. And any regulation that tries to compel work without payment seems like it will just hurt indie developers more.
These days, indie devs seem to be the only ones to still allow self-hosting of servers. Take for advantage New World Interactive (makers of Squad, Squad 44, etc). Their servers are self-hosted, though, there is an "official" license you can apply for given an application form. So there are dev "blessed" servers, but no centralization. It's what PC gaming should still be.
I got the devs mixed up. New World Interactive made Insurgency. Offworld Industries is responsible for Squad.
An attempted legal remedy is still better than the nothing we have now.
For indie games, would an exclusion like "games with less than 1 million lifetime players" be enough? That's not an unsolvable issue, especially as indie games are not the main games people are worried about being killed. Most indie games will not be 'killed' by the developers because they're not releant on servers that the developer cannot afford to host.
Lots of indie games I see just use the storefront's APIs for multiplayer matching, not even requiring a matchmaking server.
Bunk. Nobody expects you to do unpaid work. Just don't make the game depend on the availability of your server, or other forms of planned obsolescence.
I don't understand the expectation of being able to play a multiplayer game forever.
Then don't. There is a growing number of single-player games that want an internet connection and even an online account.
I can still play multiplayer Doom, multiplayer Warcraft 1, and many, many more. Seems eminently reasonable to me.
When I buy the game, tell me, "this won't exist after 2030". Done!
Or allow the community to build and host reverse engineered servers after your game is dead. Don't go out of your way to sue and destroy community efforts.
You realize that APIs can be reverse-engineered and new clean-room servers created? It has been done for a bunch of old games.
You could also comply by providing a self hostable server, or even source code that might be convertible to a self hostable server.
Requiring an "end of life plan" in the ToS would be a start.
Or even just binaries. As big of a radical copyleft OSS advocate as I am, I think it'd help this particular movement to steer clear of "just release your source code" as a solution.
I hope this will pass. Video games are an important medium, and it's distressing to the degree they are overwritten or completely destroyed when they are no longer profitable.
Look at Concord. It was turned off immediately, because there was no players interest and Sony decided to cut the losses right away. Under the proposed rules they wouldn't be able to just kill a game they had high hopes for but ended up unneeded.
The only financially viable solution for online games is to release in Europe later, after the project popularity in other markets was established.
I don't think that should apply. The issue as they put it is "effectively robbing customers of their purchases". A full refund fixes that. But most games are not doing that.
Something like this may kill games before they're even made, which is even worse. Barriers to entry don't seem like a good idea to me.
As others have noted, the problem is often with keeping servers running. It's impossible to predict how successful a game will be in the long term, so the publisher can't make any claims to it's longevity. And, it doesn't make any sense to keep servers running if there's not enough income flow. Where this is really an issue is MMOs. Games like Forza already have some solutions: online features are eventually disabled, but you can still play the core game.
Don't keep the server running. Let others put up servers.
Either release the server binary or code or publish the bare minimum API spec so others can build a server from scratch. Strip away any proprietary stuff. And don't sue when other people have server up and playing your game.
This won’t require companies to keep servers running, just that they have an end of life plan, eg: releasing a version of the server that can be self hosted for multiplayer games
That's quite some "just".
Dumping your server binaries onto a FTP server is a quite negligible "just"
Perhaps from a technical perspective, but rarely from a legal / IP perspective.
Open source the server infrastructure or describe the protocol in sufficient detail to easily be reverse engineered.
MMOs don't often have a profitability problem, they even tend to overstay their welcome compared to any other game. While it would be nice to get a server binary to self host after they're EoL it's gonna be unfeasible to run it anyway.
The issue is really more with lazy implementations where a server check is required to play something that's fully single player as you say, which has become standard for major publishers now and is far too common for indie games too. It's not too much to ask to do the bare minimum and keep that single instance auth server online or just remove the requirement entirely by commenting out a few lines.
Mate, WoW Private servers were so profitable that Blizzard decided to ship their own. What makes it unfeasable to self-host?
Why would it be unfeasible? Plenty of MMOs have had private servers.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. Add an expiration date on the "box" (I dunno what you call it in modern times):
"Online-only: This game will be playable until 2028-06-30"
This forces the publisher to put their money where their mouth is. If the game is successful, like WoW, by all means extend the time it's playable for. If it 'flops', you're on the hook to support it for 3 years, since you shouldn't be putting out made-to-fail slop.
Also, storefronts should have a button that says "Rent" or "Subscribe" instead of buy, if the EULA has clauses like "we have the right to remove access for 'any reason, or no reason'.
The word 'buy' implies some level of ownership (not to the rights to IP or anything, but at least to the product being purchased).
I think having expiration dates is very reasonable and I wish their FAQ would cover this. Current FAQ entries seem to suggest companies must make the games playable forever, and suggest this is somehow possible without ongoing support or divulging intellectual property. I am not sure this is always possible to satisfy in the most general sense.
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
It isn't with the status quo, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. The EU as a market has enough sway to solve every vendor insisting on restrictive licensing. And we'd only be talking about already sold copies anyway.
Yes, I suggest they divulge the intellectual property. Games are an art form similar to paintings or music, and we as a society should be able to experience previous art.
Keep the IP while you run the servers and sell the game, when you are no longer interested in running the servers, drop a tarball of code. It doesn’t need to be simple, it just needs to be possible and complete. The community can take care of it. If the IP is valuable, then you have your incentive to keep the game playable until it isn’t valuable to you.
There can be a lot of interwoven licensing with games. fmod, speedtree, SDK terms, music... you can't just open source it in most cases and call it good.
Or provide the server code for self-hosting[0]
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Battlefield/comments/1jxcaj3/battle...
Publishers could just put "Guaranteed playable until 2026-07-02", and then extend those games that are profitable.
You really need either a minimum term of support in law, or a requirement to publish a docker of the server into escrow, to be released if the company fails or decides to discontinue.
> Publishers could just put "Guaranteed playable until 2026-07-02", and then extend those games that are profitable.
A one-day warranty would almost certainly run afoul of the EU's merchantability laws.
Edit: Misread the date (sorry, American here -- we write dates weird). However, the point still stands: selling a product to consumers involves some warranty of merchantability, and breaching that entitles consumers to refunds (and can even get the publisher in trouble with regulators).
I wouldn't be concerned with publishers going the "guaranteed playable until" route because there's already consumer protections that discourage this type of thing.
And CRA. I really doubt that one would be acceptable lifecycle.
An expiration date could be hard to estimate, but a minimum level of support based on sales might be worth thinking about.
As I understand it, that's not the main focus of this initiative though. It's mostly about opening up dead games for stuff like private servers, so we are not forced to lose access to all the art within when the developer pulls the plug.
It seems like a relatively small ask to at least _allow_ hardcore fans to keep something alive. I can imagine publishers that have a great connection with their community (like Coffeestain) actually benefitting from handling stuff like this in a decent way.
Yeah, this level of uncertainty is annoying. It gets extra annoying when we are talking about games like BF2 and the like, that have zero real reason to not have the ability to be played on lan or similar.
good thing this has an easy solution called not using shitty DRM and having a dedicated server/lan option
ACEmulator is a great example of what this would look like for MMOPRGs - https://emulator.ac/
Pokémon Go could never have been made if this was the law.
Why not? What is stopping someone, right now, from setting up a PoGo private server?
The game has millions of pokestops, gyms, and players. A game of this scale CAN'T run on one server.
Even if you could host it on just one or a few machines, if you sign up for one server and your buddy joins another, you can't do raids or anything together. And each of these player hosted servers has a player limit.
Anti-cheat that isn't being actively updated is next to useless. Community servers would be botted to hell.
The game requires a maps tile service. Expecting Niantic to provide map tiles for anyone to download is insane. They might not even own the rights to do that.
It's virtually impossible for Pokémon go to remain in a "reasonably playable state" after the servers shutdown.
That seems an overstatement.
Adding a blurb about "guaranteed to continue working through yyyy/mm/dd" to its app store page would likely be sufficient to satisfy what this is asking for.
I don't know where you and other people in this thread are getting that idea from. That's not what the petition says, and that's definitely not what Ross Scott says in his videos.
The game that sparked this movement was shutdown 9 years after it came out, and had 3 months notice.
>94%
was at 60% less than a week ago :o
This seems very silly to me. Why would it apply only to games? It specifically is trying to apply to free games also. Should any product or service you ship with a client have to allow you to self host it if you don’t want to support it forever? What if your backend is extremely complex like WoW or Fortnite? That’s months or years of work to make that self hostable. How do you broker access to what you actually purchased? Does everyone just get to be Peter Griffin?
This seems like a lot of hullabaloo over an issue that most people don’t care about, isn’t a major problem, has large technical and financial hurdles.
It seems to me if it’s important to consumers the large size and diversity of the gaming market would make this a non issue because you could just select a game without this restriction, of which many are available in every genre.
> What if your backend is extremely complex like WoW or Fortnite?
WoW private servers have been a thing for a long time now. It's not like the initiative is asking for the ability to run the game on any set of minimum hardware. If the backend is released and a fleet of servers is needed to run it, that fulfills the ask.
Pretty much any game of this type also has some ability for the developers to run it on their own machines too, usually with some simplified backend. Releasing those developer tools would also meet the bar.
The primary difference is that games are art, and that the needless destruction of art is a harm to humanity, even if you can just look at other pieces of art.
Well, if they are art, then the artist has every right to make their work ephemeral, and demanding art to be regulated is just outright silly.
If you publish a book, in most countries, you explicitly don't have that right. In fact, you usually have to deliver a copy or several, often at your own cost, to the local national library (e.g. Library of Congress), to ensure it is preserved.
Previously in 2024:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39909538
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126782
I am very surprised that people read this and think: "HoW CaN yOu SuppORT GaME AFter BANkRUPCY! THIS WILL KILL MMOS" Jeez, learn to fucking read. If a company kills a game with multiplayer-online requirement, release the goddamn server or let people make and host servers. this is the only thing that is being proposed.
Is anyone here after PewDiePie comment ?
No but anyone reading this should check out his two recent vids on using Arch linux and De-Googling. He is doing this community a huge favor and it is very entertaining.
Which company is hosting those De-Googling videos?
Stop killing games, and also stop making websites where all you see is a blank page if you don't have JavaScript enabled.
Something about this is very distressing to me.
Millions of essentially rich middle upper class banding together effortlessly to petition the government to save their entertainment. Meanwhile there are people spending their whole lives to get even a tiny sliver of support for things like human rights violations.
> effortlessly
This is not the case
> Meanwhile there are people spending their whole lives
This is just relative privation fallacy speaking. You are welcome to try and create your own initiative and get popular streamers to talk about it. The fact that horrible things are happening in the world does not mean we shouldn't also care about other relatively bad things.
Games aren't exactly restricted to "upper middle class", they're mainstream entertainment (just look at Brazilians complaining about regional pricing). And if you want to make caring about things (art in this case; incidentally also entertainment) a competition, I got some lobbyists up the EU's bottom you can get upset about first.
Gaming really is global. Basically everywhere that can afford the devices which now include the "middle income" countries. So only ones really left out are really the poorest of the poor. If you can afford smartphone you can get on some gaming. Or even cheap computers including second hand ones.
So basically: until everything else is fixed, don't try to fix this?
1. In my view, video games that stop working are a part of a larger problem with consumer tech right now, and you've got to start somewhere. Gaming is a hobby for a lot of people now, and therefore the most visible example.
2. Games are artefacts of our modern culture, examples of artistic expression (more or less). I don't think that every game, every song and every movie is worth saving, but who am I to disparage what someone else likes.
Well don't you worry citizenpaul, this legal issue has already been settled in the United States and no one has any recourse to save their entertainment at all.
Can we not do both?
Its been one guy and a discord working nonstop for over a year. Not exactly the situation you imagine it.
Its also been overwhelming ignored and not-viable in most countries. The US for example is a lost cause.
If you think this is things working out well for middle class folks, then similar work for human rights violations are utterly doomed.
A clear example of whataboutism.
It's not like we are donating anything besides a minute or two of our time... It's just a signature.
If that was all that was needed to force law makers to fix human rights violations, I'll sign that as well, but most of those problems are not as easy to fix.
This might surprise you, but we can actually do both of these things and more!
(And it's not 1995; video games are not a "rich middle upper class" thing)
The world is a big place.