As is stated in the article, but is not clear just from the headline, this was not an unexpected outcome from the initiative. The Commission did not seek discussions with SKG, and spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups.
SKG was prepared for this, and their intention has been to join up with the group putting together the new Digital Fairness Act, since the objective there is very similar, but much broader in scope, and most of the groundwork is already there. Much of the earlier recorded Q&A sessions in Parliament had representatives commenting on this already, so it's the natural approach. This way, legislation will almost certainly be put forward and voted on, and the lobby groups will likely have a harder time trying to wrestle with a larger movement and a parliament that seems sympathetic to the cause.
Basically, this is a battle lost that never really mattered. The climax of this war is yet to come.
This is idiotic. "The industry" are also European citizens.
It's about balancing the interests of people who pay their rent and feed their children by selling games, and the interests of people who merely enjoy games.
Consulting only the group which enjoys games would be absurd to the point of being actively malicious.
Your mindset is why we got rid out of nuclear energy. Nuclear lobby bad, consumer lobby good. Consumer lobby didn't care that what they wanted was impossible (risk free free, carbon free, cheap energy) and angrily demanded by law things the industry couldn't provide, and got nothing as a result. It might very well be the case for this gaming law as well, that the result would have been less games in Europe as game producer would avoid a market that makes unprofitable demands.
You can use this deeply dishonest criticism against virtually any point of view you dislike.
Someone arguing the opposite position would be a corporate shill pushing for regulatory capture. Everyone who disagrees with you is always a corporate shill.
The government should give everyone free gasoline, everyone who says otherwise is a corporate shill only working to protect their profits!
No, it's not, and this is why you were called a shill .. not merely due to a disagreement, but due to you actively portraying your opposition as malicious, while you actively describe multi-billion dollar corporations as just people trying to "pay their rent and feed their children by selling games"
You seem to be arguing under the presupposition that there are two equal entities, industry lobbies and everyone else, and somehow that division of viewpoints gets equal consideration from the governing body.
The other person is arguing that those two entities are not equal and should not have equal weight in affecting the decisions of the European commission.
Calling them malicious for having a different view of the _purpose_ of the commission is kind of wrong (it's independent of being malicious), and from the outside just makes you look dishonest.
> You seem to be arguing under the presupposition that there are two equal entities, industry lobbies and everyone else, and somehow that division of viewpoints gets equal consideration from the governing body.
Where exactly are you getting this from? Why are you attributing this to me, or anyone? There's not a single commenter here arguing this point of view, only some windmill-tilters arguing against it.
> If the opposition simply seeks to silence you, rather than to argue against you, how are they not malicious?
in response to:
> The industry should only be allowed to comment after the laws have been written and fulfill the goals of European citizens.
Where it's clear from your framing of an "opposition trying to silence you" that you think the industry lobby has at least some right to be heard before the council votes on policy. Which is something the statement you are replying to clearly doesn't agree with. And rather than accept that there is a disagreement of the purpose of the council or the acceptability of industry lobbyists influencing law or what not, you just frame it as a moral evil (maliciousness) on the part of the other commenter. A good faith reading of the comment you replied to has so many non-malicious interpretations.
Side note: if your comment implies something hard enough (intentionally or not) that multiple people are "windmill-tilting" against something that you think you aren't saying, it deserves some reflection on whether you may have miscommunicated your point.
I suppose the charitable interpretation is that those who would invest considerable time campaigning for this are deeply into gaming, which is an activity typically associated with younger people.
There’s also the fact that through events like Gamergate, the term “gamer” has become highly charged and is not something most adults would want to be associated with.
That's an interesting point of view. For me, people who advocate for preservation are usually older because they remember the times when you could just buy games and they would keep working forever. While younger people were born into the world where online games is the norm so they don't expect everything to last long.
You brought it up, what do you mean? If one were to bring up allegations of you associating with unpopular movements, would you not clear your name? Having checked your post history, I have to genuinely ask if you're a troll account.
I simply pointed out that gaming and especially gamers have some pretty extreme negative connotations, which is true.
I could dump you links to research detailing the connections between the online gaming community and right wing extremism, but I’m pretty sure you know what I’m talking about.
“Gamer” is basically synonymous for “neo-nazi incel”, and GSK refers to itself as a “global coalition of gamers”. That’s a pretty bad look!
> Would you be happy to put a person on the street so a thousand people get to continue playing league of legends in 2060?
Yes.
The balance is that everyone's free speech has already been SEVERELY restricted in order for the game industry to have a business model at all. This is about making sure that the rest of our society actually gets a remotely fair deal. Asking that companies can't just take away what they have sold is really below the bare minimum.
Wait, are you arguing that activities that make people happy have little to no value?
I mean, we only spend money when we believe that what we buy with it is more valuable than the money we've spent, so there is some underlying activity or follow up to spending the money that naturally follows otherwise, the buyer would perceive no benefit and would not buy again
So how are you equating collection and enjoyment of your purchase as the same?
Surely they must have value at an individual level, for people are willing to pay to engage in those. The time you spend playing games does very little to help the society around you, and might in fact distract you from more productive activities. Perhaps gamers would go outside instead, and reduce the burden on the healthcare system.
This essentially amounts to government intervention to reduce the already incredibly cheap cost per hour of these activities for a small minority of gamers. Is that good public policy?
Yes, because you will not be limited in time to enjoy a single title. Like it's the case with other media - books, music, movies, etc. This is good because future people (who haven't even been born yet) will be able to enjoy the same slice of entertainment that we enjoy right now. Just like we can still enjoy games made 40 years ago.
But we are interested in benefits first and foremost since we are consumers, i.e. people who use the product. Regarding the costs, nobody dismisses them. But saying that the costs of giving the game to community are tremendous is simply misguided. Developers and publishers have been doing this since the beginning, it's not something new.
The reason why publishers don't do this is also very clear - they want us to play their newer games and spend money there. They are not doing this because it's hard for me. They just want to maximize the profit, that's it.
> But we are interested in benefits first and foremost since we are consumers
We're only consumers when we consume, but that is not the extent of our participation in society. To optimize for consumption is a shortcut to certain doom.
> But saying that the costs of giving the game to community are tremendous is simply misguided
Tremendous, no. Significant? Yes. The cost could very well be in the millions for a single project, but how many hours of gameplay does that actually buy? Do those later hours come at a significantly increased cost?
>The reason why publishers don't do this is also very clear - they want us to play their newer games and spend money there. They are not doing this because it's hard for me. They just want to maximize the profit, that's it.
I get why someone who plays games would want this. But as someone who doesn't play games, why on earth would I want to encourage this? It defies most basic economic theory.
You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for in the form of slower economic activity and lower tax revenues. I do not want to subsidize your games.
> The cost could very well be in the millions for a single project
How did you come to this number? Something simple like giving the binaries with docs doesn't cost that much money. I'm not sure what you are referring to.
> how many hours of gameplay does that actually buy?
You seem to confuse the cost of continued support with the cost of giving it to the community. Nobody is asking publishers to continue support when they don't want to.
> But as someone who doesn't play games, why on earth would I want to encourage this?
You are not expected to support this if you don't care about it... But don't act surprised when you find out that some people do play games and they do care about them.
> You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for
>> You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for
>No, that's not how it works. Not even close.
As far as I can tell, legislation which enables you to play a game in perpetuity instead of for a limited time will likely reduce the amount of tax revenue your gaming-related activities generate.
A useful metric to focus on here is the cost per hour of entertainment. The price of the game itself might stay the same, but the cost of your gaming itself would be subsidized.
> legislation which enables you to play a game in perpetuity instead of for a limited time will likely reduce the amount of tax revenue your gaming-related activities generate
How so? If I'm sure that a game is not going to die, I will be more willing to pay for it. The more such games exist, the more money I will be willing to spend on them. Hence more taxes from me. Otherwise I will stick to older games that don't have this problem, which will bring less taxes from me because of the cost.
> cost of your gaming itself would be subsidized
By whom? I know there are currently tax returns (or exemptions is more correct term probably) for gaming companies. But how does having end of life plans change this?
Depends on how they licensed various libraries used in the server binaries. Some of them might not allow redistribution of the final product, only provision of digital services.
Alternatively, as SKG suggested, Riot could post the spec needed for a server to communicate with the game, and someone could just write a server for it.
> disgusting anti-democratic suggestion [...] denying them representation
I assume the idea isn't that developing a game means you don't get to vote as a citizen, but that the industry can't lobby for special access ("spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups").
> FWIW: People building games contribute something to society, playing them contributes nothing.
if there are no players, there is no money to be made, developers will be fired.
and besides, I'd rather put someone on the street if this is the multibillionaire CEO that exploits his devs, than a dev itself. And companies can, you know, slash their billionaire salaries and bonuses to comply with the law.
Yeah, but you don't get to choose where the money comes from and which projects get cancelled because of this last straw. These things have real costs which eventually affect many, many people who are not billionaire CEOs.
It would be absurd to disregard those costs and not consult the industry on them when writing laws like this.
I'd say this shows how corrupted elites are. If the "democratic" entity spends all the time with lobbyists, and not the initiative which started the discussion, this speaks volumes.
Who is the elite here? The people nominated for the commission is by the national government of said country if anything blame the countries picking such self serving citizens to be part of the commission.
That is just restarting the problem: democracy breaks when money easily overrides the needs/desires of the people.
We also have votes, but unfortunately getting people to consider this sort of issue while casting their ballot¹ is rather difficult. Getting people to vote for the bigger picture for their benefit and that of us all doesn't work well as they are far more likely to vote on a single issue that has been in the news recently and whoever they vote for will u-turn on once in control anyway…
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[1] or even getting them to care at all, in the case of European elections [not that this is directly relevant here because of spit brexit].
I perceive democracy as a company, where people are bosses because they choose their workers. If you're the boss, and your employee uses your money to buy themselves a car instead of representing your interest, you make them pay for this and fire them
> a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
That is precisely why the SKG initiative mandates it - so that it's available from the start because it's a legal requirement. Without that, you have no financial nor legal incentive and you end up exactly like you mention - reassigning or dissolving the team.
> If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
"buy" is doing some heavy lifting here. If I buy something, it is mine. If someone else can arbitrarily take it away or stop it working, then it was mis-sold, because what I've really done is rent for an indeterminate period of time. What should be clear up front is whether I'm buying or renting.
What you're saying is literally what the lobby groups think SKG is trying to go for. It's not at all what they're asking for. You should maybe take a look at what they are actually proposing and some of the presentations by developers on why it is sensible.
They're not stupid, there has been a lot of groundwork for this over the past 10+ years.
The issue SKG tackles is that it's the video game equivalent of wildcatting & oil spoilation. A publishers contracting a small studio create a live service game hoping to strike it rich, often without doing any market research on the viability of their product, and then drop support shortly after launch leaving owners with a bricked copy.
They have this very cushy setup where they triple insulate themselves from risk while publishing games that have less snowballs chance in hell of matching their expectations (next HoK, Genshin Impact, PUBG, LOL, minecraft, fortnite, roblox, WoW).
I and a million others think the software industry needs to move past their infant stage and start taking their own products seriously. Frankly it's shocking regulation didn't come in the 00s.
>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
You also have a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. People DON'T buy the game, they ARE voting with their wallet. You are doing the equivalent of telling people "If you don't like abandoned wells you shouldn't drive." We like the gushers, you should just pay the actual cost of drilling instead of passing those off on society. That all people would/should stop playing live service games because of the relatively small cost of dead games is just as ridiculous.
I work in games, worked on some of the huge(40+ million players) online live-service games out there, and I have no idea what you're talking about here:
" What isn’t realistic is stamping their feet and demanding that companies make it possible for people to run their own servers for live service games, just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve"
Like....what licencing issues? After the game is "dead" and the parent company doesn't want to support it anymore, we could easily release the source code or even just the executables for the servers. There's nothing complicated about it, it's just some windows executables with a whole load of config files to tell them what to serve and how. I once had to go to a gaming conference with a really basic laptop to setup a local-only version of our servers to host some private lobby of the game - it took all of 30 minutes to set it up. But oh no, players can't have that because what, it's too complicated?
Like, as someone who actually wrote some of these servers for various services in these games, I really don't buy this entire argument that it can't be done. If anything, it's just the people at the top who have no idea about tech dragging their feet and coming up with implausible "what if" scenarios as to why it can't be done. For at least 3 of the games I worked on I could give you a zip file with all the files and you'd have the servers up and running within an hour, given powerful enough hardware. And then what, we can't change the servers the clients connect to? Please. Modders would have that done within 24 hours of release, probably with a nice GUI for players to use.
>> that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
Yes, and their help isn't needed with any of it, the game is by definition dead at this point, the alternative is the publisher shutting everything down and no one ever playing it again.
>>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
It's not just about consumer choice - it's also about us losing part of the culture that cannot be restored once shut down.
I say that wholeheartedly as someone who has worked on games that are(for the time being) still online. And in few years they will be inevitably shut down, leading to years of my life and effort being inaccessible to anyone - the only way that you will be able to experience it is through Youtube videos. That's a cultural tragedy, and I'm 10000% for companies being forced through law to include it in their design that _eventually_ the servers have to be released to the public. They don't have to offer any support whatsoever, the communities will figure it out, guaranteed.
> Like....what licencing issues? After the game is "dead" and the parent company doesn't want to support it anymore, we could easily release the source code or even just the executables for the servers.
I can't speak to the parent's stance, but more generally this would be referring to IP licensing and patent encumbrance. I've worked on a number of large systems where non-trivial parts of the codebase were licensed from external parties with distribution restrictions in place. Even the executable versions would be problematic as the contracts go to great lengths to lock it down to strictly company XYZ may modify and use the IP, but nothing else regardless of the form or means of distribution.
Releasing said systems as-is would require either relicensing to allow distribution (very costly and potentially impossible if the vendor declines), or replacing that functionality with a cleanroom implementation. Which is both costly, time consuming and difficult. You may also run into further issues there if the contract forbids cloning functionality, or even worse: if there is patent encumbrance you have to go back to the relicensing option.
No problem at all. Just release your own source code. Leave out the licensed stuff. That's how id did it. If you have non-ridiculous development practices, knowing what's your IP and what is not is a basic requirement anyway.
The modder base will reimplement the licensed stuff, if needed.
What if your licensed component is non-trivial, e.g. provides critical features so that omission renders the service entirely non-functional? These laws would need to cater for that scenario, as skimming over that detail and allowing stripped releases would either mean:
1) companies get to release broken, incomplete source under the banner of commercial licensing restrictions.
2) truly upstanding companies (/s) will use this as a loophole to block the majority of their source as commercially licensed by stuffing it all under related companies and licensing it back to themselves. e.g. Company A selling game licenses majority of source (say, the entire server platform) from Company B -> Company B can't be compelled to release their engine because they aren't selling the game.
#1 would be an annoyance through to major challenge depending on the scale, #2 seems a more likely outcome for the major players as they can afford to play that sort of game and get away with it.
To be clear, I think this law should be implemented. However it would be pointless to pretend that licensing constraints won't add significant complexity, and many inventive pathways to highly evasive yet technically compliant outcomes.
I think most people are looking at existing games made under different constraints and concluding that it can't be done. But If the law passed, to me it's quite clear that it's just something that would have to be considered during development - like, we already have to get a sign-off from legal on using any open source libraries, and they usually say if it's fine for something that ships vs something that doesn't. If we knew beforehand that server binaries will eventually ship then that changes the answer from legal, and we either don't use it or try to licence it for that usecase.
Yes, this would force the nature of licensing to change. It does not apply retroactively, so the legal processes would naturally need to shift. Such licenses were used in the past, so there is no reason they cannot be considered again.
The commission is defined by councils and policy from each member state. Many member states send their right wing nuts so there is a bigger picture than just "corrupt".
What about the directive would be unimplementable? Please give specifics here. SKG has repeatedly hammered this point: They only pursue this for _new_ games, only care about non-live-service games (games where you have a subscriptions are obviously "rented", and so wouldn't count). What they want is for those games to have an EOL plan built into the game from the start if they want to rely on a server. This doesn't feel like an unreasonable ask, and I'd ask you to show me what exactly about this is complicated.
It's worth noting that they don't mandate a particular plan. A solution can take many forms - multiplayer games could have servers released, _or_ be given a "direct connection" method, or even have a local (no network) multiplayer option, and still be within what SKG was asking for. For singleplayer games, it's even easier, they can just have a killswitch for the "required server" components.
All of this is cheap to do, it just needs to be planned for so that when the time comes, all the tools are in place for the EOL plan to proceed.
This is not surprising. The movement has been all about gamer vibes and not technical reality from day one. It should have been rejected, and I'm glad it was.
Not sure about the technical reality here - until 2010s, singleplayer games didn't require an Internet connection, and for multiplayer ones you could download a dedicated server application, host it yourself. Only recently it became locked down for the corporate profit; the only party making it hard are the game developers themselves.
Half-Life 2, released back in 2004, required an Internet connection to play. It was a major point of contention, in part due to how unreliable Steam was at the time
Because telemetry and advertising revenues did not plague the online landscape during those times. It has all been standardized since: "click OK to share data with our 13,285 partners", "always-online needed to prove your identity", "we need to force an upgrade of your software so we can ensure you get what's best for you, when we decide" ..oh and all of that after a 159 page legally binding and enforceable agreement that you can't negotiate or reject.
Are you sure we don't need all of this? Seems like we'd be going back to the dark ages of information technology if we did.. (/s)
What does telling your customers you plan to make a game unplayable if it doesn’t perform exactly as you expect financially have to do with technical reality, pray tell?
(Not parent) It doesn't. It's just uninformed or bad faith commenting, astroturfing, and arm chair developers who've never written a line of code for a game in their lives. Always has been.
(Or maybe Jason Hall is going by "Tyler" now. XD )
wrong, the commission did discuss with SKG, but the entire group had their head in the sand when reasonable people asked SKG to respect technical reality and resubmit a better, reality-focused proposal as SKG 2.0. They ban anyone not in their echo chamber.
The technical reality is:
- that singel player games don't need a persistent online connection
- that it is not that complicated if you develop your game with offline playability in mind from the beginning
- multiplayer games can very well have an offline playable LAN mode (Age of Empires 2 is currently sold as "Definitive Edition" which does not work offline in LAN unless you connect to Xbox online services first)
The gaming industry did way too much stupid shit in the last few years and just needs to take it a notch back.
> develop your game with offline playability in mind from the beginning
> players churn on their own without social features
you say one thing but the market votes the other way. Game developers are under pressure to turn a profit. If you want a game your way, develop them yourself! Thats how I started making games for myself. Projecting or pressuring others to do so yield no productive consequence.
> multiplayer games can very well have an offline playable LAN mode
_some_ multiplayer games can, many can't, as they are using a cloud-based multiplayer backend that isn't easily replaceable (see other discussions in this thread). SKG makes no effort to address those differences.
I don't understand your argument. SKG specifically excludes:
- Existing games (they only aim to have regulation for newer game, as existing games may be locked into technical choices like a cloud based multiplayer backend that can't be replaced)
- Non live-service games (ergo games where you have a monthly subscription of some kind, which makes it obvious you're "renting" the game for a limited time).
Within these confines, it seems _very obvious_ to me that you can design just about any multiplayer game in a way that's compatible with SKG's desired regulations. In the vast majority of multiplayer games, you can:
- Provide a LAN multiplayer mode (most match-based FPS/strategy games can do that. Too many examples to cite.)
- Provide server binaries for self-hosted servers (Many survival games, or games with a persistent world, can do that. See v-rising for a recent example.)
- Provide a local multiplayer mode (split screen/couch coop style)
And if you don't want to go through any of that for [insert reason here], you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment like WoW and you're no longer subject to the regulation!
Now, please give me an example of a game that doesn't fit within that framework if you want to continue this argument.
> a LAN multiplayer mode (most match-based FPS/strategy games can do that
Most match-based FPS don't do that anymore, as it's susceptible to DDOS. Whether a LAN-like mode is otherwise still feasible/acceptable by todays game quality standards is debatable.
> Provide server binaries for self-hosted servers
This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
> Now, please give me an example of a game that doesn't fit within that framework if you want to continue this argument.
Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
> you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment
Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
> Most match-based FPS don't do that anymore, as it's susceptible to DDOS.
We're talking about EOL plans here. You don't have to care about DDOS.
> This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
I have multiple issues with this framing:
1. We're talking about regulation about _future games_ that haven't been made yet. SKG doesn't want to regulate existing games. So we're not talking about retrofitting an EOL plan on games that already rely on complex backend. If you're planning for it from the get-go, getting an architecture that isn't so cloud-reliant isn't that complicated.
2. Even if we accept the premise that a game _absolutely needed_ a cloud only architecture to function for one reason or another, that doesn't prevent releasing the architecture binaries.
3. Licensed libraries may have redistribution prohibitions _today_, but should EOL regulations come in place, you'd find that those libraries would quickly move to allow redistribution for EOL purposes, as otherwise studios would just _not use them_.
> Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
AFAICT, Photon Fusion is fully compliant with SKG already - it supports games where one player is the "host" and all comms are P2P. Players can direct connect to one another. While it does work better with a STUN server or with Photon's cloud, they are not *necessary* for the game to function.
Photon's Voice offering might be different, but turning that off for an EOL plan is totally acceptable according to the SKG's wanted regulation - they would fall within the same category of "extra services" that aren't part of the core game.
And _furthermore_, of the three games you cited, I know for sure that PEAK and CW are playable fully offline. They're already SKG-compliant even if photon fusion was somehow not. I haven't played Gorilla Tag or looked into it, but I think I've already made my point clear.
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
WoW still has active players in the millions. FF14 has a 25k peak concurrent players in the past 24h. There are other success stories. But sure, it "tanks your playerbase".
> We're talking about regulation about _future games_ that haven't been made yet. So we're not talking about retrofitting an EOL plan on games that already rely on complex backend. If you're planning for it from the get-go, getting an architecture that isn't so cloud-reliant isn't that complicated.
I don't know about the EU effort, but the California bill would apply to any game that is released on or after January 1, 2027. That's not enough time to plan for the "changes from the get-go."
> There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
If they're not actually allowed to sell their product, then they shouldn't pretend they're selling it. They should be clear that it's a rental by offering it as a subscription only in that case and thus not be bound by that requirement.
> > you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment
>
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
And gamers at large shouldn't pretend that they are going to be shelling out money for subscriptions. There is a reason that even most MMOs switched away from mandatory subscription pricing (apart from the outlier of WOW), and it's not to make the publishers filthy reach, but often barely viable.
Doesn't have to be a monthly payment. If you can give me an EoL in the store page and sell it to me as a license, I'm happy. What sucks is that games currently get killed when the corpo decides. Without regulation, as with everything else, it'll slowly but surely go towards:
"We released MyGame 3 a month ago, sales aren't looking great, announce EoL for MyGame 1 we released 6 years ago to get those bums off it." (or the more charitable version where money's tight and the AWS costs aren't helping)
There are in total ~15-30mil paying subscriber that pay subscription fees to a single game. That's 1% of all gamers globally.
But sure, let's slap a $5/month subscription fee on all upcoming games that would have the chance to be the next Among Us / PEAK, and let's see how well that works out for indie developers.
PEAK uses P2P networking as far as I can tell. AmongUs has multiple mods that allows P2P gaming[0].
Most indie games don't rely on servers for the gameplay loop because those are expensive and an indie studios can't afford it. They instead rely on P2P networking for the gameplay loop, and at most have a matchmaking server to both give a nice experience to find other players to play with, and to allow NAT traversal.
You can easily design a game like PEAK/AmongUs in such a way that, even if the matchmaking server is disabled, the game still works because it has a direct connection or LAN option.
PEAK is listed as an example of using the Photon Fusion Shared Authority model[0]. AFAIK Photon Fusion doesn't allow for any proper P2P in any of their network topologies (apart from the fully offline single-player mode).
Or, as SKG has been saying, make games like Among Us or PEAK have some way for players to self-host the games. It'd be absolutely ridiculous if the devs behind PEAK decided to one day say "Y'know what, we're shutting down PEAK and you can no longer play it" when nothing about the game needs to be tied to a persistent internet connection at all.
Besides, PEAK has offline mode already built in, so no subscriptions needed.
> Besides, PEAK has offline mode already built in, so no subscriptions needed.
Yes, single player offline. SKG is specifically about deactivating the online/multiplayer component in games, so if PEAK were to deactivate their online coop mode, they would definitely fall under it (ignoring grandfathering).
SKG cares about games staying playable. If a game with both MP and SP modes has MP disabled, SKG’s proposals do not fall under it, because the game is still playable offline. They have repeatedly hammered this point in their official communications (such as their youtube and press releases).
I'm not sure what official communication you are seeing but e.g.[0][1] it was clearly stated that it would fall under that. And according to their framework of "game must stay in a reasonable playable state", of course the online mode of PEAK, Battelfield, Call of Duty - which are all games that are primarily purchased for their online mode (but do have an offline mode / singleplayer campaign) - would qualify for their proposal.
> Most match-based FPS don't do that anymore, as it's susceptible to DDOS. Whether a LAN-like mode is otherwise still feasible/acceptable by todays game quality standards is debatable.
How is LAN susceptible to DDoS? I think you're thinking of P2P, unless you're worried about your LAN buddies trolling you I guess.
Regardless, whether the quality of LAN games is good or not is wholly irrelevant to the SKG initiative. If players want to play an apparently inferior version of the game, they should be allowed to, and LAN is hardly going to be an inferior version of the game anyways.
> This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
Comparing your game to a SaaS app is an interesting approach, because SaaS apps are generally sold as subscriptions, not one-time purchases that would otherwise immply ownership. If the game is genuinely SaaS-like, maybe price it like one and stop selling it like a regular product.
Also this would only really be the case for AAA games, and they have more than enough cash to figure out a proper sunsetting strategy.
Again, it doesn't have to be a perfect experience or anything near it, as long as people can somehow keep playing the games they paid for, even if they're the ones to bear the costs of hosting (which isn't even a rare thing in gaming, there's many old games with community servers out there that to this day have healthy playerbases).
In my experience the community servers usually beat the experience on dedicated servers anyways though, modders are usually more passionate and have more freedom to make things work well than the devs do. See the shenanigans with Titanfall 2's servers as an example.
> Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
The games being cited to defeat this legislation are indie titles with small userbases and tight margins. The legislation is being discussed largely because of what EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do to games with millions of paying customers. Letting the hardest edge case set the ceiling for consumer protection is a convenient outcome for the people least affected by it.
And regardless, games like Minecraft and Terraria started off as small-studio indie games that built their own networking without Photon or anything like it. The self-hosted server support is a huge part of why those communities are still thriving today, many years later. The "it's too complex without third-party services" argument is newer than the practice of indie devs doing it themselves.
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
The implication that informed consumers are a problem for the industry is a pretty damning admission about how the industry currently operates.
> How is LAN susceptible to DDoS? I think you're thinking of P2P, unless you're worried about your LAN buddies trolling you I guess.
I didn't say that. Games don't to P2P anymore because it's susceptible to DDOS. LAN as alternative to Internet P2P may have seperate drawbacks (but may obviously disregard DDOS protection).
> The legislation is being discussed largely because of what EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do to games with millions of paying customers. Letting the hardest edge case set the ceiling for consumer protection is a convenient outcome for the people least affected by it.
Then propose some legislation that actually deals with that and doesn't in its communication ignore the cost of retrofitting games for all developers of games with any online component. But that's not how SKG riles up it's base of support.
> The implication that informed consumers are a problem for the industry is a pretty damning admission about how the industry currently operates.
This doesn't have anything to do with informed consumers / uninformed consumers. My comment was about the unwillingness of customers to pay for monthly subscriptions.
> consumers are a problem for the industry
They honestly are. My main reason for not going into game development is the incredible entitlement from the customerbase. I understand that situations like Control or The Crew suck, but those should be individual class action lawsuits. But instead everyone wants to impose legislation on essentially all online games, even those they purchase for less money than a coffee at Starbucks. And all that just to apparently be fine with buggy, laggy, borderline playable versions of the game, with worse matchmaking UX.
That things you bought stop working is not unique to video games with online components. I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore.
> the cost of retrofitting games for all developers of games with any online component
As it has been said many times already, the initiative does not propose any "retrofitting" for existing games.
> the incredible entitlement from the customerbase
The ability to be able to play the game in the future is not entitlement, it's a normal thing. If you car stops working because the authentication servers are down, do you consider yourself entitled as well? I hope not. Why should games be different?
> That things you bought stop working is not unique to video games with online components. I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore
But modern titles stop working on modern systems, so it's not comparable. We can still play older games via different means. But with games that use online connection that's not the case when the servers get shut down.
> The cost per hour of games is already incredibly low compared to most other paid forms of entertainment.
How is this relevant? I still want to be able to play older games 10 years from now. The cost does not matter. I would even pay more money for the guarantee that the game will be always playable.
> How is it not entitled to insist that these super attractive prices should be even lower still?
Nobody suggests to lower the prices... Do you even understand what SKG is about?
> Why should games be different from a movie ticket or a streaming subscription?
Because you can buy movies on physical media and watch them whenever you want. With games that have online component that's not always the case anymore.
>How is this relevant? I still want to be able to play older games 10 years from now. The cost does not matter. I would even pay more money for the guarantee that the game will be always playable.
You can already do that! Contact the rightsholders and negotiate with them. It'll probably be relatively cheap to buy an EOL game.
>Nobody suggests to lower the prices... Do you even understand what SKG is about?
I'm not misunderstanding anything, you are failing to consider basic economics.
Making the product last longer is effectively indistinguishable from making it cheaper in the context of the EU.
But I do get why a bunch of people seem to dismiss SKG as "childish". I didn't start from that point of view, but the commenters here certainly have me convinced with their tunnel-vision.
Ah yes, because businesses just love to turn down free money.
>Once again, nobody is asking that. So you are misunderstanding SKG.
If SKG really does not want games to remain playable after EOL, they're certainly piss-poor communicators. I thought the whole point was to "stop killing games", i.e. make them last longer.
> because businesses just love to turn down free money
Unfortunately, yes. Example - try getting publishing rights to No One Lives Forever franchise (GOG already tried that). It's not rare for publishers to sit on their IPs without doing anything with them. And it's not exclusive to videogames as well.
> make them last longer
You can look at it differently. "Last longer" can mean "getting support from the publisher for longer period of time". Nobody demands this. Or it can mean "have an EOL plan", but then it's a weird way to phrase that. But yes, this meaning is the one that SKG uses.
> Then propose some legislation that actually deals with that...
SKG and the people signing the petitions aren't legislators, the entire point of this initiative is to actually talk to legislators. It's not their job to propose a hyper-specific law on day 1, it's the job of the legislators to do so. And so far, it has been met with nothing but bad faith attacks on things they have never claimed to want, such as...
> ...the cost of retrofitting games ...
SKG has made it abundantly clear that they don't want any kind of law or legislation to be applied retroactively. There would be absolutely no retrofitting forced on anyone, it would only affect new games released after legislation passes. Similarly to how you didn't have to re-manufacture your old phone model to add a USB-C port into it, you don't have to do anything with your already-released games.
> ... the incredible entitlement from the customerbase
People expect to buy a product and to be able to use it however they'd like, without getting scammed and having it yanked from them down the line? How entitled of them!
> And all that just to apparently be fine with buggy, laggy, borderline playable versions of the game, with worse matchmaking UX.
Again, how is that anyone's problem other than the person who bought the game and is presumably happy to keep playing it? If it has reached EOL, then it's better the game remain playable somehow, regardless of how buggy or bad of an experience it is, than to just fully lose access to it. I'd say no experience is worse than a buggy one.
> I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore.
You can extremely easily emulate all of these, including on your phone, and hell Windows has native support for many games with their compatibility modes out of the gate, so yes, you could indeed play games from the 90s if you still wanted to. We've still got Doom (1993) being ported to anything that has a transistor in it to this day. In fact, looking over a list of 90s games, pretty much all of them are still playable! Monkey Island (1990!), Wolfenstein 3D ('92), Myst, the OG Warcraft, Quake is still being played competitively to this day, Civ 2, the original Diablo, the list goes on for a while and many of these games have healthy playerbases to this day.
Ever heard of GOG (Good Old Games)? It's in the name, their entire business is predicated on making retro games runnable on modern systems, and oftentimes even improving on them massively by pre-patching community patches and things of that nature.
As a sidenote, looking at lists of old games it's quite depressing how much we've lost in more recent times. I can and do still boot up games from my childhood, and many of them with vibrant & healthy communities to this day, yet there are newer games from a few short years ago that are now completely dead because the devs decided to pull the plug on them. AoE II "Enhanced" Edition doesn't even have LAN functionality without first connecting to their servers! The original game that this is a remaster of you can still play today with literally 0 issues! That is the exact issue with this crap, we're pretending like it's impossible to build games with longevity in mind when we've been doing it for the better part of 2 decades already.
The commission was talking with the game industry much more than with the initiative, which opened a clear way for the industry to misrepresent the initiative with phrases like "endless support" which nobody demands.
The technical reality is peer to peer multiplayer has existed for decades, and if indie studios can manage both then AAA games certainly can. Single player always online need not even enter the conversation. No point engaging with bad faith arguments to the contrary.
The ECI process forces the Commission to respond formally, not to legislate. The Commission said no, which SKG anticipated. They had already secured a legislative call signed by 45 MEPs and are pushing to amend the Digital Fairness Act through Parliament. The headline frames this as a defeat. Finishing the ECI process shifted the venue to Parliament, where SKG says they have majority support.
Did you honestly believe I would trust the future to some Commission? Hahahaha… Oh no, no, no, it was merely an instrument, a stepping stone to a much larger plan! It has all led to this…and this time, you will not interfere!
From the perspective of someone with some experience in consumer advocacy via the EU is that SKG did not do this the right way, or at least the right way right now. The EU expects radical compromise. The right starting point for SKG was to enter talks with games industry lobby groups to discuss possible solutions. If that fails - you will need to be able to prove that it isn't because you were unable to compromise. Your next step is to find individual game developers and publishers who agree with your proposals and can back them at some (hopefully negotiated) level. Any one-sided proposal is a non-starter.
The EU will view this this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers.
1. The standard of compromise makes no sense because there "the video-game industry" is not a company with a representative. Any compromise you could find would be dismissed on the basis that it's one lobby groups among others anyway.
2. The statements made by somewhat representative groups like the ESA showed any compromise was impossible since their whole premise is "if you don't let us kill games (which we aren't doing) then it's going to kill the industry"; the typical propaganda of "our enemies are insignificant and stupid yet the greatest threat to humanity"
3. The ESA statements were disavowed by some developers, and SKG made a point to have longer videos with developers agreeing and debunking the lies in the ESA statements already. If that's not enough, refer to point 1.
>rights of its citizen workers/producers
The whole point is that the basis of commerce is that you can't sell something and destroy it just afterwards. Sure you can have limited time subscriptions but that's not how video-games are sold. They are changing the definition based on context so they can do the most unethical things as they see fit, and as a result they are entirely destroying the industry by breaking consumer trust.
Completely agree with the first point; it would have been great showing a list of supporters from the game industry. Not that I am an expert in this matter, though.
However:
> The EU will view this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen
workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers.
How could SKG be an attack on gamedevs? What changes in the life of someone in gamedev if the online game their company has them working on provides a self-hostable server or offline functionality once they finally stop working on it?
I guess we could argue that game companies may get less revenue because users will keep playing older games that no longer produce money, and I am not keen on "perpetual games," which could impact the workers of that company... But this is a highly abusive practice. Sure, gambling makes salaries for workers around the world, but that is no excuse to keep perpetuating such an abusive industry.
This is no attack; I am genuinely curious, and I might be wrong on everything :)
If you're actually curious, to gate a taste of the cost of compliance, I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc.
On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want a accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc. so you could tick off a box and have some sort of insurance in case you're being sued.
Now you probably don't have a lot of empathy for big corps, but those laws often apply for small businesses as well (why wouldn't they?) and now imagine the struggling indie dev now also having to deal with another legal compliance so they won't lose their house to a legal troll, when they just struggle to get a game out there they have no idea if it's even going to ever be successful.
I don't really buy this. From my personal experience, indie devs are more likely to use methods which make their server tech distributable (e.g. Minecraft). Large game publishers appear to go in the opposite direction for control and lineage reasons: "Crew 1 is dead so you need to buy Crew 2 now".
Anyone who gamed before 2005 knows that games do not require magic, expensive, managed remote services. We all used to run our own servers! The GameSpy era!
Well I'm talking from experience as a mobile indie game developer.
Pretty much every year I'm getting warnings from Apple or Google, or 3rd party SDKs, that unless I make sure to update libraries, or comply with a new rule, they are going to take down the game.
One of the latest rules was some sort of a digital services act (again another regulation) that made it very difficult for indie devs not to share their personal address and phone numbers.
That's not related to SKG though, that's storefront policy.
In principle, as long as _you_ are not blocking using the binary on hardware that supports (i.e. a player already has it installed on an old phone), you're in the clear.
SKG is explicitly _not_ advocating for lifetime support, compatibility with new devices, etc
But there are 3rd party SDKs that rely on outside servers that will stop working and the app could have unexpected behavior. It doesn't have to be complete crash, but it might be enough to degrade functionality to a point where some players might say the game is unplayable etc.
Being bootstrapped with no investors, there's no extra resources, and no financial benefit in making sure that the app can function well even with these 3rd party services, servers etc. not working.
> degrade functionality to a point where some players might say the game is unplayable etc.
Yeah, it's a good point, the law that may result from parliament does need to be clear on where the line is drawn.
Personally, I would expect singleplayer and LAN to work at EOL
Edit: on 3rd party libraries & services, I would expect that such vendors would need to make their software compliant for their customers after any law change on this front. No one is gonna buy GameLift if it's a legal liability for their EOL plan
> I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc. On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want an accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc. so you could tick off a box and have some sort of insurance in case you're being sued.
This is a really good analogy, except you made one mistake: it’s not difficult at all to design something to be accessible and respectful of privacy as long as you do it from the start. If you try to build something inaccessible and privacy-invading then get caught and have to retrofit accessibility and privacy at the last minute to avoid fines and lawsuits, that’s when it becomes difficult.
And you see this exact mistake crop up in the Stop Killing Games criticism as well. People say that it’s difficult because they are thinking about taking the status quo and retrofitting longevity. For instance, trying to retroactively obtain licenses to distribute components that they didn’t originally have. When in practice, the effect of a law like this is that it would push game developers to make the right choices up front like picking appropriately licensed components, so there’s no barrier to keeping the game alive when the time comes to cease support.
It might also have escaped your attention that the EU was perfectly willing to create accessibility and privacy regulations, so if you are likening Stop Killing Games to these things then it stands to reason that this is not a reason for the EU to avoid Stop Killing Games legislation.
This is my second business after already having experience with GDPR. Thinking of it in advance does make it easier but it can definitely still break a business and it's not a trivial cost. Moreover, it's still changing frequently, just about 2 years ago there was a major change were asking for simple consent was not good enough and now there's a whole CMP TCF2 protocol you have to implement. From research I made, the tools that provide good coverage are not cheap, I pay a lot of money for these services, and they are also 3rd parties that without them the game experience might degrade. Just a little example, if the privacy consent service times out, the game load time increases to about ~10s at least.
Moreover, I have to also pay a company just to be my representative in the EU and have a stupid email address that is completely useless.
I don't know these things definitely don't make my appreciate regulations, and I think if you want to add more layers of regulation, you have to be really thoughtful about them, because often like DRM, eventually they screw the little guys more than they screw the bad actors.
> Thinking of it in advance does make it easier but it can definitely still break a business
If privacy regulations can break your business, then I think there’s a very high chance what you are doing is exactly the sort of thing the regulations are explicitly designed to discourage.
> now there's a whole CMP TCF2 protocol you have to implement.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. There’s no regulation saying you have to implement that. That’s a consequence of you making the choice to trade user data. Somebody who does not choose to do that has much less work to do. This is an example of the regulations working as intended. You’re supposed to see the friction and make better choices up front to avoid it, not make the same choices then complain about the friction.
> eventually they screw the little guys more than they screw the bad actors.
If I have to watch ads, I personally prefer personalized ads as they waste less of my time if I happen to see an ad for something I would actually want. I think generally, scaring people with "oh noes they'll have your annonymuized data" is not that dissimilar from scaring about radiation radiation from their wifi router.
Anyway, the discussion was about the harms of regulations and why developers would resist these. I personally know several indie mobile developers that had games that their core business model was ad monetization, and the regulation made these businesses less viable, and it's likely that players who enjoyed these kind of games, will now see less of these indie games.
I personally think this regulation does more harm then good for small businesses and players alike. I think legeslation has to be super careful when it comes to regulating businesses, anytime I had to deal with compliance around accessibility, privacy, transparency etc. I saw how intentions were good, but execution was absolutely terrible, with so many holes that the ones who benefit the most are the big companies that can workaround these clauses, while good intentioned small businesses need to spend money on compliance before they even know if the business is going to be viable.
> I personally think this regulation does more harm then good for small businesses and players alike
Are we supposed to just accept that games will die because of the profits of some game dev studios?
> I saw how intentions were good, but execution was absolutely terrible, with so many holes that the ones who benefit the most are the big companies that can workaround these clauses
I think regulation is a superweapon that should mostly be used in cases where there can be severe long-term damage (physical and health dangers, loans, etc.) or in cases where what it regulates is simple and easy to comply with.
For example, it makes a lot of sense to regulate gasoline so there won't be any lead in it. It also makes sense to standartize and simplify loans which can also have severe impact on people. I don't think it makes sense to regulate games to that degree, which are merely a form of entertainment and have no severe consequences on people, especially not SKG.
> If it would be so important for players to ensure their games stay alive, they'd just stop buying these games and they'd apply pressure on devs to do that
Unfortunately, it only works on paper. In reality publishers can add stuff after the release when people already paid money for it (classic bait and switch). So buying only "good" games does not guarantee that they will stay that way. Also, we did try "applying pressure", it didn't work, that's why we are here currently.
> I don't think it makes sense to regulate games to that degree
Nobody is asking to regulate the games themselves, only how they are distributed after their end of life.
> which are merely a form of entertainment and have no severe consequences on people
People make money using specific videogames. So there are consequences of shutting down games for good.
Most of the discussions I've seen about this disregard the fact that on paper it's all nice, but in practice it's a rabbit-hole of constraints. Developers often use 3rd party SDKs and services that can render the game useless if they are not included is just one concern, and many times they cannot be technically or legally included in client versions for players.
Personally, for all I care, even as a game-dev, I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game.
This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers, doesn't force them to comply with anything, and doesn't incur any additional costs. Maybe there'd be some tiny loss of revenue, but it's arguably miniscule if the games are already abandoned.
It pretty much already happening with games like the C&C Generals that have pirated abandonware versions.
Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players, instead they should just legalize reverse engineering.
> Developers often use 3rd party SDKs and services that can render the game useless if they are not included
That is indeed a case, and potential solutions has been discussed. The main idea is that games that have already been made do not need to comply with this, so they don't need to change anything. Moreover, some videogames have already been released with middleware stripped out of them. From the top of my head: Doom 3, Blietzkrieg. So you can work around that.
> I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game
To my knowledge, you can already do that in most jurisdictions. That's why there are a lot of decompilation projects that started in recent years.
> This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers
The problem is that for games with online components you also require server binaries, which you don't always have access to. So developers would need to provide at least those binaries. So unfortunately even in this case there will be something that developers must do.
> C&C Generals
That's a good example because EA made source code available last year for most C&C games. So people have been improving unofficial versions.
> Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players
SKG itself does not demand anything specific, that's the idea. People who support the initiative do provide some potential options, but I don't think they are forcing it on anyone.
The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly.
Likewise, the legal risk for small indie games here rounds to zero. Most such games will, at worst, lose access to online leaderboards if their developers shut them down.
I'm a developer of a mobile indie game and it's not true. Just to get started you need to implement tons of third part SDKs like Meta Ads, AdMob, Google Analytics, etc. These require actual handling of player choices, data sanitation etc. disregarding the loss of revenue with not being able to serve personalized ads, or even ads at all to large segments of players. And I'm talking about strictly optional rewarded ads.
These already harmed a lot of small mobile game companies, while the bigger mobile companies had much better means to deal with these.
I personally paid over $10K for different services just to comply, disregarding the loss of revenue over this compliance.
Did you ever build a commercial project or any business yourself? The nature of your comment implies to me you haven't. I highly recommend you give it a try, it might actually change your mind!
I didn't know it was impossible to build businesses without inserting to Meta/Google/others ad SDK to spy on all my users. Maybe we should stop normalizing these behavior.
Yea good luck getting any reasonable visibility on App Store or Google Play without paying good amount of $$$ to meta, Google etc.
Trust me I would have loved to throwaway this dependency on these platforms, I don't enjoy paying for ads. The market is not pretty, but there's a reason for why it's the way it is. For some reasons, players prefer downloading games for free and then paying potentially hundreds to thousands of dollars on IAPs, rather than everyone paying $5 for a game. I would have preferred it to be the latter personally, but the market doesn't seem to want to act this way.
Your videogame is a data-harvester for the purpose of ad-serving, why on Earth would GDPR compliance be easy for you? It sucks that the mobile market is essentially just a glittery front over privacy invasion vectors, but just because it's normalized it doesn't mean it's right. "Serving third party ads" is exactly the kind of thing the GDPR exists to regulate harshly.
That's cool and all, I really don't have a problem with the requirement to tell players to their face that if they play the game for free, they are sharing their data and preferences with 3rd parties. Denying content creators the ability to (a) restrict content to free loaders who refuse, (b) forcing companies to pay for services that so they could reasonably comply, mostly because the legal language is so ambiguous and broad, is something I do not appreciate.
> The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly.
I buy a VPS. I apt install nginx. Is it okay that by default, opening http://IP/index.html logs the IP address to /etc/log/nginx/access.log? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe yes but I need a privacy policy (for an empty index.html). Maybe I need to ask a lawyer (who usually errs on side of caution) because people have been arguing about it for 10 years (and please don't answer here). And in the end, even if I didn't need to do anything, it sure is _some_ nonzero drain of my resources to have think about it at all (completely ignoring whether it's justified or not).
- That data processing always requires consent. There are exactly six reasons for storing or processing data: consent, contract fulfillment, legal compliance, vital interests of a natural person, public interest/official authority, or legitimate interest. Collecting IP addresses can be a legitimate interest, but:
- The real interesting question is what you do with the IP addresses after they're stored in a file. Securing your server is a legitimate interest. Tracking your users is generally not. Having lawfully collected data is not a carte blanche to do anything you choose with it.
Yes. IP addresses by themselves are not PII and may be logged indefinitely. It's only after you start correlating them with other shit that you're collecting that they become subject to GDPR.
Same for cookies really. If you *only* operate a shopping cart, you don't have to display a cookie notice for "only technically required cookies". The point of the cookie notice is to dark pattern users into granting more access or just to annoy them enough that they continue not caring about privacy.
Consider for a moment that end-to-end encrypted messaging protects criminals of all sorts. Surely that’s a bad thing and requiring back doors for law enforcement shouldn’t be considered an attack on anybody?
I absolutely agree that the practices SKG are fighting against are pretty abusive and that it is right and proper to restrict those practices, but I also understand why people see the appeal in anti-e2ee laws.
The thing is, I have a good-enough understanding of cryptography to see why those laws are a terrible idea, and I’m infuriated by how clueless their supporters are. I’m self-aware enough to realise that I might the clueless one here and that me not seeing any legitimate issue with SKG doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
The daylight saving time shit is such a fucking fumble from the EU. We have an instance of direct democracy, we have EU politicians parading around saying “we’re gonna end it” and then absolutely nothing happens. Council points fingers at Commission, Commission points fingers at Council. “It’s their job.” How am I as an EU citizen supposed to be proud of being part of this dysfunctional mess?
It's easy talking points during elections but requires lengthy legal procedures and thus gets chopped immediately. Politicians gonna be politicians. Better to be talking about the time of day than some other dog whisle.
Western Australia has had four referenda on the topic since 1975, each time preceded by a trial period where daylight saving was observed, and every time it has been rejected and the state has switched back to no DST.
Does your member state - as an EU citizen - block the process perhaps? The daylight savings process has stopped because your countries can't agree on which timezone they'd like to be in.
Trump's said he wants to end it. That's something I'd back him on. I wish he'd sign that executive order and tilt that windmill in the courts instead of the stuff he is pushing. I'd be rooting for him!
I'm not sure what your saying here? Trump lies so you'd rather his energy be spent on ICE raids, ending birthright citizenship, and illegal tarrifs than ending daylight savings? Personally I'd rather the latter but you do you.
I would say lobbyist are continuing their take over of the EU. Copyright law is the excuse but 90's games proves this to be invalidated.
None of the games from the 90s and early 2000's required authenticating with a launder. They just worked and this is why those games are still playable to date.
Those same games that had multi-player allowed for downloading a self-hosted server.
Enemy Territory is a prime example. The game would still be playable even with out ID Software releasing the source code.
GOG is built upon legacy games that don't require a launcher. Politicians in the EU have been bought and paid for. President exists and is not being applied.
who cares. you can still pirate if you so choose (at the risk of your data if you do it on the same PC).
you pirating is basically taking part in a distribution, the host simply doesn't do it with a company but a nick (digital loophole*). but the distribution happens no less and the license of right-to-use never covered this to begin with.
all these cases are digital loopholes: companies being able to shut down servers and forcing people to move on.
How about a “stop buying games” movement where people just don’t buy this live service garbage?
It’s all shovelware. It’s all the same crap over and over. There are plenty of non live service games being released every day, buy those instead. If a game is actually important to people they’ll figure out a way to play it (as people did with WoW classic before classic).
The idea that we should spend time and energy to regulate the big studios (who will just find loopholes anyway) instead of just supporting the indies who are making good stuff is wild to me.
The classic SKG example is The Crew. Where is the indie recreation of the Continental USA to drive around? Indie games are great, but let's not act like art is fungible.
I don't like the idea of "they will just find loopholes anyway", that seems defeatist. "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."
I wish people started thinking of good regulation as a technical problem as much as it is a social one.
EU tried to ban tracking cookies. Anyone could've seen the result coming (every site now disrupts your reading). The defeatist attitude would've been right there.
I don't see how games won't just charge you a $0.01 "subscription" that lasts 5 years or various other such sidesteps. it'll just make everything more annoying.
I'll keep buying whatever games seem fun to me. I rarely play a game more than a year or two, they become stale and boring to me. I genuinely, genuinely do not care if the game stops working in 12 years time. Could not possibly care less.
> The Commission’s full communication said a legal obligation to keep games playable, as requested by the initiative, “would not be proportionate.” It cited concerns about intellectual property rights, confidential business information, publisher costs, and potential cybersecurity or safety risks once games are no longer supported.
Nice job regurgitating point-for-point all of the talking points that the publishers spoon-fed you.
I’m so skeptical of the “making it work offline is too hard” argument, I’ve personally RE’d dozens of these titles with no source access, often with anti tamper, and succeeded. Very few titles are genuinely unpreservable to some extent. For example, the VAST majority of Unreal Engine games are trivially preservable unless the developers have taken steps to strip server code, and even when devs do take those steps “reading between the ifdefs” isn’t the worst thing in the world.
It's very hard to reverse engineer something you don't have access to, i.e. server code. Sure, some of it is fairly simple, so it can be done, but when a lot of game logic is happening on the server and you don't have the server binary, then it becomes a step up in difficulty.
I am mixed here. On the one hand there is the decision part from a game publisher, on the other hand the player.
Subscription businesses is simply a usage over time. That's the troubling thing here. You don't really own games physically as we did during the 80th and 90th.
Update-mania and buggy games were introduced first as consequence of the internet, then came the registration phase and after that the subsciption model.
Why am I mixed? Did I keep my machines from back then? The SNES, the i486 etc? What if the hardware has an defect 30 years after? Eternal rights?
They are in no way guaranteed, in either reality.
I was a semi-pro gamer for some time around 99-01, being in the top 50 of the Age of Empires II: AoK ladder at the legendary ZONE in RM games. I had several smurf accounts leveled up into the ladder, to sneak into games without being tied to my clan and even clans (CN, Myll, ZXK just to name a few).
I had to cut ties, because of the impact on my university curriculum. I remember the huge fallout it took on DBD_Jinx who kind of quit the game from one day to another without notice due to - if I remember correctly - being even kicked out of university due to being to heavily involved with the game all day. He was a notorious FLUSHER everywhere and every time which was unimaginable at the time but beat almost everyone being really an excellent executioner and top notch player even in late castle, on water etc. - and this took time and a toll.
After AoK I never touched a game with any potential to being addicted. Never. I didn't play Warcraft, which I was a top notch player when it was called Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and came on a CD in 1995, and this lead me to AoK - an online game.
People should consider, what they are doing online. A sarcastic colleague once put it this way: People changing bytes on a server in a cloud, wow...
He had a point. Games are fun, but not for ever, sadly. I would love to play AoK like back then and while there is the chance now, I still refuse to take part in any online action at all. I took part in a few LAN party games - yes, we brought our laptops and played like it is 1998!
But that's it. So I am mixed. Online gaming feeds more and more addiction and that's why I sometimes think: a server that gets shut down is like a cold turkey for some.
> Did I keep my machines from back then? The SNES, the i486 etc? What if the hardware has an defect 30 years after?
For this you have options: emulators, FPGAs, fixing the original hardware. So as long as you have your copy of the game, there is a way for you to play it.
But with modern games that is not the case anymore. Publisher can decide on a whim that they don't want to support their game and shut down the servers, which renders the whole game unplayable. It even happens with singleplayer games. This is not OK and should not be accepted as the norm.
SKG aren't going for a maximalist "if you publish an online game, it must 100% work forever". Unfortunately, it seems it's not so easy to find a clear mission statement.
I see their main point as: it should still be possible to (in some way) have access to what you pay for after servers shut down.
Some games an online requirement makes sense (like where you play online with other people), but in some cases the online requirement is for a single player only game, where the server shutdown makes the game unplayable. -- Cases like that seem absurd.
Any grown up media industry - is in a eternal battle against the "classics". And games even more, as some of the classics are LEGO sets that have eternal fun build in.
Every new band ever has to compete against the beatles.
the Swiss can only propose new constitutional amendments, not statutory laws. And precisely to avoid having what is supposed to be a technical decision into an overly broad popular vote, because those are still supposed to belong into parliamentary debate.
Because if people voted on every single regulation you'd be at the ballot box five times a day.
That more democracy is more attackable is not a coherent position. More democracy means more people power. But people being powerless to resist misinformation campaigns means that they do not have power. Which means that it is not really democracy. This is the same as saying that democracy is being undermined by wealth inequality. If money can buy political power and money is unevenly distributed then it’s not a democracy.
If one was actually interested in actual democracy one would fix that misinformation asymmetry.
It's reasonable to at least expect that. It's their job after all, while for any single voter there is a lower standard you can realistically hold them too and less time available to verify/debunk claims.
On top of that, there are also instruments that help the voters track whether politicians are engaging in corrupt lobbyism like voting records + donation / campaign contribution records, though few countries do that to a degree that it forms a cohesive anti-corruption framework. None of those measures exist for individual voters.
Well, your local coucilor probably doesn't have access to it, but MPs definitely have access to aides and experts they can ask for opinion and summary before they go in front of a camera and make a fool out of themselves for saying something based on a snippet they saw on TikTok. They are literally surrounded by people whose entire job is to be well informed.
> On top of that, there are also instruments that help the voters track whether politicians are engaging in corrupt lobbyism like voting records + donation / campaign contribution records, though few countries do that to a degree that it forms a cohesive anti-corruption framework. None of those measures exist for individual voters.
Corruption by definition is intentional, compare getting hoodwinked by "misinformation". Curious what "measures [] for individual voters" even means with regards to voters. A voter cannot be corrupt since they only represent themselves.
There’s interestingly all this hoopla and indirection, tracking corruption and misaligned priorities, even now adding the burden to the feeble voter mind to not only stay clear of misinformation campaigns but to watch out for corruption in their own representatives. This seems ripe for simplification.
Less "unnecessary" online games.
To give you one tame example:
Age of Empires 2 released in 1999 and is fully playable offline either as a single or multiplayer game via LAN.
It has received two re-releases as AoE 2 HD edition and AoE 2 Definitive Edition.
The Definitive Edition does not work offline for multiplayer games anymore. It is still the same game with updated graphics and engine but it is still just Age of Empires 2.
In order to play an actuall "Local Area Network" game, you first need to connect to the online Xbox Service. Only then will "Multiplayer" be available as an option and only then you can actually select "Local Area Network" as the "server region" for the match.
All for an updated re-release of a game from 1999.
I was at the AoE 2 DE launch LAN event at a Microsoft Store with big YouTubers and everything. They could not play LAN because right at launch, the online servers crashed due to the load. No one played a multiplayer game at this LAN...
It would result in fewer online games that stop working altogether when the publisher wants to stop it.
All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this.
It's really not that complicated. Not "free", of course, but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.
Game developer here. If it were “just” that easy I’d love to support this.
> All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this
You’re making a huge assumption here both about the scope of the law, and about how straightforward this is to do. I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would be fine. I’ve also worked on games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic - running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda, and massive third party dependencies. Getting a “mini self hosted server application” out of this is a rewrite.
> but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.
The vast majority of games use existing technologies. First line of code was 30 years ago for any unreal game, for example. This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend.
What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service? What if playfab discontinue their offering, or AWS decide to remove a service that our “mini self hosted server” relies upon. Games aren’t some magical piece of technology, they’re just software like everything else.
> [...] running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda [...]
The initiative has no problem with this as far as I know; the backend being an overengineered mess doesn't make it non-compliant with what SKG wants.
I've worked on game backends that would've trivially complied with just a basic executable blob + MySQL, and ones that would've required someone to run 10+ services on AWS (yes, it was entirely stuck on AWS).
With that said I don't think anyone would really be developing things this way in a world where they actually took this type of compliance seriously, and there is no real upside to hyperfocusing like that on third-party platform solutions and so on.
3rd party libraries I agree about, I think it'd force people to actually do things in-house instead, which could be quite the ask for some of them (some of the libraries, and also some of the companies, who sometimes do not possess the talent to solve harder problems, or create their own things).
> The initiative has no problem with this as far as I know; the backend being an overengineered mess doesn't make it non-compliant with what SKG wants.
SKG wants games to be "playable" and doesn't define what playable is. Is a multiplayer chess game with no AI "playable" if you can boot into the menu? Is TLOU remastered playable if the multiplayer is turned off but the SP is still playable? Is Trackmania playable without UGC sharing and leaderboards? I would say "no" to all of the above, FWIW.
> With that said I don't think anyone would really be developing things this way in a world where they actually took this type of compliance seriously, and there is no real upside to hyperfocusing like that on third-party platform solutions and so on.
I think that what will actually happen is three things.
1) Many small studios that try things will just nope out.
2) Studios will switch to the Hollywood model of spinning up an entity per game to tack all the liability onto. There's no real reason to do this now, but if there's actual liability for it, that will change overnight.
3) Larger studios will split out online development from game development into separate entities.
I don't think it's hyperfocusing to say "there's a massive hole in this idea", I think it's dismissive of SKG to ignore people who work in this spaces concerns (ironically, it appears this is one of the reasons the EU commission isn't proceeding here, because SKG haven't engaged with industry groups to come up with a way to make this work).
> SKG wants games to be "playable" and doesn't define what playable is.
Which is completely fine since they're not a legislative body. Instead of settling on a hard line, they're leaving this part open to be defined in collaboration with lawmakers and the industry. Isn't that exactly what so many detractors are asking for?
Let's be honest, SKG wouldn't have fewer critics if they chose a specific definition of "playable". I'd even argue that the industry would be opposed far more strongly.
> Is a multiplayer chess game with no AI "playable" if you can boot into the menu?
Arguably a multiplayer game is playable when, given that you've convinced other people to join you, you can play against them on a self-hosted backend.
With that said, I don't really think the lack of a clear definition from the initiative as to what "playable" means is a problem; this is something that should be hashed out with the relevant parties. You seem to acknowledge that some level of discussion should be had with them, so it's unclear to me why you think somehow SKG should come with a fully formed basically-legislation to the table, when arguably that's not needed or useful for actual lawmakers.
> I don't think it's hyperfocusing to say "there's a massive hole in this idea"
The hyperfocusing I was referring to was making your backend as if you owe AWS/GCP/other-cloud-provider money, i.e. being stuck literally on exactly that platform and maximizing your usage of their services. It's not a great way of making things to begin with, and an even worse way when you actually have to be accountable for things being runnable over time.
One of the biggest issues the industry will face is that it puts pressure on its rapid decline in competency (the same one created and enabled by the things you allude to as being roadblocks for any initiatives around keeping games around after service ends).
They might solve those types of things with interesting accounting solutions like the ones you referred to, but those can be legislated against as well; liability circumvention is only a magic wand if you allow it to be.
> it appears this is one of the reasons the EU commission isn't proceeding here
I think nothing is being done in this particular case because there are groups that have talked quite a bit to the people deciding whether things should be done, not really because of any supposed lack of interaction from SKG. It seems naïve (or driven by other motives) to me to think otherwise.
> I’ve also worked on games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic
Don't make your game be a spaghetti mess of dependencies.
Or.
When you decide on your dependencies, make sure they are compatible with the regulations. The chances of middleware developers not updating their middleware and/or licenses to comply with these regulations are practically zero: there will 100% be market need for compliant middleware and others to provide it, so the existing middleware developers will update theirs too.
> What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service?
That's the easiest of the bunch because Steam already has at least one opensource reimplementation of the API (probably multiple) so all you have to do is drop a DLL in your game's directory and you get Steam independence.
> games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic
But you don't have to design the backend this way. Especially if you know that you will have to share the binaries when the support for the game ends.
> This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend
Some games that have been open sourced by the developers solved this issue by replacing such library calls with stubs. I think this is an acceptable compromise.
>What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service?
If you still support the game, you can replace those services to keep the game running. If you don't support it (or decided that you don't want to keep supporting it because of the service shutdown), then you just release it with those service calls, and the community will replace them (if they want to of course).
> But you don't have to design the backend this way.
You’re calling for legislating software architecture for a subset of software that is different to how it works everywhere else in the tech industry.
> Some games that have been open sourced by the developers solved this issue by replacing such library calls with stubs. I think this is an acceptable compromise.
The other commenter hit on the moving goalposts - I agree with him and not going to go into that more.
> If you don't support it (or decided that you don't want to keep supporting it because of the service shutdown), then you just release it with those service calls, and the community will replace them (if they want to of course).
I think this shows a misunderstanding of what’s actually involved here. If we can rely on the community to patch in missing calls, (and implement the logic behind those calls) then this law doesn’t do anything - the community are free to reverse engineer the service it relies on. If I make a chess game, and the community remake the matchmaker but without ELO that’s bordering on unplayable - in my mind it’s as bad as the game not existing anymore.
> You’re calling for legislating software architecture
Not really, it will be the consequence of requiring the game to be given to the community after the EOL.
> the community are free to reverse engineer the service it relies on
While that is true, it is much harder than receiving the code with the most logic intact. We already do reverse engineer the binaries, including the server protocols, so we know how hard it is. And that's why we know that it's not the way to go.
> Not really, it will be the consequence of requiring the game to be given to the community after the EOL.
"I'm not calling for it, but if it happens to be the only way to achieve what I want then so be it".
> While that is true, it is much harder than receiving the code with the most logic intact. We already do reverse engineer the binaries, including the server protocols, so we know how hard it is. And that's why we know that it's not the way to go.
But for many games, the logic _is_ in the remote service calls. Who decides what calls are reversible and which aren't? In a chess game, matchmaking is probably the most important part, for example.
> You're calling for legislating software architecture for a subset of software that is different to how it works everywhere else in the tech industry.
I am not even sure that's true, even in the limited scope of "we've already built this jumble of micro services that our thin client requires to do anything and a rewrite is impossible".
I think the real goal of this would simply be clearer communication with consumers. Therefore if you are selling an inherently temporary access pass to your server, say so. Don't call it the same thing as someone else who is selling a standalone or self-hostable software binary.
I don't see it regulating software architecture so much as it is the beginnings of trying to make legal categories of software, which I'm not opposed to doing.
I personally think this is not a desirable solution for gamers. Some, if not most, publishers will put a label about "renting" (like they already do in the EULA) and won't change a thing.
I don't think we can stop publishers from rent-seeking behavior, I am only trying to get at the idea that we should clearly communicate to a user when something is truly bought and owned vs rented. If that information is clearly and loudly proclaimed to the customer at purchase time, I have to assume consumer behavior would steer the industry in a more positive direction.
So now you have shifted to goal post from "providing a simple runnable binary" (not feasible due to baked in third-party licensing) to "open sourcing the game code, so people can rewrite the game to patch the missing parts".
The few examples you point out as "open source released with stubs" are also usually games that are decades old and cultural landmarks, where there was economic incentive from the right holders (good PR) to release them (e.g. Quake). This isn't tennable for your typical game that has to shut down online services because it's financially unsustainable.
That's just one of the options, albeit the most beneficial for gamers.
> "open source released with stubs" are also usually games that are decades old and cultural landmarks
Not necessarily.
Edit: the goalpost is "the games should remain playable after the publisher stop supporting it". It hasn't moved an inch. So I'm not sure what you are talking about...
You've not just edit'ed and added to your comment, you removed a point about supporting open sourcing the games as a solution.
> : the goalpost is "the games should remain playable after the publisher stop supporting it". It hasn't moved an inch. So I'm not sure what you are talking about...
Many people (myself included) have absolutely no problem with that in principle. It's how do you do it that we have a problem with. Saying "just have every video game use the architecture that I have in my head that works, and isolate them from how all other software works" isn't practical.
> You've not just edit'ed and added to your comment, you removed a point about supporting open sourcing the games as a solution.
I did not remove anything from my comment. Just added a statement since the alleged "goalpost moving" was referenced twice in the thread, so I had to reread my posts to check if it was really there. Hence my confusion.
> Many people (myself included) have absolutely no problem with that in principle
You can propose your own solution to the problem, not just criticize what other people say.
> just have every video game use the architecture that I have in my head
> Every single suggestion you are making ignores the associated cost to the developers/publishers of the game
The developer is the one who should think about costs. You shouldn't force it on consumers.
> If you are fine with making game development an even riskier financial endeavour than it already is
Yes, I'm absolutely fine with it. We already have a lot of games to play, and if developers have to be very considerate before making something and the number of released games decreases because of this, so be it.
> I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would be fine. I’ve also worked on games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic - running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda, and massive third party dependencies. Getting a “mini self hosted server application” out of this is a rewrite.
This is a good point. For some games, complying with a Stop Killing Games law would be easy. For those games, the developers could simply drop a server binary over the fence like you mentioned. For other games, complying with a Stop Killing Games law would be much more difficult. For those other games, the developers would have to put in significant effort or refund customers once the game is killed.
That being said, I think that what we are talking about here is short-term pain for long-term gain. In the short-term, adaptation will be difficult for some developers, but those developers will eventually learn how to make games that allow players to host their own servers on their own infrastructure.
> What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service? What if playfab discontinue their offering, or AWS decide to remove a service that our “mini self hosted server” relies upon. Games aren’t some magical piece of technology, they’re just software like everything else.
Not really an apt comparison (since you mentioned P2P), but providing something like HLDS should solve this, no? Counter-Strike 1.6 has long ended its development but it has (or had) a prolific community servers to this day. If Playfab, AWS remove that service, just use your own hardware.
Dropping a server binary works if that’s all you need. Playfab and AWS provide software services - how do you operate without Playfab's player data, or matchmaking, or parties?
90% of games have no online conponent, and run in perpetuity after purchase. The multiplayer games usually ship with a server binary you can place on any machine you control.
This only affects AAA game studios that produce micro transaction slop and live services. The exact same that are lobbying against any sort of regulation.
> 90% of games have no online conponent, and run in perpetuity after purchase
So those games are unaffected regardless of this law.
> This only affects AAA game studios that produce micro transaction slop and live services. The exact same that are lobbying against any sort of regulation.
F2P live service games are specifically excluded from this though, which presumably is what you mean by micro transaction slop. This affects every game, from a 1 man developer who uses steam for p2p all the way up to activision and call of duty. The groups hit hardest by this are going to be small-medium developers who are just trying to build a game, not Ubisoft (who are the reason for instigating this whole thing).
> The groups hit hardest by this are going to be small-medium developers who are just trying to build a game
How so? Smaller developers don't usually build games that require huge online components that will be hard to release to the public. That's mostly AAA publishers that do so (at least I can't remember the opposite from the top of my head).
> Smaller developers don't usually build games that require huge online components that will be hard to release to the public.
Yes, they do. Small developers disproportionally have to rely on online services to make their multiplayer games work to a playable standard acceptable to the users, as they can't afford to write them from scratch (and couldn't even afford to do the devops work that comes with a self-hosted alternative).
Example: PEAK, on of _the_ multiplayer hits of last year from a small studio is built on top of Photon[0] for their multiplayer. If you were to remove that component you might as well completely rewrite the game.
> PEAK, on of _the_ multiplayer hits of last year from a small studio is built on top of Photon[0] for their multiplayer
How did studios deal with multiplayer in the 1990-2010? That's right, server binary and in-game server browser. These days you don't even need to enter an IP address, just use Steam to invite/join friends. Using third-party or cloud online services is just pure laziness/convenience, and allowing for players to host their games is not rocket science.
Yes, and it was an awful experience with a fraction of the playerbase. WC3 Battle.net browser is an experience that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. TF2 server browser, where many of the good servers were also not publicly listed and head to be discovered outside of the game is also not really a tractable option.
> Yes, and it was an awful experience with a fraction of the playerbase.
“awful experience”? That’s a very very surprising thing to read. My personal experience has been the exact opposite. I’ve personally experienced two types of games:
1. Games where you can choose a server manually (i.e., by using a server browser or by manually entering an IP address).
2. Games where you have let some sort of matchmaking system choose a server for you.
For games in the first category, I end up building up a favorites list of servers where I fit in and am appreciated. For games in the second category, I am not able to do that. As a result, I get a lot of hate.
I love being cheery and spreading positive vibes in voice chat. Some people like it when I do that. Other people hate it when I do that because they think that my behavior is gay and because they hate gay people. For games in the first category, I am able to avoid the haters by playing on servers where haters are not welcome. For games in the second category, I have to just hope that I get lucky. In practice, I end up being unlucky so often that it makes me never want to play games that fall into the second category.
So from my perspective, the older way of doing things was not an awful experience. It’s the newer way of doing things (the way that allows for games to be killed) that has been an awful experience.
> TF2 server browser, where many of the good servers were also not publicly listed and head to be discovered outside of the game is also not really a tractable option.
I love TF2. I play it all the time. I didn’t know that there was a bunch of good servers that are not publicly listed and had to be discovered outside of the game. Could you link to some of them? I would love to check them out.
Minecraft has mandatory hosted servers that are so non-trivial to host that it spawned a $XXmillion industry of third-party hosting, and first party hosting is also a paid service. Also bad netcode in the Java edition.
I'm not sure if I'd call either of those "just fine". That system also only works for games that are able to attract some minimum viable community where some enthusiasts volunteer to host any servers at all. Great for a really long-lived community, bad for any new game trying to make a splash.
Minecraft targets kids. Of course they would rather use mom's credit card to host a server than learn Docker. I have a Minecraft server running for my friends, it took all of 15 minutes to set up.
And what the hell has netcode to do with who runs the servers? So all the cloud-hosted games never suffer from jitter, latency, bad routing, network congestion? Again, it's just FUD.
> Small developers disproportionally have to rely on online services
I'm not convinced that that's the case. If you're talking about cloud providers then the cost can become very high very quickly, so smaller developers have to carefully manage the budget. To my knowledge, cloud services are usually used for simple stuff like logs and analytics, and games don't really need that to play the game.
Also, don't forget that it's not just multiplayer games. Singleplayer games suffer from this as well.
Most of the cloud providers have generous enough free tiers that small developers fit into them. Look at EOS, Playfab, Steam. You can run a backend for free for < 5k players with lambda and dynamodb.
edit:
> To my knowledge, cloud services are usually used for simple stuff like logs and analytics
Respectfully, you’re wrong here and this is the problem that me and many others have with this line of defense for SKG. No small developers who are managing their budget tightly are storing logs on AWS for analysis after the fact and paying for it. They’re using services like Sentry that do it for free or for $19/months. They’re using services like playfab for parties, vivox for voice chat, flex match for Matchmaking. Those services are free for small amounts of use that 90% of games would fit under.
The question remains - how does any of this prevent small developers from releasing either the binary or the code in the modified form? Again, that has already been done with variety of games (not just popular ones as you assume), so it's not something extraordinary. The developers definitely have the resources to do so since they were getting money for the game, and the least they can do for their game and its community is to give it to them after they stop supporting it themselves.
> The developers definitely have the resources to do so since they were getting money for the game
There is no guarantee that they did!!! Yes, the examples we are pointing out (typical "friendslop" games from the last years) made bank, and should be able to afford to afford and EOL path.
However for every successful game that uses those technologies there are ~100 that "didn't make it", or barely broke even that are now also forced to do additional work on something they either post-hoc now was financially unfeasible, or have to do up-front work on something where it's a gamble whether it will be financially feasible.
In my personal opinion, completely downplaying the effort and financial reality that comes with making games compliant, and based on that creating carveouts for e.g. sub-$100k-revenue games was the downfall of SKG. If they would have made an effort to recognize that, they would be able to mobilize a large base of the indie developer community as well.
I get what you mean - if the developer stops supporting the game then they might run out of money to make the changes. This can even happen spontaneously in some cases. But I'm still expecting at least some effort in preserving their product, their legacy. Some people might call it naive (and it probably is), but for me personally the baseline is that games should be playable at least in some way. Maybe the experience will not be the same, maybe there will a lot of lag, maybe something will break. But it is still better than not being able to play the game at all.
I don't think anyone is downplaying the effort of making a videogame that is both easy to host for the small developers and for the community. But unfortunately developers themselves often choose to pursue financial goals disregarding everything else. So it's understandable that gamers are not happy and demanding some solution. And that the industry is trying to push back.
They may have never made any money to begin with, as they ran out of money during the development phase of the game because they were trying to comply with the regulation, and never got to release the game. Regulation almost always places a higher proportional burden on the smaller players, while larger players can afford it, which is why sensible regulation has carveouts for smaller players.
> maybe there will a lot of lag, maybe something will break. But it is still better than not being able to play the game at all
How is that better? A multiplayer game with awful lag isn't enjoyable anymore, and a game without joy is just a chore.
> they ran out of money during the development phase of the game because they were trying to comply with the regulation
I don't believe it. This is not the biggest spending point when making a videogame. If a developer uses this as an excuse, there was probably something else wrong with the development.
> How is that better?
Well, being able to play a game is better than not being able to play the game. I've played multiplayer games with high lag, you can get used to this. Especially if you want to play the game. Also, community can fix some stuff on their own, but only if they have something to work with.
If the law were to be passed, surely Photon would be incentivized to make a self-hosting alternative, no? Something that uses the same API but is self-hosted.
There is no indication that a self-hostable alternative that to what Photon is providing is even feasible, as a lot of what they are doing includes tuning network settings, setting up CDN-like structures, etc.. Even for their enterprise offerings they are targeting a managed cloud approach, and not an independently deployable binary.
If the law were to be passed, Photon would at the maximum be incentivized to produce a self-hostable API-compatible alternative that would be neutered to such a degree that Games still qualify as "playable" on paper but would be unenjoyable to actually play. More likely, they won't do anything, as they are not the game developer and not responsible for compliance.
Those games are unaffected whether or not SKG is written into law. If ojr of those games has an optional multiplayer component all of a sudden it can come under the purview. One of the things SKG has pushed down the line is what is “playable”. There is a very small but very active online community for a bunch of games that would call the online part of their game a requirement. The last of us and uncharted had very unpopular multiplayer modes off the top of my head.
Small multiplayer “friendslop” games - things like Lethal Fompany, Peak, Totally Reliable Delivery service. They’ve been smash hits, wildly popular but I can definitely see a world where those games just don’t get made when you add a new layer of liability, potentially in perpetuity.
Are you aware that you don't need turnkey cloud services for indie multiplayer right? Even Godot lets you ship a server binary that allows people to host their own games. Many other indie multiplayer games do, we've been doing this since Doom. We're not talking about MMOs here.
There is literally zero reason that Lethal Company needs cloud services for their servers, or for it not to allow players to host their games. EOS & co. are golden handcuffs, and designing the multiplayer system from day 1 with preservation in mind is not that much more work. Of course Epic wants you to use their easy solution, it's called vendor lock in.
Regarding the "friendslop" games - I don't see an issue, the companies that provide those game with online services will adapt to the new requirements to keep getting money from those game developers.
Regarding the optional multiplayer modes - the developers will probably not use some complex architecture for this, so giving it to the community will not be that hard. Also there are multiplayer games that do support community servers out of the box, so it's not an issue to make a game like this.
It's the standard problem of devolving responsibility to individual action: the effect is so diffuse as to be negligible in all but the most extreme cases. In most cases, one wouldn't even be able to correlate change in sales with the boycott action.
On the other hand, actions like picket lines produce a clear relationship between the issue (look at the sign) and the action. Contacting advertisers and shareholders to get them to pull out their funding also has a direct effect, and connects more cleanly the effect to the cause.
This movement stems from Ubisoft’s The Crew, and judging by how Ubisoft is doing financially, maybe they have already.
>Ubisoft has released its financial results for the full 25-26 fiscal year, reporting a sharp decline in revenue and net bookings, down 21.8% and 17.4% year-over-year (YoY), respectively, due to the "softer new release schedule" and new operating model.
EU already have markings for lots of things, like how efficient a dishwasher is.
I think a reasonable middle ground here is to just have EU mandate something similar for games. To receive an A rating the game has to be installable and playable fully offline, for example, and so on.
They could allow for publishers to guarantee a minimum support period, with full refunds guaranteed if the publisher does not honor that. So an E rating may be a game that's guaranteed playable for 2 years and requires online connection to play.
Then those who purchase can make informed decisions. Do I want to buy this game with a rating that signals the game may stop working at any point the publisher decides?
Yes. Exactly. I, for one, am following this credo: If your single player game has an “always online” clause; I am not your customer. No ifs, no buts, no “but i like this franchise”s.
Vote with your wallet. Do not hesitate to boycott.
I'd like to see legislation to require publisher to clearly state if game works offline, and if not, what is the committed, guaranteed operational life ("at least to June 2030" prominently displayed, for instance).
I agree, and i think one more thing should be also explicit; save files.
Whether the game works offline, and until when the servers are guaranteed, is one part. But the savegames and progression data should also belong to the user.
The game is made by the studio, sure, but the save file is the part I construct by playing. It is my time, my choices, my progress, my world state and my memories.
So I would add a clear principle that the publisher should not be able to kidnap the user's save data.
So much noise, so few principles. Whatever happened to don't buy if you don't like it? Read contracts before you agree to them? This whole discussion is kind of ridiculous. Gaming is not a matter of health or wellness. We don't need a nanny chaperoning videogame purchases.
The EU is incapable of forcing the Sony assholes to allow region switching of a PSN account between EU countries... do you expect them to do more advanced thinking wrt the gaming market?
Government should just release legislation, that games that require additional upkeep should provide "Best before" date. That should make customers carefully consider their purchase up front, and instead of buying latest and greatest AAA title, purchase a few 10 year old indie games.
I'm curious to see if this will embolden game corps to continue mistreating consumers or if they will acknowledge consumers are aware of that ethereal state of their "ownership" of games and start selling more complete products instead of "clients" to servers that can be rug-pulled at any time. I think we all can guess the answer as consumers continue to buy, unfortunately, but this movement is at least a step in the right direction.
Well that probably doesn't count as a "so-called" :)
But almost everywhere else it seems to be just corporations pushing for laws against other corporations, like with Epic/Tinder etc against Apple/Google etc
For UK parliament petitions it was 1 in 800. And only because one MP was really against importing shark fins and pushed it themselves as well. Democracy is fake.
Calling this a failure seems a bit unfair. The signatures forced an official EU response, even if they did not produce a law.
The disappointing part is the voluntary industry code. Publishers are not being asked to run servers forever, only to avoid making paid games completely unusable after shutdown.
At what point does buying a game become nothing more than renting access until the publisher changes its mind?
Consider that basically every live-service game you have ever played will become unplayable sooner or later, and how many modern AAA games are live-service...
We can still play the NES version of Mario (1985), but we can't play Evolve (2015), Anthem (2019), Concord (2024), etc.
The fun part about this is that Evolve is fundamentally a P2P game, so it got an offline revival pretty quickly. Anthem would have gotten one much quicker had they not wrapped the game in Denuvo, as it stands that one’s only possible under certain constraints (Linux with new enough AMD cpu/intel cpu, or windows with a hypervisor). Concord was similarly wrapped in an antitamper, but they shipped the majority of the stuff reqd for local play, so that got an offline revival as well.
Yeah, I guess my perspective is along the lines of nothing of value was lost, at least not enough to mobilize people from more pressing causes, but clearly other people think differently.
Yes, absolutely! I personally want to be able to play games many years after they are released and after they have stopped receiving any support. Yet we see growing number of examples where this is not the case and you get locked out of a game permanently when its publisher decides it no longer wants to support it.
The premise was flawed from the get go. It should have been when you release a game it should be sound,
NO DAY 0 patches,
free of bugs that prevent in any way completing the game or cause serious annoyance,
a way to have a digitally bought game made offline, and play offline.
If it's an online game, then after X years, or before abandonment by the studio release a vm that holds the server code, so the addicts could host their own shit.
That's all. But it was fucked from the get go, maybe literally started by a lobbyist. Or simply Ross Scott was simply didn't know what he was doing.
the attempted takeover of the gaming industry has been the biggest blowback to western political establishments everywhere
video games would normally distract people who would otherwise remain politically inactive
when these establishments attempt to insert their propaganda and control mechanisms into these industries, it infuriates millions of people who just want to be left alone
1.3M signatures to grant government power it shouldn't be granted. It's good that it failed. Stop giving money to proprietary software if you have a problem with the arrangement.
Power to say "that product you are selling is not okay with me! If the customer is willing to buy, it must be because you have deceived him. We cannot trust customers to buy games on their own, they need help from the state to do that!"
The initiative is not about telling which games customers can and cannot buy, it's about customers getting to play a game they paid for without the fear of it becoming bricked after the publisher stops supporting it.
This is equivalent to the government making certain kinds of contracts unlawful. It's the same kind of situation as in prostitution and illicit drug markets. The government claims that certain kinds of agreements should simply not be available to customers and sellers. This is not the government's business.
I think that is literally what SKG is doing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that game companies often create games and sell them (i.e. sell licenses), and the terms of those licenses include some degree of revocability and nonguarantees of continued function—which I don't like, btw. Nonetheless, customers buy these games, agree to these licenses, having attentatively read those terms or not.
It's a bit of inference on my part, but here's my bottom line: the conduct SKG is lobbying against is permitted by the contracts which game sellers and customers have agreed to, presumably. Otherwise, a smart instantiation of the SKG idea would be bringing class actions for breaches of contract, I guess?
So I agree, nobody is trying to block people from making games certain ways, including in this sort of Mission Impossible tape way. That would be weird and draconian to outlaw. But I don't know how to interpret SKG other than to be outlawing the sale of such revocable/spontaneously self-destructing game services, which is to say outlawing the contracting between customers and sellers to exchange money for services usable under such terms.
I think a specimen case would be useful to understand. The infamous one seems to be The Crew. Presumably SKG would seek to outlaw something about the conduct of Ubisoft there, presumably the revocation or destruction of the service. Equally presumably, the right to revocation was in the terms that everyone signed. So either, the law trumps the contract, or the contract was unlawful in the first place. This effectively forbids some kinds of contract.
Anyway, that's just my interpretation, so if I'm thinking stupid, I hope my thoughts are laid bare, and that I have not lost your patience, so that you may poke out my errors.
> my impression is that game companies often create games and sell them (i.e. sell licenses), and the terms of those licenses include some degree of revocability and nonguarantees of continued function
Yes, that's the case. But the absence of guarantees is not very specific, which opens a door for publishers to just drop support on a whim. It's not an issue with titles that have no online components, since you can just keep playing them. But a lot of games nowadays do require online connection, even singleplayer ones. So a publisher shutting down the servers for such game will render the game unplayable in any way. This is the crux, and this is what SKG is trying to solve.
> the conduct SKG is lobbying against is permitted by the contracts which game sellers and customers have agreed to, presumably
Unfortunately, publishers can change the agreements. They can promise you 10 year support for a game, and then drop support for this game one year after release (see Anthem as an example; Concord is even more obvious). This should definitely not happen.
> I don't know how to interpret SKG other than to be outlawing the sale of such revocable/spontaneously self-destructing game services
You can still sell them and deny access to the game after shutting it down, you just need to be prepared for legal actions. So no, nobody wants to outlaw the production of such games (at least nobody from the initiative talks about it in such way).
> The infamous one seems to be The Crew
Yes, it's the most popular. But there are hundreds of games like that that are already dead and cannot be played. You might think it's a very small number compared to overall number of games that have been ever released, but it will increase. Also, Ubisoft themselves told us multiple times that they don't want gamers to own the games.
> This effectively forbids some kinds of contract
It's nothing new. For instance, you cannot make a game that formats your system drive when you die in-game. Nobody is stopping you from developing such game, but you will be open to legal actions, since it can be considered malware. Even if you warn the players beforehand - it's still a malware. So the argument "they agreed to this" is not very sound. Like with real world Russian roulette - it's not OK to shoot someone just because they agreed to it.
Also contracts should not contradict the laws. But to prove if such practice contradicts the existing laws is quite hard as we can currently see.
PirateSoftware predicted this would happen and got death threats, swatted, multiple videos hating on him. Like he is the villain. Lobby groups, politics and copyright law are the issues.
He also attacked Ross and insulted him multiple times. He wasn't nice about it, in fact he was very aggressive. He also pretended to be someone who he wasn't. He also tried using his influence to stop the movement, which backfired spectacularly.
> In its official response on June 16, the Commission said it “cannot propose a legal obligation” requiring publishers to keep games playable after they stop being sold commercially.
Control behavior by regulating the intermediary. Figure out what the intermediary publishers rely on is, and regulate the intermediary or transactions to that intermediary
This works within any legal system anywhere and just requires a little inspiration
Why would 1.3M signatures be enough to secure EU law? That is entirely unreasonable and undemocratic, given the small section of the entire EU population that number represents.
The "despite" certainly creates an interesting expectation, though.
As is stated in the article, but is not clear just from the headline, this was not an unexpected outcome from the initiative. The Commission did not seek discussions with SKG, and spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups.
SKG was prepared for this, and their intention has been to join up with the group putting together the new Digital Fairness Act, since the objective there is very similar, but much broader in scope, and most of the groundwork is already there. Much of the earlier recorded Q&A sessions in Parliament had representatives commenting on this already, so it's the natural approach. This way, legislation will almost certainly be put forward and voted on, and the lobby groups will likely have a harder time trying to wrestle with a larger movement and a parliament that seems sympathetic to the cause.
Basically, this is a battle lost that never really mattered. The climax of this war is yet to come.
> spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups.
The industry should only be allowed to comment after the laws have been written and fulfill the goals of European citizens.
To ask the fox to guard the hen house is killing democracy.
Thats what the EU parliament is for
This is idiotic. "The industry" are also European citizens.
It's about balancing the interests of people who pay their rent and feed their children by selling games, and the interests of people who merely enjoy games.
Consulting only the group which enjoys games would be absurd to the point of being actively malicious.
But the commission did consult with the industry much more than with the initiative, they misrepresented the initiative and no balance was achieved...
And your solution is to exclude the industry from the process? That's what Frieren is proposing, and specifically what I am attacking.
Of course not. I'd rather the commission talked equally to both parties involved instead of preferring the one with the stronger lobbying.
Hey! That's exactly what lobbyists against regulations would say!
Your mindset is why we got rid out of nuclear energy. Nuclear lobby bad, consumer lobby good. Consumer lobby didn't care that what they wanted was impossible (risk free free, carbon free, cheap energy) and angrily demanded by law things the industry couldn't provide, and got nothing as a result. It might very well be the case for this gaming law as well, that the result would have been less games in Europe as game producer would avoid a market that makes unprofitable demands.
risk free & cheap lol
You can use this deeply dishonest criticism against virtually any point of view you dislike.
Someone arguing the opposite position would be a corporate shill pushing for regulatory capture. Everyone who disagrees with you is always a corporate shill.
The government should give everyone free gasoline, everyone who says otherwise is a corporate shill only working to protect their profits!
This but unironically
> absurd to the point of being actively malicious
No, it's not, and this is why you were called a shill .. not merely due to a disagreement, but due to you actively portraying your opposition as malicious, while you actively describe multi-billion dollar corporations as just people trying to "pay their rent and feed their children by selling games"
Deeply dishonest indeed.
The person you replied to isn’t the same person that was called a shill, by the way.
> but due to you actively portraying your opposition as malicious
It's extremely difficult to see how the statement quoted below is not fairly characterized as malicious
>The industry should only be allowed to comment after the laws have been written and fulfill the goals of European citizens.
If the opposition simply seeks to silence you, rather than to argue against you, how are they not malicious?
You seem to be arguing under the presupposition that there are two equal entities, industry lobbies and everyone else, and somehow that division of viewpoints gets equal consideration from the governing body.
The other person is arguing that those two entities are not equal and should not have equal weight in affecting the decisions of the European commission.
Calling them malicious for having a different view of the _purpose_ of the commission is kind of wrong (it's independent of being malicious), and from the outside just makes you look dishonest.
> You seem to be arguing under the presupposition that there are two equal entities, industry lobbies and everyone else, and somehow that division of viewpoints gets equal consideration from the governing body.
Where exactly are you getting this from? Why are you attributing this to me, or anyone? There's not a single commenter here arguing this point of view, only some windmill-tilters arguing against it.
> Why are you attributing this to me
Because you wrote:
> If the opposition simply seeks to silence you, rather than to argue against you, how are they not malicious?
in response to:
> The industry should only be allowed to comment after the laws have been written and fulfill the goals of European citizens.
Where it's clear from your framing of an "opposition trying to silence you" that you think the industry lobby has at least some right to be heard before the council votes on policy. Which is something the statement you are replying to clearly doesn't agree with. And rather than accept that there is a disagreement of the purpose of the council or the acceptability of industry lobbyists influencing law or what not, you just frame it as a moral evil (maliciousness) on the part of the other commenter. A good faith reading of the comment you replied to has so many non-malicious interpretations.
Side note: if your comment implies something hard enough (intentionally or not) that multiple people are "windmill-tilting" against something that you think you aren't saying, it deserves some reflection on whether you may have miscommunicated your point.
SKG people are mostly immature and tend to overreact. I’m glad their initiative got killed
> SKG people are mostly immature and tend to overreact
How so? What's immature about the desire to keep games functional?
I suppose the charitable interpretation is that those who would invest considerable time campaigning for this are deeply into gaming, which is an activity typically associated with younger people.
There’s also the fact that through events like Gamergate, the term “gamer” has become highly charged and is not something most adults would want to be associated with.
That's an interesting point of view. For me, people who advocate for preservation are usually older because they remember the times when you could just buy games and they would keep working forever. While younger people were born into the world where online games is the norm so they don't expect everything to last long.
I’m sure the preservation folks will tend to be older, but they’re still going to end up grouped with all other gamers.
It’s a deeply unfortunate association. The “gamer” identity is toxic to the point where “gamer word” means “racial slur”.
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Gamergate has nothing to do with the SKG initiative.
It’s a bad look to have to explicitly deny things like this.
You brought it up, what do you mean? If one were to bring up allegations of you associating with unpopular movements, would you not clear your name? Having checked your post history, I have to genuinely ask if you're a troll account.
I didn’t suggest that the two were directly related.
You made the association. You literally brought them up yourself.
I simply pointed out that gaming and especially gamers have some pretty extreme negative connotations, which is true.
I could dump you links to research detailing the connections between the online gaming community and right wing extremism, but I’m pretty sure you know what I’m talking about.
“Gamer” is basically synonymous for “neo-nazi incel”, and GSK refers to itself as a “global coalition of gamers”. That’s a pretty bad look!
SkG is a lobbyist too!
It's a much smaller set of European citizens, and yet they have a much larger access to lawmakers. So no, it's not idiotic.
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> Would you be happy to put a person on the street so a thousand people get to continue playing league of legends in 2060?
Yes.
The balance is that everyone's free speech has already been SEVERELY restricted in order for the game industry to have a business model at all. This is about making sure that the rest of our society actually gets a remotely fair deal. Asking that companies can't just take away what they have sold is really below the bare minimum.
> And FWIW: People building games contribute something to society, playing them contributes nothing.
You're aware that they are taxed products that people buy with their wages, right?
Yes, but you'd generate the same value by simply collecting them.
Wait, are you arguing that activities that make people happy have little to no value?
I mean, we only spend money when we believe that what we buy with it is more valuable than the money we've spent, so there is some underlying activity or follow up to spending the money that naturally follows otherwise, the buyer would perceive no benefit and would not buy again
So how are you equating collection and enjoyment of your purchase as the same?
Surely they must have value at an individual level, for people are willing to pay to engage in those. The time you spend playing games does very little to help the society around you, and might in fact distract you from more productive activities. Perhaps gamers would go outside instead, and reduce the burden on the healthcare system.
This essentially amounts to government intervention to reduce the already incredibly cheap cost per hour of these activities for a small minority of gamers. Is that good public policy?
> Is that good public policy?
Yes, because you will not be limited in time to enjoy a single title. Like it's the case with other media - books, music, movies, etc. This is good because future people (who haven't even been born yet) will be able to enjoy the same slice of entertainment that we enjoy right now. Just like we can still enjoy games made 40 years ago.
Everything is good policy if you're only willing to list the benefits, and not acknowledge that there are associated costs.
Perhaps the audience that would consume these old games simply won't be big enough.
But we are interested in benefits first and foremost since we are consumers, i.e. people who use the product. Regarding the costs, nobody dismisses them. But saying that the costs of giving the game to community are tremendous is simply misguided. Developers and publishers have been doing this since the beginning, it's not something new.
The reason why publishers don't do this is also very clear - they want us to play their newer games and spend money there. They are not doing this because it's hard for me. They just want to maximize the profit, that's it.
> But we are interested in benefits first and foremost since we are consumers
We're only consumers when we consume, but that is not the extent of our participation in society. To optimize for consumption is a shortcut to certain doom.
> But saying that the costs of giving the game to community are tremendous is simply misguided
Tremendous, no. Significant? Yes. The cost could very well be in the millions for a single project, but how many hours of gameplay does that actually buy? Do those later hours come at a significantly increased cost?
>The reason why publishers don't do this is also very clear - they want us to play their newer games and spend money there. They are not doing this because it's hard for me. They just want to maximize the profit, that's it.
I get why someone who plays games would want this. But as someone who doesn't play games, why on earth would I want to encourage this? It defies most basic economic theory.
You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for in the form of slower economic activity and lower tax revenues. I do not want to subsidize your games.
> The cost could very well be in the millions for a single project
How did you come to this number? Something simple like giving the binaries with docs doesn't cost that much money. I'm not sure what you are referring to.
> how many hours of gameplay does that actually buy?
You seem to confuse the cost of continued support with the cost of giving it to the community. Nobody is asking publishers to continue support when they don't want to.
> But as someone who doesn't play games, why on earth would I want to encourage this?
You are not expected to support this if you don't care about it... But don't act surprised when you find out that some people do play games and they do care about them.
> You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for
No, that's not how it works. Not even close.
>> You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for
>No, that's not how it works. Not even close.
As far as I can tell, legislation which enables you to play a game in perpetuity instead of for a limited time will likely reduce the amount of tax revenue your gaming-related activities generate.
A useful metric to focus on here is the cost per hour of entertainment. The price of the game itself might stay the same, but the cost of your gaming itself would be subsidized.
> legislation which enables you to play a game in perpetuity instead of for a limited time will likely reduce the amount of tax revenue your gaming-related activities generate
How so? If I'm sure that a game is not going to die, I will be more willing to pay for it. The more such games exist, the more money I will be willing to spend on them. Hence more taxes from me. Otherwise I will stick to older games that don't have this problem, which will bring less taxes from me because of the cost.
> cost of your gaming itself would be subsidized
By whom? I know there are currently tax returns (or exemptions is more correct term probably) for gaming companies. But how does having end of life plans change this?
> People building games contribute something to society, playing them contributes nothing.
The people building games wouldn't be contributing anything if the players weren't playing/buying them.
False dilemma. Riot could release the server binaries when they end League of Legends service, and no one would get thrown on the street.
Depends on how they licensed various libraries used in the server binaries. Some of them might not allow redistribution of the final product, only provision of digital services.
That's a non-issue, those providers would have to relax their licenses, since releasing binaries after EOL would become expected of all.
Alternatively, as SKG suggested, Riot could post the spec needed for a server to communicate with the game, and someone could just write a server for it.
All hundred different microservices? And I'm sure you also want docs for how to run them all together too?
Everything you buy instead of something else is putting someone on the street.
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> disgusting anti-democratic suggestion [...] denying them representation
I assume the idea isn't that developing a game means you don't get to vote as a citizen, but that the industry can't lobby for special access ("spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups").
What is that even supposed to mean in practice? Given the lack of a reasonable proposal, I think I'll take their words at face value.
I love how you complain about the poor companies while companies are the only ones being heard. maybe take less of a moral superiority stance?
What's democratic about a decision made by the wealthy few, disregarding a massive popular wave!?
> FWIW: People building games contribute something to society, playing them contributes nothing.
if there are no players, there is no money to be made, developers will be fired.
and besides, I'd rather put someone on the street if this is the multibillionaire CEO that exploits his devs, than a dev itself. And companies can, you know, slash their billionaire salaries and bonuses to comply with the law.
Yeah, but you don't get to choose where the money comes from and which projects get cancelled because of this last straw. These things have real costs which eventually affect many, many people who are not billionaire CEOs.
It would be absurd to disregard those costs and not consult the industry on them when writing laws like this.
Digital fairness act for those that want to check it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fairness_Act
I'd say this shows how corrupted elites are. If the "democratic" entity spends all the time with lobbyists, and not the initiative which started the discussion, this speaks volumes.
Who is the elite here? The people nominated for the commission is by the national government of said country if anything blame the countries picking such self serving citizens to be part of the commission.
what can you do? they have billions and we have signatures.
That is just restarting the problem: democracy breaks when money easily overrides the needs/desires of the people.
We also have votes, but unfortunately getting people to consider this sort of issue while casting their ballot¹ is rather difficult. Getting people to vote for the bigger picture for their benefit and that of us all doesn't work well as they are far more likely to vote on a single issue that has been in the news recently and whoever they vote for will u-turn on once in control anyway…
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[1] or even getting them to care at all, in the case of European elections [not that this is directly relevant here because of spit brexit].
I perceive democracy as a company, where people are bosses because they choose their workers. If you're the boss, and your employee uses your money to buy themselves a car instead of representing your interest, you make them pay for this and fire them
Piracy, so they don't have billions any more?
I like your mode of thinking
You can vote for someone else the next time. Sadly the EU parliament elections turnout is still relatively low in many member states.
okay so how do we convince enough people to vote correctly? And what is the correct choice?
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> just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve
A lot of things are "impossible" until they become legally required, at which point it's just business as usual.
> and a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things
Which is why we need a legal requirement - so that companies plan ahead for this.
> a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
That is precisely why the SKG initiative mandates it - so that it's available from the start because it's a legal requirement. Without that, you have no financial nor legal incentive and you end up exactly like you mention - reassigning or dissolving the team.
> If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
"buy" is doing some heavy lifting here. If I buy something, it is mine. If someone else can arbitrarily take it away or stop it working, then it was mis-sold, because what I've really done is rent for an indeterminate period of time. What should be clear up front is whether I'm buying or renting.
What you're saying is literally what the lobby groups think SKG is trying to go for. It's not at all what they're asking for. You should maybe take a look at what they are actually proposing and some of the presentations by developers on why it is sensible.
They're not stupid, there has been a lot of groundwork for this over the past 10+ years.
>If they kept it to single player games and a push for games which aren’t multiplayer not to have a
but they are keeping to that. unfortunately
The issue SKG tackles is that it's the video game equivalent of wildcatting & oil spoilation. A publishers contracting a small studio create a live service game hoping to strike it rich, often without doing any market research on the viability of their product, and then drop support shortly after launch leaving owners with a bricked copy.
They have this very cushy setup where they triple insulate themselves from risk while publishing games that have less snowballs chance in hell of matching their expectations (next HoK, Genshin Impact, PUBG, LOL, minecraft, fortnite, roblox, WoW).
I and a million others think the software industry needs to move past their infant stage and start taking their own products seriously. Frankly it's shocking regulation didn't come in the 00s.
>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
You also have a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. People DON'T buy the game, they ARE voting with their wallet. You are doing the equivalent of telling people "If you don't like abandoned wells you shouldn't drive." We like the gushers, you should just pay the actual cost of drilling instead of passing those off on society. That all people would/should stop playing live service games because of the relatively small cost of dead games is just as ridiculous.
I work in games, worked on some of the huge(40+ million players) online live-service games out there, and I have no idea what you're talking about here:
" What isn’t realistic is stamping their feet and demanding that companies make it possible for people to run their own servers for live service games, just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve"
Like....what licencing issues? After the game is "dead" and the parent company doesn't want to support it anymore, we could easily release the source code or even just the executables for the servers. There's nothing complicated about it, it's just some windows executables with a whole load of config files to tell them what to serve and how. I once had to go to a gaming conference with a really basic laptop to setup a local-only version of our servers to host some private lobby of the game - it took all of 30 minutes to set it up. But oh no, players can't have that because what, it's too complicated?
Like, as someone who actually wrote some of these servers for various services in these games, I really don't buy this entire argument that it can't be done. If anything, it's just the people at the top who have no idea about tech dragging their feet and coming up with implausible "what if" scenarios as to why it can't be done. For at least 3 of the games I worked on I could give you a zip file with all the files and you'd have the servers up and running within an hour, given powerful enough hardware. And then what, we can't change the servers the clients connect to? Please. Modders would have that done within 24 hours of release, probably with a nice GUI for players to use.
>> that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
Yes, and their help isn't needed with any of it, the game is by definition dead at this point, the alternative is the publisher shutting everything down and no one ever playing it again.
>>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
It's not just about consumer choice - it's also about us losing part of the culture that cannot be restored once shut down.
I say that wholeheartedly as someone who has worked on games that are(for the time being) still online. And in few years they will be inevitably shut down, leading to years of my life and effort being inaccessible to anyone - the only way that you will be able to experience it is through Youtube videos. That's a cultural tragedy, and I'm 10000% for companies being forced through law to include it in their design that _eventually_ the servers have to be released to the public. They don't have to offer any support whatsoever, the communities will figure it out, guaranteed.
> Like....what licencing issues? After the game is "dead" and the parent company doesn't want to support it anymore, we could easily release the source code or even just the executables for the servers.
I can't speak to the parent's stance, but more generally this would be referring to IP licensing and patent encumbrance. I've worked on a number of large systems where non-trivial parts of the codebase were licensed from external parties with distribution restrictions in place. Even the executable versions would be problematic as the contracts go to great lengths to lock it down to strictly company XYZ may modify and use the IP, but nothing else regardless of the form or means of distribution.
Releasing said systems as-is would require either relicensing to allow distribution (very costly and potentially impossible if the vendor declines), or replacing that functionality with a cleanroom implementation. Which is both costly, time consuming and difficult. You may also run into further issues there if the contract forbids cloning functionality, or even worse: if there is patent encumbrance you have to go back to the relicensing option.
No problem at all. Just release your own source code. Leave out the licensed stuff. That's how id did it. If you have non-ridiculous development practices, knowing what's your IP and what is not is a basic requirement anyway.
The modder base will reimplement the licensed stuff, if needed.
What if your licensed component is non-trivial, e.g. provides critical features so that omission renders the service entirely non-functional? These laws would need to cater for that scenario, as skimming over that detail and allowing stripped releases would either mean:
1) companies get to release broken, incomplete source under the banner of commercial licensing restrictions.
2) truly upstanding companies (/s) will use this as a loophole to block the majority of their source as commercially licensed by stuffing it all under related companies and licensing it back to themselves. e.g. Company A selling game licenses majority of source (say, the entire server platform) from Company B -> Company B can't be compelled to release their engine because they aren't selling the game.
#1 would be an annoyance through to major challenge depending on the scale, #2 seems a more likely outcome for the major players as they can afford to play that sort of game and get away with it.
To be clear, I think this law should be implemented. However it would be pointless to pretend that licensing constraints won't add significant complexity, and many inventive pathways to highly evasive yet technically compliant outcomes.
I think most people are looking at existing games made under different constraints and concluding that it can't be done. But If the law passed, to me it's quite clear that it's just something that would have to be considered during development - like, we already have to get a sign-off from legal on using any open source libraries, and they usually say if it's fine for something that ships vs something that doesn't. If we knew beforehand that server binaries will eventually ship then that changes the answer from legal, and we either don't use it or try to licence it for that usecase.
Yes, this would force the nature of licensing to change. It does not apply retroactively, so the legal processes would naturally need to shift. Such licenses were used in the past, so there is no reason they cannot be considered again.
> how corrupted elites are
The commission is defined by councils and policy from each member state. Many member states send their right wing nuts so there is a bigger picture than just "corrupt".
Seeing your comment, the base seems more corrupted than the elite. The corruption they suffer is to see everyone as being corrupted.
Think about it: how you would implement such directive and make it implementable... Now you see the problem.
What about the directive would be unimplementable? Please give specifics here. SKG has repeatedly hammered this point: They only pursue this for _new_ games, only care about non-live-service games (games where you have a subscriptions are obviously "rented", and so wouldn't count). What they want is for those games to have an EOL plan built into the game from the start if they want to rely on a server. This doesn't feel like an unreasonable ask, and I'd ask you to show me what exactly about this is complicated.
It's worth noting that they don't mandate a particular plan. A solution can take many forms - multiplayer games could have servers released, _or_ be given a "direct connection" method, or even have a local (no network) multiplayer option, and still be within what SKG was asking for. For singleplayer games, it's even easier, they can just have a killswitch for the "required server" components.
All of this is cheap to do, it just needs to be planned for so that when the time comes, all the tools are in place for the EOL plan to proceed.
Did you even read what SKG was advocating for in detail? Because it answers your question.
> The Commission ... spent virtually all of their time with ... industry lobby groups.
This is how the European Union works.
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> This sounds like cope
You can listen to Ross' explanation in his recent video [1], it starts at 12:12
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgoODQFrPgw
This is not surprising. The movement has been all about gamer vibes and not technical reality from day one. It should have been rejected, and I'm glad it was.
Not sure about the technical reality here - until 2010s, singleplayer games didn't require an Internet connection, and for multiplayer ones you could download a dedicated server application, host it yourself. Only recently it became locked down for the corporate profit; the only party making it hard are the game developers themselves.
Half-Life 2, released back in 2004, required an Internet connection to play. It was a major point of contention, in part due to how unreliable Steam was at the time
Because telemetry and advertising revenues did not plague the online landscape during those times. It has all been standardized since: "click OK to share data with our 13,285 partners", "always-online needed to prove your identity", "we need to force an upgrade of your software so we can ensure you get what's best for you, when we decide" ..oh and all of that after a 159 page legally binding and enforceable agreement that you can't negotiate or reject.
Are you sure we don't need all of this? Seems like we'd be going back to the dark ages of information technology if we did.. (/s)
What does telling your customers you plan to make a game unplayable if it doesn’t perform exactly as you expect financially have to do with technical reality, pray tell?
(Not parent) It doesn't. It's just uninformed or bad faith commenting, astroturfing, and arm chair developers who've never written a line of code for a game in their lives. Always has been.
(Or maybe Jason Hall is going by "Tyler" now. XD )
What SKG is asking for is not only technical reality but easy to do if you plan for it from the start.
Please actually read the proposed initiative.
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wrong, the commission did discuss with SKG, but the entire group had their head in the sand when reasonable people asked SKG to respect technical reality and resubmit a better, reality-focused proposal as SKG 2.0. They ban anyone not in their echo chamber.
The technical reality is: - that singel player games don't need a persistent online connection - that it is not that complicated if you develop your game with offline playability in mind from the beginning - multiplayer games can very well have an offline playable LAN mode (Age of Empires 2 is currently sold as "Definitive Edition" which does not work offline in LAN unless you connect to Xbox online services first)
The gaming industry did way too much stupid shit in the last few years and just needs to take it a notch back.
> develop your game with offline playability in mind from the beginning
> players churn on their own without social features
you say one thing but the market votes the other way. Game developers are under pressure to turn a profit. If you want a game your way, develop them yourself! Thats how I started making games for myself. Projecting or pressuring others to do so yield no productive consequence.
> multiplayer games can very well have an offline playable LAN mode
_some_ multiplayer games can, many can't, as they are using a cloud-based multiplayer backend that isn't easily replaceable (see other discussions in this thread). SKG makes no effort to address those differences.
I don't understand your argument. SKG specifically excludes:
- Existing games (they only aim to have regulation for newer game, as existing games may be locked into technical choices like a cloud based multiplayer backend that can't be replaced)
- Non live-service games (ergo games where you have a monthly subscription of some kind, which makes it obvious you're "renting" the game for a limited time).
Within these confines, it seems _very obvious_ to me that you can design just about any multiplayer game in a way that's compatible with SKG's desired regulations. In the vast majority of multiplayer games, you can:
- Provide a LAN multiplayer mode (most match-based FPS/strategy games can do that. Too many examples to cite.)
- Provide server binaries for self-hosted servers (Many survival games, or games with a persistent world, can do that. See v-rising for a recent example.)
- Provide a local multiplayer mode (split screen/couch coop style)
And if you don't want to go through any of that for [insert reason here], you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment like WoW and you're no longer subject to the regulation!
Now, please give me an example of a game that doesn't fit within that framework if you want to continue this argument.
> a LAN multiplayer mode (most match-based FPS/strategy games can do that
Most match-based FPS don't do that anymore, as it's susceptible to DDOS. Whether a LAN-like mode is otherwise still feasible/acceptable by todays game quality standards is debatable.
> Provide server binaries for self-hosted servers
This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
> Now, please give me an example of a game that doesn't fit within that framework if you want to continue this argument.
Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
> you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment
Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
[0]: https://www.photonengine.com
> Most match-based FPS don't do that anymore, as it's susceptible to DDOS.
We're talking about EOL plans here. You don't have to care about DDOS.
> This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
I have multiple issues with this framing:
1. We're talking about regulation about _future games_ that haven't been made yet. SKG doesn't want to regulate existing games. So we're not talking about retrofitting an EOL plan on games that already rely on complex backend. If you're planning for it from the get-go, getting an architecture that isn't so cloud-reliant isn't that complicated.
2. Even if we accept the premise that a game _absolutely needed_ a cloud only architecture to function for one reason or another, that doesn't prevent releasing the architecture binaries.
3. Licensed libraries may have redistribution prohibitions _today_, but should EOL regulations come in place, you'd find that those libraries would quickly move to allow redistribution for EOL purposes, as otherwise studios would just _not use them_.
> Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
AFAICT, Photon Fusion is fully compliant with SKG already - it supports games where one player is the "host" and all comms are P2P. Players can direct connect to one another. While it does work better with a STUN server or with Photon's cloud, they are not *necessary* for the game to function.
Photon's Voice offering might be different, but turning that off for an EOL plan is totally acceptable according to the SKG's wanted regulation - they would fall within the same category of "extra services" that aren't part of the core game.
And _furthermore_, of the three games you cited, I know for sure that PEAK and CW are playable fully offline. They're already SKG-compliant even if photon fusion was somehow not. I haven't played Gorilla Tag or looked into it, but I think I've already made my point clear.
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
WoW still has active players in the millions. FF14 has a 25k peak concurrent players in the past 24h. There are other success stories. But sure, it "tanks your playerbase".
> We're talking about regulation about _future games_ that haven't been made yet. So we're not talking about retrofitting an EOL plan on games that already rely on complex backend. If you're planning for it from the get-go, getting an architecture that isn't so cloud-reliant isn't that complicated.
I don't know about the EU effort, but the California bill would apply to any game that is released on or after January 1, 2027. That's not enough time to plan for the "changes from the get-go."
> There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
If they're not actually allowed to sell their product, then they shouldn't pretend they're selling it. They should be clear that it's a rental by offering it as a subscription only in that case and thus not be bound by that requirement.
> > you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment
>
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
And gamers at large shouldn't pretend that they are going to be shelling out money for subscriptions. There is a reason that even most MMOs switched away from mandatory subscription pricing (apart from the outlier of WOW), and it's not to make the publishers filthy reach, but often barely viable.
Doesn't have to be a monthly payment. If you can give me an EoL in the store page and sell it to me as a license, I'm happy. What sucks is that games currently get killed when the corpo decides. Without regulation, as with everything else, it'll slowly but surely go towards:
"We released MyGame 3 a month ago, sales aren't looking great, announce EoL for MyGame 1 we released 6 years ago to get those bums off it." (or the more charitable version where money's tight and the AWS costs aren't helping)
>If you can give me an EoL in the store page and sell it to me as a license, I'm happy
The goal here is to disallow this, as it's obviously what everyone would do if allowed to.
They'd just sell every game with 1 year EoL and keep the servers running however long they feel like.
Ok yeah, that'd be kinda stupid.
WoW, FF14, Elder Scrolls: Online, runescape. That's a lot of outlier I can cite off the top of my head.
> WoW, FF14, Elder Scrolls: Online, runescape
There are in total ~15-30mil paying subscriber that pay subscription fees to a single game. That's 1% of all gamers globally.
But sure, let's slap a $5/month subscription fee on all upcoming games that would have the chance to be the next Among Us / PEAK, and let's see how well that works out for indie developers.
PEAK uses P2P networking as far as I can tell. AmongUs has multiple mods that allows P2P gaming[0].
Most indie games don't rely on servers for the gameplay loop because those are expensive and an indie studios can't afford it. They instead rely on P2P networking for the gameplay loop, and at most have a matchmaking server to both give a nice experience to find other players to play with, and to allow NAT traversal.
You can easily design a game like PEAK/AmongUs in such a way that, even if the matchmaking server is disabled, the game still works because it has a direct connection or LAN option.
[0]: https://github.com/InvoxiPlayGames/AmongUsP2P
> PEAK uses P2P networking as far as I can tell.
PEAK is listed as an example of using the Photon Fusion Shared Authority model[0]. AFAIK Photon Fusion doesn't allow for any proper P2P in any of their network topologies (apart from the fully offline single-player mode).
[0]: https://doc.photonengine.com/photon/v1/photon-products#the-q...
Or, as SKG has been saying, make games like Among Us or PEAK have some way for players to self-host the games. It'd be absolutely ridiculous if the devs behind PEAK decided to one day say "Y'know what, we're shutting down PEAK and you can no longer play it" when nothing about the game needs to be tied to a persistent internet connection at all.
Besides, PEAK has offline mode already built in, so no subscriptions needed.
> Besides, PEAK has offline mode already built in, so no subscriptions needed.
Yes, single player offline. SKG is specifically about deactivating the online/multiplayer component in games, so if PEAK were to deactivate their online coop mode, they would definitely fall under it (ignoring grandfathering).
SKG cares about games staying playable. If a game with both MP and SP modes has MP disabled, SKG’s proposals do not fall under it, because the game is still playable offline. They have repeatedly hammered this point in their official communications (such as their youtube and press releases).
I'm not sure what official communication you are seeing but e.g.[0][1] it was clearly stated that it would fall under that. And according to their framework of "game must stay in a reasonable playable state", of course the online mode of PEAK, Battelfield, Call of Duty - which are all games that are primarily purchased for their online mode (but do have an offline mode / singleplayer campaign) - would qualify for their proposal.
[0]: https://youtu.be/sEVBiN5SKuA?t=1967
[1]: https://youtu.be/36qDEeTDXNE?t=2378 - Statement by affiliated Pirate Party member
> SKG is specifically about deactivating the online/multiplayer component in games
No, this is false. SKG also includes singleplayer games which require constant online connection.
Yes, you are right, but that's not the part in discussion here with GP.
> Most match-based FPS don't do that anymore, as it's susceptible to DDOS. Whether a LAN-like mode is otherwise still feasible/acceptable by todays game quality standards is debatable.
How is LAN susceptible to DDoS? I think you're thinking of P2P, unless you're worried about your LAN buddies trolling you I guess.
Regardless, whether the quality of LAN games is good or not is wholly irrelevant to the SKG initiative. If players want to play an apparently inferior version of the game, they should be allowed to, and LAN is hardly going to be an inferior version of the game anyways.
> This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
Comparing your game to a SaaS app is an interesting approach, because SaaS apps are generally sold as subscriptions, not one-time purchases that would otherwise immply ownership. If the game is genuinely SaaS-like, maybe price it like one and stop selling it like a regular product.
Also this would only really be the case for AAA games, and they have more than enough cash to figure out a proper sunsetting strategy.
Again, it doesn't have to be a perfect experience or anything near it, as long as people can somehow keep playing the games they paid for, even if they're the ones to bear the costs of hosting (which isn't even a rare thing in gaming, there's many old games with community servers out there that to this day have healthy playerbases).
In my experience the community servers usually beat the experience on dedicated servers anyways though, modders are usually more passionate and have more freedom to make things work well than the devs do. See the shenanigans with Titanfall 2's servers as an example.
> Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
The games being cited to defeat this legislation are indie titles with small userbases and tight margins. The legislation is being discussed largely because of what EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do to games with millions of paying customers. Letting the hardest edge case set the ceiling for consumer protection is a convenient outcome for the people least affected by it.
And regardless, games like Minecraft and Terraria started off as small-studio indie games that built their own networking without Photon or anything like it. The self-hosted server support is a huge part of why those communities are still thriving today, many years later. The "it's too complex without third-party services" argument is newer than the practice of indie devs doing it themselves.
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
The implication that informed consumers are a problem for the industry is a pretty damning admission about how the industry currently operates.
> How is LAN susceptible to DDoS? I think you're thinking of P2P, unless you're worried about your LAN buddies trolling you I guess.
I didn't say that. Games don't to P2P anymore because it's susceptible to DDOS. LAN as alternative to Internet P2P may have seperate drawbacks (but may obviously disregard DDOS protection).
> The legislation is being discussed largely because of what EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do to games with millions of paying customers. Letting the hardest edge case set the ceiling for consumer protection is a convenient outcome for the people least affected by it.
Then propose some legislation that actually deals with that and doesn't in its communication ignore the cost of retrofitting games for all developers of games with any online component. But that's not how SKG riles up it's base of support.
> The implication that informed consumers are a problem for the industry is a pretty damning admission about how the industry currently operates.
This doesn't have anything to do with informed consumers / uninformed consumers. My comment was about the unwillingness of customers to pay for monthly subscriptions.
> consumers are a problem for the industry
They honestly are. My main reason for not going into game development is the incredible entitlement from the customerbase. I understand that situations like Control or The Crew suck, but those should be individual class action lawsuits. But instead everyone wants to impose legislation on essentially all online games, even those they purchase for less money than a coffee at Starbucks. And all that just to apparently be fine with buggy, laggy, borderline playable versions of the game, with worse matchmaking UX.
That things you bought stop working is not unique to video games with online components. I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore.
> the cost of retrofitting games for all developers of games with any online component
As it has been said many times already, the initiative does not propose any "retrofitting" for existing games.
> the incredible entitlement from the customerbase
The ability to be able to play the game in the future is not entitlement, it's a normal thing. If you car stops working because the authentication servers are down, do you consider yourself entitled as well? I hope not. Why should games be different?
> That things you bought stop working is not unique to video games with online components. I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore
But modern titles stop working on modern systems, so it's not comparable. We can still play older games via different means. But with games that use online connection that's not the case when the servers get shut down.
> The ability to be able to play the game in the future is not entitlement, it's a normal thing
No it isn't. The cost per hour of games is already incredibly low compared to most other paid forms of entertainment.
How is it not entitled to insist that these super attractive prices should be even lower still?
> Why should games be different?
Why should games be different from a movie ticket or a streaming subscription?
> The cost per hour of games is already incredibly low compared to most other paid forms of entertainment.
How is this relevant? I still want to be able to play older games 10 years from now. The cost does not matter. I would even pay more money for the guarantee that the game will be always playable.
> How is it not entitled to insist that these super attractive prices should be even lower still?
Nobody suggests to lower the prices... Do you even understand what SKG is about?
> Why should games be different from a movie ticket or a streaming subscription?
Because you can buy movies on physical media and watch them whenever you want. With games that have online component that's not always the case anymore.
>How is this relevant? I still want to be able to play older games 10 years from now. The cost does not matter. I would even pay more money for the guarantee that the game will be always playable.
You can already do that! Contact the rightsholders and negotiate with them. It'll probably be relatively cheap to buy an EOL game.
>Nobody suggests to lower the prices... Do you even understand what SKG is about?
I'm not misunderstanding anything, you are failing to consider basic economics.
Making the product last longer is effectively indistinguishable from making it cheaper in the context of the EU.
But I do get why a bunch of people seem to dismiss SKG as "childish". I didn't start from that point of view, but the commenters here certainly have me convinced with their tunnel-vision.
> Contact the rightsholders and negotiate with them
We tried that. That didn't work.
> Making the product last longer
Once again, nobody is asking that. So you are misunderstanding SKG.
> tunnel-vision
That is very ironic and indeed dismissive.
>We tried that. That didn't work.
Ah yes, because businesses just love to turn down free money.
>Once again, nobody is asking that. So you are misunderstanding SKG.
If SKG really does not want games to remain playable after EOL, they're certainly piss-poor communicators. I thought the whole point was to "stop killing games", i.e. make them last longer.
> because businesses just love to turn down free money
Unfortunately, yes. Example - try getting publishing rights to No One Lives Forever franchise (GOG already tried that). It's not rare for publishers to sit on their IPs without doing anything with them. And it's not exclusive to videogames as well.
> make them last longer
You can look at it differently. "Last longer" can mean "getting support from the publisher for longer period of time". Nobody demands this. Or it can mean "have an EOL plan", but then it's a weird way to phrase that. But yes, this meaning is the one that SKG uses.
> Then propose some legislation that actually deals with that...
SKG and the people signing the petitions aren't legislators, the entire point of this initiative is to actually talk to legislators. It's not their job to propose a hyper-specific law on day 1, it's the job of the legislators to do so. And so far, it has been met with nothing but bad faith attacks on things they have never claimed to want, such as...
> ...the cost of retrofitting games ...
SKG has made it abundantly clear that they don't want any kind of law or legislation to be applied retroactively. There would be absolutely no retrofitting forced on anyone, it would only affect new games released after legislation passes. Similarly to how you didn't have to re-manufacture your old phone model to add a USB-C port into it, you don't have to do anything with your already-released games.
> ... the incredible entitlement from the customerbase
People expect to buy a product and to be able to use it however they'd like, without getting scammed and having it yanked from them down the line? How entitled of them!
> And all that just to apparently be fine with buggy, laggy, borderline playable versions of the game, with worse matchmaking UX.
Again, how is that anyone's problem other than the person who bought the game and is presumably happy to keep playing it? If it has reached EOL, then it's better the game remain playable somehow, regardless of how buggy or bad of an experience it is, than to just fully lose access to it. I'd say no experience is worse than a buggy one.
> I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore.
You can extremely easily emulate all of these, including on your phone, and hell Windows has native support for many games with their compatibility modes out of the gate, so yes, you could indeed play games from the 90s if you still wanted to. We've still got Doom (1993) being ported to anything that has a transistor in it to this day. In fact, looking over a list of 90s games, pretty much all of them are still playable! Monkey Island (1990!), Wolfenstein 3D ('92), Myst, the OG Warcraft, Quake is still being played competitively to this day, Civ 2, the original Diablo, the list goes on for a while and many of these games have healthy playerbases to this day.
Ever heard of GOG (Good Old Games)? It's in the name, their entire business is predicated on making retro games runnable on modern systems, and oftentimes even improving on them massively by pre-patching community patches and things of that nature.
As a sidenote, looking at lists of old games it's quite depressing how much we've lost in more recent times. I can and do still boot up games from my childhood, and many of them with vibrant & healthy communities to this day, yet there are newer games from a few short years ago that are now completely dead because the devs decided to pull the plug on them. AoE II "Enhanced" Edition doesn't even have LAN functionality without first connecting to their servers! The original game that this is a remaster of you can still play today with literally 0 issues! That is the exact issue with this crap, we're pretending like it's impossible to build games with longevity in mind when we've been doing it for the better part of 2 decades already.
The commission was talking with the game industry much more than with the initiative, which opened a clear way for the industry to misrepresent the initiative with phrases like "endless support" which nobody demands.
The technical reality is peer to peer multiplayer has existed for decades, and if indie studios can manage both then AAA games certainly can. Single player always online need not even enter the conversation. No point engaging with bad faith arguments to the contrary.
The ECI process forces the Commission to respond formally, not to legislate. The Commission said no, which SKG anticipated. They had already secured a legislative call signed by 45 MEPs and are pushing to amend the Digital Fairness Act through Parliament. The headline frames this as a defeat. Finishing the ECI process shifted the venue to Parliament, where SKG says they have majority support.
I'm not sure but it sounds like a skirmish to lure out the lobby groups talking points into the wide open by the voice of the EU commission.
Don't look so smug! I know what you're thinking, but The Commission was merely a setback!
Did you honestly believe I would trust the future to some Commission? Hahahaha… Oh no, no, no, it was merely an instrument, a stepping stone to a much larger plan! It has all led to this…and this time, you will not interfere!
From the perspective of someone with some experience in consumer advocacy via the EU is that SKG did not do this the right way, or at least the right way right now. The EU expects radical compromise. The right starting point for SKG was to enter talks with games industry lobby groups to discuss possible solutions. If that fails - you will need to be able to prove that it isn't because you were unable to compromise. Your next step is to find individual game developers and publishers who agree with your proposals and can back them at some (hopefully negotiated) level. Any one-sided proposal is a non-starter.
The EU will view this this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers.
1. The standard of compromise makes no sense because there "the video-game industry" is not a company with a representative. Any compromise you could find would be dismissed on the basis that it's one lobby groups among others anyway.
2. The statements made by somewhat representative groups like the ESA showed any compromise was impossible since their whole premise is "if you don't let us kill games (which we aren't doing) then it's going to kill the industry"; the typical propaganda of "our enemies are insignificant and stupid yet the greatest threat to humanity"
3. The ESA statements were disavowed by some developers, and SKG made a point to have longer videos with developers agreeing and debunking the lies in the ESA statements already. If that's not enough, refer to point 1.
>rights of its citizen workers/producers
The whole point is that the basis of commerce is that you can't sell something and destroy it just afterwards. Sure you can have limited time subscriptions but that's not how video-games are sold. They are changing the definition based on context so they can do the most unethical things as they see fit, and as a result they are entirely destroying the industry by breaking consumer trust.
Completely agree with the first point; it would have been great showing a list of supporters from the game industry. Not that I am an expert in this matter, though.
However:
> The EU will view this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers.
How could SKG be an attack on gamedevs? What changes in the life of someone in gamedev if the online game their company has them working on provides a self-hostable server or offline functionality once they finally stop working on it?
I guess we could argue that game companies may get less revenue because users will keep playing older games that no longer produce money, and I am not keen on "perpetual games," which could impact the workers of that company... But this is a highly abusive practice. Sure, gambling makes salaries for workers around the world, but that is no excuse to keep perpetuating such an abusive industry.
This is no attack; I am genuinely curious, and I might be wrong on everything :)
If you're actually curious, to gate a taste of the cost of compliance, I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc. On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want a accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc. so you could tick off a box and have some sort of insurance in case you're being sued.
Now you probably don't have a lot of empathy for big corps, but those laws often apply for small businesses as well (why wouldn't they?) and now imagine the struggling indie dev now also having to deal with another legal compliance so they won't lose their house to a legal troll, when they just struggle to get a game out there they have no idea if it's even going to ever be successful.
I don't really buy this. From my personal experience, indie devs are more likely to use methods which make their server tech distributable (e.g. Minecraft). Large game publishers appear to go in the opposite direction for control and lineage reasons: "Crew 1 is dead so you need to buy Crew 2 now".
Anyone who gamed before 2005 knows that games do not require magic, expensive, managed remote services. We all used to run our own servers! The GameSpy era!
Well I'm talking from experience as a mobile indie game developer.
Pretty much every year I'm getting warnings from Apple or Google, or 3rd party SDKs, that unless I make sure to update libraries, or comply with a new rule, they are going to take down the game.
One of the latest rules was some sort of a digital services act (again another regulation) that made it very difficult for indie devs not to share their personal address and phone numbers.
That's not related to SKG though, that's storefront policy.
In principle, as long as _you_ are not blocking using the binary on hardware that supports (i.e. a player already has it installed on an old phone), you're in the clear.
SKG is explicitly _not_ advocating for lifetime support, compatibility with new devices, etc
But there are 3rd party SDKs that rely on outside servers that will stop working and the app could have unexpected behavior. It doesn't have to be complete crash, but it might be enough to degrade functionality to a point where some players might say the game is unplayable etc.
Being bootstrapped with no investors, there's no extra resources, and no financial benefit in making sure that the app can function well even with these 3rd party services, servers etc. not working.
> degrade functionality to a point where some players might say the game is unplayable etc.
Yeah, it's a good point, the law that may result from parliament does need to be clear on where the line is drawn.
Personally, I would expect singleplayer and LAN to work at EOL
Edit: on 3rd party libraries & services, I would expect that such vendors would need to make their software compliant for their customers after any law change on this front. No one is gonna buy GameLift if it's a legal liability for their EOL plan
> I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc. On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want an accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc. so you could tick off a box and have some sort of insurance in case you're being sued.
This is a really good analogy, except you made one mistake: it’s not difficult at all to design something to be accessible and respectful of privacy as long as you do it from the start. If you try to build something inaccessible and privacy-invading then get caught and have to retrofit accessibility and privacy at the last minute to avoid fines and lawsuits, that’s when it becomes difficult.
And you see this exact mistake crop up in the Stop Killing Games criticism as well. People say that it’s difficult because they are thinking about taking the status quo and retrofitting longevity. For instance, trying to retroactively obtain licenses to distribute components that they didn’t originally have. When in practice, the effect of a law like this is that it would push game developers to make the right choices up front like picking appropriately licensed components, so there’s no barrier to keeping the game alive when the time comes to cease support.
It might also have escaped your attention that the EU was perfectly willing to create accessibility and privacy regulations, so if you are likening Stop Killing Games to these things then it stands to reason that this is not a reason for the EU to avoid Stop Killing Games legislation.
This is my second business after already having experience with GDPR. Thinking of it in advance does make it easier but it can definitely still break a business and it's not a trivial cost. Moreover, it's still changing frequently, just about 2 years ago there was a major change were asking for simple consent was not good enough and now there's a whole CMP TCF2 protocol you have to implement. From research I made, the tools that provide good coverage are not cheap, I pay a lot of money for these services, and they are also 3rd parties that without them the game experience might degrade. Just a little example, if the privacy consent service times out, the game load time increases to about ~10s at least.
Moreover, I have to also pay a company just to be my representative in the EU and have a stupid email address that is completely useless.
I don't know these things definitely don't make my appreciate regulations, and I think if you want to add more layers of regulation, you have to be really thoughtful about them, because often like DRM, eventually they screw the little guys more than they screw the bad actors.
> Thinking of it in advance does make it easier but it can definitely still break a business
If privacy regulations can break your business, then I think there’s a very high chance what you are doing is exactly the sort of thing the regulations are explicitly designed to discourage.
> now there's a whole CMP TCF2 protocol you have to implement.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. There’s no regulation saying you have to implement that. That’s a consequence of you making the choice to trade user data. Somebody who does not choose to do that has much less work to do. This is an example of the regulations working as intended. You’re supposed to see the friction and make better choices up front to avoid it, not make the same choices then complain about the friction.
> eventually they screw the little guys more than they screw the bad actors.
Little guys are often the bad actors.
If I have to watch ads, I personally prefer personalized ads as they waste less of my time if I happen to see an ad for something I would actually want. I think generally, scaring people with "oh noes they'll have your annonymuized data" is not that dissimilar from scaring about radiation radiation from their wifi router.
Anyway, the discussion was about the harms of regulations and why developers would resist these. I personally know several indie mobile developers that had games that their core business model was ad monetization, and the regulation made these businesses less viable, and it's likely that players who enjoyed these kind of games, will now see less of these indie games.
I personally think this regulation does more harm then good for small businesses and players alike. I think legeslation has to be super careful when it comes to regulating businesses, anytime I had to deal with compliance around accessibility, privacy, transparency etc. I saw how intentions were good, but execution was absolutely terrible, with so many holes that the ones who benefit the most are the big companies that can workaround these clauses, while good intentioned small businesses need to spend money on compliance before they even know if the business is going to be viable.
> I personally think this regulation does more harm then good for small businesses and players alike
Are we supposed to just accept that games will die because of the profits of some game dev studios?
> I saw how intentions were good, but execution was absolutely terrible, with so many holes that the ones who benefit the most are the big companies that can workaround these clauses
So we are supposed to not do anything...
I think regulation is a superweapon that should mostly be used in cases where there can be severe long-term damage (physical and health dangers, loans, etc.) or in cases where what it regulates is simple and easy to comply with.
For example, it makes a lot of sense to regulate gasoline so there won't be any lead in it. It also makes sense to standartize and simplify loans which can also have severe impact on people. I don't think it makes sense to regulate games to that degree, which are merely a form of entertainment and have no severe consequences on people, especially not SKG.
> If it would be so important for players to ensure their games stay alive, they'd just stop buying these games and they'd apply pressure on devs to do that
Unfortunately, it only works on paper. In reality publishers can add stuff after the release when people already paid money for it (classic bait and switch). So buying only "good" games does not guarantee that they will stay that way. Also, we did try "applying pressure", it didn't work, that's why we are here currently.
> I don't think it makes sense to regulate games to that degree
Nobody is asking to regulate the games themselves, only how they are distributed after their end of life.
> which are merely a form of entertainment and have no severe consequences on people
People make money using specific videogames. So there are consequences of shutting down games for good.
Most of the discussions I've seen about this disregard the fact that on paper it's all nice, but in practice it's a rabbit-hole of constraints. Developers often use 3rd party SDKs and services that can render the game useless if they are not included is just one concern, and many times they cannot be technically or legally included in client versions for players.
Personally, for all I care, even as a game-dev, I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game.
This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers, doesn't force them to comply with anything, and doesn't incur any additional costs. Maybe there'd be some tiny loss of revenue, but it's arguably miniscule if the games are already abandoned.
It pretty much already happening with games like the C&C Generals that have pirated abandonware versions.
Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players, instead they should just legalize reverse engineering.
> Developers often use 3rd party SDKs and services that can render the game useless if they are not included
That is indeed a case, and potential solutions has been discussed. The main idea is that games that have already been made do not need to comply with this, so they don't need to change anything. Moreover, some videogames have already been released with middleware stripped out of them. From the top of my head: Doom 3, Blietzkrieg. So you can work around that.
> I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game
To my knowledge, you can already do that in most jurisdictions. That's why there are a lot of decompilation projects that started in recent years.
> This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers
The problem is that for games with online components you also require server binaries, which you don't always have access to. So developers would need to provide at least those binaries. So unfortunately even in this case there will be something that developers must do.
> C&C Generals
That's a good example because EA made source code available last year for most C&C games. So people have been improving unofficial versions.
> Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players
SKG itself does not demand anything specific, that's the idea. People who support the initiative do provide some potential options, but I don't think they are forcing it on anyone.
The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly.
Likewise, the legal risk for small indie games here rounds to zero. Most such games will, at worst, lose access to online leaderboards if their developers shut them down.
I'm a developer of a mobile indie game and it's not true. Just to get started you need to implement tons of third part SDKs like Meta Ads, AdMob, Google Analytics, etc. These require actual handling of player choices, data sanitation etc. disregarding the loss of revenue with not being able to serve personalized ads, or even ads at all to large segments of players. And I'm talking about strictly optional rewarded ads.
These already harmed a lot of small mobile game companies, while the bigger mobile companies had much better means to deal with these.
I personally paid over $10K for different services just to comply, disregarding the loss of revenue over this compliance.
Maybe don't fill your games with ads and release them on restrictive, exploitative platforms?
Did you ever build a commercial project or any business yourself? The nature of your comment implies to me you haven't. I highly recommend you give it a try, it might actually change your mind!
I didn't know it was impossible to build businesses without inserting to Meta/Google/others ad SDK to spy on all my users. Maybe we should stop normalizing these behavior.
Yea good luck getting any reasonable visibility on App Store or Google Play without paying good amount of $$$ to meta, Google etc.
Trust me I would have loved to throwaway this dependency on these platforms, I don't enjoy paying for ads. The market is not pretty, but there's a reason for why it's the way it is. For some reasons, players prefer downloading games for free and then paying potentially hundreds to thousands of dollars on IAPs, rather than everyone paying $5 for a game. I would have preferred it to be the latter personally, but the market doesn't seem to want to act this way.
aka "don't make games that anyone has the chance of playing"
That's an boggling misrepresentation of the market.
The "release them on restrictive, exploitative platforms" part of the comment excludes (depending on interpretation): any mobile platform + Steam
So that excludes ~95% of addressable playerbase.
Your videogame is a data-harvester for the purpose of ad-serving, why on Earth would GDPR compliance be easy for you? It sucks that the mobile market is essentially just a glittery front over privacy invasion vectors, but just because it's normalized it doesn't mean it's right. "Serving third party ads" is exactly the kind of thing the GDPR exists to regulate harshly.
That's cool and all, I really don't have a problem with the requirement to tell players to their face that if they play the game for free, they are sharing their data and preferences with 3rd parties. Denying content creators the ability to (a) restrict content to free loaders who refuse, (b) forcing companies to pay for services that so they could reasonably comply, mostly because the legal language is so ambiguous and broad, is something I do not appreciate.
> The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly.
I buy a VPS. I apt install nginx. Is it okay that by default, opening http://IP/index.html logs the IP address to /etc/log/nginx/access.log? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe yes but I need a privacy policy (for an empty index.html). Maybe I need to ask a lawyer (who usually errs on side of caution) because people have been arguing about it for 10 years (and please don't answer here). And in the end, even if I didn't need to do anything, it sure is _some_ nonzero drain of my resources to have think about it at all (completely ignoring whether it's justified or not).
This hinges on two misunderstandings:
- That data processing always requires consent. There are exactly six reasons for storing or processing data: consent, contract fulfillment, legal compliance, vital interests of a natural person, public interest/official authority, or legitimate interest. Collecting IP addresses can be a legitimate interest, but:
- The real interesting question is what you do with the IP addresses after they're stored in a file. Securing your server is a legitimate interest. Tracking your users is generally not. Having lawfully collected data is not a carte blanche to do anything you choose with it.
> Is it okay that by default [...] ?
Yes. IP addresses by themselves are not PII and may be logged indefinitely. It's only after you start correlating them with other shit that you're collecting that they become subject to GDPR.
Same for cookies really. If you *only* operate a shopping cart, you don't have to display a cookie notice for "only technically required cookies". The point of the cookie notice is to dark pattern users into granting more access or just to annoy them enough that they continue not caring about privacy.
Consider for a moment that end-to-end encrypted messaging protects criminals of all sorts. Surely that’s a bad thing and requiring back doors for law enforcement shouldn’t be considered an attack on anybody?
I absolutely agree that the practices SKG are fighting against are pretty abusive and that it is right and proper to restrict those practices, but I also understand why people see the appeal in anti-e2ee laws.
The thing is, I have a good-enough understanding of cryptography to see why those laws are a terrible idea, and I’m infuriated by how clueless their supporters are. I’m self-aware enough to realise that I might the clueless one here and that me not seeing any legitimate issue with SKG doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
Well, it's a million signatures for something to be brought up, not for something to definitely become law.
A decade or so ago I (among millions) signed to abolish daylight saving time. Still waiting for that heh.
The daylight saving time shit is such a fucking fumble from the EU. We have an instance of direct democracy, we have EU politicians parading around saying “we’re gonna end it” and then absolutely nothing happens. Council points fingers at Commission, Commission points fingers at Council. “It’s their job.” How am I as an EU citizen supposed to be proud of being part of this dysfunctional mess?
It's easy talking points during elections but requires lengthy legal procedures and thus gets chopped immediately. Politicians gonna be politicians. Better to be talking about the time of day than some other dog whisle.
It's also been "abolished" many times around the world, then quickly reinstated when kids start dying.
Good thing there's actual data so we can find out how many countries observe DST: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr...>.
Not everywhere.
Western Australia has had four referenda on the topic since 1975, each time preceded by a trial period where daylight saving was observed, and every time it has been rejected and the state has switched back to no DST.
Does your member state - as an EU citizen - block the process perhaps? The daylight savings process has stopped because your countries can't agree on which timezone they'd like to be in.
I'm Finnish, so my guess is "no". Gallup polling gave a >85% in favour of abolishing DST. 52% also voted in favour of winter time.
Trump's said he wants to end it. That's something I'd back him on. I wish he'd sign that executive order and tilt that windmill in the courts instead of the stuff he is pushing. I'd be rooting for him!
Ah, the same guy who promised to end wars, that sounds good
Trump promises a lot of things, while also promising others their polar opposite or flipping 180° once in office.
If you'd back a politician with a track record that bad on any promise, that is probably something telling more about you than the politician.
I'm not sure what your saying here? Trump lies so you'd rather his energy be spent on ICE raids, ending birthright citizenship, and illegal tarrifs than ending daylight savings? Personally I'd rather the latter but you do you.
That is what you're saying. I was very clear.
No, I said exactly the opposite. My exact words:
> I wish he'd sign that executive order and tilt that windmill in the courts instead of the stuff he is pushing.
You say you were very clear, but I genuinely don't understand what about that you disagree with.
> The Commission’s full communication said a legal obligation to keep games playable, as requested by the initiative, “would not be proportionate.”
Making games playable is not proportionate but mass surveillance of private messages is complete fine.
I would say lobbyist are continuing their take over of the EU. Copyright law is the excuse but 90's games proves this to be invalidated.
None of the games from the 90s and early 2000's required authenticating with a launder. They just worked and this is why those games are still playable to date.
Those same games that had multi-player allowed for downloading a self-hosted server.
Enemy Territory is a prime example. The game would still be playable even with out ID Software releasing the source code.
GOG is built upon legacy games that don't require a launcher. Politicians in the EU have been bought and paid for. President exists and is not being applied.
> Copyright law
who cares. you can still pirate if you so choose (at the risk of your data if you do it on the same PC).
you pirating is basically taking part in a distribution, the host simply doesn't do it with a company but a nick (digital loophole*). but the distribution happens no less and the license of right-to-use never covered this to begin with.
all these cases are digital loopholes: companies being able to shut down servers and forcing people to move on.
we need these laws.
How about a “stop buying games” movement where people just don’t buy this live service garbage?
It’s all shovelware. It’s all the same crap over and over. There are plenty of non live service games being released every day, buy those instead. If a game is actually important to people they’ll figure out a way to play it (as people did with WoW classic before classic).
The idea that we should spend time and energy to regulate the big studios (who will just find loopholes anyway) instead of just supporting the indies who are making good stuff is wild to me.
The classic SKG example is The Crew. Where is the indie recreation of the Continental USA to drive around? Indie games are great, but let's not act like art is fungible.
I don't like the idea of "they will just find loopholes anyway", that seems defeatist. "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."
I wish people started thinking of good regulation as a technical problem as much as it is a social one.
EU tried to ban tracking cookies. Anyone could've seen the result coming (every site now disrupts your reading). The defeatist attitude would've been right there.
I don't see how games won't just charge you a $0.01 "subscription" that lasts 5 years or various other such sidesteps. it'll just make everything more annoying.
I'll keep buying whatever games seem fun to me. I rarely play a game more than a year or two, they become stale and boring to me. I genuinely, genuinely do not care if the game stops working in 12 years time. Could not possibly care less.
> I genuinely, genuinely do not care if the game stops working in 12 years time
That's very grim... I'm on the completely different side, majority of games I've been playing recently are fairly old.
> The Commission’s full communication said a legal obligation to keep games playable, as requested by the initiative, “would not be proportionate.” It cited concerns about intellectual property rights, confidential business information, publisher costs, and potential cybersecurity or safety risks once games are no longer supported.
Nice job regurgitating point-for-point all of the talking points that the publishers spoon-fed you.
I’m so skeptical of the “making it work offline is too hard” argument, I’ve personally RE’d dozens of these titles with no source access, often with anti tamper, and succeeded. Very few titles are genuinely unpreservable to some extent. For example, the VAST majority of Unreal Engine games are trivially preservable unless the developers have taken steps to strip server code, and even when devs do take those steps “reading between the ifdefs” isn’t the worst thing in the world.
It's very hard to reverse engineer something you don't have access to, i.e. server code. Sure, some of it is fairly simple, so it can be done, but when a lot of game logic is happening on the server and you don't have the server binary, then it becomes a step up in difficulty.
I am mixed here. On the one hand there is the decision part from a game publisher, on the other hand the player.
Subscription businesses is simply a usage over time. That's the troubling thing here. You don't really own games physically as we did during the 80th and 90th.
Update-mania and buggy games were introduced first as consequence of the internet, then came the registration phase and after that the subsciption model.
Why am I mixed? Did I keep my machines from back then? The SNES, the i486 etc? What if the hardware has an defect 30 years after? Eternal rights?
They are in no way guaranteed, in either reality.
I was a semi-pro gamer for some time around 99-01, being in the top 50 of the Age of Empires II: AoK ladder at the legendary ZONE in RM games. I had several smurf accounts leveled up into the ladder, to sneak into games without being tied to my clan and even clans (CN, Myll, ZXK just to name a few).
I had to cut ties, because of the impact on my university curriculum. I remember the huge fallout it took on DBD_Jinx who kind of quit the game from one day to another without notice due to - if I remember correctly - being even kicked out of university due to being to heavily involved with the game all day. He was a notorious FLUSHER everywhere and every time which was unimaginable at the time but beat almost everyone being really an excellent executioner and top notch player even in late castle, on water etc. - and this took time and a toll.
After AoK I never touched a game with any potential to being addicted. Never. I didn't play Warcraft, which I was a top notch player when it was called Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and came on a CD in 1995, and this lead me to AoK - an online game.
People should consider, what they are doing online. A sarcastic colleague once put it this way: People changing bytes on a server in a cloud, wow...
He had a point. Games are fun, but not for ever, sadly. I would love to play AoK like back then and while there is the chance now, I still refuse to take part in any online action at all. I took part in a few LAN party games - yes, we brought our laptops and played like it is 1998!
But that's it. So I am mixed. Online gaming feeds more and more addiction and that's why I sometimes think: a server that gets shut down is like a cold turkey for some.
> Did I keep my machines from back then? The SNES, the i486 etc? What if the hardware has an defect 30 years after?
For this you have options: emulators, FPGAs, fixing the original hardware. So as long as you have your copy of the game, there is a way for you to play it.
But with modern games that is not the case anymore. Publisher can decide on a whim that they don't want to support their game and shut down the servers, which renders the whole game unplayable. It even happens with singleplayer games. This is not OK and should not be accepted as the norm.
SKG aren't going for a maximalist "if you publish an online game, it must 100% work forever". Unfortunately, it seems it's not so easy to find a clear mission statement.
I see their main point as: it should still be possible to (in some way) have access to what you pay for after servers shut down.
Some games an online requirement makes sense (like where you play online with other people), but in some cases the online requirement is for a single player only game, where the server shutdown makes the game unplayable. -- Cases like that seem absurd.
Any grown up media industry - is in a eternal battle against the "classics". And games even more, as some of the classics are LEGO sets that have eternal fun build in.
Every new band ever has to compete against the beatles.
makes me envy of Switzerland's "enough signatures causes referendum which actually does create a new law" system
Proportional to the respective populations, this would have needed roughly four times as many signatures to get to that level in Switzerland.
if so, making that failure more explicit would also be of great help
the Swiss can only propose new constitutional amendments, not statutory laws. And precisely to avoid having what is supposed to be a technical decision into an overly broad popular vote, because those are still supposed to belong into parliamentary debate.
Because if people voted on every single regulation you'd be at the ballot box five times a day.
You should check out Swiss constitution sometimes to see how true that is :P
So, mob rule?
Some would more amicably call it democracy, but to each their own.
Democracy is mob rule when I don’t like it. Democratic activity is populism when I don’t like it.
More direct democracy also makes it more attackable for misinformation campaigns (trying to offer a populist answer to complex problems).
That more democracy is more attackable is not a coherent position. More democracy means more people power. But people being powerless to resist misinformation campaigns means that they do not have power. Which means that it is not really democracy. This is the same as saying that democracy is being undermined by wealth inequality. If money can buy political power and money is unevenly distributed then it’s not a democracy.
If one was actually interested in actual democracy one would fix that misinformation asymmetry.
And that, I would argue, is rooted in wealth inequality.
For this argument to work, you'd need to show that a generic politician is somehow immune to misinformation campaigns/lobbyism.
It's reasonable to at least expect that. It's their job after all, while for any single voter there is a lower standard you can realistically hold them too and less time available to verify/debunk claims.
On top of that, there are also instruments that help the voters track whether politicians are engaging in corrupt lobbyism like voting records + donation / campaign contribution records, though few countries do that to a degree that it forms a cohesive anti-corruption framework. None of those measures exist for individual voters.
Why is it reasonable to expect that? What mechanism makes politicians immune to disinfo?
Well, your local coucilor probably doesn't have access to it, but MPs definitely have access to aides and experts they can ask for opinion and summary before they go in front of a camera and make a fool out of themselves for saying something based on a snippet they saw on TikTok. They are literally surrounded by people whose entire job is to be well informed.
> On top of that, there are also instruments that help the voters track whether politicians are engaging in corrupt lobbyism like voting records + donation / campaign contribution records, though few countries do that to a degree that it forms a cohesive anti-corruption framework. None of those measures exist for individual voters.
Corruption by definition is intentional, compare getting hoodwinked by "misinformation". Curious what "measures [] for individual voters" even means with regards to voters. A voter cannot be corrupt since they only represent themselves.
There’s interestingly all this hoopla and indirection, tracking corruption and misaligned priorities, even now adding the burden to the feeble voter mind to not only stay clear of misinformation campaigns but to watch out for corruption in their own representatives. This seems ripe for simplification.
It's always a misinformation campaign when you'd rather people be uninformed.
It might be a good thing that companies kill games, actually.
I want Non-free Software to suck as much as possible to give people more reasons to use Free/Open-source Software, which can't be killed.
As written, wouldn’t this result in fewer online games? Maybe dramatically fewer?
Less "unnecessary" online games. To give you one tame example: Age of Empires 2 released in 1999 and is fully playable offline either as a single or multiplayer game via LAN. It has received two re-releases as AoE 2 HD edition and AoE 2 Definitive Edition. The Definitive Edition does not work offline for multiplayer games anymore. It is still the same game with updated graphics and engine but it is still just Age of Empires 2.
In order to play an actuall "Local Area Network" game, you first need to connect to the online Xbox Service. Only then will "Multiplayer" be available as an option and only then you can actually select "Local Area Network" as the "server region" for the match.
All for an updated re-release of a game from 1999.
I was at the AoE 2 DE launch LAN event at a Microsoft Store with big YouTubers and everything. They could not play LAN because right at launch, the online servers crashed due to the load. No one played a multiplayer game at this LAN...
It would result in fewer online games that stop working altogether when the publisher wants to stop it.
All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this.
It's really not that complicated. Not "free", of course, but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.
Game developer here. If it were “just” that easy I’d love to support this.
> All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this
You’re making a huge assumption here both about the scope of the law, and about how straightforward this is to do. I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would be fine. I’ve also worked on games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic - running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda, and massive third party dependencies. Getting a “mini self hosted server application” out of this is a rewrite.
> but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.
The vast majority of games use existing technologies. First line of code was 30 years ago for any unreal game, for example. This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend.
What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service? What if playfab discontinue their offering, or AWS decide to remove a service that our “mini self hosted server” relies upon. Games aren’t some magical piece of technology, they’re just software like everything else.
> [...] running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda [...]
The initiative has no problem with this as far as I know; the backend being an overengineered mess doesn't make it non-compliant with what SKG wants.
I've worked on game backends that would've trivially complied with just a basic executable blob + MySQL, and ones that would've required someone to run 10+ services on AWS (yes, it was entirely stuck on AWS).
With that said I don't think anyone would really be developing things this way in a world where they actually took this type of compliance seriously, and there is no real upside to hyperfocusing like that on third-party platform solutions and so on.
3rd party libraries I agree about, I think it'd force people to actually do things in-house instead, which could be quite the ask for some of them (some of the libraries, and also some of the companies, who sometimes do not possess the talent to solve harder problems, or create their own things).
> The initiative has no problem with this as far as I know; the backend being an overengineered mess doesn't make it non-compliant with what SKG wants.
SKG wants games to be "playable" and doesn't define what playable is. Is a multiplayer chess game with no AI "playable" if you can boot into the menu? Is TLOU remastered playable if the multiplayer is turned off but the SP is still playable? Is Trackmania playable without UGC sharing and leaderboards? I would say "no" to all of the above, FWIW.
> With that said I don't think anyone would really be developing things this way in a world where they actually took this type of compliance seriously, and there is no real upside to hyperfocusing like that on third-party platform solutions and so on.
I think that what will actually happen is three things. 1) Many small studios that try things will just nope out. 2) Studios will switch to the Hollywood model of spinning up an entity per game to tack all the liability onto. There's no real reason to do this now, but if there's actual liability for it, that will change overnight. 3) Larger studios will split out online development from game development into separate entities.
I don't think it's hyperfocusing to say "there's a massive hole in this idea", I think it's dismissive of SKG to ignore people who work in this spaces concerns (ironically, it appears this is one of the reasons the EU commission isn't proceeding here, because SKG haven't engaged with industry groups to come up with a way to make this work).
> SKG wants games to be "playable" and doesn't define what playable is.
Which is completely fine since they're not a legislative body. Instead of settling on a hard line, they're leaving this part open to be defined in collaboration with lawmakers and the industry. Isn't that exactly what so many detractors are asking for?
Let's be honest, SKG wouldn't have fewer critics if they chose a specific definition of "playable". I'd even argue that the industry would be opposed far more strongly.
> Is a multiplayer chess game with no AI "playable" if you can boot into the menu?
Arguably a multiplayer game is playable when, given that you've convinced other people to join you, you can play against them on a self-hosted backend.
With that said, I don't really think the lack of a clear definition from the initiative as to what "playable" means is a problem; this is something that should be hashed out with the relevant parties. You seem to acknowledge that some level of discussion should be had with them, so it's unclear to me why you think somehow SKG should come with a fully formed basically-legislation to the table, when arguably that's not needed or useful for actual lawmakers.
> I don't think it's hyperfocusing to say "there's a massive hole in this idea"
The hyperfocusing I was referring to was making your backend as if you owe AWS/GCP/other-cloud-provider money, i.e. being stuck literally on exactly that platform and maximizing your usage of their services. It's not a great way of making things to begin with, and an even worse way when you actually have to be accountable for things being runnable over time.
One of the biggest issues the industry will face is that it puts pressure on its rapid decline in competency (the same one created and enabled by the things you allude to as being roadblocks for any initiatives around keeping games around after service ends).
They might solve those types of things with interesting accounting solutions like the ones you referred to, but those can be legislated against as well; liability circumvention is only a magic wand if you allow it to be.
> it appears this is one of the reasons the EU commission isn't proceeding here
I think nothing is being done in this particular case because there are groups that have talked quite a bit to the people deciding whether things should be done, not really because of any supposed lack of interaction from SKG. It seems naïve (or driven by other motives) to me to think otherwise.
> I’ve also worked on games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic
Don't make your game be a spaghetti mess of dependencies.
Or.
When you decide on your dependencies, make sure they are compatible with the regulations. The chances of middleware developers not updating their middleware and/or licenses to comply with these regulations are practically zero: there will 100% be market need for compliant middleware and others to provide it, so the existing middleware developers will update theirs too.
> What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service?
That's the easiest of the bunch because Steam already has at least one opensource reimplementation of the API (probably multiple) so all you have to do is drop a DLL in your game's directory and you get Steam independence.
> games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic
But you don't have to design the backend this way. Especially if you know that you will have to share the binaries when the support for the game ends.
> This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend
Some games that have been open sourced by the developers solved this issue by replacing such library calls with stubs. I think this is an acceptable compromise.
>What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service?
If you still support the game, you can replace those services to keep the game running. If you don't support it (or decided that you don't want to keep supporting it because of the service shutdown), then you just release it with those service calls, and the community will replace them (if they want to of course).
> But you don't have to design the backend this way.
You’re calling for legislating software architecture for a subset of software that is different to how it works everywhere else in the tech industry.
> Some games that have been open sourced by the developers solved this issue by replacing such library calls with stubs. I think this is an acceptable compromise.
The other commenter hit on the moving goalposts - I agree with him and not going to go into that more.
> If you don't support it (or decided that you don't want to keep supporting it because of the service shutdown), then you just release it with those service calls, and the community will replace them (if they want to of course).
I think this shows a misunderstanding of what’s actually involved here. If we can rely on the community to patch in missing calls, (and implement the logic behind those calls) then this law doesn’t do anything - the community are free to reverse engineer the service it relies on. If I make a chess game, and the community remake the matchmaker but without ELO that’s bordering on unplayable - in my mind it’s as bad as the game not existing anymore.
> You’re calling for legislating software architecture
Not really, it will be the consequence of requiring the game to be given to the community after the EOL.
> the community are free to reverse engineer the service it relies on
While that is true, it is much harder than receiving the code with the most logic intact. We already do reverse engineer the binaries, including the server protocols, so we know how hard it is. And that's why we know that it's not the way to go.
> Not really, it will be the consequence of requiring the game to be given to the community after the EOL.
"I'm not calling for it, but if it happens to be the only way to achieve what I want then so be it".
> While that is true, it is much harder than receiving the code with the most logic intact. We already do reverse engineer the binaries, including the server protocols, so we know how hard it is. And that's why we know that it's not the way to go.
But for many games, the logic _is_ in the remote service calls. Who decides what calls are reversible and which aren't? In a chess game, matchmaking is probably the most important part, for example.
> if it happens to be the only way to achieve what I want
Again, I'm not advocating for some specific architecture. There is more than one way to make a game hostable by players.
> But for many games, the logic _is_ in the remote service calls
Exactly, and this is the issue - you shut down the server and the game becomes bricked.
> You're calling for legislating software architecture for a subset of software that is different to how it works everywhere else in the tech industry.
I am not even sure that's true, even in the limited scope of "we've already built this jumble of micro services that our thin client requires to do anything and a rewrite is impossible".
I think the real goal of this would simply be clearer communication with consumers. Therefore if you are selling an inherently temporary access pass to your server, say so. Don't call it the same thing as someone else who is selling a standalone or self-hostable software binary.
I don't see it regulating software architecture so much as it is the beginnings of trying to make legal categories of software, which I'm not opposed to doing.
I personally think this is not a desirable solution for gamers. Some, if not most, publishers will put a label about "renting" (like they already do in the EULA) and won't change a thing.
I don't think we can stop publishers from rent-seeking behavior, I am only trying to get at the idea that we should clearly communicate to a user when something is truly bought and owned vs rented. If that information is clearly and loudly proclaimed to the customer at purchase time, I have to assume consumer behavior would steer the industry in a more positive direction.
So now you have shifted to goal post from "providing a simple runnable binary" (not feasible due to baked in third-party licensing) to "open sourcing the game code, so people can rewrite the game to patch the missing parts".
The few examples you point out as "open source released with stubs" are also usually games that are decades old and cultural landmarks, where there was economic incentive from the right holders (good PR) to release them (e.g. Quake). This isn't tennable for your typical game that has to shut down online services because it's financially unsustainable.
That's just one of the options, albeit the most beneficial for gamers.
> "open source released with stubs" are also usually games that are decades old and cultural landmarks
Not necessarily.
Edit: the goalpost is "the games should remain playable after the publisher stop supporting it". It hasn't moved an inch. So I'm not sure what you are talking about...
You've not just edit'ed and added to your comment, you removed a point about supporting open sourcing the games as a solution.
> : the goalpost is "the games should remain playable after the publisher stop supporting it". It hasn't moved an inch. So I'm not sure what you are talking about...
Many people (myself included) have absolutely no problem with that in principle. It's how do you do it that we have a problem with. Saying "just have every video game use the architecture that I have in my head that works, and isolate them from how all other software works" isn't practical.
> You've not just edit'ed and added to your comment, you removed a point about supporting open sourcing the games as a solution.
I did not remove anything from my comment. Just added a statement since the alleged "goalpost moving" was referenced twice in the thread, so I had to reread my posts to check if it was really there. Hence my confusion.
> Many people (myself included) have absolutely no problem with that in principle
You can propose your own solution to the problem, not just criticize what other people say.
> just have every video game use the architecture that I have in my head
I'm not proposing any specific architecture.
[flagged]
> Every single suggestion you are making ignores the associated cost to the developers/publishers of the game
The developer is the one who should think about costs. You shouldn't force it on consumers.
> If you are fine with making game development an even riskier financial endeavour than it already is
Yes, I'm absolutely fine with it. We already have a lot of games to play, and if developers have to be very considerate before making something and the number of released games decreases because of this, so be it.
> I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would be fine. I’ve also worked on games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic - running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda, and massive third party dependencies. Getting a “mini self hosted server application” out of this is a rewrite.
This is a good point. For some games, complying with a Stop Killing Games law would be easy. For those games, the developers could simply drop a server binary over the fence like you mentioned. For other games, complying with a Stop Killing Games law would be much more difficult. For those other games, the developers would have to put in significant effort or refund customers once the game is killed.
That being said, I think that what we are talking about here is short-term pain for long-term gain. In the short-term, adaptation will be difficult for some developers, but those developers will eventually learn how to make games that allow players to host their own servers on their own infrastructure.
> What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service? What if playfab discontinue their offering, or AWS decide to remove a service that our “mini self hosted server” relies upon. Games aren’t some magical piece of technology, they’re just software like everything else.
Not really an apt comparison (since you mentioned P2P), but providing something like HLDS should solve this, no? Counter-Strike 1.6 has long ended its development but it has (or had) a prolific community servers to this day. If Playfab, AWS remove that service, just use your own hardware.
Dropping a server binary works if that’s all you need. Playfab and AWS provide software services - how do you operate without Playfab's player data, or matchmaking, or parties?
Why? I can go and fire up my own Unreal Tournament (1999) dedicated server right now, loads are still running.
It means the customer needs the option to run their own servers.
And would that really be a bad thing?...
90% of games have no online conponent, and run in perpetuity after purchase. The multiplayer games usually ship with a server binary you can place on any machine you control.
This only affects AAA game studios that produce micro transaction slop and live services. The exact same that are lobbying against any sort of regulation.
The gaming industry will be fine.
> 90% of games have no online conponent, and run in perpetuity after purchase
So those games are unaffected regardless of this law.
> This only affects AAA game studios that produce micro transaction slop and live services. The exact same that are lobbying against any sort of regulation.
F2P live service games are specifically excluded from this though, which presumably is what you mean by micro transaction slop. This affects every game, from a 1 man developer who uses steam for p2p all the way up to activision and call of duty. The groups hit hardest by this are going to be small-medium developers who are just trying to build a game, not Ubisoft (who are the reason for instigating this whole thing).
> The groups hit hardest by this are going to be small-medium developers who are just trying to build a game
How so? Smaller developers don't usually build games that require huge online components that will be hard to release to the public. That's mostly AAA publishers that do so (at least I can't remember the opposite from the top of my head).
> Smaller developers don't usually build games that require huge online components that will be hard to release to the public.
Yes, they do. Small developers disproportionally have to rely on online services to make their multiplayer games work to a playable standard acceptable to the users, as they can't afford to write them from scratch (and couldn't even afford to do the devops work that comes with a self-hosted alternative).
Example: PEAK, on of _the_ multiplayer hits of last year from a small studio is built on top of Photon[0] for their multiplayer. If you were to remove that component you might as well completely rewrite the game.
[0]: https://www.photonengine.com
> PEAK, on of _the_ multiplayer hits of last year from a small studio is built on top of Photon[0] for their multiplayer
How did studios deal with multiplayer in the 1990-2010? That's right, server binary and in-game server browser. These days you don't even need to enter an IP address, just use Steam to invite/join friends. Using third-party or cloud online services is just pure laziness/convenience, and allowing for players to host their games is not rocket science.
Yes, and it was an awful experience with a fraction of the playerbase. WC3 Battle.net browser is an experience that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. TF2 server browser, where many of the good servers were also not publicly listed and head to be discovered outside of the game is also not really a tractable option.
> Yes, and it was an awful experience with a fraction of the playerbase.
“awful experience”? That’s a very very surprising thing to read. My personal experience has been the exact opposite. I’ve personally experienced two types of games:
1. Games where you can choose a server manually (i.e., by using a server browser or by manually entering an IP address).
2. Games where you have let some sort of matchmaking system choose a server for you.
For games in the first category, I end up building up a favorites list of servers where I fit in and am appreciated. For games in the second category, I am not able to do that. As a result, I get a lot of hate.
I love being cheery and spreading positive vibes in voice chat. Some people like it when I do that. Other people hate it when I do that because they think that my behavior is gay and because they hate gay people. For games in the first category, I am able to avoid the haters by playing on servers where haters are not welcome. For games in the second category, I have to just hope that I get lucky. In practice, I end up being unlucky so often that it makes me never want to play games that fall into the second category.
So from my perspective, the older way of doing things was not an awful experience. It’s the newer way of doing things (the way that allows for games to be killed) that has been an awful experience.
> TF2 server browser, where many of the good servers were also not publicly listed and head to be discovered outside of the game is also not really a tractable option.
I love TF2. I play it all the time. I didn’t know that there was a bunch of good servers that are not publicly listed and had to be discovered outside of the game. Could you link to some of them? I would love to check them out.
Somehow other multiplayer games deal with it just fine (Squad, Arma, Satisfactory, Minecraft off the top of my head) and let players host their game.
You're just spreading FUD.
ARMA has famously awful netcode.
Minecraft has mandatory hosted servers that are so non-trivial to host that it spawned a $XXmillion industry of third-party hosting, and first party hosting is also a paid service. Also bad netcode in the Java edition.
I'm not sure if I'd call either of those "just fine". That system also only works for games that are able to attract some minimum viable community where some enthusiasts volunteer to host any servers at all. Great for a really long-lived community, bad for any new game trying to make a splash.
Minecraft targets kids. Of course they would rather use mom's credit card to host a server than learn Docker. I have a Minecraft server running for my friends, it took all of 15 minutes to set up.
And what the hell has netcode to do with who runs the servers? So all the cloud-hosted games never suffer from jitter, latency, bad routing, network congestion? Again, it's just FUD.
> Small developers disproportionally have to rely on online services
I'm not convinced that that's the case. If you're talking about cloud providers then the cost can become very high very quickly, so smaller developers have to carefully manage the budget. To my knowledge, cloud services are usually used for simple stuff like logs and analytics, and games don't really need that to play the game.
Also, don't forget that it's not just multiplayer games. Singleplayer games suffer from this as well.
Most of the cloud providers have generous enough free tiers that small developers fit into them. Look at EOS, Playfab, Steam. You can run a backend for free for < 5k players with lambda and dynamodb.
edit:
> To my knowledge, cloud services are usually used for simple stuff like logs and analytics
Respectfully, you’re wrong here and this is the problem that me and many others have with this line of defense for SKG. No small developers who are managing their budget tightly are storing logs on AWS for analysis after the fact and paying for it. They’re using services like Sentry that do it for free or for $19/months. They’re using services like playfab for parties, vivox for voice chat, flex match for Matchmaking. Those services are free for small amounts of use that 90% of games would fit under.
The question remains - how does any of this prevent small developers from releasing either the binary or the code in the modified form? Again, that has already been done with variety of games (not just popular ones as you assume), so it's not something extraordinary. The developers definitely have the resources to do so since they were getting money for the game, and the least they can do for their game and its community is to give it to them after they stop supporting it themselves.
> The developers definitely have the resources to do so since they were getting money for the game
There is no guarantee that they did!!! Yes, the examples we are pointing out (typical "friendslop" games from the last years) made bank, and should be able to afford to afford and EOL path.
However for every successful game that uses those technologies there are ~100 that "didn't make it", or barely broke even that are now also forced to do additional work on something they either post-hoc now was financially unfeasible, or have to do up-front work on something where it's a gamble whether it will be financially feasible.
In my personal opinion, completely downplaying the effort and financial reality that comes with making games compliant, and based on that creating carveouts for e.g. sub-$100k-revenue games was the downfall of SKG. If they would have made an effort to recognize that, they would be able to mobilize a large base of the indie developer community as well.
I get what you mean - if the developer stops supporting the game then they might run out of money to make the changes. This can even happen spontaneously in some cases. But I'm still expecting at least some effort in preserving their product, their legacy. Some people might call it naive (and it probably is), but for me personally the baseline is that games should be playable at least in some way. Maybe the experience will not be the same, maybe there will a lot of lag, maybe something will break. But it is still better than not being able to play the game at all.
I don't think anyone is downplaying the effort of making a videogame that is both easy to host for the small developers and for the community. But unfortunately developers themselves often choose to pursue financial goals disregarding everything else. So it's understandable that gamers are not happy and demanding some solution. And that the industry is trying to push back.
> they might run out of money to make the changes
They may have never made any money to begin with, as they ran out of money during the development phase of the game because they were trying to comply with the regulation, and never got to release the game. Regulation almost always places a higher proportional burden on the smaller players, while larger players can afford it, which is why sensible regulation has carveouts for smaller players.
> maybe there will a lot of lag, maybe something will break. But it is still better than not being able to play the game at all
How is that better? A multiplayer game with awful lag isn't enjoyable anymore, and a game without joy is just a chore.
> they ran out of money during the development phase of the game because they were trying to comply with the regulation
I don't believe it. This is not the biggest spending point when making a videogame. If a developer uses this as an excuse, there was probably something else wrong with the development.
> How is that better?
Well, being able to play a game is better than not being able to play the game. I've played multiplayer games with high lag, you can get used to this. Especially if you want to play the game. Also, community can fix some stuff on their own, but only if they have something to work with.
If the law were to be passed, surely Photon would be incentivized to make a self-hosting alternative, no? Something that uses the same API but is self-hosted.
There is no indication that a self-hostable alternative that to what Photon is providing is even feasible, as a lot of what they are doing includes tuning network settings, setting up CDN-like structures, etc.. Even for their enterprise offerings they are targeting a managed cloud approach, and not an independently deployable binary.
If the law were to be passed, Photon would at the maximum be incentivized to produce a self-hostable API-compatible alternative that would be neutered to such a degree that Games still qualify as "playable" on paper but would be unenjoyable to actually play. More likely, they won't do anything, as they are not the game developer and not responsible for compliance.
Those games are unaffected whether or not SKG is written into law. If ojr of those games has an optional multiplayer component all of a sudden it can come under the purview. One of the things SKG has pushed down the line is what is “playable”. There is a very small but very active online community for a bunch of games that would call the online part of their game a requirement. The last of us and uncharted had very unpopular multiplayer modes off the top of my head.
Small multiplayer “friendslop” games - things like Lethal Fompany, Peak, Totally Reliable Delivery service. They’ve been smash hits, wildly popular but I can definitely see a world where those games just don’t get made when you add a new layer of liability, potentially in perpetuity.
Are you aware that you don't need turnkey cloud services for indie multiplayer right? Even Godot lets you ship a server binary that allows people to host their own games. Many other indie multiplayer games do, we've been doing this since Doom. We're not talking about MMOs here.
There is literally zero reason that Lethal Company needs cloud services for their servers, or for it not to allow players to host their games. EOS & co. are golden handcuffs, and designing the multiplayer system from day 1 with preservation in mind is not that much more work. Of course Epic wants you to use their easy solution, it's called vendor lock in.
Regarding the "friendslop" games - I don't see an issue, the companies that provide those game with online services will adapt to the new requirements to keep getting money from those game developers.
Regarding the optional multiplayer modes - the developers will probably not use some complex architecture for this, so giving it to the community will not be that hard. Also there are multiplayer games that do support community servers out of the box, so it's not an issue to make a game like this.
Probably not, but that would be a good thing in my book anyway.
If only those 1.3 million signatories pledged to never buy from a company that Kills Games again...
Boycotts are the weakest form of protest.
How do you reckon? Boycotting has a concrete immediate effect, unlike for example, picketing, signing letters. Weak, maybe, weakest?
It's the standard problem of devolving responsibility to individual action: the effect is so diffuse as to be negligible in all but the most extreme cases. In most cases, one wouldn't even be able to correlate change in sales with the boycott action.
On the other hand, actions like picket lines produce a clear relationship between the issue (look at the sign) and the action. Contacting advertisers and shareholders to get them to pull out their funding also has a direct effect, and connects more cleanly the effect to the cause.
Yet, most people don't do even that much.
This movement stems from Ubisoft’s The Crew, and judging by how Ubisoft is doing financially, maybe they have already.
>Ubisoft has released its financial results for the full 25-26 fiscal year, reporting a sharp decline in revenue and net bookings, down 21.8% and 17.4% year-over-year (YoY), respectively, due to the "softer new release schedule" and new operating model.
EU already have markings for lots of things, like how efficient a dishwasher is.
I think a reasonable middle ground here is to just have EU mandate something similar for games. To receive an A rating the game has to be installable and playable fully offline, for example, and so on.
They could allow for publishers to guarantee a minimum support period, with full refunds guaranteed if the publisher does not honor that. So an E rating may be a game that's guaranteed playable for 2 years and requires online connection to play.
Then those who purchase can make informed decisions. Do I want to buy this game with a rating that signals the game may stop working at any point the publisher decides?
Yes. Exactly. I, for one, am following this credo: If your single player game has an “always online” clause; I am not your customer. No ifs, no buts, no “but i like this franchise”s.
Vote with your wallet. Do not hesitate to boycott.
I'd like to see legislation to require publisher to clearly state if game works offline, and if not, what is the committed, guaranteed operational life ("at least to June 2030" prominently displayed, for instance).
I agree, and i think one more thing should be also explicit; save files.
Whether the game works offline, and until when the servers are guaranteed, is one part. But the savegames and progression data should also belong to the user.
The game is made by the studio, sure, but the save file is the part I construct by playing. It is my time, my choices, my progress, my world state and my memories.
So I would add a clear principle that the publisher should not be able to kidnap the user's save data.
So much noise, so few principles. Whatever happened to don't buy if you don't like it? Read contracts before you agree to them? This whole discussion is kind of ridiculous. Gaming is not a matter of health or wellness. We don't need a nanny chaperoning videogame purchases.
Every time I hear lobby, I hear accepted/sanctioned corruption.
The EU is incapable of forcing the Sony assholes to allow region switching of a PSN account between EU countries... do you expect them to do more advanced thinking wrt the gaming market?
Government should just release legislation, that games that require additional upkeep should provide "Best before" date. That should make customers carefully consider their purchase up front, and instead of buying latest and greatest AAA title, purchase a few 10 year old indie games.
I guess that they forgot to put a big "Protect the children" title on top of their proposal to have it accepted blindly.
I'm curious to see if this will embolden game corps to continue mistreating consumers or if they will acknowledge consumers are aware of that ethereal state of their "ownership" of games and start selling more complete products instead of "clients" to servers that can be rug-pulled at any time. I think we all can guess the answer as consumers continue to buy, unfortunately, but this movement is at least a step in the right direction.
PirateSoftware must be so giddy right now.
When was the last time any law in any of the so-called democracies was influenced by common citizens?
Serious question not snark
Last weekend in Switzerland.
Well that probably doesn't count as a "so-called" :)
But almost everywhere else it seems to be just corporations pushing for laws against other corporations, like with Epic/Tinder etc against Apple/Google etc
For UK parliament petitions it was 1 in 800. And only because one MP was really against importing shark fins and pushed it themselves as well. Democracy is fake.
Calling this a failure seems a bit unfair. The signatures forced an official EU response, even if they did not produce a law.
The disappointing part is the voluntary industry code. Publishers are not being asked to run servers forever, only to avoid making paid games completely unusable after shutdown.
At what point does buying a game become nothing more than renting access until the publisher changes its mind?
I thought regulations were leading to civilization erasure for the EU ...
Or is this one of the good ones(tm)
No shit Sherlock! Pay your taxes to fund illegal immigration and shut up, little consumer-comrade.
Once more, capital is shown to have more power than people.
Is this cause even worth a movement?
Consider that basically every live-service game you have ever played will become unplayable sooner or later, and how many modern AAA games are live-service...
We can still play the NES version of Mario (1985), but we can't play Evolve (2015), Anthem (2019), Concord (2024), etc.
The fun part about this is that Evolve is fundamentally a P2P game, so it got an offline revival pretty quickly. Anthem would have gotten one much quicker had they not wrapped the game in Denuvo, as it stands that one’s only possible under certain constraints (Linux with new enough AMD cpu/intel cpu, or windows with a hypervisor). Concord was similarly wrapped in an antitamper, but they shipped the majority of the stuff reqd for local play, so that got an offline revival as well.
Yeah, I guess my perspective is along the lines of nothing of value was lost, at least not enough to mobilize people from more pressing causes, but clearly other people think differently.
Yes, absolutely! I personally want to be able to play games many years after they are released and after they have stopped receiving any support. Yet we see growing number of examples where this is not the case and you get locked out of a game permanently when its publisher decides it no longer wants to support it.
The premise was flawed from the get go. It should have been when you release a game it should be sound,
NO DAY 0 patches,
free of bugs that prevent in any way completing the game or cause serious annoyance,
a way to have a digitally bought game made offline, and play offline.
If it's an online game, then after X years, or before abandonment by the studio release a vm that holds the server code, so the addicts could host their own shit.
That's all. But it was fucked from the get go, maybe literally started by a lobbyist. Or simply Ross Scott was simply didn't know what he was doing.
Days since last being disappointed by the EU: 0
the attempted takeover of the gaming industry has been the biggest blowback to western political establishments everywhere
video games would normally distract people who would otherwise remain politically inactive
when these establishments attempt to insert their propaganda and control mechanisms into these industries, it infuriates millions of people who just want to be left alone
[flagged]
How is it forcing people to work?
What happens if someone decides to no longer work managing a server for a game they built?
Then they don't lock their playability behind a goddamn server. Why are boatloads of games with singleplayer content locked behind a launcher anyway?
1.3M signatures to grant government power it shouldn't be granted. It's good that it failed. Stop giving money to proprietary software if you have a problem with the arrangement.
> to grant government power it shouldn't be granted
What power? Power to save games from becoming unplayable on the whim?
Power to say "that product you are selling is not okay with me! If the customer is willing to buy, it must be because you have deceived him. We cannot trust customers to buy games on their own, they need help from the state to do that!"
Shall I go on?
CU: I consent.
GD: I consent.
EU: Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?
"Oh, won't someone think of the gamers?"
The initiative is not about telling which games customers can and cannot buy, it's about customers getting to play a game they paid for without the fear of it becoming bricked after the publisher stops supporting it.
This is equivalent to the government making certain kinds of contracts unlawful. It's the same kind of situation as in prostitution and illicit drug markets. The government claims that certain kinds of agreements should simply not be available to customers and sellers. This is not the government's business.
But nobody is trying to block "certain kinds of agreements". You can still make whatever games you could make before. Nothing changes in that regard.
I think that is literally what SKG is doing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that game companies often create games and sell them (i.e. sell licenses), and the terms of those licenses include some degree of revocability and nonguarantees of continued function—which I don't like, btw. Nonetheless, customers buy these games, agree to these licenses, having attentatively read those terms or not.
It's a bit of inference on my part, but here's my bottom line: the conduct SKG is lobbying against is permitted by the contracts which game sellers and customers have agreed to, presumably. Otherwise, a smart instantiation of the SKG idea would be bringing class actions for breaches of contract, I guess?
So I agree, nobody is trying to block people from making games certain ways, including in this sort of Mission Impossible tape way. That would be weird and draconian to outlaw. But I don't know how to interpret SKG other than to be outlawing the sale of such revocable/spontaneously self-destructing game services, which is to say outlawing the contracting between customers and sellers to exchange money for services usable under such terms.
I think a specimen case would be useful to understand. The infamous one seems to be The Crew. Presumably SKG would seek to outlaw something about the conduct of Ubisoft there, presumably the revocation or destruction of the service. Equally presumably, the right to revocation was in the terms that everyone signed. So either, the law trumps the contract, or the contract was unlawful in the first place. This effectively forbids some kinds of contract.
Anyway, that's just my interpretation, so if I'm thinking stupid, I hope my thoughts are laid bare, and that I have not lost your patience, so that you may poke out my errors.
> my impression is that game companies often create games and sell them (i.e. sell licenses), and the terms of those licenses include some degree of revocability and nonguarantees of continued function
Yes, that's the case. But the absence of guarantees is not very specific, which opens a door for publishers to just drop support on a whim. It's not an issue with titles that have no online components, since you can just keep playing them. But a lot of games nowadays do require online connection, even singleplayer ones. So a publisher shutting down the servers for such game will render the game unplayable in any way. This is the crux, and this is what SKG is trying to solve.
> the conduct SKG is lobbying against is permitted by the contracts which game sellers and customers have agreed to, presumably
Unfortunately, publishers can change the agreements. They can promise you 10 year support for a game, and then drop support for this game one year after release (see Anthem as an example; Concord is even more obvious). This should definitely not happen.
> I don't know how to interpret SKG other than to be outlawing the sale of such revocable/spontaneously self-destructing game services
You can still sell them and deny access to the game after shutting it down, you just need to be prepared for legal actions. So no, nobody wants to outlaw the production of such games (at least nobody from the initiative talks about it in such way).
> The infamous one seems to be The Crew
Yes, it's the most popular. But there are hundreds of games like that that are already dead and cannot be played. You might think it's a very small number compared to overall number of games that have been ever released, but it will increase. Also, Ubisoft themselves told us multiple times that they don't want gamers to own the games.
> This effectively forbids some kinds of contract
It's nothing new. For instance, you cannot make a game that formats your system drive when you die in-game. Nobody is stopping you from developing such game, but you will be open to legal actions, since it can be considered malware. Even if you warn the players beforehand - it's still a malware. So the argument "they agreed to this" is not very sound. Like with real world Russian roulette - it's not OK to shoot someone just because they agreed to it.
Also contracts should not contradict the laws. But to prove if such practice contradicts the existing laws is quite hard as we can currently see.
Real lolbertarianism has never been tried. Maybe in somalia.
nice idea.
Like,
1. Let make cocaine legal to sell
2. Say to people 'Stop giving money to drug deallers if you have a problem with the arrangement.'
Laws were never going to be the solution.
They are too busy passing freedom-stifling laws.
The fact that the dude from Stop Killing Games completely fumbled his speach at the European parliament definitely didn't help their case.
Which one exactly? I saw one speech and that was decent.
This one: https://youtu.be/oXcogLmxnJw?is=FJpTrhEpez_S6MzK
To be fair to him it's more bad coordination or bad prep but it weakened the argument so much in my opinion.
PirateSoftware predicted this would happen and got death threats, swatted, multiple videos hating on him. Like he is the villain. Lobby groups, politics and copyright law are the issues.
He also attacked Ross and insulted him multiple times. He wasn't nice about it, in fact he was very aggressive. He also pretended to be someone who he wasn't. He also tried using his influence to stop the movement, which backfired spectacularly.
> In its official response on June 16, the Commission said it “cannot propose a legal obligation” requiring publishers to keep games playable after they stop being sold commercially.
Control behavior by regulating the intermediary. Figure out what the intermediary publishers rely on is, and regulate the intermediary or transactions to that intermediary
This works within any legal system anywhere and just requires a little inspiration
at least, I can do it anywhere, so just reach out
Why would 1.3M signatures be enough to secure EU law? That is entirely unreasonable and undemocratic, given the small section of the entire EU population that number represents.
The "despite" certainly creates an interesting expectation, though.
Democracy is not just majority. But being represented.
Basically you said that Belarus is democratic country because 51% percent people voted for today's dictator.