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Stop Killing Games

eci.ec.europa.eu

483 pointsr1chardnl259 comments

All fellow European users should sign the petition!

By the way, this is an official European Union initiative, it's safe and useful to add your vote (unlike those useless petitions on websites such as Change.org).

Official or not, I've never seen the government care even a little bit about a petition, beyond paying it lip service until the news cycle moves on to the next current thing.

I'm sure folks here could list dozens of times they have helped, but also defeatism in general isn't a useful tool for solving problems.

if your best rebuttal is "well just stay positive" in a year of negatives, I'm not going to be very optimistic in the end. It just feels like people denying the reality around them.

It's more of a you are guaranteed to miss all the shots you don't take situation. Signing a petition isn't exactly a high cost so even if the chance to succeed is lot you might as well.

I don't know, I think the EU has already proven itself willing to regulate the tech industry. And I'm not sure if this proposal is something that the game industry would die on a hill to stop. So getting some relatively easy brownie points from a citizen initiative seems plausible.

At a minimum it has the safe effect as any other hopeless change.org petition, media attention.

Those ECI that manage to get the needed vote count do influence the EU politics.

Since ECIs were launched in 2012, 110 initiatives were started, 10 reached the needed vote count.

Of these 2 made actual impact:

- Ban Glyphosate led to a reevaluation of the pesticide approval procedure

- End The Cage Age made the commission reevaluate the factors for a transition int the agriculture sector.

This particular initiative about games will probably face much less head wind, since:

1. It is about customer rights ( which the EU just loves )

2. It will disproportionately impact American companies

I wonder if CDPR will support this proposal if it gets somewhere.

I never played it, but apparently Gwent had a pretty graceful termination of support where they kinda handed the game to the "community" and allowed them to keep the game going. Don't know if they would support legislation to enshrine those kinds of practices into law, but at least CDPR seems to be more on this side of things.

I'm sure the company that differentiates itself by marketing a DRM-free gaming platform would certainly voice support of similar concepts, but more importantly, why should we care? CDPR's politics is merely the politics of one person, their CEO. Is the EU a democracy of hundreds of millions of citizens, or is it an oligarchy of CEO's?

It doesn't matter one bit what a corporate spokesman says about democratic legislation and IMHO it feels unwholesome to even bring it up.

> but more importantly, why should we care?

Because money talks, and CDPR has lots of Witcher/Cyberpunk money.

Yes, we are in 2024 an oligarchy of ceo's facading like a (republic) democracy. Wholesomeness was never in the equation. If you have any benevolent dictators, you may as well use them.

I don't know the outcome of the second one you mentioned, but Glyphosate use was extended last year for another 10 years [0]. So what is the "actual impact" you are referring to?

[0] https://food.ec.europa.eu/plants/pesticides/approval-active-...

> I don't know the outcome of the second one you mentioned,

There is a whole paragraph about the outcome in the page you literally linked. It leads to this report [1] where the commission basically dismisses the ECI and explains they will do nothing but at least the commission had to make its position clear and replies.

[1] https://food.ec.europa.eu/document/download/09b68864-8425-4f...

The proposal had 2 clauses, the second reads:

” ensure that the scientific evaluation of pesticides for EU regulatory approval is based only on published studies, which are commissioned by competent public authorities instead of the pesticide industry”.

The second part was addressed by a proposal, that was accepted.

It’s in the bottom of the pages here:

https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Citizens%27_Initiativ...

" The European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) is a European Union (EU) mechanism aimed at increasing direct democracy by enabling "EU citizens to participate directly in the development of EU policies",[1] introduced with the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007. This popular initiative enables one million citizens of the European Union,[2] with a minimum number of nationals from at least seven member states, to call directly on the European Commission to propose a legal act (notably a Directive or Regulation) in an area where the member states have conferred powers onto the EU level. This right to request the commission to initiate a legislative proposal puts citizens on the same footing as the European Parliament and the European Council "

I know what it is. The danish government set up a similar thing. It has had zero impact on anything. Hence my scepticism.

I moved to Denmark so hello! :)

I'm curious of your examples actually as I'd like to learn more about the Danish process specifically.

As for ECIs, the wikipedia page does show successes. Of course I have my doubts this will even reach the necessary 1 million signatures (and honestly needs more cause many will be invalidated), but if it does reach 1 million, it does have a shot of doing something!

Welcome to Denmark. Pardon the weather. The danish petition site is here: https://borgerforslag.dk/

Of 1843 petitions, 52 have been presented in the Folketing, and some of those are silly/unrealistic, like removing tax on fuel. Others had very widespread support and a lot of news coverage, like banning genital mutilation of children, but nothing came of that. I think the enthusiasm for this initiative has declined greatly, since only one petition got enough votes (50.000) in 2024 to reach the Folketing. People have realised it's pointless.

Thanks for the context! Unfortunate to hear and curious to do some follow-up reading.

And at least the weather has picked up a bit right now haha! Time to get off the web and take advantage of it as Denmark gets so nice once the weather is good.

Only EU users can sign, to be clear

Only EU citizens, not even permanent residents.

Which makes sense, no? Having a say in how the country (or union in this case) is run is precisely the difference between a (permanent) resident and a citizen.

As a European, and avid gamer, I support part of the intent here, but I don't think that this has any chance of causing any kind of practical change. The petition is way too broad and doesn't address any specific instances of consumer deceptive practices.

- It's often not practical: There is a vast spectrum of business models where "playable state" requires significant investment, or is even not technically feasible. It could require the company to give up additional intellectual property (server side). It could require them to relicense 3rd party brands (such as The Crew had license for car models), or assets (music). It could involve 3rd party software re-licensing.

- There's a precedent of existing software licensing models. The EU would need to tear up such models completely to enable this.

- You already agreed to the EULA/ToS when you signed up for the service. You were informed that the service could go down. Chose other games if you don't like this.

- Out of scope: The EU will look at business practices if they involve deception and exploitation, but other than that, markets are generally liberal. We don't just demand specific services from companies. At best, we can hope for clearer information to ensure that consumers are well informed of what they are paying for (perpetual license vs time-limited subscription to a live service.

> You already agreed to the EULA/ToS when you signed up for the service. You were informed that the service could go down. Chose other games if you don't like this.

This information disclosure is the real issue. Companies use the EULA/TOS to bury information that they know consumers are unlikely to read but also fulfill their legal obligations.

Often it’s difficult to even find this information until after you buy it, and they’re certainly not telling you on their Steam store page that they will completely kill the game at some point in the future.

There is an EU Court ruling that found that EULA/TOS are not applicable or enforceable in Europe, so that's kind of a non-issue. Also, this doesn't really change the outcome if a publisher would be forced to guarantee usability of their product after they shut down servers, does it?

https://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?num=C-128/11

The great thing about long pieces of text you don’t feel like reading is that there’s always someone else who will.

Then again this applies for all things in life. Don’t worry if you don’t wanna do the thing. Someone else will.

I think the EU governments simply have much more important things to do than to regulate what are essentially toys. People who call themselves "gamers" especially seem lack perspective to recognise that this is just a silly hobby rather than something that actually matters and urgently needs to be addressed by the government.

What requires regulating is not the hobby, but instead the 250-billion-dollar market built on predatory practices.

(E.g. we somehow have a lot of bodies regulating sport events, whereas playing football is just a silly hobby rather than something that actually matters. Same logic applies.)

There's a lot of predatory practices in games, but shutting down an unpopular game is not one of them. We mostly lost the lootbox war, so I don't see this law getting much more sympathy.

Shutting down a live service game after collecting a generous up-front payment from many a customer is very much a rug pull, NFT style, is it not?

Free-to-play games, or even purely subscription-based games, I kind of agree. But a thing I bought for 60-100 reserve currency shouldn't just poof! and disappear, especially if the company pulling the rug is doing well (hi, Ubisoft).

Depends on the time active. If it was like the day before (2023) that pretended to be an MMO but couldn't even do that for 3 days, then yes. That should be punished. If it's your average games as a service that stays actively updated for 2 years and then shuts down I don't know if I can call that a "rug pull". That's still 2 years of actively updated entertainment, which isn't something most offline games can muster up.

I guess it comes down to how long is long enough for that 60-100 currency. I'm sure greybeards who stuck with WOW for 20 years wouldn't feel swindled if the game shut down tomorrow. Devestated, but a huge chunk of lifetime entertainment is far from a rug pull. Meanwhile you can feel betrayed by stuff like Babylon's fall that didn't even make a year (even if very few were optimistic to begin with).

Agreed. They'd have a much better chance focusing on specific deceptive business practices. The EU would be more likely to require explicit and clear labeling of what it is that you are buying.

The Crew is a great example of a company behaving in a way that should be very illegal. They collected my payment for the product, then decided to kill the product presumably to save money on the cloud infra. There was no refund.

In any other industry this business technique is known as "theft".

Please, by all mean, join the class action lawsuit. They will claim that you agreed to the Terms of Service that said that they could shut down the game at any time for any reason. There is no theft, when what you paid for was access to a service. You can't just demand that companies only sell you what you want, or even give it to you retroactively.

What you can do, is to demand transparent, non-deceptive, and fair terms of service. What you can also do, it to speak with your wallet and refuse to play online-only games. It's not a human right to play games, you know.

This is so out there. Having a car is not a human right. Therefore I'll now take your car and sell it for parts.

I will also claim that you consented to that. Suddenly there is no theft!

(When I paid for the game, there were no ToS to sign either, so it's fair.)

If they did decide to do this, the "intellectual property" thing seems like a complete non-issue to me. Third parties wouldn't have any customers if they didn't license things in a compliant way, so they'd just change their licensing to follow the law. This seems vastly easier than e.g. restricting the use of various chemicals in manufacturing, where you actually have to solve engineering problems and alter physical supply chains to make the change.

I feel like it's not broad at all, it just demands that the company delivers what they advertised, since they don't usually openly disclose the temporary nature of your "purchase", because it would hurt sales. (No, hiding it in the EULA doesn't count as per EU courts.)

- Disagree on it being technically infeasible. It's basically trivial: You're probably already running the Kubernetes config on the cluster anyway. Just release the server binaries/config/docs. Laws are also usually not retroactive, so negotiating licenses that allow for this in the future seems trivial too.

- You don't lose IP by distributing anything, just like you don't lose it for distributing the client. I don't own Ford because I bought a Ford car. The only thing licensed IP in a product does it that you can't sell it anymore after it expires. It has no effect on previously sold copies.

- EULA/ToS is invalid if it contains unfair/unexpected clauses. They like to call it a service, but that doesn't mean that it actually is, legally. As opposed to SaaS, games are sold as a product with no expiration date. The EULA/ToS also always contain clauses like "terms can change at any time for any or no reason", which is inherently invalid. So the whole EULA/ToS could be invalid on its face too.

- This is just about basic ownership rights. If it's a rental/service (with a disclosed price for a specific time period), then it's fine. Otherwise it's a product and you have to abide by the regulation for products. Anything other than these two options is inherently unfair, because you can't assess the value of something if you don't know how long it may be used for.

>just demands that the company delivers what they advertised

I don't know any company that advertises "game will stay up for X amount of time and will always be playable". On the contrary I'm pretty sure every EULA specifies that they aren't. you're logging into someone else's server, so I should log in knowing that server won't say up forever

>EULA/ToS is invalid if it contains unfair/unexpected clauses.

how is it unexpected 30 years into the internet that "oh yeah, this is a server-based game, it won't stay up forever". It's unfair, but laws are rarely made with a goal of perfect "fairness".

> Disagree on it being technically infeasible. It's basically trivial:

Nothing is trivial in tech. Not unless you're talking on the scale of years. This isn't even a gamedev thing, it's just that there's always random footguns and pitfalls due to the nature of shifting to a attrition strategy instead of a retention strategy.

> You don't lose IP by distributing anything

if you distribute IP you do not own, you end up taking damages while also having the game taken down. very few games are made fully in house anymore.

> It could require the company to give up additional intellectual property (server side).

Seems only fair to ensure the entire work eventually enters the public domain - otherwise what's the incentive for the rest of society to put up with copyright in the first place?

DRM alone renders the notion of copyright as a bargain with the public domain a complete laughing stock. Rightsholders should be forced to choose between technical and legal protection. That should apply here as well.

I mean, the licensing thing exists as a separate anti-consumer behavior that is frankly unconscionable both artistically and in consumer rights in itself.

Companies shouldn’t be allowed to delete stuff out of my library because they don’t want to renew the contract for the music (f.ex). If they do that, they should be forced to refund the full original price of the purchase, at a minimum.

It’s also obscene for the creator of the work change the work retroactively. This should immediately surrender copyright protection on all materials covered by the first release, or the second release should not receive copyright protection (it's not a new work).

Not sure where the line is between a “remaster”/“director’s cut” but certainly by the time it’s in people’s libraries it’s over the line - I would be very upset to find out that, say, the ending of a movie changed to a version I specifically chose against purchasing (like a directors cut). If you want to release an extra ending, or a directors cut/remaster, fine, but don’t change the things people already bought.

This functionally will force them to sign perpetual licensing deals or not license the content at all. By setting the rules of the game, you can nudge them into the better behavior, and it becomes standard.

Like I'm sure they are used to abusing the consumer etc, because it's been legal to do so, and the way you stop that is attaching consequences for the behavior you want to stop. I'm sure that this will be a shift in how they negotiate contracts etc. And it will be a good one for the consumer.

Requiring separate licensing for playing my game in the cloud is also unconscionable and anti-consumer. Charging for managed-content-library services (like netflix/gamepass) is different but if I as a consumer buy a game and want to play it on a computer instance I rent from Amazon or Google, that should be legal.

In the sense that GDPR is forcing a shift in mindset for companies from "how we handle our data" to "how we handle the customer's data", there is a fundamental shift that needs to happen in the copyright mindset away from "licensing our content/protecting the copyright holders" to "protecting the customer's license". The idea of a license as an ephemeral thing that can be torn away from a consumer without consequence (because the lawyers put "haha eat shit" in some contract-of-adhesion) needs to stop. A significant number of license terms will need to be invalidated immediately etc, just like when other things are regulated (store regulations sometimes mean people can refund things today that they couldn't yesterday, etc). Mostly it will be fine / the consumer will be made whole from parties that are almost inevitably still around and actually able to pay (eg EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft haven't gone anywhere).

- "useful"

Virtually no petitions ever reach the thresholds. The effect of this system is to blunt the formation of actually-effective organized political groups, by burning their time and energy and feel like they're "participating" in EU lawmaking—and subsequently gaslight them into thinking they lack popular support, and should probably give up. When in fact many of the petitions are broadly popular among anyone who's polled; it's just that at its core it's an anti-democratic system set up to perpetuate laws in the opposite direction of what >50% of people actually want.

Few people are truly passionate about–in this example–video game consumer protection laws, but I'd wager an overwhelming majority of anyone who's asked would side with consumer protection over consumer abuse.

> Virtually no petitions ever reach the thresholds.

Someone needs to try, right? Once it fails, then we can be pessimistic.

What does it mean to be safe in this case?

Change.org can keep and sell your info to third parties (maybe they are already doing it, i.e. you are the product).

I'm not claiming it would be safe in a cybersec way in the EU's servers, but at least they won't sell it.

> unlike those useless petitions on websites such as Change.org

I've always thought change.org was just a brilliantly constructed honeypot for rage.

Someone please define "reasonable playable state".

Because, for something like an MMORPG, "playable" means being able to run a server. So, what does "playable" entail? Source and internal sysops documentation? That isn't "playable" for the vast majority of people. Working binary? Now you may be required to develop these specifically for consumer hardware, and/or in different versions.

Example: MOBAs with ladders and matchmaking algorithms. You will likely need a separate server architecture that works independently of the userlist and matchmaking system. Bear in mind these systems are usually not made to be modular, they are custom-built to work in a given environment.

Not saying that it cannot be done, I am also supporting the idea, but there should be a VERY CLEAR definition of what counts as "reasonable playable state".

Legislation is always intentionally vague so that edge cases can prove themselves in court. I think they made the right choice by adapting the demands and wording to something that appeals to legislators.

The FAQ mentions does "server emulators" made by fans, so "reasonably playable" could possibly mean just removing restrictions to using those. Basically removing the phone-home restrictions.

Keeping the game working but offline-only also seems to be a suggestion, the list of "real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way" include some games that are playable offline-only.

But your point stands, this should be discussed with more clarity before turning into law.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

This isn't a draft for a law though, this is a petition to create such a draft. These kinds of critique are kinda premature - even if they're done by Internet famous people like pirate software

Yes, I totally agree.

If it causes enough in-fighting to turn people off, then I'd say the critiques are needed. There's already so much going against the law without the people themselves wondering if this would force their favorite MMO to shut down.

What does this:

> These kinds of critique are kinda premature - even if they're done by Internet famous people like pirate software

mean? “Internet famous people like pirate software” — is “pirate software” a person on the Internet, or what?

He's a twitch streamer that usually gets around 15-30 thousand concurrent viewers while he develops and plays indie games live, on-stream

This was his video after he ranted for a while live.

https://youtu.be/ioqSvLqB46Y?si=Iggw95x1fnZvBJ3O

His issues boil down to

1. it's too broad/non-specific, that makes it bad for developers and will harm the industry

2. The announcement/marketing video for this initiative had several questionable points in it which make the industry look bad

Yeah yeah, but that doesn't explain the grammar of the sentence fragment I quoted and italicized. I still don't understand what that bit is supposed to mean. Can you explain it?

My comment explained what he is, with a small note of what he usually does and a summary of his points, what more could you conceivably want answered?

Click on the provided link if you can't understand what I wrote and take notice of his username.

I think massively online games are the tricky part.

I'd be happy if this stopped publishers killing games were small teams on a private server were viable.

Hell - I've had games I bought killed where there was a viable single player mode. There's no justification for that.

What exactly is tricky about MMOs? World of Warcraft private servers are a thing and there are many more MMOs with private servers.

The tricky part for private servers right now is someone having to apply elbow grease, reverse engineer things, while the publisher has the legal power to shut it down and punish people for trying to bring back a dead game they don't even support anymore.

I think it aims mainly at games that use an online connection as a DRM mechanism, such as Hitman 3 and Gran Turismo 7. Both games are single player games that shouldn't necessitate online connection in the first place.

>but there should be a VERY CLEAR definition of what counts as "reasonable playable state".

There's a weird idea online that laws are super specific and technical and that if you don't nail things down exactly people can side-step and go "wahaha I didn't break any rules!" when that's simply not the case.

Laws are more general and very much about the spirit of actions, and then the specificities get proven in court down the line. Those cases then get referenced in further court actions and end up informing the law overall, without having to have hyper specific wording for all edge-cases enshrined forever. This also provides fluidity for a changing and evolving legal and social system as a judge can take the specifics of that case into account. Every games definition of playable is going to be different, you can't codify something like that.

Europe is a civil law system, which places much higher prominence on proper codification of law than the common law systems common in the Anglosphere, which is generally closer to the procedure you're talking about.

Yes, this is correct. But an ECI just requires that something happen from the Commission. In fact, revisions are basically expected if the Commission decides legislation is the path forward as past successful ECIs have demonstrated.

If you look at EU laws you'll still find plenty of examples of primary legislation setting out general, high-level concepts, which are then given more specificity in delegated regulations, regulatory guidance or court decisions.

It may not be a total coincidence that the common law based UK and US became so much more dominant in commerce. Obviously their imperial holdings had a lot to do with other factors too, like the UK's early lead in the industrial revolution, and the US's massive natural resources, but it's hard to ignore the advantage of a more nimble, flexible, yet predictable legal system for commerce in a time of rapidly changing technology.

UK is one the poorer countries in Western Europe and it has oil.

Sorry if it wasn't obvious, I was talking about the historical UK that owned and operated the British Empire up until the world wars and then almost seamlessly ceded the mantle to the US.

I bet you also are unable to learn any lessons from the ancient Roman empire since Rome is now just some touristy city with a lot of litter, or something?

The US produces around 13% of the world's oil today (and also produced most of the oil and gas for a period when it was new), around the same as Saudi Arabia, and has constantly benefitted from its natural resources (not just oil-- even going back to trees and iron ore)

But none of those things are in any way central to my point-- the advantage of being in a common law country when you run a business in a complex evolving commercial industry, so you can both depend on reliable consistent law, but also expect it to naturally and flexibly extend itself to new situations faster and more consistently with older expectations than a political legislature possibly can.

Well, Continental law was strongly inspired by Roman law and Roman law was prefered by Europea law experts when England was an Island kingdom while Roman Empire was ... An Empire. I don't think you are an expert in law systems comparision and your statements seems to be very broad and unsourced. (random economical number isn't a source)

Some companies like BASF struggle in the American law environment in a combination of jury responsibility (very old concept!), high penalties and jury don't have any clue about science.

I've never heard any such complaint about the European law systems.

Online games that aren't sold as services (like WoW with a subscription) wouldn't need to work online or with servers. The bare minimum this asks for is some state of playable which could include just the ability to run around on the map on a local machine... Ross Scott has talked about this a lot. We would love more, but we are asking for bare minimum.

I'm really skeptical of modern online infra. I've worked on two MMOs as a Tech Artist and the way artists, designers, etc worked on the game was with a local only build! One of these companies actually barred WAN access from our dev machines so LAN only also worked for internal playtests! Trends to make dev builds online only are quite awful for developers in the trenches and are more about exec control than any usefulness added by such requirements.

Complex server infrastructure that you mention is also not needed if you ask me, at least not to the point to make it too hard to widely ship. I'd be fine if someone still had to stand up a centralized matchmaking server still, just allow any player to do it.

As an example, compare Helldivers 2 and WoW. WoW is vastly more complex but Helldivers 2 uses more modern cloud "tech" that didn't exist 20 years ago. Both had issues keeping up with player demand on launch. So what's the point of this newfangled tech? Well, it's devs convincing players they're getting a better service or good (don't know which!) and that this complexity based lock in is worth it. And it's also cloud providers like AWS and Azure convincing devs to create architectures like this which lock devs into these platform holders. I'm not convinced were seeing real improvements on the dev or player side... Scamming turtles all the way down if you ask me.

It also turns out a lot of this stuff is able to reverse engineered. I'm right now playing original Demons Souls with full multiplayer connectivity (including matchmaking from a central private server) which required PSN support of the PS3 days. WoW private servers also required a great deal of reverse engineering. If online randos can do it...

Plus WoW private servers literally revealed a new revenue stream to Blizzard in the form of WoW classic: "After a month or so of large scale protests, Blizzard invited the Nostalrius team to the Blizzard HQ to present the case for Vanilla. An eighty-page "post-mortem" document describing the development of Nostalrius, the problems that happened and some marketing strategies was presented to Blizzard, and after some time, released on the Nostalrius forums" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft_Classic

Others have also mentioned middleware licenses as a problem. Those licenses would adapt just fine. A single game will ship with multiple binaries of RAD Tools, Havok, SpeedTree, etc. So now a player has potentially hundreds of copies of different versions of all these binaries and libraries. This is a completely solvable problem that won't stifle development or even require leaking of trade "secrets".

Also, this is relatively new problem in the industry. The market grew just fine allowing for players to use their goods more freely. That any such regulation would hurt the industry is dubious at best, corporate speak at worst. In fact, I'd argue that enabling player freedom an creativity over their purchased goods has helped the industry grow to where it is today! Counter Strike was a mod, TF2 was a mod, PUBG was a mod (Fortnite wouldn't exist with out it), DOTA was a mod! Minecraft in part exploded cause of mods. A healthy and innovative free market demands player and user freedom!

> I've worked on two MMOs as a Tech Artist and the way artists, designers, etc worked on the game was with a local only build! One of these companies actually barred WAN access from our dev machines so LAN only also worked for internal playtests! Trends to make dev builds online only are quite awful for developers in the trenches and are more about exec control than any usefulness added by such requirements.

I'm an online dev for multiplayer games, and I disagree with your take. In my experience the sheer number of bugs we've seen from "I tested it in the local only build mode so it's fine" and the impact that has on the project makes it worth _not_ supporting an offline mode. I'm not an exec, but practicing good habits during development (there's a phase where it's not worth it sure, but by the time you're on a live project...) makes actually building a game easier.

> As an example, compare Helldivers 2 and WoW. WoW is vastly more complex but Helldivers 2 uses more modern cloud "tech" that didn't exist 20 years ago. Both had issues keeping up with player demand on launch. So what's the point of this newfangled tech?

https://x.com/Pilestedt/status/1760077808146014340 - helldivers backend team was 4 people. _That's_ the point of this newfangled tech.

> Those licenses would adapt just fine.

Handwaving away this problem doesn't make it just og away.

> I'm an online dev for multiplayer games, and I disagree with your take. In my experience the sheer number of bugs we've seen from "I tested it in the local only build mode so it's fine" and the impact that has on the project makes it worth _not_ supporting an offline mode. I'm not an exec, but practicing good habits during development (there's a phase where it's not worth it sure, but by the time you're on a live project...) makes actually building a game easier.

Both should be available cause yes, you need to test like you said. But if I'm setting up skinning on a character or cloth simulation on a cape, I want my turn around time as fast as possible from DCC to engine. Maybe I just want to validate my PBR materials with a specific level's lighting rig and baked GI/reflection probes. Those specific examples are client side only, so I absolutely want that to work on an offline build. The longer a roundtrip to the engine takes for content (including the time it takes to start the game up), the harder it is to iterate and thus quality also falls. Forcing online always for devs at the very least, makes booting the game slower (or just fail) and you need to reboot the game constantly (even with hot reload). That cost adds up quick across many devs and many years. You need both lest you drive your artists and TAs insane. My last company hemorrhaged artists to literally go work next door on very similar styled art content from one live service game to another just because our tools were so exhausting to them to roundtrip, and online wasn't even forced!

>https://x.com/Pilestedt/status/1760077808146014340 - helldivers backend team was 4 people. _That's_ the point of this newfangled tech.

WoW took 4-5 years to develop with "The original World of Warcraft was created by a team of 40 people, which eventually doubled in size as the launch drew close." https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/20/21070494/world-of-warcraft...

Where as as Helldivers 2 has about 100 devs at the end of development taking 8 years according to their CEO. So not seeing the wins there. In terms of concurrent players around launch, WoW had around 0.5 million within months and Helldivers 2 seemed to have peaked at 0.75 million across PC and PS5. 19 years apart and not really seeing that 5x in practice... None of this suggests to me that this "tech" is a useful as many think.

> Handwaving away this problem doesn't make it just og away.

I mean, we have tons of precedent of these middleware licenses working just fine when redistributed as binaries to users' devices, so how is this handwavy? Like yes, there's an issue with already shipped games that make use of such licenses, but after such a law passes, the licenses will have to adapt to licenses similar to what already exist. And prior to this recent problem in games, middleware licenses worked just fine too and often shipped with server binaries. These licenses are not the norm as explained by all the middleware that does get packaged with almost every game today...

Providing testbed maps for rapid iteration and is not the same thing at all as allowing you to play offline.

> WoW took 4-5 years to develop with "The original World of Warcraft was created by a team of 40 people, which eventually doubled in size as the launch drew close."

You’re moving the goalposts here. You asked about cloud tech initially. The topic of “have game budgets and teams gotten out of control” is a totally different one.

> so how is this handwavy?

These aren’t just game middleware technologies that we’re talking about - things like Java, SQL Server, have non distributable licenses. Systems like LaunchDarkly require active subscriptions and don’t allow for redistribution and are often deeply embedded in applications.

> And prior to this recent problem in games, middleware licenses worked just fine too and often shipped with server binaries

Some games still do ship with server binaries. Valheim is a good example. But, to your point earlier about WoW vs Helldiverd - games aren’t developed the same way as they were “prior to this recent problem”, player behaviour and expectations have changed. You can’t just go back to the way things were here any more than you can with social media, banking, email, movie rentals, etc.

> Providing testbed maps for rapid iteration and is not the same thing at all as allowing you to play offline.

Sure, but I mean, at this point, I'll even take a guarantee that I can just run around on a map without spawns just so the world art is preserved. The initiative is pretty broad about what it means to be playable for this reason. Actually, that's the whole point of this initiative is to establish such a bare minimum. And if the game is truly a service, and not a good, than this wouldn't even apply! Companies would just have to be explicit about the service nature of the product which they are not unless you pay a subscription like in the WoW case, which this doesn't affect. So you could still do all this tight coupling that is apparently good for development and ship games just fine if players are properly informed on the service nature (which means some kind of expectation for how long the service will last). I agree that a testbed map isn't the same as playing offline, but I don't agree that it's preferred, or even natural, that development require that offline play be so arduous to accomplish. Especially when something as complex as WoW or PSN matchmaking + a game's specific netcode (Demons Souls PS3 emulation case) can be reverse engineered without any support from devs. Most arguments along the lines of "it's just too technically difficult" do not past the smell test to me.

> You’re moving the goalposts here. You asked about cloud tech initially. The topic of “have game budgets and teams gotten out of control” is a totally different one.

I feel like I pretty succinctly explained that this tech did not provide a huge boost in productivity in development nor did it allow for substantially more scalability of players. Not sure how that's moving the goalpost. You posted a tweet highlighting 4 people allowed for 5x the player capacity in a week. I don't know how many multiplayer engineers worked on WoW pre initial launch but considering the team was smaller than Arrowhead, I doubt it's significantly more than 4 and their concurrent player numbers around launch weren't significantly different (certainly not 5x). I get that Blizzard probably predicted bigger launch numbers than Arrowhead so there's at least some merit to being able to scale up fast.

But overall, I think, like most modern software "advances", we've been duped on their actual performance and efficiency gains, while most gains have actually come from better hardware and internet connections (hardware again). And end users really aren't feeling much of an improvement. I think more has been lost to users and players actually. Less mods, less weird community servers with new game modes, etc. And as mentioned earlier, this actually helped incumbent devs find new revenue streams! The new supposed features of this tech is more to serve all the meta stuff like progression tracking and matchmaking which requires greater centralization of online services. Ye in many cases, like Helldivers 2, the actual gameplay is P2P. So the only thing players get out of the this new "tech" is the thing designed to keep them addicted which is stuff like lootboxes and Skinner box progression mechanics. (I acknowledge my last points here on meta mechanics as goalpost moving, I do view this as part of a much larger issue)

> Systems like LaunchDarkly require active subscriptions and don’t allow for redistribution and are often deeply embedded in applications.

I mean, this is just a bad state. I view this initiative as fighting shit like this. It's bad for devs too. What happens if LaunchDarkly or some other platform holder goes down or cuts off access to a dev for some perceived breach of conduct or license agreement? That's so damaging to a developer, and if they aren't established, existentially threatening. We shouldn't encourage this kind of coupling. As for the non distributable licenses of common distributable like Java and SQL, I'm not terribly worried the economics won't catch up to make it feasible to just use distributable license. We've already seen lots of Java technologies relicensed to GPL 2 over a decade ago. It's all possible without collapsing the economics of it all.

> games aren’t developed the same way as they were “prior to this recent problem”, player behaviour and expectations have changed. You can’t just go back to the way things were here any more than you can with social media, banking, email, movie rentals, etc.

We certainly can go back, or better yet, do better than we used to! I really don't think there's a good technological arguments for why we dev this way now. It's mostly political and I think we should resist this type of excusing of rent seeking style software as "tech advancement". All those areas you mentioned are the way they are not because of technological necessity but because of political and cultural forces. We can style them in a way that's more compatible with a more free and expressive user base, and ultimately, a freer market. The more, but still limited, openness of the pass certainly contributed greatly to the grown of games!

>WoW took 4-5 years to develop with "The original World of Warcraft was created by a team of 40 people, which eventually doubled in size as the launch drew close." Where as as Helldivers 2 has about 100 devs at the end of development taking 8 years according to their CEO. So not seeing the wins there.

Even if we were only comparing cloud teams, I don't see the wins from WOW from 20 years ago working on asset pipelines that was simply 1 3d modeler, compared to an HD release in 202X. Bandwidth hasn't really kept up with asset fidelity, and at the same time consumer demands for ping also went up (as in, lower ping haha).

>we have tons of precedent of these middleware licenses working just fine when redistributed as binaries to users' devices, so how is this handwavy?

Every license is different, and it only takes one important middleware being difficult to stall the whole thing by months. I imagine licenses for server tech are more prohibitive than middleware tools that can work offline (which needs to be distributed for the game to run).

> Online games that aren't sold as services (like WoW with a subscription) wouldn't need to work online or with servers.

Absolutely agree, but fact is, games which rely on a centralized server architecture for the actual purposes of playing them do exist, and are thus a factor that needs to be considered.

I agree. This is a heavily vibes-based petition, seemingly designed to be emotive at the expense of clarity. Is it about DRM stopping games from working? MMOs being shut down? Live services dying?

In the best case scenario, this would be relatively narrowly targeted at something like DRM servers, requiring a final patch to strip DRM. What I fear is more likely to happen is that you end up with something with loopholes that causes many more games to go down the SimCity (the shitty version) route of faux online features to get them to fall into some sort of online-required carve-out. Or you end up with the GDPR route, where the big names will violate it anyways and just don't care about the penalties for doing so.

"No planned obsolescence" seems like a pretty clear goal to me. No carve-out for online games required.

They don't care about GDPR penalties? I'm going to need a source for this one.

Funny thing is server shutdowns are rarely as "planned" out as you'd imagine. Look at GameInformer as we speak. In less than 1 business day the staff was kicked out with no warning, its 20+ year old website taken down, and its twitter handle deleted, hours after making a goodbye statement. This was clearly not planned more than a month in advance by Gamestop. Planned Obscolecense implies (if not, is outright defined) as designing a product to fail in a specific amount of time. No game service worth its salt is designed to shut down in 6 months (you can probably find some chinese asset mills to prove me wrong. so take a charitable interpretation of "worth its salt")

There may be premature shutdown but no buiness plans to run servers for free forever. Ongoing server costs will be part of the business plan from the start.

> This is a heavily vibes-based petition, seemingly designed to be emotive at the expense of clarity. Is it about DRM stopping games from working? MMOs being shut down? Live services dying?

Por que no los dos?

Both are dick moves, verging on fraud if you've made money by ostensibly “selling” something that the customer finds themselves not actually owning, aren't they? Why should either of them be legal?

I am honestly not sure where I stand on this ( MMORPGs especially, because those were designed for being played on the internet -- unlike offline games that merely have internet connection requirement ), but FFXI darkstar project was likely a good example of what could be done.

<< Bear in mind these systems are usually not made to be modular, they are custom-built to work in a given environment.

Lets say that somehow this requirement ( 'reasonable playable state' ) was mandated. It would likely result in more modular architecture. I call that a win.

> Lets say that somehow this requirement ( 'reasonable playable state' ) was mandated. It would likely result in more modular architecture. I call that a win.

It would also raise the cost of development, and raise the barrier of entry into markets.

Again, I am not against this proposal quite the opposite. But it should be made clear very early on what "reasonable playable state" means, and ideally in a way that would not constitute a huge competitive disadvantage for smaller developers.

>It would likely result in more modular architecture.

I just see more workarounds rather than better tech. These laws almost never give better tech practices in the short run.

I imagine many games will switch to a f2p model (which seems to be an exception here) and hike up BP costs to make up for the lack of consistent $30-60 before we get a better modular architecture.

> Someone please define "reasonable playable state".

Wouldn't this be the job of the lawmakers?

> Source and internal sysops documentation?

Maybe, why not. MMORPGs are the exception here, so most games will not necessarily be forced to deliver them.

> You will likely need a separate server architecture that works independently of the userlist and matchmaking system. Bear in mind these systems are usually not made to be modular, they are custom-built to work in a given environment.

Just open the APIs and let the community build their own. Maybe, the gaming-industry could even move to open standards, have open source-projects for most of those stuff, which would be beneficial for everyone.

> but there should be a VERY CLEAR definition of what counts as "reasonable playable state".

Why? In worst case, it has to be decided game by game. And for most games this is probably not a big deal, as they are not that hard entangled with online-features. I think any law should also giver the industry some leeway to establish a useful ground on their own.

I mean, a solution here could go from removing licensing and allowing people debugging, so they can build their own backends. Or forcing companies to deliver the whole backend, including documentation and whatever. This is a pretty big range of options.

See Directive 2019/770 for the definition of "functional" in this context. It's already a codified term: The digital content or service must be able to perform its intended functions reliably, meet the quality and performance expectations set forth in the contract, and be compatible with other systems as expected by the consumer.

This is great! As an indie game developer I care a great deal about game preservation. The game I'm working on requires Internet upon the first start and seamlessly syncs game state across your devices, but I pushed for open sourcing as much code as possible. We released 75% of the game's code under the MIT License[1], even before the game's full release. With the infra we built, we can publish the entire source within minutes once the game is no longer commercially viable.

[1] https://cpojer.net/posts/athena-crisis-open-source

FYI if I click play nothing happens. Also not clear how to get the game on iOS (I love a good advance wars-like game)

The play button should just scroll you down to the demo embedded on the website ( https://athenacrisis.com )

To play on iOS, you can install it from here: https://app.athenacrisis.com/download

You get an account either by buying it directly on athenacrisis.com or via Steam.

Best similar case I can think of is the EU regulating charging cables (and mandating USB-C for a lot of devices).

It was a common consumer good with a problem that really annoyed some people so much that they made a law to "fix" it. Others said it would stifle innovation. To me how people feel about that probably says something about what chances this proposal has.

How do people feel about the USB-C mandate? Are there other similar recent examples?

I feel that usb-c mandate is the best thing in the world of consumer electronics since mobile phones were invented. I need 1-2 cables instead of a battery of connectors. In fact, i normally just have 1 on me - my laptop's, which I use for everything.

The USB-C mandate is good, but the actual USB-C spec is not, with how confusing it became because now the USB-C connector doesn't tell you whether the cable is charge-only, USB 2.0, USB 3.1, USB 3.2 or USB 4.0. So everytime I grab a cable I need to test it and label it accordingly.

With USB-A and B, you knew at a glance at least which speeds it supported.

There's no such thing as a charge-only USB-C cable that's compliant with USB standards. So if it's got a USB logo, and isn't a counterfeit, then it's not charge-only. Of course there are plenty of counterfeits.

Otherwise entirely correct, the marking requirements for USB-C are terrible. And the ports don't have any good way to show which alternate functions they support. You can have 40Gib/s USB-4.0 without the DisplayPort alternate mode supported, for example.

The fact that they don't meet a standard doesn't negate the fact that they exist, are for sale, and that most people do not understand the very technical specifications, or even what the USB logo represents.

No, but it means there’s a consumer safety issue rather than a problem with the standard just as someone selling contaminated meat does not mean that the food safety labeling laws are broken.

I do not like the mandate because I prefer the lightning connector as the objectively better connector.

I’m always amused when people say they don’t see a difference. The difference to me is significant.

How is it better?

1. It's proprietary. · 2. It's more expensive. · 3. It's slower. · 4. It doesn't support fast-charging. ·

My favorite is that it doesn't have enough pins for native HDMI. Those Lightning to HDMI adapters have a proper controller chip that takes compressed video and decodes it to output HDMI.

the flimsy, breakable part is on the cable rather than the expensive device

Most importantly, I find it easier to plug into the device without looking.

I hold the opposite perspective, to me personally, the USB-C feels objectively better.

I own phones with both connectors and I've hit issues with two lightning cables over the last ~6 years where dropping the cable onto something metallic shorts out a couple of the connectors rendering the cable useless. Thus far I've not managed to do similar with USB-C.

Both cables ultimately wind up being replaced after fatiguing to failure in roughly comparable time IME.

Both adapters are pleasant to use compared to predecessors, but USB-C I can share between devices, so the 100W laptop charger will happily charge my phone etc which I find quite convenient.

I'm curious what you find preferable about the lightning adapter?

iirc the EU did not mandate usb-c. It merely forced the industry to pick a standard (the industry reached consensus on usb-c)

Apple didn't manage to convince the rest of the industry that it's the better connector, so USB-C came out ahead. That was not the mandate. The mandate just told them to collaborate and standardize around one connector.

Apple charges money on a license for lighting cables. And it's not cheap. Surprise, their competitors don't want to pay out millions to Apple for some crappy charging cables.

People have this idea lightning stuck around because it was good. No, it was a money printing machine that required no lubrication from Apple. Even the dumbest of the dumb MBAs wouldn't have killed lightning. From a business perspective it's gold.

Lightning is the only charging cable that manages to stop working after a while, plus it has some kind of DRM bs. It can rest in pieces, in many cases literally.

The RoHS directive is the better analogy.

2 days ago (2 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41144108

3 days ago (2 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41129339

4 days ago (131 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41121570

"Stop Destroying Games" is a much better title. (Third link)

I thought this was about violence in video games the first time I clicked.

If games are a kind of software, why must games face this kind of regulation when other kinds of (actually more important) software doesn't / won't?

In saying this, I'm not in favor of this regulation, actually the opposite - because imagine if this regulation passed for games and then passed for software in general next.

MMORPGs are software provided as a service, but this proposed regulation wants to make them playable even after the service provider discontinues service. If applied to software in general then that means all SaaS once it has any customers, then it has the obligation to make (and keep?) that software usable indefinitely.

And what if the reason you had to discontinue was out of your control? Eg. one of your critical service providers went out of business? Guess you'll have to recreate that service provider's whole service so your now open source software can still work on top of it before you can actually go out of business yourself.

It is just an absurd expectation for game companies to have to consider this. And in the end it just makes it harder for the smaller not-established game companies while giving the bigger companies another boost, concentrating their advantage.

" If games are a kind of software, why must games face this kind of regulation when other kinds of (actually more important) software doesn't / won't? "

I am neutral to the iniative but I can answer this question very clearly: Games are cultural products and you want to get the exact same experience (as you want to see the same film and not something else)

Using GIMP or Photoshop is a very different experience: Does it matter? Not so much. You can use an alternative and in case user will change. The Crew or Gran Turismo? You don't want to change so much.

Their FAQ talks about using games as the first step in fighting companies discontinuing services of various kinds (not only cultural products).

It is true there is a cultural aspect for games and they mention it, but if a regulation like this passes, then it is easy to imagine what other regulations would be pushed next.

Yes it could be great for consumers, but too many regulations means it becomes harder to start and do businesses and the advantages fall to the established players and in the end there are less options in the market(s) due to monopolies so the consumer is actually worse off.

" It is true there is a cultural aspect for games and they mention it, but if a regulation like this passes, then it is easy to imagine what other regulations would be pushed next. " Does it? That is a strong conclusion. Also we can distinguish between different solutions in this discussion anyway.

" Yes it could be great for consumers, but too many regulations means it becomes harder to start and do businesses and the advantages fall to the established players and in the end there are less options in the market(s) due to monopolies so the consumer is actually worse off. " From a regulation point this is easy to tackle: Just give some sort of limit to tackle only the big players.

Respecting basic property rights is not up for debate. If a business model relies on violating them, then it probably doesn't deserve to exist in the first place.

>I am neutral to the iniative but I can answer this question very clearly: Games are cultural products and you want to get the exact same experience (as you want to see the same film and not something else)

Maybe this is a bit too philosophical, but: you'll never get the exact same experience. Year 1 Wow is not even the same game as year 20 WoW. Braid in 2008 won't give the same "wow" factor in 2024, be it due to stiffer competition or your opinion of the creator himself over the course of 16 years. these will affect a game no matter the state, single or multiplayer, indie or AAA.

There can be some archival benefits, but I don't think anyone would expect to start a MP game 10 years from now and get the exact experience as a day one player (for better and worse).

Of course I agree with you on art view point but you see the point: Nobody wants to use an older GIMP version while I play old Pokémon games.

Some people do want to use an older version of Photoshop though. The people who do want older gimp can still pull it from somewhere. Pretty sure Adobe's been hell bent on making sure CS6 is as useless as possible.

I feel it goes the same for games (a most proprietary platform). There will be some playing pokemon Red in 2024, but most people moved on to Sword/Shield or Scarlet/Violet. Most don't necessarily care if Red/Blue is legally available (and with the 3ds shop gone, I don't think it is as of now).

The problem there is that games don't usually advertise a subscription, like basicall all SaaS products do. They masquerade as a good for a one-time payment, then turn around and pretend it was a rental all along.

Note that it's not about running servers for all eternity. It's about patching out the requirement of an _official_ server and/or releasing dedicated server software, at least _after support ends_, like games have done for decades already.

MMOs can be both. If it quacks like a good, it is one, no matter what they say in the ToS/EULA. Stuff like World of Warcraft would likely be unaffected, because they are up-front about the duration you pay for.

Since the only wording is "providing reasonable means to continue functioning of" when someone interprets this as extreme as "MMORPGs must run their servers in the cloud forever in case someone tries to sign on 70 years from now" and someone else interprets this as mildly as "Games with single player modes must be allowed to launch without server connectivity at the time cloud services are retired" it becomes difficult to immediately refocus talk about how "this" does/doesn't should/shouldn't will/won't apply to other software since it's not even a strong agreement on "what" we're really talking about.

That said I'd hazard a bet most people supporting this also support similar feelings about generic software as well. Sometimes it's just easier for regulation to start in one "obvious" case and spread out from there rather than hope to wait for everyone to agree to change everything at once.

A reasonable requirement would be having the server code, data, and assets be released to public domain when they shut down the service. If they're not operating it, I don't see any good reason to allow people to squat on content that people want to run for themselves. A year after the last commercial offering is sufficient time.

If you run a SaaS and then shut it down, game or otherwise, then you should have to release that software under a permissive license, or to the public domain, along with any non-code assets necessary for functionality equivalent to the last commercially offered state.

The world would be better, we'd end up with fewer leeches and rent seekers.

By selling software, the developers benefit from the protections of copyrights. Mandating the release of source and assets after the end of commercial activity benefits society. This would require government to work with an archive organization of some sort - maybe offer tax incentives to any site that freely hosts said content, for up to 5 years after the release.

There are all sorts of valuable things we could be doing that benefits society and individuals instead of making it all about ruthless corporate bloodsucking and maximizing markets.

Part of the problem is sometimes the company doesn't have the license to release (i.e. "redistribute") the server code. In that case they're stuck - the law requires them to both release and not release the code.

Or what about scenarios where the company doesn't have code access to a critical dependency? It's not so unusual either - using a non-OSS DB or cloud service would qualify.

I think a better version of the law should mirror right-to-repair efforts: service providers have to release an API spec and not block attempts to point the client code at the new server, analogous to improving the "repairability" of the software with third party components. Constraining this event to when the service shuts down should mitigate economic concerns for companies.

Something like mandating the binary be released for the version operating at the end of the product's life would be good - not ideal, but since making everything open source by fiat isn't feasible, this would still allow people to operate software after it's been abandoned.

Recently discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126782

What if, in stead of a requirement, we created an opt-in obligation for companies? If you promise "EOL support guaranteed" you register a plan with whatever agency and pay some fee and they check in every couple years and make sure you remember. And if you don't, then you don't get the badge, and we find out if consumers actually care.

I have thought about this for a while. I think that a lot of labeling could be done with regards to promises of consumer products. Publishers (of any kind of digital product) cannot expect to transition to a model where we don't own anything and they make no assurances on the product they serve.

It would be great to have a badge of the sort "this product will not have ads, will not have microtransactions, will be able at least until 2030, etc.".

The non-indie market isn't saturated enough for that, and publishers will collude to never allow any of their games to promise this so gamers won't get the chance to get used to it.

Because most users of games don't really care for this. They are either too young, or to busy with other facets of life that they just want to play the game.

It is only a small percentage that are dedicated enough to care, either because they really enjoy the game or because they want to support game preservation.

If you make it opt-in, companies won't care to add it and they will only lose a few percentage points (I would be surprised for anything higher than 1%) of people that will be put off by the lack of "EOL support" guarantee.

<< Because most users of games don't really care for this.

Agreed, but surely there is money to be made on people like me, who clearly have money to drop on games without blinking too much if I am having fun without having to jump through hoops ( fwiw, DRM is a hoop for me ). As in, I was a kid once. My generation is all grown up, but we actually have money to spend on games. Is it just easier to sell to kids who don't know any better?

If you want a middleweight solution, between "ask about this on developer forums" and "try to get a law passed," you could create a consumer organization that publishes a list of games that are doing all the right things. Publish a newsletter, create free distribution for companies that don't use DRM and have sunset support plans.

> and pay some fee

Why should the government make money from checking up on someone?

This is how a lot of regulation happens! It can actually work better than having central funding for inspections - if there's a sudden glut of people who need, like, meat processing facilities inspected, but it'll take a year to get the government to triple the meat processing inspection budget, then you get a huge backlog of plants that can't run. If the inspector is funded by fees, they can hire right away.

For IoT devices, the upcoming regulations will probably include a stipulation that vendors need to specify a guaranteed support period for the devices. I would prefer the same kind of commitment and dependability for games to a simple badge. It would combine free choice for how to build your business model with the ability for customers to make an informed choice ("they can pull the plug in 5 month? I'm not paying EUR 60 for that"). At least as long as there isn't a malicious compliance cartel, e.g. all big vendors only guaranteeing a month and "kindly" supporting it for longer…

(And my highest preference would be for vendors to be forced to publish both server and client code as free software, if they don't continue selling their service for reasonable prices. Not only for games, but for all services and connected devices. Getting political support for such regulations is, of course, extremely hard.)

Consumers don't always make decisions in their own best interest. They are also often under informed. Their buying habits can often follow less than rational psychology. Businesses know these things and devote a great deal of resources to exploit it. People shouldn't be punished for being imperfect and businesses shouldn't be able to weaponize human psychology to take advantage of people. If we made seatbelts and airbags optional they probably wouldn't have caught on either.

I do not like this line of argumentation even though I think it would likely generate the result I want in this instance. You mentioned seatbelts and airbags, but that train keeps on pushing and now we have calls for mandated kill switch[1] and automatically limit car speed[2]. It is so easy to keep pushing, because who would argue against safety.

The funny thing is, I agree with you, but in a narrow scope. I am adult. I can and do make decisions that are not fun long term, but could be considered stances on issues ( Doom whatever refund after DRM update ). I am not entirely certain 13-year old demographic playing current crop of always on games have the same perspective. There is a reason we try to protect kids from predatory behavior. They tend to not know any better.

But then, it unfortunately starts being about parents not doing their jobs.

<< People shouldn't be punished for being imperfect and businesses shouldn't be able to weaponize human psychology to take advantage of people.

tldr, i agree in general, but i hesitate on specifics

[1]https://mccaul.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/mccaul-... [2]https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/24/california-car-spee...

Yeah I'm not a nanny state advocate. Moderation in all things, there is good regulation and bad regulation.

What level of justification do you think should be required to skip consumer preference and go with a law?

In the case of seatbelts I think the case is quite strong. Even beyond consumer preference, there's a burden on public healthcare, and a cost in safety to others (if you get knocked out of your seat you could lose control of the vehicle, belt keeps you by the wheel). Parents can injure their kids by not using seatbelts.

I don't see any of that in games. As a consumer and as a bystander I don't really know whether I want the marginal dollar of game development spent on long term support or on performance improvements or something else. It certainly varies game to game. For big AAA games that depend on mtx, but could be played entirely offline, the studios have a legitimate interest in making playing them offline hard!

I'd also note that having any laws at all about how games work is going to make it more expensive to develop games, purely because you'll make people check if they're following the laws. Imagine a teenager shipping their first game, or a small studio deciding whether to release a hackathon project, or a small team at a big company spinning out a mini game into a standalone. I dread "no, don't launch that, I don't know if breaking the mid battle save system counts as reasonably playable"

That's a good question and I haven't thought long enough and deeply enough on this issue to have a fully formed opinion of it. I do think our current copyright system in the west is generally broken and over emphasizes short term business profits over the long term benefit of cultural works. But as to what level game publishers should be forced to make games available I can't say.

As far as how regulations work, I am generally in favor of reworking incentive structures to make companies want to behave in a prescribed manner rather than just outright banning deviant behavior. If something is illegal but still beneficial, they will find ways to dodge regulations and factor fines into cost projections. You have to make it worth their while to do as you want.

At some point, if you have an M rating on your box for GTA and you decide to buy it for little Timmy, you don't really get much ground to be disappointed that Timmy was exposed to all these 17+ rated content.

I'd rather at least test content awareness before we go to bans (e.g. explicitly list that a game has MTX on the front of the box).

>If we made seatbelts and airbags optional they probably wouldn't have caught on either.

Why are we comparing a life savinng hardware device for a multi thousand Kg car moving 100+ km/hr to a video game server not shutting down in 6 months? Despite the initiative name, games haven't directly killed anyone.

>What if, in stead of a requirement, we created an opt-in obligation for companies?

Yes, we could call it "copyright".

The purpose of copyright is to reward artists for the creation of works via a temporary monopoly. If they want to permanently hoard the ability to run the game they've sold, then they don't need, and shouldn't be given, any legal protections whatsoever.

That way, consumers can reverse-engineer the game, and companies don't have govt interfering with their business practices. It's a win/win! Unless the corporations need govt-enforced copyright.

Reasonable, but the level of copyright protection for games is actually really small! It only actually covers the art and text, not the game mechanics. I don't think I'd support that trade overall but it seems better than the unilateral requirement on game companies.

> It only actually covers the art and text, not the game mechanics.

Not quite true, there was a famous court case where someone knocked off tetris with different art, and lost the case because the game mechanics were identical. You can make something similar but you can't just clone.

https://www.pcgamer.com/court-declares-tetris-clone-a-breach...

Or we could just make copyright protection dependent on ensuring that the protected works actual enters the public domain. If you provide the source and neccesary documentation to the archival agency up front then you get copyright protection. And if you don't, then you don't get copyright protection, and we find out if companies actually care.

The intent "don't turn off my games!" is generally good, but in practice the most likely thing that'll come from this is one of:

1. It passes, and subsequently a large amount of games just don't launch in the EU. GG. 2. Nobody can write enough caveats to make it workable, and it's abandoned. 3. People don't care because it's just videogames.

I'm broadly supportive of "can we make offline modes standard where the game in it's current design reasonably could be played offline", but that kind of language is too loose for legislation, and too prescriptive for technical innovation.

> 1. It passes, and subsequently a large amount of games just don't launch in the EU

Unlikely, it's a huge and valuable market.

> 2. Nobody can write enough caveats to make it workable, and it's abandoned.

The EU has demonstrated they care about companies following the spirit of the law, not the letter. It'll be fine.

> 3. People don't care because it's just videogames.

Clearly they do. It's been making the rounds online for the past few days and now even made it to the top of HN.

>Unlikely, it's a huge and valuable market

They said the same thing about Facebook News and Canada.

Many tech companies already refuse to launch in overly-regulated markets, or launch years late with "government special" versions of the software that meet the extreme demands of the EU or China or whoever.

> Many tech companies already refuse to launch in overly-regulated markets

You say overly-regulated, I say sufficiently regulated. Maybe, just maybe, those companies should not launch here.

>You say overly-regulated, I say sufficiently regulated. Maybe, just maybe, those companies should not launch here

Sure! Sounds like we're in total agreement that the comment I replied to suggesting that the EU was "too big to ignore" is false, and that their regulations do in fact make it so that some products stay out.

Canada has a population of 41 million. The European Economic Area has a population of 453 million.

> They said the same thing about Facebook News and Canada.

Canada is not in the same league as the EU or the US. In terms of population, we are very roughly 10% the size of either. In terms political influence, we may like to toot our own horns but we are nowhere near as influential. Heck, we are nowhere near as influential as many individual EU member states.

As for products launching years late (if at all) in overly regulated markets, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that is often intentional. I have little doubt that much of the reason behind China's regulations is good old-fashioned protectionism. Yes, there are other factors but they are by no means the only reasons. Protectionism is something that most nations participate in, including the US and EU member states.

Games also aren't in the same league as a social media attempting regulatory caputure. You'll find some surprisingly high production value games in asia that chooses to never release outside of Asia. Maybe not even outside of its domestic country of origin.

You definitely can skip some markets and manage a successful game. The other caveat is that gamers will still find the game if they hear about it enough. They get worse ping but very few barriers from buying a game not officially supported in your region.

>I have little doubt that much of the reason behind China's regulations is good old-fashioned protectionism

It mostly is, if we're being honest. It's still a big Asian factor, despite it being a dying western sentiment to simply focus on the domestic businesses over the foreign powers. Back to the above examples, there are some Japanese only games that in fact go out of their way to region lock out overseas audiences for various reasons.

Could someone elaborate on the reasons? Clearly translation is going to be one, since the market for any given game is going to be much smaller than the market for most social media sites. I would imagine that cultural norms, e.g. what is acceptable in one country is verboten in another, is a more significant barrier when it exists since it would alter the story or game mechanics. But is there anything else?

I’m highly ambivalent about this. On one side, I agree it is a problem, on the other, is regulation really the answer? I don’t want my taxes poured all over this, but perhaps more information about the longevity risks of the game at purchase?

The market incentives are not there, why not try finding those first?

> I don’t want my taxes poured all over this Your taxes are already poured all over things you don't care about, and things that are ridiculous expenses.

There's no incentive to keep a game alive after the server costs outlive the monthly income generated. Only a handful of games have been kept alive out of pure preservation or low cost (or in some cases, because the publishers just forgot about it).

Regulation might be necessary since in the last 8 years of gaming, less and less games have been able to be preserved. And we had had outrageous examples like, The Crew, where fans have been able to reverse engineer an analogue to Ubisoft's servers in less than a year. Ubisoft have no incentive, so maybe it is time they are forced to.

I'm obviously not a lawyer, but it just seems so arbitrary a problem. Doesn't the same problem happen with all other software these days? Perhaps something more radical should come into play. In the defense industry we had this thing, that the source code was held in escrow, in the case that the company went bankrupt, or a national emergency required access. What if software of a certain nature, was required to have such a thing as a continuity plan?

What I'm getting at, is if all creative souls are required to front a guarantee of eternal commitment to their creations, we will see a good deal less novelty.

Playing an old video game is among the least necessary things I can think of.

>is regulation really the answer?

What other alternatives are there when the market has clearly demonstrated that it's not going to regulate itself in favor of the customers?

It has. Very few consumers care about this, otherwise LTS guarantees would be a way to boost sales, or publishers would build more of a reputation around that. If there were actually a regulation as proposed, it'd be "tyranny of the minority." A few people with a lot of time and passion forcing an industry to work the way they want.

Is it that few consumers care about this, or that the products are very good and consumers want to buy them but then are upset when the product is killed? I think the latter is more likely, given that the petition in question is being spurred on by people wanting to return to games that they enjoyed but have been arbitrarily closed down.

Understand that companies have a perverse incentive to kill games that are genuinely good in their own right: People may not buy a new game if they're still playing and replaying a slightly older one.

Of course nobody wants a game shut down, but they'll still buy online games knowing full well that they won't last forever. It's not much of a consideration.

I'd argue that it is a consideration, but other factors still cause the purchase. Things aren't black and white in real life as they are in an economic theory. People can financially support something for a plethora of reasons: Their friends are on there, they're psychologically affected by the FOMO that the game studio has hired psychologists to maximize (this really happens), the game itself is outstandingly fun (all the more reason to not want it killed arbitrarily). It may seem counter intuitive, but giving money to something does not necessarily mean that you support every facet of it unquestioningly. I think it's totally fine to say you enjoy a game but hate that it's going to be killed, then still buy it so you can at least enjoy it before it gets killed.

Doubly so in this case where the perverse incentive to kill games that game studios have doesn't depend on how well a game does. They have every incentive to kill every old game they make regardless of how well it does because they always want to sell you their new game no matter what. Not buying a game won't make it not die.

Right, you consider the pros and cons and buy it. Everyone will always want every pro, but when tradeoffs have to be made, which features get the axe? I think they're already making the best tradeoffs. The video game industry is quite competitive, LTS would cost money, and they need to make money somehow, so this is the gotcha they chose instead of subscriptions or higher prices.

It's also a totally unnecessary entertainment product, so the fact that people keep buying it shows they're happy enough with it.

>I think they're already making the best tradeoffs.

This is self-evidently false, given that people are upset enough about it to make this petition... Unless you meant "best" in a different sense? Not sure what you mean by this. To me it's obvious that killing a game and making it unplayable forever is perhaps the worst possible tradeoff.

"Best" for the most customers, even if it ticks off some relatively small group of people. They kill old games so they can make new ones and not have to outright do subscription models. Signing a petition doesn't cost anything, so it's not meaningful.

Also, I was always in that group, refusing to pay upfront for an online-only game, but I acknowledge most people don't really care.

Exactly what I do: Don't buy online games unless I accept that it may be gone next month. Meaning I'm very picky and focus either on studios with good reputations or games that otherwise seem to have enough commitment to assure me. Market would correct itself and start advertising LAN hosting or guaranted offline play to bring people back.

But given current trends, I'm inclined to simply think a lot of people don't mind that risk. So I'm simply a minority in the matter, as usual. If they don't care, why should I (who's already mostly walked away) care?

> The market incentives are not there, why not try finding those first?

I agree, we should make companies actually pay for copyright protection (by ensuring the works are available after the copyright period) instead of just giving it them for free. That would fix the incentives of corportations to design games and other products to disappear.

When you are on Prime and you click buy instead of rent for a movie, what does the EU do to protect you?

Is there a reason this digital protection is narrowly limiting itself to video games and not all digital goods or all implied warranties for any good sold?

I also think workers should be paid fair wages, and also that we should protect artists from the threats of AI, but only if they work in the video game industry, not anywhere else. Did I do it right? Is that how we do this now?

Because it comes from gamers and people concerned about preservation of games. Why broaden it if the people who are pushing for the initiative don't care about other stuff?

We all have finite time to repsond to lobbying efforts of groups, by seeking to intervene narrowly with regulatory intervention we increase the burden on the public to stay vigilant across a wider range of issues.

Narrowly-crafted regulatory interventions are tools of the elite class to weaken the resolve and solidarity of the working class. That's my general reasoning.

> We all have finite time to repsond to lobbying efforts of groups,

I understand. If you don't care about this petition, you don't need to sign it. If you care, the amount of time and effort it takes to sign it is very small.

I watched a video on this proposal, and one interesting argument is that this isn't even supposed to be necessary, since leaving a game broken that you paid for is a violation of your property rights. Any (armchair) lawyer wants to opine what the courts would think of this?

The initial direction of the campaign was to investigate whether or not this was legal at all. The short version is - they refuse to answer and sidestep the question.

Here's a video where Ross got a chance to directly ask the EU about the legality of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-g1_nZKC-k

They answer the questions to their ability and their purpose. They are not courts and are thus not finders of fact. If you phrase a question that would get them to act as one then their correct course of action is to simply state which relevant law governs that.

One problem I have with Ross and his lawyers is his lack of reaction to the initial answers form the comission. The digital content and services law talk about objective and subjective conformity and the commission emphasized this: why didn't they use that terminology? The purchase of a game itself is a purchase of digital content (you purchase access to data in digital form) while running the servers is undeniably a digital service. So the game is in essence a bit of both. That is fine and desirable.

It is obvious that eliminating the service makes the game unplayable and being able to play the game without reverse engineering is undeniably the most basic objective criteria a game has: that you can play it. The primary remedy is to make it conformant. The minimal action that would objectively make it playable would be the ability to point the game at a different server. The fact that no service currently exists is a semi-related criteria. Subjectively, they probably also need to provide some way for people to sensibly build servers, although maybe this is an objective requirement: the requirement that a game requiring servers has a way for users to ensure that a server is running. Otherwise, vaporware companies could build "games" that require connection to a server that they never build and if you have the misfortune of buying one you somehow got what you expected--an unplayable game? Publishing the server with the game (like many games do) is the easiest way to do this, although perhaps publishing an API is enough if they are extremely upfront about that?

The secondary remedy is refund and the requirement is that they refund the difference in value between the current value of the non-conformant digital goods and the value if it was conformant. This one is obvious, since in its nonconformant state the game has no value. So the refund should be full. This is the remedy that may make free-to-play games more attractive to certain predatory businesses that want to terminate games despite the investment of time and money by players like Ubisoft here.

This is the legal theory that you need to present but this theory is clear from the law so I don't know exactly what more you would need from the commission. In principle, anyone could reach out to Ubisoft (or Steam if you purchased it there) and present this theory stating that you purchased digital content which is no longer objectively conformant due to their changes. From there they need to tell you if they will create a remedy so that the goods function again, failing that they can refund you. If you get no response (possibly they attempt to dodge the law by stating you purchased a license, but the EU clarified that isn't relevant since it was a license to digital content and thus this law comes into play) or they clearly are giving you a run-around you can demand a refund and they have 2 weeks to comply. The law also empowers you to seek remedies outside of the courts so chargebacks are conformant to the intentions of the law at that point in time. Moreover, the law prevents the company from retaliating against you for asserting your rights. Getting your money back is the consolation prize, since I imagine you just want to continue playing the game that you love.

I have multiple times sought remedies under this act so I have read quite a bit about it. I have read quite a bit about it and have been lucky enough to receive remedies without needing to go to court so far. I am not a lawyer, just an autodidactic citizen.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...

Is it a property though? You are buying a non-exclusive revocable license for specific piece of software, it's not an NFT. You don't own anything, you only get permission to use thing you paid for in a set of specific circumstances. Usually it is written somewhere in the license agreement.

The thing is that the EU considers buying a non-exclusive revocable license not legal and classifies those as non-exclusive irrevocable licenses.

My personal opinion is that an always-online game isn't even your property. No more so than an account here on Hacker News has me own HN/Ycombinator. It's their server and if it shuts down tomorrow that's unfortunate. But perfectly within their rights as handling their property.

In a casual legal sense, I feel it will ultimately come down to how and what a court considers a good, and how much of a digital good you own. I can see an alternative argument in a case where, say, you end up buying a "new" game at WalMart for a server that is no longer up. In that extreme case I can understand feeling like you were swindled (I can't think of a case where this happened, but I wouldn't be surprised about this occurance). So I can understand an argument where there should be some sense of game you buy when you buy a game.

This is just a proposal not the law once it is up for debate then every european and game developers etc will get to have a say and a real framework hammered out.

I think we have a much more pressing problem in the apps industry. I, as a consumer, don't want my UX to change with every software update. I want an ption to lock the features down, and only receive security updates. Why? Because I might use the app on a daily basis, and grow used to how it behaves. I dont want it to change without my consent. I think this would be a much more pressing problem then conserving games.

I had wanted something similar; which is a "configuration safe upgrade"; this can be combined with the other things that you mention. But, note that even security features can cause problems if they are not what the user wanted. It is appropriate to get rid of buffer overflows and other stuff like that, but to disable some feature because it is sometimes considered as "insecure" can be bad if the user cannot configure this.

That is also a worthy cause and I will support that petition as well as soon as you get around to making it.

I doubt it'll change much, but I do agree with it. If you buy something, it shouldn't be pulled out from under you.

Replace "games" with "software" and we will get the freedom but probably a 2008 style crash.

I think this is slightly less common for general software. But I remember some cases of old software failing to install because the online DRM servers were taken offline.

It’s not possible to expect software to be runnable forever.

We do not expect this for the desktop software (Microsoft Windows), so we cannot expect this from games. Hardware changes, Internet changes, integrations change (Steam may die on one day).

Just have “a minimum of X years” is simple and sufficient.

Software is in fact eternal. Maxwell’s Equations of Software (Lisp) is still a thing to this day [1]. Even for software designed for arcane architectures. You can simulate the Apollo Guidance Computer and its software today [2], which got people on the Moon. Technological progress must never come at the expense of people's rights.

[1]: https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp [2]: https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/

WTF are you talking about? I played SimCity for DOS just the other day through an emulator. Easy as pie. It's only be going out of your way to make it hard to emulate by unnecessarily depending on an online infrastructure that you kill archivability.

This isn't aimed at MMOs. It's aimed at games like Super Mario Run on my phone, which is totally single player and refuses to start up half the time until it spends 10 minutes downloading hundreds more megabytes of "updates" that don't seem to change the game at all.

I am certain I won't be able to play Super Mario Run 20 years from now, despite having paid good money for it, unless Nintendo happens to in their benevolence allow me to re-buy a reissue of it again. Super Mario World from 1993 on the other hand, plays perfectly, and there is a cottage industry of nostalgic streamers competing for better and better times speedrunning it.

That's what this is about. Being able to play a classic game from 30 years ago with your grandkids, just as you can watch a classic movie.

I'm not sure if this approach can really work.

What I definitely would like to see is a requirement to preserve a working VM containing source code, assets and build tools, set up to compile everything without an internet connection. It'd be much more useful to have than old binaries when all this stuff eventually becomes public domain.

still sour about ubisoft killing co-op for splinter cell games. it's only been 11 years! ;)

I think people are just beating around the bush and not saying what they really mean here. On one side are consumers (these petitioners) who just want the companies to give them everything so they can continue using these products without any consideration for the other side's point of view that software is the creator's property unless specified otherwise.

On the other side are the producers, who just don't want any legislative burden to be placed on them and want to create and distribute software exactly how they want to.

In a serious negotiation both positions would be untenable and a compromise has to be reached.

It stops being their property when they sell it. They keep owning the IP, but not the individual copy. Anything else is just someone coming to your house and stealing something you bought back.

Basic property rights are not up for negotiation.

You're making grandiose claims that are obviously uninformed.

"This petitioner" Ross Scott is fighting remote kill-switches in games. Here's a recent video, but listening in should be enough https://www.accursedfarms.com/posts/dead-game-news/dead-game... Even if the outcome of all of this is merely correct labeling, it will be a win in his view.

What's important is setting a precedent that no, it's not fine to take money for something that will only work until a box somewhere in the world is turned on if you won't say how long you will keep that box on.

What singleplayer game has exercised a remote kill switch?

Is being only singleplayer the defining feature? How about games with both singleplayer and multiplayer sections?

The recent one that really kickstarted this would be Ubisoft's The Crew, which shutdown the servers a few months ago and is no longer playable at all, even the singleplayer story portions that have no need for multiplayer.

The petition is worded generally. Just says video games should stay in a working state.

The comment above talks about a remote killswitch in particular, which suggests a portion of the game that doesn't reasonbly require online access is being disabled. Anything multiplayer understandably might not work forever. If The Crew had a singleplayer mode that got disabled (idk, never heard of this game) and was a one-time purchase with no refund, that's pretty scummy imo. Even then, if that were outlawed, that'd push them to put everything online instead of giving a local copy out at all.

Also, I know Steam updates cannot be disabled or reversed. GTA IV is a local game, but they released an "update" that deleted some soundtracks. Sure you can run Steam in offline mode, but not if you have any multiplayer games in your library.

Doom Eternal (which would turn out to be a deeply ironic name and which I was only playing singleplayer) had some botnet layered over it that tried to "update" whenever you started the game. There was a bug where the little startup dialog that would say "updating" or whatever instead said nothing, and it just hung there, and there was no way to bypass it. It effectively bricked the game because not even reinstalling got rid of it. You couldn't do anything to play the game anymore. Research revealed this happened on all platforms, and nobody had a fix. Awesome to be in the future with all this fancy technology, where my game rips me off on accident, WAY BEFORE end of life (this was like a year or two from its release). :D Meanwhile, I can fire up Doom 1 and 2 via gzdoom in less time than it took that dialog to finish when it was still working. And you can play Doom 3 in the browser! https://wasm.continuation-labs.com/d3demo/

Yeah, stuff like this is why I wouldn't feel the urge to play new video games even if I had time. Even if everything works fine, I don't want to wait on updates.

There's nothing uninformed about the above comment. The petition just says games, doesn't specify that they're singleplayer or anything like that. What the petitioner says on his own blog is separate.

The other side already gets consideration in the form of (extremely long) copyright protection. Designing products in a way so that they are unvailable in any useful form after the end of the copyright term is already a violation of that contract.

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41121570

The path to too much friction to make new things is paved with regulation with good intentions

Signed, from Italy ;D

To all the comments who expressed doubts on how this would work in practice: please read the FAQ, it answers a lot of questions and gives concrete examples.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

Looking at the most relevant questions of online games, I notice few answers and no concrete examples - it’s just “not at all” followed by what sounds like a teenager student trying to bluff their way through an assignment they didn’t read. The online gaming and licensing “answers” conspicuously read like they did not involve anyone with experience actually building or operating software applications.

The critical flaw in this proposal is the attempt not to “interfere with any business practices while a game is still being supported”. I have some professional involvement in software preservation and would love to see more things preserved, but that’s going to require changes to how games are developed and sunsetted. As a simple example, the incorrect “not at all” assertion at the beginning of the multiplayer answer is directly contradicted by the acknowledgement buried in the middle admitting that this would require the game to be designed for preservation from the beginning. That’s actually correct because it’s rare for someone to develop a game from scratch, which involves reusing tools and content which are not licensed under the same terms as the original game. You could, and arguably should, require games to be developed in a more sustainable manner avoiding dependencies which can’t be easily removed or replaced at end of life but that absolutely is a change in business practice. Similarly, game developers license engines, content, etc. under terms which have limits or activation fees and that would need some sort of interference in existing business practice to change – again, arguably a good thing to do but it needs to be upfront about it similar to how we can’t just say people should stop using single-use plastic packaging without doing something about the economic factors which make it widespread.

This is especially important when you remember that preservation is most useful when it’s easily accessible: if your game is preserved but that requires running a couple of nested emulators and some patches downloaded from one dude in Moldova, very few people are actually going to do so. What you really want is to keep the game buildable so it can run on normal operating systems and bugs & quality of life improvements can be made. For example, many multiplayer games in the past only supported IPv4 but there are a growing number of people in the world who only have IPv6 so it’d be good for long-term preservation to be able to add support but maintaining a build tool chain would really hammer the licensing issues.

Not to mention:

1. World of Warcraft in 2004 is very different from World of Warcraft in 2024. Do future versions "destroy" previous ones? How do you deal with this?

2. What even is the definition of a "video game"? Is Neopets a video game? Is Twitter?

I’d like a proposal which simply starts by saying that they have to use terms like “rent” or “subscribe” for anything which uses DRM or company servers, and expand from there since it definitely gets thorny fast on both fronts. (What do you do with a Facebook game when they break an API a decade later?)

For things like Warcraft, I think that absolutely should be preserved for historians and other researchers if nothing else but it’s hard to imagine that being possible without some kind of active cooperation. I wonder whether there’d be an angle where you could get some kind of tax credit by depositing playable offline copies with a national library but simply the storage costs would be a burden there.

> I wonder whether there’d be an angle where you could get some kind of tax credit by depositing playable offline copies with a national library but simply the storage costs would be a burden there.

It should simply be a requirement for copyright protection in the first place - if it doesn't actually end up in the commons after the copyright term the deal makes no sense for society overall.

> 1. World of Warcraft in 2004 is very different from World of Warcraft in 2024. Do future versions "destroy" previous ones? How do you deal with this?

I think it's more about the right of the consumer to be able to play what they paid for than keep the original version intact.

The right to play World of Warcraft by yourself is worthless. The content available to a single player isn't even supposed to be fun.

You'd need the right to run a full server that your friends can also connect to.

> World of Warcraft in 2004 is very different from World of Warcraft in 2024. Do future versions "destroy" previous ones? How do you deal with this?

Well one of the links that was provided to me in the last discussion list the original version of FF14 (before reborn) as "dead" even though FF14 is still a thing (yes I know it was majorly changed given the original issues). So I am guessing there are at least some people that are going to try to make the argument that every version needs to be preserved.

I think that is taking things too far, but given it is listed on that page, some do think that.

> I think that is taking things too far

Why?

This has now been posted multiple times and what you said is my biggest issue with this, its super vague and its mixing up multiple issues.

On the link for this post, if you click through to the actual initiative it is primarily talking about phoning home and yet apparently it also applies to actual online games.

In no way shape or form is World of Warcraft just "phoning home".

In the last time this was posted I was trying to discuss this with someone and they were trying to make the argument that apparently WoW gets an exception because it has a subscription but Guild Wars 2 doesn't because... it doesn't have a subscription? They are both MMO's. That makes zero sense from a technical explanation for why doing this may not be a reasonable expectation. Even if somehow that is an exception that we are going to give, where is that at all concretely explained?

Looking at the website. Lets look at this quote:

> So, if a server could originally support 5000 people, but the end user version can only support 500, that's still a massive improvement from no one being able to play the game ever again.

That is such a simplification of what a "sever" is that I am convinced no one technical was involved in writing this. There can be multiple components that may need to be scaled differently, external resources, etc etc. Maybe some are but it isn't like a "server" is just a single, launch this app with this amount of resources and your good to go. That is before getting into the complication of if a system was built to create on demand resources, maybe it spins up a server, container, etc when an online game starts, someone goes into an instance, etc etc.

To me this should be 2 things. First, no just phoning home for single player games. Thats easy and I doubt anyone is going to argue they are a good thing. Second, once a game does shut down attempts by the community to bring it back can't be challenged legally.

Anything beyond that, is not going to have issues from a technological standpoint. Like you mentioned, re-using systems, code, etc. It is not reasonable to expect that all of that will just be put out for anyone to use. I would not be surprised if there are major parts of FF11 that were used in FF14. So if FF11 shuts down, why do we expect parts of 14 to basically be put out?

I am all for not killing games but lets be realistic about what an online game actually is and the reality of the company putting out all of the resources for it to be playable after shutting down the servers. Particularly assuming could they even legally depending on what components they license.

World of Warcraft is probably the murkiest example since you had to buy a copy of WoW to play the game, but the packaging clearly said how the box only includes a month of gameplay and you need to pay for any additional time after that. So it was never really advertised as a full and complete game, even though you had to buy it.

If World of Warcraft was just a subscription without having to buy the game, then I think it'd be a lot clearer. You pay $12 for a month of WoW and you get a month of WoW, nothing more, nothing less.

It's quite a lot different from a game like The Crew, which is sold as a complete game, even though it stopped working when Ubisoft axed the servers and was even retroactively removed from players' game libraries.

Thats why I started to feel like that no one had a good explanation of what exactly they are going for here. The person I was discussing with seemed to imply the information they were presenting was from youtube videos.

My impression was that they were somehow trying to argue that there being a subscription is the only way that a consumer can understand it is an online only game. But, yeah you still have to buy the expansions and the base game (sometimes). Same with FF14 and other MMO's.

This just felt like a arbitrary designed exception that has no basis on technology. The difference between WoW and FF14 and games like GW2, Destiny, and other similar games is minimal at best from that side of things. Obviously not he same code and not designed the same way, but still systems meant to handle similar large scale things.

I just don't understand how you can argue that a consumer understands that with a subscription but if they pick up an online only game like GW2 or Destiny that they somehow don't understand that?

Regarding The Crew. I honestly still don't understand what the situation with that game was since I never played it. Was it a truly online game that required interactions with a server (not phoning home) to fundamentally work and interactions with other players to fundamentally work. Or is it like Forza where the online component was a layer on top of a single player game.

That distinction is important and are very different discussions about the impact and realities of something like this.

It's OK to ask for a minimum level of preservation even if so much more could be done. Emulators and e.g. IPv4 and other such technological problems are really not that important. People have been making all kinds of crazy binary patches and wrappers to keep old software working in modern environments. Emulators are also not a problem even for novice users if they are packaged appropriately. What is needed is to ensure that this is a) allowed and b) people have access to all parts of the game, including server components.

> The costs associated with implementing this requirement can be very small, if not trivial.

This is too naive. While it may be the case for single player games that use online connection only as a DRM mechanism (Hitman 3, Gran Turismo 7), for some games it's not trivial at all.

For example, The Division 2 servers do not only act as a "coordinator" between players like CS:GO servers, but also run logics for NPCs and environments. The server and the client are too tightly coupled.

I'd rather see some sort of provision where if the company disables the product they sold us, they're required to subsequently license the source code to us for personal use.

First off, hobbyists have an amazing track record reverse engineering many online games and creating third party servers and mods for them, so not only does this solve the problem but the amount of creativity that would be unlocked would be incredible.

Second, you better believe many many publishers will flip the fuck out if they're staring this possibility in the face, and as a result they will work way harder to support their games in the future.

Right, but how hard would it be to make the server self-hostable? I feel like as long as the server address wasn't hardcoded into the game, it wouldn't be too hard

That depends entirely on the infrastructure necessary for hosting the multiplayer servers. Such as, does it require a database server for persistent storage of player information? It might be built for a k8s based environment. Split into many smaller services that all interact using a service mesh or message queue.

You cant just take these things, press a button, and voila, a small bundled server platform anyone can run at home. The modern day software development experience is a massive and complex beast.

They explicitly mention server hosting as an acceptable thing. They are not saying every consumer has to be able to run the infrastructure, but the community has to be able to. A few services on a k8s cluster would absolutely suffice for this.

It's irrelevant whether the costs are trivial. Once developers and publishers release the server binaries or API-spec, fans can invest as much time and money as they want to replicate it. They don't need to reverse-engineer it.

What happens if the game developer has licensed 3rd party tools and libraries which the server software depends on and they don’t have the right to include these?

Those shouldn't be included, of course. If the server has them too tied up to be decoupled, then I guess someone needs to unscramble the spaghetti before serving it

That page is hard to understand. It is presented in my own language, but gives the impression of being translated by a drunk person with a dictionary, with plenty pages torn out.

While I can get a general understanding of the points being raised by translating key words back to English and think about the context it is being used in, I'm not sure it's worth the bother.

Here's another petition: If you want to be taken seriously, do not use translation tools.

edit: Found the language dropdown in the top right corner. It was obscured by my web browser. If you have trouble understanding the text, select English there. It is a coherent text and therefore likely the intended language. ("Take action", I could never have guessed that one, no one was supposed to steal anything.)

It's very wordy. I get the feeling ChatGPT wrote it. AI has the tendency to maximize word usage, like it's a highschooler trying to hit the 'word count minimum' in their paper.

Agreed. Moreover, this appears to focus entirely on a consumerist perspective ie. the problem of online-activated games that get switched off after a couple years of sales which seems relevant to single-player games that don't need servers, but not MMORPGs/MMOx I guess, but the papmphlet wouldn't say. What's with web games? What about the inherent conflict of interest of selling vs preservation/piracy? What about the monopolistic tendencies of platforms such as Steam/consoles and their influence on game sujets (prude no-gore PC all-ages HD remakes) and that of payment providers?

Hey, could you tell me which language do you mean in particular?

Does it matter? It's the same with every language, expect for the three or four major languages it handles best. Automated translation is derogatory to the audience.

It's an anti-feature. Just remove it. The target users will read the web page just like they read any other web page, in the language it is written.

Should they find their own language skills lacking, they will click the translate button in their web browser. Just like they do on any other web page.

Echoing what the others said, these arguments don't hold water. It ignores all of the practicalities of what would actually be involved in doing this, the impacts on licensing, business models, security (and saying "there's no security risk" doesn't mean there's no security risk - there's a reason we don't distribute game server binaries for many games), and lastly the sheer development effort involved.

The discussion around the EU's "Stop Killing Games" proposal is quite interesting and touches on broader issues of consumer

"The 'Stop Killing Games' initiative highlights a fundamental tension between consumer rights and the current business models in the gaming industry.

On one hand, the idea of preserving games for future access aligns with broader movements toward digital preservation, similar to efforts in other digital media industries like film and music.

However, as some users have pointed out, implementing these requirements could significantly disrupt how games are developed, particularly when games rely on proprietary servers or content licensed under restrictive terms.

A middle-ground approach might be to incentivize companies to create 'preservable' versions of their games, possibly through tax credits or other benefits for depositing source code or playable copies with national archives. This could foster a culture of preservation without forcing drastic changes to current business models.

It's also worth considering how this policy could set a precedent for other digital services—shouldn't we be having similar conversations about software, apps, and even streaming content?

> However, as some users have pointed out, implementing these requirements could significantly disrupt how games are developed, particularly when games rely on proprietary servers or content licensed under restrictive terms.

"Yes." I believe is the universal answer here. Fill in your local custom version of, "I'm OK with that", "I'm failing to see the problem", etc.

"Fully agree"

It's as simple as "Ah, you plan to stop your proprietary server end-point? This enforces section #2 of the regulation, requiring you to provide the means for others to operate their own end-point and publish a transition-plan for affected customers"

That's equally applicable to Games as well as any form of connected product.

> possibly through tax credits or other benefits for depositing source code or playable copies with national archives.

How would that work in practice? You could play your game yesterday, but you can't play it tomorrow because the company shut off the servers. But fear not because your tax dollars paid for the executables to be deposited in an archive Ark of the Covenant style.

That might be satisfying with an oil painting. But games are meant to be played with.

Can one check it out and run it? Can one modify the game to keep it running on new hardware or operating system? Can one re-distribute those modifications to others? Can one pay for someone else to run the servers for them?

As much as I would like the outcome, I doubt that this is meaningful use of tax-money in general.

I also wouldn't want taxes to be invested to preserve every oil-painting ever painted by someone, as it would inevitably create an industry that creates oil-paintings for the sole purpose of tax-benefits...

If we are going in the details, maybe tax credit should be over a small fraction of benefits for that game. You'd only get back a bit of what you paid.

The problem is that you can barely reach consensus that tax-money is spent on elderly homes and child-care, as the a critical mass of your taxpayers are not yet old and don't have children.

Once you try to establish that tax-payers money is being spent to preserve art, you inevitably cause a unsolvable political discussion on what art actually is. At best, the budget will be drained uncontrollably with the system being abused by players gaming the system, at worst the ruling political party will define what art is and only provide funding for the most boring forms of art.

To be a bit constructive: Instead of a dedicated credit/payout, it would make more sense to establish a mandate in a region (i.e. US, EU) that public funding or tax-credits for ANY company can only be made on the premise that the output created by the company becomes partially owned by the public (and the citizens of this region), which requires it to provide value even without the company's involvement.

This would apply for any form of financial incentive given to company offices in a region, regardless whether it's hardware, software or services.

But I wouldn't hold my breath on that ever being properly mandated/executed...

Oh no! a world which prioritizes people being paid to create art! The horror...

You’re right, they should do something productive with their time.

Okay, I know this is just meant to be twitter-style bullying, but I'll bite:

As I wouldn't want every local governmental authority to freely define what constitutes "art", it means that everything can be categorized as art.

So the most economic and democratic solution then is to close the whole circle and reduce tax for everyone in return of submitting "art", even if it's just a picture of a milk-carton in a corner.

However, the consequence would be excessive governmental cost for the Ministry of Culture and Arts to preserve every piece of contributed art, so every citizen can see every art created by every other citizen. This of course would have to be funded by tax-money, which unfortunately means increased tax-burden for everyone...

Result: A development put in motion which will definitely not end up prioritizing people being paid to create art!

> a world which prioritizes people being paid to create art! The horror...

You misunderstand. Creating art is hard. Putting oil paint on a canvas is easy. So if you pay money for paint on canvas without any other checks you will get the simplest passable form of paint on canvas. If you don't mandate that the whole canvas is covered all you will get is a pile of canvas with a single brush stroke.

Look up the concept perverse incentive, or cobra effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

We already got plenty of game archives / abandonware stuff with VM, emulators or other compatibility solutions. There is no hard blocker except will to allow this broadly. If there is a tax credit, editors might think about this from the beginning, for newer games.

For sure you can always find exceptions and loophole, just like an expert can probably find issues around oil paintings preservation.

> particularly when games rely on proprietary servers or content licensed under restrictive terms.

The software to run proprietary servers could be sold as part of the game.

Content with too restrictive licenses won't be marketable anymore, that's a problem that will solve itself.

Even more, for games it could create a market for a universal server-endpoint architecture:

While the game is "live", the publisher operates his own servers with competitive f,eatures and performance, once he decides to stop this offer he needs to either open his whole proprietary server architecture or migrate his changes into an de-facto industry-standard architecture that provides such preservation to the market.

In long-term, it could lead to the entire gaming-industry collaborating on an open-standard server-framework to save costs for such end-of-life compliance.

A new game would have its disruptive online features developed on a fork of this standard architecture, with changes/additions being contributed back to it during the lifecycle, so when the game goes end-of-life all that is needed is to enable 3rd party servers...

> the idea of preserving games for future access aligns with broader movements toward digital preservation, similar to efforts in other digital media industries like film and music

And from the FAQ:

> If this practice is not stopped, it may be codified into law and spread to other products of more importance over time, such as agricultural equipment, educational products, medical devices, etc.

So there is a notion of using games as a step to 'stop' companies from being able to discontinue services.

If this passes for games, next would be software in general.

Next thing you know if you develop and sell any software you will have to make sure it is usable forever. Any MacOS updates or Windows updates (or iOS/Android updates) breaking a software or app you once sold to a few people and discontinued? You will have to fix it until you die or face penalties.

Do you have software with a cloud component sold under a lifetime license? Be prepared to maintain that service forever or release its complete source code if you don't. Additionally, you would need lifetime licenses for any critical proprietary third-party components your cloud service relies on or be prepared to cover their service fees indefinitely.

While this perspective may seem exaggerated, there is always a double-edged nature to such regulations. The sword slices both ways.

I think all games/software would then convert to a service/subscription based model, cause there would be no limit to future liabilities when selling any lifetime license.

Pay monthly to play the game. Pay monthly to use any software (including downloadable software and apps.) Pay monthly to use the OS.

EDIT: Actually thinking about it, it seems this proposal wants to cover mmorpgs which already are subscription based.

In that case if the same rules applies to software in general, then any software that is subscription based would also have to be usable indefinitely even if you sold just 1 month subscription and went out of business.

This kind of creates a bad incentive where users of software / players of games might want the company to die so they can use the software or play the game for free forever.

> Next thing you know if you develop and sell any software you will have to make sure it is usable forever. Any MacOS updates or Windows updates (or iOS/Android updates) breaking a software or app you once sold to a few people and discontinued? You will have to fix it until you die or face penalties.

The campaign is about the software that being made unusable specifically by choice of the entity responsible for it. MacOS/Windows updates breaking an existing app is completely out of scope of the initiative, and nobody will be penalized for that, it would be very unreasonable from any angle.

Stop buying games you don't like.

The issue is that I might like them, but someone shuts down a server that does nothing more than check my license and I can't even play it offline.

No, thank you, I am tired of EU regulations. Vote with your money. Buy games that you could download (GOG) , avoid external launchers and make sure that it's possible to play a game without additional account.

Vote with your money is by definition an approval of oligarchy, not democracy. It is appalling it is so common a refrain nowadays. People with more money shouldn't necessarily get more say in our society's norms. You are free to your opinion but when you say that people should vote with their money one whale is going to come along and swamp your "vote" 100x. Your opinion should be just as valid as theirs not less because they spend more. If I got it wrong and you're the whale then I just hope you can have some empathy.

Launchers aren't necessarily a problem when they are held to reasonable standards on data privacy, refunds, and durability among others. There is unique value that they can offer which is typically lessened by not being interoperable with one another. Many of the norms were hard won via EU and other national regulations. On the other hand, far too many companies want a piece of the data pie without even attempting at interoperability and egress. The Helldivers 2 debacle is an indication that clearly something is wrong.

The markets are still highly polluted with things that should be a violation of our norms even though things are getting better.

I absolutely support that, but you need to differentiate a bit.

If a game has a functioning single player and a company chooses to shutdown multiplayer/matchmaking after some time I think that's fair. Sure, it would be nicer if the servers were open sourced or an alternative was provided, but at least there is some way to still play.

However, there are also games that only have multiplayer - here a company can just take away your ability to play the game completely. A prominent recent example is "The Crew".

It's also not 100% clear when buying, "The Crew" certainly had a large story aspect to it and it wasn't common in 2014 for such games to be "always online". It's quite a difficult path to find a solution to all of this as we can't force companies to operate servers indefinitely; on the other side we are loosing consumer rights and history.

>No, thank you, I am tired of EU regulations.

Okay fine then, abolish the copyright laws that forcibly prevent us from solving the problem ourselves. This is like expecting full rights to a patent with none of the responsibility of publicly documenting your innovation. Make it legal to leak the source code of abandoned games.

>Vote with your money.

This does not work with video games, unless you were a whale to begin with. Whales spend magnitudes more money on games than the average players [1]. Companies know this and exploit this weakness in the human psychology.

Just because you decided to not buy a game for $60, that will not stop a whale from dropping thousands and more.

[1]: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/whales-games-genshin-impact-compet...

A good way to justify games costing 100 USD/EUR or more, due to longer support period.

Personally, I don't support this, just because there were a few cases where studios closed support to an online game, doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be a rule. It is self-regulating pretty well. Games that are good, are going to be popular and don't need their servers closed. I personally don't expect mediocre games to have online support forever.

>A good way to justify games costing 100 USD/EUR or more, due to longer support period.

You're not required to support it longer, you just need to ensure the game is still playable after the support period for the people whose money you received.

Ubisoft killed The Crew servers and then actually revoked the game license from people who've bought it, so even if you bought and "owned" the game, it would no longer actually be in your library.

https://www.eurogamer.net/ubisoft-reportedly-revoking-the-cr...

Sure. But I wonder, why this, and why now. Where were these people when car makers started to have proprietary everything, from chargers to service points, to the point where you can't even service a punctured tyre on certain makes. Or certain operating systems having a complete "walled garden". Call me a cynic but at this point, after normalizing DRM and phone-home, online DRM, it's too late. For this initiative to stick, it would have been at least 5 years ago.

From the link:

> neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state

This could not possibly mean forcing e.g. WoW to keep their servers running forever. It just means that if your game could be written without a phone home "feature", then it must be.

In other words, it would not justify an increased price. Publishers may choose to increase the price, because they don't actually need a justification in order to do that. But this legal change would not be a good reason.

One scenario I wonder about is what would be required to happen before and at the time of a company running a game closing themselves.

Say you have a proprietary game/service now that could include some third party middleware they're not allowed to share, and the game relies upon an online service - right now that's allowed, and there's the scenario where the company is ongoing and want to cease the game the may be obligated to do work to make a community effort to have the game survive viable. If the company is closing, presumably they'd either be obligated to do the work for a release up-front (and maintain it over versions?) and keep it in escrow as when they won't be able to do the work later, or if any other company wants to buy their assets they either inherit the obligation to work on a free/libre release or keep the game/service running even though it may have contributed to sinking the previous company.

The simple answer to this any server-side middleware would need to have distribution rights for end-of-life. And maintaining it is not difficult as all you're doing is essentially releasing the server side binaries. The only complexity would come in ensuring distributed systems (for load balancing) also work fine on a single system server.

> The only complexity would come in ensuring distributed systems (for load balancing) also work fine on a single system server.

This isn't part of this petition though. It would be fine to release server binaies that rely on distributed infrastructure. It would be up to fans to make it work. Which is fine by me personally.

I think as soon as you say "the game relies on an online service" it's exempt from the provisions of this initiative. Of course anything can be pretended to be an online service (that's the whole point of SaaS) but all the initiative concretely says is "phoning home for no reason is not a service".

There's a faq around the petition. It's specifically about multiplayer games and others claiming to be a "service."

> Games that are good, are going to be popular

Games that pass a certain quality bar and were designed with mass appeal in mind are going to be popular.

I've played at least a few live-service games that I consider good, but were shutdown due to lack of popularity. Some of them I can't even find client files for to start working on a server.

Value is subjective - tons of games that are now considered cult classics didn't gain any meaningful popularity on release.

How or why are you expecting a mediocre game to be a "forever" product then? Older, good games that are single player are sold DRM-free by the GoG project. I really struggle to see what issue this petition is trying to solve. Keeping multiplayer games have online support forever? Is this some "anti-DRM" initiative? Still unclear. I deeply believe even though this initiative looks good, but corporate will find a way to price it in, and raise prices. Like it always does.

> It is self-regulating pretty well.

No it is definitely not. Companies are very abusive to consumers, especially as more games move to a live service model.

Good regulation, I hope it passes.

As for the price, I am not concerned. If customers reject higher price points, they will "self regulate" back to an acceptable level.

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