A ban on rendering multiplayer games unplayable has a chance to become law | Hacker News Reader

A ban on rendering multiplayer games unplayable has a chance to become law

pcgamer.com

7 pointsberetguy7 comments

This is fantastic, I could play StarCraft II forever:

> Understanding that developers and publishers can't support games forever, the initiative would expect "the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state." That means giving players the tools to host the game on their own servers, for example, and removing the requirement for games to connect to the publisher's (defunct) servers in order to be played. This is what the developer behind Knockout City did when it pulled the plug on the game's official servers.

Wouldn't this push AAA game creators to adopt the subscription model we all love to hate?

Depending on how the law is implemented, I can think of a number of ways that studios would try to get around it:

- If the law says it only applies to games which are purchased for an up-front cost, then make the game free-to-play but with microtransactions

- Include a single-player campaign, which will remain playable even when the multiplayer or game-as-a-service part of the game goes offline

- Just don't allow EU players to buy or play the game

If this were to become law, I expect that it would result in many more games with offline solo play, rather than resulting in more games where the tools to host your own server are provided. That's still probably a victory for players, though.

That definitely would be a victory.

If that happens it would be suboptimal but still it would be better than what is happening right now. If that happens the game is still going to die at some point but at least company will be upfront about the fact that gamers don’t own but rent/lease their games, and gamers will know when they stop being playing a game (when they stop paying for it, that is).

What happens now is publishers sell games like products - for a single time fee and they don’t let you know when you will stop being able to play the game up front. Then some day they shut down the server and nobody ever can play the game again. Imagine Amazon deleting books you bought from your kindle account. That’s what’s happening now.

Original title which is too long: “If 1 million people sign a petition, a ban on rendering multiplayer games unplayable has a chance to become law in Europe”

Instead of rendering the game stand alone or P2P I would not mind a middle ground provided it was not done in a passive-aggressive manor. One possibility would be putting all the server code into a Github repo and inviting active developer members of that gaming community to start supporting it a year or two prior to the official decommission of the corporate servers. Then the community could stand up their own self hosted servers. The game client developers could also be a part of that to really keep the game alive and evolving not to mention it would look good on their CV should the company downsize further. The client could also be adapted ahead of time to let people choose between staying on the corporate servers until the end, or beta-testing the public servers. I assume licensing would have to change to accommodate this. The corporate servers should provide a way for people to export all of their character and account data to be imported into the community servers by the player in the event they wish to run their own servers. This should lead to a big modding community, at the risk of all the characters becoming over-powered.

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