Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice | Hacker News Reader

Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

pcgamer.com

122 pointsriffraff432 comments

> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only

that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.

seems like 'video games europe' is gearing up to lobby/influence the lawmakers to distort this initiative.

the bare minimum would be to ban these kind of things from describing themselves as products instead of a service in their marketing. no "Buy" or "Purchase", instead "Rent" or "Lease" possibly with a stated minimum guaranteed time online / expiration date.

EDIT: reminder, if you're from the EU and over the age of 18 it's still a good idea to sign the petition even though it passed the threshold since there could be invalid signatures (bots, underage people, etc ...) if the valid signatures are below the threshold after the verification is done this petition will get dropped.

The game that kicked this particular petition off was The Crew, a game that you could happily play single player which Ubisoft made always online purely for DRM reasons its a prime example of the abuse of power that legislators should be doing something ab0out.

This isn't exactly an abuse of power - you can just not buy it. UbiSoft has transformed itself into a terrible, bloated company and it probably die soon, but the better way to do this is to have industry standards similar to PEGI that describe the game's future support, not to hit them with EU-specific regulations.

"Let the problem fester until the negative externalities build up so much it overcomes the coordination problem and companies are subject to the same coercion (but through 'market forces' so it's good), one day, eventually, maybe" isn't a meaningful argument against legislation.

Excellent summary of our current pseudocapitalist hellscape. How do we stop this ride when even the meta is a coordination problem.

and yet it would be solved overnight if the consumers just stopped buying what they evidently dislike so much

The problem is that these consumers realize they'd dislike some things of a product long after buying it (and often it isn't the entire product that is a problem, so someone might still dislike a lot some aspect of a product while liking another aspect of it).

And others may not even realize the negative issues at all but still they create network effects that drag other consumers along the ride anyway, regardless of if they like it or not.

Arguments like this are not very powerful.

It seems like "abstinence is a birth control method"

that said, more occurrences of this situation might make your argument more powerful over time.

That’s the American/capitalist thinking : the market should sort itself out against bad actors.

Yeah and it doesn't work because the market isn't really free. Becoming a AAA game publisher requires so much money that has so many strings attached that there is no concept of a real free market.

Personally I don't believe a real free market can exist anyway. There always has to be a balance between socialism and capitalism.

All the big publishers are bound by these strings such as the wish for more recurring revenue. Hence the microtransactions and online models. You can't really avoid those.

> Personally I don't believe a real free market can exist anyway. There always has to be a balance between socialism and capitalism.

I 100% share this but I can’t understand how even the most capitalist (ideologically) person in the world would not want to create rules to at least avoid actors to become too big.

Monopolies are a bug of the capitalism and they break it from the inside. When monopolies aren’t kept at bay, you aren’t even in capitalism anymore.

> I 100% share this but I can’t understand how even the most capitalist (ideologically) person in the world would not want to create rules to at least avoid actors to become too big.

This is definitely true. I don't know if this is true, but my instinct is that it's much harder to create a monopoly if you don't have a government willing to write rules to enforce your existing advantages.

> It seems like "abstinence is a birth control method"

Only with very very poor pattern matching. If people don't buy something, there is a 0% chance it will exist. That's better than any birth control method you might recommend.

You have correctly identified a flaw in the economic model you're using – although you missed the step where you look at the real world, and take note of the discrepancy.

In the real world, things exist that are not bought.

>you can just not buy it

Did Ubisoft clearly advertise the fact that the game would stop functioning entirely in the future when it was selling it?

Hence:

> the better way to do this is to have industry standards similar to PEGI that describe the game's future support, not to hit them with EU-specific regulations.

Coincidentally EU regulations are quite good at creating new industry standards

> This isn't exactly an abuse of power - you can just not buy it.

This is the EU. We don't believe the market fixes everything. As an EU citizen I really applaud the restrictions on bad business practices of tech companies. A lot of those are US-based but they'll have to play by our rules if they want to operate here.

OK, I signed it. hopefully I entered the correct postal code for my address; I always have to look up the code online.

>> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only

> that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.

I think the criticism isn't centered around single player games at all, but rather MMORPGs and the likes.

> that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.

That’s asking developers to make different games. That’s not the same thing as “stop shitting down games like the crew”

> The bare minimum would be to ban these kind of things from describing themselves as products instead of a service.

I don't know if amazon kindle books "you are getting a license" wording has affected anything.

But what if you can't call them "games" anymore? Call it "time-limited entertainment"?

> Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable.

No? How would the "rights holders" be in any way liable for someone posting illegal content on a community-hosted server after a game has gone end-of-life?

Also, community servers not having to adhere to the publisher's standards of what community content is safe vs unsafe is clearly a positive in my humble opinion.

Don't you know? If I cmd+S the HN front-end and throw my own backend behind it, host my own instance, and post something illegal on it, then YC is liable!

Obviously they're not, but hey, just joining them in making things up. Protect the children!!

It’s more complicated than that.

I work in games and in my last workplace I was CTO of a racing simulation; that means I was working with brands that were not only my own in a pretty big way.

The stipulations that were put on us was pretty strong. For example (and it’s not just these guys), Mercedes will not permit you to allow the logo to fall off; If you have a damage model in the game this is annoying. Some won’t allow the car to get dirty, or to deform in a realistic way because it harms a copyright (did you know that the front lights of cars are part of their brand and trademark in most cases).

I’m using a pretty obvious example, that by selling a product that contains these other brands, we are beholden to not represent them in a way they don’t like; it’s part of the transaction for having it.

I can already hear people thinking: but, most games don’t have any third party intellectual property. But that’s less true than you think, even fantasy games will inevitably wind up copying something from our world that is not completely generic. The most annoying ones are the little background things; Rockstar for example will almost assuredly have issues with using the shapes of famous buildings and licensing issues if they make their radio stations too easy to pirate.

It’s a quagmire. Honestly, I’m not even sure why we bother making anything, there seems to always be some random popping their head up seeking another slice.

If this passes, then such stipulations become illegal, since they can't force you to create a product that would fly on the face of the law.

That probably won’t be true, or we will lose the ability to license altogether.

Here’s hoping though!

The thing about licenses is that it's overratted. No licensor makes you unable to continue supporting the product, since the licensee will make sure to include a provision that all copies of the licensed software have the ability of use the licensed work.

I can easily understand why it sucks from your perspective, but European tradition dictates that we make it suck for you and then you have to make it suck for your counterparty. We don't directly intervene with your freedom to write whatever contracts you please, only what you release to consumers.

That's intensely frustrating to be caught in the middle of. At times you end up feeling that the politicians are coopting you and your work for their ends, that they are underhandedly enveloping you in the public administration. That is in a way exactly what they are doing, but you have to remember that it's what your customers want. You are still making for your customers, they have just made their wants known though a process other than the free market.

There is no such thing as a 100% free market, not in America, not anywhere.

What was passed was a petition for the EU to listen to the needs of a million EU citizens. It is not yet a law, but it might become one. Laws are the rules of the market. A 100% free market is anarchy.

The answer to that is simple, and has been used by other media (to the chagrin of fans of course). When it comes time to "kill" the game, make a final update to strip all such licensed material out of the game.

The companies that develop and publish games amortize plenty of things out into multiple years. That's why live service is so increasingly common. The same developers and publishers should also factor in that they might have to remove some assets when they want to stop providing active support.

So if they strip the libraries out and the server cannot run id that okay?

They shouldn't use libraries that don't allow them to release a server at the official game's sunset. There's been a lot of rhetoric from the publishers about "developer choice", which is really publisher's choice, but that's the whole problem. They are choosing to make games with a hard shelf life, and that's contrary to the copyright regimes of most jurisdictions that have some sort of eventual public domain mechanism. What's the use of a public domain if the work is intentionally destroyed by that point. I consider that theft from the public, in a way that mere copyright infringement can never equate to.

It’s really not a quagmire.

When you EOL the game and release the server, just strip the licensed content. Remove the logos. Nobody gives a flying toss anyway.

People want the community and the GAME. They don’t care whether the actual logo is there.

Heck, if the game connects to a community server, have it hide all licensed content. you’ve satisfied your contractual obligations. Whether people mod the game or not to re-add things has no bearing on you.

The licenced design seems to include the front part of the car per the above comment, that would mean creating seperate models for EOL games.

No, even if the licensing agreement between the developer and the car maker ends, then according to first sale doctrine, the game buyers keep the licensed content. Removing it from user systems would be undue (but admittedly has happened such as with the in-game music in GTA).

The reason for that is that the game is continuing to be distributed and the nature of digital distribution is ephemeral so contents like music are removed from the distribution when the license expires. If you own the game on physical media or remove the connection to the digital distribution service (never patch it) then as a consumer you’re fine as you note with the first sale doctrine. It’s just legally the developer can no longer offer the content as part of future distributions. The same would be true for another physical media release.

I don't think anyone is asking for developers to continue to distribute their games after they EOL them. They're just asking for a way to keep games that have already been distributed running.

That is not how it works. When car licenses expire then you can still download the racing games in your library from Steam etc., even after new sales are discontinued. You are already the owner of the licensed content and you get access to it anytime.

Steam even says that in the event of that they go out of business, measures are in place to ensure gamers' continued access to their games.

There is no first sale doctrine in Europe, and nor does the US one apply to digitally distributed content.

Directive 2009/24/EC clearly makes reference to the first sale doctrine in Article 4

I'm happy to be convinced, but so far this isn't really helping the point. What you've described applies to an extraordinarily small percentage of games. I'm looking at my Steam library with ~170 games. I see ~8 that have real brand names, 7 being shooters that contain gun brands - which have never cared about these things, given they're already appearing in the context of people killing each other in the first place - and the other 1 being Football Manager (an offline game).

> I can already hear people thinking: but, most games don’t have any third party intellectual property. But that’s less true than you think, even fantasy games will inevitably wind up copying something from our world that is not completely generic.

Then please give us some proper examples we can learn from.

> Rockstar for example will almost assuredly have issues with using the shapes of famous buildings and licensing issues if they make their radio stations too easy to pirate.

GTA is hardly a "fantasy game", its entire schtick is getting as close to the real-world setting as possible, going as far as to parody real-life brands. They're quite unique in doing so, an extreme outlier.

Take a look at the current top 10 games on Steam by player count. You'll see that indeed the only real-world brands featured are potentially gun brands, and none of them have things like famous buildings. DOTA, Apex Legends, Stardew Valley, Rust, Palworld, Elden Ring and a bunch of idlers and shooters (CS2, PUBG, Delta Force).

I can’t speak for them because I never worked on them, but you’d be surprised how often a piece of music or a graphic is copyrighted. One of thousands of your common textures gets a bit too close to something else and suddenly you need a license.

Fun fact: a lot of game audio is licensed too, sound effects and such.

Regardless, the issue of sublicensing goes beyond what you’re allowed to let people do, it also goes into the idea that you’re often forced to disallow people from harvesting those assets from the game, or allowing the game to turn into derivative works - and because you yourself do not actually own the asset, you’re forced to confront it.

To avoid these issues, games would have to be very small (2D? Chiptunes? idk how small), but it’s one of a million tiny issues that comes up in game development, and each one of those tiny issues risks not allowing you to release the game.

Games are really, really hard to make, there are so many issues waiting to kill it- and even if you manage to make it, there’s no guarantee it’s successful, so spending time on these things is stealing time from making it fun or viable.

Again, what the fuck does the licensing of music or textures have anything to do with people playing the game offline?

Why do you mix your awful DRM scheme with something completely separated from the subject matter?

Are you trying to claim that the licensing scheme establishes by contract that the players must be stripped of their consumer rights by not being able to own the game they bought?

Well, good news for you, maybe the regulations that will come out of it will make this sort of licensing contract illegal. Perhaps it will make it easier to make games for you.

It’ll make licensing more expensive because the net result is more permissive. Or in the hypothetical the content could be removed and replaced with something bespoke or cheaper to licence. But both of these options will make the game more expensive to build overall across its surface area.

How is it more permissive? The product is the same as it was before the official servers went down.

Forcing games to be moddable is unrelated to stop killing games.

When you’re licensing content from third parties the more permissive rights you need the more expensive it is. Music is a very good example where it might not even be possible to get a perpetual license. A bunch of games have removed music as their license to it has expired for example. In the context of EOL of a game if you have to provide it for free to owners in perpetuity any third party content, code and so on needs to have been licensed for that use. That is typically more permissive than licenses as mentioned up thread and so more expensive.

Stop killing games is not about forcing developers to perpetually sell games. They can still stop selling games. They just can't leave it in an unplayable state.

If developers want to get the rights to distribute a song for 5 years with their game, they can still do that.

No I’m talking about the distribution of games. With physical media that’s all fine because once the license expires they stop making new copies. People that own a copy are fine. With digital distribution once you’ve EOL’d a product you still need to make it available right? Otherwise how do people that have paid for it get it? But that means you can’t distribute elements you no longer have the license to.

With online distribution games can be made unavailable for purchase. You are not distributing it anymore. Only people that previously purchased can still download the game.

There are multiple such cases in stores such as Steam or GoG. I own games that are not available for purchase anymore.

Those games were not killed. I can still download and play them.

Offering the game for download but not sale is still distributing it and you’d still need licenses for all the content you’re distributing. In the cases you mention the games still hold the licenses which is common but not universal.

You've signed a pretty shoddy license agreement if it requires you to refund all your customers, in full, after a few years. That's just bad business.

If you’re saying that a change like SKG would lead to developers needing to take a perpetual license then you should say that rather than alluding to it with a non-sequitur like this.

If that’s what you mean then I’d say maybe but doing so would definitely increase the cost and complexity in using licensed content. Which is likely to be passed on.

Interestingly though reading the EU petition and the petition authors views it would be fine to remove the content once the licence expired.

Developers already need to license whatever they're licensing in perpetuity, since they need to sublicense to the people who buy their games (regardless of format). Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to sell you the physical media. Licenses aren't yes/no affairs.

Stop Killing Games doesn't change this in any way.

No they don’t need perpetual licenses for physical copies. They just need to stop distributing physical copies when they lose the license. For example a reissue of a rhythm-action game (or a release on another platform) might be missing songs from previous releases of the same title. The issue with digital distribution is that you can’t redistribute the content once the license has expired. So if someone needs to redownload the game for whatever reason then they can’t provide content they no longer have a license for.

They need the ability to grant perpetual licenses.

We’re talking about distribution so maybe you’ve come in to the conversation in a weird way there. To be clear the developer cannot continue to distribute content they no longer have rights to. With physical media you don’t go back to the publisher to get new copies but with digital media you do. And hence falls foul of changes in distribution rights.

"Distribution rights" aren't laws of nature. If you're making physical media, you get a license to sell physical copies of the game (containing the licensed material) for a limited time, to people who are allowed to keep them once your sales license has expired.

The digital equivalent would be: you get a license to sell digital copies of the game (containing the licensed material) for a limited time, to people who are allowed to re-download them once your sales license has expired. (And you are allowed to provide that downloading service, but not continue to sell the games, nor make them available to people who have not purchased them.)

It's not that hard – and the existence of Steam demonstrates that many people are already doing things this way.

If the licensing agreement does not differentiate in between "customers purchasing new copies" and "previously purchasing copies being available" then therein lies the problem.

Looks like the possibility of regulations will fix that. That in the Year of our Lord 2025, when online channels are many times the only possibility of purchasing a game, licensing agreements do not cover that, it seems that proper regulation is very much necessary.

That’s because distribution is seperate from sale. For example Spotify has a license to distribute music but not sell it.

I suspect if you’re expecting to undo decades of IP law with this then you’ll be disappointed. I also suspect that the requirement to be functional rather than complete could also mean as long as the game continued to work removing the content would be fine.

> I suspect if you’re expecting to undo decades of IP law

No, I only expects regulations that dictates I get to own the games I purchase. As any other consumer good.

And if that is not possible, then the agreement should be that games are leased for a set number of years, no gotchas to the consumer.

For some reason I think that the second would be much worse for the videogame industry. I don't think many people would be super excited about leasing a game for a few years for 60+ USD.

That's a solvable technical problem. If your game needs a online server to work, either patch it to not need it, or distribute the server. IF your licensing prohibits you form doing it... well, don't enter that kind of licensing, negotiate different terms. There might be a small fraction of games that stop being financially viable. That's what we call a tradeoff.

Games already handled this today on Steam, Apple Store, Play Store, etc by taking down the store page preventing new copies from being sold. Users can still redownload it. That's how things work today, and is how they would still work if SKG gets what they want. This isn't a new problem and is already the industry standard for how expiring IP works for the digital distribution for games.

then why can't you buy Need for Speed: Most Wanted from 2005?

(small hint: https://www.reddit.com/r/needforspeed/comments/1ceaq0r/where...)

Did you reply to the wrong post. A publisher stop selling games when the license expires is standard practice in the industry.

> In the context of EOL of a game if you have to provide it for free to owners in perpetuity any third party content

You start your argument from a presumption that releasing an offline game is almost an impossibility. Are you trying yo argue that offline games have zero things licensed? This sounds like a major argument in favor of offline games.

Sounds to me that the simple solution is just stop licensing things with such draconian requirements. If I play a racing game I care about it being fun. If the car I am using in-game is a BMW or a made up brand for the game is immaterial.

It’s about the distribution of games, doesn’t matter whether it’s online or offline you need a license to distribute IP that you don’t own.

Never making a licensed product or using third-party IP is definitely one solution but I don’t think is the intent nor without adverse effects.

> doesn’t matter whether it’s online or offline

Then the solution seems simple. Making the game available offline does not seem to have any impact in terms of licensing.

I don’t think you’ve followed the discussion then.

Only in the sense that you are arguing against strawman versions of the idea in favor of the status quo.

If you’re saying that because they said the solution is simple, then it would seem you have not followed the discussion.

To them, it is as “simple” as not using the things that require onerous licensing. Whether the game is offline or online only matters as much as the licensor might prefer one or the other; obviating the onerous licensor (making your own assets and/or doing business with more agreeable people) is a simple solution. Simple meaning the complexity to understand it, not to implement it.

For some people that's true, But I've played with people that for example, slightly prefered PES Gameplay but just would refuse to play without a proper Real Madrid Team

In my experience, the more casual the player the more this mattered to them, but it was still a huge market

> just would refuse to play without a proper Real Madrid Team

Interestingly enough, I used to be an avid Football Manager player, where real teams/players is an important deal.

I can still download Football Manager 2010 (that is not available for purchase anymore), and I can play with Borussia Dortmund with all 2010 players without any issues.

If they could figure out how to properly license those teams/players so that the game is not dead in 2025 (considering how much anal football teams/leagues are with licensing deals), I am sure that racing games (and others) can figure it out as well.

This seems pretty easy. If the license to the music goes for X years, then build that expiration into the game. After X years, licensed music goes away, and the game is still playable. This is completely in scope of SKG. Everyone understands that not every feature has to be retained to stay the playable game.

That expiration date should, of course, be on the box. The consumer deserves to know.

That’s absurd. I can still pop in my Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater CD from decades ago and listen to the original soundtrack. TTL licensing should be illegal.

Yea, nobody seems to be addressing this: Content never expiring was the default for many years, when games shipped on physical media. Industry defenders are acting like this is impossible, where it routinely happened for a long time.

That would be frustrating to code for.

Before anyone says that its as simple as a switch statement, it’s not, its date enumeration and a switch statement, and an alternative codepath for testing and more assets: on every hot path, when you already only get 8ms for your frame is an annoying cost.

The expiration date properly visible is not a terrible idea though; or at least a “this edition is valid for x years” after which, updates that fix issues may remove content. Hrm.

I guess that only leaves the third option: don’t license music or other assets that way. It’s really not that hard. Instead of writing a contract that promises that you won't distribute the music with your game for more than X years, write one that promises you’ll only sell the music with your game for X years, but that you might still distribute it to anyone who made their purchase before the cutoff.

You see? It’s not that hard. You can license music and still make a game that doesn’t die after a few years. If EU law changes to make that a _requirement_, then you simply stop signing any licensing deal that would break the requirement.

> It’ll make licensing more expensive because the net result is more permissive

The current state of affairs is that the net result is such that consumers are stripped of their rights. I find it more unacceptable.

If the licensing costs without fucking over consumers is prohibitive, then maybe those games should not exist. If no one is licensing the brands/assets/music/whatever because the licensing costs are too high, it's likely that in time the costs will come down.

> If the licensing costs without fucking over consumers is prohibitive, then maybe those games should not exist.

Wow, who is killing games now?

Absolutely, games that strip consumers of their rights should not exist.

I am not going to defend predatory practices. You think you threw me a gotcha, but you are actually only exposing yourself.

The framing was your own so it’s not the gotcha you feel it is. I also don’t know what you think I’m exposing because I’m broadly in agreement that games at their EOL, particularly single player should continue to work. I am interested in discussing where that breaks down but I think that’s probably where we differ. You seem more interested in being combative and making up gotchas.

> You seem more interested in being combative and making up gotchas.

Only because you are being purposely obtuse, gesturing at licensing as something that makes game development impossible without making games previously purchased by consumers unavailable.

If you make cakes that are poisoned with lead, and regulations say that you cannot sell lead-poisoned food, you cannot say "but all egg suppliers only sell lead-poisoned eggs, this will kill the cake industry".

If regulations say that games should be made accessible for people that purchased them past EOL, licensing agreements will have to adapt for it. Differentiating distribution as in "new copy being sold" and "previously sold copy being available for download".

> Only because you are being purposely obtuse, gesturing at licensing as something that makes game development impossible without making games previously purchased by consumers unavailable.

Please show me where I said that! If that’s what you think I’ve been saying it’s definitely not. And you accuse me of arguing against straw men!

That is a separate issue from what the Stop Killing Games political movement is bringing attention to. Few people are bemoaning that they can’t play the game that was never made. The rest are complaining that games they’ve played for years are being made unavailable when the authentication servers are killed.

If the law is that you can't do this, then those terms will just disappear from licencing agreements. It's not like there's a shortage of textures and sounds in the marketplace.

That entirely depends on the content, some is fungible and some isn’t. For the majority of general content developers are already getting a perpetual license so it’s really these special cases that will remain an issue and are unlikely to be resolved in the manner you suggest.

For some things.

For others you may not be able to license it.

Example: have you seen a street racing game with Toyota’s in it?

There’s a reason that Need For Speed games fell off after Most Wanted (original) and it’s because they themselves don’t get total artistic license on their works.

And part of the agreements is a reasonable expectation that you will not assist anyone else to violate the agreement - and, the agreements are not perpetual either.

So, depends on context. There are examples where licensing opportunities dry up.

Somehow game companies managed to deal with this when games were sold on CDs. They’ll figure it out again.

Yeah, it was easier then.

The presumption was that sales were not perpetual- and reselling isn’t leasing a license in the same way.

Maybe there’s a way though

Yes - they started including DRM software on the CDs. They'll figure that out again.

Yea, I think some people are acting like these "licenses" are physical constants, found in nature and can't be modified! They are made by humans and can be unmade by humans. Regulation could deem those licenses unenforceable. Regulation could force permissive licensing. Regulation could add or remove IP protection. It's all conjured up by humans.

Yes, it is unlikely that legislators, bought and paid for by big corporations, will ever change the rules to reduce help to big corporations, but it's at least humanly possible.

How is the logo falling off (or not falling off) relevant to the end of life of the game? The logos don’t automatically fall off at the end of the game’s life, do they?

Sounds like that licensing issue is curtailing developer choice, which is apparently the worst problem the industry could possibly face. If your choice is going to be curtailed either way, I’d rather it go in the consumer protection direction, no?

Why would you be responsible for what other people do? Your game can already be modded to e.g. have the logo fall off.

You shouldn't blame consumers that you failed to negotioate proper terms for your licenses. Maybe having legislation to point at will help you out to get more reasonable terms.

How exactly does this stop you allowing people to play the game offline?

Is your game not allowing the Mercedes logo to fall off intrinsically tied to it being online? Is the server code the only thing keeping the logo in place?

Or are you just making shit up because you find the initiative icky?

I find it bizarre how game developer companies try hard to antagonize the public that keeps buying their things.

Honestly the "quagmire" here is created by dumb laws and/or dumb lawyers.

Mercedes is supposed to have a trademark for automobiles and you're making a video game. That's a different industry so you shouldn't have to license anything from them -- no one is going to be confused into thinking your video game is a motor vehicle and buy it instead of a Mercedes, and that's all trademarks are supposed to be for.

Make it clear that these things don't have to be licensed for video games -- which there is absolutely no sound for them to be -- and you won't have these problems.

I've often wondered why sports and sim games don't tell these trademark peddlers to pound sand and ship with robust modding tools. Eager fans can then add unofficial versions of Mercedes, Lionel Messi, and a jet in the shape of the Great Redeemer.

We had this a decade ago with Asetto Corsa, PES, and Skyrim, but it appears to be falling out of favor. Are the publishers or developers not doing this because of legal liability or because they want to get a financial piece of the mod pie?

Collaboration with real world brands seem to have real issues like this. However I don't see how your examples apply or extrapolate to the rest of games out there.

My bad, let me try to be clearer;

Working with external brands is an obvious example of third party licenses that, as a consumer, you can perceive.

Games are made of hundreds (maybe even thousands) of these licenses that you will have trouble perceiving; Sound effects, certain harmonics, programatic audio cues (as a technology), procedural generation and even likenesses are non-perpetual in nature.

The landscape of artistic works is mired in copyrights, the more art the more likely you get too close to someones copyright even if you have an entirely home-built texture, it might look inspired by another texture and thus litigious individuals can request royalties: royalties which will come with their own restrictions.

I’m not saying that its impossible to comply, merely outlining the current state of things. If licenses won’t be granted but copyrights are maintained then it will be extremely burdensome for developing games that are large- as the risk and operational overhead will be quite punishing.

For what its worth; I’m all for the movement of stop killing games, but people seem to have this notion that its game developers doing it out of spite in order not to cannibalise future sales, when in reality developers would prefer to release more games with more innovative ideas. The issue is that games, by default, don’t exist; and making them exist is a perilous journey so fraught with failures that I am personally surprised we have any games, yet so many. Everyone wants a slice when its successful and eventually theres nothing left, spending time one this will come from somewhere else and in all likelihood certain things will become impossible due to license holders not permitting use of their works nor something that is similar.

You might thing you’re giving developers power to fight but we’re stuck in the middle and they don’t give a shit, they want their 30 pieces of silver and we don’t have a product if we can’t find a way to work within their parameters.

Because parents and the general public won't see that it's Bob's private server for $game. They see $game_name by $developer/publisher.

Mojang (creators of Minecraft ) is an unfortunate good case study for this. It's sale to Microsoft is in part down to not being able to balance freedom for server owners and the PR issues caused by people scamming others, in this case children, while obscuring it under the Minecraft brand.

I don't agree that we should be coerced into being in the kid safe padded play area, but I ain't blind enough to not see why we are.

Imagine if the kids were all hanging out on Bob's Private Club Penguin Server.

But the sale to Microsoft resulted in more scamming. In fact, the Xbox version of the game has in game currency added that requires dollars. And Microsoft allows servers free reign to scam children into spending that currency and buying more.

> Because parents and the general public won't see that it's Bob's private server for $game. They see $game_name by $developer/publisher.

That isn't how liability works. The judge isn't going to let you sue the wrong person because you're confused.

$developer/publisher’s lawyer still has to show up and explain the confusion to the judge. Not a legal liability but a financial one. Then if one judge somewhere says something something trademark? they would also have to appeal.

It doesn't even get to that point because the first thing someone who wants to file a lawsuit does is hire a lawyer, and the lawyer isn't going to bring the case against the wrong party either.

Not legaly liable, but the "court of popular opinion" cares very little about facts, details, or legal entities.

> It's sale to Microsoft is in part down to not being able to balance freedom for server owners and the PR issues caused by people scamming others, in this case children, while obscuring it under the Minecraft brand.

Source? This is the first time I’ve heard this claim.

Minecraft's sale to Microsoft had a lot more to do with Notch not being particularly keen on turning down a billion dollar check than anything else.

Video games publishers don't want you to play the same game for too long without spending more money. They don't want to make games like Terraria where you have a $10 game you can play for a thousand hours. They'd much rather you buy multiple $60+ games, plus expansions, "micro"-transactions and subscriptions.

They don't want games that last forever, they want to pressure you into constantly buying the next big thing.

This is literally every industry now. Shall we "regulate" all industries to be like this, then? Is that achievable?

Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point? "That's not what this is about. Ok, where are we heading then?

I mean, what you describe sounds pretty good. It sounds like you think it's not feasible for some reason (other than political will). Do you want to elaborate on that?

It certainly is feasible. Requiring it to happen though, would result in some interesting economic dynamics, I believe.

We currently exist in a two tier global economy where some countries are required to follow a strict set of laws, and others basically make their own. To be clear, I am saying that Russia and China do not care at all about piracy and IP theft and so on.

As you increase the rules that Western companies must follow, you run the risk that some day your only options will be non-Western companies, and that may or may not be a good thing. This is what has happened with manufacturing, and it was good for a while until it wasn't. It still is quite good in some pockets though, like batteries and solar.

Paying for a subscription is explicitly not what this is about. No one is suggesting this for MMOs. Just that it be clear that it is a subscription, that you're not actually buying the game. What a one-time fee for an MMO? Give it an expiry date. You can keep pushing the expiry date, but you have to promise support up to at least that date.

AFAICT SKG doesn't really make a distinction between games bought with a one-time purchase and games that are subscribed to. In their FAQ, they explicitly say it would apply to MMOs too (see https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq "What about large-scale MMORPGs? Isn't it impossible for customers to run those when servers are shut down?) although they don't spell out whether they mean exclusively games bought with a one-time fee or games that are subscription-only.

Ross from Accursed Farms said this in a video FAQ on youtube:

" Would this initiative affect subscription games? Well, that's another question that depends on what the EU says. Personally, I think it's very unlikely because that doesn't fit well with other existing consumer laws. I think the only way you could even make that argument would be that this is necessary for preservation and most governments don't seem to care about that at all. However, I don't think this is a huge loss, since only a handful of games operate that way today. So if we can give up those but then save 99% of other games, I'm willing to make that bargain. "

so it seems like they actually are suggesting that they'd like for (a law that came out of) SKG to apply to subscription games but there's an understanding that it probably won't.

Then this is essentially a formalized buggestion, and what will almost certainly happen is companies will respond back with "Won't Fix"

If Netflix decides to end their service and make every TV show and movie they have permanently unavailable, even through all other legal businesses, then yeah, it would be nice of them to give that stuff away.

A more accurate analogy would be: you bought a physical DVD and DVD player, but now the film studio is preventing you from playing the DVD that you own on the hardware you own. In which case yes, we should regulate. Paying for access to a constantly changing library is not the same as paying to permanently own a single product.

It’s pretty easy to solve static content like ebooks and video games; just legislate that your license is transferrable between services and media. Then I can legally torrent a game that is unsupported.

Content subscriptions like Netflix are different because you are not paying face value for one title. The better analogy here would be the game streaming services like XBox online. It’s clear you are not doing anything like “buying a game”, it’s the whole point of the business model. As you say, it would be a lot harder to make these laws apply there (but I bet that wouldn’t stop the EU from trying).

I think any legislation on this subject would have to reckon with the second-order effects; on the margin you’d be adding pressure for publishers to move to pure subscription services, if these laws don’t apply in those cases.

> legislate the that your license

What we should be doing is applying the laws that already exist: when I purchase a physical book I own a copy of it and can sell it, lend it, modify it.

Amazon and the publishers have zero say in the matter.

Buying a digital copy should be no different. I more of this stupid “you bought a license to access a copy” crap.

Let's step through this example.

All Xbox games around 2004 were physical CDs. Many had online services attached to them. Eventually, those servers were turned off. You can still play LAN and singleplayer. You still have your access to the physical bytes on the disk (though there is copy protection).

What should companies be required to do regarding the servers?

Not sue people into oblivion if they want to reverse engineer and create their own servers.

That is a perfectly rational suggestion. It is repulsive that large companies such as my employer do this.

Keep in mind that is one of the things that this movement is asking for. Doesn't seem unreasonable at all IMO.

Thing is, you are by default allowed to write mostly any contract / ToS you like (within the broad rules of contract law). So to implement this you need to explicitly ban “license for things that could be purchases”. And as I noted above the edge cases and market pressures make that non-trivial; do you also ban subscription services like Audible?

We already have subscriptions services for physical books and audiobooks.

They’re called libraries.

You don’t own the books when you check them out, and you wouldn’t own a digital copy when you check it out from audible.

As for market pressure, you don’t have to ban them. Require that if they want to rent digital copies out they must also allow for purchasing of them at a price that the average person would find resonable.

The FTC is currently suing John Deere over this kind of thing.

Also, Netflix is a weird comparison here. That seems like it should be an online-only service, they're not selling the actual movies to you. It's one of the situations where the model actually makes sense, unlike single-player video games.

> Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point?

Actually not Netflix as they just offer a monthly subscription and not individual sales, but _YES_ by all means if I "purchase" (not rent!) a book or movie on Amazon (or anyone else), I'd like that, thank you.

I'm sure if movie studios could get together and throw a switch that made every 5+ year old disappear entirely, forcing consumers to keep buying new movies, they would. Just like every car manufacturer would choose to disable every 2+ year old car on the road if they could. Why do we give video game companies this power?

Because it turns out that you don't need a server side simulation of reality to stream some bytes over the internet, and yet Netflix literally does pull content whenever they feel like it

> Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point?

No. However, you should be able to make a copy using your own computer (onto the computer or onto an external media such as a DVD) and then you can play the movies that you have copied on your own computer (not necessarily the one used for Netflix) or DVD player. This should be possible without needing to use their software, and it does not mean that their software or their service should need to offer it as an option; it is done on your side. (They can refuse to serve the movie to you faster than the actual duration of the movie if they want to do, though, therefore making it take as much time to copy as it does to watch it normally.)

(However, I am generally opposed to copyright anyways.)

> Shall we "regulate" all industries to be like this, then?

Don't threaten me with a good time

This would be why they’re trying to create consumer protection laws

That kind of reasoning makes sense if you have a single publisher controlling the entire market and they don't want to undercut their own business. But that's obviously not the case. There are plenty of publishers that want to publish games like Terraria, especially if they go on to sell more than 60 million copies.

I think the market is actually much more segmented than your comment implies. There's publishers who absolutely dominate certain niches, especially sporting games, and the only realistic competition they have are themselves.

It's worth keeping in mind that the "market" for a particular player can actually be incredibly small depending on their interests. In the most extreme example, a player might be a fan specifically of a single IP or series of games. Call of duty is one good example because there really are a lot of people who are like this. Video game IPs are a government granted monopoly on a small scale, and the word monopoly is not there for no reason, there is only one place to get CoD if you are a fan of CoD. Predictably, these companies follow the OA's suggested strategy very closely!

I’m not sure “sellers would love to raise prices and have people keep buying” is the indictment that you think it is. Terraria and Modern Warfare, which is monetized the way you describe, are such different products…

Why would you want to spend 1000s of hours in a game? That must be eradicated with fire. Time is your most precious resource... why waste it on one game? Games need to be shorter, maybe 20 hrs or so for high budget single player games.

I detest this line of thinking. There are plenty of games that are playable for this length of time. I've played hundreds of hours of Factorio, and I am not even close to exhausting the experience. Terraria was a fine example, too.

It's time to learn how to let go of something that is akin to an addictive substance. I also spent countless hours playing MMOs. While I have fond memories of them, I was relieved when I managed to stop playing these exploitative games.

I agree that single player games and the day zero patch shenanigans must go in order to preserve them. But otherwise, I'm glad that after long years most of these games cannot be injected into your bloodstream anymore.

Some people enjoy things you don't , calm down.

I'm calm. All I'm saying is that 5-10 years of exposure to a game is more than enough.

You don't get to decide this

Well, the difference is that the MMOs are almost uniformly skinner boxes engaging in psychological warfare against each and every person that plays them, while Terraria is the videogame equivalent of going to a museum, seeing a beautiful painting, and remembering that there's endless joy to be found in the world.

It's time you stop telling people how to enjoy things.

Planned obsolescence even has affected video games too?

Having worked there in the past, Ubisoft is awful. When I was there previously there was an aggressive push for UPlay (now Ubisoft Connect) integration into all products. Then there were the bullshots for promos/E3/etc. There were often clashes with leadership who would fight against creativity / novel ideas in favour of cookie-cutter mechanics that would not add anything to the experience - certainly there was a mentality of, let's just copy what was recently successful.

I'm blown away that series like AC, FarCry are still big sellers. These games are vapid and designed to be a time sink.

I'll never buy an Ubisoft game again. Instant dealbreaker to see that studio on the Steam store page; I've deleted a $3 sale game from my cart when I realized that it was Ubisoft. No game is worth giving money to a company that hates its customers so much.

On the flip side ex-Ubisoft employees seem to be finding success after their departure. Highly recommend Clair Obsur: Expedition 33.

Not to mention the sexual assault

> I'm blown away that series like AC, FarCry are still big sellers. These games are vapid and designed to be a time sink.

They are like junk food. Everyone has the junk food that they enjoy. FarCry is certainly the McDonald's of games. I enjoy some junk food once in a while, problems arise if I make it my staple diet.

For Steam users, a reminder that you can go to a publisher's page and "Ignore" that publisher. The option is a little bit hidden, it's in the settings cog on the right-hand side of the page. It'll stop steam from recommending their games to you, and when one does show up, like in the Top Sellers list, it'll have a message on it saying that it's by a publisher that you ignored.

I have Ubisoft, EA, and Sony marked as such, personally.

> In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

How? Can't wait to hear them substantiating this tidbit, because from a regular enterprise operations viewpoint this does NOT pass the smell test.

When I found out that Booking[.]com of all companies is moving major traffic, I started to look at what companies are even buying or selling anymore. I clearly had no idea.

In the following paper, CPs refer to content providers, as defined in the paper.

https://estcarisimo.github.io/assets/pdf/papers/2019-comnets... [pdf]

(more at https://estcarisimo.github.io/publications/ )

canonical link for above paper, which is the lead researcher's GH from what I can tell:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01403... ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2019.05.022 )

> Studying the Evolution of Content Providers in IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Cores

> Esteban Carisimo, Carlos Selmo, J. Ignacio Alvarez-Hamelin, Amogh Dhamdhere

[I have edited out some hyphens that made this really hard to read but were helpful due to the layout of the original document as typeset. If that bothers you, I'm sorry in advance. Links are included above.]

> Our goal is to investigate what role CPs now play in the Internet ecosystem, and in particular, if CPs are now a part of the “core” of the Internet. Specifically, we motivate this work with the following questions: How can we identify if a CP does or does not belong to the core of the Internet? If the core of the network does indeed include CPs, who are they?As the overall adoption of IPv6 has been slow, do we notice that delay on IPv4 and IPv6 core evolution? As the AS ecosystem has shown striking differences according to geographical regions [15], do we also see geographical differences in the role of CPs and their presence in the “core” of regional Internet structures? Finally, as more CPs deploy their private CDNs, can we detect “up and coming” CDNs that are not currently in the core of the network but are likely to be in the future?

> We use the concept of k-cores to analyze the structure of the IPv4 AS-level internetwork over the last two decades. We first focus on seven large CPs, and confirm that they are all currently in the core of the Internet. We then dig deeper into the evolution of these large players to correlate observed topological characteristics with documented business practices which can explain when and why these networks entered the core. Next, we repeat the methodology but using IPv6 dataset to compare and contrast the evolution of CPs in both networks. Based on results, we investigate commercial and technical reasons why CPs started to roll out IPv6 connectivity.

> We then take a broader view, characterizing the set of ASes in the core of the IPv4 Internet in terms of business type and geography. Our analysis reveals that an increasing number of CPs are now in the core of the Internet. Finally, we demonstrate that the k-core analysis has the potential to reveal the rise of “up and coming” CPs. To encourage reproducibility of our results, we make our datasets available via an interactive query system at https://cnet.fi.uba.ar/TMA2018/

[…]

> Finally, we study the core evolution of nine other remarkable CPs that belong to the TOPcore but were not included in the Big Seven. Seven of the nine selected ASes are the remaining ASes in Bottger et al.’s [47] TOP15 list, except Hurricane Electric (AS6939) which we do not consider as a CP since it is labeled as Transit/Access in CAIDA’s AS classification [80]. These seven ASes are OVH (AS16276), LimeLight (AS22822), Microsoft (AS8075), Twitter (AS13414), Twitch (AS46489), CloudFlare (AS13335) and EdgeCast (AS15133). The other two ASes are Booking.com (AS43996) and Spotify (AS8403). Interestingly, Booking.com or Spotify are not normally considered among the top CPs, however, they are in both TOPcores.

What else would these companies have to gain by making their games online only? Perhaps game developers even have contractual obligations to uphold, or incintives to include third party network interactions. The presence of Twitch, Cloudflare, and Microsoft on this list are interesting, because Microsoft drives a lot of threat intel and also makes a popular OS among gamers. If you want to reduce network traffic and reduce your reliance on third parties and internet access, migrating from Windows and using Proton on Linux would probably be a step in the right direction for many games that you would want to play single player.

Imagine you're an indie game studio developing an MMORPG, both your server and client is likely under constant development and you may only have one or two actual production servers running your server code.

Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.[1] While adding documentation, support for different systems, while ensuring safety as the server can now be reverse engineered and while possibly being liable to abuse created through those servers. Even though your game (and its clients) aren't tailored to working on any server other than the official one anyway.

At least that's my understanding of the issue.

This proposal is obviously aimed at big publishers like EA and Ubisoft, but it hurts small developers. I argue we should just stop playing EA and Ubisoft games, who are the only ones who continue to pull this crap.

[1]: As TheFreim pointed out, this isn't necessarily required. But the server program has to be released when the official servers are shut down. Which means this possibility has to be prepared for throughout development.

> Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.

This is not accurate. From the FAQ:

> Q: Won't this consumer action result in the end of "live service" games?

> A: No, the market demand and profitability of these games means the video games industry has an ongoing interest in selling these. Since our proposals do not interfere with existing business models, these types of games can remain just as profitable, ensuring their survival. The only difference is future ones will need to be designed with an "end of life" build once support finally ends.

I suggest reading the proposal or /at least/ the FAQ page: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

I was actually reading the FAQ just now.

From my understanding, a company does not have to release a private server alongside the client while the official servers are live, what I said previously was inaccurate. But when the official servers are closed, they are required to provide them.

However, I don't see how a bankrupt studio can release their server code when they don't have enough money to keep their servers running. An MMORPG shutting down it's servers may not even have any developers left. It may also not have any players left.

The FAQ suggests that this won't burden developnent at all, but I believe that it will.

Regardless if they continuously release their server code or not, they still need to develop an "end of life" plan which means having the server code ready to release when they want to kill their servers.

I think one of the most relevant part of the FAQ is:

Q: Isn't it impractical, if not impossible to make online-only multiplayer games work without company servers.

A: Not at all. The majority of online multiplayer games in the past functioned without any company servers and were conducted by the customers privately hosting servers themselves and connecting to each other. Games that were designed this way are all still playable today. As to the practicality, this can vary significantly. If a company has designed a game with no thought given towards the possibility of letting users run the game without their support, then yes, this can be a challenging goal to transition to. If a game has been designed with that as an eventual requirement, then this process can be trivial and relatively simple to implement. Another way to look at this is it could be problematic for some games of today, but there is no reason it needs to be for games of the future.

I too want online games to be killed responsibly, but I don't think Stop Killing Games is being honest about how this will influence small budget game development as opposed to the big publishers they keep talking about.

Then you design for it up front. There is nothing that stipulates that the eol build has to be developed right at the end.

Then if they go bankrupt, the job is already done. It isn't more work, it's just knowing a feature needs to be implemented, and knowing that before you even start.

> However, I don't see how a bankrupt studio can release their server code

This feels like trying to poke small holes for no reason.

Let’s say bankrupt studios are off the hook. What then? Most games still be saved. EA just announced they are killing Anthem in 2026. EA won’t be bankrupt next year. There you have one game already immortalized thanks to regulation.

> Let’s say bankrupt studios are off the hook.

We can "say" this, but it would need to be part of the proposal. To be honest I haven't read the proposal, just the FAQ. But I would expect some nuance to be added to protect small studios.

Like I said in my first comment, I feel like this proposal is just targeting studios like EA. And I am sure it works well for that. Though personally I would've hoped that consumers would just stop buying EA games.

> Imagine you're an indie game studio developing an MMORPG

To my understanding, this wouldn't affect MMORPGs where you're explicitly buying X months of access (so long as you do get the access you paid for, or a refund if it's shut down early) which is how most I'm aware of work.

> Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.[1] While adding documentation, support for different systems,

The proposal requires leaving the game in a reasonably playable state, but not any specific actions like these. In fact the FAQ specifically says "we're not demanding all internal code and documentation".

> while ensuring safety as the server can now be reverse engineered and while possibly being liable to abuse created through those servers

I don't see why the company would be liable for this. Moderation of the private servers would be up to those running the private servers. If there is something to this effect in EU law that I'm unaware of, it seems like it'd already be placing undue burden on games that do currently (or want to) release their server software and that this initiative would be a good opportunity to exempt them from that liability.

> but it hurts small developers

If anything I'd speculate small developers are likely to have less issue releasing server software/code, and more likely to have a game this doesn't even apply to in the first place, giving them an edge over larger publishers.

But even if it were a significant burden, I feel it's really just providing what was already purchased. At the extreme, do you think it'd be okay to take $70 from someone for a singleplayer game, then shut down authentication servers (rendering it unplayable) a few minutes later?

> But the server program has to be released when the official servers are shut down. Which means this possibility has to be prepared for throughout development.

... which is why it doesn't pass my smell test.

Say you're working on either a monolithic game server codebase, or just a microservice that's a part of a larger service mesh fulfilling that role. Are you writing any tests? You probably (hopefully) do. So where's that code gonna run the first time before it's even pushed up to version control? Locally. So some extents of it definitely have to run locally, or if you have good test coverage, all of it.

But okay, let's go a layer further. Say you're trying to go into production with this. As the saying goes, everyone has a production environment, but the lucky folks "even" have others. This sarcastically implies that you need to be able to deploy your solution into multiple environments. And you don't want to be doing this manually, because then e.g. you have no CI/CD, and thus no automated testing on code push. That's not even considering multi-geo stuff, because for multiplayer games I imagine latency matters, so you really want to deploy either to the edge or close to it, and will definitely want to be all around the world, at least in a few key places.

So you can test locally, and can deploy automatically. Tell me, what is the hold up then? It would take me approximately one entire minute to give you the binaries for anything I ever touch, because if I couldn't do that, the automation wouldn't be able to do so either. At some point, the bullshit has to end, and that's at operations. Not much docs to write either: if your stuff does anything super super custom, you're doing something very wrong. And respectfully, if the aforementioned do not apply to you, you shouldn't be operating any online service at scale in production for anyone in 2025.

Really the only technical wrenches you can throw into this that I can think of are licensing and dependencies. Neither of these are reasonable spots to be in from an economical or a technical standpoint. Like what, you can't mock other services? How are you testing your stuff then? Can't change suppliers / providers? How is that reasonable from a business agility standpoint?

So clearly if there is a salient technical rationale for this, it's going to have to be a very sharp departure from anything I've ever experienced in non-gaming enterprise, or my common sense.

Regarding all the other points (and this will read dismissive because I've already rambled on way too long and I'm trying to keep it short, I genuinely don't mean it like that):

- if you're writing an MMORPG as a small up-and-coming indie, you're definitely going bankrupt

- if you're writing an MMORPG, I'm pretty sure you'll have more than just one or two servers running, or there's nothing massive about that multiplayer online role playing game after all

- it does not require you to continually release anything

- it does not request you to release documentation (what is there to "document" btw? I'm certainly not imagining too much)

- it does not request you to support different systems

- it does not request you to release anything before EOS, thus, security concerns for the official client are null and void - and even if it wasn't (e.g. sequels), security by obscurity is not a reasonable security story anyways

- the dangerous parts of the reverse engineering efforts still routinely happen without access to server binaries anyways (see all COD games and their players getting hacked to pieces right as we type away)

- possibly liable is not liable, and I trust you're not a lawyer, just like I'm not

- it's just a client-server setup like any other - remember, other environments must be possible to connect to as well, if nothing else then for testing

All of this is completely ignoring how we had dedicated servers and competition events with private setups since forever.

I legitimately cannot imagine that you can cock up an online service architecture and codebase bad enough, that a team of devs and devops/SREs/ops, or even just a few of those dudes, couldn't get something mostly operational out the door in a few day(!) hackathon at most. Even without planning for all this. And how this would skyrocket the costs especially mystifies me. Surely asset development, staffing, operational costs and marketing are the cost drivers here? How would you surpass ALL or even ANY of that? Just doesn't make sense!

I guess the (media) battle is on now.

In some ways I think even this statement by the trade association is already a win - the initiative forced them to explicitly address topics such as private servers, which they'd rather not talk about at all. Their statement also made it easy to ask counter questions regarding offline single-player or actual player compensation on shutdown. (I love the "we understand it can be disappointing, but we give players fair notice" statement, as if players didn't pay money for this)

I don't expect a lot of support from EU politicians for the initiative, as the current Parliament is even more conservative and corporate-friendly than usual. But well, hope dies last, and at least the will of the public seems to be there. (And also the appearance of being a tech regulator has become more popular in Brussels)

So we'll see.

I don't buy these arguments. If game developers don't want to sell games that way then don't. Sell subscriptions instead. Like instead of $60 for a game, $60 one-time fee for a two-year subscription, which afterwards renews automatically in 3 months intervals at no cost until further notice. Same applies to all paid in-game content.

That way the developers can continue offering both games and subscriptions where each type makes most sense. And everybody knows what they are signing up for. People who buy a game get a game which they can play indefinitely. People who buy a subscription know the earliest possible end date and everything beyond that is just bonus.

I don't think this would have any significant impact on the industry.

Publishers would just advertise their games as coming with a 2-year subscription, or whatever. People would have the same expectations as now: the game will be supported for a couple of years, and it will be supported much longer if there's an obvious way that is profitable to the developer.

No publisher would unilaterally want to start advertising games as subscriptions, but if everyone was forced to do it, nothing changes. Perhaps an extra layer of clicking through for the user, like when we mandated all websites must have annoying cookie popups.

Most games won't need it. When every other offline game says "buy" but the games as a service one has to say "rent" for the same price, consumers will notice I think.

I think what people are saying is the opposite would happen. If this initiative makes it into law, nearly every game company will overnight make their games say "Rent" instead of "Buy", so that they can continue with their shitty practice.

And that's good.

People don't generally lie for no reason. Companies are interested in obscuring their licensing practices because they believe it might hurt them to be more transparent.

That might not be true. It might turn out that the user base doesn't see the difference between "Rent" and "Buy". But it's the user base's decision to make, not the companies.

So, even if this kind of law has no other effect other than "we use more accurate and truthful language", then it's still a net positive.

And that is totally fine, as long as people know what they are investing their time and money into.

I know that some years back, getting your mobile phone financed on two-year contracts was a normal thing. But it was a debt trap for consumers. Some EU countries noticed, and now carriers have to declare such contracts a consumer credit, and need to afford the same consumer protection to their customers as banks have for loans (in Netherlands for example registering with the BKR).

So carriers can still do that but they cannot pretend it's not a loan.

> People would have the same expectations as now

If that premise was true, why would misleading advertisement be the norm right now? Why bother?

Changing it to a subscription WOULD change perception. Most people don't understand the current status quo. When they do know, it would create a market pressure for real game ownership.

I dont think this is true. If publishers advertized 2 year license, some people would decide to not buy the license. The exact reason why they insist on calling it "buying".

The publishers that already apply the model can be forced. And some might decide to do another model instead of doing this model because it affects user’s view. This is the whole point.

Of course, was anyone expecting they would react otherwise, especially with the changes after 32bit gaming across consoles and desktop platforms.

It is all about IP, and like Hollywood nowadays, how to repackaged it in remakes and emulation.

A bit hard if we're allowed to just play the original versions.

Correct. The backends to these online games isn’t complicated, but it is protected. They want the ability to resell the entire service to another game studio to run.

This has happened a lot in the past. EverQuest, Pirates, Lots of mmos have changed studios and with that, the backend services needed to run them.

Now, that said, there are a few countries in the EU that you could reverse engineer the server and it’s totally legal. Some of the best fun I’ve had were on private WoW or Lineage 2 servers.

I think very few people (outside of the industry - important caveat) are opposed to the stated goals of the initiative:

> This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union [...] to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.

The concern that I have is that I have no idea what the actual text of the law is going to be.

You can look at laws like the DMCA, that had a reasonable purpose (made adjustments to the copyright system for the age of the internet) and a royally screwed up implementation that basically everyone can find a problem with.

It's easy to imagine that the laws that pass could be (1) completely neutered by corruption in the EU leading to regulatory capture (2) far too strong and written in a way that imposes unfair burdens on developers (which include indie devs too) or (3) bad just because of technical incompetence of the authors.

I know that there's not much I can do about those things, but that may explain the emotional reactions of some people like e.g. PirateSoftware - nobody actually knows what the resulting law will be like, and everyone familiar with the legislative system knows how bad the outputs can be.

So don’t even try because it might be bad?

Nowhere did I say or imply that - did you respond to the wrong comment by accident?

It’s kind of implied by your argument. All these concerns apply to every piece of legislation that gets concocted. What makes this topic especially effected by one’s distrust in the government’s ability?

> It’s kind of implied by your argument.

No, it's absolutely not. You're reading your own thoughts into it. Nowhere is the implication that we should do nothing.

> All these concerns apply to every piece of legislation that gets concocted. What makes this topic especially effected by one’s distrust in the government’s ability?

Because the authors are asking for public support for an initiative, and it now has a lot of public attention, with some specific people (mostly PirateSoftware) that are also publicly opposing it, and likely many more lurkers that don't want to sign it because of their concerns.

It's also the case that the more technical the topic, the more that legislators tend to screw it up, likely because of technical incompetence.

I'm elaborating the concerns so that they can get addressed. If you want more signatures, then you'd want to know what peoples' hangups are so that you can fix them.

The correct path would be to establish/find a consumer protection group to help legislative bodies craft the documents in a way that held true to the spirit of what is driving this initiative. The industry will do the same to thing. So as the documents are drafted the feedback from the public’s standpoint continues to have a voice. Hopefully that happens but it’s too early in the process to say and it requires funding too.

The hang ups can’t simply be nihilistic complaints about the government’s abilities without any solutions proposed. That’s an argument for doing nothing

> establish/find a consumer protection group to help legislative bodies craft the documents

Yes, that's one of the ways to address this. Active consumer participation is still necessary, though, as the consumer protection group can still lose its way.

> The hang ups can’t simply be nihilistic complaints about the government’s abilities without any solutions proposed. That’s an argument for doing nothing

No, it's factually not. If I order soup from a restaurant, and it arrives and is terrible and I complain, I do not have to specify what the chef did wrong, or how they should fix it, for my complaint to be valid - and the fact that I'm not providing the solution does not mean that I think nothing should be done. Similarly, I don't have to point out what the solution has to be for my complaint to be valid, and that does not mean that I think nothing should be done. That's just insane.

To correct your analogy to apply to prior comments, you didn’t like your soup so you tell the chef you have no confidence in their ability as a cook and should never even try to sell food because you have such little confidence in his abilities to create an dish anyone would enjoy eating. That’s nihilistic

You're just being obtuse. I'll serve up the final correction here. You hear about a restaurant that sometimes serves up really good food, but sometimes serves up really bad food. People online are choosing to ignore the bad food and praising the restaurant, and also becoming violently angry against anyone who brings up the bad food. Conductr comes along and says "we shouldn't even TRY the food here?" which is totally helpful and relevant.

> to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.

Yeah, I like the general goal, but I worry about the corner cases; is an MMO “functional/playable” if you just release a localhost server? Are we forcing indie shops to pay for servers indefinitely now? Great way to ensure no more indie MMOs get built if that ends up being the text interpretation.

And, as you say, the question you should always be asking about EU legislation - how does this affect the small/medium shops’ competitiveness? Counterintuitively, compliance can hit the small guys relatively harder and entrench the big guys.

Not to say that we shouldn’t try to fix the problem. But agree that skepticism about EU regulations has some historical merit.

> compliance can hit the small guys relatively harder and entrench the big guys

This is almost always the case, actually. Regulation and compliance are taxes on the productivity of an organization. And the "shape" of the tax is mostly flat - the burden is sublinear in the size of the organization, so the relative effects on smaller companies are bigger. And smaller companies already have significantly less available resources, and especially less legal resources (no lawyers on retainer), to handle it.

Obviously that doesn't mean that regulation shouldn't be passed, just that you have to write it very, very carefully - think embedded systems rather than web frontend - minimizing complexity and aggressively red-teaming it for loopholes and edge-cases.

OTOH an indie dev probably isn't running some massive server farm with 20 linked microservices that would be hard to replicate.

Yes, that's true, but to be clear, even if the actual compliance isn't that much of a problem (as you correctly point out here), just determining how to comply is burdensome and may require expensive experts (or even lawyers) to verify - see the confusion around GDPR, for instance.

Again, I'm not saying that it isn't worth regulating, just that you need to design the regulation as carefully as possible. You'd probably agree that the best regulation is that that minimizes burden on companies while maximizing positive effects for consumers, no?

> is an MMO “functional/playable” if you just release a localhost server? Are we forcing indie shops to pay for servers indefinitely now?

The man behind Stop Killing Games has made it perfectly clear that they do not want to force game developers to continue operating servers. Rather, as you suggest, releasing server binaries would be acceptable. Although a mere "localhost" server would likely not be sufficient, because (if I interpret your suggestion correctly) it takes away the multiplayer funtionality of the game. I think it would be reasonable to require developers to release online multiplayer capable server binaries.

> I think it would be reasonable to require developers to release online multiplayer capable server binaries.

Not a game dev but would there be concerns about forcing devs to ship binaries for a codebase that was previously purely SaaS and proprietary, and likely containing logic that is a reusable for future games? The edge cases here seem a little gnarly. (Maybe it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, how much competitive advantage comes from the MMO server code? I gather it can be tricky to do some things well like AoC pushing high player counts.)

The game itself also contains code that might be reusable for a future project. Among other things, the game engine itself. They have no problem shipping that to people though? Why is server code any different?

Perhaps mandatory Docker container packaging for EOL multiplayer games?

Ross addresses these things in his videos on the initiative. For one, the game doesn't have to be 100% functional, it just has to do a bare minimum.

They might not even need to release server binaries, even. I would think releasing documentation on how the network commication runs, and adding a box to enter a server IP into the client at EOL would be sufficient. The community, if enough people care, would then be empowered to write their own server implementation without needing the reverse engineering step.

Online games like MMOs and live service games generally have tooling for developers to run the game on their local machines for obvious reasons. Releasing said tooling would also be an option.

This vague handwringing isn't any better. None of us know what the law will end up turning into. But we shouldn't let that stop this being addressed properly in our political institutions. That's what they're there for.

Also, bringing up the DMCA is sort of rich, since it was always just a vehicle for the biggest content companies in publishing, film, television, music and software to protect their property online.

Now we have something that was brought into being by consumers and may finally do something to curb anti-consumer behaviour by companies like this, and you're against it because you have no idea what it'll look like. I just can't, man. What's even the point of legislation if we have to be afraid it'll all be corrupted? Why even have political institutions at all at that point?

And if the end result of this legislation is that videogames in EU aren't licensed or sold but are instead all streamed and you are instead just buying access to stream a game, then what? TO me it's just amazing how the advocates for SKG ignore any possibility that it could make things much worse that they already.

> And if the end result of this legislation is that videogames in EU aren't licensed or sold but are instead all streamed and you are instead just buying access to stream a game, then what?

Then the industry is honest, and I can spend my money on an indie developer that doesn't do that.

Companies that do that will likely be completely outcompeted by studios that give a shit.

If that business model worked so well, they'd all be doing it already. It'd cause piracy to cease, and (mostly) render the need for anti-cheat redundant, barring external image recognition cheats that are already tough to stop anyway.

> imposes unfair burdens on developers (which include indie devs too)

Any such law should include a carve-out so that indie devs and small startups aren't impacted because just the need maintain compliance paperwork can be a burden. Carve out thresholds can be based on a combination of product revenue and units sold. Similar carve outs should generally be part of a lot of government regulations because startup entrepreneurship is so key to job growth, innovation and ensuring more choice for consumers. The best way to keep huge companies honest is making them keep earning their success by enabling smaller, hungrier new competitors laser focused on better serving customer needs.

That said, I do generally agree with your broader point that how regulations are written and enforced matters a lot. Too many start with good intentions but end up being sidestepped, subverted or triggering unintended consequences. If a "Stop Killing Games" regulation is drafted I think it should be narrowly targeted and conceived with the understanding that both the tech and business models will continue rapidly evolving and the market will quickly adapt to sidestep or subvert whatever new rules are put in place. That will likely mean that, realistically, an effective regulation probably shouldn't be as expansive or all-encompassing as we might be imagining from our armchairs.

I'd be happy if the focus was simply on getting large game companies to clearly commit up front what their commitments are over time by listing how long will each aspect of the game will continue to work by type (ie single-player offline, multiplayer self-hosted, multiplayer cloud, feature updates, security updates). Then company management and investors will know to set aside funds to cover server fees for that time period after the final sale. This isn't new or burdensome. Large companies already have accounting practices to accrue future liabilities on their books. When they sell future enterprise services to other companies there's a contract with financial reserves and revenue recognition. Selling a game to consumers with the expectation of future online delivered services should have a similarly spelled out commitment and appropriate financial reserves.

In reality, this may mean some companies choose minimum commitments that we'd all feel are far too short but as long as the consumers know up front what the commitment actually is, the free market can determine over time what costs consumers are willing to pay for which commitments. I expect some companies will try to minimize their financial commitment by making games which could obviously have offline single-player aspects always require online for everything or be subscription-only and only commit to offer the subscription for 1 month after purchase. Let them try and see how the market reacts. Government regulation isn't some magic wand we can wave to just force companies to "do the right thing" or, more specifically, make the products we want and sell them to us on the terms we'd prefer. Companies will either pass the increased costs on to consumers or not go into that business at all. Realistic regulation should focus first on two things: 1) Ensuring a level-playing field for fierce competition and, 2) clear up front disclosure of what the deal is.

Oh no! Not developer choice!

This is the weakest argument I've ever heard. Compare:

"Stop burning coal? That curtails factory owner choice!" etc. etc.

I'm sure the people behind the movement would love to point out that, yes, that is the entire point.

They claim to protect from illegal content and unsafe communities, but those sound like desperate grasps at straws that are easily disproven. They also misrepresent the basic demands of the petition, as online only games are still allowed.

Just open CS2 and go to the community server tab. There’s a little notice telling you that you might be exposed to unmoderated and unsafe content.

Apparently in 2025 corporate lawyers have forgotten how to write a disclaimer. It’s all BS to protect their short term games.

I would spend way more money on games if they didn’t have a ~5 year life span.

> illegal content and unsafe communities

Those are two arguments which will win over europeans and euro politicians.

Of course it does. The whole idea of "Stop Killing Games" is that developers should not be able to summarily kill off a game that people have invested time and money into, just because it's not making them enough money going forward.

Developers should absolutely not have that choice. It's fine if you want to run a live service game where the optimal experience happens during active support. However, unless you as a dev are willing to refund every single purchaser of the game, in full, when you discontinue a game, then you are stealing from purchasers. Moreover, even if you are willing to give a full refund to all players, it's really shitty to just rip an experience away from people, never to be experienced again (whether in a watered-down or limited form, or not).

It's the same reason I don't agree with perpetual copyright, nor a copyright owner's right to suppress a work's availability. In almost all jurisdictions, copyright is intended to be a limited time right, with the rights eventually entering the public domain. If people can't access the work when it would become public domain, then that work is effectively stolen from the public in a way that mere non-commercial copyright infringement can never be theft.

Also, part of the issue is the death of private servers. Game publishers have chosen to revert to centralized servers, rather than allowing private servers. Thus they have also taken on the additional cost of running those servers. Older games can be easily played on private servers to this day, as the community of any moderately popular game will almost always step up to provide the service. Even games you might not expect would be that popular or games that never had private servers - for example, Rock Band 3 only ever supported connecting to Harmonix servers in an official capacity. This support is also discontinued (they still operate the Rock Central servers, but only for Rock Band 4). Yet right now, thanks to reverse engineering, there is a fan-operated server that you can connect to with a slightly modified game. You can even download the fan-created server software (written in Go) and stand up your own server for your friends or for whatever other reason (maybe you want to run a small tournament and use a private GoCentral server to record statistics and have a private leaderboard).

> Game publishers have chosen to revert to centralized servers, rather than allowing private servers. Thus they have also taken on the additional cost of running those servers.

I fail to see the principal difference between a "centralized" and a "private" server here. Just publish the code for running the "centralized" server, as you would do for the private server, and add a possibility to configure which server to connect to in the game?

I could see this becoming an issue when the server is hardwired to require some publisher SSO login, but given how everyone + their dog uses OIDC nowadays, a requirement to make authentication interoperable is only a very mild restriction.

> just because it's not making them enough money going forward.

sometimes it's not even that -- it's to prevent the older version from competing with new releases. See Overwatch 1 -> 2 or Counter-Strike 1 -> 2

It's such a bizarre counter argument. The whole point of the movement is that developers are choosing to harm the medium and should stop.

It's the publishers forcing their hand, to be fair. I don't think any developer who worked for years on a game is thrilled about it not being playable in the future.

This goes beyond games and calls for regulation of anything sold as a product, but working more like a subscription service. Similar issues also affect an increasing number of appliances that rely on apps and connect through manufacturer-hosted services. If the manufacturer goes out of business or shuts down a service, fully working devices can lose some or all of their features. Manufacturers should be required to open up their devices and provide a documented local API, if for no other reason, then to reduce the huge amount of electronic waste created by making devices artificially obsolete.

I think that approaching the problem from the perspective of a physical product, like a smart lightbulb that doesn't work anymore because the manufacturer shut down its servers, would be easier for non-technical people to understand and would likely have a better chance of success.

Vote with your wallet, there are thousands of games that don't do shady stuff.

There's fewer games to vote on every year, as conglomerates like Microsoft out vote your wallet a billion times over every time they buy a game studio to embrace, extend and then extinguish.

If looking at AAA publishers, maybe. The indie game scene continues to pump out games, some good, some bad, at half or less of cost of the AAA games. They won't be as polished, but many still deliver an exceptional experience.

there are more games than ever, it's just that microsoft, ubisoft, etc are spending billions on actual psychologists to ensure the populace remains apathetic towards them.

I don't care how smart you are, how much self control you have, whatever, in the face of billions of dollars, voting with your wallet does not stand a chance. The house always wins.

Huh, that's funny, I've never bought a Ubisoft game. I guess I'm the first person ever who's resistant to those psychologists.

Do you not understand that the people on HN, you and me included, are far from the average consumer? We care about things most people really don't.

They said:

> I don't care how smart you are, how much self control you have, whatever, in the face of billions of dollars, voting with your wallet does not stand a chance. The house always wins.

Yes, you're totally right that HN users are far from the average consumer, but they weren't talking about the average consumer - they were making a categorical statement that all consumers have no self-agency and are mind-controlled by these companies, and I was pointing out how clearly insane that claim is.

That's a ludicrously ungenerous interpretation of what they said. Of course they weren't making an ontological claim. And I'm sure you know that too.

Yup

Something I am noticing more and more is how stagnant the North American game industry is. Meanwhile Europe and Japan are still killing it

Larian with BG3 - Europe Cd Projekt with Witcher and Cyberpunk - Europe

Nintendo rocking on as normal Monster hunter wilds and the RE remakes? Capcom, Japan

Elden Ring and Nightreign. FromSoft, Japan

Helldivers 2. Arrowhead Studios, Sweden

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Warhorse Studios, Czech

I cannot remember the last time I bought a new game and had a blast with it from a North American studio. Certainly not a AAA studio anyways

You mean you're not a fan of the latest reskin of CoD, or the latest reskin of CS with even more loot boxes?

> Certainly not a AAA studio anyways

Almost every time I have spent more than $35 on a game in the past year I have wound up regretting it. It seems as though the quality of games typically increases til that point (exceptions exist, Terraria) and then declines sharply (again, exceptions exist). It has turned out to be a useful signal to be way more careful about a purchase for me.

I refuse to buy any game, AAA studio or indie, that costs more than $25.

I have shit to do and not a lot of time to game, so I can be patient for games to go on sale.

>Vote with your wallet

I bought Minecraft from Mojang, years later I am forced to setup a Microsoft account to play the game, or risk downloading a cracked version. They did not offer a refund. Minecraft is a video game where you need to login even if you do not play online. (maybe things changed , I think this MS account thing was a few years back, it worked for my account but I read of people having big issues because some MS assholes ahd to force the Java edition players to use an MS account)

This behaviour should not be legal.

Minecraft is at least reasonably easy to play offline, the account mostly only stores your skins. That said, it may require a third-party launcher now.

But you won't be able to access some public servers for a game you paid for without the account.

I don't remember this being the case, you could reuse your old MC purchase when they made the transition over.

the mojang to minecraft.net transition, yeah. the minecraft.net to microsoft transition, no. https://youtu.be/rUFDRAEducI

I was forced to not only setup a Microsoft account, but hand over my phone number - after creating an account without a phone number and transferring my Minecraft license over, they immediately locked my account.

Someone at Microsoft should go to jail for this.

Its not always obvious when you buy them which games will still be around a few years later.

Some singleplayer titles from just a few years ago are no longer playable. (Hello, Ubisoft). Meanwhile there are MMOs like guild wars 1, released 20 years ago, still playable today.

Right, exactly. Game companies don't advertise when you buy a game that its single-player features will only work as long as the servers stay up. I'm sure they don't want to. But if players aren't made aware of that fact then it's hard for them to make informed purchasing decisions.

It's obvious enough if you buy on Steam. Any game that says it needs it's own DRM or an account with the publisher is a nope.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was such a breath of fresh air in this regard. If you just want a reasonably priced, good game with no shady stuff but still that AA (arguably AAA) experience I can’t recommend it enough.

And people are. Games sales are slumping in response to a decade of predatory dark patterns and simply not giving the audience what they're asking for.

Just keeping the games playable is a singular issue and in the noise. It's a good issue to single out for regulation.

Or just sign the initiative, so that you maybe don't have to abstain to achieve this goal? I don't understand this mentality.

Americans have been conditioned to blame individuals for everything wrong in society.

Look where decades of "voting with our wallets" led us. How some people can still utter that sentence unironically is beyond me at this point.

Your claim that there has been "decades of voting with our wallets" is laughable. Nobody I know who plays games decides to buy them or not based on ideological reasons - they just buy the things that are popular or that their friends play. There's extremely little engagement on these issues.

But it's true. Most people pay for what's being currently promoted. So "voting with wallet" doesn't really work, because you will be outvoted by majority of people who don't know what they're getting into. That's why gacha games and other lootbox-heavy ones are most profitable. This is where "vote with your wallet" brought us.

You're confused about the meaning of "voting with your wallet".

> But it's true.

It's not - you're talking about something else entirely. When @umvi says "vote with your wallet" they mean buy things whose values you support. You, and GP @thrance, are not describing that - you're describing people buying things on autopilot without respect to values - the exact opposite. So, no, we haven't had decades of "unsuccessful voting with your wallet" because consumers have been mentally checked out for decades.

> So "voting with wallet" doesn't really work, because you will be outvoted by majority of people who don't know what they're getting into

That's literally how normal democracy works - if the majority of the populace is uninformed, then they'll vote in an uninformed way, and the solution is for them to get informed and start doing research and making conscious decisions. That's what @umvi means when they say "vote with your wallet." - active participation instead of passive existence.

You're confusing the lack of active participation with the presence of it.

The problem with democracy: people on average have average intelligence and you don't solve difficult problems with average intelligence. That being said, it's still better than anything else we've tried.

Right - I'm also hand-waving a bit here and lumping democratic republics in with "true democracies" for the sake of simplicity, but you're absolutely correct.

>You're confused about the meaning of "voting with your wallet".

>You're confusing the lack of active participation with the presence of it.

Probably.

>you're describing people buying things on autopilot without respect to values

That is probably where I am confused - I'm not sure that people "do not respect the values". It's either that they have values, but those values are imposed, or it's what you describe, that people just don't think deeply about it. And from my personal experience I really can't tell. But when I read the web, everyone apparently figured it out, and do indeed consciously decide.

Then why do you call it "vote with your wallet" and not "buy stuff you like"? If you don't intend for your purchase to weigh in on anything, why do you call it "voting"?

If that's truly what you mean by "vote with your wallet", then yeah, we're on the same page. I almost only play solo games, most of them indie.

Voting with your wallet does work, possibly others don't share in your tastes.

It would be fair, but when you go online, everyone (and I mean everyone) shares their distaste for modern gaming industry and its practices. Yet, those practices still bring the most money to this day. So does it mean that people go against their principles? Or is it just another "vocal minority" situation?

There's some evidence that it's a vocal minority. Taking a game made by a terrible company that has a lot of dark patterns, Call of Duty Black Ops 6 has sold at least 491 thousand units (https://steamdb.info/app/1938090/charts/) (certainly far higher, but apparently they haven't published the sales figures, so this is the best lower bound that we get), yet you see far fewer than that number of Reddit posts and comments and upvotes, or upvotes on YouTube videos about these terrible practices.

I suspect that the majority of those who play games would rather these mechanics not exist, but don't feel strongly enough about it to boycott those games. I don't have evidence for this beyond my interactions with personal friends and their "mild apathetic unhappiness" for lack of a better term.

There's also definitely a number of people that are willing to accept some compromise to either play a very well-made game, or one that their friends are playing. I hate Epic Games and its practices, for instance, but I'm willing to play Fortnite with friends if they ask me, and I justify that by telling myself that I'm never going to buy anything with their premium currency.

You proved my point: "voting with your wallet" will never work. DLCs, microtransactions, lootboxes... They all got normalized alarmingly quickly, despite numerous calls to "vote with your wallets" every single times. We need regulations, isolated individuals have no power against a system built to extract the most out of them.

> You proved my point: "voting with your wallet" will never work. DLCs, microtransactions, lootboxes... They all got normalized alarmingly quickly, despite numerous calls to "vote with your wallets" every single times.

Factually incorrect. There are numerous instances of consumers complaining, leaving bad reviews on Steam, refunding games, or stopping buying games because of their values, and the studios/producers actually changed the thing. Helldivers 2's mandatory PSN account is one of the most recent instances of that happening.

Factually, consumers will band together to take collective action, and when they do, there are positive effects. The problem is apathy, not lack of power.

> We need regulations, isolated individuals have no power against a system built to extract the most out of them

This is literally self-contradictory. If individuals can't "vote with their wallets" to achieve change (which, as I described above, empirically does happen), then individuals in a democracy also can't vote to enact their will on the system - and those regulators are appointed by those elected representatives.

Make up your mind - does voting work, or does it not?

> Factually incorrect.

How. You only gave anecdotal evidence of some instances where enough complaining got consumers a little concession. Meanwhile, DLCs, microtransactions and lootboxes went from "totally inacceptable" to "absolutely bog standard" in a few years. Do you deny that at each step of this process, many people called to "vote with your wallet"? Do you deny that it failed miserably and that the game industry keeps getting away with more and more, in spite of it?

> This is literally self-contradictory. If individuals can't "vote with their wallets" to achieve change (which, as I described above, empirically does happen), then individuals in a democracy also can't vote to enact their will on the system - and those regulators are appointed by those elected representatives.

Literally straw-manning my point. I should have emphasized "isolated". To me calls to "vote with your wallet" are akin to a single worker demanding a raise or better working conditions. Without a union, they're out of luck. On the other hand, a collective effort to change the law like "Stop Killing Games", now we're talking.

> You only gave anecdotal evidence of some instances where enough complaining got consumers a little concession

You're using "anecdotal" incorrectly. Your statement was ""voting with your wallet" will never work." and I provided a counterexample, meaning that your statement is factually incorrect, so you're just wrong. It's also incorrect to call it a "concession" - the players got everything they asked for - there was no compromise. There are also far more counterexamples if you cared to search the internet for a few minutes - the Skyrim paid mods incident, the League of Legends free lootbox removal, and The Crew 2 and Motorfest not having offline modes as just three more.

> Meanwhile, DLCs

Been around for decades, not just "a few years"...

> microtransactions and lootboxes went from "totally inacceptable" to "absolutely bog standard" in a few years

Yes, and? Not enough people cared to actually do anything about it. The fact is, that when people care enough, and actually put their money where their mouth is, companies either listen (as above) or go out of business (as a number of studios are today).

It's quite simple to see that when people don't buy a studio's games, the studio either changes things or goes out of business. The reason that companies get away with these practices is because people either (1) morally compromise enough to buy games with mechanisms that they don't approve of, (2) they literally just don't care, or (3) aren't even aware of the issues. The call to "vote with your wallet" is meant to encourage the compromisers to stop compromising and the apathetic to realize that they have to take action for change to happen.

If your claim is that when people make values-based purchases it doesn't affect the market or fix issues - that's just factually wrong. If your complaint is that people don't care enough to make values-based purchases - that's exactly what the call to action of "vote with your wallet" is meant to help.

> Literally straw-manning my point. I should have emphasized "isolated".

I assumed you weren't talking about isolated individuals because that's completely irrelevant to this discussion. The poster's call to action of "vote with your wallet" on a site with tens/hundreds of thousands of visitors is literally a call to collective action, so any references to isolated action is just not relevant or logically coherent.

And, because you got that part wrong, this isn't really relevant, but...

> To me calls to "vote with your wallet" are akin to a single worker demanding a raise or better working conditions

This is also completely incorrect. If an individual worker demands something from their employers, they can just get fired. The power is in the hands of the employer. In the case of games, the power imbalance is heavily skewed towards the purchasers - if you decide not to purchase a game, the studio loses on revenue, and you lose some tiny increment of entertainment. Comparing someone having to play a different game, with someone getting fired, is crazy. Those situations are categorically different.

> On the other hand, a collective effort to change the law like "Stop Killing Games", now we're talking.

Telling people to "vote with their wallets" is a collective effort, and it works. That doesn't mean you can't complement it with regulation, but anyone familiar with the legislative system knows how incredibly difficult it is to wield regulation and how much you should try to solve problems through other methods first.

> Vote with your wallet

The ratio of me hearing this vs. seeing it actually affect change is maybe 10000:1 at this point.

Why not just vote with your vote instead.

Anyone saying "vote with your wallet" is implicitly saying billionaires deserve more say in the world than you do since they have so much more in their wallet.

Tell them to fuck off.

Everywhere, license agreements that can be changed by the company at any time, pretty much for every game developer that can afford a lawyer to write up said license agreement. They could all start doing shady stuff at any time. Might still leave thousands of games, but they add up to a drop in the bucket of the overall market.

I find it really frustrating how they phrase things because there is so much BS in almost one sentence. The entire point of having a private server is so that they are no longer in control of these things.

Moreover if I am running a private server:

- It isn't their responsibility to secure players data.

- it isn't their responsibility to remove illegal content.

- it isn't their responsibility to remove "unsafe" (whatever that means) community content.

So how could they be liable?

> In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

This is pretty much disingenuous argument that "PirateSoftware" was pushing. They are pretending that a single player mode would need to be created. This isn't what is being requested.

I did some looking into this a few days ago, and I can understand the sentiment. I can't understand the proposed implementation. There is a lack of technical discourse and heavy criticism of any negative opinion. I don't want to defend big publishers, I have not bought a new AAA game in many years. I think they are user hostile.

Stop Killing Games is just way too broad. Remove online DRM checks from my single player game? Sure, I have been on board with that for a very long time. Make sure my MMO stays playable forever? You're asking for a miracle. You as a consumer need to be informed about what you're paying for. It's your job.

"Just release the server's source / binary" is a pipe-dream and I figured more people here would understand this. Modern software is super complex, distributed, entangled with external services and dependencies. Often it's not just isolated, should you be forced to release the backend serving all of your (still active) games? Has anyone considered the security implications? Should you be forced to use only libraries that you can distribute? Can you see how this may stifle creativity?

"Just state when the game will go offline" is impossible. The game will go offline when it can't be responsibly funded it anymore. Whether that's 2 or 10 years from now. If a company has to declare when your game service will expire, expect most online games to transition to a subscription model going forward. If the consumer won't have that, expect less of them to exist. It's going to backfire spectacularly. A better idea would be to mandate a minimum support window, and refunds within that window.

What constitutes a "playable state"? Is the anti-cheat in an online FPS integral to playability? Many would argue so, I'll let you think about that one. This movement is riddled with such ambiguities.

I believe if you have a financial incentive not to release source / binaries then that’s a good financial incentive to keep the servers up. If such a mandate doesn’t result in actually releasing anything but instead properly incentivizes the right behavior, I’d still say the movement had won.

> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only

No problem. Per "Stop Killing Games" initiative, you will only have to provide means for the users to still be able to play those games after you decide to pull the plug on it.

You can, for example, release the server code so that players can keep playing the game somehow, if they so desire. No need to keep supporting your online rent-seeking scheme ad-eternum after it outlived its usefulness.

We need to be frank about what those developers really want though. They want to be able to take away games they previously sold so that players move on to their shiny new online rent-seeking scheme. Allowing people to actually own the games they bought is bad for business.

Fuck this noise and fuck those developers.

If game publishers could in clear writing at time of purchase commit to a set number of years that game will be live then I think that is a good start. For example when the next live service game is released and you go to purchase it there is a clear warning that the publisher has only guaranteed the game to be live for 2 years. Personally that would prevent me from buying the game, but perhaps not others.

The idea that a publisher can sell a live service game and shut it down in 1 month with no legal repercussions is ridiculous to me.

The publisher can't do that. No one can tell the future.

They could be liable if they shut down the servers and make the purchase unusable before the end of the minimum contracted duration.

I don't disagree, but this is just one symptom of what the video game industry has become.

As someone who hadn't played video games since his youth back in the late 80s, 90s, I was astonished when I tried to get back into it a few years ago.

Kernel-level DRM, online checks, €80+ price tags, incomplete games that require DLC, and all this for rushed unfinished broken games. You keep paying though, so the game companies keep pushing ("if they'll put up with this, what else can we get away with?").

If any of this goes through in terms of legislation, it will mostly just have “buy” change into “lifetime subscription” (where as usual, “lifetime” means the lifetime of the service). I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be done, and the article itself alludes to that outcome, but it also means that it won’t stop the killing of games.

An interesting side observation:

The usual inter country struggles in the Eu might actually play out in favor of customers this time. Game development is stronger in smaller EU countries ( measured in percent of the gdp ) so big countries will not block any initiatives.

---This seems like it's being overly complicated. Isn't one of their requested options just to say that it's a "subscription" or that it may be discontinued some day when you originally "purchase" the game? ---If that option is acceptable to the stop game killing folks, why all this talk about public/private servers, security, portability, etc. ---When you sell it, just say "you are really kinda buying a subscription and we might shut it off in the future, but we'll try to give you some warning.?" ---Why would the industry be against that?

Predictable response, they'd rather have complete autonomy to decide what they will do and be the sole arbiter of consumers' rights, while gaming history disintegrates thanks to the double-tap of online-dependency shutdowns and marketplaces that make it a TOS violation to leave your library to someone.

It makes then accountable for their choices by forcing them to think of a phase-out strategy other than simply abandoning it.

To be honest... in the last 10 years, there were maybe 1 or 2 AAA games I revisited and played multiple times. The quality is getting worse and worse. Every game steals/implements well known, 20 year old mechanics from other games, the story is for 12 year olds, same old shit repeated again and again. Basically aggressive, spoiled children in adult body commandeer 100s of people and create these godawful monstrosities.

Regulation is not a good answer to bad actors when the problem is too vague. All this is going to do is create burdens the big players can skirt cat-and-mouse style while the small guys struggle beneath them (ie regulatory capture).

I don’t have a good solution but this is not it, very open to the idea that this is a clear/tactical solution and I just haven’t thought enough about it though.

Nothing about "innovation"? Just "choice"?

But as probably many other comments say, if you buy something from Ubisoft you deserve it.

Seems pretty obvious to me that if this passes, big game companies will either re-label all new releases as “subscriptions” and/or just never make a single-player game again. And mostly nothing will change. If you don’t like companies like this, don’t buy their games. There’s literally thousands of indie game companies that don’t abuse their users.

> don’t buy their games

Not a solution. Other people will buy them and outvote you with their wallets. This has already happened. People did buy The Crew, and I doubt that most of them realized that it will be closed 10 years later.

>and/or just never make a single-player game again

plenty of companies making single player games now would be fine.

What you just described is a massive improvement over the status quo.

Today, I have no idea when the game I just purchased is going to be disabled.

This movement seems similar to software licensing to me.

  proprietary -> BSD/MIT -> GPL -> AGPL

I agree with "Stop Killing Games"' vision of what games should be like. But I don't understand why people care to turn it into a movement...

There is SO MUCH choice in games nowadays, including decades of classic games, that people should simply stop supporting player-hostile companies.

Vote with your wallet doesn't work when other people still fork over the cash anyway. Look at microtranactions, universally hated, yet developers/publishers make money hand over fist because enough people are willing to pay.

So maybe it's because people are happy with renting games and don't care to keep playing them forever? I'm just wondering if the concern is shared by most consumers. Stop Killing Games could make games more expensive for the people who are happy with the sad status quo - and they could be the majority.

If current events in America have taught us anything is that "most consumers" opinions is of no importance. I want to believe in democracy but when the public education system have been attacked for decades is hard to defer to the popular opion on most things. I think most people, given the time and unbiased information would arrive at the appropriate conclusion but time and access to unbiased information are both in short supply.

If this happened all multiplayer titles would turn F2P.

People do not appreciate quite what a narrow path has to be walked by games from an IP standpoint. Code libraries, licensed property, per platform (and platform category) restrictions, general IP restrictions (not showing vehicles being damaged, or UI overlays on certain parts of licensed objects) and so on. This is why in the recent ROG Ally announcement Microsoft could not say all XBox games will run on it, because if it's a PC it's not a console, so various games will not be allowed to be sold on it as those contributing IP rights will have been split up separately.

Simply pretending these very real concerns don't exist is nonsense land. You want games with real vehicles or licensed music? This is what you have to deal with. At least these days they have learned to license music for longer than used to be the case.

how did they do it in the past? If I can put my Tony Hawks cd from the PS2 into a cd player and enjoy all the DRM music, what changed between now and then?

If music labels refuse to license out their songs like that, then if this law passes, they're going to have to suck it up and play nice again, else lose customers/publishers.

Most of that era consoles would load level data from the CD, and then play the music as cd-da audio. There was no DRM on the music, perhaps because nobody thought of it, but more likely because there wasn't quite enough computing power to do it. PS2 games could be on CD or DVD and could have had cd quality music as a data file reasonably, but PS1 probably not, and cross platform games likely would use cd audio because it's easy.

The choice for licensors was to have the music in the game and available on the cd or not.

For a modern release, DRM music tracks that only play in the game is an option.

We've also learned that the licenses are (or were) often time limited... The publisher can't make new copies after some time, without getting a new license for the audio. Sometimes that's also related to a different format.

The issue with most of what you're saying here is that all of that works the way it does because it can, not because it has to. Code libraries, for example, may essentially prohibit what is being requested by SKG because they can. However, if they couldn't then they wouldn't. The companies selling the libraries aren't going to simply shut up shop.

Which is just to say, if there's money to be made then businesses will do so within the regulatory framework.

This is part of the beauty of such a thing being a law.

If your code library, licensed property etc. does not allow companies to comply with the law, then its value is zero and you won't be able to sell it. So suddenly, all providers of such libraries etc. have to make this possible.

These concerns have been raised and addressed. Firstly, I am not sure how cars getting damaged means that multiplayer games have to become F2P - but that's not steelmanning your argument.

One of the major concerns raised has been middle are: components that developers purchase and use in their server implementation. This is often the largest hurdle to many pro-consumer outcomes: the developers can't share anything related because they don't own it.

The most likely outcome after sensible laws are passed is that the industry evolves just as it did with GDPR. Developers will look to other middlewares that are SKG compliant.

Failing that, gamers have routinely shown that they are capable of clean room implementations of server software (WoW and Genshin Impact) - all that needs be done is the client being released with all server auth disabled and some way to specify the server to use. Developers might even be required to provide basic protocol specifications. Essentially, repair it yourself instructions.

This strawman argument you have provided is exactly the same one used by Pirate Software. It relies on a highly specific interpretation of the initiative. The initiative calls for "reasonably playable state," which can have a vast number of outcomes that are different to the single one that you have chosen.

And if the cars do prohibit a game from addressing server concerns and remaining in a reasonably playable state, remove them. The game will continue to be reasonably playable following that.

Those are all just decisions the companies made. For future games, the game developers and the companies licensing IP can simply make different decisions. If a large market like the EU creates strong incentives for them, they will make different decisions.

Now, this is not necessarily the case for existing games. Revisiting existing licensing deals can be needlessly difficult. But I'm assuming the proposed regulations will only apply to new games rather than trying to force changes retroactively.

How things are doesn’t prevent how things could be. Studios could negotiate better licensing deals.

All of those things are concerns. But if video game publishers really needed to figure this stuff out in order to sell units, they would. Contracts would change. But they'd still get signed. Everyone wants money too much. The only hard part is trying to fix this stuff for games which have already signed on the dotted line. Or games which have shipped and disbanded their software teams.

But even then, can't they just opensource what they're allowed to? Even if it doesn't build, it wouldn't take the community long to rip out FMOD or whatever and replace it with working alternatives. Or submit a final patch which removed the part where games phone home before launching in singleplayer mode. Why would that interfere with the licence for 3rd party IP?

IMO if I'm "buying" the game, you can't also remotely disable the thing I bought. (And "buy" is the word they all use!). If you want to remotely disable the game at some point in the future, I'm fine with that so long as they list it very explicitly and loudly on the box. "THIS GAME ONLY PLAYABLE UNTIL 2030". Games publishers need to start being honest and upfront about what we're paying for. Its not an unreasonable ask.

> You want games with real vehicles or licensed music?

Not really if it means that I wouldn't be able to play the game in 10 or 20 years.

The number of people who want that may be higher than you think. It's the only/main reason why the FIFA-games exist.

All the more reason to have games that don't have it then? We could have a modern Sensible Soccer for everyone else who only cares about the gameplay.

anyone ever noticed how so many completely different restaurants food tastes almost exactly the same? it’s because so many of them use the exact same food suppliers to buy their food before they cook it. [0]

gaming over the last few years feels the same way. like they all taste almost the same.

> Simply pretending these very real concerns don’t exist is nonsense land.

i don’t believe this to be true at all.

if all of the things you listed are limiting game development so much, than this isn’t “progress” in the games space. if it’s really that bad, maybe we should regress, start from the basics and let some of the incredible indie studios or midsize studios take the lead who will A) bring us actual originality, not more IP rehashed for the thousandth time, B) not bleed gamers wallets dry and C) lets us actually own the thing we buy.

sooo many amazing games were made in the past that were able to do this and do it well, the difference is they didn’t cry if they “only” made $40 million in profit.

cod3 made like $400 million in the first 24 hours.

the difference now is the AAA studios are sucking all of the air out of the room and not leaving nearly as much room for midsize studios.

[0] sysco, us foods, and pfg supply an absolute massive number of restaurants in the US. sysco alone distributes to something like 700,000 restaurants.

This isn't relevant to your points, but thought I'd pipe in to your rhetorical question anyway:

> You want games with real vehicles or licensed music?

The answer is actually no.

> If you complained that it's too hard to hash the passwords entered by your users or to encrypt medical data, or that you don't feel like complying with GDPR, you'd get rightfully fined out of existence.

Hear, hear.

How would a policy for this only affect EU games? EU has other policies that affect Apple, Microsoft, Google etc. as far as I know, any company that wants to sell/offer a service in EU will need to comply with its policies.

The EU doesn't have to worry about what happens in the rest of the world. The rest of the world can benefit of this anyways.

That’s not how it works. The EU does not care about what Apple does in the US. It’s Apple’s choice to either tweak their products to adapt to the laws of their different markets or apply these changes across the board. We’ve seen that with recent iOS versions where EU regulations imposed changes, some of which were done only for devices in the EU.

For some time Microsoft had EU specific versions of Windows.

EULA sometimes differ depending on location because a lot of the bullshit software companies get away with in the US is illegal in other parts of the world.

Another extreme example is the hoops companies have to jump through to sell in China. Again, this generally does not affect the same products in the rest of the world.

It is a problem that we know how to solve.

> The EU does not care about what Apple does in the US.

Well, partially they do. For example when it comes to the Right to be forgotten, there were attempts to apply this also to data which is stored and displayed outside the EU. Only after ECJ ruling (C-507/17) such attempts were stopped.

> For some time Microsoft had EU specific versions of Windows.

Microsoft does have the N (formerly called "Reduced Media") editions of Windows created in response to legal demands from the EU, but these are available worldwide. Other than that it is the same version of Windows, which just behaves differently when it comes to browser choice etc. depending on your location.

> For example when it comes to the Right to be forgotten, there were attempts to apply this also to data which is stored and displayed outside the EU. Only after ECJ ruling (C-507/17) such attempts were stopped.

They care to the extent that the situation in the EU is resolved. They did not make any extraterritorial jurisdiction arguments like the US government did with Microsoft’s data centres in Ireland.

> Microsoft does have the N (formerly called "Reduced Media") editions of Windows created in response to legal demands from the EU, but these are available worldwide.

You are right, I got confused. The browser ballot screen was shown only in the EU, but it was not a separate product. Regarding Windows N, I don’t think the ruling forced them to sell it worldwide; it did not even stop them from selling their usual Windows versions in the EU.

If anything even comes out of this, the furthest a law could possibly go is to impose a 2 year window (after sale) in which a game needs to work as described.

A law can do much more.

Just like the law don't just require that you can return you toxic ham within 2 years of purchase.

That would already be great progress. For context Ubisofts the Crew shutdown only after 3 months of stopping sales.

It could also work as a deterrent on making dedicated servers only architecture. If you can disable dedicated servers instantly(instead of 2 years) but enable private servers that might be more cost efficient.

Rent-seeking, treaterlite publishers gonna bullshit. Not exactly a surprise they care about money most of all.

Having followed this initiative quite extensively from the beginning, the most baffling thing has been the underwhelming support from developers themselves, both from studios and individual devs.

You would think the very idea of years of your work being rendered unplayable in an instant would be enough incentive to signal boost any effort against this industry practice.

Instead, developer discourse has revolved around just how hard it would be to do what this is petition is asking for. You are an engineer for crying out loud. If you solved a problem but a new constraint arrives in the form of a law, you figure out how to solve the problem under the new constraint. Just because something is hard, doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

It's almost like flexing your skills and signalling your elite knowledge is more important to people than simply defending what's right.

I think that most developers are just afraid to voice such anti-industry opinion. Gamedev is fairly small industry, so if you piss off wrong people, you might be left without job opportunities.

I feel... uneasy about the idea. Are games art?

If so, are you comfortable telling artists what types of art they can create? I know not everyone is going to agree with me here but it feels like a slippery slope.

what a strawman. its not about "you cannot draw this" but its more like "please dont use dyes that offgas deadly fumes", a technical regulation not about substance

Talk about strawman, it's literally "I paid for something I don't like, there should be a law!" And you're comparing it to poison gas

>... it's literally "I paid for something I don't like, there should be a law!"

Is this entirely the fault of the customer, or is it that the studios have largely forced this model upon customers, leaving them with little choice?

this was not a literal comparison, wtf, but an example of a technical limitation that will be imposed by law as a counter to your "art" stupidity. You can Use alternative formulation if you cant comprehend basic methaphors: „stop using dyes that decay in 2 months“

>... it's literally "I paid for something I don't like, there should be a law!"

It's much more like "I paid for something, there should be a law so no one can take what I've paid for"

IMHO the incentives are disproportionately in favour of everyone doing something that hurts consumers (= "something that I don't like"), thus regulation in favour of consumer rights is appropriate.

There isn't a scenario where, at scale, someone can offer a product that respects consumer rights and is successful, because it's too profitable to not respect consumer rights just like it wasn't in many other cases.

art, shmart. aside the fact that a large part of art is money laundering or tax evasion, what is being asked for is more like banning radioactive or cancerous paint pigment

Depends entirely on the game. Some are art, games designed by people who love games for the sake of games. Others are things that employ the use of art for the sake of long-term financial gain.

>I feel... uneasy about the idea. Are games art?

Yes, which is precisely why they shouldn't be treated like a commodity. Nobody is telling artists what art they can make, what the initiative is about making sure public continues to have access to works of art.

Which is normal for everything that's considered to be of cultural relevance. Film studios and novelists don't get to burn libraries down the moment someone stops paying them. It's exactly because games are art that preservation and access need to be priorities. Can you imagine if Amazon started to delete books from your Kindle? (I'm pretty sure they tried that once actually, with 1984 no less)

The destruction of art is, in most civilizations, seen as completely obscene. The reason why game companies got away with it was precisely because games had a lower status.

How do you feel about art that changes over time? Temporal pieces. Plays that were only ever to be performed once?

Those are cool! They're also designed that way for a specific art-based reasoning - the temporality often has a deeper meaning.

Games designed for limited play, however, are designed that way for the sake of profit churn.

Once art get sold, it becomes a product and your customers have legal rights in that transaction

Would any art gallery pay for a piece that the artist could walk in and take away whenever they wanted?

This isn't so much about art, more about what you deserve when you pay money for something. People are still free to make whatever they want.

Yes, games are art. Which is why this is so important. Are you comfortable with destroying cultural heritage for the sake of corporate profit? Did you even ask artists working in the game industry what they think about this?

> are you comfortable telling artists what types of art they can create?

Yes, absolutely. For instance, I think it's fine to prohibit artists to kill animals for the sake of making art. Or humans, but it's already outlawed.

At a macro level, killed games are a good thing for gaming companies. It creates a shortage of playable games so that new games sell and continue to make money.

The biggest competitor to the video game industry is movies (Netflix, Disney plus, etc) and past games.

Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today? If players can play thousands of high quality games for free, why bother paying for a new game?

I suppose the book industry has the same problem, maybe there are some parallels to study from that.

> Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today?

This is something we can answer pretty easily by looking at the book industry. People do enjoy novelty. The pulp sci-fi/fantasy from the 60s-80s is long forgotten save for a few masterpieces, and there is a flow of recent books that people buy and read.

> At a macro level, killed games are a good thing for gaming companies.

But they aren’t good for consumers.

Who cares? This is capitalism, it's all about capital, not consumers. Good for capital == will happen.

It would still be illegal to acquire a copy of a killed game. Their numbers would still dwindle, since they'd be limited to people who bought the game before it was killed.

Until copyright runs out.

And as we all know, the book, music and motion picture industries have all ceased operations due to the presence of copyright expiry.

I mean, Project Gutenberg and libraries exist and the literature industry hasn't died yet.

Silly that this is being downvoted, especially since the book industry comparison is an interesting one:

There will always be people like myself who enjoy older (even outdated) books, but even we still buy new books because they are part of the zeitgeist and carry new ideas/developments. It'd be the same for new video games, some people would enjoy older games, but they'd likely still pick up a similar new game that developed something novel.

I guess the real problem here is that video game companies don't want to create anything novel, not least because it's a risk.

These are weak arguments but there are valid ones why I would not think this has a footing, even if I support the attitude. What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine? You can't just rip/disable licensed items out, they may form a significant part of business code. Code and APIs would be needed to be documented. Why just games? What about abandoned Saas offerings? These restrictions might creep over.

I hate live service games like the next guy but legal advisors can bend these to form powerful counter-arguments.

I also think many comments are a bit too eager in claiming "oh just publish the code" and "oh just let users host X". It's obviously not that simple. The biggest one for me is that single player games should still be playable offline after servers have been sunset.

I'm sure that with current games, licenses were indeed acquired for a certain limited time. But if you start development and you know you'll have to sunset it according to the rules one day, I'm sure you'll come up with other licenses or just a way to strip out content like that.

What’s the problem with releasing a server executable? As far as I can tell that would be enough to get around this legislation. And I can’t imagine that to be prohibitively expensive.

What is a server executable? With a lot of modern games it could be a whole stacks worth of systems that neither the game client or server side game runtime will work without.

And which are not owned by the developer or available to be perpetually licensed.

To my understanding the idea is that if a company licenses some 3rd-party component for their game, the component would either need to be severable from the game while still leaving it reasonably playable, or the license would need to permit people who have purchased the game to use that component. This is going foward, not applying retroactively to existing games.

I think that's still fairly favorable to game publishers compared to most other purchased goods. If you manufacture an office chair and license a patented swivel mechanism, the license you acquire cannot require you to break purchasers' chairs after the license expires, nor even to go around their homes swapping out the mechanism (which analogously may still be permitted for games).

Moreover if the rightsholder for that patent had been licensing only under the terms that the purchased chair is destroyed after 5 years but then a change in consumer protection law prevents that practice, they'd need to license it out under more reasonable terms (like you can only sell the chairs with the mechanism for 5 years, but there's no limit on how long people can use the mechanism in their purchased chairs) - otherwise they'd get no business.

> If you manufacture an office chair and license a patented swivel mechanism, the license you acquire cannot require you to break purchasers' chairs after the license expires, nor even to go around their homes swapping out the mechanism (which analogously may still be permitted for games).

The big difference here is that you’re applying B2C terms on B2B licenses. This would essentially ban enterprise B2B licenses for video game software which is insanity

> The big difference here is that you’re applying B2C terms on B2B licenses.

Both are cases of B2B licensing with the latter business then selling a product on to consumers.

> This would essentially ban enterprise B2B licenses for video game software which is insanity

I don't see how. If for instance some company develops an audio processing library, they can still license it out to a game development company for a limited time - just that the license would be "the company can no longer sell games with this technology after the license expires", opposed to anything that would prevent functioning of the already-sold games. Or rather, they could stipulate the latter in their license, but then their market would be limited to game development companies willing to patch it out after the license expires.

Yes it can.

Fairly notably quite a lot of publishers sell their physical books and newspapers and require retailer unsold copies to be destroyed - but they were sold to the retailer.

> Moreover if the rightsholder for that patent had been licensing only under the terms that the purchased chair is destroyed after 5 years but then a change in consumer protection law prevents that practice, they'd need to license it out under more reasonable terms (like you can only sell the chairs with the mechanism for 5 years, but there's no limit on how long people can use the mechanism in their purchased chairs) - otherwise they'd get no business.

They quite possibly already have an alternative business of licensing the component for non-game offerings that they won't jeopardise.

> Yes it can. Fairly notably quite a lot of publishers sell their physical books and newspapers and require retailer unsold copies to be destroyed - but they were sold to the retailer.

Issue is with A->B->C due to business B being unable to legally fulfill the terms that'd require them to go around consumer C's homes destroying the chair they have bought (even if such destruction is hidden in some fine-print, given decent consumer protection laws). Some business B can still agree to terms impacting themselves (and as a business, typically have greater capacity to review/negotiate contracts), like destroying their unsold stock.

> They quite possibly already have an alternative business of licensing the component for non-game offerings that they won't jeopardise.

I think generally it's a large enough market (especially if this eventually expands beyond games to all purchased software, which I hope to see) that existing suppliers would adapt to either allow their component to be easily severed/mocked, or accept some probably-long-outdated version of their component being included in end-of-life releases (as it would for client-side components), else an alternative would emerge to fill that void.

Saas offerings are safe as they don’t let you Buy a thing. They’re very transparently a service. Same with timed licenses. It’s clear what you’re paying for. Most of the time.

With games it’s often not the case. You buy them and then at unspecified moment you might lose a significant portion of functionality or the whole game. At the time you buy a game you don’t know if it’s for a time, what time, or what will stop working.

When I bought WoW it was very clear to me I was buying a service. If blizzard decided after 2 years it wasn’t sustainable and to shut down the game at no point would I be entitled to own it. It was clearly a license to access their service, as long as it exists. Same for any other MMORPG

You can host offline servers of older mmos easily. I had my own lineage 2 private server in middle school. Private online servers too. Wow classic became a thing because private vanilla servers were incredibly popular.

You should be able to do this for any game. I understand them fighting it during the games lifetime.

And what about a single-player game that relies on the company's server being online in order to allow you to play it?

The dev, having access to source code, issues the final patch that disables that feature. Better yet, the dev, having access to source code, never implements this feature in the first place as it doesn’t improve the player experience in any shape or form.

Well thats more or less what people are asking for with this.

Yea I think the problem is that people don't realize how expensive the upkeep of live games are.

Most new releases rely on Multiplayer, the publishers have to come up with creative ways to monetize it.. so they introduce cosmetics, stores, etc in order to fund the ongoing development and cost.

This causes a backlash and eventually the game gets dropped because people don't want to pay a subscription.

Why not apply it to Saas? If you sold lifetime licenses and you don't want to run it anymore, just let your customers self host it. Even better if you can open source it.

If it's really impossible for you to allow a game to remain playable after you abandon it, the only reasonable option is to not sell it at all. Instead you can rent it, with the length of the rental clearly stated up front. Advertising a rental as a sale should be illegal.

Who defined playable? Take Diablo 3 and 4. They are shared world games, are they playable without them? Maybe to you’d but to me they’re not. world of Warcraft has a rich questing experience which doesn’t require playing with other people - is it ok if they just switch off multiplayer content? That’s a different game, IMO.

> What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine?

It's ok, the engine will adjust it if big studios can't use it otherwise. It's just people having to talk to each other.

> Code and APIs would be needed to be documented.

Why? Nobody is talking about forced opensourcing.

> the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers

Nice way to make publishers stop making multiplayer services available to the EU in the first place because deactivating it is illegal when costs outweigh profits.

Sounds good to me! EU gamers will not be taken advantage of.

Great, maybe it will foster innovation among indie studios.

I'm fine with that. Others will come and fill the void.

this has already been addressed but just for you.

they won't leave the biggest global market with almost 500 million potential buyers because they can't rug pull anymore, even if they somehow suddenly don't like money anymore others will gladly take there place.

the same "argument" has been thrown at GDPR which now every single corporation follows.

> Even the singleplayer components [of Ubisoft’s “The Crew (2014) were unusable when the servers were turned off]: [Y]ou just wanting to race around cars in a world with you and other NPCs in it, is no longer viable. Essentially, you didn't "buy" the game, but in a sense were "renting" it for an indeterminate amount of time, a lease that expired due to the publishers and developers no longer wanting to provide that service for you.

Probably true! There is likely some additional revenue that the publisher gets from running servers, even for single-player mode. The question then is what will change in these games if that revenue is no longer there to fund them? Will the quality be lower? Will the price be higher? Will the publishers release new games less frequently? Maybe they just don’t make single-player games anymore?

Honestly? I think we can do without these predatory practices even at the cost of some games.

And I somehow doubt there’s revenue to make off these single player games being online dependent, because the most probable ways simply wouldn’t fly in Europe due to consumer protections.

Most likely it’s just “anti-piracy” or something like that.

Maybe they just stop adding hard requirements for online connectivity to their single-players games, which is something which takes more effort to do in the first place?

I worry that they just stop completely shipong single-player mode as that seems easiest.

That is fine. Other companies will fill that void. There are plenty of small indy companies that make great single-player games, that could benefit from the attention.

This might happen to so extent but a big part of the market is single player games, so those companies would also lose a large portion of their profit

Ok, but the context of the article (which I quoted) is multi player games with a single player mode. Of course single player games don’t need and often don’t have a server, so whether or not they make up a large part of the market is irrelevant here.

I work for a game company. I am ardently opposed to this idea.

All you will end up with, in the best case scenario that isn't even guaranteed to happen, is extremely mediocre games for which you will have the server executable along with the client.

Whether you like it or not, thanks to piracy and competition (and yes I've heard Gabe Newell's quote on piracy), server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy, and not even just for games. And no, "just release your source code then" is not a valid rule to enforce either.

If you like video games so much but don't like the terms of serivce and price, have you tried making your own? It has never been easier to do so, and there are freely usable code and art assets on hundreds of different platforms for you to attempt.

> If you like video games so much but don't like the terms of serivce and price, have you tried making your own?

This is such and odd thing to suggest. People want to play the games they paid for, _obviously_ they aren't going to make their own game.

What you have paid for is not a physical copy of something that is guaranteed to work forever.

All you will achieve with this initiative is that that will be clearly labeled now, instead of implied.

If that's all that will happen, why do you have a problem with it?

If that was the end of the road, then I definitely don't have a problem with it. Like another poster said, it would be like labeling for cigarettes, and that is totally fine.

What I do fear however, is that they will go a step further, requiring companies to release server builds, client and server sourde code, and then of course the ultimate dream, "well no you actually can't turn it off, we require you to maintain it forever even if it loses you money because gaming is a right".

>requiring companies to release server builds, client and server sourde code

you did not read the initiative. they do not mention any of that and explicitly state that this won't be required (even if they wanted because of copyright laws).

Politics is a forward looking industry. As you can see with Trump, he went from talking about deporting so called illegal immigrants to deporting naturalized citizens.

Do not be surprised when they go from something harmless to something punitive that forces small companies out of business.

punitive won't be "break there own laws to enforce others" but nice fear mongering. copyright infringement might as well be above murder in terms of politician interest don't worry.

>What you have paid for is not a physical copy of something that is guaranteed to work forever.

untested legal ground in the EU

>All you will achieve with this initiative is that that will be clearly labeled now, instead of implied.

maybe or maybe not. creator of the infinitive has already acknowledged that its possible but still preferable to a surprise rug pull grey area.

ah, yes, for example quake3 an extremely mediocre game that has server executable along with the client? what is this argument even about?

Ok, so your idea is that we will require all companies to release server and client builds, and also the source code as well (?), at some clearly defined point in the future, if they decide to terminate the live service?

Will we also require the same of the smart fridge companies? Will we also require the same of companies that don't sell live services, such as toilets?

good idea! we need to give rights to the consumers!

I'm all for it if no industry receives a special carve out!

If I buy a smart fridge and the company that made them suddenly decided to turn them all off, then I'd definitely like the ability to turn mine back on, yes.

And no, there's no expectation of source code. That's been covered many times.

How can we ensure that if we legislate the games industry, then we also legislate all other industries with no special carve outs? That would make me much more supportive.

So your argument is that you won't support Stop Killing Games, but you'll support Stop Killing Things In General?

That's a strange stance. Even if that was your position SKG has a good opportunity to act as a stepping stone towards something grander.

Yes that's right. My opinion is that I am against legislating anything until we legislate everything.

Put yourself in the shoes of an employee or owner of some business. Would you enjoy being forced to follow certain rules of actual consequence, while others are allowed to do whatever they want?

Games and non-games don't compete, so no problem here.

We'll do so, one at a time.

> server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy

It is a legitimate business strategy... for now.

I think there’s a mid ground where industry does nothing except slap a sticker on warning people that game features will sunset in the future, making parts of the game unplayable, perhaps making some commitment like no sooner than December 31, 2030.

It will essentially be the similar thing as the Surgeon General’s warning on a pack of cigarettes or the Parental Guidance logo on an album. The are US things, not sure if EU has similar.

Completely and thoroughly agree. That is a very reasonable outcome.

This is already one of the proposed solutions. Although you would have to state a specific date as not to mislead consumers. I would then have to decide if paying 80$ for a game I won't be able to play in the next 5 years is worth it.

> If you like video games so much but don't like the terms of serivce and price, have you tried making your own?

No need to go that far, there's plenty of games sold with better terms of service than the ones your company offers.

Forcing companies to be upfront about this aspect will help concerned consumers choose these instead of yours.

And which company is that?

e.g. Factorio. e.g. Hades.

Both games available offline and DRM-free.

How do they handle piracy, unless they don't? In which case, very good for them that they have such a great group of supporters. I am not sure if we should require every company to behave in such a way, and simply let consumers reward such companies with their money? This is just a fundamental economic model argument that I apply to any industry, except maybe baby formula or something.

> How do they handle piracy, unless they don't?

So your point is that you need to fuck your paying customers in order to mildly annoy people who don't buy your games?

Besides, the proposal doesn't even require you not to have anti-piracy servers; it only requires you to avoid bricking the game once you turn of the servers.

> simply let consumers reward such companies with their money?

For that you would need to be upfront about it.

It is about truthful advertising. If you are selling a video game, you aren't allowed to yank access to that game away from users.

If you wanna do a subscription or a rental, you have to call it that.

I don't see why forcing companies to stop lying is a bad idea.

Your games are mediocre now.

It's better to have a mediocre game that one can play, than an exceptional game that one can't.

You're free to make games now, and yet it's most often hard to justify money for a game that isn't a skin on a version of solitaire (on sale).

That's how bad your industry is. So, please, with your warning. As if you have work product to bargain with.

You act as if your industry is busy. Outside of a couple of exceptional studios, and infinite sequels on literally only a few popular formulas (whether or not these formulas are good is another discussion), your industry is largely non-productive. If we are utilizing your metric of good vs mediocre.

I agree with you that there is a mountain of shit in the gaming industry.

Is any other industry different? Are Instagram and Tiktok literally not brainwashing hundreds of millions of people? Do defense companies care that innocents are murdered with their weapons? Do airplane companies face any enforceable moral judgment that they encourage relatively rich people to engage in idle leisure in other countries rather than being productive with their time for society, to which they owe some level of production in exchange for the society that raised them?

The argument knows no bounds. It is a matter of taste.

Points for the most insane answer possible, no offense. No idea what you are talking about.

Given that you work for the video game industry, perhaps your comment is in a sense perfect.

The last part of it is just me going off the rails, but do you really think only the game industry is bad?

Good luck with that really weird approach.

>is extremely mediocre games for which you will have the server executable along with the client.

opposed to absolutely nothing? yeah i think we can do with "mediocre"

>video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy

if they aren't misleading customers about it sure. make the game a subscription and you can shut it down whenever you want :)

>And no, "just release your source code then" is not a valid rule to enforce either.

nobody said that. the petition explicitly leaves out the "how" because it could possibly run against existing copyright laws.

>have you tried making your own?

ad hominem and irrelevant to the topic. i don't need to have every build a roof to be against building it with asbestos.

Re subscription marketing messaging, totally agree.

Re mediocre, ok that's fine.

Re the "how", then we arent really talking about anything here. Until there is a how, there is nothing to firmly agree or disagree with, so we have to talk in hypotheticals, which we are, and which is semi valuable.

Re making your own, when a company sells you a toilet and it breaks, you fix it yourself or buy a new one. When your 1999 game doesnt run on Windows 11, you fix it yourself or you buy a new one. If you require companies to fix it for you, the small ones will go bankrupt and the big ones will find a loophole.

>the small ones will go bankrupt and the big ones will find a loophole.

you mean the loop hole that was industry standard before 2000 and a handful of dudes in basements solved?

Sorry I am not sure what you mean, but I would actually really like to know what you are referencing

private server where the default in the past. that's why games that are 30 years old like quake, doom and unreal tournament (all created by dev teams the size of about a dozen with as much funding as current indie games) can still be played to this day and as long as software allows it forever with 0 effort or cost by the developers.

I completely and thoroughly agree with this suggestion. It shouldn't be a requirement, however. You should reward companies who do this with your money, and it should be clearly labeled that you will or will not be receiving this.

It seems you didn't read the initiative text. The initiative does not force game Devs to release the code or make specific technical demands.

Game Devs only have to make a plan for when the game gets shut down to still allow the users to be able to play the game. How that is archived can be decided by the developers. Of course the law could be different in the future.

But most people do agree that it is bad to intentionally break games that people payed money for. All they are basically are asking for, is that games are built in a way that they can be enjoyed as long as possible (maybe supported by the community). Is that not also in the intention of the game developers?

It might be the intention of some game developers. I can tell you however that the intention of the people who run my company is to make as much money as possible.

My opinion is that you, as a consumer, should reward the companies who treat you best with your money. You should not require the government to do it for you, because if you do, the thing you end up with might not be the thing you receive, sadly.

And yes, this logic holds for most industries, but not all. I for one think there should be stringent rules for food processing, since that can actually kill you, and yet still putrid beef and tainted baby formula are sold on a relatively frequent basis.

Yup, consumers should predict future. Classic liberal logic. Vote with your wallet tactics has it's limitations.

> Whether you like it or not, thanks to piracy and competition ... server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy

The only people you're effecting are legitimate players. Pirates crack the games and have an easier time for it. Unless you're talking about multiplayer games, which wasn't the target of the proposal (though even there I'd argue it's definitely doable).

> I work for a game company

You work for a shit game company.

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