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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

It's not "demanding others make things for you". It's demanding they don't remotely disable the thing you already bought.

Imagine you buy a car, then a few years later the company remotely disables it because they're selling a newer model. Without giving you the money back of course. That's what's happening with games. And not just multiplayer: tons of single player games have been killed this way. The whole SKG thing started with The Crew, whose single player campaign (a massive thing with tons of content) got remotely yanked by the publisher.

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I don't believe a ton of true single player games have been killed this way. For multiplayer games your car analogy completely fails. The car company doesn't pay the road tax, or gas, or your mechanic.

There have been a few, and they make fantastic examples to bring up when explaining the concept to people without a broad understanding of the market.

There were about 20,000 games released on Steam last year how many worked that way?

Why would it be acceptable for a single one to do this?

And why do you think that games released last year are a good yardstick when we're talking about games being shut down at the end of their lifetime?

I'm trying to understand the scope of the issue.

The reason I picked the last year is to see what the current landscape is. If this is a common practice in need of regulation then I'd expect a large number of current titles present the issue. If it's a 'few' then how many exactly does that imply? If we're talking less than ten then that would be less than 0.05% of games released last year (let alone the number releaded over the last ten).

Someone linked this page which has 440 dead games over the past few decades which is 2.2% of the output of 2025 but obviously includes many more years, mobile, console releases and so on: https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list

There are several fundamental issues with your approach.

First: unless the average lifetime of a "dead game" is below two months, your focus on games from last year will exclude most dead games. To give an analogy - you're trying to determine how many humans die before twenty years old, and determining this data by looking at babies born in 2025.

Second: the list is unlikely to be complete, especially since many supporters of SKG most likely haven't heard of it. I have seen many people advertising SKG towards their friends or audience, and I've never heard any of them mention this list.

Sure but this is back of the envelope and surely a question any legislators will be interested in. If you have better data I’m all for seeing it.

For the record I’m not using the number of dead games from the last year just the number of released games in the last year as a point of comparison. If I used a wider period and considered more platforms than Steam that would include more games and make the percentage significantly smaller. So the bias is actually in favour of SKG with this ballpark.

I’m kind of confused. In your metaphor, what do the road tax, gas or mechanic represent?

Why is this only targeted at games and not mobile apps, app subscriptions or websites.

This pretty much removes the ability to use _any_ commercial software without a custom license which is just insanity. No using any AWS services in case the pull the rug on you.

You might argue “but you can X and you can Y”, and that’s true, but again why is this only a problem for games?

The short answer is someone cared enough about the specific example in gaming to actually go through all the work to demand change.

The longer answer is that games are one of the only pieces of software your average consumer actually buys these days, and they have a few particularly egregious examples that make it much easier to argue in front of a bunch of politicians without a firm grasp on the digital world, like "Game is completely client side except it checks with a server every 5 minutes to make sure you have a valid license, so when the company goes belly up you're left with a brick"

SKG is basically "right-to-repair" but for games. I do contend that if your phone breaks and the company says "we won't fix it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job. On the same token, if a game that you purchased turns off their servers and says "we won't run it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job.

Now, how I would be able to run it is a very open question and I do agree there are some ways that are more reasonable asks than others. But the present-day status quo of "company says suck eggs and you just have to deal with it" is not an acceptable final state.

SKG is more like if the car company is required to provide a working factory, capable of manufacturing all the car's parts, along with working supply chains for all those things, to the car ownership "community", if they ever want to stop manufacturing that kind of car. They're required to do this for free.

You know, so the "community" can take it over and keep manufacturing parts to keep the car going forever.

Modern multiplayer game infrastructure is extremely complex; you don't just "hand over the server code". It's a massive multimillion dollar project to do anything analogous to that, and this project is mandatory and must be done for free. And no, gamers won't expect to pay any more because of SKG.

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