The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games
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As a developer or manufacturer, if your software or device absolutely requires a server that costs money to maintain, then your business plan should take that into account: You should be charging customers monthly to keep that service running. You shouldn't promise a one-time payment, take the customer's money and then yank the service away on a whim.
Nobody is asking for free labor to keep services running. I'm asking that you 1. only tether your product to a server if you absolutely need to, and 2. charge for that kind of product monthly so that you can leave it running while you still have customers. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
And it makes these devices worse. I should be able to control my oven using a simple REST api and home assistant. The fact that in order to interact with my oven with a home assistant I first have to reach out to my manufacture servers is just insane. It's an oven. It only has so many sensors and nobs to twist.
About the only grace I give these manufacturers is the fact that google and apple both make it an annoying pain to maintain applications in their app store. A manufacturer can't simply drop "oven app" once and expect it to be available on the store forever. But that too should be solved with the same regulation that says "Ovens, refrigerators, washing machines, thermostats, and doorbells must not connect to the internet". We can teach the world about VPNs if they want remotely access their devices.
If the app doesn't use the Internet then the natural way to provision it is to have it pre-loaded on the device anyway. Why should the goal of "avoid needing to hit the manufacturer's servers" involve hitting Google's servers?
These sorts of EULA should be flat out illegal.
And any and all EULAs or similar documents presented after a sale should be completely null and void. But any corporation attempting to that should be fined a signficant portion of their revenue. Past that, dissolution of company.
But no, we live in a shit society that someone who signs up for a demo of Disney+ and then has his wife die due to bad food, and they tried to slap indefinite arbitration on him.
https://lawreview.missouri.edu/infinite-arbitration-how-one-...
This whole country feels like one big fucking company store scam.
But I think there is an argument to be made that the EULA has no compensation. Since payment has already been made for the product, it's completely one sided.
2. It's not just a country. Sadly this is a worldwide problem, this is the global standard. And it's sickening.
For starters, the arbitration clause is designed to make sure that these cases never get to the supreme court. Lower courts see an arbitration clause and say "Thank god, I don't want to deal with this" and are more than happy to sweep cases that way to unload their docket. Once in arbitration, any ruling made has no precedent setting value. The arbitration process is itself designed to drive up legal costs.
But even if that arbitration clause wasn't there or a judge decides to hear the case, it's incredibly expensive to take someone to court. Hundreds if not millions of dollars in fees. The US doesn't have a "loser pay" system, instead both sides are responsible for their own legal fees. Further, the US doesn't have any sort of public civil litigators. We barely have criminal defenders.
The best case scenario is that some sort of class action is built up. But that's really hard and isn't likely to address the contract itself. Even if it does, it'll only be the one contract for the one manufacturer.
Big legal fees, limited applicability, likely burden shifting from public courts. The only way this gets addressed would be through regulation or new laws outlawing the practice.
It should not be allowed for a developer or device manufacturer to kill or nerf any product remotely, once it was bought and paid for.
Imagine a highly complex online game that requires a few people and tens of thousands a month in cloud costs to keep it running. Now imagine that this game is 25 years old and only has 100 players total left. Are you saying that this developer must maintain the exact same quality of online play for 100 people?
This is what the post was saying:
1. No nerfing to the game/service whatsoever. This means you can't just kill online play. Ever.
2. Charge a monthly price or significantly increase the purchasing price.
Clearly neither of these are viable for most games and the game industry.
It had its server reimplemented by enthusiasts [1] with no access to this "one of a kind cloud" for decades now. Heck it even supposedly had game client ported to new engine [2].
> B-but we can't release the binaries due to licensing...
Release the source. As a developer you should be able to write code that allows to stub out all the propriety parts. The community will replace your speedtrees, matchmaking, netcode, anticheats and so on.
Change is hard we get it, but the excuses are on par with any other industry..
Exactly!
If you ever want a clear demonstration of the phrase "litany of excuses", all you have to do is post online calling for a game company to provide any kind of post-sale support or user-friendly EOL plan for their game.
1. "Game companies don't make any money, so they can't provide any development support after the sale, which barely pays for initial development!"
2. "Game companies are under immense time pressure so they can't waste time on EOL plans or developing the server to be eventually severable and releasable!"
3. "Game companies cannot release the server binaries because of vague licensing reasons!"
4. "Game companies cannot release the server source code because of other vague licensing reasons and secret sauce IP!"
5. "Game companies cannot release the server source code because of cheating!"
6. "Game companies might not even have the server source code when it's time to EOL the online service! You can't expect them to save a backup!"
7. "The game company might shut down and that means they have to just suddenly pull the plug!"
8. "Servers are expensive and complicated to run, and surely the community wouldn't be able to do it!"
9. "The server source might not compile anymore, and surely the community wouldn't be able to fix it!"
You'll hear variations of these excuses and others whenever you suggest these guys lift even a finger to non-disruptively turn down their game.
IMO, the move from community servers over to matchmaking & vendor only servers being the only viable option was a huge disservice to the long-levity of games. If I find the code around here, I could still get a Tremulous server running today for a few bucks, even if I haven't played that game for 20+ years.
3 is valid and can be tricky, as it would depend on when in the software lifecycle the release would be mandatory. If it's in a wind-down or bankruptcy situation, it would be tricky. Though that discussion is similar to the responsible disclosure discussion, isn't it? Exploiters usually already know them.
Not to mention open sourcing the code will subject the company to legal liability if there’s something weird in there like discrimination of some form.
Thats pretty easy actually.
All you have to do is go into the setting page on the git repo and change the settings from private to public.
I'm sure most game devs are able to figure that one out.
Everything else that resolves was that is merely consequences for which I have little pitty for.
Solutions to this modern problem was solved during the dialup and LAN party era. None of those single player games required an online launcher.
What they're saying is (for games that would come out in the future only), is that they need to have an EoL plan for the game.
Let people host their own servers. That used to be a standard feature of multiplayer games.
for existing services built in stupid ways, this may be impractical. After such a law is passed, services won't be built in stupid ways in the first place.
Only works for games where you don't have saved states in the game. For example, counter strike.
For a game like World of Warcraft, how do you suppose to make this work?
Similarly, counter strike was famous for having a thriving community of private servers before they released cs:go
I get what problem you're trying to solve. But it's honestly a much more difficult problem than you think it is. It's not as simple as just allow others to run servers.
Nobody is proposing that. Subscription based games are not the covered by SKG and never were. Even if WoW was not subscription based, it would still be required to do something only when Blizzard decides that they don't want to keep WoW online anymore. Not before that. Nobody asks to voluntarily allow competing servers.
I think we need to stop treating it as a dichotomy.
There's an understanding it won't last forever, when you buy a multiplayer game, ans making devs make offline versions in the cases where its trivial is going to bite indie game studios.
Gamers have repeatedly shown they dont like subs. Its hard to model "we want to charge you 40 cents per month, escalating with inflation" but thats what youre asking for
Pretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.
I'd be 100% for "if your game has an easily releasable server you have to release it on EoS" but this bill isn't it.
I personally would just put like a $200k sales carveout and that would make me happy.
That should not be ok. It wasn’t sold with a disclaimer or expectation that it could be switched off.
It’s the reason I buy most games once, on GOG.
I wish we could target this specifically.
Are you sure? I played in 2024 on PC and it was playable.
According to Wikipedia: “in December 2023, all servers for mirrors edge catalyst were shut down by EA” but that only says online content was disabled.
It’s possible that the game is only unplayable on PlayStation, but still playable (without online features) on PC. But it does seem to still be listed in stores (steam and PlayStation) so I’m not sure exactly what’s going on. I’d have to redownload it to test it again.
Well, the comment that you replied to said “Gaming companies did not need to insert themselves into the process in the first place.” If the gaming company inserts itself into the process in such a way that the multiplayer part of the game would stop functioning if the game company were to disappear, then the game company is a single point of failure. And it would be a single point of failure that cannot be repaired or replaced by end users. In general, I would consider single points of failure to be design flaws. In this particular case, I would consider it to be a particularly egregious design flaw because it’s actually easier to create a multiplayer game that does not have the design flaw (e.g., local split screen multiplayer, releasing the server binary) than it is to create a multiplayer game that does have the design flaw. In this case, it really is bad design.
Also, I’m highly skeptical that this would have a chilling effect on novel games. Could you give an example of a game that might be chilled in this situation?
Try stealing from 60 different corporations and see how that works out.
It's not stealing in that sense. You're enshrining "devs can't sell a 1 time payment license to an ongoing service" as a right and I simply disagree.
Your framing relies on devs not being allowed to sell this license. I don't think banning them is healthy.
If they marked the buy button "license" like California will soon mandate, would that suffice for you, or do you actually demand a perpetual experience?
Edit: also corps frequently short each other very slightly all the time. No one makes some outrage about small amounts like that.
There's no need to "make devs make" anything. We'll do it ourselves. The corporations just need to stop getting in our way with their idiotic cease and desist letters and injunctions and legal threats.
There's no need for them to spend even one cent of their money or even one second of their time on the matter. They just need to do literally nothing. That's literally all they have to do.
This is a root problem, but you can't simply say "void copyright ownership" without crossing international lines.
It's an awkard international committee problem since you can't overwrite the centralized law.
So companies should be required to either have a server release or meet the their explicit obligation given at time of sale.
So "this game for rent until 1/1/2031". If it flops, they buy out the users, release to make the game work without the company, or maintain servers until they fulfill their obligation.
Capitalism can't refine markets without full information. That means here, how much support a game will get. Whether it's a sale or rent, and so on.
The movement just says a bunch of stuff and expects the important nitty grotty to be figured out, but that part is load bearing for many.
Id support mandating notices. I just don't want indies to have to do this from day 1 before many sales tbh.
Single player ones are a no brainer.
If someone wants to argue this position, I would challenge them to explain why anything around IP law exists as it does now if that was not the explicit goal.
I'm not saying the current system achieves that, but it is part of the justification.
Early on, you also had to prove your patrnt with a physical thing. Couldnt write the patent to deceive. And for making plain language, you got protection for 17 years.
Now, theres shit like 'business process patents', genetic patents, and other horrible. And patents are now writtten to confuse and hide, unlike plain language.
Copyrights were basically bought by Disney. Theyve been grossly perverted due to money interests.
Im mostly OK with trademarks. It comes from Heraldry and family coat of arms. Trademarked colors are quite bullshit however.
20 years max will provide plenty of reward for creators. Some work on making copyright protect creators first, preferencing them over later owners, would also be good.
We also need works to be free to use, legislated so, after copyright expires. That would be to prevent, for example, Trade Marks being leveraged against users of works on which copyright has expired.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue that these releases were negative to ID or the game series.
I'd like to see an example of just one game that failed commercially due to a company releasing the source code to an older game.
It's also necessary to heavily punish any company that tries to leverage the legal system's expenses to financially ruin adversaries, especially individuals, by burdening them with the legal costs of defending themselves for the crime of exercising their rights.
Then let gamers decide.
Example: If I'm reminded, at purchase time, that this $70 game will work online for 24 months and single-player offline for 36 months, then I can make an informed decision before I buy. Studios would be forced to bring their business plan into visibility and be held to a level of service, and then gamers can't complain when a game is "switched off" according to plan.
This is already implied, just not explicit and quantified in advance.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a game that had early expiry of online already contemplated. And offline play should be rich and complete indefinitely. But I still live in the glorious console cartridge era in my head and in my emulators.
Companies would just default to saying "we reserve the right to shut off online connectivity at any time."
The point of copyright is to increase the amount of creative works available to people by making the production financially viable. If companies aren't making the works available, or taking released works and making them unavailable, copyright has failed.
Even the "Copyright Alliance" acknowledges this: https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai...
> While the copyright law is intended to serve the purpose of enriching the general public through access to creative work, it is important to understand that the copyright law imposes no obligation upon creators to make their copyrighted works available. As a result, an unpublished work that is never distributed to the public receives the same copyright protection that a published work would receive.
the basic function of a multiplayer server is to keep the players game state synched, large numbers of players, and very fast gameplay vs connection rate and jitter is fly in ointment.
You can only use the words “purchase” or “buy” if you can install / move the files to a device that is completely airgapped from the internet and continue to use the product indefinitely. Extend it to movies and music as well.
Use established language to enable consumers to make an informed decision.
The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
Yes, a big company can take it away, but I think they have to leave it online long enough to get your money’s worth.
So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.
Ideally a free subscription through packed in keys and such but we'll probably end up being nickel and dimed even further.
You?
The companies making the games?
Why should they get to destroy games—gone, forever, with no chance of retrieval or resurrection—that hundreds of people put their time and love into, and millions of people want to play, just because they think it'll make this quarter's stock price numbers look better?
Copyright was created to protect the rights of the creator for a limited time to promote the useful arts. Creations are supposed to become part of the public domain once the creator is no longer getting use out of them. Game companies want to break that bargain, scorched-earth style, and ensure that no one can ever use the things that they create to make anything new.
Why should profit be the first, last, and only consideration when it comes to deciding whether the art of today is even possible to view tomorrow?
And you know what ... it is ok for people to buy a thing, keep having a thing and not being forced to buy entirely different thing.
This example is humorously short and this is why there is backlash to game companies shutting down games. What about the people who bought it towards the end? They just get nothing? All that time and money spent just gets thrown in the trash because they don't want a cloud bill? They either need to opensource the games and servers or keep supporting them for a decade or longer.
Not guaranteed. Many just run a local server, either in-process or externally. Minecraft's singleplayer mode actually runs a server in-process internally. This simplifies development because singleplayer is conceptually the same as playing alone on a server.
This gets more complicated when there are infrastructure servers in the mix for things like player state, matchmaking, etc. You would bypass that in development but they are required for normal play while being external to the game server.
That might be your future. But as long as there are computing platforms that users can run in their own home there will be games for them.
Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud, and their customers have proven willing to pay higher prices for the types of gaming experience Nintendo will deliver.
Consoles might as well already be cloud for all you control them. But I guess I should've specified PC gaming. I thought it was indicated from the context of "stop killing games". Also, to be clear, I'll never "cloud" game or use consoles. I'll just remain in the past with old hardware and old (and new indie) games. But the "PC gaming industry" as an economic block larger than movies is dying and that's a shame.
I enjoy low-latency competitive games, and I'd say those are unlikely to get replaced by cloud, because many players notice latency spikes immediately. But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by people who like the feeling of owning their own hardware, or feel the need to have lower latency in games.
I'm sure if someone built a data center within two blocks of my home and I was able to stream from it, many of these issues would disappear as well.
Perhaps, but I never claimed otherwise. Simply that the personal devices that do exist will also have games for them. Computer games were here from the beginning, and they will be here in the end. And even personal devices that were chosen for non-gaming needs can play games, nothing requires games to run only on RGB-infested PCs.
> But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by
Yes, the market dynamics may certainly shift, but that's been the story for decades already. And if cloud gaming were going to be this immediately-better story, things like Stadia and Luna would have performed much better in the market.
I think people worry about the cost-efficiency of how to do gaming in a world where hardware is expensive, but the reason hardware is expensive is because it's being sucked up for AI usage, not for gaming usage. So cloud gaming will also necessarily be expensive by these terms, even if the average cost seems less for a cloud gaming subscription than owning your own PC or console.
as long as there is a market the producers will come, even in a super capital intensive industry like this. and it looks like nvidia is partially going back on the whole data center push with rtx spark. its just one high end product but it shows they know a lot of people want local gaming and local inference.
The whole thing seems absurd when you remember that no one needs video games. This doesn’t need to be legislated. Let them kill video games and then stop buying their video games if they’re just going to kill it off. Why are people still buying games that cash be killed off?
If enough people are still buying these games then clearly the game being killed off is not an important factor. If it was, they wouldn’t buy them.
What does need to be legislated is how these games and services are marketed: it must be made clear latest date the service is guaranteed to be up.
>On September 29, 2022, Google announced that it would shut down Stadia, citing its lack of traction with users. The service was shut down on January 18, 2023, and Google refunded all purchases for hardware and games made through the Google and Stadia stores.
even more fortunately, further attempts will fail for the same reason - input lag.
even games are not really a moat for owning hardware - next Gears with its timing-sensitive reloading mechanic can just get adapted for cloud.
if cloud gaming gets another hype wave for one reason or another, this time I am pretty sure they will lock in a much bigger user base. me personally? still committed to owning my hardware, but I can totally imagine my mother playing some RTS on a GeForce Now-connected tablet and having zero complaints.
Good riddance. Online features suck. Make your game multiplayer or make it singleplayer. Don't add pointless online features.
PS all you need to make sure it works is release the server once you stop supporting it yourself.
> They rely on a huge network of interconnected cloud micro services.
Give people the docker file.
> A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.
That's more AAA stuff not indie.
If they run it themselves, probably. Indies are more likely to use free services like Steamworks and Firebase which can be pulled out from under them for any reason.
Edit: oh, it's yours. Spend 5 minutes understanding exactly what SKG have said they are not asking for.
That article is paid for by the lobbysts and completely incorrect and wrong.
Valve themselves could make a solution (a server emulator for instance). Or publishers that use Valve servers for matchmaking can just replace them. The first solution is for games that are no longer supported. The second one is for those that are.
I haven't read all the details but wouldn't SKG pin this responsibility on the game developer/publisher instead? Meaning you can't rely on a third-party to release a solution because they might not do it.
> Or publishers that use Valve servers for matchmaking can just replace them.
Steamworks makes a lot of systems available to developers (DLC, microtransactions, inventory, server browser, lobbies, authentication, networking/datagram relay, P2P networking, input binding, UGC/workshop, cloud sync, ...). It could take a long time to replace it all, especially if your game only shipped on Steam. And when you're done you get to worry about how you ship that update to players, because you might not be able to do it via Steam!
Yes, since they have the publishing rights. To my knowledge, Valve specifically has been fairly open in terms of keeping games alive on their store. So I think that if things come to this, they will offer publishers some easy solutions. Of course, we don't know what will actually happen, that's why holding publishers responsible is a better approach, since it doesn't rely on goodwill of a single entity (Valve in this case).
>It could take a long time to replace it all, especially if your game only shipped on Steam
That's correct, but if a publisher has just shipped a game, they have the motivation to keep the game running and make money from it, so they will spend some time adjusting the game. It's only an issue when a publisher does not want to make money from the game anymore (hence they shut it down). In this case transition will indeed be less justifiable for them, and that is exactly what SKG wants - to have them do this using legal basis.
Nothing makes me as hopeless for the future as reading people trying to one up the negativity about any initiative at all, and if no one did anything, they’d hit you with the snarky ‘go vote to make your voice heard instead of complaining’
It takes big balls to fight publishers and even more massive to fight the internet and the pseudo-intellectual snark of internet commenters. The entire SKG initiative has my support and perhaps it’s the only thing that might convince me that ordinary citizens actually have any say at all in directing legislation.
In my gaming circles, people who work on SaaS solutions are against SKG even though they are avid gamers and even open source contributors. They just recoil on a thought of an EOL plan. Same on HN.
"Think of the indies" is just same old "Think of the children" astroturfing.
I feel a carveout for total says, say $200k USD or less, would be reasonable. Otherwise you're just conscripting indie time.
I was working on a game, but I'm not looking forward to releasing updates everytime steam changes their relay. Considering scrapping multiplayer completely.
If the indie game has multiplayer, it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages. No indie is setting up a proprietary autoscaling game server infrastructure on AWS that they will have to maintain for years and have an end-of-life plan for if the SKG initiative passes.
The only companies that SKG would inconvenience are AAA/live service studios. They have enough money to find a workable solution, or more likely, spend billions in lobbying against this initiative.
This is drifting some from the original specific topic toward the broader conflict, but, not for everyone involved, surely? Will the audience run your server binary, under normal circumstances? Or will they say “Wow, you couldn't even be bothered to put up some basic servers for free? Jeez, you're saying I have to set up a whole account somewhere else and pay them just so I can have a multiplayer game, or set up weird-looking technical shit on my computer that might expose me to hackers? Nobody else asks me to do this, what is this bullshit”? Of course there are intermediary options here (one of which I describe below), but those don't necessarily let you do the “we didn't want to be in the hosting business” plan straightforwardly, so you might still have to take on a lot of the fixed planning costs.
The incentive gradient among consumers tilting so hard in the direction of indefinite active support becoming table stakes seems to be a core part of the vicious cycle here. “I shouldn't have to set stuff up” implicitly cedes control; if they're not doing the coordination, then someone is, and that someone gets hidden responsibility and power without compensation or effective voice, which is an unstable combination by default. This is a similar issue to what happens with convenient, centralized, subsidized social media and chat platforms.
Minecraft is actually an interesting borderline case here: the player license authentication and name/appearance binding is all centralized, and that could suddenly go away and leave everyone in the dark, but individual world servers can be run independently and there are a number of third-party hosting businesses based on this. Microsoft later felt compelled to offer Realms as a first-party means of setup, but IIRC those do take a recurring fee so it's not in the same unstable zone. But then we have a separate issue where, as far as I can dimly tell, a lot of people started expecting “game companies do the work to keep us safe on Their Platform” as, again, table stakes, and so they implemented non-repudiable digital signatures in chat to allow people on non-centrally-hosted servers to still report each other's chat messages to central moderation, which I must assume is another ongoing cost. (In the modded world there are mods that strip this.)
The "hacker" part now is completely lost on people. They just don't see the big picture, it isn't just about getting your money's worth. Some people spend their free time playing with other people they've only ever met online. Some people escape into a game after work. Relationships are built in these games, and when a game gets suddenly taken away with no recourse, it's a horrible feeling.
I can't find the best example, but this video is of a guy who plays these "dead" games and tries to find the people who are still playing, getting to know them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FEW7gxci2Q
Some of these people are just lovely, taking the time to show him around, teaching him the ropes. They're just happy that someone is playing the game. This all exists because the developers are still supporting these games. Take a look at the section about Blockland in the video I linked!
Then you can make the punishments/fines for breaking that promise draconian, since nobody has to opt in.
Most single-player games would have the logo out of the box, gamers would come to expect it for those, and take a good hard look at single player games that don't have it. With multiplayer games it would be more varied, but there would now be a very clear incentive to see if it might not be possible after all to do what is needed to get that label, especially if none of your competitors have it. And most importantly when planning new games, you'd double check every decision would disqualify the game for it.