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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

> > you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment

> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".

And gamers at large shouldn't pretend that they are going to be shelling out money for subscriptions. There is a reason that even most MMOs switched away from mandatory subscription pricing (apart from the outlier of WOW), and it's not to make the publishers filthy reach, but often barely viable.

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Doesn't have to be a monthly payment. If you can give me an EoL in the store page and sell it to me as a license, I'm happy. What sucks is that games currently get killed when the corpo decides. Without regulation, as with everything else, it'll slowly but surely go towards:

"We released MyGame 3 a month ago, sales aren't looking great, announce EoL for MyGame 1 we released 6 years ago to get those bums off it." (or the more charitable version where money's tight and the AWS costs aren't helping)

>If you can give me an EoL in the store page and sell it to me as a license, I'm happy

The goal here is to disallow this, as it's obviously what everyone would do if allowed to.

They'd just sell every game with 1 year EoL and keep the servers running however long they feel like.

Ok yeah, that'd be kinda stupid.

WoW, FF14, Elder Scrolls: Online, runescape. That's a lot of outlier I can cite off the top of my head.

> WoW, FF14, Elder Scrolls: Online, runescape

There are in total ~15-30mil paying subscriber that pay subscription fees to a single game. That's 1% of all gamers globally.

But sure, let's slap a $5/month subscription fee on all upcoming games that would have the chance to be the next Among Us / PEAK, and let's see how well that works out for indie developers.

Or, as SKG has been saying, make games like Among Us or PEAK have some way for players to self-host the games. It'd be absolutely ridiculous if the devs behind PEAK decided to one day say "Y'know what, we're shutting down PEAK and you can no longer play it" when nothing about the game needs to be tied to a persistent internet connection at all.

Besides, PEAK has offline mode already built in, so no subscriptions needed.

> Besides, PEAK has offline mode already built in, so no subscriptions needed.

Yes, single player offline. SKG is specifically about deactivating the online/multiplayer component in games, so if PEAK were to deactivate their online coop mode, they would definitely fall under it (ignoring grandfathering).

> SKG is specifically about deactivating the online/multiplayer component in games

No, this is false. SKG also includes singleplayer games which require constant online connection.

Yes, you are right, but that's not the part in discussion here with GP.

SKG cares about games staying playable. If a game with both MP and SP modes has MP disabled, SKG’s proposals do not fall under it, because the game is still playable offline. They have repeatedly hammered this point in their official communications (such as their youtube and press releases).

I'm not sure what official communication you are seeing but e.g.[0][1] it was clearly stated that it would fall under that. And according to their framework of "game must stay in a reasonable playable state", of course the online mode of PEAK, Battelfield, Call of Duty - which are all games that are primarily purchased for their online mode (but do have an offline mode / singleplayer campaign) - would qualify for their proposal.

[0]: https://youtu.be/sEVBiN5SKuA?t=1967

[1]: https://youtu.be/36qDEeTDXNE?t=2378 - Statement by affiliated Pirate Party member

PEAK uses P2P networking as far as I can tell. AmongUs has multiple mods that allows P2P gaming[0].

Most indie games don't rely on servers for the gameplay loop because those are expensive and an indie studios can't afford it. They instead rely on P2P networking for the gameplay loop, and at most have a matchmaking server to both give a nice experience to find other players to play with, and to allow NAT traversal.

You can easily design a game like PEAK/AmongUs in such a way that, even if the matchmaking server is disabled, the game still works because it has a direct connection or LAN option.

[0]: https://github.com/InvoxiPlayGames/AmongUsP2P

> PEAK uses P2P networking as far as I can tell.

PEAK is listed as an example of using the Photon Fusion Shared Authority model[0]. AFAIK Photon Fusion doesn't allow for any proper P2P in any of their network topologies (apart from the fully offline single-player mode).

[0]: https://doc.photonengine.com/photon/v1/photon-products#the-q...

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