8 ms·

Stop Killing Games

105 points by sph 3y ago

sph 3y ago
This is a campaign to stop game publishers from turning off and rendering their games-as-a-service which people might have paid for completely inaccessible. The goal is to contact as many consumer agencies worldwide until we have some solid legislation that forces game companies to patch or release their backend, so that paying users can keep playing the game indefinitely after the publishers decide to pull the plug. Games-as-a-service are an increasingly common practice that puts an expiration date to games that are sold at full price, and many users are totally unaware that after a few years the game they have paid for is basically worthless. There is no technological reason this is the case, but pure greed by publishers. Many of today's GaaS are single-player games that have no business at all being online-only. A studio might choose this publishing strategy to extract as much money from consumers, to milk the playerbase with a monthly subscription and killing games when a sequel is announced. There is no law today stopping companies from doing so. We can play games from the 1970s, we can play multiplayer games from the 1990s but many others not even a decade old now are lost forevermore. This is unacceptable. --- Companion video by the author, Ross Scott: "The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games" - https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE --- EDIT: it is quite disheartening to see software engineers in this forum defending the practice and saying it is impossible to patch an online-only form of DRM. Even if it were the case, a publisher should be required by law to tell consumers that their $70 game will stop being playable in a few years.
- dadrian 3y ago
  > There is no technological reason this is the case, but pure greed by publishers. Ah yes, because server-side infrastructure is notoriously free and cheap to run, with no ongoing operational costs, and requires no employees to maintain.
  - lukan 3y ago
    So why do they do it and not let the game run on the user devices locally? Oh, might it be the difference between a one time purchase and a regular monthly fee? That being said, I just purchase games I can run without internet, if they are singleplayer.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    Don't paying players somehow offset that? If not, it would be nice to see by how much.
  - themaninthedark 3y ago
    My reading of the request is to allow the players to host and run their own servers, as was done in times of yore. So in that case, there would be no ongoing cost to the publishers.
    - kevingadd 3y ago
      Not all games are CS1.6. Some game servers quite literally require access to tens or hundreds of gigabytes of game data, in addition to support from various login and database servers. It's possible to do the leg work to make all of this available to the community but it's not trivial, and it wouldn't be "no cost to the publisher".
  - _dain_ 3y ago
    They're advocating for publishers to patch the game to let players run homebrew servers after the official servers shut down. Or, in the case of single-player games that phone-home, to just disable the phone-home part. Read the FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
- golergka 3y ago
  > There is no technological reason this is the case Of course there is. Many modern multiplayer games are unfeasible without dedicated servers, and many games are multiplayer by default as a design and production choice. Making a game that is designed for multiplayer first and foremost also able to run on a player's computer is not always a trivial task. I was a lead at an open-world game that was supposed to run without dedicated servers on players PCs, and it was a very FUN task to actually get it there. Changing it to run on dedicated servers from the very beginning would save a LOT of production costs and time, I honestly wish this was the case. ---- As an update, I'll just copy my other comment from elsewhere in this thread: OK, here are 6 different git repositories that our different systems were built with, without custom scripts and setup that our devops team have built over 8 years of operation. And it also requires an Oracle license to run. Good luck figuring it all out! P.S.: We forgot a couple of third-party libraries in there, so we'll be hit by a bunch of lawsuits because our private licenses for these libraries absolutely did not cover open-sourcing them for the whole world.
  - mrkeen 3y ago
    Every multiplayer game used to include the server software as part of it. I put the "multiplayer first and foremost" date in 1999 with Quake 3.
    - golergka 3y ago
      Everquest was released in 1999 too. Modern multiplayer games are much closer to MMOs than to session-based games on local servers for small groups without any meta-gameplay.
  - _dain_ 3y ago
    Once upon a time, "dedicated server" was understood to mean something players hosted themselves. it's like everyone has been lobotomized by cloud computing and SaaS. you know people can run stuff on their own computers, right? or rent their own VPS?
- kevingadd 3y ago
  If this is made a legal requirement what will happen is that publishers jettison the studio responsible for dead GAAS titles and then they close the studio down so there's no one to hold responsible for this requirement. Which already happens a lot, to be fair.
- nerdjon 3y ago
  > Many of today's GaaS are single-player games that have no business at all being online-only. I am still looking for an example and I have yet to see one. From what I can tell The Crew is an online game? What am I missing here. > many users are totally unaware that after a few years the game they have paid for is basically worthless. Sorry I don't buy this, online gaming isn't some niche thing anymore. The internet obviously isn't niche. I feel like it is well understood that an online game, like Fortnite, WoW, whatever requires a server to work and may at some point stop working. Also for the record, I just checked every online xbox game I have and on the back it makes it clear that this could change at any point so they can likely all argue that the warning is already there. > online-only form of DRM I feel like we are talking about 2 different problems. One is DRM that requires a game to be connected to the internet to play, that is valid and should never be a thing if it is truly a single player game. However from what I can tell the examples that we are talking about are not just simple single player games that require an internet connection to run and are actually online games.
  - zerox7felf 3y ago
    > From what I can tell The Crew is an online game? What am I missing here. The main selling point of The Crew was the large, open-world map. All people I know who played that game completely disregarded any multiplayer features (of which there was not that many, at most amounting to co-op throughout the game's campaign). > I feel like it is well understood that an online game, like Fortnite, WoW, whatever requires a server to work and may at some point stop working. For most online games, it is absolutely possible to provide basic server functionality, even for MMOs like WoW. See another comment I wrote on here about CSGO/CS2. WoW (and Fortnite i think?) are in a different class than The Crew since they follow a subscription model, where it is more obvious that you do not own the game.
  - neurostimulant 3y ago
    The Crew actually has single player campaign! It's absurd that they made a $50 game that has single player contents completely unplayable instead of simply disabling the online components.
    - 3y ago
nerdjon 3y ago
While I understand the annoyance at a game shutting down and you can no longer play it. I also strongly oppose this from a technical prospective. It costs money to run servers, it costs money to maintain servers. It costs engineering effort to keep servers updated and secure. The idea that you can't shut down your servers is just wrong. (However an argument that a single player game does not work without being online is completely valid, but seems to not be the point of this). So no will not be signing and if there was a government requirement to keep servers running, I guarantee you the result will be less games released. It just would not be worth the risk. Edit: I misunderstood the point is not to keep servers running but to provide a way to run the servers ourselves. Which while my point above is about a different problem I still fundamentally disagree with that requirement.
- _dain_ 3y ago
  They aren't arguing for the servers to be kept up indefinitely. They are arguing that publishers should release an end-of-life patch to allow players to host their own servers. Read the FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
  - nerdjon 3y ago
    So first that requires additional engineering effort to do, which if they are making the decision to shut down the game it likely means it isn't making money so that's a waste of effort on their part. It may also not be an easy task, especially if it isn't a simple single service you start up and it's microservices or whatever. That is before getting into the question on whether or not there are certain parts of the system that are shared with other games that simply can't just be put out for release.
    - _dain_ 3y ago
      A "waste of effort" to make it so paid customers can continue to play the games they bought? Oh no, it might not be an "easy task" to undo all their planned obsolescence. Shucks. Maybe they should have thought of that before they planned the obsolescence in the first place. Seriously, in most cases it will be completely trivial to do, especially single-player games. (Yes, single-player games are routinely getting killswitched by spiteful publishers. It's a fucking outrage.) ------ [It seems I'm rate-limited so I can't reply further, but I have noticed in this thread a lot of people who don't seem to understand all the context behind this, making a lot of naive and ill-informed points. There are dozens of examples of publishers killing games for arbitrary/spiteful reasons, that have nothing to do with the cost it would take to provide an alternative. Ross Scott has many documented cases on his channel, see here https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms/search?query=dead%20game%20news https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms/search?query=dead%20... We're not just talking about always-online multiplayer games here. It's also games with single-player campaigns that are rendered unplayable by the deactivation of a central auth server. Or games with a co-op component that are now unplayable because it's gated behind a centralized matchmaking system that shut down. Or games with libraries of shared player-created levels that are now inaccessible, like Super Mario Maker. Also I have to say, I'm flabbergasted at the unthinking deference being shown to enormous conglomerate publishers in this discussion, and the focus on one side of the ledger to the exclusion of the other. People are saying that this will impose a cost on corporations, and this is in and of itself a reason to reject it. Like ... yes, of course regulations impose a cost on businesses! Obviously! The idea is that this small cost will be offset by a larger increase in consumer welfare. Just saying "this will impose a cost on business" is a fully-general counterargument against any kind of consumer-protection regulation. Nevermind the ethics of it -- people should fucking own what they pay for and they shouldn't have the rug pulled out from under them! As for the idea that it is too complicated to self-host a modern multiplayer game: this is Hacker News, not Never-Bother-To-Even-Try News. Mod communities have done impressive feats in reverse-engineering game servers. It can be done.]
nuz 3y ago
I'm absolutely against involving the government to require indefinite support or anything like this suggests. It will have the opposite effect to "ending killing games", it'll increase indie costs and basically kill development of some games rather than the opposite.
- _dain_ 3y ago
  It does not advocate requiring indefinite support by the publisher/developer. It is about making publishers provide whatever tools are necessary to let players keep the game running without a central server. It's basically right-to-repair for videogames. Read the FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
- wadefletch 3y ago
  Wouldn't shifting online-first games to access-subscription based pricing make better accounting sense for the publishers too? Seems like this is less an issue of actual support and more an issue of pricing/access model disconnect. When a SaaS product ends, it can be frustrating for sure, but it rarely feels like a betrayal in the way ending access to a one-time payment product does.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  Is there a history of indie developers running SaaS-modeled games who have shut down central servers without letting fans still play the games that they paid for?
  - sph 3y ago
    Indie developers tend to be very OK with people running their dedicated servers. It's also cheaper for them. The issue are the big publishers like EA, Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, Microsoft, where the goal is to squeeze every cent out of players.
- wheybags 3y ago
  Just release server binaries, at least when you decide to shutter support (preferably just release them with the game). Then the community can take over at zero cost to the developer.
glimshe 3y ago
People who build and maintain games need to pay their bills. While publishers are often rich, and pay big executive salaries, there is a limit for how long a money-losing server can stay up, especially as they more often than not require babysitting and security/legal patches - it isn't reasonable to expect the server to stay up for decades without any sort of monetary contribution by players. Also, some multiplayer games aren't financed by big and rich companies... So what's the financially sustainable solution? Paying a subscription is not a popular option, but something has to pay for the thing.
- vinyl7 3y ago
  Back in the olden days, players could run their own server. The only thing the company needed to run was a tiny box that curated a list of running servers. The main issue is that everything is now a complex cloud live service such that there's probably not a single binary that can be distributed to players to run their own server.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    One wrinkle is that effective anti-cheat is much harder with player-hosted servers, and if the game has RCE exploits or particularly nasty bugs, player-hosted servers can exploit them against anyone unlucky enough to connect.
- skyyler 3y ago
  I've seen people suggest that when an online-only game shutters its servers, the code for the server-side software should be released to the public AS-IS with no warranty. Obviously, that's a take from a gamer that isn't familiar with the legal troubles involved with releasing code for public view, but that's kinda where the consumers are at, it seems. I don't play games with online components, so I don't really have a horse in this race.
  - GrantMoyer 3y ago
    This proposal is just for the release of software binaries to run a server, not code. > In asking for a game to be operable, we're not demanding all internal code and documentation, just a functional copy of the game.
bmacho 3y ago
You wouldn't kill a car
- bilekas 3y ago
  Not sure if this is a strange Meta joke, but wasn't it "You wouldn't download a car" ?
  - sph 3y ago
    I think the joke is that they would let you download a car for full price, and then kill it after a few years because it is too expensive to run their vehicle database server (and also because they have a new model out, but no one says that part out loud). In 2050 Hacker News software engineers will claim that it is lunacy to imagine buying a car and owning it forever. How can that even possibly work?
pitaj 3y ago
I think a better policy would be requiring, as a condition of copyright registration, a copy of the multiplayer-related server and client code to the government. If the public servers are shut down, that code is released to the public so anyone can run a server. You'd have to tailor the law so that they can't just keep a single, underpowered server up rather than release the code or whatever. But it might be possible to accomplish. That said, I'd rather copyright just didn't exist in the first place.
dingdingdang 3y ago
I thought this was going to be commentary on how a disproportionate amount of AAA games are focused on killing and shooting; thus (figuratively) murdering the potential that games have for conveying all sorts of human experiences. It was a bit more literal.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Indeed. I used to play a lot of shooters, and while the mechanic is fun I really wish there were more games that reproduced this type of engagement without the idea that you're wielding a killing machine. Or I wish more games explored other mechanics entirely and that this genre was less popular.
  - hackable_sand 3y ago
    Check out Receiver! It is somewhat a survival game with an interesting skill ceiling for gunplay. Additionally, if you enjoy satire and dystopia, check out Cruelty Squad!
  - dingdingdang 3y ago
    That summarises nicely how I feel about it as well, I've got nothing against shooting games but I would love to see the tech used for building and exploration games or simulators.. why not a proper "real" minecraft clone based off some of the modern FPS engines for example: build bridges where reasonable physics applies..etc!
bilekas 3y ago
Supplementary video to explain further. As it seems some comments here aren't reading the FAQ. https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE?si=PNwHYXz8cvHs2AEc https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE?si=PNwHYXz8cvHs2AEc
- nerdjon 3y ago
  I really should not have to go to the FAQ to understand the actual point of what they are hoping to achieve. The front page should make it clear that they are not advocating for servers remaining up indefinitely (which is a valid assumption given the wording on the page). An FAQ should actually answer questions not be where it tells you the point of the site.
  - beretguy 3y ago
    Just watch the video and study the problem.
- voussoir 3y ago
  Here's his other video from 2019, "Games as a service is fraud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
ryandrake 3y ago
I've recently gotten back into some C-64 retro gaming, and I can't help but think how impossible this would be if the technology were available back then that lets game developers "tether" their game's functionality to their own servers and kill the games by killing the servers. Fully agree with the article. Ideally it should be a warranty return if the game stops working due entirely to a decision by the developer. It's simply a defective product. If the game really requires a server, there should be a way for end users to run the server if the game developer no longer wants to run it.
Animats 3y ago
If games are going to do this, they should have to put the end of life date in marketing materials.
montagg 3y ago
As a person who works on a large online game, I appreciate what they are trying to do and I’m sympathetic to the pain of losing a game you love, in addition to the game preservation issues. However, games just aren’t the same as they were in the 90s. The service architecture is more complex, the ecosystem management is greater (ranked systems and matchmaking health for example), and games evolve in ways that are not backwards compatible. I don’t want to say what they’re asking for is impossible, but I don’t think it’s realistic depending on competing goals. If you want to preserve a game, you have to decide what parts are important to preserve, because some aspects just won’t exist without centralized services, lots of other players, and experts managing those systems. If you just want to host a single match on your own server, and maybe the other aspects like meta-game systems or matchmaking don’t matter to you as much, you might be able to do it but you then don’t get the real game experience. Matchmaking in particular is a complex problem, and the reason some games have become successful is moving away from the lobby or self-hosted server model toward centralized matchmaking, which needs constant tending and large player populations to be successful. I’m open to the idea that these are solvable, but I don’t believe requiring it by law is a good idea. It just makes the cost of multiplayer games higher and riskier for publishers, and they’re already very risk averse because of the massive content costs involved. Should games be cheaper because you’re just leasing them? Maybe, but there are armies of professionals who want to make a living doing just this that are required to make this stuff look like someone pushed a “make game” button. At least that’s how it works today. Should those devs get a larger slice of the pie than publishers or execs or whatever? I mean, hell yeah, but it doesn’t stop the reality that games are just more complex and massively more expensive to make than in the past, and that’s just where the market is. A proposal for how games can be preserved or given back to consumers at end of life really needs a more detailed proposal than “make it the law,” because I just don’t think it’s realistic. All of the above is about explicitly multiplayer games. Single player games that have little to no multiplayer involvement at the core of the gameplay is an entirely different situation. There could still be complexities there, but you can get closer to the real game experience without centralized services.
- zerox7felf 3y ago
  I don't quite buy this, having grown up with source engine games. CSGO/CS2 (and to some extent TF2 before it) makes it fully possible to host your own, dedicated server, due to its heritage from the 90s-era HL1 mod. At the same time, there is complex matchmaking and ranking support, existing completely in parallel. I don't think anyone expects to have the entire matchmaking and competitive ranking infrastructure available to host. Bare essentials for hosting a server + ability of players to join should not be terribly hard to provide, especially if companies know before hand that this will be required, and can thus design server infrastructure accordingly. As for this being done via legislation / court precedence, I see no other option. I don't see how these basic tools are technically hard to achieve for the vast majority of games, and I don't see any world where companies themselves would consider providing this.
RGamma 3y ago
Stop buying killable games. This feels like an age old problem by now; people keep doing it...
- beretguy 3y ago
  No wonder. Look at how many people in this very thread actually defend not owning their games. It takes a lot of patience and effort to explain to these people something as basic as 1 + 1= 2. I gave up, but I’m glad other people keep fighting.
readthenotes1 3y ago
City of Heroes has survived a decade after the publisher killed it, and is now even legit. https://forums.homecomingservers.com/ https://forums.homecomingservers.com/
nathants 3y ago
the online game indie renaissance is coming. it’s just so much easier to build online games than it used to be. a lot of gamedevs and software engineers getting laid off these days. some small percentage of those is gonna go build things instead of finding a new abusive employer. i wish them well and can’t wait to see what they build! the rest of them may do the same after the next layoffs. viva la renaissance!
bencelaszlo 3y ago
I think what we need is to legalize abandonware. Abandonware is now something that happens in practice and works because nobody is interested about going after these games and other types of software. What if a game would become legally abandonware after: - its company went bankrupt - it got pulled from (online) stores - required servers were turned off After this, the abandonware would become freely distributable but commercially unavailable. Online games and services should also publish server binaries.
- beretguy 3y ago
  This can’t help online only games. Nobody other than the company has access to server code.
wasteduniverse 3y ago
[dead]
GrantMoyer 3y ago
As I commented on a related thread, I really hope this succeeds and sets precedent against the rampant anti-consumer licensing of media beyond just videogames. If I purchase a license to a videogame, song, movie, e-book, etc. in a transaction that's characterized as conferring ownership, I should have the right to consume it indefinitely, in whatever format, from whatever device, so long as I take the proper precautions to preserve my own access.

105 points by sph 3y ago

sph 3y ago

This is a campaign to stop game publishers from turning off and rendering their games-as-a-service which people might have paid for completely inaccessible. The goal is to contact as many consumer agencies worldwide until we have some solid legislation that forces game companies to patch or release their backend, so that paying users can keep playing the game indefinitely after the publishers decide to pull the plug. Games-as-a-service are an increasingly common practice that puts an expiration date to games that are sold at full price, and many users are totally unaware that after a few years the game they have paid for is basically worthless. There is no technological reason this is the case, but pure greed by publishers. Many of today's GaaS are single-player games that have no business at all being online-only. A studio might choose this publishing strategy to extract as much money from consumers, to milk the playerbase with a monthly subscription and killing games when a sequel is announced. There is no law today stopping companies from doing so. We can play games from the 1970s, we can play multiplayer games from the 1990s but many others not even a decade old now are lost forevermore. This is unacceptable. --- Companion video by the author, Ross Scott: "The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games" - https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE --- EDIT: it is quite disheartening to see software engineers in this forum defending the practice and saying it is impossible to patch an online-only form of DRM. Even if it were the case, a publisher should be required by law to tell consumers that their $70 game will stop being playable in a few years.

dadrian 3y ago
> There is no technological reason this is the case, but pure greed by publishers. Ah yes, because server-side infrastructure is notoriously free and cheap to run, with no ongoing operational costs, and requires no employees to maintain.
- lukan 3y ago
  So why do they do it and not let the game run on the user devices locally? Oh, might it be the difference between a one time purchase and a regular monthly fee? That being said, I just purchase games I can run without internet, if they are singleplayer.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Don't paying players somehow offset that? If not, it would be nice to see by how much.
- themaninthedark 3y ago
  My reading of the request is to allow the players to host and run their own servers, as was done in times of yore. So in that case, there would be no ongoing cost to the publishers.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    Not all games are CS1.6. Some game servers quite literally require access to tens or hundreds of gigabytes of game data, in addition to support from various login and database servers. It's possible to do the leg work to make all of this available to the community but it's not trivial, and it wouldn't be "no cost to the publisher".
- _dain_ 3y ago
  They're advocating for publishers to patch the game to let players run homebrew servers after the official servers shut down. Or, in the case of single-player games that phone-home, to just disable the phone-home part. Read the FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
golergka 3y ago
> There is no technological reason this is the case Of course there is. Many modern multiplayer games are unfeasible without dedicated servers, and many games are multiplayer by default as a design and production choice. Making a game that is designed for multiplayer first and foremost also able to run on a player's computer is not always a trivial task. I was a lead at an open-world game that was supposed to run without dedicated servers on players PCs, and it was a very FUN task to actually get it there. Changing it to run on dedicated servers from the very beginning would save a LOT of production costs and time, I honestly wish this was the case. ---- As an update, I'll just copy my other comment from elsewhere in this thread: OK, here are 6 different git repositories that our different systems were built with, without custom scripts and setup that our devops team have built over 8 years of operation. And it also requires an Oracle license to run. Good luck figuring it all out! P.S.: We forgot a couple of third-party libraries in there, so we'll be hit by a bunch of lawsuits because our private licenses for these libraries absolutely did not cover open-sourcing them for the whole world.
- mrkeen 3y ago
  Every multiplayer game used to include the server software as part of it. I put the "multiplayer first and foremost" date in 1999 with Quake 3.
  - golergka 3y ago
    Everquest was released in 1999 too. Modern multiplayer games are much closer to MMOs than to session-based games on local servers for small groups without any meta-gameplay.
- _dain_ 3y ago
  Once upon a time, "dedicated server" was understood to mean something players hosted themselves. it's like everyone has been lobotomized by cloud computing and SaaS. you know people can run stuff on their own computers, right? or rent their own VPS?
kevingadd 3y ago
If this is made a legal requirement what will happen is that publishers jettison the studio responsible for dead GAAS titles and then they close the studio down so there's no one to hold responsible for this requirement. Which already happens a lot, to be fair.
nerdjon 3y ago
> Many of today's GaaS are single-player games that have no business at all being online-only. I am still looking for an example and I have yet to see one. From what I can tell The Crew is an online game? What am I missing here. > many users are totally unaware that after a few years the game they have paid for is basically worthless. Sorry I don't buy this, online gaming isn't some niche thing anymore. The internet obviously isn't niche. I feel like it is well understood that an online game, like Fortnite, WoW, whatever requires a server to work and may at some point stop working. Also for the record, I just checked every online xbox game I have and on the back it makes it clear that this could change at any point so they can likely all argue that the warning is already there. > online-only form of DRM I feel like we are talking about 2 different problems. One is DRM that requires a game to be connected to the internet to play, that is valid and should never be a thing if it is truly a single player game. However from what I can tell the examples that we are talking about are not just simple single player games that require an internet connection to run and are actually online games.
- zerox7felf 3y ago
  > From what I can tell The Crew is an online game? What am I missing here. The main selling point of The Crew was the large, open-world map. All people I know who played that game completely disregarded any multiplayer features (of which there was not that many, at most amounting to co-op throughout the game's campaign). > I feel like it is well understood that an online game, like Fortnite, WoW, whatever requires a server to work and may at some point stop working. For most online games, it is absolutely possible to provide basic server functionality, even for MMOs like WoW. See another comment I wrote on here about CSGO/CS2. WoW (and Fortnite i think?) are in a different class than The Crew since they follow a subscription model, where it is more obvious that you do not own the game.
- neurostimulant 3y ago
  The Crew actually has single player campaign! It's absurd that they made a $50 game that has single player contents completely unplayable instead of simply disabling the online components.
  - 3y ago

nerdjon 3y ago

While I understand the annoyance at a game shutting down and you can no longer play it. I also strongly oppose this from a technical prospective. It costs money to run servers, it costs money to maintain servers. It costs engineering effort to keep servers updated and secure. The idea that you can't shut down your servers is just wrong. (However an argument that a single player game does not work without being online is completely valid, but seems to not be the point of this). So no will not be signing and if there was a government requirement to keep servers running, I guarantee you the result will be less games released. It just would not be worth the risk. Edit: I misunderstood the point is not to keep servers running but to provide a way to run the servers ourselves. Which while my point above is about a different problem I still fundamentally disagree with that requirement.

_dain_ 3y ago
They aren't arguing for the servers to be kept up indefinitely. They are arguing that publishers should release an end-of-life patch to allow players to host their own servers. Read the FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
- nerdjon 3y ago
  So first that requires additional engineering effort to do, which if they are making the decision to shut down the game it likely means it isn't making money so that's a waste of effort on their part. It may also not be an easy task, especially if it isn't a simple single service you start up and it's microservices or whatever. That is before getting into the question on whether or not there are certain parts of the system that are shared with other games that simply can't just be put out for release.
  - _dain_ 3y ago
    A "waste of effort" to make it so paid customers can continue to play the games they bought? Oh no, it might not be an "easy task" to undo all their planned obsolescence. Shucks. Maybe they should have thought of that before they planned the obsolescence in the first place. Seriously, in most cases it will be completely trivial to do, especially single-player games. (Yes, single-player games are routinely getting killswitched by spiteful publishers. It's a fucking outrage.) ------ [It seems I'm rate-limited so I can't reply further, but I have noticed in this thread a lot of people who don't seem to understand all the context behind this, making a lot of naive and ill-informed points. There are dozens of examples of publishers killing games for arbitrary/spiteful reasons, that have nothing to do with the cost it would take to provide an alternative. Ross Scott has many documented cases on his channel, see here https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms/search?query=dead%20game%20news https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms/search?query=dead%20... We're not just talking about always-online multiplayer games here. It's also games with single-player campaigns that are rendered unplayable by the deactivation of a central auth server. Or games with a co-op component that are now unplayable because it's gated behind a centralized matchmaking system that shut down. Or games with libraries of shared player-created levels that are now inaccessible, like Super Mario Maker. Also I have to say, I'm flabbergasted at the unthinking deference being shown to enormous conglomerate publishers in this discussion, and the focus on one side of the ledger to the exclusion of the other. People are saying that this will impose a cost on corporations, and this is in and of itself a reason to reject it. Like ... yes, of course regulations impose a cost on businesses! Obviously! The idea is that this small cost will be offset by a larger increase in consumer welfare. Just saying "this will impose a cost on business" is a fully-general counterargument against any kind of consumer-protection regulation. Nevermind the ethics of it -- people should fucking own what they pay for and they shouldn't have the rug pulled out from under them! As for the idea that it is too complicated to self-host a modern multiplayer game: this is Hacker News, not Never-Bother-To-Even-Try News. Mod communities have done impressive feats in reverse-engineering game servers. It can be done.]

nuz 3y ago

I'm absolutely against involving the government to require indefinite support or anything like this suggests. It will have the opposite effect to "ending killing games", it'll increase indie costs and basically kill development of some games rather than the opposite.

_dain_ 3y ago
It does not advocate requiring indefinite support by the publisher/developer. It is about making publishers provide whatever tools are necessary to let players keep the game running without a central server. It's basically right-to-repair for videogames. Read the FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
wadefletch 3y ago
Wouldn't shifting online-first games to access-subscription based pricing make better accounting sense for the publishers too? Seems like this is less an issue of actual support and more an issue of pricing/access model disconnect. When a SaaS product ends, it can be frustrating for sure, but it rarely feels like a betrayal in the way ending access to a one-time payment product does.
Minor49er 3y ago
Is there a history of indie developers running SaaS-modeled games who have shut down central servers without letting fans still play the games that they paid for?
- sph 3y ago
  Indie developers tend to be very OK with people running their dedicated servers. It's also cheaper for them. The issue are the big publishers like EA, Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, Microsoft, where the goal is to squeeze every cent out of players.
wheybags 3y ago
Just release server binaries, at least when you decide to shutter support (preferably just release them with the game). Then the community can take over at zero cost to the developer.

glimshe 3y ago

People who build and maintain games need to pay their bills. While publishers are often rich, and pay big executive salaries, there is a limit for how long a money-losing server can stay up, especially as they more often than not require babysitting and security/legal patches - it isn't reasonable to expect the server to stay up for decades without any sort of monetary contribution by players. Also, some multiplayer games aren't financed by big and rich companies... So what's the financially sustainable solution? Paying a subscription is not a popular option, but something has to pay for the thing.

vinyl7 3y ago
Back in the olden days, players could run their own server. The only thing the company needed to run was a tiny box that curated a list of running servers. The main issue is that everything is now a complex cloud live service such that there's probably not a single binary that can be distributed to players to run their own server.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  One wrinkle is that effective anti-cheat is much harder with player-hosted servers, and if the game has RCE exploits or particularly nasty bugs, player-hosted servers can exploit them against anyone unlucky enough to connect.
skyyler 3y ago
I've seen people suggest that when an online-only game shutters its servers, the code for the server-side software should be released to the public AS-IS with no warranty. Obviously, that's a take from a gamer that isn't familiar with the legal troubles involved with releasing code for public view, but that's kinda where the consumers are at, it seems. I don't play games with online components, so I don't really have a horse in this race.
- GrantMoyer 3y ago
  This proposal is just for the release of software binaries to run a server, not code. > In asking for a game to be operable, we're not demanding all internal code and documentation, just a functional copy of the game.

bmacho 3y ago

You wouldn't kill a car

bilekas 3y ago
Not sure if this is a strange Meta joke, but wasn't it "You wouldn't download a car" ?
- sph 3y ago
  I think the joke is that they would let you download a car for full price, and then kill it after a few years because it is too expensive to run their vehicle database server (and also because they have a new model out, but no one says that part out loud). In 2050 Hacker News software engineers will claim that it is lunacy to imagine buying a car and owning it forever. How can that even possibly work?

pitaj 3y ago

I think a better policy would be requiring, as a condition of copyright registration, a copy of the multiplayer-related server and client code to the government. If the public servers are shut down, that code is released to the public so anyone can run a server. You'd have to tailor the law so that they can't just keep a single, underpowered server up rather than release the code or whatever. But it might be possible to accomplish. That said, I'd rather copyright just didn't exist in the first place.

dingdingdang 3y ago

I thought this was going to be commentary on how a disproportionate amount of AAA games are focused on killing and shooting; thus (figuratively) murdering the potential that games have for conveying all sorts of human experiences. It was a bit more literal.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Indeed. I used to play a lot of shooters, and while the mechanic is fun I really wish there were more games that reproduced this type of engagement without the idea that you're wielding a killing machine. Or I wish more games explored other mechanics entirely and that this genre was less popular.
- hackable_sand 3y ago
  Check out Receiver! It is somewhat a survival game with an interesting skill ceiling for gunplay. Additionally, if you enjoy satire and dystopia, check out Cruelty Squad!
- dingdingdang 3y ago
  That summarises nicely how I feel about it as well, I've got nothing against shooting games but I would love to see the tech used for building and exploration games or simulators.. why not a proper "real" minecraft clone based off some of the modern FPS engines for example: build bridges where reasonable physics applies..etc!

bilekas 3y ago

Supplementary video to explain further. As it seems some comments here aren't reading the FAQ. https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE?si=PNwHYXz8cvHs2AEc https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE?si=PNwHYXz8cvHs2AEc

nerdjon 3y ago
I really should not have to go to the FAQ to understand the actual point of what they are hoping to achieve. The front page should make it clear that they are not advocating for servers remaining up indefinitely (which is a valid assumption given the wording on the page). An FAQ should actually answer questions not be where it tells you the point of the site.
- beretguy 3y ago
  Just watch the video and study the problem.
voussoir 3y ago
Here's his other video from 2019, "Games as a service is fraud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

ryandrake 3y ago

I've recently gotten back into some C-64 retro gaming, and I can't help but think how impossible this would be if the technology were available back then that lets game developers "tether" their game's functionality to their own servers and kill the games by killing the servers. Fully agree with the article. Ideally it should be a warranty return if the game stops working due entirely to a decision by the developer. It's simply a defective product. If the game really requires a server, there should be a way for end users to run the server if the game developer no longer wants to run it.

Animats 3y ago

If games are going to do this, they should have to put the end of life date in marketing materials.

montagg 3y ago

As a person who works on a large online game, I appreciate what they are trying to do and I’m sympathetic to the pain of losing a game you love, in addition to the game preservation issues. However, games just aren’t the same as they were in the 90s. The service architecture is more complex, the ecosystem management is greater (ranked systems and matchmaking health for example), and games evolve in ways that are not backwards compatible. I don’t want to say what they’re asking for is impossible, but I don’t think it’s realistic depending on competing goals. If you want to preserve a game, you have to decide what parts are important to preserve, because some aspects just won’t exist without centralized services, lots of other players, and experts managing those systems. If you just want to host a single match on your own server, and maybe the other aspects like meta-game systems or matchmaking don’t matter to you as much, you might be able to do it but you then don’t get the real game experience. Matchmaking in particular is a complex problem, and the reason some games have become successful is moving away from the lobby or self-hosted server model toward centralized matchmaking, which needs constant tending and large player populations to be successful. I’m open to the idea that these are solvable, but I don’t believe requiring it by law is a good idea. It just makes the cost of multiplayer games higher and riskier for publishers, and they’re already very risk averse because of the massive content costs involved. Should games be cheaper because you’re just leasing them? Maybe, but there are armies of professionals who want to make a living doing just this that are required to make this stuff look like someone pushed a “make game” button. At least that’s how it works today. Should those devs get a larger slice of the pie than publishers or execs or whatever? I mean, hell yeah, but it doesn’t stop the reality that games are just more complex and massively more expensive to make than in the past, and that’s just where the market is. A proposal for how games can be preserved or given back to consumers at end of life really needs a more detailed proposal than “make it the law,” because I just don’t think it’s realistic. All of the above is about explicitly multiplayer games. Single player games that have little to no multiplayer involvement at the core of the gameplay is an entirely different situation. There could still be complexities there, but you can get closer to the real game experience without centralized services.

zerox7felf 3y ago
I don't quite buy this, having grown up with source engine games. CSGO/CS2 (and to some extent TF2 before it) makes it fully possible to host your own, dedicated server, due to its heritage from the 90s-era HL1 mod. At the same time, there is complex matchmaking and ranking support, existing completely in parallel. I don't think anyone expects to have the entire matchmaking and competitive ranking infrastructure available to host. Bare essentials for hosting a server + ability of players to join should not be terribly hard to provide, especially if companies know before hand that this will be required, and can thus design server infrastructure accordingly. As for this being done via legislation / court precedence, I see no other option. I don't see how these basic tools are technically hard to achieve for the vast majority of games, and I don't see any world where companies themselves would consider providing this.

RGamma 3y ago

Stop buying killable games. This feels like an age old problem by now; people keep doing it...

beretguy 3y ago
No wonder. Look at how many people in this very thread actually defend not owning their games. It takes a lot of patience and effort to explain to these people something as basic as 1 + 1= 2. I gave up, but I’m glad other people keep fighting.

readthenotes1 3y ago

City of Heroes has survived a decade after the publisher killed it, and is now even legit. https://forums.homecomingservers.com/ https://forums.homecomingservers.com/

nathants 3y ago

the online game indie renaissance is coming. it’s just so much easier to build online games than it used to be. a lot of gamedevs and software engineers getting laid off these days. some small percentage of those is gonna go build things instead of finding a new abusive employer. i wish them well and can’t wait to see what they build! the rest of them may do the same after the next layoffs. viva la renaissance!

bencelaszlo 3y ago

I think what we need is to legalize abandonware. Abandonware is now something that happens in practice and works because nobody is interested about going after these games and other types of software. What if a game would become legally abandonware after: - its company went bankrupt - it got pulled from (online) stores - required servers were turned off After this, the abandonware would become freely distributable but commercially unavailable. Online games and services should also publish server binaries.

beretguy 3y ago
This can’t help online only games. Nobody other than the company has access to server code.

wasteduniverse 3y ago

[dead]

GrantMoyer 3y ago

As I commented on a related thread, I really hope this succeeds and sets precedent against the rampant anti-consumer licensing of media beyond just videogames. If I purchase a license to a videogame, song, movie, e-book, etc. in a transaction that's characterized as conferring ownership, I should have the right to consume it indefinitely, in whatever format, from whatever device, so long as I take the proper precautions to preserve my own access.