2 ms·

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

by 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

by sph 3y ago

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