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Well, ok, you grasped at a few issues there that go off in different directions. The issue with "Stop Killing Games" is that the legislation doesn't currently

by dijit 4mo ago

Well, ok, you grasped at a few issues there that go off in different directions. The issue with "Stop Killing Games" is that the legislation doesn't currently look like anything, it's a broad appeal and the solution for studios will depend on where it finally lands. If it lands in the realm of "Games must be released FOSS after x years" then, aside from the fact that a lot of the times we don't own the copyrights to our own assets or certain code (they're on license for a single release) the second issue is how to release it. First: the online backend for The Division or Destiny are just... not possible to run. The backend is fused to the products via a slurry of certificate pinning and object serialisation, with some things happening only on the server. "Un-fusing" them is, basically impossible at this point; so the question is: can you build such a system without them being fused together in the first place? The answer is: yes, but only by slowing down development. It would become much more about defining our boundaries and working on a "slim" version of the backend, or stubbing the backend completely. Obviously this is a lot of effort. The thing is we only barely managed to get a functional system, so adding an extra year for programming isn't going to be possible, we'll have to "cut" features that are hard to make. "So, why don't you just release the server". Well, that's a good question, we could remove the certificate pinning we have on the client, and the entitlement checks, stub out all the code that relies on third party APIs and give you a server binary. But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs. So, we'd have to work on slimming that down, or building things in a totally different way: which means "seamless" darkzones and safehouses becomes impossible. THEN you have the issue of releasing a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product, which we already had a major issue with. So, most likely, we just make single player games. Honestly, the industry is moving that way anyway because unless you've been doing it for a while making multiplayer games is really hard from a game design standpoint and there's an ongoing operational cost which people are a bit too price sensitive to support. That's why Massive released The Division 1 & Division 2 but then pivoted to doing single-player games like Star Wars and Avatar which only retains the most basic multiplayer elements.

fragmede 4mo ago
> the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs. > So, we'd have to work on slimming that down ...why? My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.
- dijit 4mo ago
  Community backlash will be fierce if it's not actually runnable. Ubisoft doesn't have the most stellar reputation for example (I don't work there anymore) so people look at things we do by accident as if they are intentionally malicious. Also, the California law is one law, the EU is also looking at this and it's likely to look different - that's why "Stop Killing Games" doesn't really mean anything yet, even people within the movement have differing definitions.
  - ashdnazg 4mo ago
    The key is communication. If the company says the binary has a certain min. requirement, then the vast majority of people will accept that. Of course there'll be idiots, but I doubt you'll see a stronger backlash than to a company shutting down the servers without any solution, like they can do now.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on. if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation. the spirit of the law is that i can reasonably spin up an instance of the server for me and my friends to play.
  - ashdnazg 4mo ago
    Kind of depends on the definition of no one. If the company puts an artificial proof of work demanding a rack of the latest data center GPUs, that should be illegal. If the binary has the same hardware requirements that the company used when the service was up, I see it as totally fair.
ashdnazg 4mo ago
> But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs. As far as I understand that situation is accepted by the initiative. The requirement is not that it works on any specific hardware or software stack, just that it can theoretically work. > a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product Anti-cheat solutions aren't required to be released, and if there are bugs in the server, they might even be found and patched by the community.
- dijit 4mo ago
  What you're saying is true for the californian legislation, but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction) - nor the direction of the authors article, and like I replied in a sibling response: it's not like people would be pleased to get our binaries. Second: anti-cheat itself is a fucking joke. A crutch, a last ditch hail-mary because we ran out of time to batten down the hatches or things were changed so often from the start of the project to the end that we couldn't add safety into the protocol design properly. Exposing how our systems think about how you move, how you shoot, when AI ticks, when loot ticks, behaviour trees and how phase transitions are computed: gives an attacker a hell of a lot of leverage. To put this into broader easier to understand terms: ask yourself why it's so easy to cheat in Unreal Engine games vs Battlefield. It's not the anti-cheat. It's the complexity of digging through the engine and knowing what the memory is doing and what the server is doing.
  - strbean 4mo ago
    > but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction) Where can we find information about the direction the EU is going on this? AFAICT there has just been one meeting on the topic?
    - dijit 4mo ago
      There's been... a lot more than just one meeting. https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/news/14th-valid-initiative-stop-destroying-videogames-submitted-commission-examination-2026-01-26_en?prefLang=el https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/news/14th-valid-initia... https://commission.europa.eu/european-citizens-initiative/meeting-organisers-european-citizens-initiative-stop-destroying-videogames-european-commission-2026-02-23-0_en https://commission.europa.eu/european-citizens-initiative/me... https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/stop-destroying-videogames/product-details/20260407CHE13962 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/stop-destroying... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXdmoeaYZ9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXdmoeaYZ9Y https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/news-media/news/eesc-debates-eci-protects-rights-europes-video-gamers https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/news-media/news/eesc-debates-e...
F3nd0 4mo ago
Wow, thank you for the detailed answer! I understand your point much better now. I still think ‘kills any sort of multiplayer games’ (what the other dev said) is a gross exaggeration, since you list some ways this could be made to work, but it sounds like some things would cost significantly more resources and need to be done differently. But hey, maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Plus, there are multiplayer games which aren’t quite as resource-intensive on the server side.)
- dijit 4mo ago
  I think what I'm trying to explain is that we barely make it work by the skin of our teeth, and adding more requirements means fewer features. The extra point I made was that it's actually kind of costly to run these systems, and I promise you publishers would love to push that cost onto the community with community run servers (think: CS1.6) but the reason they don't is because developing systems that way takes much longer and cannot be properly secured (mostly due to cheating but also from an entitlement standpoint). So, I think either multiplayer games will get much more basic, with simple gameservers. No more large multiplayer RPGs. Or, there will be fewer multiplayer games, because it's even more risk in an already risky business.
  - kmeisthax 4mo ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "no more large multiplayer RPGs" here. It's not technically impossible to have community-hosted MMO servers. Hell, most MMORPG publishers have to have an active legal team specifically to shut those down. As for community run servers being longer to develop... wait, what? How is that the case, when that used to be the standard way multiplayer got built prior to everyone trying to chase World of Warcraft? I can understand the anti-cheat argument, and I will begrudgingly acknowledge that you can't exactly force third-party servers to run your anti-piracy checks. But none of that is a technical argument. That's an argument about business risks, and publishers all jumped on the live service bandwagon because they consider their customers' control over their own games to be a business risk.
singpolyma3 4mo ago
> But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs. This doesn't seem like much of an obstacle? Can buy or rent such without too much trouble.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >Can buy or rent such without too much trouble. for... thousands of dollars a month. the goal of the regulation is that regular people can keep playing their games. not just rich people.
  - singpolyma3 4mo ago
    Only one group needs to do it for everyone to keep playing. Everyone running their own server isn't very interesting for multiplayer... Usually you'd do it in groups.
    - nearbuy 4mo ago
      Most of the time, no group of players will run a server at that cost. So regular players still can't play. It's not unheard of though. WoW and City of Heroes had/have large, expensive fan servers. But realistically, this legislation would save maybe 0-2% of games in the thousands-per-month cost range. According to the parent commenter, we might lose many more than that from the legislation causing studios to decide not to make them to begin with. Games with cheap servers are a different story.
tayo42 4mo ago
We used to have player run servers for years. Is it some lost skill to write software that way?
- dijit 4mo ago
  It's not a lost skill. Spinning up a binary and replicating actors across two computers that both have a connection string to a server is.. for all intents and purposes: easy. Where it falls down is when you start to have complex interactions with AI that's serverside, or you have a dynamic world that changes based on player behaviour, or you have cross platform requirements, integrations with companion apps and above all: matchmaking. If you're a looter-shooter, there's a whole host of complicated interactions too. A game like Apex Legends could probably distribute their server binary, but if you require online, as in, not just a single match, but an economy- a dynamic matchmaker and a dynamic world (meaning: when you kick a box it stays kicked) and a persistent account (you keep your loot): then that doesn't work well anymore. The interactions are just too complex to batten down reliably, they'll be exploited, there'll be no fun, or: it just won't be possible for certain features, regardless of safety. You can see how this looks by trying to use one of the many unofficial versions of Runescape.
  - hodgehog11 4mo ago
    This is the whole spirit of the "Stop Killing Games" argument though: you don't need to keep any of that stuff once support drops. It just needs to be "functional", in the most basic possible sense. If there are no players, no economy, no advanced AI, because it was all disconnected, that's considered fine. The response of "but that isn't any fun!" is totally irrelevant; you can't preserve the initial experience, but you can preserve the basic software itself so that players still have something to mess with. Programming-wise, this requires a little more emphasis on a modular implementation that needs to be considered from the start. Otherwise, it seems pretty straightforward. Or am I missing something?

by dijit 4mo ago

fragmede 4mo ago

> the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs. > So, we'd have to work on slimming that down ...why? My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.

dijit 4mo ago
Community backlash will be fierce if it's not actually runnable. Ubisoft doesn't have the most stellar reputation for example (I don't work there anymore) so people look at things we do by accident as if they are intentionally malicious. Also, the California law is one law, the EU is also looking at this and it's likely to look different - that's why "Stop Killing Games" doesn't really mean anything yet, even people within the movement have differing definitions.
- ashdnazg 4mo ago
  The key is communication. If the company says the binary has a certain min. requirement, then the vast majority of people will accept that. Of course there'll be idiots, but I doubt you'll see a stronger backlash than to a company shutting down the servers without any solution, like they can do now.
john_strinlai 4mo ago
>My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on. if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation. the spirit of the law is that i can reasonably spin up an instance of the server for me and my friends to play.
- ashdnazg 4mo ago
  Kind of depends on the definition of no one. If the company puts an artificial proof of work demanding a rack of the latest data center GPUs, that should be illegal. If the binary has the same hardware requirements that the company used when the service was up, I see it as totally fair.

ashdnazg 4mo ago

> But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs. As far as I understand that situation is accepted by the initiative. The requirement is not that it works on any specific hardware or software stack, just that it can theoretically work. > a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product Anti-cheat solutions aren't required to be released, and if there are bugs in the server, they might even be found and patched by the community.

dijit 4mo ago
What you're saying is true for the californian legislation, but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction) - nor the direction of the authors article, and like I replied in a sibling response: it's not like people would be pleased to get our binaries. Second: anti-cheat itself is a fucking joke. A crutch, a last ditch hail-mary because we ran out of time to batten down the hatches or things were changed so often from the start of the project to the end that we couldn't add safety into the protocol design properly. Exposing how our systems think about how you move, how you shoot, when AI ticks, when loot ticks, behaviour trees and how phase transitions are computed: gives an attacker a hell of a lot of leverage. To put this into broader easier to understand terms: ask yourself why it's so easy to cheat in Unreal Engine games vs Battlefield. It's not the anti-cheat. It's the complexity of digging through the engine and knowing what the memory is doing and what the server is doing.
- strbean 4mo ago
  > but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction) Where can we find information about the direction the EU is going on this? AFAICT there has just been one meeting on the topic?
  - dijit 4mo ago
    There's been... a lot more than just one meeting. https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/news/14th-valid-initiative-stop-destroying-videogames-submitted-commission-examination-2026-01-26_en?prefLang=el https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/news/14th-valid-initia... https://commission.europa.eu/european-citizens-initiative/meeting-organisers-european-citizens-initiative-stop-destroying-videogames-european-commission-2026-02-23-0_en https://commission.europa.eu/european-citizens-initiative/me... https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/stop-destroying-videogames/product-details/20260407CHE13962 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/stop-destroying... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXdmoeaYZ9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXdmoeaYZ9Y https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/news-media/news/eesc-debates-eci-protects-rights-europes-video-gamers https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/news-media/news/eesc-debates-e...

F3nd0 4mo ago

Wow, thank you for the detailed answer! I understand your point much better now. I still think ‘kills any sort of multiplayer games’ (what the other dev said) is a gross exaggeration, since you list some ways this could be made to work, but it sounds like some things would cost significantly more resources and need to be done differently. But hey, maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Plus, there are multiplayer games which aren’t quite as resource-intensive on the server side.)

dijit 4mo ago
I think what I'm trying to explain is that we barely make it work by the skin of our teeth, and adding more requirements means fewer features. The extra point I made was that it's actually kind of costly to run these systems, and I promise you publishers would love to push that cost onto the community with community run servers (think: CS1.6) but the reason they don't is because developing systems that way takes much longer and cannot be properly secured (mostly due to cheating but also from an entitlement standpoint). So, I think either multiplayer games will get much more basic, with simple gameservers. No more large multiplayer RPGs. Or, there will be fewer multiplayer games, because it's even more risk in an already risky business.
- kmeisthax 4mo ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "no more large multiplayer RPGs" here. It's not technically impossible to have community-hosted MMO servers. Hell, most MMORPG publishers have to have an active legal team specifically to shut those down. As for community run servers being longer to develop... wait, what? How is that the case, when that used to be the standard way multiplayer got built prior to everyone trying to chase World of Warcraft? I can understand the anti-cheat argument, and I will begrudgingly acknowledge that you can't exactly force third-party servers to run your anti-piracy checks. But none of that is a technical argument. That's an argument about business risks, and publishers all jumped on the live service bandwagon because they consider their customers' control over their own games to be a business risk.

singpolyma3 4mo ago

> But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs. This doesn't seem like much of an obstacle? Can buy or rent such without too much trouble.

john_strinlai 4mo ago
>Can buy or rent such without too much trouble. for... thousands of dollars a month. the goal of the regulation is that regular people can keep playing their games. not just rich people.
- singpolyma3 4mo ago
  Only one group needs to do it for everyone to keep playing. Everyone running their own server isn't very interesting for multiplayer... Usually you'd do it in groups.
  - nearbuy 4mo ago
    Most of the time, no group of players will run a server at that cost. So regular players still can't play. It's not unheard of though. WoW and City of Heroes had/have large, expensive fan servers. But realistically, this legislation would save maybe 0-2% of games in the thousands-per-month cost range. According to the parent commenter, we might lose many more than that from the legislation causing studios to decide not to make them to begin with. Games with cheap servers are a different story.

tayo42 4mo ago

We used to have player run servers for years. Is it some lost skill to write software that way?

dijit 4mo ago
It's not a lost skill. Spinning up a binary and replicating actors across two computers that both have a connection string to a server is.. for all intents and purposes: easy. Where it falls down is when you start to have complex interactions with AI that's serverside, or you have a dynamic world that changes based on player behaviour, or you have cross platform requirements, integrations with companion apps and above all: matchmaking. If you're a looter-shooter, there's a whole host of complicated interactions too. A game like Apex Legends could probably distribute their server binary, but if you require online, as in, not just a single match, but an economy- a dynamic matchmaker and a dynamic world (meaning: when you kick a box it stays kicked) and a persistent account (you keep your loot): then that doesn't work well anymore. The interactions are just too complex to batten down reliably, they'll be exploited, there'll be no fun, or: it just won't be possible for certain features, regardless of safety. You can see how this looks by trying to use one of the many unofficial versions of Runescape.
- hodgehog11 4mo ago
  This is the whole spirit of the "Stop Killing Games" argument though: you don't need to keep any of that stuff once support drops. It just needs to be "functional", in the most basic possible sense. If there are no players, no economy, no advanced AI, because it was all disconnected, that's considered fine. The response of "but that isn't any fun!" is totally irrelevant; you can't preserve the initial experience, but you can preserve the basic software itself so that players still have something to mess with. Programming-wise, this requires a little more emphasis on a modular implementation that needs to be considered from the start. Otherwise, it seems pretty straightforward. Or am I missing something?