As is stated in the article, but is not clear just from the headline, this was not an unexpected outcome from the initiative. The Commission did not seek discussions with SKG, and spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups.
SKG was prepared for this, and their intention has been to join up with the group putting together the new Digital Fairness Act, since the objective there is very similar, but much broader in scope, and most of the groundwork is already there. Much of the earlier recorded Q&A sessions in Parliament had representatives commenting on this already, so it's the natural approach. This way, legislation will almost certainly be put forward and voted on, and the lobby groups will likely have a harder time trying to wrestle with a larger movement and a parliament that seems sympathetic to the cause.
Basically, this is a battle lost that never really mattered. The climax of this war is yet to come.
This is idiotic. "The industry" are also European citizens.
It's about balancing the interests of people who pay their rent and feed their children by selling games, and the interests of people who merely enjoy games.
Consulting only the group which enjoys games would be absurd to the point of being actively malicious.
Your mindset is why we got rid out of nuclear energy. Nuclear lobby bad, consumer lobby good. Consumer lobby didn't care that what they wanted was impossible (risk free free, carbon free, cheap energy) and angrily demanded by law things the industry couldn't provide, and got nothing as a result. It might very well be the case for this gaming law as well, that the result would have been less games in Europe as game producer would avoid a market that makes unprofitable demands.
I suppose the charitable interpretation is that those who would invest considerable time campaigning for this are deeply into gaming, which is an activity typically associated with younger people.
There’s also the fact that through events like Gamergate, the term “gamer” has become highly charged and is not something most adults would want to be associated with.
That's an interesting point of view. For me, people who advocate for preservation are usually older because they remember the times when you could just buy games and they would keep working forever. While younger people were born into the world where online games is the norm so they don't expect everything to last long.
I think with younger generations the perception shifted quite a bit. Gaming has become so normal that people with "radical" views and behavior are now in minority. Also the other aspects affected this - livestreaming is a good example where you need to be on your best behavior to not get banned or canceled.
More or less sure, but not 100% of course. Women are treated a bit better in my experience compared to say 10 or 15 years ago. Unfortunately, I haven't played many competitive games in the last couple of years, but before that rather than being insulted there were two outcomes: women were either treated normally (well as normal as it can get during heated rounds) or they were being hit on (I witnessed it a couple of times myself). The popularity of streaming also helped a bit since a lot of streamers are women.
You brought it up, what do you mean? If one were to bring up allegations of you associating with unpopular movements, would you not clear your name? Having checked your post history, I have to genuinely ask if you're a troll account.
I simply pointed out that gaming and especially gamers have some pretty extreme negative connotations, which is true.
I could dump you links to research detailing the connections between the online gaming community and right wing extremism, but I’m pretty sure you know what I’m talking about.
“Gamer” is basically synonymous for “neo-nazi incel”, and GSK refers to itself as a “global coalition of gamers”. That’s a pretty bad look!
Have you ever touched grass? You could also argue that posting in an online message board is linked with right wing extremism because there are right wing extremists posting stuff online.
No, it's not, and this is why you were called a shill .. not merely due to a disagreement, but due to you actively portraying your opposition as malicious, while you actively describe multi-billion dollar corporations as just people trying to "pay their rent and feed their children by selling games"
You seem to be arguing under the presupposition that there are two equal entities, industry lobbies and everyone else, and somehow that division of viewpoints gets equal consideration from the governing body.
The other person is arguing that those two entities are not equal and should not have equal weight in affecting the decisions of the European commission.
Calling them malicious for having a different view of the _purpose_ of the commission is kind of wrong (it's independent of being malicious), and from the outside just makes you look dishonest.
> If the opposition simply seeks to silence you, rather than to argue against you, how are they not malicious?
in response to:
> The industry should only be allowed to comment after the laws have been written and fulfill the goals of European citizens.
Where it's clear from your framing of an "opposition trying to silence you" that you think the industry lobby has at least some right to be heard before the council votes on policy. Which is something the statement you are replying to clearly doesn't agree with. And rather than accept that there is a disagreement of the purpose of the council or the acceptability of industry lobbyists influencing law or what not, you just frame it as a moral evil (maliciousness) on the part of the other commenter. A good faith reading of the comment you replied to has so many non-malicious interpretations.
Side note: if your comment implies something hard enough (intentionally or not) that multiple people are "windmill-tilting" against something that you think you aren't saying, it deserves some reflection on whether you may have miscommunicated your point.
> Where it's clear from your framing of an "opposition trying to silence you" that you think the industry lobby has at least some right to be heard before the council votes on policy
This is an inherent feature of democracy. "The industry" consists entirely of people, of course you can't exclude them.
>A good faith reading of the comment you replied to has so many non-malicious interpretations.
"Let's not allow rich people to participate in the political process" has just as many possible non-malicious interpretations as "Let's not allow black people to participate in the political process". i.e. none
And even above I'm steelmanning by assuming that Frieren didn't want to also exclude indie developers.
> Would you be happy to put a person on the street so a thousand people get to continue playing league of legends in 2060?
Yes.
The balance is that everyone's free speech has already been SEVERELY restricted in order for the game industry to have a business model at all. This is about making sure that the rest of our society actually gets a remotely fair deal. Asking that companies can't just take away what they have sold is really below the bare minimum.
Depends on how they licensed various libraries used in the server binaries. Some of them might not allow redistribution of the final product, only provision of digital services.
Alternatively, as SKG suggested, Riot could post the spec needed for a server to communicate with the game, and someone could just write a server for it.
Wait, are you arguing that activities that make people happy have little to no value?
I mean, we only spend money when we believe that what we buy with it is more valuable than the money we've spent, so there is some underlying activity or follow up to spending the money that naturally follows otherwise, the buyer would perceive no benefit and would not buy again
So how are you equating collection and enjoyment of your purchase as the same?
Surely they must have value at an individual level, for people are willing to pay to engage in those. The time you spend playing games does very little to help the society around you, and might in fact distract you from more productive activities. Perhaps gamers would go outside instead, and reduce the burden on the healthcare system.
This essentially amounts to government intervention to reduce the already incredibly cheap cost per hour of these activities for a small minority of gamers. Is that good public policy?
Yes, because you will not be limited in time to enjoy a single title. Like it's the case with other media - books, music, movies, etc. This is good because future people (who haven't even been born yet) will be able to enjoy the same slice of entertainment that we enjoy right now. Just like we can still enjoy games made 40 years ago.
But we are interested in benefits first and foremost since we are consumers, i.e. people who use the product. Regarding the costs, nobody dismisses them. But saying that the costs of giving the game to community are tremendous is simply misguided. Developers and publishers have been doing this since the beginning, it's not something new.
The reason why publishers don't do this is also very clear - they want us to play their newer games and spend money there. They are not doing this because it's hard for me. They just want to maximize the profit, that's it.
> But we are interested in benefits first and foremost since we are consumers
We're only consumers when we consume, but that is not the extent of our participation in society. To optimize for consumption is a shortcut to certain doom.
> But saying that the costs of giving the game to community are tremendous is simply misguided
Tremendous, no. Significant? Yes. The cost could very well be in the millions for a single project, but how many hours of gameplay does that actually buy? Do those later hours come at a significantly increased cost?
>The reason why publishers don't do this is also very clear - they want us to play their newer games and spend money there. They are not doing this because it's hard for me. They just want to maximize the profit, that's it.
I get why someone who plays games would want this. But as someone who doesn't play games, why on earth would I want to encourage this? It defies most basic economic theory.
You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for in the form of slower economic activity and lower tax revenues. I do not want to subsidize your games.
> The cost could very well be in the millions for a single project
How did you come to this number? Something simple like giving the binaries with docs doesn't cost that much money. I'm not sure what you are referring to.
> how many hours of gameplay does that actually buy?
You seem to confuse the cost of continued support with the cost of giving it to the community. Nobody is asking publishers to continue support when they don't want to.
> But as someone who doesn't play games, why on earth would I want to encourage this?
You are not expected to support this if you don't care about it... But don't act surprised when you find out that some people do play games and they do care about them.
> You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for
>> You're suggesting a subsidy for gamers which everyone else would to pay for
>No, that's not how it works. Not even close.
As far as I can tell, legislation which enables you to play a game in perpetuity instead of for a limited time will likely reduce the amount of tax revenue your gaming-related activities generate.
A useful metric to focus on here is the cost per hour of entertainment. The price of the game itself might stay the same, but the cost of your gaming itself would be subsidized.
> legislation which enables you to play a game in perpetuity instead of for a limited time will likely reduce the amount of tax revenue your gaming-related activities generate
How so? If I'm sure that a game is not going to die, I will be more willing to pay for it. The more such games exist, the more money I will be willing to spend on them. Hence more taxes from me. Otherwise I will stick to older games that don't have this problem, which will bring less taxes from me because of the cost.
> cost of your gaming itself would be subsidized
By whom? I know there are currently tax returns (or exemptions is more correct term probably) for gaming companies. But how does having end of life plans change this?
> disgusting anti-democratic suggestion [...] denying them representation
I assume the idea isn't that developing a game means you don't get to vote as a citizen, but that the industry can't lobby for special access ("spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups").
> FWIW: People building games contribute something to society, playing them contributes nothing.
if there are no players, there is no money to be made, developers will be fired.
and besides, I'd rather put someone on the street if this is the multibillionaire CEO that exploits his devs, than a dev itself. And companies can, you know, slash their billionaire salaries and bonuses to comply with the law.
Yeah, but you don't get to choose where the money comes from and which projects get cancelled because of this last straw. These things have real costs which eventually affect many, many people who are not billionaire CEOs.
It would be absurd to disregard those costs and not consult the industry on them when writing laws like this.
I'd say this shows how corrupted elites are. If the "democratic" entity spends all the time with lobbyists, and not the initiative which started the discussion, this speaks volumes.
That is just restarting the problem: democracy breaks when money easily overrides the needs/desires of the people.
We also have votes, but unfortunately getting people to consider this sort of issue while casting their ballot¹ is rather difficult. Getting people to vote for the bigger picture for their benefit and that of us all doesn't work well as they are far more likely to vote on a single issue that has been in the news recently and whoever they vote for will u-turn on once in control anyway…
--------
[1] or even getting them to care at all, in the case of European elections [not that this is directly relevant here because of spit brexit].
I perceive democracy as a company, where people are bosses because they choose their workers. If you're the boss, and your employee uses your money to buy themselves a car instead of representing your interest, you make them pay for this and fire them
Who is the elite here? The people nominated for the commission is by the national government of said country if anything blame the countries picking such self serving citizens to be part of the commission.
> a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
That is precisely why the SKG initiative mandates it - so that it's available from the start because it's a legal requirement. Without that, you have no financial nor legal incentive and you end up exactly like you mention - reassigning or dissolving the team.
> If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
"buy" is doing some heavy lifting here. If I buy something, it is mine. If someone else can arbitrarily take it away or stop it working, then it was mis-sold, because what I've really done is rent for an indeterminate period of time. What should be clear up front is whether I'm buying or renting.
What you're saying is literally what the lobby groups think SKG is trying to go for. It's not at all what they're asking for. You should maybe take a look at what they are actually proposing and some of the presentations by developers on why it is sensible.
They're not stupid, there has been a lot of groundwork for this over the past 10+ years.
The issue SKG tackles is that it's the video game equivalent of wildcatting & oil spoilation. A publishers contracting a small studio create a live service game hoping to strike it rich, often without doing any market research on the viability of their product, and then drop support shortly after launch leaving owners with a bricked copy.
They have this very cushy setup where they triple insulate themselves from risk while publishing games that have less snowballs chance in hell of matching their expectations (next HoK, Genshin Impact, PUBG, LOL, minecraft, fortnite, roblox, WoW).
I and a million others think the software industry needs to move past their infant stage and start taking their own products seriously. Frankly it's shocking regulation didn't come in the 00s.
>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
You also have a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. People DON'T buy the game, they ARE voting with their wallet. You are doing the equivalent of telling people "If you don't like abandoned wells you shouldn't drive." We like the gushers, you should just pay the actual cost of drilling instead of passing those off on society. That all people would/should stop playing live service games because of the relatively small cost of dead games is just as ridiculous.
I work in games, worked on some of the huge(40+ million players) online live-service games out there, and I have no idea what you're talking about here:
" What isn’t realistic is stamping their feet and demanding that companies make it possible for people to run their own servers for live service games, just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve"
Like....what licencing issues? After the game is "dead" and the parent company doesn't want to support it anymore, we could easily release the source code or even just the executables for the servers. There's nothing complicated about it, it's just some windows executables with a whole load of config files to tell them what to serve and how. I once had to go to a gaming conference with a really basic laptop to setup a local-only version of our servers to host some private lobby of the game - it took all of 30 minutes to set it up. But oh no, players can't have that because what, it's too complicated?
Like, as someone who actually wrote some of these servers for various services in these games, I really don't buy this entire argument that it can't be done. If anything, it's just the people at the top who have no idea about tech dragging their feet and coming up with implausible "what if" scenarios as to why it can't be done. For at least 3 of the games I worked on I could give you a zip file with all the files and you'd have the servers up and running within an hour, given powerful enough hardware. And then what, we can't change the servers the clients connect to? Please. Modders would have that done within 24 hours of release, probably with a nice GUI for players to use.
>> that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
Yes, and their help isn't needed with any of it, the game is by definition dead at this point, the alternative is the publisher shutting everything down and no one ever playing it again.
>>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
It's not just about consumer choice - it's also about us losing part of the culture that cannot be restored once shut down.
I say that wholeheartedly as someone who has worked on games that are(for the time being) still online. And in few years they will be inevitably shut down, leading to years of my life and effort being inaccessible to anyone - the only way that you will be able to experience it is through Youtube videos. That's a cultural tragedy, and I'm 10000% for companies being forced through law to include it in their design that _eventually_ the servers have to be released to the public. They don't have to offer any support whatsoever, the communities will figure it out, guaranteed.
> Like....what licencing issues? After the game is "dead" and the parent company doesn't want to support it anymore, we could easily release the source code or even just the executables for the servers.
I can't speak to the parent's stance, but more generally this would be referring to IP licensing and patent encumbrance. I've worked on a number of large systems where non-trivial parts of the codebase were licensed from external parties with distribution restrictions in place. Even the executable versions would be problematic as the contracts go to great lengths to lock it down to strictly company XYZ may modify and use the IP, but nothing else regardless of the form or means of distribution.
Releasing said systems as-is would require either relicensing to allow distribution (very costly and potentially impossible if the vendor declines), or replacing that functionality with a cleanroom implementation. Which is both costly, time consuming and difficult. You may also run into further issues there if the contract forbids cloning functionality, or even worse: if there is patent encumbrance you have to go back to the relicensing option.
No problem at all. Just release your own source code. Leave out the licensed stuff. That's how id did it. If you have non-ridiculous development practices, knowing what's your IP and what is not is a basic requirement anyway.
The modder base will reimplement the licensed stuff, if needed.
What if your licensed component is non-trivial, e.g. provides critical features so that omission renders the service entirely non-functional? These laws would need to cater for that scenario, as skimming over that detail and allowing stripped releases would either mean:
1) companies get to release broken, incomplete source under the banner of commercial licensing restrictions.
2) truly upstanding companies (/s) will use this as a loophole to block the majority of their source as commercially licensed by stuffing it all under related companies and licensing it back to themselves. e.g. Company A selling game licenses majority of source (say, the entire server platform) from Company B -> Company B can't be compelled to release their engine because they aren't selling the game.
#1 would be an annoyance through to major challenge depending on the scale, #2 seems a more likely outcome for the major players as they can afford to play that sort of game and get away with it.
To be clear, I think this law should be implemented. However it would be pointless to pretend that licensing constraints won't add significant complexity, and many inventive pathways to highly evasive yet technically compliant outcomes.
I think most people are looking at existing games made under different constraints and concluding that it can't be done. But If the law passed, to me it's quite clear that it's just something that would have to be considered during development - like, we already have to get a sign-off from legal on using any open source libraries, and they usually say if it's fine for something that ships vs something that doesn't. If we knew beforehand that server binaries will eventually ship then that changes the answer from legal, and we either don't use it or try to licence it for that usecase.
Yes, this would force the nature of licensing to change. It does not apply retroactively, so the legal processes would naturally need to shift. Such licenses were used in the past, so there is no reason they cannot be considered again.
The commission is defined by councils and policy from each member state. Many member states send their right wing nuts so there is a bigger picture than just "corrupt".
What about the directive would be unimplementable? Please give specifics here. SKG has repeatedly hammered this point: They only pursue this for _new_ games, only care about non-live-service games (games where you have a subscriptions are obviously "rented", and so wouldn't count). What they want is for those games to have an EOL plan built into the game from the start if they want to rely on a server. This doesn't feel like an unreasonable ask, and I'd ask you to show me what exactly about this is complicated.
It's worth noting that they don't mandate a particular plan. A solution can take many forms - multiplayer games could have servers released, _or_ be given a "direct connection" method, or even have a local (no network) multiplayer option, and still be within what SKG was asking for. For singleplayer games, it's even easier, they can just have a killswitch for the "required server" components.
All of this is cheap to do, it just needs to be planned for so that when the time comes, all the tools are in place for the EOL plan to proceed.
This is not surprising. The movement has been all about gamer vibes and not technical reality from day one. It should have been rejected, and I'm glad it was.
Not sure about the technical reality here - until 2010s, singleplayer games didn't require an Internet connection, and for multiplayer ones you could download a dedicated server application, host it yourself. Only recently it became locked down for the corporate profit; the only party making it hard are the game developers themselves.
Half-Life 2, released back in 2004, required an Internet connection to play. It was a major point of contention, in part due to how unreliable Steam was at the time
Because telemetry and advertising revenues did not plague the online landscape during those times. It has all been standardized since: "click OK to share data with our 13,285 partners", "always-online needed to prove your identity", "we need to force an upgrade of your software so we can ensure you get what's best for you, when we decide" ..oh and all of that after a 159 page legally binding and enforceable agreement that you can't negotiate or reject.
Are you sure we don't need all of this? Seems like we'd be going back to the dark ages of information technology if we did.. (/s)
What does telling your customers you plan to make a game unplayable if it doesn’t perform exactly as you expect financially have to do with technical reality, pray tell?
(Not parent) It doesn't. It's just uninformed or bad faith commenting, astroturfing, and arm chair developers who've never written a line of code for a game in their lives. Always has been.
(Or maybe Jason Hall is going by "Tyler" now. XD )
wrong, the commission did discuss with SKG, but the entire group had their head in the sand when reasonable people asked SKG to respect technical reality and resubmit a better, reality-focused proposal as SKG 2.0. They ban anyone not in their echo chamber.
The technical reality is:
- that singel player games don't need a persistent online connection
- that it is not that complicated if you develop your game with offline playability in mind from the beginning
- multiplayer games can very well have an offline playable LAN mode (Age of Empires 2 is currently sold as "Definitive Edition" which does not work offline in LAN unless you connect to Xbox online services first)
The gaming industry did way too much stupid shit in the last few years and just needs to take it a notch back.
> develop your game with offline playability in mind from the beginning
> players churn on their own without social features
you say one thing but the market votes the other way. Game developers are under pressure to turn a profit. If you want a game your way, develop them yourself! Thats how I started making games for myself. Projecting or pressuring others to do so yield no productive consequence.
> multiplayer games can very well have an offline playable LAN mode
_some_ multiplayer games can, many can't, as they are using a cloud-based multiplayer backend that isn't easily replaceable (see other discussions in this thread). SKG makes no effort to address those differences.
I don't understand your argument. SKG specifically excludes:
- Existing games (they only aim to have regulation for newer game, as existing games may be locked into technical choices like a cloud based multiplayer backend that can't be replaced)
- Non live-service games (ergo games where you have a monthly subscription of some kind, which makes it obvious you're "renting" the game for a limited time).
Within these confines, it seems _very obvious_ to me that you can design just about any multiplayer game in a way that's compatible with SKG's desired regulations. In the vast majority of multiplayer games, you can:
- Provide a LAN multiplayer mode (most match-based FPS/strategy games can do that. Too many examples to cite.)
- Provide server binaries for self-hosted servers (Many survival games, or games with a persistent world, can do that. See v-rising for a recent example.)
- Provide a local multiplayer mode (split screen/couch coop style)
And if you don't want to go through any of that for [insert reason here], you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment like WoW and you're no longer subject to the regulation!
Now, please give me an example of a game that doesn't fit within that framework if you want to continue this argument.
> a LAN multiplayer mode (most match-based FPS/strategy games can do that
Most match-based FPS don't do that anymore, as it's susceptible to DDOS. Whether a LAN-like mode is otherwise still feasible/acceptable by todays game quality standards is debatable.
> Provide server binaries for self-hosted servers
This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
> Now, please give me an example of a game that doesn't fit within that framework if you want to continue this argument.
Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
> you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment
Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
> Most match-based FPS don't do that anymore, as it's susceptible to DDOS.
We're talking about EOL plans here. You don't have to care about DDOS.
> This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
I have multiple issues with this framing:
1. We're talking about regulation about _future games_ that haven't been made yet. SKG doesn't want to regulate existing games. So we're not talking about retrofitting an EOL plan on games that already rely on complex backend. If you're planning for it from the get-go, getting an architecture that isn't so cloud-reliant isn't that complicated.
2. Even if we accept the premise that a game _absolutely needed_ a cloud only architecture to function for one reason or another, that doesn't prevent releasing the architecture binaries.
3. Licensed libraries may have redistribution prohibitions _today_, but should EOL regulations come in place, you'd find that those libraries would quickly move to allow redistribution for EOL purposes, as otherwise studios would just _not use them_.
> Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
AFAICT, Photon Fusion is fully compliant with SKG already - it supports games where one player is the "host" and all comms are P2P. Players can direct connect to one another. While it does work better with a STUN server or with Photon's cloud, they are not *necessary* for the game to function.
Photon's Voice offering might be different, but turning that off for an EOL plan is totally acceptable according to the SKG's wanted regulation - they would fall within the same category of "extra services" that aren't part of the core game.
And _furthermore_, of the three games you cited, I know for sure that PEAK and CW are playable fully offline. They're already SKG-compliant even if photon fusion was somehow not. I haven't played Gorilla Tag or looked into it, but I think I've already made my point clear.
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
WoW still has active players in the millions. FF14 has a 25k peak concurrent players in the past 24h. There are other success stories. But sure, it "tanks your playerbase".
> We're talking about regulation about _future games_ that haven't been made yet. So we're not talking about retrofitting an EOL plan on games that already rely on complex backend. If you're planning for it from the get-go, getting an architecture that isn't so cloud-reliant isn't that complicated.
I don't know about the EU effort, but the California bill would apply to any game that is released on or after January 1, 2027. That's not enough time to plan for the "changes from the get-go."
> There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
If they're not actually allowed to sell their product, then they shouldn't pretend they're selling it. They should be clear that it's a rental by offering it as a subscription only in that case and thus not be bound by that requirement.
> > 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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
> Most match-based FPS don't do that anymore, as it's susceptible to DDOS. Whether a LAN-like mode is otherwise still feasible/acceptable by todays game quality standards is debatable.
How is LAN susceptible to DDoS? I think you're thinking of P2P, unless you're worried about your LAN buddies trolling you I guess.
Regardless, whether the quality of LAN games is good or not is wholly irrelevant to the SKG initiative. If players want to play an apparently inferior version of the game, they should be allowed to, and LAN is hardly going to be an inferior version of the game anyways.
> This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
Comparing your game to a SaaS app is an interesting approach, because SaaS apps are generally sold as subscriptions, not one-time purchases that would otherwise immply ownership. If the game is genuinely SaaS-like, maybe price it like one and stop selling it like a regular product.
Also this would only really be the case for AAA games, and they have more than enough cash to figure out a proper sunsetting strategy.
Again, it doesn't have to be a perfect experience or anything near it, as long as people can somehow keep playing the games they paid for, even if they're the ones to bear the costs of hosting (which isn't even a rare thing in gaming, there's many old games with community servers out there that to this day have healthy playerbases).
In my experience the community servers usually beat the experience on dedicated servers anyways though, modders are usually more passionate and have more freedom to make things work well than the devs do. See the shenanigans with Titanfall 2's servers as an example.
> Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
The games being cited to defeat this legislation are indie titles with small userbases and tight margins. The legislation is being discussed largely because of what EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do to games with millions of paying customers. Letting the hardest edge case set the ceiling for consumer protection is a convenient outcome for the people least affected by it.
And regardless, games like Minecraft and Terraria started off as small-studio indie games that built their own networking without Photon or anything like it. The self-hosted server support is a huge part of why those communities are still thriving today, many years later. The "it's too complex without third-party services" argument is newer than the practice of indie devs doing it themselves.
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
The implication that informed consumers are a problem for the industry is a pretty damning admission about how the industry currently operates.
> How is LAN susceptible to DDoS? I think you're thinking of P2P, unless you're worried about your LAN buddies trolling you I guess.
I didn't say that. Games don't to P2P anymore because it's susceptible to DDOS. LAN as alternative to Internet P2P may have seperate drawbacks (but may obviously disregard DDOS protection).
> The legislation is being discussed largely because of what EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do to games with millions of paying customers. Letting the hardest edge case set the ceiling for consumer protection is a convenient outcome for the people least affected by it.
Then propose some legislation that actually deals with that and doesn't in its communication ignore the cost of retrofitting games for all developers of games with any online component. But that's not how SKG riles up it's base of support.
> The implication that informed consumers are a problem for the industry is a pretty damning admission about how the industry currently operates.
This doesn't have anything to do with informed consumers / uninformed consumers. My comment was about the unwillingness of customers to pay for monthly subscriptions.
> consumers are a problem for the industry
They honestly are. My main reason for not going into game development is the incredible entitlement from the customerbase. I understand that situations like Control or The Crew suck, but those should be individual class action lawsuits. But instead everyone wants to impose legislation on essentially all online games, even those they purchase for less money than a coffee at Starbucks. And all that just to apparently be fine with buggy, laggy, borderline playable versions of the game, with worse matchmaking UX.
That things you bought stop working is not unique to video games with online components. I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore.
> the cost of retrofitting games for all developers of games with any online component
As it has been said many times already, the initiative does not propose any "retrofitting" for existing games.
> the incredible entitlement from the customerbase
The ability to be able to play the game in the future is not entitlement, it's a normal thing. If you car stops working because the authentication servers are down, do you consider yourself entitled as well? I hope not. Why should games be different?
> That things you bought stop working is not unique to video games with online components. I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore
But modern titles stop working on modern systems, so it's not comparable. We can still play older games via different means. But with games that use online connection that's not the case when the servers get shut down.
> The cost per hour of games is already incredibly low compared to most other paid forms of entertainment.
How is this relevant? I still want to be able to play older games 10 years from now. The cost does not matter. I would even pay more money for the guarantee that the game will be always playable.
> How is it not entitled to insist that these super attractive prices should be even lower still?
Nobody suggests to lower the prices... Do you even understand what SKG is about?
> Why should games be different from a movie ticket or a streaming subscription?
Because you can buy movies on physical media and watch them whenever you want. With games that have online component that's not always the case anymore.
>How is this relevant? I still want to be able to play older games 10 years from now. The cost does not matter. I would even pay more money for the guarantee that the game will be always playable.
You can already do that! Contact the rightsholders and negotiate with them. It'll probably be relatively cheap to buy an EOL game.
>Nobody suggests to lower the prices... Do you even understand what SKG is about?
I'm not misunderstanding anything, you are failing to consider basic economics.
Making the product last longer is effectively indistinguishable from making it cheaper in the context of the EU.
But I do get why a bunch of people seem to dismiss SKG as "childish". I didn't start from that point of view, but the commenters here certainly have me convinced with their tunnel-vision.
Ah yes, because businesses just love to turn down free money.
>Once again, nobody is asking that. So you are misunderstanding SKG.
If SKG really does not want games to remain playable after EOL, they're certainly piss-poor communicators. I thought the whole point was to "stop killing games", i.e. make them last longer.
> because businesses just love to turn down free money
Unfortunately, yes. Example - try getting publishing rights to No One Lives Forever franchise (GOG already tried that). It's not rare for publishers to sit on their IPs without doing anything with them. And it's not exclusive to videogames as well.
> make them last longer
You can look at it differently. "Last longer" can mean "getting support from the publisher for longer period of time". Nobody demands this. Or it can mean "have an EOL plan", but then it's a weird way to phrase that. But yes, this meaning is the one that SKG uses.
I also want to add that proposing people to buy an IP from a company (or pay it to keep supporting it) is very disingenuous and even borderline trolling. That's not how it works even remotely. Companies do not "negotiate" with consumers about it. So even bringing this up shows the amount of dismissiveness and bad faith that SKG "deniers" bring to the discussion. Utterly baffling...
Is it really disingenuous to point out "haha, well obviously you guys simply aren't willing to put up enough cash to make this attractive for the rightsholders"?
I think it is simply the truth of the matter. The financial incentives don't line up, the rightsholders are not keeping you from playing games just because they're evil.
But I think you missed why I brought this up, I did so only because you specifically claimed that financial incentives are irrelevant in your earlier comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582196
I was referencing the comment which proposed to buy out the rights to the game. This is absurd (and hence disingenuous), because again it's not how it works in real life, and it's not just with games. You cannot just approach a company willy-nilly as a consumer and politely ask them to sell their IP to you - that includes games, movies, books etc. They are not going to respond to it unless you are another big company.
Regarding my comment, I already replied right there that I'm willing to pay more money for the games if it means they are preserved. You again misunderstand (probably on purpose) what it's all about...
Gaming industry is not poor (although they like to tell you that). They rack billions on exploitative mechanics like lootboxes, gachas and live services, but don't want to keep their games alive even though it would cost them a fraction of what they earn to do so. This confirms that this is not about money, at least not in the way you are trying to portrait it. Also remember that gaming companies love to evade taxes. Yeah, they are (totally not evil) entities who act with pure goodwill towards their consumers...
> Then propose some legislation that actually deals with that...
SKG and the people signing the petitions aren't legislators, the entire point of this initiative is to actually talk to legislators. It's not their job to propose a hyper-specific law on day 1, it's the job of the legislators to do so. And so far, it has been met with nothing but bad faith attacks on things they have never claimed to want, such as...
> ...the cost of retrofitting games ...
SKG has made it abundantly clear that they don't want any kind of law or legislation to be applied retroactively. There would be absolutely no retrofitting forced on anyone, it would only affect new games released after legislation passes. Similarly to how you didn't have to re-manufacture your old phone model to add a USB-C port into it, you don't have to do anything with your already-released games.
> ... the incredible entitlement from the customerbase
People expect to buy a product and to be able to use it however they'd like, without getting scammed and having it yanked from them down the line? How entitled of them!
> And all that just to apparently be fine with buggy, laggy, borderline playable versions of the game, with worse matchmaking UX.
Again, how is that anyone's problem other than the person who bought the game and is presumably happy to keep playing it? If it has reached EOL, then it's better the game remain playable somehow, regardless of how buggy or bad of an experience it is, than to just fully lose access to it. I'd say no experience is worse than a buggy one.
> I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore.
You can extremely easily emulate all of these, including on your phone, and hell Windows has native support for many games with their compatibility modes out of the gate, so yes, you could indeed play games from the 90s if you still wanted to. We've still got Doom (1993) being ported to anything that has a transistor in it to this day. In fact, looking over a list of 90s games, pretty much all of them are still playable! Monkey Island (1990!), Wolfenstein 3D ('92), Myst, the OG Warcraft, Quake is still being played competitively to this day, Civ 2, the original Diablo, the list goes on for a while and many of these games have healthy playerbases to this day.
Ever heard of GOG (Good Old Games)? It's in the name, their entire business is predicated on making retro games runnable on modern systems, and oftentimes even improving on them massively by pre-patching community patches and things of that nature.
As a sidenote, looking at lists of old games it's quite depressing how much we've lost in more recent times. I can and do still boot up games from my childhood, and many of them with vibrant & healthy communities to this day, yet there are newer games from a few short years ago that are now completely dead because the devs decided to pull the plug on them. AoE II "Enhanced" Edition doesn't even have LAN functionality without first connecting to their servers! The original game that this is a remaster of you can still play today with literally 0 issues! That is the exact issue with this crap, we're pretending like it's impossible to build games with longevity in mind when we've been doing it for the better part of 2 decades already.
The commission was talking with the game industry much more than with the initiative, which opened a clear way for the industry to misrepresent the initiative with phrases like "endless support" which nobody demands.
The technical reality is peer to peer multiplayer has existed for decades, and if indie studios can manage both then AAA games certainly can. Single player always online need not even enter the conversation. No point engaging with bad faith arguments to the contrary.
SKG was prepared for this, and their intention has been to join up with the group putting together the new Digital Fairness Act, since the objective there is very similar, but much broader in scope, and most of the groundwork is already there. Much of the earlier recorded Q&A sessions in Parliament had representatives commenting on this already, so it's the natural approach. This way, legislation will almost certainly be put forward and voted on, and the lobby groups will likely have a harder time trying to wrestle with a larger movement and a parliament that seems sympathetic to the cause.
Basically, this is a battle lost that never really mattered. The climax of this war is yet to come.