Unofficial but it is fun to watch live as the tracker numbers go up https://stopkillinggamestracker.pages.dev/
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"Online-only: This game will be playable until 2028-06-30"
This forces the publisher to put their money where their mouth is. If the game is successful, like WoW, by all means extend the time it's playable for. If it 'flops', you're on the hook to support it for 3 years, since you shouldn't be putting out made-to-fail slop.
The word 'buy' implies some level of ownership (not to the rights to IP or anything, but at least to the product being purchased).
You could force the company to release their code upon bankruptcy, but what if another company wants to buy those assets? What if some other IP that they might use on other games is mixed in there and required for the game to work?
You could make a prohibition on live service games to begin with. You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset. The problem here is economic.
Game companies can’t go back to the old model of lumpy cash flow. You can’t have one huge pile of money come in when the game launches, and then a long miniscule tail. That doesn’t keep people employed. It’s also super risky when a game with a huge budget and long development time flops. You have to have some kind of constant revenue stream from subscriptions or micro-transactions to stay afloat. If users can run their own servers, that can never happen.
Millions of essentially rich middle upper class banding together effortlessly to petition the government to save their entertainment. Meanwhile there are people spending their whole lives to get even a tiny sliver of support for things like human rights violations.
This sounds purely like a technical and legal problem, not an economic one. Even if a company wants to run their game as a live service they can be required to design it in such a way that the server portion is portable and self-hostable, but not release the server until they shut down their own.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Battlefield/comments/1jxcaj3/battle...
Worst case you don't get what you want, but usually such bankrupt entities have successors that take on the liability the same way you'd take on liability for a lack of good data hygiene practices under GDPR.
You really need either a minimum term of support in law, or a requirement to publish a docker of the server into escrow, to be released if the company fails or decides to discontinue.
But it's less obvious to me how the legislation should work for a multiplayer-only game that goes out of business. I suppose it should require a refund at some point. But at what point?
Steam only lets you refund a game that you played for less than two hours.
And if you think that's not long enough, there's surely some time period where you can agree that you've got your money's worth. Kind of like how you lose the ability to say "I didn't like it" after you ate your whole dinner at a restaurant.
Yet in the comments here someone gives an example of three years of online support which is insane. Why is multiplayer special? Should Steam also let you refund any game until three years elapse?
This is not the case
> Meanwhile there are people spending their whole lives
This is just relative privation fallacy speaking. You are welcome to try and create your own initiative and get popular streamers to talk about it. The fact that horrible things are happening in the world does not mean we shouldn't also care about other relatively bad things.
Alternatively (e.g. if the server is an authentication check) then they can release a patch that removes that check.
The console wars are no longer company vs company, it is company vs consumer. So much anti consumer shenanigans are going on in the video game industry a message needs to be sent.
If you care about video games, even in passing as a complete casual, please sign the petitions. I've done my dash for the UK.
This seems like a lot of hullabaloo over an issue that most people don’t care about, isn’t a major problem, has large technical and financial hurdles.
It seems to me if it’s important to consumers the large size and diversity of the gaming market would make this a non issue because you could just select a game without this restriction, of which many are available in every genre.
The idea is to force the companies to provide an end-of-life plan that leaves the game in a "reasonably playable state". Depending on the game the approach can differ. Releasing the binaries along with instructions for hosting dedicated servers is one approach (that some games already take). I was playing on a (pirated, but it was a long way ago and I was a child) Lineage 2 server way back in 2007 on my local ISP network, so even something like MMORPGs can be covered if it's included in the discussion at the design stage of the game.
But even if the backend is very complex and vendor-locked, releasing something like a set of Cloudformation templates and saying "you can only host this on AWS and it's going to be restrictively expensive but there you go" is also an option that would satisfy the requirements. It's still better then having nothing at all to dig at (although some fans still do reverse-engineer and spin up community servers even without having access to any of this).
Requiring an "end of life plan" in the ToS would be a start.
But anything more than that I probably don't agree with.
WoW private servers have been a thing for a long time now. It's not like the initiative is asking for the ability to run the game on any set of minimum hardware. If the backend is released and a fleet of servers is needed to run it, that fulfills the ask.
Pretty much any game of this type also has some ability for the developers to run it on their own machines too, usually with some simplified backend. Releasing those developer tools would also meet the bar.
Its also been overwhelming ignored and not-viable in most countries. The US for example is a lost cause.
If you think this is things working out well for middle class folks, then similar work for human rights violations are utterly doomed.
It may not always be possible, especially if you aren't actually charging in some way... but the money soak that some games are is ridiculous and the massive corporate decision making interfering with the game design in that direction deserve to have to fulfill that requirement.
I'm honestly mixed in a lot of ways as I do see and understand the need/desire for some decisions without malice or greed behind them. But in the end, it's a balancing act. Actual online driven games should probably have a monthly fee, if they don't they're bound to get taken offline sooner than later. It doesn't need to be a huge fee even $20/year to keep the lights on. For offline games, maintaining a license api server shouldn't be an undue burden, and there's almost no reason to ever turn such a thing off... If the game isn't that widely used a $5/mo VPS can probably handle it.
Aside: I really miss gamespy and the like for self-hosting the server side for interactive games, lan party play, etc. Wish more games would go back to that.
Developers originally released server applications so people could host their own multi-player games [0]. They often would release both a Windows and Linux server application. Games even came packaged with server hosting a player could host a multi-player game [1]. Allowing the communication protocol to be re-verse engineered so people can build and run their own servers [2].
[0] https://wiki.unrealadmin.org/Server_Install_linux [1] https://wolffiles.de/etmanual/en/Tech%20Help/Information/Ser... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/05/activision-kills-fan-...
Ensuring that the multiplayer server component of your game is a standalone end-user distributable is a huge task to impose on every game that wants to have a multiplayer component. Especially once you consider the vast majority of games that never even get traction much less turn a profit.
So, the second someone buys your prerelease indie slither.io game, what exactly does this checklist look like? It needs to also day 1 launch with a self-hostable standalone server distro instead of the crappy spaghetti mess you live coded on an EC2 machine?
Thanks to the hard work of these organizations, the US market, at least, allows for those who purchased these games to continue to play them with a third party patch to their client. See below:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exempt...
Keep the IP while you run the servers and sell the game, when you are no longer interested in running the servers, drop a tarball of code. It doesn’t need to be simple, it just needs to be possible and complete. The community can take care of it. If the IP is valuable, then you have your incentive to keep the game playable until it isn’t valuable to you.
> Especially once you consider the vast majority of games that never even get traction much less turn a profit.
Which is the whole point. Believe it or not - people who slave away on the game for years want people to maybe get to play it and enjoy it? Cause it's also art and not just business and there's a preservation angle to all of it?
> It needs to also day 1 launch with a self-hostable standalone server distro instead of the crappy spaghetti mess you live coded on an EC2 machine?
Not by day 1 launch, by day "we shut everything down". Not on an EC2 machine - as I mentioned in the thread above, even dumping your cloudformation templates and saying "enjoy all these queues" will satisfy the requirements.
A one-day warranty would almost certainly run afoul of the EU's merchantability laws.
Edit: Misread the date (sorry, American here -- we write dates weird). However, the point still stands: selling a product to consumers involves some warranty of merchantability, and breaching that entitles consumers to refunds (and can even get the publisher in trouble with regulators).
I wouldn't be concerned with publishers going the "guaranteed playable until" route because there's already consumer protections that discourage this type of thing.
It's like thinking that just because the code exists, then it's in a state that could be pushed publicly to github, and that's not the case for almost any codebase.
To think that I would need to do all that the second I charge $1 seems unreasonable. And I think you underestimate how true this is for most games you see on Steam.
If the game can be taken away from you st any time then "buying" is definitely inaccurate too then. "Licensing for a limited time" might be the most accurate, but something like "Lease for X years" might be more concise and accurate enough.
The issue is really more with lazy implementations where a server check is required to play something that's fully single player as you say, which has become standard for major publishers now and is far too common for indie games too. It's not too much to ask to do the bare minimum and keep that single instance auth server online or just remove the requirement entirely by commenting out a few lines.
WoW has always required a monthly subscription since release
They also need to have had invested in the extra work so that hypothetical players can have the opportunity to self-host the server on day 1 for a game that never caught on in the first place?
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/legally-weird/u-s-copyrig...
Please do not spread misinformation like this.
You are buying a license for 2 weeks sounds a lot less appealing than just "buying", but that would have been the reality for Concord had they not issued refunds. Is a year that much better? Maybe, but have it in writing.
These "we sell you a license we may terminate at any point for any reason" terms are absolute bullshit.
I mean, this covers it. Put that code out, and some one else can rysnc it to a VPS. The ask here in not that it's nicely bundled up into a single click deploy. It's that a path exists at all. If I need a fleet of servers and some technical know how, that's fine. Even expected for many games.
If you really wanted to make sure, you could require the company to deliver the corresponding assets to the national library within N days of release.
If you really don't want to bother with that - don't sell the game, sell timed access and shut it down once the last subscription runs out.
Publishers aren't required to keep servers up, nor do they need to release the server binaries/code. It just demands that the publisher thinks about the end of life for their game. A great way to do that for online games would be to publish the server, definitely... But it's not required.
These kinds of gotchas and knowitall armchair analysis is way too premature. This isn't an actual legal document, it's a draft that would then become a legal document.
Is it? Your hosting it somehow? No one is asking for a 1-click installer. What do you do? Let us do that.
It seems short sighted.
2. Games are artefacts of our modern culture, examples of artistic expression (more or less). I don't think that every game, every song and every movie is worth saving, but who am I to disparage what someone else likes.
> No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way.
I would love for companies to allow people to host private servers when they abandon MMOs.
Any of the following options are enough to satisfy this proposal:
- Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.
- Have your server source code (stripped down of proprietary stuff) ready for public release at EoL.
- Allow customers to reverse engineer the binaries and communication protocol after EoL.
- Package dedicated server binaries with the game and allow customers to connect to it via a LAN or direct IP option.
It's not like we are donating anything besides a minute or two of our time... It's just a signature.
If that was all that was needed to force law makers to fix human rights violations, I'll sign that as well, but most of those problems are not as easy to fix.
Or do you have tooling that allows your devs to run it on their machines without the server components (most online games do)? Releasing that instead is also an option.
If a developer decides to not take that requirement in the design stage then that is their prerogative, but not even doing it would be like not following any other EU consumer protection law.
If not, then buying is not owning and piracy is not stealing.
It is as easy as saying, "this game you're buying won't run after 2030"
Or publishing the bare minimum APIs you'd need to simulate to get the game to function. We have great people in the community that will make stuff work on their own, no instructions required.
Just don't go out of your way to destroy your game.
(Usually I don't like regulations that blatantly favor small businesses like this, because they're coming from a misguided place. But in this case, the benefit of the regulation scales with the number of customers of a given firm, while the costs are fixed per firm, so applying it to large firms but not large ones won't much encourage fragmentation and could capture most of the benefits of applying it to everyone without most of the costs.)
Which to me doesn't sound huge ask. Unless you have overly strictly coupled the game with online. Which for single player games is likely bad design anyway.
Or allow the community to build and host reverse engineered servers after your game is dead. Don't go out of your way to sue and destroy community efforts.
You realize that APIs can be reverse-engineered and new clean-room servers created? It has been done for a bunch of old games.
As I understand it, that's not the main focus of this initiative though. It's mostly about opening up dead games for stuff like private servers, so we are not forced to lose access to all the art within when the developer pulls the plug.
It seems like a relatively small ask to at least _allow_ hardcore fans to keep something alive. I can imagine publishers that have a great connection with their community (like Coffeestain) actually benefitting from handling stuff like this in a decent way.
This software is not guaranteed beyond 0 Unix time.
> - Have your server source code (stripped down of proprietary stuff) ready for public release at EoL.
This isn't viable, and i would expect anyone on this site to understand that. it's roughly equivalent to saying "just make facebook stripped of proprietary code and ready for the public to run"
> - Allow customers to reverse engineer the binaries and communication protocol after EoL.
This is a reasonable path forward, but likely a non-starter in the US for political reasons. I understand that "stop killing games" is an EU thing.
> - Package dedicated server binaries with the game and allow customers to connect to it via a LAN or direct IP option.
See point 2. This is nonsensical.
For indie games, would an exclusion like "games with less than 1 million lifetime players" be enough? That's not an unsolvable issue, especially as indie games are not the main games people are worried about being killed. Most indie games will not be 'killed' by the developers because they're not releant on servers that the developer cannot afford to host.
Lots of indie games I see just use the storefront's APIs for multiplayer matching, not even requiring a matchmaking server.
> But it's less obvious to me how the legislation should work for a multiplayer-only game
It should. If the game is made after the Stop Killing Games law is passed, you have to have A Plan. Open source engine? Not prosecute private servers? Pick your poison.
> Why is multiplayer special?
It's not. Multiplayer wasn't special ten years ago. Only insistence on always online DRM and micro transactions changed this.
Either release the server binary or code or publish the bare minimum API spec so others can build a server from scratch. Strip away any proprietary stuff. And don't sue when other people have server up and playing your game.
If you can't meet these very achievable goals, perhaps the game isn't at a point where it should be sold for money. What are you going to do when that ec2 instance gets randomware and becomes inaccessible, just tell all the people who paid you money to go home and forget about it?
I love indie developers, but if one can't have a modicum of professionalism, then they shouldn't ask people to pay for a product.
Nope. This has been done for many "dead" games. Servers have been reverse engineered from nothing. Private servers are a common thing.
> This software is not guaranteed beyond 0 Unix time.
Imagine Apple says that about iOS. Wouldn't you want consumer protection so Apple doesn't do that? Why should anything else be any different?
> This software is not guaranteed beyond 0 Unix time.
Grandma goes to the store to buy a game for their grandkid. She sees two game boxes. One says in the front "This game will stop working tomorrow and you will not get a refund" and the other says "This game will stop working in 2030". Which one does she pick?
I think bankruptcy is clearly its own category here. This is targeted at companies who release something then shutter it because they didn't sell enough copies.
Seriously.
It's like people forgot what multiplayer gaming was like pre-2005. Everyone ran their own servers. You could run your own Half-Life game server and other users merely pointed their game client to your IP address.
The only exceptions back then were the MMORPGs.
There's no reason we can't go back to the way it used to be. I used to run multiplayer Starcraft on a LAN without an Internet connection. Why can't I do that with Starcraft II? We used to play Quake on custom servers. Some servers had fun communities. All that is gone in favor of live services that can be shut down on a whim.
I don't even think requiring server source code to be disclosed should be necessary. Merely the binaries with some basic instructions on setting it up (which could easily be based on internal documents for setting up test servers) would be sufficient.
The only financially viable solution for online games is to release in Europe later, after the project popularity in other markets was established.
- The original developper is not working on the game anymore, another company is maintaining it and has no capacity for making significant changes to it.
- You can't release your server source code because you will be using a lot of proprietary add ons that can't be released, and those are usually absolutely essential.
- Your server is going to be built against a now unsupported version of the engine, that you probably can't even install on current year operating systems
- stripping the source code of 'proprietary stuff' is significant work, there's no package management, code is copy pasted.
- Your protocol is based on third party commercial code and that other company doesn't like reverse engineering
- Changing the way the networking works to remove the lobby is significant development work, the networking framework is out of date, not maintained, and the devs are most likely not available anymore.
It's really difficult to create a cohesive gaming organization without controlling your own multiplayer servers. It's a sad state of gaming that every game has centralized servers. If anything, I'd love to see requirements that decentralize multiplayer hosting. The devs can release their own servers, but they'd be alongside the community ones, as well.
This hard from the developer perspective, but its solvable at the regulation level.
Shoot, how is peer-to-peer nonsensical? Elden Ring (seamless multiplayer) got it tacked on as a mod. It’s insanely doable.
I don’t accept that these are nonstarters. In the slightest.
Then I had to stop playing because it was eating into my study time too much.
I've tried going back to MMOs a couple of times since then, but nothing seems to have the charm of a smaller community like that.
2. It is a problem now, but the license for those can and will change if the law mandates it. Unless addon authors don't want to make any money, that is.
3. I don't get the argument. If it works at the time of release - you're good. You're not expected to keep updating it to work on modern systems.
4. This is just point 2 repeated.
5. This is still just point 2 repeated and reverse engineering is allowed in EU, whether they like it or not.
6. Why do you need to change the way networking works?
Getting back to games, I still don't see why allowing users to host private servers with their friends is impossible. If anything, it seems like its strictly a DRM issue...but at EOL for a game you no longer find profitable enough to keep the servers online, who really cares about DRM
All you should have is a "reasonable effort" EOL plan that allows customers to continue using the parts that can work without the developers support. They even call out "Gran Turismo Sport" as a good example. Sony announced the EOL a year before, and stopped selling micro-transactions. Then they removed the online services while retaining offline support for add-ons and in-game items.
A reasonable EOL plan might be: We'll support the online matchmaking for 3 years. After that we retain the rights to shut down the services providing at least a one year notice. All in-game items and add-ons will be made downloadable for all players 6 months before shut-down. All offline game modes will remain playable using those items as before.
If you buy something, that will be yours, you can use it as long as you want, you can sold it or it can be inherited from you. (In copyright terms that's a perpetual, irrevocable license.)
If there is only a limited duration you can use something, that's called renting and the duration must be known before you enter into a contract.
Yeah, then it gets messy. That's what the legal system and insolvency procedures are for.
> You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset
That's the strawman going around. You might not even have to provide EOL support for all online-components. Just use reasonable effort to make offline content playable. The law-making process hasn't even started and people already are arguing against the worst-case, least nuanced regulation possible.
Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X
providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher
Have your server source code (stripped down of proprietary stuff) ready for public release at EoL
Allow customers to reverse engineer the binaries and communication protocol after EoL
Package dedicated server binaries with the game
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[0] https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
The code of server would be a perfect match to cover the company's liabilities of keeping the game playable.
If someone wants to buy the bankrupted company, they gets it's liabilities including "keep the game playable", too.
If your game uses matchmaking or is multi region or crossplay it’ll be depending from a lot of different services, and tightly integrated with them.
Latency concerns, for example, might be handled at several points in the flow that would stop existing for a standalone server. None of the code involved is reusable because it was written for a completely different context.
The game that sparked this movement was shutdown 9 years after it came out, and had 3 months notice.
Even if you could host it on just one or a few machines, if you sign up for one server and your buddy joins another, you can't do raids or anything together. And each of these player hosted servers has a player limit.
Anti-cheat that isn't being actively updated is next to useless. Community servers would be botted to hell.
The game requires a maps tile service. Expecting Niantic to provide map tiles for anyone to download is insane. They might not even own the rights to do that.
It's virtually impossible for Pokémon go to remain in a "reasonably playable state" after the servers shutdown.
So no, it's not inevitable that every game will just sprout an expiry date. It's possible but only if you're right that consumers don't care about owning versus renting games.
It’s a subject you know nothing about and you’re not even curious?
I want to play games with my friends, not consider how the landscape of always-online services have distributed brokerage connectivity services, global banlists, and whatever powers microtransactions into what should be a game with four little dudes running a kitchen badly. I especially don’t want to consider how rising requirements for stability and cross-platform connectivity which have prompted these services means that P2PoverIP simply won’t work in the face of CGNAT or Sony’s distribution policies or fucking Comcast not having IPv6 yet; and I especially don’t want to think of the lower average technical acumen of the individual gamer has caused dedicated servers to completely fall out of fashion due to user confusion.
I really don’t want to think about the “paradox of polish”, where smaller games can get away with such things like dedicated servers and p2p networking that don’t work sometimes; whereas everything in an AAA title has to work flawlessly out of the gate or it’ll be panned despite the horse’s left testicle contracting appropriately in cold water.
Man, I don’t wanna be sad about market forces encouraging centralization for the efficiency necessary to stay competitive. I just wanna play dead or alive 2 with my bros even tho the dreamcast server’s offline.
The terms of the purchase of an online game that might shut down are quite clear and known ahead of time. It's just not a fixed amount of time.
Why wouldn't everyone just say "its not guaranteed to continue working after 0 seconds from release", which is basically the current situation, and be done with it?
If you mean the servers to actually host the self-hosted solution, then "me" is a perfectly reasonable option. Server hosting is far from an insurmountable hobby expense.
I can say this with certainty because I've also worked on multiplayer in several shipped multi-region cross-platform games, and this sort of arrangement is precisely what we have shipped. Granted, Direct IP connections are usually only supported on PC, but they are there, they do work, and our PC players appreciate that piece of mind.
There is a different valid business model, where you subscribe for eg. a monthly / yearly fee and can watch movies form a catalog or play games from a catalog as long as you keep paying and the service is working.
> The terms of the purchase of an online game that might shut down are quite clear and known ahead of time.
On a ticket or a pass there is a clear date or deadline printed on them. Do the same for games (buy thins game 10 EUR for 1 year) and that would be fine, too, (it is the same subscription model just with yearly duration).
I'd certainly encourage a more sustainable solution like a self runnable server, but I'd settle for replacing the word "buy" in marketing with "license" or "rent" with actual terms other than "until we decide to turn it off".
You don't get to make software a "license" but then not have any obligations to your licensee.
No it wouldn't. Not even you believe the statement you just wrote lol.
I agree that clearer language about what you are actually "buying" would be good for consumers, but it's tangential to Stop Killing Games.
Granted, I do realize that it is an additional lift. It helps that we reuse our engine between projects, and the games that we work on tend to be amenable to traditional client/server setups. We also don't support certain features over UDP, such as matchmaking or VoIP, and we also file the task of players actually finding and connecting to each other over UDP as "not our problem" unless they're on the same LAN segment. Our games also don't have in-game stores or microtransactions, so there's no digital goods to protect either.
However, in practice, the existence of the UDP layer was far and away the least difficult part of making a working multiplayer game. The most difficult parts are the same ones you run into on any normal multiplayer project - figuring out how to get the uber-flexible middleware you're using to play ball, solving the application layer bugs, and satisfying the certification whims of the platform owners.
In the specific case of Pokemon Go, and with end-of-life plans in mind, you could probably design the game around that expectation. GDPR has had similar consequences, at the very least.
Also, this text is not law. This will be negotiated and I doubt the gaming industry would leave the initiative as-is.