Stop Killing Games

I’m curious how this can be enforced. If a game requires centralized servers, and the company goes out of business, you can’t force a bankrupt entity to keep the system running. Even if they published an expiration date, if there is no money left to run the servers, there’s nothing to sue for, nobody to fine, and no money to run the server.

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.

> 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

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.

The petition doesn't ask for the company to keep the servers up, only that it's possible to keep playing locally (either a LAN setup or private servers like Minecraft)

This requires companies to have an end-of-life plan for their games should the company wish to take down their servers. It does not require source code for the centralized servers, only the binaries. In the case of bankruptcy, the end-of-life plan would be part of the assets sold with the game.

This would be enforced on a timeline far enough in the future that the backup plan wouldn't be an afterthought, but part of the live service concept. I bet it'd help out a lot of studios to ensure their entire infra can be hosted on a developer machine anyway.

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.

I wonder if a decently sized tax on games which "expire" or aren't sustainable is a path forward. It would allow live games to continue existing, but give those made sustainably a market advantage.

If the company doesn't have any money to run the servers then they should allow users/communities to run their own servers. The company can have subscriptions and/or microtransactions, but the moment they stop providing the servers (preventing the game running) then they would need to allow users to run their own servers (even if they reverse engineer the server protocol) -- so DMCA would not apply in this case.

Alternatively (e.g. if the server is an authentication check) then they can release a patch that removes that check.

Do the binaries have to be usable forever? Or for how long? What if some system update breaks them?

The solution can easily be found in the past.

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-...

Why bother? If consumers care they will just prefer games that don’t have this issue and games that might die will be taxed implicitly. It would probably very often be worth it to just pay the tax for any of the big games people care about with this.

They don't, they just need to be usable at end of life. The proposal is purposefully very lenient

Even if the law only covered non-bankrupt companies, it would already help, because most game companies don't go bankrupt (and IIRC there already are reasonably effective laws against intentionally planning to use bankruptcy to get out of your obligations, so creative company structure design shouldn't be as big of a problem).

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.

Nope! Do I need a fleet of servers to run it? No problem! Do I need a specific release.minor.patch of FreeBSD? No problem! Do I need your proprietary kernel patches? Yeah you need to release those.

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.

AGPLv3

You could pose the same argument against any form of warranty. Why provide/require any warrant for anything if the company might go bankrupt?

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.

If a company goes bankrupt and dissolved (usually) it's assets are sold to cover it's liabilities.

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.

Can they include a dead man's switch so they become unusable one day later?

I think so, as long as it's not reliant on a central server!