Stop Killing Games

This seems very silly to me. Why would it apply only to games? It specifically is trying to apply to free games also. Should any product or service you ship with a client have to allow you to self host it if you don’t want to support it forever? What if your backend is extremely complex like WoW or Fortnite? That’s months or years of work to make that self hostable. How do you broker access to what you actually purchased? Does everyone just get to be Peter Griffin?

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 primary difference is that games are art, and that the needless destruction of art is a harm to humanity, even if you can just look at other pieces of art.

> What if your backend is extremely complex like WoW or Fortnite?

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.

Well, if they are art, then the artist has every right to make their work ephemeral, and demanding art to be regulated is just outright silly.

If you publish a book, in most countries, you explicitly don't have that right. In fact, you usually have to deliver a copy or several, often at your own cost, to the local national library (e.g. Library of Congress), to ensure it is preserved.