Stop Killing Games

Lots of bad takes in this thread. The whole idea behind this is just to stop defrauding customers that buy your software and then are left holding the bag. Nobody is asking for developers to keep running server infra for eternity.

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.

Thank you for this very good summary. I'm frustrated at the really really bad takes on this by people I thought were very smart.

I'm more and more baffled the more I go through this thread.

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.

Or if I understand right if you have some online component make final version of the game to operate without it. So you might lose multiplayer, but single player components of game should still continue to function.

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.

> - Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.

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.

> This is nonsensical.

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?

Well, this is about software you bought in advance. The Facebook comparison doesn't really work because you're not paying in advance to use it.

> 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?

> Lots of bad takes in this thread.

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.

StarCraft was amazing, you could have a link local network, just launch the game, hit multiplayer and the instances would find eachother.

I developed a few commercial games on unity a while ago, here's why some of what's proposed is harder than you think,

- 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.

Will that really solve anything then? Everyone will just put an expiration date of ~1 year and consumers will go with it, like they do every time.

The rule won't apply retroactively to all games ever released, you know. All of these requirements can - and should - be met when new games are designed and architectured to satisfy the law.

That would require a complete re-architecture of game engines and complete rework of how the games are developed and published. If I had to satisfy those requirements next year, I just wouldn't release in Europe, and I say that as an European.

Yeah, pre-console-ization of PC releases, devs would produce server binaries that would allow you to host your own servers. You could tweak rules, give preferential slots, etc. It allowed you to create a real community around your self-hosted server.

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.

World of Warcraft actually made it very easy to use a custom server, since you'd just need to change a hostname in a single text file and the client would connect to it instead. Not that it was allowed but from a technical perspective it was quite supportive. I think it's no longer as simple but there's still private server projects around.

> 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.

This hard from the developer perspective, but its solvable at the regulation level.

Then just keep doing things the same way, but add a disclaimer that says you are only selling a license to play the game, and it's not guaranteed to work after a certain date.

How is a dedicated server nonsensical? There’s a fuckton of games, ancient and modern, with them.

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 like what happened with the cookie banners, everybody is going to put the minimum date, and the only winners will be the lawyers selling consulting in EU regulation compliance with the publishers.

As a broke college student, I had a great time playing on third-party servers. The experience was janky, of course, but it was hilarious. I made some good friends there.

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.

1. Not a problem because it's not being applied retroactively, but it should be included in the design from the start for new games

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?

Ok; package up Cloudflare, Facebook, or E-Trade and let people host it.

Either the one little Timmy wanted, or the one the clerk tells her is selling fast (whether or not it's selling fast).

If that would be true, there were no new games that would comply with this proposal.

But there are many.

this is very close to what i'm advocating for EOL phones.

give proper documentations on how to write/adapt firmware.

no need to opensource everything, but at least document it fully.

and of course, allow rooting

Isn't that exactly how these companies scale across multiple data centers? They write the code once, package it all together, and host it in multiple areas?

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

The initiative is not even asking you to provide the full functionality of your online-components.

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.

Wat? E-trade is not an application, it's probably dozens of coordinated services. Meanwhile, a game usually has a single binary and another one for the server.

  Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X

False, it says[0]

  providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher

It MUST be possible to continue playing the game using reasonable means. It is not sufficient to declare an EOL date.

  Have your server source code (stripped down of proprietary stuff) ready for public release at EoL

This would only be sufficient if the proprietary dependencies are reasonable easy to acquire.

  Allow customers to reverse engineer the binaries and communication protocol after EoL

I don't think this reverse engineering could currently be disallowed in the EU, so it would not be affected by the initiative.

  Package dedicated server binaries with the game

True, it would meet the requirements of the initiative, but it would be sufficient to provide the server after EOL.

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[0] https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...

I guess the bad takes are unavoidable. I couldn't find a clear and succinct explanation of the mission anywhere on that site and had to read your post to have any idea what are they even arguing for and against.

Not op but worked on multiplayer.

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.

> Why can't I do that with Starcraft II?

Because Blizzard wanted to skin the golden goose by controling SC2 pro-scene. It went about as well as any modern Acti-Blizz idea. Poorly.

You are begging the question, the question being whether consumers care. You believe they don't (e.g. that the expires-on date won't affect sales) and the creators of this petition believe people will care and will prefer games that do not have that expiry date.

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.

> I don’t accept that these are nonstarters. In the slightest.

It’s a subject you know nothing about and you’re not even curious?

No. Because any explanation will come from someone invested in the subject, so will all sound completely reasonable and may even contain aspects of truth.

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.

> Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.

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?

There is nothing preventing you from writing an abstraction that supports both the fancy middleware as well as direct IP connections.

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.

But why would anyone buy battlefield of war 2028 if I dont destroy previous version?

fair enough, don't release it on europe and lose access to a market of 700 million people from the first world who pay the highest prices

maybe your game can live only by the sales of the US

I guess we could have made two different games at once, but we just needed one game that would work all the time for everyone. If we'd had the time or money to actually do that we would have used the time and money to made a completely new game in parallel.

>That would require a complete re-architecture of game engines and complete rework of how the games are developed and published.

No it wouldn't. Not even you believe the statement you just wrote lol.

I suspect you overestimate the amount of time or effort needed to write such an abstraction. Our base multiplayer abstraction is about 3k lines of C++, and once you have that in place there are a number of battle-tested low-level netcode libraries that can help implement the UDP subclass. Doing this also pays dividends during development, as it allows you to diagnose and fix issues with the application layer of your netcode far easier than having to navigate the authentication rigamarole of a middleware first.

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 steam summer sale the overwhelming majority of games sold were released over 1 year ago.