It’s amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they’re no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.
Digital Fairness Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act/F33096034_en
This is a masterclass in “pick your one thing in life and focus on that.”
I’m highly pessimistic that the spirit of this legislation, which I wholly support, can ever be enshrined in law with enough specificity that it works the way we want it to in the cases where we need it to, without becoming a truly undue burden on small developers or forcing all publishers to just work around it in some way: like taking everything to a subscription model going forward.
Uuh, more often than not, the small devs already make their games indefinitely playable and preservable, just out of a love for the medium.
No actual artist wants their work to have an expiry date.
Legal enforcement is only needed for the passionless big publishers that shutter games just to funnel players into purchasing their latest releases.
It’s mentioned in the parliament presentation. Only a small minority of game publishers engage in this BS, but it’s ALL the big ones, meaning the problem is experienced by the vast majority of consumers.
I don’t see how this would put any additional burden on smaller devs. Small teams usually don’t make always-online type games because they’re very complex and expensive
Take Among Us. It is not some huge bullshit live service game, but it makes use of the internet. It was created by a small developer.
The game includes local network play which is a good thing because I assume it would have to under this law, so it can play “offline.”
Do we think that local network play was zero effort to include? Would it really have no effect on small developers if they all had to include this always?
I know what you mean about small indie games being simple but the reality is a little more complex than that image. Small developers do also create online games. They aren’t big shit shows like Fortnite but that doesn’t mean they don’t use the internet.
No one ever wants to hear that it’s more complicated than they think it is, but that’s the truth virtually all the time.
I understand the core case that this man wants to stop. But laws have to be written for all, with precise language, and can’t just say “you know the kind of game we’re talking about.”
And that’s where this gets difficult.
If you can make a multiplayer game over the internet, you can make a multiplayer LAN mode or even share the server implementation or give API specifications to allow the community to make their server software
Yeah I think there’s some promise in “open the source” as a remedy here. Because that doesn’t really put any onus on the game maker. They can keep making games exactly as they do now, but if they want to utterly walk away from a title, they have to open the source.
I think the complications with this would come from IP and copyright law, licensing, etc. for example, if the developer licensed any other software (or music or whatever) in order to make the game, do they actually have the rights to open source all of that? Perhaps not.
It’s kind of like accelerating the public domain thing. Very interesting remedy for this situation, but extremely complex legally, I would guess.
Small teams and indies use things like photon to make multiplayer games.
We’ve had the technology since stone ages, quit lying about this so called burden. All it takes is to not be greedy.
Spoken like someone who’s never had to implement regulatory measures in software.
Yeah. I have similar feelings. And I don’t think the social media fervor is helping things sometimes. There needs to be a certain level of precision in what is being asked for, and I see lots of broad statements about what laws should prevent from happening from random individuals. Using words like “kill switches” when required servers are taken offline. Or demanding every game have a direct networking mode or LAN options in addition to matchmaking or platform facilitated matchmaking.
Yes it’s video games and people want what they want and always think it’s simpler to deliver than it is.
All they have to do is give up the rights. If they can’t afford it, I guarantee I’m there is a web somewhere that will do it for free.
I imagine you see the undue burden as a mandate to keep running the game servers yourself when you have no income to do so.
Once upon a time, the norm for exclusively online games was to provide a hostable server so that any third party could host, because the game companies didn’t want to bother with hosting themselves, so at most they owned or outsourced a hosted registry of running servers, and volunteers ran instances.
Then big publishers figured out that controlling the servers and keeping the implementation in-house was a good way to control the lifespan of games, and a number of games kept it closed.
So the remedy is to return to allowing third party hosting, potentially including hooks for a third party registry for running game servers if we are talking more ephemeral online instances like you’d have in shooters. One might allow for keeping the serving in-house and only requiring third party serving upon plan to retire the in-house game.