I've recently gotten back into some C-64 retro gaming, and I can't help but think how impossible this would be if the technology were available back then that lets game developers "tether" their game's functionality to their own servers and kill the games by killing the servers.
Fully agree with the article. Ideally it should be a warranty return if the game stops working due entirely to a decision by the developer. It's simply a defective product. If the game really requires a server, there should be a way for end users to run the server if the game developer no longer wants to run it.
I'm absolutely against involving the government to require indefinite support or anything like this suggests. It will have the opposite effect to "ending killing games", it'll increase indie costs and basically kill development of some games rather than the opposite.
Just release server binaries, at least when you decide to shutter support (preferably just release them with the game). Then the community can take over at zero cost to the developer.
What does the server infrastructure actually look like for these games? "Just release server binaries" kinda implies there is a simple .exe file that an average user can run to host their own server. In today's age of cloud computing, microservices, and serverless computing, I'm not sure if it is as simple as the suggestion implies. Especially for some of the bigger companies that likely have their own shared infrastructure across games. For example, is it even possible to separate the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare server code from the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 server code?
> "Just release server binaries" kinda implies there is a simple .exe file that an average user can run to host their own server.
FWIW in an online game i worked on recently(ish), which was BTW shut down by the publisher (thus making all the work people spent on it for years go to waste), it was really just "run a single .exe" - pretty much every developer had the server running on their machine for local debugging.
Yes, it's probably complex, but if you release everything required, then a sufficiently dedicated community will figure it out. Or maybe nobody will bother because the game was bad. Either way you lose nothing.
Re: shared infra - there will probably be some testing component used for local dev, you can release that instead of the full thing. For example: just the dedicated server part that I can connect to using a dev command line flag to play a game, but not the shared infra login system, lobby server, inventory server, matchmaking etc.
Sure, there will be some edge cases where it really is impossible to disentangle from a live, profitable other game - but I would wager the vast majority of games could be covered with very low effort.
>Sure, there will be some edge cases where it really is impossible to disentangle from a live, profitable other game - but I would wager the vast majority of games could be covered with very low effort.
I don't think we should be making laws in which "there will be some edge cases where it really is impossible" to comply. I get and empathize with the spirit, but you and the people behind this campaign can't just dismiss the complexities involved here with "I would wager" type responses. It shows a lack of insight into the realities of both game development and legislation.
I don't think a youtube video is the place to iron out edge cases. that's more a thing for regulators.
Requiring complex infrastructure with big ongoing costs, and requiring a constant income stream from consumers to support it is evidence that a game is a service and not a good, and as such there's no expectation of a perpetual license.
The fact remains people paid a one time fee to play the crew, and now you can't play it anymore, even offline. It was sold as a good, and not as a service.
Meanwhile other games with big offline and online components such as Elden Ring are completely playable offline, and mods already exist to allow online multiplayer without utilizing centralized servers. A discussion needs to happen about what is and isn't fraud.
The entire point of this campaign is to make the companies think about these kinds of decisions before making the game.
Imagine if your fridge cut out after two years because the company went bankrupt, would you really just accept "Oh well, it was designed that way! It's far too complicated to expect the company who made it in the first place to plan around that happening, that's just the way the industry works."
It's absolute madness that games are just kind of expected to die simply because its not a physical good.
That is a silly analogy. Fridges don't have an ongoing costs to the manufacturer. To be the equivalent of games, the fridge would have to come with an implicit promise that the manufacturer will pay for the electricity use of the fridge. You would then effectively be arguing that the manufacturer is obligated to send you a free generator if they went bankrupt.
The point is that games already rely on ongoing support. I admit my analogy isn't perfect, but I was trying to work off your analogy which completely ignores why these games break. It isn't directly because the developer went bankrupt. It is because the developer stopped providing a service that they previously provided for free.
It does not advocate requiring indefinite support by the publisher/developer. It is about making publishers provide whatever tools are necessary to let players keep the game running without a central server.
The government (at least in the US) is heavily involved in supporting the status quo here by blocking preservation efforts through DMCA.
Often times asking the government to take action means asking them to take their boot off your neck. It is important to take a moment to check what the issue is before assuming that asking the government to take action implies expansion of powers.
Is there a history of indie developers running SaaS-modeled games who have shut down central servers without letting fans still play the games that they paid for?
Ross Scott, the guy behind this campaign, addressed that in one of his Youtube videos. But I am not sure which one. But anyway, he is not in favor of requiring companies to run their servers forever. He is in favor of requiring companies to patch the games when they turn off the servers, so that the players can run the game locally, on their own servers. We know that that is possible, because Epic Games has done it before, when they shut down the servers for Unreal Tournament. Even if this does raise the cost of game development, speaking strictly as a consumer, I will gladly take a $60 game that will run long after the people who made it die, over a $50 game that will only last for 5 years.
Wouldn't shifting online-first games to access-subscription based pricing make better accounting sense for the publishers too?
Seems like this is less an issue of actual support and more an issue of pricing/access model disconnect.
When a SaaS product ends, it can be frustrating for sure, but it rarely feels like a betrayal in the way ending access to a one-time payment product does.
As I commented on a related thread, I really hope this succeeds and sets precedent against the rampant anti-consumer licensing of media beyond just videogames.
If I purchase a license to a videogame, song, movie, e-book, etc. in a transaction that's characterized as conferring ownership, I should have the right to consume it indefinitely, in whatever format, from whatever device, so long as I take the proper precautions to preserve my own access.
As a person who works on a large online game, I appreciate what they are trying to do and I’m sympathetic to the pain of losing a game you love, in addition to the game preservation issues. However, games just aren’t the same as they were in the 90s. The service architecture is more complex, the ecosystem management is greater (ranked systems and matchmaking health for example), and games evolve in ways that are not backwards compatible.
I don’t want to say what they’re asking for is impossible, but I don’t think it’s realistic depending on competing goals. If you want to preserve a game, you have to decide what parts are important to preserve, because some aspects just won’t exist without centralized services, lots of other players, and experts managing those systems. If you just want to host a single match on your own server, and maybe the other aspects like meta-game systems or matchmaking don’t matter to you as much, you might be able to do it but you then don’t get the real game experience. Matchmaking in particular is a complex problem, and the reason some games have become successful is moving away from the lobby or self-hosted server model toward centralized matchmaking, which needs constant tending and large player populations to be successful.
I’m open to the idea that these are solvable, but I don’t believe requiring it by law is a good idea. It just makes the cost of multiplayer games higher and riskier for publishers, and they’re already very risk averse because of the massive content costs involved.
Should games be cheaper because you’re just leasing them? Maybe, but there are armies of professionals who want to make a living doing just this that are required to make this stuff look like someone pushed a “make game” button. At least that’s how it works today. Should those devs get a larger slice of the pie than publishers or execs or whatever? I mean, hell yeah, but it doesn’t stop the reality that games are just more complex and massively more expensive to make than in the past, and that’s just where the market is. A proposal for how games can be preserved or given back to consumers at end of life really needs a more detailed proposal than “make it the law,” because I just don’t think it’s realistic.
All of the above is about explicitly multiplayer games. Single player games that have little to no multiplayer involvement at the core of the gameplay is an entirely different situation. There could still be complexities there, but you can get closer to the real game experience without centralized services.
I don't quite buy this, having grown up with source engine games.
CSGO/CS2 (and to some extent TF2 before it) makes it fully possible to host your own, dedicated server, due to its heritage from the 90s-era HL1 mod. At the same time, there is complex matchmaking and ranking support, existing completely in parallel.
I don't think anyone expects to have the entire matchmaking and competitive ranking infrastructure available to host. Bare essentials for hosting a server + ability of players to join should not be terribly hard to provide, especially if companies know before hand that this will be required, and can thus design server infrastructure accordingly.
As for this being done via legislation / court precedence, I see no other option. I don't see how these basic tools are technically hard to achieve for the vast majority of games, and I don't see any world where companies themselves would consider providing this.
There is a massive difference between those p2p games that I grew up with as well and running a live game server.
Those CSGO servers are not running all of the AI mobs, progression tracking systems, and other components that many games have today. All of those things are multiple services, databases, how they all communicate in the backend, etc. These are hosting entire long running worlds that have a lot of (literally) moving pieces.
That is before getting into just how much core data for the game is stored server side instead of client side for things like MMO's.
I mean to my knowledge the idea that a CS server would have a database (if not multiple) running to keep track of things would be absurd?
people literally built their own compatible World of Warcraft backends to do exactly that. Running a couple different docker containers for a couple necessary services is nbd and i assume that everyone involved understands that’s how cloud applications (including games) are engineered nowadays.
Table stakes engineering competence is not an excuse or justification here.
> If you want to preserve a game, you have to decide what parts are important to preserve [...] you might be able to do it but you then don’t get the real game experience
The author of this website is aware of that. Everyone will come away from a game with a different favorite part, of course, but for him it's mainly about preserving the worlds and art assets, even if some of the more fancy functionality is lost.
With games as a service, your game client already has the vast majority of the assets it needs locally. The world, models, physics engine, and the ability to move through the world are already handled by the client. But they remove that online authentication lynchpin, and you're left with tens of gigabytes of assets that you can't even open to view.
In his words:
> The comparison is between a less functional game versus nothing. It's the difference between putting grandpa in a wheelchair or taking him out back and shooting him in the head.
Plus, most of the "it's too hard" would be obviated if the publishers would plan for this eventuality from the beginning. Providing a bare-minimum experience that lets you navigate the world in singleplayer should not be "too hard".
> If a company has designed a game with no thought given towards the possibility of letting users run the game without their support, then yes, this can be a challenging goal to transition to. If a game has been designed with that as an eventual requirement, then this process can be trivial and relatively simple to implement. Another way to look at this is it could be problematic for some games of today, but there is no reason it needs to be for games of the future.
Presumably any laws resulting from these petitions would give a generous window for companies to catch up before going into force, like many new regulatory laws.
Furthermore, as far as I can tell, based on quotes like:
• "We understand some features can be impractical for an end user to attain if running a server only an end-user system."
• "For extra demanding videogames that require powerful servers the average user will not have access to, the game will not be playable on the same scale as when the developer or publisher was hosting it."
the proposal doesn't require that unofficially supporting a discontinued game be easy or inexpensive, just possible in some form.
This is a campaign to stop game publishers from turning off and rendering their games-as-a-service which people might have paid for completely inaccessible. The goal is to contact as many consumer agencies worldwide until we have some solid legislation that forces game companies to patch or release their backend, so that paying users can keep playing the game indefinitely after the publishers decide to pull the plug.
Games-as-a-service are an increasingly common practice that puts an expiration date to games that are sold at full price, and many users are totally unaware that after a few years the game they have paid for is basically worthless.
There is no technological reason this is the case, but pure greed by publishers. Many of today's GaaS are single-player games that have no business at all being online-only. A studio might choose this publishing strategy to extract as much money from consumers, to milk the playerbase with a monthly subscription and killing games when a sequel is announced. There is no law today stopping companies from doing so.
We can play games from the 1970s, we can play multiplayer games from the 1990s but many others not even a decade old now are lost forevermore. This is unacceptable.
EDIT: it is quite disheartening to see software engineers in this forum defending the practice and saying it is impossible to patch an online-only form of DRM. Even if it were the case, a publisher should be required by law to tell consumers that their $70 game will stop being playable in a few years.
> Many of today's GaaS are single-player games that have no business at all being online-only.
I am still looking for an example and I have yet to see one. From what I can tell The Crew is an online game? What am I missing here.
> many users are totally unaware that after a few years the game they have paid for is basically worthless.
Sorry I don't buy this, online gaming isn't some niche thing anymore. The internet obviously isn't niche. I feel like it is well understood that an online game, like Fortnite, WoW, whatever requires a server to work and may at some point stop working. Also for the record, I just checked every online xbox game I have and on the back it makes it clear that this could change at any point so they can likely all argue that the warning is already there.
> online-only form of DRM
I feel like we are talking about 2 different problems. One is DRM that requires a game to be connected to the internet to play, that is valid and should never be a thing if it is truly a single player game.
However from what I can tell the examples that we are talking about are not just simple single player games that require an internet connection to run and are actually online games.
> From what I can tell The Crew is an online game? What am I missing here.
The main selling point of The Crew was the large, open-world map. All people I know who played that game completely disregarded any multiplayer features (of which there was not that many, at most amounting to co-op throughout the game's campaign).
> I feel like it is well understood that an online game, like Fortnite, WoW, whatever requires a server to work and may at some point stop working.
For most online games, it is absolutely possible to provide basic server functionality, even for MMOs like WoW. See another comment I wrote on here about CSGO/CS2. WoW (and Fortnite i think?) are in a different class than The Crew since they follow a subscription model, where it is more obvious that you do not own the game.
The Crew actually has single player campaign! It's absurd that they made a $50 game that has single player contents completely unplayable instead of simply disabling the online components.
I have said this in a few places now, but this is my fundamental problem with this petition. The front page is horribly written to actually convey the problem (I should not be required to go to the FAQ to get a basic understanding) and then the FAQ is arguing for 2 very different things.
On The Crew (which I have not played) if there is truly a single player component that does not rely on any server side systems, than I agree. Online DRM should not exist.
However the OP used "Many of today's GaaS are single-player games that have no business at all being online-only" which a single player game is not a GaaS. Those 2 things cannot be the same.
The problem is the FAQ tries to make claims about truly online games and how those also should somehow be preserved, which is a very complex problem.
So to be clear, I fully agree that if it is truly a single player game than yes that should be able to be played without an online connection. However the OP and this website is conflating 2 massively different things and makes standing behind it impossible.
> There is no technological reason this is the case
Of course there is. Many modern multiplayer games are unfeasible without dedicated servers, and many games are multiplayer by default as a design and production choice. Making a game that is designed for multiplayer first and foremost also able to run on a player's computer is not always a trivial task.
I was a lead at an open-world game that was supposed to run without dedicated servers on players PCs, and it was a very FUN task to actually get it there. Changing it to run on dedicated servers from the very beginning would save a LOT of production costs and time, I honestly wish this was the case.
----
As an update, I'll just copy my other comment from elsewhere in this thread:
OK, here are 6 different git repositories that our different systems were built with, without custom scripts and setup that our devops team have built over 8 years of operation. And it also requires an Oracle license to run. Good luck figuring it all out!
P.S.: We forgot a couple of third-party libraries in there, so we'll be hit by a bunch of lawsuits because our private licenses for these libraries absolutely did not cover open-sourcing them for the whole world.
Once upon a time, "dedicated server" was understood to mean something players hosted themselves.
it's like everyone has been lobotomized by cloud computing and SaaS. you know people can run stuff on their own computers, right? or rent their own VPS?
Everquest was released in 1999 too. Modern multiplayer games are much closer to MMOs than to session-based games on local servers for small groups without any meta-gameplay.
If this is made a legal requirement what will happen is that publishers jettison the studio responsible for dead GAAS titles and then they close the studio down so there's no one to hold responsible for this requirement.
> There is no technological reason this is the case, but pure greed by publishers.
Ah yes, because server-side infrastructure is notoriously free and cheap to run, with no ongoing operational costs, and requires no employees to maintain.
Not all games are CS1.6. Some game servers quite literally require access to tens or hundreds of gigabytes of game data, in addition to support from various login and database servers. It's possible to do the leg work to make all of this available to the community but it's not trivial, and it wouldn't be "no cost to the publisher".
While I understand the annoyance at a game shutting down and you can no longer play it.
I also strongly oppose this from a technical prospective. It costs money to run servers, it costs money to maintain servers.
It costs engineering effort to keep servers updated and secure.
The idea that you can't shut down your servers is just wrong.
(However an argument that a single player game does not work without being online is completely valid, but seems to not be the point of this).
So no will not be signing and if there was a government requirement to keep servers running, I guarantee you the result will be less games released. It just would not be worth the risk.
Edit: I misunderstood the point is not to keep servers running but to provide a way to run the servers ourselves. Which while my point above is about a different problem I still fundamentally disagree with that requirement.
This is a common rebuttal but does not pass the sniff test. Alternatives to shutting the servers down:
- patching the game so it does not require a server. Many GaaS are single player games, and are online-only as a form of DRM
- release a closed source binary of the server so that people can run it themselves
- release documentation so people can implement their own backend
- release the server as open source
- be legally required to put a large sticker on the box saying "THIS GAME WILL EXPIRE. BUYER BEWARE."
Some games require servers, like World of Warcraft, but that is a moot point as well because people have been able to reverse engineer and create their own unofficial WoW servers. If Blizzard shuts down tomorrow, WoW will keep chugging along. Not all games benefit from having a dedicated community of nerds to do what the company should have been doing all along, hence this campaign.
These are "alternatives" in the same way that "drive a car" is an alternative to a cross-country flight on a jet. Sure, you could theoretically do it...
My personal bias is that given the choice between a 2-3 hour flight between Sacramento, CA and Seattle, WA, and a very long drive that might have to cross snowy mountain passes - I've done both, and the difference between them is vast. People love to say that difficult things are easy.
I've also driven cross-country from the US west coast to the east coast. Flying is much, much easier. It's a completely different "can I take this trip" equation.
> patching the game so it does not require a server. Making GaaS are single player games, and are online-only as a form of DRM.
Do you have a single example of this? The Crew does not seem like an example of this since it is a multplayer game. I agree with always on DRM being a bad thing, but online features is not the same as online drm.
> release a closed source binary of the server so that people can run it themselves.
That requires that it was ever a single binary in the first place and not multiple systems. Also would require that the parts that are specific to them, like auth, would need to be able to be toggled or removed before releasing it.
> release documentation so people can implement their own backend.
> release the server as open source
Sure, that's an alternative but it still takes time for them to do it.
> be legally required to put a large sticker on the box saying "THIS GAME WILL EXPIRE. BUYER BEWARE."
There is something to be said about as a consumer understanding that an "online game" will eventually shut down. This should be well understood.
Your proposals are all implying that just doing all of this is just free and one day they can just flip a switch and here is everything for the community but that isn't the reality and it is severely flawed.
> The Crew does not seem like an example of this since it is a multplayer game.
One can play The Crew single player, it has a whole campaign. There have been tons of games that are single player with multiplayer elements. This is same as GTA5 or The Division or any other game which is single player and multiplayer
> That requires that it was ever a single binary in the first place
Or release all binaries / source code. The whole docker swarm config, or the terraform or whatever was used to run the stuff. Not sure if server side is two binaries out of a sudden it is impossible.
> Sure, that's an alternative but it still takes time for them to do it.
Why? release all the docs+source code as you have them, and call it a day.
> There is something to be said about as a consumer understanding that an "online game" will eventually shut down. This should be well understood.
Why? I had played tons of online games that were not shut down. Dooms, quakes, warsaw, etc. This is a relatively new thing that companies are both, not allowing single player run without a server, and shutting down the server part. I think in the past we had similar thing when GameSpy was shutdown, and recently Games For Windows Live which microsoft stopped supporting. However, these are mostly DRM cases with some bypass possible.
I want to add, I suspect Blizzard has complex architecture, but people managed to reverse engineer the server to run custom diablo/starcraft/wow servers. Now blizzard as they have not shutdown their services has been actively fighting these efforts of custom servers. All the ask is that companies that do shutdown their services do the opposite. Help community run the games longer.
In case of The Crew, the shut down was a deliberate push to get people to buy The Crew 2.
Online DRM is prevalent. I'll add another example, Project Diva won't even launch if you're offline. It's a single player rhythm game. (In this case it's a property of Denuvo, a popular DRM software for lots of games. I think technically if you launch online it counts as an activation (which you can't do too frequently or else) and you're ok for a couple weeks.)
>The idea that you can't shut down your servers is just wrong.
Personally i find the idea of deceptive advertising and breach of contract with no recourse to be wrong too.
How about we meet in the middle?
No one is forced to keep any servers online any longer than they want to, but if a game is reliant on such a thing, then they must provide such information and state upfront the exact date in which the game will stop working before selling a single copy.
That way would be buyers can decide whether it is worth it with that information in mind.
> Personally i find the idea of deceptive advertising and breach of contract with no recourse to be wrong too.
How is it deceptive marketing? It's an online game. It should be well understood in today's world that something that is Online and requires online functionality to work may shut down at some point.
If it is truly an online game, something that does not work single player.
I would agree with you if we are only talking about single player games that require an online connection to play. Those are wrong.
This is exactly what this is focusing on. The Crew, shut down in March 31, is a single player game with a whole campaign already installed on your hard drive, with an online component. Gamers are OK with losing online play, but why are they also losing the single player campaign? Honestly, I feel some comments here are from people that haven't played a game in 20 years, and believe there is an actual technical reason for the online DRM.
We are not talking about MMOs. This issue affects single player games as well.
That is the problem, it is not clear exactly what it is we are talking about with this campaign.
We have online DRM which I agree with is a bad thing.
But if you look at the FAQ they are also clearly talking about online servers for games.
So this is conflating 2 very distinct issues here.
Regarding the Crew, do we know for a fact that it is 100% installed on your hard drive? Or are we making assumptions.
Edit:
> We are not talking about MMOs.
There is literally a FAQ entry for MMO's.
Edit again:
Just realized that you are the one that posted it here. Assuming you are also the person that made the website, this is way too broad.
If we actually want to talk about online DRM than yeah, I stand behind it completely. it is stupid that I can't play Kingdom Hearts without being online.
But the moment that you start mixing that with actually online games that may require an online connection for the actual gameplay itself, than your argument completely falls apart.
Those are 2 very different issues and I would recommend not only making the home page clear on what exactly it is you are talking about (I should not have to go to the FAQ to understand your point) but also make sure that we are talking about a core issue of online DRM.
GaaS is not online DRM. I don't know of a single actual single player game that could be considered GaaS. The Crew doesn't even seem to fit this idea. Maybe it has a GaaS component, like Halo Infinite, but the single player part of Halo Infinite is not a GaaS.
So this entire thing is confusing because we are mixing 2 distinct problems and hoping for a single solution to both which is not realistic.
Instead of responding to criticism you focus on something else entirely...
Nowhere am I stating that gamers should not have access to their games, I have made it clear that I disagree with actual online DRM.
but GaaS is NOT online drm. An Online Multiplayer game is NOT Online DRM. That is a frankly absurd argument to make.
Again you are mixing 2 very different things.
The reason I am all over this thread is because of the problem with arm chair developers in the gaming community thinking that certain things are easy or just free to do.
I am not a manager at Ubisoft or have any particular stakes in this except for being a gamer.
Please actually respond to why you are choosing to mix up 2 distinct issues here and fix the website (if it is yours) so it is actually clear what your problem here is.
> the gaming community thinking that certain things are easy or just free to do
It's not easy nor free, but if you're buying the game (not renting). There should be atleast some guarantees that it won't be a piece of junk (or piece of virtual junk) in a year or two. There are such guarantees provided for most types of other goods, why games or software in general should be treated differently?
Think this way: if your game has an expiration date - it should be on the label plain and clear.
And no, there's no general understanding that Online multiplayer games are going to close some day. Do you really believe that little Timmy playing Fortnite and his single Mom who's giving Timmy money to buy more Vbucks follow all game industries' new trends?
> There are such guarantees provided for most types of other goods.
There is? Like what. Software is unique in this aspect that it may require external sources to work.
At absolute best we have a warranty for hardware or a guarantee that food will be good until an expiration date. But I can't think of a single other thing that you spend money on that would have a guarantee that is anything like requiring the company to open source their server side infrastructure if they shut down the online services.
It isn't an expiration date. In most situations, they are not publishing a game saying, oh we are going to shut this down in 3 years. No, they are hoping it will succeed, that they can continue to make money selling DLC for as long as they can.
If the game flops or just doesn't have enough players at some point, then yeah it will shut down. But that isn't an expiration date when it is announced.
I am not going to argue about "Little Timmy" since their parents should understand this well. It isn't line games are the only online services that ever shut down and you loose time, money, etc.
I don't understand how this is so hard to comprehend, we are mixing 2 distinct problems here. One is actual online DRM, which I agree with is bad.
The other one is an online game that eventually runs its course and is shut down. That happens.
As far as labels go, I checked all of my xbox games and it is clear that the online component can cue changed at any point. Obviously it doesn't give an expiration date since one doesn't exist as of time of publishing. But the notice is there and should be well understood by this point.
Again my problem with the OP is trying to call GaaS "Online DRM" which it frankly isn't. They tried to say "it isn't about MMO"s while MMO is one of the few FAQ.
> The idea that you can't shut down your servers is just wrong.
That's not what's being asked. What's being asked is that the game must be left on a playable state without the publishers or affiliated parties input.
If that involves making available the API of the server side then fine.
The game can be patched before sunsetting from the publisher.
Or if the game is patched out to be offline only, then fine.
The fact that people are okay with not owning games especially that you pay for is ludicrous.
So first that requires additional engineering effort to do, which if they are making the decision to shut down the game it likely means it isn't making money so that's a waste of effort on their part.
It may also not be an easy task, especially if it isn't a simple single service you start up and it's microservices or whatever. That is before getting into the question on whether or not there are certain parts of the system that are shared with other games that simply can't just be put out for release.
A "waste of effort" to make it so paid customers can continue to play the games they bought?
Oh no, it might not be an "easy task" to undo all their planned obsolescence. Shucks. Maybe they should have thought of that before they planned the obsolescence in the first place.
Seriously, in most cases it will be completely trivial to do, especially single-player games.
(Yes, single-player games are routinely getting killswitched by spiteful publishers. It's a fucking outrage.)
------
[It seems I'm rate-limited so I can't reply further, but I have noticed in this thread a lot of people who don't seem to understand all the context behind this, making a lot of naive and ill-informed points. There are dozens of examples of publishers killing games for arbitrary/spiteful reasons, that have nothing to do with the cost it would take to provide an alternative. Ross Scott has many documented cases on his channel, see here https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms/search?query=dead%20...
We're not just talking about always-online multiplayer games here. It's also games with single-player campaigns that are rendered unplayable by the deactivation of a central auth server. Or games with a co-op component that are now unplayable because it's gated behind a centralized matchmaking system that shut down. Or games with libraries of shared player-created levels that are now inaccessible, like Super Mario Maker.
Also I have to say, I'm flabbergasted at the unthinking deference being shown to enormous conglomerate publishers in this discussion, and the focus on one side of the ledger to the exclusion of the other. People are saying that this will impose a cost on corporations, and this is in and of itself a reason to reject it. Like ... yes, of course regulations impose a cost on businesses! Obviously! The idea is that this small cost will be offset by a larger increase in consumer welfare. Just saying "this will impose a cost on business" is a fully-general counterargument against any kind of consumer-protection regulation. Nevermind the ethics of it -- people should fucking own what they pay for and they shouldn't have the rug pulled out from under them!
As for the idea that it is too complicated to self-host a modern multiplayer game: this is Hacker News, not Never-Bother-To-Even-Try News. Mod communities have done impressive feats in reverse-engineering game servers. It can be done.]
In no way is a game shutting down planned obsolescence. If the Fortnite servers are shut down that's not planned obsolesce, that game does not work and makes zero sense as a single play game. A publisher is not going to spend a ton of money working on a game with a plan to shut it down, they hope to milk it for money as long as they can.
I agree with single player games requiring always online, but I have not seen an example of this actually being the case that there was not a patch put out at the last moment to make the game not connect to a server anymore.
There is a major difference between a game requiring an online connection for a 100% single player game and an online games servers shutting down.
The first is bad and I agree and should never be a practice. The second is just reality.
> that game does not work and makes zero sense as a single play game.
Why not? Just unlock all in-game contents, replace other players with offline bots, then shutdown the servers. Many online games have chosen this route in the past.
This assumes that the content is all client side and some of it is not server side. As is the case with many games.
> replace other players with offline bots.
That requires work to make the bots know how to play the game, something that even actively supported games suck at. Many bots are really bad with objective based gameplay. and testing. Which is a cost if they are shutting down the game.
If the game was built around the assumption that it will always have an internet connection, there may also need to be a lot of changes to the game itself to operate that way.
> If the game was built around the assumption that it will always have an internet connection, there may also need to be a lot of changes to the game itself to operate that way.
Then such games shouldn't be sold as goods like the the petition mentioned. They should be sold as services like WoW, so their customers know what to expect at the end of the service. Selling them as goods is worse than selling "lifetime" membership for an SaaS, then closing the SaaS after 3 years, because the customers may not know that the game would become unplayable in a few years when they purchased it.
That is a strange distinction that would allow the company to just get out of supporting whatever law they may try to get with just a wording change on the box?
WoW you have to buy. Yes there is a subscription but you also have to buy the game and each expansion.
Destiny 2 you have to buy each expansion.
They are not selling a SaaS as a lifetime one time buy, I checked all of my xbox games and every single one makes it clear that they can change it at any point.
So it sounds like your argument is they just change the wording of something, charge the same amount, and then this proposal does nothing?
I don't really buy the argument that consumers don't understand that servers eventually shut down.
That distinction is actually very important to set the customers expectation.
You don't "buy" WoW, their website explicitly ask you to subscribe (monthly or yearly) [1]. Yes, you can buy the expansion, but those wouldn't work without subscription. Customers wouldn't be duped into buying the game and expecting it to still working later when all the servers are shut down, so the petition problably wouldn't apply to WoW, though the petition mentioned about getting this kind of game to support some form of self hosted server support for at least a fraction of its features at the end of its lifetime.
You also don't "buy" Destiny 2, it's a free-to-play game. You can buy items and expansions like WoW. It's not as clear cut as WoW, but it's also should be clear enough that Destiny 2 is not sold as traditional goods, and the petition probably doesn't apply to this game as well.
The game mentioned in the petition, The Crew, was sold for $50 with single player campaign and online components just like other games usually do. Then the publisher made the game unplayable later, even though it has some single player campaign contents. What's their excuse for doing this? Is this game actually a service where it can be made unusable at any point? If so, it should be clear from the get go and the game shouldn't be sold as goods, so customers who want the game they bought to be playable indefinitely (minus the online components) can spent their money on other games instead.
> That distinction is actually very important to set the customers expectation.
At one point you did buy destiny 2 just like you did the first one. While they changed their business model for the base game at one point the example is still a valid one. You could argue that their "free to play" part is largely a demo to get you to buy the expansion. FFXIV does the same thing. Same with WoW.
You buy those expansions for both games and in both situations when the servers shut down you loose access to something that you spent money on.
Regarding The Crew. Part of the problem here, and one of my biggest issues with this particular campaign, is it seems like we are arguing about 2 very different things and the main page paints one picture of what they want and the FAQ is something else.
To be clear, I have not played this game so I am trying to get information about what the actual reality of this game is and is not and that makes this a very hard conversation.
We have online DRM for single player games. Which I 100% agree with shouldn't ever be a thing. It makes no sense.
But then we have online games. Where being online is a fundamental part of the game and the server side component is required.
This petition seems to want to treat both of these equally where they are fundamentally different problems and the second one is far more complex.
I cannot find a concrete information on where The Crew actually falls for this. It has a single player component but is this actually all local content or was it engineered in a way to rely on something server side. I honestly don't know and we can speculate on whether it should have been or is and is not, but that is an important part of this conversation.
I don't think this distinction about traditional goods is as important as you think it is. As far as a consumer goes, when more games were physical. I could go and buy WoW, FF11, Destiny, whatever the same as I would any single player game. And I did, I used to physically buy all of the Wow expansions and it was up to the consumer to understand that it is an online game that may shut down one day. That isn't a hard thing to know.
The Crew is an open-world racing game, similar with need for speed most wanted. Exactly the kind of games where the online components can be replaced with offline bots because it already has bots playing opponent cars in the campaign. You can check the campaign gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdRtfqwj2cg
My question is on how the game is built. Is the single player simply not working due to the entire game requiring being online or is there a part of the single player that relies on something that is online to work at all.
As in, is all of the necessary code to run the single player actually on the disk or not? No amount of showing me gameplay is going to answer this question unless someone has actually looked at the game itself or the network activity to determine what is actually happenjng.
I doubt the stored actual game data in the server as this is an open world racing game where you drive around seamlessly without loading, and from 2014 where can't expect most gamers to had gigabit connection back then. But this store progression data online and refuse to work without internet connection.
Doesn't require a gigabit connection, but if there is any sort of quest (or similar) system that could be data that is stored server side.
That is not an uncommon practice in MMO's. WoW released in 2004 (it is not clear to me when exactly WoW did this practice, if it was from the beginning or a later change).
So it is entirely possible. Not saying it is necessarily the right way they should have made it, but it is a possible explanation that is an important part of the conversation.
The reason The Crew is specifically the target of this whole campaign is because it has an offline mode built into the code itself, the flag to change into this mode relies on an encrypted key. Currently this has not, or can't, be broken.
So not only did they shut the game down, they took active measures to make SURE no one would ever be able to run it again. Letting it live, (or at least giving the fans a chance to resurrect it) could be as simple as the company posting that encryption key on twitter.
That's why this is all so egregious, because it's not even developer incompetence or budget necessarily, it's greed and bordering on outright theft.
By the way, the guy who made this site goes by Ross Scott on youtube, he has a couple videos that explain everything. He's not a programmer, but probably has months of research into the legal aspects plus a small army of volunteers helping with the process.
Thank you for actually answering my question. Knowing what its reliance on for the servers is an important part of this discussion.
In that case, I agree with the fact that the single player component should be made playable without needing to be online.
However I from what I can tell the person who has made the site also has pushed back against entirely online games and GaaS, which eventually shut down.
I stand by my opinion here that we are looking at a campaign that is talking about 2 massively different issues, trying to address them with the same thing.
The answer to this problem is simple, stop making actual single player games that require a constant internet connection.
Any talk about multiplayer games, MMO's, etc (in the FAQ) is making this entire discussion confusing and that is a very different problem to single player games being inaccessible.
OK, here are 6 different git repositories that our different systems were built with, without custom scripts and setup that our devops team have built over 8 years of operation. And it also requires an Oracle license to run. Good luck figuring it all out!
P.S.: We forgot a couple of third-party libraries in there, so we'll be hit by a bunch of lawsuits because our private licenses for these libraries absolutely did not cover open-sourcing them for the whole world.
If it's not economically viable to keep the servers running then it shouldn't be a problem to release the code for the server so that others can run it.
There are usually real legal and procedural obstacles to doing this.
Games often contain third-party code that the studio doesn't have the rights to open-source, and may rely on privately licensed middleware binaries or NDA'd SDKs that you can't redistribute.
For a basic example, even Unreal Engine - which is practically open at present - still restricts its github repos to people who've agreed to their access terms.
Let's imagine you've jumped through all the hoops and have the legal right to release all the code for your game servers. The servers were probably designed to run in a particular environment with access to particular resources - your login servers, your user account database, etc. Do you need to open-source those too?
Let's imagine we're talking about a game like Destiny or Guild Wars where the server also needs access to a big collection of data files. Are you now going to dump a 50gb .tar.gz on a CDN and pay to host it for everyone who wants to download it? How long do you keep that up? Do you rely on the community to host a torrent for you, or rely on the Internet Archive to host it for free?
At the end of the day what you probably get is a bundle of c/cpp files where 75% of the headers they need are there, all the dll/lib files are missing, and once you start the server it's trying to connect to a bunch of services that don't work, and there's no documentation for any of it so the community needs to spend a year plus trying to reverse engineer all of this from what they have.
If a game is well-loved, the community will probably make do and eventually get it working, but it's very much not a "just release the code" situation if you want everyone to be happy. It's expensive and difficult.
Add too that, that there may be shared code bases. Maybe a major part of the server side code is something used between multiple games at your company.
Maybe it has references to unreleased games, comments when the assumption was the code was not leaving the company, etc.
This is a great ideal that doesn't line up with reality.
>I guarantee you the result will be less games released
Best case would be that it results in less games that are reliant on a public server to connect to. I don't really think we need any more 4-5 person team deathmatch shooter games
Or games just shift online-first game pricing to subscriptions. (Fortnite and others have done this already to great success.) The issue here is in a disconnect between pricing model and access model. Mandated uptime seems impractical and unlikely for reasons you listed.
It doesn't need to be keeping servers running forever, and if that's what anyone is proposing that's dumb.
However, it is not impossible to develop games with an offline mode for when the day comes that the servers do go down. It is a bit more work (depending on the game) but it's very doable and many, many games have done so.
In their example, The Crew could have easily been made with an offline mode. Or allow the creation of private servers. Anything. There was nothing technical preventing it. It would have cost a small amount more to develop, but would have helped preserve the game for the future.
> However, it is not impossible to develop games with an offline mode for when the day comes that the servers do go down. It is a bit more work (depending on the game) but it's very doable and many, many games have done so.
Yes and no, in a lot of situations (like MMO's) much of the data is stored server side and is not client side. That would take a fundamental shift in how the game was built in the first place to just make it work locally.
Regarding the Crew, I honestly don't know that game so I can't speak for it. So I would like to see whether or not it could have been an easy switch or if it was something else fundamental to the design of the game. Like what I mentioned above.
In the sense that building a cathedral is a bit more work than building a house.
Most indie games FAIL. You want them to spend a minimum of an extra 20-30% upfront just so some dude who either outright pirates or only buys stuff on deep discount can play it in 20 years?
We are not talking about indie games. This is a common practice of AAA studios, making hundreds of millions from games sold at $70 apiece. Apples and oranges.
No wonder. Look at how many people in this very thread actually defend not owning their games. It takes a lot of patience and effort to explain to these people something as basic as 1 + 1= 2. I gave up, but I’m glad other people keep fighting.
I really should not have to go to the FAQ to understand the actual point of what they are hoping to achieve.
The front page should make it clear that they are not advocating for servers remaining up indefinitely (which is a valid assumption given the wording on the page). An FAQ should actually answer questions not be where it tells you the point of the site.
I think the joke is that they would let you download a car for full price, and then kill it after a few years because it is too expensive to run their vehicle database server (and also because they have a new model out, but no one says that part out loud).
In 2050 Hacker News software engineers will claim that it is lunacy to imagine buying a car and owning it forever. How can that even possibly work?
I think what we need is to legalize abandonware. Abandonware is now something that happens in practice and works because nobody is interested about going after these games and other types of software.
What if a game would become legally abandonware after:
- its company went bankrupt
- it got pulled from (online) stores
- required servers were turned off
After this, the abandonware would become freely distributable but commercially unavailable. Online games and services should also publish server binaries.
the online game indie renaissance is coming. it’s just so much easier to build online games than it used to be.
a lot of gamedevs and software engineers getting laid off these days. some small percentage of those is gonna go build things instead of finding a new abusive employer.
i wish them well and can’t wait to see what they build!
the rest of them may do the same after the next layoffs.
I thought this was going to be commentary on how a disproportionate amount of AAA games are focused on killing and shooting; thus (figuratively) murdering the potential that games have for conveying all sorts of human experiences. It was a bit more literal.
Indeed. I used to play a lot of shooters, and while the mechanic is fun I really wish there were more games that reproduced this type of engagement without the idea that you're wielding a killing machine. Or I wish more games explored other mechanics entirely and that this genre was less popular.
That summarises nicely how I feel about it as well, I've got nothing against shooting games but I would love to see the tech used for building and exploration games or simulators.. why not a proper "real" minecraft clone based off some of the modern FPS engines for example: build bridges where reasonable physics applies..etc!
I think a better policy would be requiring, as a condition of copyright registration, a copy of the multiplayer-related server and client code to the government. If the public servers are shut down, that code is released to the public so anyone can run a server.
You'd have to tailor the law so that they can't just keep a single, underpowered server up rather than release the code or whatever. But it might be possible to accomplish.
That said, I'd rather copyright just didn't exist in the first place.
People who build and maintain games need to pay their bills. While publishers are often rich, and pay big executive salaries, there is a limit for how long a money-losing server can stay up, especially as they more often than not require babysitting and security/legal patches - it isn't reasonable to expect the server to stay up for decades without any sort of monetary contribution by players. Also, some multiplayer games aren't financed by big and rich companies...
So what's the financially sustainable solution? Paying a subscription is not a popular option, but something has to pay for the thing.
If you read the FAQ on that site, "publishers must run servers indefinitely" is not what this campaign wants to achieve at all. There are other ways of making sure multiplayer games can remain playable (by putting the server in the hands of other people, for example).
I've seen people suggest that when an online-only game shutters its servers, the code for the server-side software should be released to the public AS-IS with no warranty.
Obviously, that's a take from a gamer that isn't familiar with the legal troubles involved with releasing code for public view, but that's kinda where the consumers are at, it seems.
I don't play games with online components, so I don't really have a horse in this race.
Back in the olden days, players could run their own server. The only thing the company needed to run was a tiny box that curated a list of running servers. The main issue is that everything is now a complex cloud live service such that there's probably not a single binary that can be distributed to players to run their own server.
One wrinkle is that effective anti-cheat is much harder with player-hosted servers, and if the game has RCE exploits or particularly nasty bugs, player-hosted servers can exploit them against anyone unlucky enough to connect.
Fully agree with the article. Ideally it should be a warranty return if the game stops working due entirely to a decision by the developer. It's simply a defective product. If the game really requires a server, there should be a way for end users to run the server if the game developer no longer wants to run it.