Yeah, that’s why he says it’s stupid. It seems like he’s fine with the idea of removing DRM that makes single player games unplayable but forcing devs to make online multiplayer games playable forever is ridiculous.
My position is it’s ridiculous. I agree with Thor. Saying all games must exist forever is too vague because I don’t think all games should be forced to exist forever.
Q: Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?
A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:
‘Gran Turismo Sport’ published by Sony
‘Knockout City’ published by Velan Studios
‘Mega Man X DiVE’ published by Capcom
‘Scrolls / Caller’s Bane’ published by Mojang AB
‘Duelyst’ published by Bandai Namco Entertainment
etc.
That’s fine for single player games but modifying some massive MMO so that someone can host it on a laptop is literally impossible. This language applies to everything. EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, all of it would need to be able to run on someone’s home computer when they’re purposefully built from the ground up to work on massive servers?
Not a fair comparison. The private servers were written with the small hosting in mind. They would very likely never scale to what Blizzard has in place. For all I know, Blizzard could run their stuff on a Mainframe with specific platform optimizations against an IBM DB2.
But I also don’t think this has to be transferable to a local setup without effort either. Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
You found the point. It’s not about having it scale to the level the official servers are at. It’s about preserving it in some fashion, so that the dedicated few can still experience it. We don’t need thousands, we need a few dozen. And, if developers develop with this design philosophy - that eventually the game servers will be shut down and we have to release a hostable version at end of life, then the games can be written from the ground up with that implementation in mind.
Such an architecture is typically shit. Building a system that is simple AND scales high won’t work. Complexity usually gets added to cope with scale. If we don’t allow companies to build scalable (i.e. complex) systems, we simply won’t get such games anymore.
Again: I am completely in favor of forcing devs to release everything necessary to host it. I am not in favor of forcing devs to target home machines for their servers, when their servers clearly have completely different requirements. That’s unrealistic.
It’s not impossible at all. People have done this literally for decades. Classic WoW only exists because people hosted their own seevers and Blizzard wanted in on the money. Star Wars Galaxies the same. I think Everquest 1 as well. And probably others as well.
Because they can be sued for that. Have been sued for that. And while it is possible to reverse engineer this stuff it is incredibly hard to do. So games with smaller fanbases might lack the manpower to achieve it. Or the game was made in such a way as to make reverse engineering impossible.
FFXIV has headed in the opposite direction of your claim. They’ve recently been making a lot of changes to major story dungeons so that the experience relies as little as possible on online communities. Right now, playing requires a subscription. It’s more and more believable to see that requirement removed if the game was somehow dead and that ‘had’ to happen.
The difference between a home server and a larger business server is simply the scale of how many players it can host at once.
WoW’s server binary was reverse engineered by fans, and a large ecosystem of privately run WoW servers that players can connect to exist at this very moment.
Private servers running older vanilla versions of wow became so popular, blizzard then created their own vanilla wow server to get in on the action.
I don’t think there’s any language in this petition that says it must be hosted on a laptop. The server binary, with a reasonable expectation that someone with documentation, the hardware, and the know-how to use it, would be enough.
If a big MMO closes that’d be rough, but those types of games tend to form communities anyways like Minecraft. You don’t have to pay Microsoft a monthly rate to host a Java server for you and a few friends, you just have to have a little bit of IT knowledge and maybe a helper package to get you and your friends going. It’s still a single binary, even if it doesn’t run on a laptop well for larger settings.
With a big MMO, there will form support groups and turnkey scripts to get stuff working as well as it can be, and forums online for finding existing open community servers by people who have the hardware and knowledge to host a few dozen to a few hundred of their closest friends online.
Life finds a way.
If it’s a complicated multi-node package where you need stuff to be split up better as gateway/world/area/instance, the community servers that will form may tend towards larger player groups, since the knowledge and resource to do that is more specific.
God, finally someone with common sense. The devs do not need to change the software for you to host a server in your 10 year old ThinkPad, they just need to make the software available. It’s not up to them to figure out HOW you are going to host the game’s server, they just need to make it POSSIBLE.
You sold someone some code that you then rendered inoperable by actions beyond their control; that’s what you’d get in trouble for. Delete your own code all you like.
If you sell someone a game that relies on a server you own, and did not advertise clearly that you were selling a service, not a good (something you own), and then break that product for the customer without any possibility of them repairing their good, and you delete the code that could’ve fixed it, you’d be sorta commiting fraud.
If you abandon a product that was sold as a good, and it became inoperable due to forces unrelated to you, you’d be in the clear.
Right, so an MMO charging a monthly fee shouldn’t need to make their game available to everyone if they stop charging people the fee and shut it down? Because that’s what I think too.
I’m being specific because this is being intended as a law everyone must follow. “All games need to be available forever” is very vague. How will this vague law be applied in practice? People brought up the idea of eternal code preservation. Alright. How does that work?
I’m not picking a fight. I want supporters to explain in vivid detail their expectations because it’s clear not even all the supporters agree on how it would be implemented. Some said it doesn’t apply to MMOs. Some said it does. It needs to be one or the other. That’s not being pedantic, it’s being realistic.
Any company that isn’t completely incompetent has some revision control solution like GitHub. It saves the original and all the changes throughout the life of the code. It’s designed specifically to allow developers to update or even delete code while still maintaining records
An indie dev recently lost the source code to their early access game and had to remove it from Steam. If this law was in place, what punishment would they face for their incompetence? It would be rare for a massive company to not have source control, but it probably isn’t uncommon for small first time devs. So now you have a well intentioned law putting regulations in place that hurt small devs and raise the barrier to entry.
A game’s code can be submitted to a repository on release to the public to be stored for the sake of preservation. The repository can always be made access on a case by case basis, thus preventing the loss of code and culture while also protecting the IP holder’s rights
And every single game dev would be required to do this for the thousands of games released every year? Who would host this massive repository? Who would determine access on a case by case basis? It’s a nice suggestion but mandating this as a law everyone has to follow? Why? I thought this was about consumer protection
Is that repository required by law? Is every author and director required to follow it or be punished? What if an author only publishes it on their website and then takes the website down and it never makes it to the archive are they in trouble? It’s a nice thing, but mandating it as law is ridiculous.
Yeah, that’s why he says it’s stupid. It seems like he’s fine with the idea of removing DRM that makes single player games unplayable but forcing devs to make online multiplayer games playable forever is ridiculous.
To clarify, your position is it’s ridiculous, or you’re stating that his position is that it’s ridiculous?
My position is it’s ridiculous. I agree with Thor. Saying all games must exist forever is too vague because I don’t think all games should be forced to exist forever.
Per the official Stop Killing Games FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq (apologies if formatting ends up looking weird)
That’s fine for single player games but modifying some massive MMO so that someone can host it on a laptop is literally impossible. This language applies to everything. EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, all of it would need to be able to run on someone’s home computer when they’re purposefully built from the ground up to work on massive servers?
People have been running private wow servers for a long time now apparently, so it seems possible for mmos.
Not a fair comparison. The private servers were written with the small hosting in mind. They would very likely never scale to what Blizzard has in place. For all I know, Blizzard could run their stuff on a Mainframe with specific platform optimizations against an IBM DB2.
But I also don’t think this has to be transferable to a local setup without effort either. Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
You found the point. It’s not about having it scale to the level the official servers are at. It’s about preserving it in some fashion, so that the dedicated few can still experience it. We don’t need thousands, we need a few dozen. And, if developers develop with this design philosophy - that eventually the game servers will be shut down and we have to release a hostable version at end of life, then the games can be written from the ground up with that implementation in mind.
Such an architecture is typically shit. Building a system that is simple AND scales high won’t work. Complexity usually gets added to cope with scale. If we don’t allow companies to build scalable (i.e. complex) systems, we simply won’t get such games anymore.
Again: I am completely in favor of forcing devs to release everything necessary to host it. I am not in favor of forcing devs to target home machines for their servers, when their servers clearly have completely different requirements. That’s unrealistic.
It’s not impossible at all. People have done this literally for decades. Classic WoW only exists because people hosted their own seevers and Blizzard wanted in on the money. Star Wars Galaxies the same. I think Everquest 1 as well. And probably others as well.
So why does this law need to exist if everyone is doing it and has been doing it for decades?
Because they can be sued for that. Have been sued for that. And while it is possible to reverse engineer this stuff it is incredibly hard to do. So games with smaller fanbases might lack the manpower to achieve it. Or the game was made in such a way as to make reverse engineering impossible.
Just because it’s possible with a small sample of games doesn’t mean it’s possible for all or even most of them.
Also, even if a normal desktop can’t run a particular game server, there is almost always a way to get a computer that will.
FFXIV has headed in the opposite direction of your claim. They’ve recently been making a lot of changes to major story dungeons so that the experience relies as little as possible on online communities. Right now, playing requires a subscription. It’s more and more believable to see that requirement removed if the game was somehow dead and that ‘had’ to happen.
The difference between a home server and a larger business server is simply the scale of how many players it can host at once.
WoW’s server binary was reverse engineered by fans, and a large ecosystem of privately run WoW servers that players can connect to exist at this very moment.
Private servers running older vanilla versions of wow became so popular, blizzard then created their own vanilla wow server to get in on the action.
This comment betrays a technical misunderstanding.
Not only is it possible, but designing games from the ground up in this way makes it easier for developers to test and make robust software.
I don’t think there’s any language in this petition that says it must be hosted on a laptop. The server binary, with a reasonable expectation that someone with documentation, the hardware, and the know-how to use it, would be enough.
Lol that not impossible.
If a big MMO closes that’d be rough, but those types of games tend to form communities anyways like Minecraft. You don’t have to pay Microsoft a monthly rate to host a Java server for you and a few friends, you just have to have a little bit of IT knowledge and maybe a helper package to get you and your friends going. It’s still a single binary, even if it doesn’t run on a laptop well for larger settings.
With a big MMO, there will form support groups and turnkey scripts to get stuff working as well as it can be, and forums online for finding existing open community servers by people who have the hardware and knowledge to host a few dozen to a few hundred of their closest friends online.
Life finds a way.
If it’s a complicated multi-node package where you need stuff to be split up better as gateway/world/area/instance, the community servers that will form may tend towards larger player groups, since the knowledge and resource to do that is more specific.
God, finally someone with common sense. The devs do not need to change the software for you to host a server in your 10 year old ThinkPad, they just need to make the software available. It’s not up to them to figure out HOW you are going to host the game’s server, they just need to make it POSSIBLE.
They all should still be preserved. The code can be stored without needing servers to be kept open, for example
What? I write some code and then delete it and I’m in trouble because I didn’t preserve it?? I really don’t understand this concept at all
You sold someone some code that you then rendered inoperable by actions beyond their control; that’s what you’d get in trouble for. Delete your own code all you like.
That’s a different statement than you made before. I am also against disabling something someone paid for. But what did you mean by
I have to store code? Can’t I delete my own code?
If you sell someone a game that relies on a server you own, and did not advertise clearly that you were selling a service, not a good (something you own), and then break that product for the customer without any possibility of them repairing their good, and you delete the code that could’ve fixed it, you’d be sorta commiting fraud.
If you abandon a product that was sold as a good, and it became inoperable due to forces unrelated to you, you’d be in the clear.
Right, so an MMO charging a monthly fee shouldn’t need to make their game available to everyone if they stop charging people the fee and shut it down? Because that’s what I think too.
That is not what is being discussed and was never being discussed. You’re sounding like you’re being pedantic to try to pick a fight
I’m being specific because this is being intended as a law everyone must follow. “All games need to be available forever” is very vague. How will this vague law be applied in practice? People brought up the idea of eternal code preservation. Alright. How does that work?
I’m not picking a fight. I want supporters to explain in vivid detail their expectations because it’s clear not even all the supporters agree on how it would be implemented. Some said it doesn’t apply to MMOs. Some said it does. It needs to be one or the other. That’s not being pedantic, it’s being realistic.
Any company that isn’t completely incompetent has some revision control solution like GitHub. It saves the original and all the changes throughout the life of the code. It’s designed specifically to allow developers to update or even delete code while still maintaining records
An indie dev recently lost the source code to their early access game and had to remove it from Steam. If this law was in place, what punishment would they face for their incompetence? It would be rare for a massive company to not have source control, but it probably isn’t uncommon for small first time devs. So now you have a well intentioned law putting regulations in place that hurt small devs and raise the barrier to entry.
Removing the game from sale is not disabling the game for existing owners. These are two very different problems.
A game’s code can be submitted to a repository on release to the public to be stored for the sake of preservation. The repository can always be made access on a case by case basis, thus preventing the loss of code and culture while also protecting the IP holder’s rights
And every single game dev would be required to do this for the thousands of games released every year? Who would host this massive repository? Who would determine access on a case by case basis? It’s a nice suggestion but mandating this as a law everyone has to follow? Why? I thought this was about consumer protection
Iunno, the Library of Congress in the states seems capable of holding every movie, book, journal, etc.
I think a way could be found for games in the EU if even the US can manage this for other media
Is that repository required by law? Is every author and director required to follow it or be punished? What if an author only publishes it on their website and then takes the website down and it never makes it to the archive are they in trouble? It’s a nice thing, but mandating it as law is ridiculous.