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Stop Killing Games throw weight behind California bill that would force companies to either keep games working independently after server shutdowns or issue refunds
The Stop Killing Games campaign have revealed their support for a Californian bill related to game server shoutdowns.
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+1. Often no reason to not push a open server option when they shutdown when they drop a game they sold. I am certain that publishers will just try to release them for free though and charge a subscription. May not be successful though.
MaestroWhich is also fine. Then you haven’t bought anything that they break after the fact. They just cancel all subscriptions.
Thats not a business model we want to encourage.
Games should be buy once, play forever.
Yeah that’s not how online games work though. Servers cost money, probably way more than you would expect, which is why online games used to use monthly subscriptions until people decided they didn’t like that so they moved to free-to-play with micro transactions instead. Guild Wars 2 is a good example of how an MMO can be run without needing a monthly sub by making everyone by each individual expansion, in the beginning you even had to buy the content for each story patch but the newer patch content is free with the expansion afaik. Online games don’t have to be predatory with their pricing but they do need to make a lot of money to keep the lights on.
I think the point is more that when they decide they don’t want to run the servers anymore they should have to release the server code or in some other way allow the server to be run locally so that the game isn’t useless.
Also, until about 15 years ago, it was completely expected that you would buy a software once and they would still run their servers. That’s why windows used to cost like $350 in mid 2000s dollars, you could still reasonably expect to get online updates for it years later.
Yeah but do you think people will pay $350 up front for a video game?
People already pay that much just as a subscription. Given that that $350 came with like 10 years of support; Yes I honestly think that people would pay a couple hundred dollars for a game like RuneScape or something that came with a 10 year guarantee.
iamthetotBut those studios could still provide tools necessary to keep the games playable after they no longer want to support it.
No one is asking for laws that force studios to foot the bill for indefinite support. But games don’t have to built in such a way that access can be entirely removed at the whim of a dev or publisher.
Lots of MMOs have private servers already. It’s not a revolutionary ask.
It’s not up to me to pay extra for servers, they should take the costs of them into account when deciding to make an online game.
Games like World of Warcraft make you pay for DLC and a subscription, which is ridiculous. OSRS just asks for a monthly subscription, is that a model I want to see expanded? Absolutely fucking not. On topic though, games with that model should still have to release the entire game for free after they close the official servers.
So do you think people would happily pay possibly hundreds of dollars upfront to play an MMO to “account for server costs”? Players have to pay extra no matter what, if the customer isn’t paying for the server costs who is? You also have to keep in mind that WoW expansions are massive compared to most OSRS updates and are released on a fairly short schedule, that kind of dev cycle takes a lot of money to maintain.
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No, the point of the Stop Killing Games initiative is to make games buy once, be playable forever somehow. If a game releases that is dependent on server infrastructure, the studio should have an end of life plan. That could look like many things, including releasing the tools necessary for anyone else to spin up a server.
Yeah, but that doesn’t actually include games like, say, World of Warcraft. You can only buy monthly subscription. You are told it will run out in a month and you will need to pay again to play. It’s not the greatest model, but it’s not the same things as games where you pay once, without being told the game is going to shut down or when, then it suddenly becomes unplayable at a random time when the publisher decides to kill it.
Paying once and having the game shut down a year later, and paying the same price but a little once a month and having the game shut down a year later is the same. I don’t get this thinking at all.
No, all games should release server binaries (and the game for free if it’s a subscription model) after they close down. Same for free-to-play or whatever, we should have the right to archive games.
Can you even play Minecraft locally if Microsoft shuts down their authentication servers nowadays ?
Yes you just don’t have a skin in game, that already happens if you try to play without an internet connection
AlkI do hope we get dedicated server software be normal again. I kinda want to play Overwatch 1 again. But I can’t. No server software and the game client was converted to overwatch 2.
I should be able to start overwatch 1, spin up a server and play with my friends right now. It was stolen from me.
radiouser
DarkFutureI actively avoid purchasing games that don’t allow client hosting. And I generally try to avoid games that matchmake. I’m tired of shitty matchmaking. I’m tired of corporate hosted lobbies. I’m tired of getting kicked out after each match and having to matchmake with an entirely different group of players.
Give me dedicated client hosted servers. Let us form relationships with other players by playing in the same servers on a regular basis. Gaming is more fun that way.
Overall, this sounds pretty good.
I see there is an exemption for subscription-based MMOs, but no exemption for buy-to-play MMO (like, Guild Wars). I wonder how this bill would impact that market?
I think the assumption is that buy-to-play MMOs tend to be less microservice-based or ‘cloud native’ than subscription ones, such that they are more likely to already feature a monolithic server application. They’re probably thinking games like ARK: SE, and DayZ, rather than Guild Wars. In reality, some sub-based MMOs have monolithic servers (e.g. Mabinogi), and some buy-to-own MMOs have distributed architectures.
This was probably also an easier sell to politicians, by saying, “hey, they said they sold the whole game for that price, so why can they not deliver the whole game, server included?” With a subscription, it becomes harder from a business ‘rights’ perspective to argue that a player who paid for e.g. 1 month of a subscription immediately before the game is retired should be allowed to then own and operate the full game indefinitely, and then becomes a sort of, “how long paying the sub is long enough to ’own’ the game?” debate. This is especially important because it could impact a lot of non-game software as well, so politicians are much more likely to quash this out of fear of backlash. So they may just be picking their battles.
WRT market impact, I am sure the shittier companies would use the exemption as a loophole, and just make all their multiplayer games subscription-based. I doubt it will encourage more buy-to-own MMOs in the future as well, but I think SKG cares more about the extant software people paid for already, than the market impact.
Th4tGuyIII’m not even slightly surprised. Sounds like the exact MO of Stop Killing Games.
You don’t have to keep services running forever, that’s not fair at all, but you should have to give people the tools to do it themselves - because people should be able to preserve these experiences.
𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠Im sorta excited by games that work a bit like an mmo but can be played completely offline like no mans sky.
Beginning on the date a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall provide the purchaser with one or more of the following:
(A) A version of the digital game that can be used by the purchaser independent of services controlled by the operator.
(B) A patch or update to the purchaser’s version of the digital game that enables its continued use independent of services controlled by the operator.
(C) A refund in an amount equal to the full purchase price paid for the digital game by the purchaser.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1921
I don’t agree with the companies having to run the servers forever, imagine how that impacts indie shops.
But when they take the burden of running sole-hosted servers and shut them down, they should have to push some self host able server software for the community.
And single player hands should never require on line functionality.
Good job you agree with SKG. They have said over and over again that they do not think they should have to keep hosting servers indefinitely just not making the thing you spent money on unusable. Wether that be by giving the community server hosting software or in cases of games like the crew just not making single player online only.
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Luckly you agree with SKG. They have always said they are not fighting to force companies to keep servers running. They are fighting for us to have the right to either run them offline or to run our own servers when the game is no longer supported.
ScrubblesThere are no requirements under SKG to force them to run games forever just FYI. Their wording is soft on purpose. It could mean running a server still sure, or releasing a dedicated server client, or even releasing the source code so independent developers and open source folks can figure out how to run them themselves.
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Look, I’d be happy if they just open source the server code. You don’t need to force the fucks to run the damn software. That’s like the worst idea ever.
it’s also incredibly unlikely to stick, whereas open sourcing server code might happen.
I don’t think it will.
Imagine Bethesda sharing their backend code… they won’t. As they will be using it forever, after the heat death of the universe.
lol true, or their stuff running in an overlaid modern engine, like oblivion remastered.
in the end it’ll be
creation engineGamebryo all the way downI’m no architect but couldn’t they just switch the server code to something already in circulation that’s open source, or allow the community to make its own?
Is the server code that integral that it can’t be changed?
Depends on many things.
But ideally you want some game logic on the server side, to prevent cheating.
You can just sync world state between players, but that will always cause weird glitches.
I don’t develop games, so I’m no expert, but I my backend would have the ’one true’ state of the world, and players would only interact with it by using verified actions.
I did one such game, but it was turn-based tabletop, not very comparable to open-world games.
From the Stop Killing Games discourse, that might not be feasible because of patents/licensing, work required and companies’ protectiveness… But a suggestion I remember was that the companies could just be required to release all of the proprietary server binaries, so that somebody dedicated to the cause can figure out how to spin up their own server. This means a company doesn’t have to clean up their sources and ensure they are actually buildable, and can just dump what they were already running somewhere.
I’m actually for a law that forces them to open source server code upon release. The only reason to keep it private is to have direct control over the experience.
At that point they might as well be honest and have you pay subscription, because you don’t really fully own the product.
And before you say that could exclude any kind of live service, DRMs can and should be updated independently. They offset server processing by utilizing your processor and memory anyways, so it’ll have little effect on that dubious practice.
A third option should be release the server protocol.
Which is really the best one.
Yes please.
Cool. So then they force the subscription model.
The problem is you want your cake and you want to eat it too.
I want to eat the cake I bought. I don’t want to buy a cake and then have it taken away from me before I’m finished eating it.
I understand you don’t want to deliver cake anymore. That’s fine. You need to open the rest of the box so I can get the rest of my cake out. You don’t need to deliver anymore to me You just need to not take away the cake I already have.
There’s just too many liabilities there.
A lot of these games they have routines to update the entire software OR simply where they can run arbitrary scripts or things like that. Arbitrary code execution would be a huge problem. Even if it wasn’t an automatic thing and you could simply push a message out to people, “hey you need to update this, you know we don’t have the money Ubisoft has, but we’re making some updates anyways because we love y’all! So go download this… And please donate to keep the show going!” Bam. Pwned.
Things like maintaining usernames and passwords being passed off to Independent third parties? The users would fucking revolt at such an idea.
This is one of those things that I get sounds really good in the perfect utopian society where there’s no bad actors. But the reality is people want your cake.
Oh, come on.
Any game with a sufficiently sized community will also have, as part of that community, enough nerds to run private servers if need be.
Hell, WoW is 20 years old and still has to sue to shut down private servers. There’s plenty of ways to make this happen.
You’re right that there should be concerns about connecting old games to a random server that can push software updates.
However, I think you’re misunderstanding what the SKG movement is as well as what this legislation is asking for.
It’s not asking for companies to leave the servers running indefinitely. It’s definitely not telling them to just allow a 3rd party to take over the databases with all of the information there.
It’s telling companies to provide information upfront about what consumers can expect when the game servers are officially shut down. It’s telling them to have a plan for shutting the game down.
It provides some options for what those plans could look like:
- Offline mode (and communicate what features will no longer be available) - Allow private servers - Refunds
The current version of this bill has an exception for free games and subscription only based games.
A refund makes no sense.
That’s eerily similar to asking for a refund at an arcade machine because you died.
Yea, exactly. This idiotic bill is trying to leverage that which has none, nor should!
The way I see it, a refund is a last resort if they are unable to follow through on the other 2 options.
Using your analogy, asking for a refund at an arcade would be more like asking for a refund for a subscription based online only game. In both of those cases you’re paying to play for a limited amount of time. This bill has an exclusion for that already, so it’s not an issue here.
Think of it this way: Imagine you bought a kitchen appliance (like a refrigerator) that has a screen on the door for creating timers, leaving notes, and checking the weather.
One day, the company says they’re shutting down the servers so that your refrigerator will no longer be able to check the weather, sync notes, etc. However, along with this update the refrigerator will no longer be able to keep food cold.
Wouldn’t you want a refund at that point so that you could buy a new one? Or better yet, maybe we need a law to tell these companies that shutting down their servers shouldn’t affect the core features of the appliance.
This is basically what’s started happening to a large number of games. Instead of just losing access to a few online features, companies are locking us out of the entire game, even if they are mainly a single player game. Just look at what happened to The Crew.
And I expect companies trying to present refund as the default option, squeezing negative PR out of it and using it for astroturfing against SKG as a whole
So do you sue MTG because no one wants to play magic anymore?
Same with the pogs people?
The other incredibly shit things people fawn over and then discard like trash?
No dude. You’re trying to sell me some bullshit and I’m not buying it. That’s what you don’t get!
I would accept that if I did pay for such a thing I would be a complete fucking moron and so -no - I wouldn’t be entitled to a refund. And that’s probably expressed in their policy - they don’t issue refunds - and so I don’t know why you would want one after you’ve read their terms and you’ve agreed to buy in their product with the expectation of no refund.
You sound completely fucking insane.
Dude. I play BAR. It’s literally open source spin off of a popular video game. It updates itself. It has been running for like over a decade. It is like the iron manning of this model.
Abd it works! Its great! No problems! You act like corpos cant brick your shit with mandatory updates, which may or may not run on pure vibes. Do you remember the past two years?
?
Beyond All Reason. https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
TYVM!
I described what it was.
yes and I searched duck-duck-go for BAR game rts and got shit results. thankfully someone provided a link. Perhaps if you’d specified BAR Beyond All Reason I may have found it while walking and typing lol, but yeah, you described what it was but din’t really make it easy to find.
have a great day.
Iron manning? You mean a strongman? Like the opposite of a straw man(the fallacy, the myth, the legend?)
Abd(sic) it works!?
I act like what? Bro. You don’t know me. I’m a pirate…. So miss me with your assumptions.
Again. A totally vague question. What specifically in the past 2 years could you possibly be referring to because it’s not indicated by your idiotic fucking message.
And if you don’t reply I will not in any way be disappointed and I’m certainly not holding my breath.
Im thinking of your mom. Obviously. Rest is in the thread. There is a test case of the argument you csn literally download and play at your fucking leisure. Its open source. Audit the code if you want.