“They can’t run servers forever!” Open source the server then Let people who want to play it run it themselves then
EDIT: typo
I remember being able to run a private World of Warcraft server on my computer back in like, 2009. Surely if WoW can be reverse-engineered, so can many other titles.
But yes, it would obviously be better if they’d just open-source it.
Surely if WoW can be reverse-engineered, so can many other titles.
This is solving wrong problem. Or rather, this problem should not exist at all.
ITT: Time travelers from 2009, thinking
my_game_dedicated_server.exeis still how all online games work.I’m sorry to inform you that this is 2024, AWS has invaded every cubic centimeter of computing, and most companies couldn’t extract a business-critical system from the rest of their infrastructure in a way that another company could run it even if they had 3 years and 100 million dollars to get it done.
Found the executive. You’re the crow in this meme.
No. They can release source code or documentation for others to work off of, no one is asking them to deliver a fully functioning standalone version.
For that matter you could just do community developed servers.
Look at headscale
AWS
Which runs very same dedicated server. And, as it was pointed out above, source code is fine too.
My yin, being required to provide what they do have and nothing more would be a huge boon to community driven efforts to preserve it. “Not everything can be perfect so therefore we should do nothing” is a bad take.
That’s BS
You don’t start big. You start small and then scale up from there.
Stop Killing Games was stated by Ross Scott, and he asked a few people in game making how hard this initiative would be on that end
Its anywhere from a few hours to a couple days worth of work for a person or small team unless they designed it so badly they should be fired
There is no excuse
Meanwhile ragnarok online a 2002 mmorpg is alive and kicking with hundreds of private servers…
This is so weird after I was just thinking “I wonder if there’s a way to play RO the way it was circa 2007 or so when I remember it…”
“Stop Killing Games” is literally a way to force companies to let you host your own servers. That’s the intention. The company loses nothing, they can wash their hands and move on.
In fact, they can even continue to sell games without servers.
If you want to make this a law, how would anyone handle this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3jMKeg9S-s&t=73
This argument holds true for developers of all sizes and is somehow totally ignored by most here.
One thing that would go against monetization of servers after hostility to get the original to go down would be that anyone could spin up a free one in competition. Once the server binaries are available to everyone, anyone can run a server. Why would someone pay for something they can get for free?
This still doesn’t cover for the abuse of studios which is the main concern here, after all making games harder to kill off shouldn’t come with making the production or maintenance more risky or significantly mor expensive. A malicious party trying to kill a game because they dont like it or part of the community is still a valid motive.
Regarding your Question, minecraft servers are a good example of this: there are many servers out there which monetise in game resources or grind shorteners for real world money. I dont think that it is a stretch to say that a non sandbox game could be adjusted to work in such fashion. Also the point is not that there are other options, but that someone may easily make money with stuff the dont own and have never contributed to in its making.
At the end of the day all of us still want new games to be made. Therefore we need to accept that the people making them need to be able to have a steady income doing their job. Monetising ones own creation is, and should be, well within your rights. Even if some of us dont like it providing a platform in form of a game, as a service / with ever fresh content can be a valid value proposition and there are many studios out there doing this successfully while being well respected, think of Deep rock galactic or path of exile.
You can abuse studios right now. This would not change that. It would not make maintenance risky or more expensive.
It provides an extremely theoretical motive for people to do the abuse, that is unlikely to materialize in reality.
And if you want to be theoretical, it removes ideological reasons for abuse. Right now, if you dislike an online game, and got the studio shut down, the game would be gone. With this initiative, it would survive removing the motivation to try in the first place.
It provides an extremely theoretical motive for people to do the abuse, that is unlikely to materialize in reality.
Yeah, this whole argument seems like a theoretical spurious hypothetical.
The dude in the video is acting like this is completely legal too, when all of the abuse is already illegal and the authorities just cannot prevent it because of the scale and size of the Internet combined with their own ineptitude.
If I’m in the business generally of blowing up and attacking company servers, why would I suddenly want to pivot to hosting monetized game servers? That’s an entirely different business. The whole thing strikes me as “OH NOES SOMEBODY MIGHT MAKE SOME MONEY OFF OF MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES!!!”.
Centralized, proprietary servers for games other than subscription MMO games are complete and utter bullshit. Either make the game a subscription and keep all of it server-side, or allow people to host the servers and stop acting like assholes.
If a game has reached EoL then they’re just being straight greedy worrying about someone else making a little money off it. Running a public server costs money too.
And again, nobody said they have to release a ready to go and fully functioning standalone binaries. Just the documentation on how it works as a bare minimum would go EXTREMELY far for the open source community and then the whole “ThEY DiDnt MaKE anY ConTrIBuTIOns” goes up in smoke
Stop killing games said that games need to be kept in a functioning state afaik. That means exactly that. I am very for modding games but modding a game does not entitle me to the original creators intellectual property, but merely the part j have added.
Also what documentation? :)
Stop killing games said that games need to be kept in a functioning state afaik
Not what was said, so what you know is wrong
Also what documentation?
They would have to make it for it to be available, obviously, that’s part of the point of pushing for these laws
Wrong, see first bullet point https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci
Which is elaborated on elsewhere in their campaign to mean “repairable within reason for the normal person”
It does not mean that a developer has to do anything extreme at all
They just need to change everything about how they design and create the games to fit the new model.
No, they do not, way to out yourself as someone with 0 idea about the industry. This is covered by game devs who support STG, watch the videos or read a summary
Should be anywhere from a couple hours work for one person to a week or so of one team. MOST games will fall on the shorter end of that spectrum unless the developers are really bad at their jobs
I prepared for this argument very long time ago.
He omits a number of unrealistic assumptions:
- Bots buying game somehow is not infinite money glitch for developers. Assumption of complete lack of mental capacity of dev.
- Nobody except ‘Bad Guy’ can run server. Or if there is, none of them will run server just to play game instesd of profiting. Assumption of complete lack of mental capacity of players.
- ‘Bad Guy’ somehow makes more money from servers than spends on botting.
And now I will add new assumption I missed:
- ‘Bad Guy’ spends less on botting, than it costs to reverse engieneer protocol or make new game.
You dont need bots to ruin a game, ddos is sufficient and cheap enough to come by, probably even easier in the future. Argument 2 already covered in other comment below
Your reply basically was “even if they will not profit from it, they still can abuse company by doing it”. It does not address critique of implicit assumptions such takes.
Such position is fundamentally anti-social and similar to making shopping center contaminate enviroment with radiation when company, that owns it, goes bankrupt, because “it would open ways for abuse”. Except it’s even more nonsensical(see 2, 3 and 4).
If anything, this is not an argument against SKG, this is argument against capitalism as a whole.
Because it would almost certainly not happen in reality. The server being released means everyone could spin up one for free. You wouldn’t be able to monetize it to any significant degree.
If you want to be generous toward Thor, he is a security expert trained to focus on any hypothetical risks, however unlikely. If you don’t, he is a game developer with monetary interest in this not passing and vast experience conning people.
idk https://pretendo.network/ seems to be doing pretty good. It would be nice to just host my own small server after the game is done for just me and some of my friends.
I am talking about the video hypothetical. Trying to destroy a game only to profit off the released server.
It may be true that it may not actually happen. However:
- I have elaborated on monetization in another long comment.
- it cannot be wrong to have monetary interest in your product.
- A law (which is the goal afaik) needs to account for unlikely scenarios, thats why its usually so hard to make new ones
I am not against leaving games playable, but the fact that people like the game means that the devs did a good job and their fate needs to be accounted for. Devs who make good games are not an enemy
it cannot be wrong to have monetary interest in your product
There is nothing wrong with making money off the games you make. But once you are done doing that, you shouldn’t be allowed to just wipe the thing people paid you for.
If your game relies on your servers, I won’t buy your game.
Here is a completely noncontributory comment.
I stumbled across a copy of a physical book from the author of the comic this is from. I wondered to myself if this meme is in it.
It is.
THE PROPHECY HAS BEEN FULFILLED!
THE CHOSEN ONE IS AMONG US
they can’t keep running servers forever
That’s exactly why we need it to pass.
Which EU citizens can help with by signing it. We are 40% there, we need your signature.
Getting back to the old status quo
I feel like wayyy too many engineer minds lean back on “too vague” without understanding how many judgment calls judges make in cases every day. It’s not uncommon for them to have to decide what someone’s intent or knowledge was when taking a certain action.
Software engineer here. I find the petition to be very specific, and totally feasible.
Anyway, this isn’t a true referendum where its text would become immediate law as soon as it passes. It’s a petition that would be presented to legislators who would write the actual law. The petition doesn’t need to be written in legalese.
(Also: if the customer paid them even one cent, then they DO owe the customer something. Also: They should be forced to release the server software when they shut down the servers.)
It’s a petition that would be presented to legislators who would write the actual law.
Oh-ho-ho! It’s about to get better: they can instead say, that existing laws cover this. Which will have even greater impact.
That’s someone who shouldn’t be a judge, that’s what a jury or maybe even mediators would be for. A judge is black and white, and shouldn’t judge on anything they aren’t 100% educated on.
You’re absolutely wrong.
Just because the USA broken system is that way doesn’t mean it’s the norm, nor should it be how it’s actually done.
How can you be an impartial judge on something you don’t know anything about? They need to know the law, the relevant materials, and comprehend it.
So yea, they NEED to be knowledgeable, and if they are using “personal interpretations” instead of established, they aren’t fit to be a judge.
Just because this is allowed by your corrupt system doesn’t make it okay to allow dude.
It’s literally in the word “impartial” means. OP is saying they want biased judges who judge with their emotions instead of objectively.
You’re arguing against things nobody brought up. Nobody said judges shouldn’t be impartial or knowledgeable. It’s also not about ”personal interpretation“.
But judging is all but black and white. A lot of laws have wiggle room to varying degrees, and for a reason. Because no two cases are identical and intents and knowledge have to be able to be taken into account. That’s why laws are usually a little vague.
For example, a sentence for assault and battery has a degree of freedom (when the suspect is found guilty), the punishment can vary from a fine (of varying hights) to a time in prison (from a few months to some years).Just because the USA broken system
Stop making everything about that shithole of a country. Stop Killing Games isa european initiative towards EU laws ffs.
Just because the USA broken system is that way doesn’t mean it’s the norm, nor should it be how it’s actually done.
Dude, I know you are upset with your legal system. Who wouldn’t? But we are discussing EU here.
If two guys and a basement can run the guild wars 1 servers for next to nothing (their words) than yes, company’s very much could run their servers forever.
Maybe its my lack of trust in the government from being in the US, but you guys seem to have a ton of faith that your legislators will take this and not make it a shit show and worse than the status quo.
*it’s
I always get this one wrong.
How? I’m not native English speaker, but I rarely do this type of mistakes. Yet I often see them in others’ texts.
Native speakers often don’t actively pay attention to grammar rules to the extent that non-native speakers do because native speakers often mostly rely on what intuitively makes sense to them. Non-native speakers, on the other hand, usually first learn the language through a set of rules and exceptions then afterwards develop an intuition for the target language.
For a non-native speaker, some mistakes can be hard to make because you’ve been studying for years to not make it. For a native speaker those mistakes may be easy to make because they got a gut feeling of what was right then didn’t pay attention, care, or remember when it was corrected assuming it was corrected at all.
Hopefully this helps a bit. This is largely what I learned from studying German from a professor with a PhD in linguistics who loved to go on little linguistics rants and tangents. But it also comes from what I’ve observed in my efforts trying to learn German and Japanese. Hope I’m able to get my skill in either language to where you’re currently at in English.
its my lack of trust in the government from being in the US,
yes.
It would be great if servers were just running in the background with an update
Their fault. I remember a time when publishers allowed for people to run their own dedicated servers, for FPS at least. They could have modified that existing model, but instead they took that ability away from the user whilst almost simultaneously making excuses about the problem they created.
If their servers can’t run forever, give us dedicated servers on a larger scale FFS!
I really believe it has nothing at all to do with running the servers or their maintenance costs.
It’s about control. It’s a rare sight to see any kind of multiplayer experience that isn’t all about selling shit through MTX. If you could run your own server, you might be able to also give yourself the shit they want to nickel and dime you for without paying, and that would really ruin their model.
Yeah, but the point is if they’ve already shut off their servers and moved on to the next thing, who cares? Just let the dedicated fans and other nuts run their own servers and they can wash their hands of it entirely. They weren’t going to make any money on it after pulling the plug anyway.
If they completely replace a game with its successor and shut the former down, then people can only play the latter: the developers don’t have to compete with themselves, and the publishers have an easier time with their enshittification of their franchise.
The game that kicked off SKG in the first place is an example of this, as far as I’ve heard The Crew was better received than The Crew 2 and 3.
I mean you can see it even a bit with Payday 3 and 2, if 2 wasn’t such a cash cow you can believe a lesser company would’ve shut that thing down ages ago
Ah, but then there’s a chance fewer people would buy the next piece of shit designed to extract their money.
Yep.
If its possible for someone to choose an older, less expensive game, then that means those games are market competitors for similar modern games, with more mechanics designed to coax money out of you.
Its basically a hyper charged version of planned obsolesence.
You’ve nailed it with these two points.
I’d like to add they specifically want to determine when and where you access their IP.
Yep, their argument against game preservation is that some people may use the preserved games for shock recreation!
That is an idiotic argument.
Replace *shock* with \*shock\*
Thanks!
To all the people saying they should release server source code: You don’t even need to do that (as nice as it would be). At the very basic level all that is needed is:
- remove DRM (which probably cost more effort to add in the first place)
- a description of the API for any online components (which any decent dev team will already have internally documented)
- remove DRM (which probably cost more effort to add in the first place)
Denuvo charges monthly. And, looking at history of games, takes no effort by developers. Heck, they even can take their own pirated game with DRM removed. And even if removing DRM costs money, they have nobodu, but themselves to blame.
Depending on the game, a lot of mechanics live on the server side. Not sure which game this is about though.
But think of any competitive game like League. All the processing and tracking is on the server. Change that and you change the game.
