The only choice it really limits from the publisher is the choice to decide to stop supporting a game out of nowhere. This new plan would just make it so you have to eventually plan to sunset the game from its “live” elements.
It also means there will never be another F2P game. They have to make their money upfront from every user. They can't just turn it off when the profit slows and/or stops.
Genshin Impact is a F2P game that makes stupid amounts of money. If it stopped making money, they could very well just stop developing for it and let it be as it is.
Game pass was always going to be bad for consumers, and probably bad for smaller orgs. The problem is people are short sighted and don’t care.
Like with Walmart moving into a neighborhood. People are like oh it’s so much cheaper than the local shops! And then those get priced out of business and Walmart raises prices and lowers salary. People won’t or can’t think ahead
We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.
Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
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Stop Killing Games is not trying to force companies to provide private servers or anything like that, but leave the game in a playable state after shutting off servers. This can mean:
provide alternatives to any online-only content
make the game P2P if it requires multiplayer (no server needed, each client is a server)
gracefully degrading the client experience when there’s no server
Of course, releasing server code is an option.
The expectation is:
if it’s a subscription game, I get access for whatever period I pay for
if it’s F2P, go nuts and break it whenever you want; there is the issue of I shame purchases, so that depends on how it’s advertised
if it’s a purchased game, it should still work after support ends
That didn’t restrict design decisions, it just places a requirement when the game is discontinued. If companies know this going in, they can plan ahead for their exit, just like we expect for mining companies (they’re expected to fill in holes and make it look nice once they’re done).
I argue Stop Killing Games doesn’t go far enough, and if it’s pissing off the games industry as well, then that means it strikes a good balance.
If server code is released such that people can run private servers after the official servers are shut down, then legally the people running the servers should be the ones liable for illegal activity that happens on them.
I could imagine third-party companies springing up whose entire business model is JUST providing unofficial servers for discontinued games and moderating them. Maybe a subscription service that provides access to servers for several different online service games.
Of course, it would be more likely that it would be just a player who hosts a server for themselves and their friends and doesn’t attempt to be profitable. That would be fine too.
I could imagine third-party companies springing up whose entire business model is JUST providing unofficial servers for discontinued games and moderating them
That kind of already exists, you can buy hosting for Minecraft and other games. AFAIK, moderation isn’t a part of it, but many private groups exist that run public servers and manage their own moderation. It exists already, and that should absolutely be brought up as a bill is being considered.
We have had that exact model for decades. Hosting companies use to and probably still offer rack space for arena shooters. The main company managed the master server, which was just a listing of IP addresses, but there were only ever a few official game servers with defaults loaded.
Minecraft has private servers (at least on Minecraft java) as well as their own server platform “Realms”, also every client is also a server. Though the authentication system is a Microsoft account so that’s likely to still be online well into the future
I understood that from a IP and trademark stand point. It could be hard to retain your copyright or trademark if you are no longer controlling a product
No, copyright isn’t relinquished from any of that (not even any effect on damages if you still require players to have bought the game to use the private servers), and trademarks wouldn’t be affected at all if you simply require that 3rd party servers are marked as unofficial
Exactly, and that also includes online games like Minecraft. Nobody is going to sue Microsoft because of what someone said or did in a private Minecraft server, though they might if it’s a Microsoft hosted one.
Stop Killing Games is not trying to force companies to provide private servers
I don’t think this is what they mean. They say that of they provide the tools for users to deploy the servers, bad things can happen. So I think they understood SKG, they just lie about the consequences for gamers
If that’s their argument, then the counterargument is simple: preserve the game another way. If hosting servers is dangerous, put the server code into the client and allow multiplayer w/ P2P tech, as had been done since the 90s (e.g. StarCraft).
What they seem to be doing is reframing the problem as requiring users to host servers, and arguing the various legal issues related to that. SKG just needs to clarify that there are multiple options here, and since devs know about the law at the start (SKG isn’t retroactive), studios can plan ahead.
It’s just a disingenuous argument trying to reframe the problem into cyber security and IP contexts, while neither has been an issue for other games in the past.
Another part of it is that if they discontinue support, they can’t stop the community from creating their own server software.
There are so many ways to approach this. The point is ensuring consumers retain the right to keep using what they purchased, even if they have to support it themselves.
Sort of. They need to have the tools as well. So I suppose they could release the APIs for their servers before shutting down their servers so community servers can be created, that would probably be sufficient. But they need to do something beyond just saying, “we won’t sue you if you reverse engineer it.”
We saw the depths a nepo baby from Blizzard would go for this initiative to fail, can’t imagine what could happen with a body comprised of people from the biggest worms in the industry (Epic, EA, Activision, Microsoft, Ubi et al.)
“curtail developer choice” is such a weak argument because you could equally apply it to literally every piece of regulation ever passed. Of course it curtails choice, that’s almost the dictionary definition of an industry regulation.
True. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attack predatory behavior when we see it. If they want to sell me something, I need to own it, and that means I get to use it after they’ve stopped supporting it.
When I pay to see a film in a theater, I don’t own the film. I don’t get to watch the film again after it leaves the theater.
While I pay to see a concert, a play, or a musical, I don’t own those performances. I don’t get to see them again. They generally aren’t recorded (Although that is changing in some limited cases.)
I do think a game dying is terrible and I do think games should be clearly labeled (so people can make an education decision if they want to rent the game).
This isn’t paying to see a concert, play, or musical. This is buying a book for amazon’s e-reader, and them not allowing you to read the book anymore when they put out the book’s sequel.
Fun fact a company did this with DVDs back in the day, once you broke the seal on it the air would react with a coating on the disk which would become increasingly dark until it became unreadable.
Sure, you’re paying for a performance when you watch a film or play at a theater. If I pay to watch a video game tournament, I’m likewise paying for a performance, not the game.
When you buy a film (DVD, Bluray, or Digital Copy) or a recording of a play performance, you own that copy and can watch it as often as you want for as many years into the future as you want. What we’re saying is that video games should work the same way, if I buy a game, I should be able to play it whenever I want at any point in the future. That’s it, it’s the same thing as with a film.
I don’t know how you could do that without staying exclusively on open source
I’m old enough that the games I’m nostalgic for are on floppy discs on my shelf, but now the games I play are downloaded and rely on whatever company keeping a server up to authenticate me
Who knows what Microsoft will do with Minecraft in 30 years
Who knows what Steam will do with the licences it’s sold me
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