No No. NO! All of this is bullshit. Its not how any of this will work. Its all misinterpreted on purpose and then used as propaganda against the inititive because companies ARE afraid of it. They know this has the power to stop their predatory business practices. Moderation is the hosters responsibility so if anything, private servers would make it cheaper for companies to make games. This is also NOT RETROACTIVE as any other such regulation. Companies will only have to comply with future games. Having to remove proprietary network components from the server so they can release it at end of life IS A GOOD THING. It also makes development MORE ACCESSIBLE for small developers as everyone will have to use more open infrastrucuture. And at last this only affects the end of life of games which means it DOES NOT touch live service games DURING their life and only changes their last stage in their life cycle. For fucks sake this is getting annoying but i take this as a good thing because these stupid multi-national corpos are finally feeling the pressure.
protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist
Nanny State BS. If someone runs a private server, it’s their responsibility to moderate it.
and would leave rights holders liable.
No it wouldn’t.
In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only
Unreal Tournament games are online or multiplayer only games. Even though Epic shut down the master servers, you can modify the .ini file to redirect to a community server. “Online-only” translates to predatory monetization models.
So…here’s the thing, folks: What you’re REALLY going to have to do is stop buying live service video games.
If I understand this, it is a petition to get the EU government to look into maybe thinking about making some laws to…do something about live service games becoming unplayable when the servers shut down. Okay, here’s how that’s going to go: “We looked into it and decided not to do anything.”
Has anyone tried…not buying the damn games in the first place? If you pay for these games knowing that the soulless reptilian cloacal slits that run the AAA industry can just shut down servers whenever they want, YOU are the problem.
Sure. I remember when Id Software released Doom as open source. They had just released Quake II earlier that month, Doom was old news and not really a money maker for the company, so they opened the source code to let the community play with it. That was a cool thing to do, it should be done more often.
I would say yeah, you should build a game in such a way that it can be played once its abandoned. The greed vampires who are actually in charge won’t let a law like that be passed. Or if it is, they’ll ignore it.
Doom, Build Engine games, Marathon. I can still play those games, but even if Bungie faux-Marathon ever comes out, I wouldn’t be able to play it after a few years. One of the biggest turnoffs to these As-A-Service games is time limited events. I don’t want to feel nostalgic for something and not be able to replay it. Between the discussions on Hell Divers II events and the Sony fuckary, I’m glad I passed. Fuck, I remember my hype for Hawken died when I saw it was going to be f2p.
I strongly dislike the end-around that these “live service” games are trying to do around copyright law. I’m a strong proponent of the idea that intellectual property law is a compromise. You get some time to make your money on your idea, then it becomes the heritage of all mankind. Treating games as a service is an attempt to weasel out of their end of the bargain.
If the population at large is too stupid to make healthy video game purchasing decisions, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for protections to come from the representatives they elected.
I can see a stack of ways that this isn’t going to work:
The government looks at the petition and says "No we’re not going to consider that."
The government says "We’ve considered that and decided to do nothing."
The government pulls an EU and the solution they come up with is to make every video game published everywhere in the world force the user to agree to the EULA every time the game launches, prompting a slew of “EULA auto-accept” mods to work around the annoying thing you now have to constantly click.
The government puts in a law that’s written decently. The industry, particularly those parts based outside the EU such as Japan and North America, ignore it, and shut down servers when they damn well please.
But let’s indulge in the fantasy that democracy works for a minute and Stop Killing Games becomes a law that works perfectly as intended. The publishers will find some other way to be shifty greedy fuckpukes. Case in point: Live service games just shutting down their servers whenever they want is 100% legal right now. The government currently is not protecting consumers. It never truly will. The shadiness of business will always outrun government protection, 100% of the time.
I still maintain, if you continue to pay for live service games, you’re the problem.
lol. Games like The Crew aren’t super hard to be turned into a single player game. Nobody is asking them to add a 20 hour single player campaign with a fleshed out storyline. Just add bots and open up the game to be driven around in without an online connection.
This is short sighted. Architectures can and will change in the future. I’m running game servers on my aarch64 devices, if I wasn’t able to compile, and sometimes even edit, the code I wouldn’t have been able to run these servers. Emulation isn’t always ideal, janky or even non existent.
Sure, but the point is to be realistic and not put undue weight on the developers, right? Binaries can generally be much more permissive than source code when proprietary dependencies are involved, and easier to release “clean” than source code.
Yes, of course and it’s a lot better than what we have at this point, it’s a great first step. I still remember the days of Id Software releasing their game (logic) under the GPL.
… as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist…
There are third party options for this.
… and would leave rights holders liable.
Liable for what? A service everyone knows they’re no longer providing? Are car manufacturers still liable for 50 year old rusty cars people still drive? Can Apple today be held liable for a software vulnerability in the Lisa or the Mac II?
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.
Then don’t design games that way. Don’t make games like these. This is good news, actually.
Minecraft, the game that sold the most copies in history, has a huge infrastructure of community-hosted servers, some with tens of thousands of players playing at the same time. The community has created different flavors of the server software, optimized it, added mod support and even reprogrammed parts of it.
At this point, it’s hard for me to believe how someone could say a community can’t run game servers with a straight face.
I know. I like online content as well. Some of the games I spent the most hours in (Warframe, Helldivers 2) are these kinds of games. But if a corpo lobbying group is forcing the choice between “Enshittified always online” or “never any online content ever anymore” I’ll choose the latter.
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
Straight fucking lie, the ones liable are the uploader and the host, which after official support ends is no longer the rights holders.
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.
I 100% guarantee the people who wrote that statement don’t know or care how much effort it would take to build the infrastructure to run their server-side components.
I’m fairly confident that any AAA production uses Infrastructure As Code to spin up infrastructure in their dev and qa environments, so it’s literally just a matter of handing over the Terraform or BICEP and some binaries for any custom code they need to use. I also highly, HIGHLY doubt that the vast majority of game servers are hosted on-prem. They’re most likely either using Azure or AWS.
videogameseurope.eu
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