if gabe could come out with a statement that if steam had to shut down for some reason he’d try to make sure people get to keep playing their games they have downloaded he’d probly cause these guys to have an aneurysm, but I doubt even gabe would go that far
He did say something similar years ago if I recall correctly but we never got any details and it was so long ago it’s hard to guess whether that’s still the plan. Reassurance or update on that wouldn’t be unwelcome, that’s for sure.
You can (could?) reach out to Steam Support, and this is part of the email they reply with:
“In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network, measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.”
Not sure if they ever expounded upon those details though.
My question is, what is this group as an entity, and why does their opinion matter? Are they an ngo-style advocacy group, or an actual governing body of some kind?
As long as people can host a server instance, does it matter?
Hypothetically, even if it costs 1000$ per hour in AWS fees to get the required hardware to run that, at least you have the option to, alternatively have a peer to peer option to play smaller version on a LAN with a max of however many players your own network can support, there could be many implementations, which at the end of the day would still allow you to play the game when the official servers (authentication or room hosts) are shuttered and inaccessible
The main point of SKG is that currently, we, as customers, are not even getting the short end of the stick, we are getting no stick, despite having paid for it.
And ultimately, at the end of the day, not our problem to try to figure this out, the point is we’re unhappy with the current situation and want things to change.
Also note that none of this is retroactive, will only apply to games released in the future, so having an end of life plan as a requirement from the get-go is pretty simple to work on when nothing was done yet.
The initiative’s issue isn’t with them being online-only (though personally people hate it). The initiative aims for games to have the ability to have a reasonable state of playability past the end of life.
This is for all kinds of games - single-player, multiple player, live service, only only. The point is to keep what you paid for.
There are, it may surprise you to learn, different types of game that have online connectivity for different reasons. And the appropriate EOL response may differ across those games.
“Live-service” games where the main gameplay is singleplayer but an online connection is required so they can enforce achievements and upgrades (…and “anti-piracy” bs) may be best served by simply removing the online component so it can all be done locally.
Online competitive games can be switched to a direct connection mode.
MMOs and other games with large numbers of users and a persistent online server can be run on fan-operated servers, so long as (a) the server binary is made available, and (b) the client is modified to allow changing settings to choose a server to connect to (it could be something as simple as a command-line flag with no UI if the devs are being really cheap).
I picked an actual “online only” example for a reason. Yet everyone is jumping around talking about other things.
Turning a battle royal into a lan only game sounds like the solution I was expecting in my replies. And then yeah, you can even route that over the internet.
But that’s not changing the design, really. It’s providing the infrastructure needed to run it, even if it’s lan only, and would need more to run it over the internet.
Depends on what one means by “change the design”. It doesn’t make a fundamental change to the deeper architecture of the game, no. But it does require some relatively superficial changes, which are themselves a design problem of sorts.
Enabling the ability for purchasers to specify an arbitrary server to connect to would require a design change compared to how most games are recently. That feature used to be standard in the early years of online gaming.
We had online-only multiplayer games in the early 2000s with self-hosted servers supporting over 60 players per map. It’s absolutely possible to do better with today’s tech.
Man. Y’all really think I’m talking about networking design?
I thought we were talking about gameplay design. That’s why I picked 100 player battle royal.
“Change the game design” implies that, to me. I didn’t pick a single player experience with always online requirements. Or a 4 player game with online matchmaking and no direct connect options.
There’s such a strong, and obsessive need among a bunch of people on this topic to explain and explain, and not parse the precise thing being asked.
There’s also a lot of people who conflate having the opinion that the effort will fail due to its approach and the person/people behind it with not wanting it to succeed.
What I’m doing is poking at how people are behaving and how they talk about this initiative. And how the messaging is confusing and all over the place. It takes 5 people racing to explain it to me when I understand perfectly, and lay out a specific case. Yet no one replies to explain how my example would work.
I’m not the only one who sees this initiative as misguided, and mis framed.
Sorry for coming off like a troll, usually my outlier questions get responses instead of people acting like they are here.
I’ve really dug a bit too deep on this one, and I’ll try to stop replying now.
If you understand perfectly, you’ve yet to demonstrate this. The ask is to remove superfluous, anti-consumer design elements like always-online connections for single-player games, or shuttering official servers with no mitigation plan for those who wish to play the game after this occurs, and people have asked for changes to these, specific sorts of anti-consumer design choices. Meanwhile, you’re over here big brain posting about “That’s not a design change! Now, turning a 100-player online battle royale game into a single player JRPG, that would be a design change!” It’s no great wonder that you’re being treated as either a troll or an idiot when you’ve manage to misunderstand something so fundamental, while confidently insisting time and again that you alone get it, and everyone is just misguided.
I can find a community for a fighting game from 2012 to get together every Thursday night for a 30-person tournament via Discord. 100 people in a battle royale could work much the same.
Give players a copy of the server so they can host their own, or patch the game to allow direct connections like games used to have in the 90s and 00s?
Changing the design happens during the pre-production. This will not effect any games retroactively. As unfortunate as it is, until the EU parliament decides on a law or regulation all games destined to die will die.
Any games that are grandfathered in, would be done so by the good will of the corporations if they do wish to.
I think it mostly revolves around how you get 100 players together for a good game. The match making part. I’m skeptical of the quality of match making, but that’s not a showstopper for people committed to playing. But if we set aside the need for someone to maintain hosting, then it becomes peer to peer or a lan party, or a combination of the two.
I remember what it was like rounding up and wrangling 80 people to raid in WoW back in the day.
And none of this is a showstopper I don’t see why we can’t talk about that. It’s not like discussing the difficult edge cases or the feasibility of the details could harm things.
My initial question in this thread framed changing the game design, not networking stack. So it was about making it all local/same screen only. An absurd example on purpose.
I think it mostly revolves around how you get 100 players together for a good game. The match making part.
This part is not really what the initiative is about. The initiative can't guarantee you'll be able to find 100 other people to play with. Even matchmaking (unless it's somehow made integral to the game) is not really relevant to the initiative. What the initiative is concerned with is preservation of games. To give a specific example, if you're able to organize 100 people to play the same game the initiative wants you to have the technical capability to set up the game for 100 people. And to give a more real life example, Anthem is shutting down at the start of 2026. That means if me and my 2 friends get nostalgic and want to play Anthem in 2027 we literally cannot, the game won't run. But if what SKG wants to achieve would be a reality right now then EA would have to have a way for me to set up whatever is necessary for me and my 2 friends to play Anthem together, be it some kind of server binary or P2P solution or source code or whatever, doesn't matter how the company wants to solve this as long as it works. That's what SKG is about.
My initial question in this thread framed changing the game design, not networking stack. So it was about making it all local/same screen only. An absurd example on purpose.
SKG isn't saying companies should make BR-s local/split screen. It's only concerned with keeping games in a playable state. SKG doesn't alter the game design unless the technical stack required to keep the game running is somehow integral to the design of the game. SKG deliberately leave the "how a game should be preserved" open so publishers/developers could preserve games how they see fit. If the publishers/developers want to rip out the multiplayer and replace it with local/split screen that's how they've decided to preserve their game. That is not really criticism of SKG, that's just a bad faith argument that can be made only because SKG isn't as restrictive as people claim it to be.
And specifically in your example the design of a BR game does not need to change at all because the only thing preventing some BR-s from being preserved is the fact that you cannot set up your own servers.
The initial post you replied to was talking about changing the design, not the game design. I think the thread got off course because you interpreted that as game design. As long as users can host the servers themselves, the game design can remain exactly the same. Even if the game can only be played when it’s orchestrated by museum curators or something, that’s still preferable than the game being totally dead. If you’ve ever been to PAX East, there’s always a room with a full networked game of Steel Battalion multiplayer via LAN. Every controller was $200 back in the day, plus everyone needs an Xbox and TV. It was highly unlikely that anyone could ever play this game without Xbox Live, but it can still be done, so where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I don’t have a problem if someone wants to turn a battle royale into a 4 player game.
If someone wants to host something bigger, that’s cool too.
I think there would be room in the market for a group to host servers for abandoned games.
It’s not terribly difficult or costly to set up a cloud host if you remember to put the cost restrictions on, so there’s one more option for multiplayer games.
That’s for games in the past, games going forward could be designed better. But for games that have already been made, there’s no reasonable way to redesign games that have already been published. Any redesign will change the game instead of preserving it, and you’ll never get the original devs back together with the original tech stack in order to do any major changes. But smaller things like getting old games to be able to point to different servers isn’t a big problem.
Seems like your reading comprehension is lacking, so I’m going to encourage you to reread the entire exchange up to this point. If you can’t figure it out, you’re not someone worth discussing with.
What “online only” means is the need to authenticate to a proprietary server. After logging in, you are then (potentially) directed to a random server to play on.
If you are not online, you cannot authenticate and therefor not be directed to a server. This means you cannot play the game. When the authentication server and infrastructure behind the game is taken offline, the game becomes unplayable, because it is online only.
If a final patch were to be made where either a private authentication server would be made available for you to self-host, or authenation to be completely removed, you could play the game either offline on your device locally or LAN, or online by anyone who cares enough to host a server with the game logic. It would no longer be “online only” since you would have a choice. You can choose to play offline, or choose to play online.
If a game actually needs servers beyond the authentication part, then those should be made available too, so that anyone, again, can play locally or online.
It’s logical that if game servers are made available, a game can never be “online only” again, because you could host the server on your pc and connect to localhost.
Your whole argumentation about “online only” game design falls completely flat. You are mixing concepts that have nothing to do with one another.
A game can be a battle royale by design, gameplay wise, and have the ability to host your own servers by design, technical architecture wise.
Quake Live used to be online only. You could not host your own servers. They released for steam and made it possible to host your own servers. The old authentication system was taken down, logins are no longer required, and now you just launch the game and pick a server in a built in server browser. It should be the standard and Quake Live should serve as an example of how it should be done.
Or just let someone else host a fucking server and let the game get pointed to that one or any other they want. They could even sell the server software and make money on that. I’d love to host my own servers of some old online only games where I could play with just my friends and family.
Absolute trash statement, I really hope this bites them.
They’re just repeating a lot of the same misinformation that Pirate Software had been saying, the exact things that had riled the gaming community and caused this latest wave of action. We’re already primed to discount the points they’re trying to make and it shows exactly how disingenuous they’re being.
Positively, I hope this reflects some true fear on their end.
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.
As has been stated over and over and over again, private servers used to be an option until the industry decided they weren’t any more. If the result of this is that it forces the industry to not make shitty, exploitative games, that’s still a win for the consumers. I would rather have no game at all than something that psychologically tries to exploit my FOMO and drains my wallet.
It’s also a strawman argument. Because yes, developers have less to no control over the operation of private servers. Yes, that means they can’t moderate those servers.
But
This initiative only covers games, not supported anymore by the devs anyway. Meaning legally speaking everything happening to private servers would be literally not their concern anymore. And new legislation, should it come to that, would spell that out.
secure players’ data: there should be no sensitive player data being stored on a private game server like that anyways, you’re connecting to a server, not logging into a service
remove illegal content: not the developer’s responsibility in this case, it’s the responsibility of the private server (admittedly this could get messier with net neutrality and safe harbor stuff? unclear, but point remains, it’s still not the developer’s responsibility here)
combat unsafe community content: ditto. Not the the responsibility of the developer but the private servers. It’s often been argued that the smaller communities of private servers do a BETTER job of moderating themselves)
would leave rights holders liable: HERE IT IS! We can’t let you self host something like Marvel Rivals due to all the copyrights and trademarks and brand protections. How dare you!
Same for the “online only design” argument. The moment they decide it’s not viable anymore and they want to shut it down: what does it matter to them, what players do with it? As long as they offer the service themselves, no one is bugging them. (Although I would absolutely be in favor of also getting self hosting options right from the start, I am realist enough to accept, that this would indeed lower economical feasibility of some projects.)
That part of the argument is slightly different. If I understand the press statement correctly, what they are saying is: “Some servers can’t, on a technical level, be hosted by the community”. And that’s not a straw man (arguing against something never asked for), that’s just a lie. We have access to all the same stuff as the industry (AWS etc). Hosting these kinds of servers might be very expensive, but the initiative only asks for a way to keep games alive not for a cheap way (though I would prefer a cheap way of course)
I imagine it’s rather licensing. If they have to provide the software at some point, they can’t use components they are not allowed to distribute. And I agree, that this will impact development costs. But with the law in place, this is not an unexpected cost but one that can be factored in. Might be, that some live services are then no longer viable… but I don’t care. There are more games than anyone could play and games are cancelled or not even started to develop all the time for various reasons. One more or less is just noise.
Devs have numerous options for how to address the SKG initiative. The top three that come to my mind are:
Release server binaries (along with modifying clients to have a setting to connect to the right server)
Modify multiplayer to work over LAN (good when the server’s only/main job is matchmaking)
Modify the game itself to no longer require online connectivity
In the case of live service games, I would suggest option 3 is the most appropriate. If the main gameplay is singleplayer, but it’s online so you can dole out achievements and gatekeep content, the answer is simple: stop doing that. Patch it to all work in-client. And keep in mind that this will be a requirement at end-of-life from the beginning. If it’s an unexpected requirement, that’s going to be a huge development cost. If it’s expected, making that EOL change easy to implement will be part of the code architecture from the start.
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.
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.
… 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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