That does not seem to be accurate in Faliszek's case. He did not "take his first steps into trying to make an indie game", he led the studio that did make it, led development on the game and then proceeded to go through the exact process we're discussing to make it community-runnable.
He has DEFINITELY seen the code needed to run the server architecture, if the 30 minute video breaking down the process of decoupling the game from central servers he posted today is any indication (which I did watch, including the parts that are about organic farming, because Chet actually IS interesting enough for me to spend my day checking out his manifesto).
No, I'm just unwilling to engage in the complexity on your terms. Which is to say, I'm not going to parse several pages of line-by-line forum bickering for the sake of your verbal incontinence.
You can choose a subject and we can talk about that subject, or you can keep it legible with an overall argument.
But you are not interesting enough for me to spend my day reading your manifesto.
But again, it's not just a technical issue. It's cost and functionality and compliance and legal requirements, too.
Also, eff no, it IS complicated. And expensive. You're handwaving a ton of stuff there, it's not just some Oracle DB.
And again, you're not saying "can we do it", you're saying "can we make it mandatory to do it for everything?"
At this point you have to go back to the big blurb you didn't read or the video you didn't watch. It's the specifics of what you need to do. At scale. For every live game, so like 80% of the mobile industry, a decent chunk of console and PC.
And each of those has a litany of technical, legal and financial requirements, each different from each other, by design.
You can't just write into a law that it needs to happen and have it magically materialize. That's not how this is going to work, even if the inititative succeeded.
Understandable. You can ignore the big blurb (or go watch Chet's much better version, which is also half an hour, but still). The point is that's just me rattling off the top of my head all the complications I can think of for a modern game.
The thing is yes, you are talking about running a service. Because that's what a bunch of these games are. That's what The Crew was, at least if you ask Ubisoft.
And if you're regulating this issue you can't say "let them do the complicated thing we can't salvage". Everybody is going to have to comply with the requirements, big and small.
So it's one thing to carve out exceptions for community servers for an MMO, it's another to set requirements on sunsetting server-based games by law (Minecraft doesn't count, it doesn't have matchmaking and was always local-hosted).
The world you're imagining is a world where Ubisoft still has The Crew 2 and Activision still has WoW, but Lethal Company or Among Us maybe don't get made. Because if the requirements for both are the same the percentage of their budget compliance takes is massively different.
That's the problem with this on paper, right? You can't target just one scenario that pissed you off. Laws are for everybody. You need to find a solution where you define your terms well enough to ensure that a) you get the outcome you want from the big boys, and b) the small fry and the edge cases don't get tossed with the bathwater.
OK, so you're now hosting the post-support servers for Anime CCG Pocket Collection 2045, the briefly popular collectible monster card game.
Where do I make an account? Does my old account work? Did you get all my personal info along with the game code to make that happen? Where are you storing my passwords? How are you linking my account to the first party account I used to buy the game? Who do I send a letter to exercise my access rights according to GDPR? In fact, are you GDPR-compliant? How do you know? How do I know? Who is running moderation on the chat? Are bans issued and enforced? Who is to blame if there are legal ramifications from something related to moderation? If I want to buy a skin for the game's popular Electric Squirrel mascot and my transaction doesn't work, where do I get a refund? If you don't handle MTX in your private server, then who makes the code changes to allow players to just buy everything without MTX or to not allow things to be bought? I mean, the entire game is built on collecting Monster Cards, so if everybody has everything it's gonna get weird. Are you rebalancing the game as part of this process or nah? Hey, there is no seasonal content in the game and it feels broken. Can you re-run some old seasons? Who decides which ones? Do you even have the right content server data for that? Where are you storing my inventory and the data for my Electric Squirrel Home Building feature? Are you paying for the server costs of doing that? What happens to my data if you run out of money the way the original developer did? Hey, I also want to run a server, but the entire thing is supposed to matchmake globally and cross-platform, so who says you're the official host of the game now? Why can't I run it instead?
Dedicated servers are more or less trivial, it's not about having a rack of 5090s. Plenty of games with small servers rent those out or let people self-host them, from Minecraft to Conan.
The problem is running a service.
That's why this is so hard. Multiplayer games revolving around standalone matches are whatever, but modern GaaS stuff is... fundamentally not that. Running the game and making the game are not that different from each other, and running the game gets expensive. As in, making-the-game expensive.
We need a solution so that enterprising communities can at least try to work around all those issues without getting immediately shot down by IP holders, and we need a solution to preserve this type of fleeting, fungible media in some form. I just don't know what that is, and I'm pretty sure it's not a one-size-fits-all thing that maintains the game you paid for running as if the servers hadn't been taken down. I just don't see how you set that up as a general rule that everybody can just comply with.
EDIT: Oh, holy crap, I could have saved myself the fantasy scenario. Turns out Faliszek went ahead and broke down exactly what it took to do this for their game. Because they did do it, despite him being actively hostile to this initiative.
I'm gonna pat myself in the back a bit for having caught a lot of the actual pitfalls he describes, but I still recommend giving it a watch. It's not an angry video, it's super informative and well worth the time.
I'm gonna be straight with you, I'm not gonna want to actually read what you wrote some other time.
Just to correct the record on this more reasonably sized dose of surprisingly overt strawmanning, I don't think it's impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server. I think it's not feasible to require a version of a modern persistent game server infrastructure, from login to matchmaking to data storage, to be converted or provided to be run or financed by end users. Especially not in a way that still allows pre-existing commercial clients to run normally. I mean, for one thing, would you be running one instance or several? Who's handling how to point the client at the right place? Who's responsible for the legal obligations regarding data storage and personal information? How do you handle monetization hooks in games where scarcity is baked into the design?
Whatever, the technicalities have been deliberated and I'm sure your perfect blend of experience and education is very aware of all that, has memorized the PnL of a dozen different live service games, is aware of all the costs and has accounted for all those wrinkles. For all I know it's all in that manifesto, I'm not gonna check. Ultimately if your rant ends up with "maybe F2P live service games SHOULD die" the argument isn't technical and it's not fundamentally about preservation.
I'm sorry to say that I have not and will not be attending that TED Talk. I've already done way more homework for this piece of online drama than anybody should, I'm not reading, dismantling and responding to an essay this fine evening.
At a glance, while I do agree that Faliszek is deliberately ignoring some elements of the argument, but I saw the whole video. The way Scott presents the argument, even acknowledging that he argues that server code may need a dedicated server beyond the capabilities of end users, is just not feasible.
This wall of text seems to just go back to the usual talking points of "in my day servers didn't need matchmaking" and "let F2P die", at which point it's just resetting the argument loop, in that the other side of the argument just goes "but I like F2P games", and we're back to the start.
I disagree. I care about preserving multiplayer games.
DRM servers going down is a thing and I think we can all agree that it should be regulated. In practice it exists in that grey area where Youtube also lives where... yeah, sure, cracking it is not technically legal but nobody is going to enforce that so if you want to play it you bypass the DRM and go on with your day.
But I do care about keeping some version of those multiplayer games. It's a massive loss not seen in media since the early days of television to have a massive cultural artifact just poof itself out of existence at regular intervals. We need a solution to that.
If what this argument is about is just forcing people to keep their activation and authentication servers online or removing DRM then it's been a pointless argument.
It's not what the petition says, not what the advocates for the movement are talking about and not the core of the issue, though. The Crew, which started the entire argument, wasn't a single player game with discontinued DRM, it was talking to centralized servers all along. The Matrix's MMO or Vanilla WoW before that became a commercial product did not fit the bill here, and yet were the things we all think about when we think about this issue.
The reason this is a perfect shitstorm of online grief is that you're here really wishing this is some Star Wars scenario where your side is the Rebel Alliance and on the other side there's a bunch of developers going "That's not how the Force works!".
You can't boil down a complex technical and legal issue to "it's consumer vs corporation" and hope that magically makes servers portable or implementation feasible. And you can't lump people who know what they're talking about and aren't part of a particularly large corporation with your good guys vs bad guys fantasy just because they disagree with you on the issues.
I don't disagree. My caveat would be that this can't be a blank check to just pull the plug at will. There are different types of server dependencies and different types of remedies here.
I would consider a time-gated mandatory refund for software that stops working within a certain term. That seems like a significant disincentive for the specific type of thing we're talking about. I'd consider carving exceptions in EU regulation for modding and community server replacements of discontinued software. I'd consider obligations to remove certain server checks (e.g. DRM-only or activation checks) on discontinued software and so on.
You lose some face when you go online with delusions of large GaaS releases suddenly generating some magical portable package that runs on end user hardware, but that doesn't mean there isn't an issue or available solutions. I'm concerned that some of the petty drama is poisoning the well and nobody will take this seriously in a long time because of it, because I do think action is needed and is urgent.
Which corpos? These guys are both indies at the moment.
You keep wanting this to be a "us versus them" of big companies vs users and that's not the conversation that's happening here.
But hey, by all means I would love to have Faliszek act as a Valve corporate representative and have the irrational side-taking on the Internet argue itself into a singularity.
Of the two guys in question one seems to be a tiny indie dev making single player games. The other is a hugely established figure working on a multiplayer game, but I'm going to say Faliszek's career isn't particularly contingent on this argument, considering that he's a narrative director, first and foremost.
See, this is kind of the problem we're having. You guys are just... saying stuff.
I don't agree with the ultimate takeaway of either of these guys on this issue, fundamentally, but if you're going to stand here and say that they are arguing against this because they are making money out of some server-disconnection racket then you're going to make me stand here and call bullshit because it just doesn't follow.
And so the drama spiral goes deeper and the internet becomes a little crappier.
Because local servers and plugs aren't the same thing.
I think this whole conversation is mixing two types of disagreements and is going to end poorly for that reason.
One disagreement is technical: can developers provide communities with a safe, functional iteration of their servers to deploy freely in such a way that discontinued games continue to operate?
The answer is "probably not". The devs speaking out aren't wrong about this. This requires rebuilding the entire concept of server architecture for games and centralized servers. Not only are older games probably unsalvageable for that process, but any game that is buying online services would be priced out and you'd end up with only the largest publishers being able to afford basic features like, say, matchmaking.
The other is of design philosophy: is it okay for live service games to exist in their current form, where they run for a bit of time and then, at the sole discretion of the IP owners, they go away with no recourse to ever run them again in any form, ever. Are we cool with that?
I am not. Some of these devs seem to be. I mean, they'd love if there was an alternative, but if the choice is between getting to have MMOs and quirky massive shooters they would rather keep the space deregulated and creatively available than restrict it.
The first one isn't much of a matter of opinion, but there are intermediate steps that can be taken. But because a bunch of people are disagreeing on the second issue with people who a) know a lot more than they do about the first disagreement, and b) aren't particularly inclined to meet them halfway on the second, we end up with this bit of entrenched online drama where ignorance, activism and disagreement is quickly becoming toxic.
I don't have an answer for this, other than maybe... please stop? That'd be nice.
I think the discussion about preservation of live games and consumer rights in server-based games needs to be had. But it needs to be mature and educated. The more the collapse of this petition turns into shitty, petty arguments full of disingenuous misrepresentations and misinformation (on both sides) the more inclined I am to say let it all die and maybe try again with a better understanding of what's being discussed, from scratch.