> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only
that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.
seems like 'video games europe' is gearing up to lobby/influence the lawmakers to distort this initiative.
the bare minimum would be to ban these kind of things from describing themselves as products instead of a service in their marketing.
no "Buy" or "Purchase", instead "Rent" or "Lease" possibly with a stated minimum guaranteed time online / expiration date.
EDIT: reminder, if you're from the EU and over the age of 18 it's still a good idea to sign the petition even though it passed the threshold since there could be invalid signatures (bots, underage people, etc ...) if the valid signatures are below the threshold after the verification is done this petition will get dropped.
The game that kicked this particular petition off was The Crew, a game that you could happily play single player which Ubisoft made always online purely for DRM reasons its a prime example of the abuse of power that legislators should be doing something ab0out.
This isn't exactly an abuse of power - you can just not buy it. UbiSoft has transformed itself into a terrible, bloated company and it probably die soon, but the better way to do this is to have industry standards similar to PEGI that describe the game's future support, not to hit them with EU-specific regulations.
>> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only
> that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.
I think the criticism isn't centered around single player games at all, but rather MMORPGs and the likes.
> that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.
That’s asking developers to make different games. That’s not the same thing as “stop shitting down games like the crew”
> 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.
No? How would the "rights holders" be in any way liable for someone posting illegal content on a community-hosted server after a game has gone end-of-life?
Also, community servers not having to adhere to the publisher's standards of what community content is safe vs unsafe is clearly a positive in my humble opinion.
Because parents and the general public won't see that it's Bob's private server for $game. They see $game_name by $developer/publisher.
Mojang (creators of Minecraft ) is an unfortunate good case study for this. It's sale to Microsoft is in part down to not being able to balance freedom for server owners and the PR issues caused by people scamming others, in this case children, while obscuring it under the Minecraft brand.
I don't agree that we should be coerced into being in the kid safe padded play area, but I ain't blind enough to not see why we are.
But the sale to Microsoft resulted in more scamming. In fact, the Xbox version of the game has in game currency added that requires dollars. And Microsoft allows servers free reign to scam children into spending that currency and buying more.
> It's sale to Microsoft is in part down to not being able to balance freedom for server owners and the PR issues caused by people scamming others, in this case children, while obscuring it under the Minecraft brand.
Source? This is the first time I’ve heard this claim.
Don't you know? If I cmd+S the HN front-end and throw my own backend behind it, host my own instance, and post something illegal on it, then YC is liable!
Obviously they're not, but hey, just joining them in making things up. Protect the children!!
I work in games and in my last workplace I was CTO of a racing simulation; that means I was working with brands that were not only my own in a pretty big way.
The stipulations that were put on us was pretty strong. For example (and it’s not just these guys), Mercedes will not permit you to allow the logo to fall off; If you have a damage model in the game this is annoying.
Some won’t allow the car to get dirty, or to deform in a realistic way because it harms a copyright (did you know that the front lights of cars are part of their brand and trademark in most cases).
I’m using a pretty obvious example, that by selling a product that contains these other brands, we are beholden to not represent them in a way they don’t like; it’s part of the transaction for having it.
I can already hear people thinking: but, most games don’t have any third party intellectual property. But that’s less true than you think, even fantasy games will inevitably wind up copying something from our world that is not completely generic. The most annoying ones are the little background things; Rockstar for example will almost assuredly have issues with using the shapes of famous buildings and licensing issues if they make their radio stations too easy to pirate.
It’s a quagmire. Honestly, I’m not even sure why we bother making anything, there seems to always be some random popping their head up seeking another slice.
Video games publishers don't want you to play the same game for too long without spending more money. They don't want to make games like Terraria where you have a $10 game you can play for a thousand hours. They'd much rather you buy multiple $60+ games, plus expansions, "micro"-transactions and subscriptions.
They don't want games that last forever, they want to pressure you into constantly buying the next big thing.
That kind of reasoning makes sense if you have a single publisher controlling the entire market and they don't want to undercut their own business. But that's obviously not the case. There are plenty of publishers that want to publish games like Terraria, especially if they go on to sell more than 60 million copies.
I think the market is actually much more segmented than your comment implies. There's publishers who absolutely dominate certain niches, especially sporting games, and the only realistic competition they have are themselves.
It's worth keeping in mind that the "market" for a particular player can actually be incredibly small depending on their interests. In the most extreme example, a player might be a fan specifically of a single IP or series of games. Call of duty is one good example because there really are a lot of people who are like this. Video game IPs are a government granted monopoly on a small scale, and the word monopoly is not there for no reason, there is only one place to get CoD if you are a fan of CoD. Predictably, these companies follow the OA's suggested strategy very closely!
I’m not sure “sellers would love to raise prices and have people keep buying” is the indictment that you think it is. Terraria and Modern Warfare, which is monetized the way you describe, are such different products…
BG3 has extensive modding support to the point where people released mods that turn it from a "classical" rpg to a roguelike.
BG3 has public lobbies, private lobbies, and *all* games are hosted locally on the hoster's computer, can be played through LAN without internet. It also has split screen coop.
Nothing you said about BG3 has an ounce of truth to it, and it is one of the most consumer friendly games in a sea of anticonsumer garbage. Are you trying to discredit Larian for some reason?
By playable do you just mean new content? It will be perfectly playable in 10 years just like all the other classic CRPGs. It would be amazing if modding in content was easy like NWN, if that’s what you mean, because it obviously isn’t. It does seem like such a waste. I’m in a second replay and it’s enjoyable but just so long and will become more repetitive. There are certain sections in Act I that I can’t see myself enjoying a third time at all. Some smaller modules would be amazing. I think the closest thing to that will be Solasta II in the modern era.
Why would you want to spend 1000s of hours in a game? That must be eradicated with fire. Time is your most precious resource... why waste it on one game? Games need to be shorter, maybe 20 hrs or so for high budget single player games.
I detest this line of thinking. There are plenty of games that are playable for this length of time. I've played hundreds of hours of Factorio, and I am not even close to exhausting the experience. Terraria was a fine example, too.
This is literally every industry now. Shall we "regulate" all industries to be like this, then? Is that achievable?
Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point? "That's not what this is about. Ok, where are we heading then?
A more accurate analogy would be: you bought a physical DVD and DVD player, but now the film studio is preventing you from playing the DVD that you own on the hardware you own. In which case yes, we should regulate. Paying for access to a constantly changing library is not the same as paying to permanently own a single product.
Paying for a subscription is explicitly not what this is about. No one is suggesting this for MMOs. Just that it be clear that it is a subscription, that you're not actually buying the game. What a one-time fee for an MMO? Give it an expiry date. You can keep pushing the expiry date, but you have to promise support up to at least that date.
> Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point?
Actually not Netflix as they just offer a monthly subscription and not individual sales, but _YES_ by all means if I "purchase" (not rent!) a book or movie on Amazon (or anyone else), I'd like that, thank you.
It’s pretty easy to solve static content like ebooks and video games; just legislate that your license is transferrable between services and media. Then I can legally torrent a game that is unsupported.
Content subscriptions like Netflix are different because you are not paying face value for one title. The better analogy here would be the game streaming services like XBox online. It’s clear you are not doing anything like “buying a game”, it’s the whole point of the business model. As you say, it would be a lot harder to make these laws apply there (but I bet that wouldn’t stop the EU from trying).
I think any legislation on this subject would have to reckon with the second-order effects; on the margin you’d be adding pressure for publishers to move to pure subscription services, if these laws don’t apply in those cases.
The FTC is currently suing John Deere over this kind of thing.
Also, Netflix is a weird comparison here. That seems like it should be an online-only service, they're not selling the actual movies to you. It's one of the situations where the model actually makes sense, unlike single-player video games.
> Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point?
No. However, you should be able to make a copy using your own computer (onto the computer or onto an external media such as a DVD) and then you can play the movies that you have copied on your own computer (not necessarily the one used for Netflix) or DVD player. This should be possible without needing to use their software, and it does not mean that their software or their service should need to offer it as an option; it is done on your side. (They can refuse to serve the movie to you faster than the actual duration of the movie if they want to do, though, therefore making it take as much time to copy as it does to watch it normally.)
(However, I am generally opposed to copyright anyways.)
If Netflix decides to end their service and make every TV show and movie they have permanently unavailable, even through all other legal businesses, then yeah, it would be nice of them to give that stuff away.
I mean, what you describe sounds pretty good. It sounds like you think it's not feasible for some reason (other than political will). Do you want to elaborate on that?
Having worked there in the past, Ubisoft is awful. When I was there previously there was an aggressive push for UPlay (now Ubisoft Connect) integration into all products. Then there were the bullshots for promos/E3/etc. There were often clashes with leadership who would fight against creativity / novel ideas in favour of cookie-cutter mechanics that would not add anything to the experience - certainly there was a mentality of, let's just copy what was recently successful.
I'm blown away that series like AC, FarCry are still big sellers. These games are vapid and designed to be a time sink.
I'll never buy an Ubisoft game again. Instant dealbreaker to see that studio on the Steam store page; I've deleted a $3 sale game from my cart when I realized that it was Ubisoft. No game is worth giving money to a company that hates its customers so much.
> I'm blown away that series like AC, FarCry are still big sellers. These games are vapid and designed to be a time sink.
They are like junk food. Everyone has the junk food that they enjoy. FarCry is certainly the McDonald's of games. I enjoy some junk food once in a while, problems arise if I make it my staple diet.
For Steam users, a reminder that you can go to a publisher's page and "Ignore" that publisher. The option is a little bit hidden, it's in the settings cog on the right-hand side of the page. It'll stop steam from recommending their games to you, and when one does show up, like in the Top Sellers list, it'll have a message on it saying that it's by a publisher that you ignored.
I have Ubisoft, EA, and Sony marked as such, personally.
> 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.
How? Can't wait to hear them substantiating this tidbit, because from a regular enterprise operations viewpoint this does NOT pass the smell test.
When I found out that Booking[.]com of all companies is moving major traffic, I started to look at what companies are even buying or selling anymore. I clearly had no idea.
In the following paper, CPs refer to content providers, as defined in the paper.
> Studying the Evolution of Content Providers in IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Cores
> Esteban Carisimo, Carlos Selmo, J. Ignacio Alvarez-Hamelin, Amogh Dhamdhere
[I have edited out some hyphens that made this really hard to read but were helpful due to the layout of the original document as typeset. If that bothers you, I'm sorry in advance. Links are included above.]
> Our goal is to investigate what role CPs now play in
the Internet ecosystem, and in particular, if CPs are now a part of the “core” of the Internet. Specifically, we motivate this work with the following questions: How can we identify if a CP does or does not belong to the core of the Internet? If the core of the network does indeed include CPs, who are they?As the overall adoption of IPv6 has been slow, do we notice that delay on IPv4 and IPv6 core evolution? As the AS ecosystem has shown striking differences according to geographical regions [15], do we also see geographical differences in the role of CPs and their presence in the “core” of regional Internet structures? Finally, as more CPs deploy their private CDNs, can we detect “up and coming” CDNs that are not currently in the core of the network but are likely to be in the future?
> We use the concept of k-cores to analyze the structure of the IPv4 AS-level internetwork over the last two decades. We first focus on seven large CPs, and confirm that they are all currently in the core of the Internet. We then dig deeper into the evolution of these large players to correlate observed topological characteristics with documented business practices which can explain when and why these networks entered the core. Next, we repeat the methodology but using IPv6 dataset to compare and contrast the evolution of CPs in both networks. Based on results, we investigate commercial and technical reasons why CPs started to roll out IPv6 connectivity.
> We then take a broader view, characterizing the set of ASes in the core of the IPv4 Internet in terms of business type and geography. Our analysis reveals that an increasing number of CPs are now in the core of the Internet. Finally, we demonstrate that the k-core analysis has the potential to reveal the rise of “up and coming” CPs. To encourage reproducibility of our results, we make our datasets available via an interactive query system at https://cnet.fi.uba.ar/TMA2018/
[…]
> Finally, we study the core evolution of nine other remarkable CPs that belong to the TOPcore but were not included in the Big Seven. Seven of the nine selected ASes are the remaining ASes in Bottger et al.’s [47] TOP15 list, except Hurricane Electric (AS6939) which we do not consider as a CP since it is labeled as Transit/Access in CAIDA’s AS classification [80]. These seven ASes are OVH (AS16276), LimeLight (AS22822), Microsoft (AS8075), Twitter (AS13414), Twitch (AS46489), CloudFlare (AS13335) and EdgeCast (AS15133). The other two ASes are Booking.com (AS43996) and Spotify (AS8403). Interestingly, Booking.com or Spotify are not normally considered among the top CPs, however, they are in both TOPcores.
What else would these companies have to gain by making their games online only? Perhaps game developers even have contractual obligations to uphold, or incintives to include third party network interactions. The presence of Twitch, Cloudflare, and Microsoft on this list are interesting, because Microsoft drives a lot of threat intel and also makes a popular OS among gamers. If you want to reduce network traffic and reduce your reliance on third parties and internet access, migrating from Windows and using Proton on Linux would probably be a step in the right direction for many games that you would want to play single player.
Imagine you're an indie game studio developing an MMORPG, both your server and client is likely under constant development and you may only have one or two actual production servers running your server code.
Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.[1] While adding documentation, support for different systems, while ensuring safety as the server can now be reverse engineered and while possibly being liable to abuse created through those servers. Even though your game (and its clients) aren't tailored to working on any server other than the official one anyway.
At least that's my understanding of the issue.
This proposal is obviously aimed at big publishers like EA and Ubisoft, but it hurts small developers. I argue we should just stop playing EA and Ubisoft games, who are the only ones who continue to pull this crap.
[1]: As TheFreim pointed out, this isn't necessarily required. But the server program has to be released when the official servers are shut down. Which means this possibility has to be prepared for throughout development.
> Imagine you're an indie game studio developing an MMORPG
To my understanding, this wouldn't affect MMORPGs where you're explicitly buying X months of access (so long as you do get the access you paid for, or a refund if it's shut down early) which is how most I'm aware of work.
> Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.[1] While adding documentation, support for different systems,
The proposal requires leaving the game in a reasonably playable state, but not any specific actions like these. In fact the FAQ specifically says "we're not demanding all internal code and documentation".
> while ensuring safety as the server can now be reverse engineered and while possibly being liable to abuse created through those servers
I don't see why the company would be liable for this. Moderation of the private servers would be up to those running the private servers. If there is something to this effect in EU law that I'm unaware of, it seems like it'd already be placing undue burden on games that do currently (or want to) release their server software and that this initiative would be a good opportunity to exempt them from that liability.
> but it hurts small developers
If anything I'd speculate small developers are likely to have less issue releasing server software/code, and more likely to have a game this doesn't even apply to in the first place, giving them an edge over larger publishers.
But even if it were a significant burden, I feel it's really just providing what was already purchased. At the extreme, do you think it'd be okay to take $70 from someone for a singleplayer game, then shut down authentication servers (rendering it unplayable) a few minutes later?
> Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.
This is not accurate. From the FAQ:
> Q: Won't this consumer action result in the end of "live service" games?
> A: No, the market demand and profitability of these games means the video games industry has an ongoing interest in selling these. Since our proposals do not interfere with existing business models, these types of games can remain just as profitable, ensuring their survival. The only difference is future ones will need to be designed with an "end of life" build once support finally ends.
> But the server program has to be released when the official servers are shut down. Which means this possibility has to be prepared for throughout development.
... which is why it doesn't pass my smell test.
Say you're working on either a monolithic game server codebase, or just a microservice that's a part of a larger service mesh fulfilling that role. Are you writing any tests? You probably (hopefully) do. So where's that code gonna run the first time before it's even pushed up to version control? Locally. So some extents of it definitely have to run locally, or if you have good test coverage, all of it.
But okay, let's go a layer further. Say you're trying to go into production with this. As the saying goes, everyone has a production environment, but the lucky folks "even" have others. This sarcastically implies that you need to be able to deploy your solution into multiple environments. And you don't want to be doing this manually, because then e.g. you have no CI/CD, and thus no automated testing on code push. That's not even considering multi-geo stuff, because for multiplayer games I imagine latency matters, so you really want to deploy either to the edge or close to it, and will definitely want to be all around the world, at least in a few key places.
So you can test locally, and can deploy automatically. Tell me, what is the hold up then? It would take me approximately one entire minute to give you the binaries for anything I ever touch, because if I couldn't do that, the automation wouldn't be able to do so either. At some point, the bullshit has to end, and that's at operations. Not much docs to write either: if your stuff does anything super super custom, you're doing something very wrong. And respectfully, if the aforementioned do not apply to you, you shouldn't be operating any online service at scale in production for anyone in 2025.
Really the only technical wrenches you can throw into this that I can think of are licensing and dependencies. Neither of these are reasonable spots to be in from an economical or a technical standpoint. Like what, you can't mock other services? How are you testing your stuff then? Can't change suppliers / providers? How is that reasonable from a business agility standpoint?
So clearly if there is a salient technical rationale for this, it's going to have to be a very sharp departure from anything I've ever experienced in non-gaming enterprise, or my common sense.
Regarding all the other points (and this will read dismissive because I've already rambled on way too long and I'm trying to keep it short, I genuinely don't mean it like that):
- if you're writing an MMORPG as a small up-and-coming indie, you're definitely going bankrupt
- if you're writing an MMORPG, I'm pretty sure you'll have more than just one or two servers running, or there's nothing massive about that multiplayer online role playing game after all
- it does not require you to continually release anything
- it does not request you to release documentation (what is there to "document" btw? I'm certainly not imagining too much)
- it does not request you to support different systems
- it does not request you to release anything before EOS, thus, security concerns for the official client are null and void - and even if it wasn't (e.g. sequels), security by obscurity is not a reasonable security story anyways
- the dangerous parts of the reverse engineering efforts still routinely happen without access to server binaries anyways (see all COD games and their players getting hacked to pieces right as we type away)
- possibly liable is not liable, and I trust you're not a lawyer, just like I'm not
- it's just a client-server setup like any other - remember, other environments must be possible to connect to as well, if nothing else then for testing
All of this is completely ignoring how we had dedicated servers and competition events with private setups since forever.
I legitimately cannot imagine that you can cock up an online service architecture and codebase bad enough, that a team of devs and devops/SREs/ops, or even just a few of those dudes, couldn't get something mostly operational out the door in a few day(!) hackathon at most. Even without planning for all this. And how this would skyrocket the costs especially mystifies me. Surely asset development, staffing, operational costs and marketing are the cost drivers here? How would you surpass ALL or even ANY of that? Just doesn't make sense!
In some ways I think even this statement by the trade association is already a win - the initiative forced them to explicitly address topics such as private servers, which they'd rather not talk about at all. Their statement also made it easy to ask counter questions regarding offline single-player or actual player compensation on shutdown. (I love the "we understand it can be disappointing, but we give players fair notice" statement, as if players didn't pay money for this)
I don't expect a lot of support from EU politicians for the initiative, as the current Parliament is even more conservative and corporate-friendly than usual. But well, hope dies last, and at least the will of the public seems to be there. (And also the appearance of being a tech regulator has become more popular in Brussels)
I don't buy these arguments. If game developers don't want to sell games that way then don't. Sell subscriptions instead. Like instead of $60 for a game, $60 one-time fee for a two-year subscription, which afterwards renews automatically in 3 months intervals at no cost until further notice. Same applies to all paid in-game content.
That way the developers can continue offering both games and subscriptions where each type makes most sense. And everybody knows what they are signing up for. People who buy a game get a game which they can play indefinitely. People who buy a subscription know the earliest possible end date and everything beyond that is just bonus.
I don't think this would have any significant impact on the industry.
Publishers would just advertise their games as coming with a 2-year subscription, or whatever. People would have the same expectations as now: the game will be supported for a couple of years, and it will be supported much longer if there's an obvious way that is profitable to the developer.
No publisher would unilaterally want to start advertising games as subscriptions, but if everyone was forced to do it, nothing changes. Perhaps an extra layer of clicking through for the user, like when we mandated all websites must have annoying cookie popups.
Most games won't need it. When every other offline game says "buy" but the games as a service one has to say "rent" for the same price, consumers will notice I think.
I dont think this is true. If publishers advertized 2 year license, some people would decide to not buy the license. The exact reason why they insist on calling it "buying".
If that premise was true, why would misleading advertisement be the norm right now? Why bother?
Changing it to a subscription WOULD change perception. Most people don't understand the current status quo. When they do know, it would create a market pressure for real game ownership.
The publishers that already apply the model can be forced. And some might decide to do another model instead of doing this model because it affects user’s view. This is the whole point.
Correct. The backends to these online games isn’t complicated, but it is protected. They want the ability to resell the entire service to another game studio to run.
This has happened a lot in the past. EverQuest, Pirates, Lots of mmos have changed studios and with that, the backend services needed to run them.
Now, that said, there are a few countries in the EU that you could reverse engineer the server and it’s totally legal. Some of the best fun I’ve had were on private WoW or Lineage 2 servers.
I think very few people (outside of the industry - important caveat) are opposed to the stated goals of the initiative:
> This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union [...] to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.
The concern that I have is that I have no idea what the actual text of the law is going to be.
You can look at laws like the DMCA, that had a reasonable purpose (made adjustments to the copyright system for the age of the internet) and a royally screwed up implementation that basically everyone can find a problem with.
It's easy to imagine that the laws that pass could be (1) completely neutered by corruption in the EU leading to regulatory capture (2) far too strong and written in a way that imposes unfair burdens on developers (which include indie devs too) or (3) bad just because of technical incompetence of the authors.
I know that there's not much I can do about those things, but that may explain the emotional reactions of some people like e.g. PirateSoftware - nobody actually knows what the resulting law will be like, and everyone familiar with the legislative system knows how bad the outputs can be.
> to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.
Yeah, I like the general goal, but I worry about the corner cases; is an MMO “functional/playable” if you just release a localhost server? Are we forcing indie shops to pay for servers indefinitely now? Great way to ensure no more indie MMOs get built if that ends up being the text interpretation.
And, as you say, the question you should always be asking about EU legislation - how does this affect the small/medium shops’ competitiveness? Counterintuitively, compliance can hit the small guys relatively harder and entrench the big guys.
Not to say that we shouldn’t try to fix the problem. But agree that skepticism about EU regulations has some historical merit.
> is an MMO “functional/playable” if you just release a localhost server? Are we forcing indie shops to pay for servers indefinitely now?
The man behind Stop Killing Games has made it perfectly clear that they do not want to force game developers to continue operating servers. Rather, as you suggest, releasing server binaries would be acceptable. Although a mere "localhost" server would likely not be sufficient, because (if I interpret your suggestion correctly) it takes away the multiplayer funtionality of the game. I think it would be reasonable to require developers to release online multiplayer capable server binaries.
Ross addresses these things in his videos on the initiative. For one, the game doesn't have to be 100% functional, it just has to do a bare minimum.
They might not even need to release server binaries, even. I would think releasing documentation on how the network commication runs, and adding a box to enter a server IP into the client at EOL would be sufficient. The community, if enough people care, would then be empowered to write their own server implementation without needing the reverse engineering step.
> compliance can hit the small guys relatively harder and entrench the big guys
This is almost always the case, actually. Regulation and compliance are taxes on the productivity of an organization. And the "shape" of the tax is mostly flat - the burden is sublinear in the size of the organization, so the relative effects on smaller companies are bigger. And smaller companies already have significantly less available resources, and especially less legal resources (no lawyers on retainer), to handle it.
Obviously that doesn't mean that regulation shouldn't be passed, just that you have to write it very, very carefully - think embedded systems rather than web frontend - minimizing complexity and aggressively red-teaming it for loopholes and edge-cases.
This vague handwringing isn't any better. None of us know what the law will end up turning into. But we shouldn't let that stop this being addressed properly in our political institutions. That's what they're there for.
Also, bringing up the DMCA is sort of rich, since it was always just a vehicle for the biggest content companies in publishing, film, television, music and software to protect their property online.
Now we have something that was brought into being by consumers and may finally do something to curb anti-consumer behaviour by companies like this, and you're against it because you have no idea what it'll look like. I just can't, man. What's even the point of legislation if we have to be afraid it'll all be corrupted? Why even have political institutions at all at that point?
And if the end result of this legislation is that videogames in EU aren't licensed or sold but are instead all streamed and you are instead just buying access to stream a game, then what?
TO me it's just amazing how the advocates for SKG ignore any possibility that it could make things much worse that they already.
> imposes unfair burdens on developers (which include indie devs too)
Any such law should include a carve-out so that indie devs and small startups aren't impacted because just the need maintain compliance paperwork can be a burden. Carve out thresholds can be based on a combination of product revenue and units sold. Similar carve outs should generally be part of a lot of government regulations because startup entrepreneurship is so key to job growth, innovation and ensuring more choice for consumers. The best way to keep huge companies honest is making them keep earning their success by enabling smaller, hungrier new competitors laser focused on better serving customer needs.
That said, I do generally agree with your broader point that how regulations are written and enforced matters a lot. Too many start with good intentions but end up being sidestepped, subverted or triggering unintended consequences. If a "Stop Killing Games" regulation is drafted I think it should be narrowly targeted and conceived with the understanding that both the tech and business models will continue rapidly evolving and the market will quickly adapt to sidestep or subvert whatever new rules are put in place. That will likely mean that, realistically, an effective regulation probably shouldn't be as expansive or all-encompassing as we might be imagining from our armchairs.
I'd be happy if the focus was simply on getting large game companies to clearly commit up front what their commitments are over time by listing how long will each aspect of the game will continue to work by type (ie single-player offline, multiplayer self-hosted, multiplayer cloud, feature updates, security updates). Then company management and investors will know to set aside funds to cover server fees for that time period after the final sale. This isn't new or burdensome. Large companies already have accounting practices to accrue future liabilities on their books. When they sell future enterprise services to other companies there's a contract with financial reserves and revenue recognition. Selling a game to consumers with the expectation of future online delivered services should have a similarly spelled out commitment and appropriate financial reserves.
In reality, this may mean some companies choose minimum commitments that we'd all feel are far too short but as long as the consumers know up front what the commitment actually is, the free market can determine over time what costs consumers are willing to pay for which commitments. I expect some companies will try to minimize their financial commitment by making games which could obviously have offline single-player aspects always require online for everything or be subscription-only and only commit to offer the subscription for 1 month after purchase. Let them try and see how the market reacts. Government regulation isn't some magic wand we can wave to just force companies to "do the right thing" or, more specifically, make the products we want and sell them to us on the terms we'd prefer. Companies will either pass the increased costs on to consumers or not go into that business at all. Realistic regulation should focus first on two things: 1) Ensuring a level-playing field for fierce competition and, 2) clear up front disclosure of what the deal is.
They claim to protect from illegal content and unsafe communities, but those sound like desperate grasps at straws that are easily disproven. They also misrepresent the basic demands of the petition, as online only games are still allowed.
This goes beyond games and calls for regulation of anything sold as a product, but working more like a subscription service. Similar issues also affect an increasing number of appliances that rely on apps and connect through manufacturer-hosted services. If the manufacturer goes out of business or shuts down a service, fully working devices can lose some or all of their features. Manufacturers should be required to open up their devices and provide a documented local API, if for no other reason, then to reduce the huge amount of electronic waste created by making devices artificially obsolete.
I think that approaching the problem from the perspective of a physical product, like a smart lightbulb that doesn't work anymore because the manufacturer shut down its servers, would be easier for non-technical people to understand and would likely have a better chance of success.
Of course it does. The whole idea of "Stop Killing Games" is that developers should not be able to summarily kill off a game that people have invested time and money into, just because it's not making them enough money going forward.
Developers should absolutely not have that choice. It's fine if you want to run a live service game where the optimal experience happens during active support. However, unless you as a dev are willing to refund every single purchaser of the game, in full, when you discontinue a game, then you are stealing from purchasers. Moreover, even if you are willing to give a full refund to all players, it's really shitty to just rip an experience away from people, never to be experienced again (whether in a watered-down or limited form, or not).
It's the same reason I don't agree with perpetual copyright, nor a copyright owner's right to suppress a work's availability. In almost all jurisdictions, copyright is intended to be a limited time right, with the rights eventually entering the public domain. If people can't access the work when it would become public domain, then that work is effectively stolen from the public in a way that mere non-commercial copyright infringement can never be theft.
Also, part of the issue is the death of private servers. Game publishers have chosen to revert to centralized servers, rather than allowing private servers. Thus they have also taken on the additional cost of running those servers. Older games can be easily played on private servers to this day, as the community of any moderately popular game will almost always step up to provide the service. Even games you might not expect would be that popular or games that never had private servers - for example, Rock Band 3 only ever supported connecting to Harmonix servers in an official capacity. This support is also discontinued (they still operate the Rock Central servers, but only for Rock Band 4). Yet right now, thanks to reverse engineering, there is a fan-operated server that you can connect to with a slightly modified game. You can even download the fan-created server software (written in Go) and stand up your own server for your friends or for whatever other reason (maybe you want to run a small tournament and use a private GoCentral server to record statistics and have a private leaderboard).
> Game publishers have chosen to revert to centralized servers, rather than allowing private servers. Thus they have also taken on the additional cost of running those servers.
I fail to see the principal difference between a "centralized" and a "private" server here. Just publish the code for running the "centralized" server, as you would do for the private server, and add a possibility to configure which server to connect to in the game?
I could see this becoming an issue when the server is hardwired to require some publisher SSO login, but given how everyone + their dog uses OIDC nowadays, a requirement to make authentication interoperable is only a very mild restriction.
It's the publishers forcing their hand, to be fair. I don't think any developer who worked for years on a game is thrilled about it not being playable in the future.
I bought Minecraft from Mojang, years later I am forced to setup a Microsoft account to play the game, or risk downloading a cracked version. They did not offer a refund. Minecraft is a video game where you need to login even if you do not play online. (maybe things changed , I think this MS account thing was a few years back, it worked for my account but I read of people having big issues because some MS assholes ahd to force the Java edition players to use an MS account)
I was forced to not only setup a Microsoft account, but hand over my phone number - after creating an account without a phone number and transferring my Minecraft license over, they immediately locked my account.
Minecraft is at least reasonably easy to play offline, the account mostly only stores your skins. That said, it may require a third-party launcher now.
Its not always obvious when you buy them which games will still be around a few years later.
Some singleplayer titles from just a few years ago are no longer playable. (Hello, Ubisoft). Meanwhile there are MMOs like guild wars 1, released 20 years ago, still playable today.
Right, exactly. Game companies don't advertise when you buy a game that its single-player features will only work as long as the servers stay up. I'm sure they don't want to. But if players aren't made aware of that fact then it's hard for them to make informed purchasing decisions.
Almost every time I have spent more than $35 on a game in the past year I have wound up regretting it. It seems as though the quality of games typically increases til that point (exceptions exist, Terraria) and then declines sharply (again, exceptions exist). It has turned out to be a useful signal to be way more careful about a purchase for me.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was such a breath of fresh air in this regard. If you just want a reasonably priced, good game with no shady stuff but still that AA (arguably AAA) experience I can’t recommend it enough.
And people are. Games sales are slumping in response to a decade of predatory dark patterns and simply not giving the audience what they're asking for.
Just keeping the games playable is a singular issue and in the noise. It's a good issue to single out for regulation.
Everywhere, license agreements that can be changed by the company at any time, pretty much for every game developer that can afford a lawyer to write up said license agreement. They could all start doing shady stuff at any time. Might still leave thousands of games, but they add up to a drop in the bucket of the overall market.
There's fewer games to vote on every year, as conglomerates like Microsoft out vote your wallet a billion times over every time they buy a game studio to embrace, extend and then extinguish.
If looking at AAA publishers, maybe. The indie game scene continues to pump out games, some good, some bad, at half or less of cost of the AAA games. They won't be as polished, but many still deliver an exceptional experience.
there are more games than ever, it's just that microsoft, ubisoft, etc are spending billions on actual psychologists to ensure the populace remains apathetic towards them.
I don't care how smart you are, how much self control you have, whatever, in the face of billions of dollars, voting with your wallet does not stand a chance. The house always wins.
Anyone saying "vote with your wallet" is implicitly saying billionaires deserve more say in the world than you do since they have so much more in their wallet.
Your claim that there has been "decades of voting with our wallets" is laughable. Nobody I know who plays games decides to buy them or not based on ideological reasons - they just buy the things that are popular or that their friends play. There's extremely little engagement on these issues.
I did some looking into this a few days ago, and I can understand the sentiment. I can't understand the proposed implementation. There is a lack of technical discourse and heavy criticism of any negative opinion. I don't want to defend big publishers, I have not bought a new AAA game in many years. I think they are user hostile.
Stop Killing Games is just way too broad. Remove online DRM checks from my single player game? Sure, I have been on board with that for a very long time. Make sure my MMO stays playable forever? You're asking for a miracle. You as a consumer need to be informed about what you're paying for. It's your job.
"Just release the server's source / binary" is a pipe-dream and I figured more people here would understand this. Modern software is super complex, distributed, entangled with external services and dependencies. Often it's not just isolated, should you be forced to release the backend serving all of your (still active) games? Has anyone considered the security implications? Should you be forced to use only libraries that you can distribute? Can you see how this may stifle creativity?
"Just state when the game will go offline" is impossible. The game will go offline when it can't be responsibly funded it anymore. Whether that's 2 or 10 years from now. If a company has to declare when your game service will expire, expect most online games to transition to a subscription model going forward. If the consumer won't have that, expect less of them to exist. It's going to backfire spectacularly. A better idea would be to mandate a minimum support window, and refunds within that window.
What constitutes a "playable state"? Is the anti-cheat in an online FPS integral to playability? Many would argue so, I'll let you think about that one. This movement is riddled with such ambiguities.
I believe if you have a financial incentive not to release source / binaries then that’s a good financial incentive to keep the servers up. If such a mandate doesn’t result in actually releasing anything but instead properly incentivizes the right behavior, I’d still say the movement had won.
> 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.
I find it really frustrating how they phrase things because there is so much BS in almost one sentence. The entire point of having a private server is so that they are no longer in control of these things.
Moreover if I am running a private server:
- It isn't their responsibility to secure players data.
- it isn't their responsibility to remove illegal content.
- it isn't their responsibility to remove "unsafe" (whatever that means) community content.
So how could they be 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.
This is pretty much disingenuous argument that "PirateSoftware" was pushing. They are pretending that a single player mode would need to be created. This isn't what is being requested.
> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only
No problem. Per "Stop Killing Games" initiative, you will only have to provide means for the users to still be able to play those games after you decide to pull the plug on it.
You can, for example, release the server code so that players can keep playing the game somehow, if they so desire. No need to keep supporting your online rent-seeking scheme ad-eternum after it outlived its usefulness.
We need to be frank about what those developers really want though. They want to be able to take away games they previously sold so that players move on to their shiny new online rent-seeking scheme. Allowing people to actually own the games they bought is bad for business.
If game publishers could in clear writing at time of purchase commit to a set number of years that game will be live then I think that is a good start. For example when the next live service game is released and you go to purchase it there is a clear warning that the publisher has only guaranteed the game to be live for 2 years. Personally that would prevent me from buying the game, but perhaps not others.
The idea that a publisher can sell a live service game and shut it down in 1 month with no legal repercussions is ridiculous to me.
I don't disagree, but this is just one symptom of what the video game industry has become.
As someone who hadn't played video games since his youth back in the late 80s, 90s, I was astonished when I tried to get back into it a few years ago.
Kernel-level DRM, online checks, €80+ price tags, incomplete games that require DLC, and all this for rushed unfinished broken games. You keep paying though, so the game companies keep pushing ("if they'll put up with this, what else can we get away with?").
If any of this goes through in terms of legislation, it will mostly just have “buy” change into “lifetime subscription” (where as usual, “lifetime” means the lifetime of the service). I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be done, and the article itself alludes to that outcome, but it also means that it won’t stop the killing of games.
The usual inter country struggles in the Eu might actually play out in favor of customers this time. Game development is stronger in smaller EU countries ( measured in percent of the gdp ) so big countries will not block any initiatives.
---This seems like it's being overly complicated. Isn't one of their requested options just to say that it's a "subscription" or that it may be discontinued some day when you originally "purchase" the game?
---If that option is acceptable to the stop game killing folks, why all this talk about public/private servers, security, portability, etc.
---When you sell it, just say "you are really kinda buying a subscription and we might shut it off in the future, but we'll try to give you some warning.?"
---Why would the industry be against that?
Regulation is not a good answer to bad actors when the problem is too vague. All this is going to do is create burdens the big players can skirt cat-and-mouse style while the small guys struggle beneath them (ie regulatory capture).
I don’t have a good solution but this is not it, very open to the idea that this is a clear/tactical solution and I just haven’t thought enough about it though.
To be honest... in the last 10 years, there were maybe 1 or 2 AAA games I revisited and played multiple times. The quality is getting worse and worse. Every game steals/implements well known, 20 year old mechanics from other games, the story is for 12 year olds, same old shit repeated again and again. Basically aggressive, spoiled children in adult body commandeer 100s of people and create these godawful monstrosities.
Predictable response, they'd rather have complete autonomy to decide what they will do and be the sole arbiter of consumers' rights, while gaming history disintegrates thanks to the double-tap of online-dependency shutdowns and marketplaces that make it a TOS violation to leave your library to someone.
Seems pretty obvious to me that if this passes, big game companies will either re-label all new releases as “subscriptions” and/or just never make a single-player game again. And mostly nothing will change. If you don’t like companies like this, don’t buy their games. There’s literally thousands of indie game companies that don’t abuse their users.
Not a solution. Other people will buy them and outvote you with their wallets. This has already happened. People did buy The Crew, and I doubt that most of them realized that it will be closed 10 years later.
Vote with your wallet doesn't work when other people still fork over the cash anyway. Look at microtranactions, universally hated, yet developers/publishers make money hand over fist because enough people are willing to pay.
So maybe it's because people are happy with renting games and don't care to keep playing them forever? I'm just wondering if the concern is shared by most consumers. Stop Killing Games could make games more expensive for the people who are happy with the sad status quo - and they could be the majority.
> If you complained that it's too hard to hash the passwords entered by your users or to encrypt medical data, or that you don't feel like complying with GDPR, you'd get rightfully fined out of existence.
If this happened all multiplayer titles would turn F2P.
People do not appreciate quite what a narrow path has to be walked by games from an IP standpoint. Code libraries, licensed property, per platform (and platform category) restrictions, general IP restrictions (not showing vehicles being damaged, or UI overlays on certain parts of licensed objects) and so on. This is why in the recent ROG Ally announcement Microsoft could not say all XBox games will run on it, because if it's a PC it's not a console, so various games will not be allowed to be sold on it as those contributing IP rights will have been split up separately.
Simply pretending these very real concerns don't exist is nonsense land. You want games with real vehicles or licensed music? This is what you have to deal with. At least these days they have learned to license music for longer than used to be the case.
This is part of the beauty of such a thing being a law.
If your code library, licensed property etc. does not allow companies to comply with the law, then its value is zero and you won't be able to sell it. So suddenly, all providers of such libraries etc. have to make this possible.
how did they do it in the past? If I can put my Tony Hawks cd from the PS2 into a cd player and enjoy all the DRM music, what changed between now and then?
If music labels refuse to license out their songs like that, then if this law passes, they're going to have to suck it up and play nice again, else lose customers/publishers.
Most of that era consoles would load level data from the CD, and then play the music as cd-da audio. There was no DRM on the music, perhaps because nobody thought of it, but more likely because there wasn't quite enough computing power to do it. PS2 games could be on CD or DVD and could have had cd quality music as a data file reasonably, but PS1 probably not, and cross platform games likely would use cd audio because it's easy.
The choice for licensors was to have the music in the game and available on the cd or not.
For a modern release, DRM music tracks that only play in the game is an option.
We've also learned that the licenses are (or were) often time limited... The publisher can't make new copies after some time, without getting a new license for the audio. Sometimes that's also related to a different format.
The issue with most of what you're saying here is that all of that works the way it does because it can, not because it has to. Code libraries, for example, may essentially prohibit what is being requested by SKG because they can. However, if they couldn't then they wouldn't. The companies selling the libraries aren't going to simply shut up shop.
Which is just to say, if there's money to be made then businesses will do so within the regulatory framework.
Those are all just decisions the companies made. For future games, the game developers and the companies licensing IP can simply make different decisions. If a large market like the EU creates strong incentives for them, they will make different decisions.
Now, this is not necessarily the case for existing games. Revisiting existing licensing deals can be needlessly difficult. But I'm assuming the proposed regulations will only apply to new games rather than trying to force changes retroactively.
All of those things are concerns. But if video game publishers really needed to figure this stuff out in order to sell units, they would. Contracts would change. But they'd still get signed. Everyone wants money too much. The only hard part is trying to fix this stuff for games which have already signed on the dotted line. Or games which have shipped and disbanded their software teams.
But even then, can't they just opensource what they're allowed to? Even if it doesn't build, it wouldn't take the community long to rip out FMOD or whatever and replace it with working alternatives. Or submit a final patch which removed the part where games phone home before launching in singleplayer mode. Why would that interfere with the licence for 3rd party IP?
IMO if I'm "buying" the game, you can't also remotely disable the thing I bought. (And "buy" is the word they all use!). If you want to remotely disable the game at some point in the future, I'm fine with that so long as they list it very explicitly and loudly on the box. "THIS GAME ONLY PLAYABLE UNTIL 2030". Games publishers need to start being honest and upfront about what we're paying for. Its not an unreasonable ask.
anyone ever noticed how so many completely different restaurants food tastes almost exactly the same? it’s because so many of them use the exact same food suppliers to buy their food before they cook it. [0]
gaming over the last few years feels the same way. like they all taste almost the same.
> Simply pretending these very real concerns don’t exist is nonsense land.
i don’t believe this to be true at all.
if all of the things you listed are limiting game development so much, than this isn’t “progress” in the games space. if it’s really that bad, maybe we should regress, start from the basics and let some of the incredible indie studios or midsize studios take the lead who will A) bring us actual originality, not more IP rehashed for the thousandth time, B) not bleed gamers wallets dry and C) lets us actually own the thing we buy.
sooo many amazing games were made in the past that were able to do this and do it well, the difference is they didn’t cry if they “only” made $40 million in profit.
cod3 made like $400 million in the first 24 hours.
the difference now is the AAA studios are sucking all of the air out of the room and not leaving nearly as much room for midsize studios.
[0] sysco, us foods, and pfg supply an absolute massive number of restaurants in the US. sysco alone distributes to something like 700,000 restaurants.
These concerns have been raised and addressed. Firstly, I am not sure how cars getting damaged means that multiplayer games have to become F2P - but that's not steelmanning your argument.
One of the major concerns raised has been middle are: components that developers purchase and use in their server implementation. This is often the largest hurdle to many pro-consumer outcomes: the developers can't share anything related because they don't own it.
The most likely outcome after sensible laws are passed is that the industry evolves just as it did with GDPR. Developers will look to other middlewares that are SKG compliant.
Failing that, gamers have routinely shown that they are capable of clean room implementations of server software (WoW and Genshin Impact) - all that needs be done is the client being released with all server auth disabled and some way to specify the server to use. Developers might even be required to provide basic protocol specifications. Essentially, repair it yourself instructions.
This strawman argument you have provided is exactly the same one used by Pirate Software. It relies on a highly specific interpretation of the initiative. The initiative calls for "reasonably playable state," which can have a vast number of outcomes that are different to the single one that you have chosen.
And if the cars do prohibit a game from addressing server concerns and remaining in a reasonably playable state, remove them. The game will continue to be reasonably playable following that.
How would a policy for this only affect EU games? EU has other policies that affect Apple, Microsoft, Google etc. as far as I know, any company that wants to sell/offer a service in EU will need to comply with its policies.
That’s not how it works. The EU does not care about what Apple does in the US. It’s Apple’s choice to either tweak their products to adapt to the laws of their different markets or apply these changes across the board. We’ve seen that with recent iOS versions where EU regulations imposed changes, some of which were done only for devices in the EU.
For some time Microsoft had EU specific versions of Windows.
EULA sometimes differ depending on location because a lot of the bullshit software companies get away with in the US is illegal in other parts of the world.
Another extreme example is the hoops companies have to jump through to sell in China. Again, this generally does not affect the same products in the rest of the world.
> The EU does not care about what Apple does in the US.
Well, partially they do. For example when it comes to the Right to be forgotten, there were attempts to apply this also to data which is stored and displayed outside the EU. Only after ECJ ruling (C-507/17) such attempts were stopped.
> For some time Microsoft had EU specific versions of Windows.
Microsoft does have the N (formerly called "Reduced Media") editions of Windows created in response to legal demands from the EU, but these are available worldwide. Other than that it is the same version of Windows, which just behaves differently when it comes to browser choice etc. depending on your location.
If anything even comes out of this, the furthest a law could possibly go is to impose a 2 year window (after sale) in which a game needs to work as described.
That would already be great progress. For context Ubisofts the Crew shutdown only after 3 months of stopping sales.
It could also work as a deterrent on making dedicated servers only architecture. If you can disable dedicated servers instantly(instead of 2 years) but enable private servers that might be more cost efficient.
Having followed this initiative quite extensively from the beginning, the most baffling thing has been the underwhelming support from developers themselves, both from studios and individual devs.
You would think the very idea of years of your work being rendered unplayable in an instant would be enough incentive to signal boost any effort against this industry practice.
Instead, developer discourse has revolved around just how hard it would be to do what this is petition is asking for. You are an engineer for crying out loud. If you solved a problem but a new constraint arrives in the form of a law, you figure out how to solve the problem under the new constraint. Just because something is hard, doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
It's almost like flexing your skills and signalling your elite knowledge is more important to people than simply defending what's right.
I think that most developers are just afraid to voice such anti-industry opinion. Gamedev is fairly small industry, so if you piss off wrong people, you might be left without job opportunities.
If so, are you comfortable telling artists what types of art they can create? I know not everyone is going to agree with me here but it feels like a slippery slope.
Yes, which is precisely why they shouldn't be treated like a commodity. Nobody is telling artists what art they can make, what the initiative is about making sure public continues to have access to works of art.
Which is normal for everything that's considered to be of cultural relevance. Film studios and novelists don't get to burn libraries down the moment someone stops paying them. It's exactly because games are art that preservation and access need to be priorities. Can you imagine if Amazon started to delete books from your Kindle? (I'm pretty sure they tried that once actually, with 1984 no less)
The destruction of art is, in most civilizations, seen as completely obscene. The reason why game companies got away with it was precisely because games had a lower status.
art, shmart. aside the fact that a large part of art is money laundering or tax evasion, what is being asked for is more like banning radioactive or cancerous paint pigment
Depends entirely on the game. Some are art, games designed by people who love games for the sake of games. Others are things that employ the use of art for the sake of long-term financial gain.
Yes, games are art. Which is why this is so important. Are you comfortable with destroying cultural heritage for the sake of corporate profit? Did you even ask artists working in the game industry what they think about this?
what a strawman. its not about "you cannot draw this" but its more like "please dont use dyes that offgas deadly fumes", a technical regulation not about substance
At a macro level, killed games are a good thing for gaming companies. It creates a shortage of playable games so that new games sell and continue to make money.
The biggest competitor to the video game industry is movies (Netflix, Disney plus, etc) and past games.
Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today? If players can play thousands of high quality games for free, why bother paying for a new game?
I suppose the book industry has the same problem, maybe there are some parallels to study from that.
> Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today?
This is something we can answer pretty easily by looking at the book industry. People do enjoy novelty. The pulp sci-fi/fantasy from the 60s-80s is long forgotten save for a few masterpieces, and there is a flow of recent books that people buy and read.
It would still be illegal to acquire a copy of a killed game. Their numbers would still dwindle, since they'd be limited to people who bought the game before it was killed.
Silly that this is being downvoted, especially since the book industry comparison is an interesting one:
There will always be people like myself who enjoy older (even outdated) books, but even we still buy new books because they are part of the zeitgeist and carry new ideas/developments. It'd be the same for new video games, some people would enjoy older games, but they'd likely still pick up a similar new game that developed something novel.
I guess the real problem here is that video game companies don't want to create anything novel, not least because it's a risk.
These are weak arguments but there are valid ones why I would not think this has a footing, even if I support the attitude. What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine? You can't just rip/disable licensed items out, they may form a significant part of business code. Code and APIs would be needed to be documented. Why just games? What about abandoned Saas offerings? These restrictions might creep over.
I hate live service games like the next guy but legal advisors can bend these to form powerful counter-arguments.
Saas offerings are safe as they don’t let you Buy a thing. They’re very transparently a service. Same with timed licenses. It’s clear what you’re paying for. Most of the time.
With games it’s often not the case. You buy them and then at unspecified moment you might lose a significant portion of functionality or the whole game. At the time you buy a game you don’t know if it’s for a time, what time, or what will stop working.
When I bought WoW it was very clear to me I was buying a service. If blizzard decided after 2 years it wasn’t sustainable and to shut down the game at no point would I be entitled to own it. It was clearly a license to access their service, as long as it exists. Same for any other MMORPG
Yea I think the problem is that people don't realize how expensive the upkeep of live games are.
Most new releases rely on Multiplayer, the publishers have to come up with creative ways to monetize it.. so they introduce cosmetics, stores, etc in order to fund the ongoing development and cost.
This causes a backlash and eventually the game gets dropped because people don't want to pay a subscription.
I also think many comments are a bit too eager in claiming "oh just publish the code" and "oh just let users host X". It's obviously not that simple. The biggest one for me is that single player games should still be playable offline after servers have been sunset.
I'm sure that with current games, licenses were indeed acquired for a certain limited time. But if you start development and you know you'll have to sunset it according to the rules one day, I'm sure you'll come up with other licenses or just a way to strip out content like that.
What’s the problem with releasing a server executable? As far as I can tell that would be enough to get around this legislation. And I can’t imagine that to be prohibitively expensive.
If it's really impossible for you to allow a game to remain playable after you abandon it, the only reasonable option is to not sell it at all. Instead you can rent it, with the length of the rental clearly stated up front. Advertising a rental as a sale should be illegal.
Who defined playable? Take Diablo 3 and 4. They are shared world games, are they playable without them? Maybe to you’d but to me they’re not. world of Warcraft has a rich questing experience which doesn’t require playing with other people - is it ok if they just switch off multiplayer content? That’s a different game, IMO.
Why not apply it to Saas? If you sold lifetime licenses and you don't want to run it anymore, just let your customers self host it. Even better if you can open source it.
> the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers
Nice way to make publishers stop making multiplayer services available to the EU in the first place because deactivating it is illegal when costs outweigh profits.
they won't leave the biggest global market with almost 500 million potential buyers because they can't rug pull anymore, even if they somehow suddenly don't like money anymore others will gladly take there place.
the same "argument" has been thrown at GDPR which now every single corporation follows.
> Even the singleplayer components [of Ubisoft’s “The Crew (2014) were unusable when the servers were turned off]: [Y]ou just wanting to race around cars in a world with you and other NPCs in it, is no longer viable. Essentially, you didn't "buy" the game, but in a sense were "renting" it for an indeterminate amount of time, a lease that expired due to the publishers and developers no longer wanting to provide that service for you.
Probably true! There is likely some additional revenue that the publisher gets from running servers, even for single-player mode. The question then is what will change in these games if that revenue is no longer there to fund them? Will the quality be lower? Will the price be higher? Will the publishers release new games less frequently? Maybe they just don’t make single-player games anymore?
Maybe they just stop adding hard requirements for online connectivity to their single-players games, which is something which takes more effort to do in the first place?
Honestly? I think we can do without these predatory practices even at the cost of some games.
And I somehow doubt there’s revenue to make off these single player games being online dependent, because the most probable ways simply wouldn’t fly in Europe due to consumer protections.
Most likely it’s just “anti-piracy” or something like that.
I work for a game company. I am ardently opposed to this idea.
All you will end up with, in the best case scenario that isn't even guaranteed to happen, is extremely mediocre games for which you will have the server executable along with the client.
Whether you like it or not, thanks to piracy and competition (and yes I've heard Gabe Newell's quote on piracy), server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy, and not even just for games. And no, "just release your source code then" is not a valid rule to enforce either.
If you like video games so much but don't like the terms of serivce and price, have you tried making your own? It has never been easier to do so, and there are freely usable code and art assets on hundreds of different platforms for you to attempt.
Re subscription marketing messaging, totally agree.
Re mediocre, ok that's fine.
Re the "how", then we arent really talking about anything here. Until there is a how, there is nothing to firmly agree or disagree with, so we have to talk in hypotheticals, which we are, and which is semi valuable.
Re making your own, when a company sells you a toilet and it breaks, you fix it yourself or buy a new one. When your 1999 game doesnt run on Windows 11, you fix it yourself or you buy a new one. If you require companies to fix it for you, the small ones will go bankrupt and the big ones will find a loophole.
It's better to have a mediocre game that one can play, than an exceptional game that one can't.
You're free to make games now, and yet it's most often hard to justify money for a game that isn't a skin on a version of solitaire (on sale).
That's how bad your industry is. So, please, with your warning. As if you have work product to bargain with.
You act as if your industry is busy. Outside of a couple of exceptional studios, and infinite sequels on literally only a few popular formulas (whether or not these formulas are good is another discussion), your industry is largely non-productive. If we are utilizing your metric of good vs mediocre.
I agree with you that there is a mountain of shit in the gaming industry.
Is any other industry different? Are Instagram and Tiktok literally not brainwashing hundreds of millions of people? Do defense companies care that innocents are murdered with their weapons? Do airplane companies face any enforceable moral judgment that they encourage relatively rich people to engage in idle leisure in other countries rather than being productive with their time for society, to which they owe some level of production in exchange for the society that raised them?
The argument knows no bounds. It is a matter of taste.
Ok, so your idea is that we will require all companies to release server and client builds, and also the source code as well (?), at some clearly defined point in the future, if they decide to terminate the live service?
Will we also require the same of the smart fridge companies? Will we also require the same of companies that don't sell live services, such as toilets?
I think there’s a mid ground where industry does nothing except slap a sticker on warning people that game features will sunset in the future, making parts of the game unplayable, perhaps making some commitment like no sooner than December 31, 2030.
It will essentially be the similar thing as the Surgeon General’s warning on a pack of cigarettes or the Parental Guidance logo on an album. The are US things, not sure if EU has similar.
This is already one of the proposed solutions. Although you would have to state a specific date as not to mislead consumers.
I would then have to decide if paying 80$ for a game I won't be able to play in the next 5 years is worth it.
It seems you didn't read the initiative text. The initiative does not force game Devs to release the code or make specific technical demands.
Game Devs only have to make a plan for when the game gets shut down to still allow the users to be able to play the game. How that is archived can be decided by the developers. Of course the law could be different in the future.
But most people do agree that it is bad to intentionally break games that people payed money for. All they are basically are asking for, is that games are built in a way that they can be enjoyed as long as possible (maybe supported by the community). Is that not also in the intention of the game developers?
It might be the intention of some game developers. I can tell you however that the intention of the people who run my company is to make as much money as possible.
My opinion is that you, as a consumer, should reward the companies who treat you best with your money. You should not require the government to do it for you, because if you do, the thing you end up with might not be the thing you receive, sadly.
And yes, this logic holds for most industries, but not all. I for one think there should be stringent rules for food processing, since that can actually kill you, and yet still putrid beef and tainted baby formula are sold on a relatively frequent basis.
> Whether you like it or not, thanks to piracy and competition ... server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy
The only people you're effecting are legitimate players. Pirates crack the games and have an easier time for it. Unless you're talking about multiplayer games, which wasn't the target of the proposal (though even there I'd argue it's definitely doable).
> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only
that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.
seems like 'video games europe' is gearing up to lobby/influence the lawmakers to distort this initiative.
the bare minimum would be to ban these kind of things from describing themselves as products instead of a service in their marketing. no "Buy" or "Purchase", instead "Rent" or "Lease" possibly with a stated minimum guaranteed time online / expiration date.
EDIT: reminder, if you're from the EU and over the age of 18 it's still a good idea to sign the petition even though it passed the threshold since there could be invalid signatures (bots, underage people, etc ...) if the valid signatures are below the threshold after the verification is done this petition will get dropped.
The game that kicked this particular petition off was The Crew, a game that you could happily play single player which Ubisoft made always online purely for DRM reasons its a prime example of the abuse of power that legislators should be doing something ab0out.
This isn't exactly an abuse of power - you can just not buy it. UbiSoft has transformed itself into a terrible, bloated company and it probably die soon, but the better way to do this is to have industry standards similar to PEGI that describe the game's future support, not to hit them with EU-specific regulations.
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> The bare minimum would be to ban these kind of things from describing themselves as products instead of a service.
I don't know if amazon kindle books "you are getting a license" wording has affected anything.
But what if you can't call them "games" anymore? Call it "time-limited entertainment"?
>> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only
> that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.
I think the criticism isn't centered around single player games at all, but rather MMORPGs and the likes.
> that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.
That’s asking developers to make different games. That’s not the same thing as “stop shitting down games like the crew”
OK, I signed it. hopefully I entered the correct postal code for my address; I always have to look up the code online.
> 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.
No? How would the "rights holders" be in any way liable for someone posting illegal content on a community-hosted server after a game has gone end-of-life?
Also, community servers not having to adhere to the publisher's standards of what community content is safe vs unsafe is clearly a positive in my humble opinion.
Because parents and the general public won't see that it's Bob's private server for $game. They see $game_name by $developer/publisher.
Mojang (creators of Minecraft ) is an unfortunate good case study for this. It's sale to Microsoft is in part down to not being able to balance freedom for server owners and the PR issues caused by people scamming others, in this case children, while obscuring it under the Minecraft brand.
I don't agree that we should be coerced into being in the kid safe padded play area, but I ain't blind enough to not see why we are.
> Because parents and the general public won't see that it's Bob's private server for $game. They see $game_name by $developer/publisher.
That isn't how liability works. The judge isn't going to let you sue the wrong person because you're confused.
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But the sale to Microsoft resulted in more scamming. In fact, the Xbox version of the game has in game currency added that requires dollars. And Microsoft allows servers free reign to scam children into spending that currency and buying more.
> It's sale to Microsoft is in part down to not being able to balance freedom for server owners and the PR issues caused by people scamming others, in this case children, while obscuring it under the Minecraft brand.
Source? This is the first time I’ve heard this claim.
Minecraft's sale to Microsoft had a lot more to do with Notch not being particularly keen on turning down a billion dollar check than anything else.
Imagine if the kids were all hanging out on Bob's Private Club Penguin Server.
Don't you know? If I cmd+S the HN front-end and throw my own backend behind it, host my own instance, and post something illegal on it, then YC is liable!
Obviously they're not, but hey, just joining them in making things up. Protect the children!!
It’s more complicated than that.
I work in games and in my last workplace I was CTO of a racing simulation; that means I was working with brands that were not only my own in a pretty big way.
The stipulations that were put on us was pretty strong. For example (and it’s not just these guys), Mercedes will not permit you to allow the logo to fall off; If you have a damage model in the game this is annoying. Some won’t allow the car to get dirty, or to deform in a realistic way because it harms a copyright (did you know that the front lights of cars are part of their brand and trademark in most cases).
I’m using a pretty obvious example, that by selling a product that contains these other brands, we are beholden to not represent them in a way they don’t like; it’s part of the transaction for having it.
I can already hear people thinking: but, most games don’t have any third party intellectual property. But that’s less true than you think, even fantasy games will inevitably wind up copying something from our world that is not completely generic. The most annoying ones are the little background things; Rockstar for example will almost assuredly have issues with using the shapes of famous buildings and licensing issues if they make their radio stations too easy to pirate.
It’s a quagmire. Honestly, I’m not even sure why we bother making anything, there seems to always be some random popping their head up seeking another slice.
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Video games publishers don't want you to play the same game for too long without spending more money. They don't want to make games like Terraria where you have a $10 game you can play for a thousand hours. They'd much rather you buy multiple $60+ games, plus expansions, "micro"-transactions and subscriptions.
They don't want games that last forever, they want to pressure you into constantly buying the next big thing.
That kind of reasoning makes sense if you have a single publisher controlling the entire market and they don't want to undercut their own business. But that's obviously not the case. There are plenty of publishers that want to publish games like Terraria, especially if they go on to sell more than 60 million copies.
I think the market is actually much more segmented than your comment implies. There's publishers who absolutely dominate certain niches, especially sporting games, and the only realistic competition they have are themselves.
It's worth keeping in mind that the "market" for a particular player can actually be incredibly small depending on their interests. In the most extreme example, a player might be a fan specifically of a single IP or series of games. Call of duty is one good example because there really are a lot of people who are like this. Video game IPs are a government granted monopoly on a small scale, and the word monopoly is not there for no reason, there is only one place to get CoD if you are a fan of CoD. Predictably, these companies follow the OA's suggested strategy very closely!
This would be why they’re trying to create consumer protection laws
I’m not sure “sellers would love to raise prices and have people keep buying” is the indictment that you think it is. Terraria and Modern Warfare, which is monetized the way you describe, are such different products…
Planned obsolescence even has affected video games too?
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BG3 has extensive modding support to the point where people released mods that turn it from a "classical" rpg to a roguelike.
BG3 has public lobbies, private lobbies, and *all* games are hosted locally on the hoster's computer, can be played through LAN without internet. It also has split screen coop.
Nothing you said about BG3 has an ounce of truth to it, and it is one of the most consumer friendly games in a sea of anticonsumer garbage. Are you trying to discredit Larian for some reason?
By playable do you just mean new content? It will be perfectly playable in 10 years just like all the other classic CRPGs. It would be amazing if modding in content was easy like NWN, if that’s what you mean, because it obviously isn’t. It does seem like such a waste. I’m in a second replay and it’s enjoyable but just so long and will become more repetitive. There are certain sections in Act I that I can’t see myself enjoying a third time at all. Some smaller modules would be amazing. I think the closest thing to that will be Solasta II in the modern era.
BG3 is quite possibly one of the most modable games of the last five years, and the multiplayer game is self hosted (peer to peer)
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My understanding is that WOTC wouldn’t extend their d&d license to be used in bg3 with that full set of modding that you want.
Knowling Larian I dont think that will be the case. what are you basing your assumptions upon? there is already extensive modding for bg3
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Why would you want to spend 1000s of hours in a game? That must be eradicated with fire. Time is your most precious resource... why waste it on one game? Games need to be shorter, maybe 20 hrs or so for high budget single player games.
I detest this line of thinking. There are plenty of games that are playable for this length of time. I've played hundreds of hours of Factorio, and I am not even close to exhausting the experience. Terraria was a fine example, too.
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This is literally every industry now. Shall we "regulate" all industries to be like this, then? Is that achievable?
Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point? "That's not what this is about. Ok, where are we heading then?
A more accurate analogy would be: you bought a physical DVD and DVD player, but now the film studio is preventing you from playing the DVD that you own on the hardware you own. In which case yes, we should regulate. Paying for access to a constantly changing library is not the same as paying to permanently own a single product.
Paying for a subscription is explicitly not what this is about. No one is suggesting this for MMOs. Just that it be clear that it is a subscription, that you're not actually buying the game. What a one-time fee for an MMO? Give it an expiry date. You can keep pushing the expiry date, but you have to promise support up to at least that date.
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> Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point?
Actually not Netflix as they just offer a monthly subscription and not individual sales, but _YES_ by all means if I "purchase" (not rent!) a book or movie on Amazon (or anyone else), I'd like that, thank you.
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It’s pretty easy to solve static content like ebooks and video games; just legislate that your license is transferrable between services and media. Then I can legally torrent a game that is unsupported.
Content subscriptions like Netflix are different because you are not paying face value for one title. The better analogy here would be the game streaming services like XBox online. It’s clear you are not doing anything like “buying a game”, it’s the whole point of the business model. As you say, it would be a lot harder to make these laws apply there (but I bet that wouldn’t stop the EU from trying).
I think any legislation on this subject would have to reckon with the second-order effects; on the margin you’d be adding pressure for publishers to move to pure subscription services, if these laws don’t apply in those cases.
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The FTC is currently suing John Deere over this kind of thing.
Also, Netflix is a weird comparison here. That seems like it should be an online-only service, they're not selling the actual movies to you. It's one of the situations where the model actually makes sense, unlike single-player video games.
> Shall we "regulate" all industries to be like this, then?
Don't threaten me with a good time
> Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point?
No. However, you should be able to make a copy using your own computer (onto the computer or onto an external media such as a DVD) and then you can play the movies that you have copied on your own computer (not necessarily the one used for Netflix) or DVD player. This should be possible without needing to use their software, and it does not mean that their software or their service should need to offer it as an option; it is done on your side. (They can refuse to serve the movie to you faster than the actual duration of the movie if they want to do, though, therefore making it take as much time to copy as it does to watch it normally.)
(However, I am generally opposed to copyright anyways.)
If Netflix decides to end their service and make every TV show and movie they have permanently unavailable, even through all other legal businesses, then yeah, it would be nice of them to give that stuff away.
I mean, what you describe sounds pretty good. It sounds like you think it's not feasible for some reason (other than political will). Do you want to elaborate on that?
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Having worked there in the past, Ubisoft is awful. When I was there previously there was an aggressive push for UPlay (now Ubisoft Connect) integration into all products. Then there were the bullshots for promos/E3/etc. There were often clashes with leadership who would fight against creativity / novel ideas in favour of cookie-cutter mechanics that would not add anything to the experience - certainly there was a mentality of, let's just copy what was recently successful.
I'm blown away that series like AC, FarCry are still big sellers. These games are vapid and designed to be a time sink.
I'll never buy an Ubisoft game again. Instant dealbreaker to see that studio on the Steam store page; I've deleted a $3 sale game from my cart when I realized that it was Ubisoft. No game is worth giving money to a company that hates its customers so much.
On the flip side ex-Ubisoft employees seem to be finding success after their departure. Highly recommend Clair Obsur: Expedition 33.
> I'm blown away that series like AC, FarCry are still big sellers. These games are vapid and designed to be a time sink.
They are like junk food. Everyone has the junk food that they enjoy. FarCry is certainly the McDonald's of games. I enjoy some junk food once in a while, problems arise if I make it my staple diet.
For Steam users, a reminder that you can go to a publisher's page and "Ignore" that publisher. The option is a little bit hidden, it's in the settings cog on the right-hand side of the page. It'll stop steam from recommending their games to you, and when one does show up, like in the Top Sellers list, it'll have a message on it saying that it's by a publisher that you ignored.
I have Ubisoft, EA, and Sony marked as such, personally.
Not to mention the sexual assault
> 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.
How? Can't wait to hear them substantiating this tidbit, because from a regular enterprise operations viewpoint this does NOT pass the smell test.
When I found out that Booking[.]com of all companies is moving major traffic, I started to look at what companies are even buying or selling anymore. I clearly had no idea.
In the following paper, CPs refer to content providers, as defined in the paper.
https://estcarisimo.github.io/assets/pdf/papers/2019-comnets... [pdf]
(more at https://estcarisimo.github.io/publications/ )
canonical link for above paper, which is the lead researcher's GH from what I can tell:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01403... ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2019.05.022 )
> Studying the Evolution of Content Providers in IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Cores
> Esteban Carisimo, Carlos Selmo, J. Ignacio Alvarez-Hamelin, Amogh Dhamdhere
[I have edited out some hyphens that made this really hard to read but were helpful due to the layout of the original document as typeset. If that bothers you, I'm sorry in advance. Links are included above.]
> Our goal is to investigate what role CPs now play in the Internet ecosystem, and in particular, if CPs are now a part of the “core” of the Internet. Specifically, we motivate this work with the following questions: How can we identify if a CP does or does not belong to the core of the Internet? If the core of the network does indeed include CPs, who are they?As the overall adoption of IPv6 has been slow, do we notice that delay on IPv4 and IPv6 core evolution? As the AS ecosystem has shown striking differences according to geographical regions [15], do we also see geographical differences in the role of CPs and their presence in the “core” of regional Internet structures? Finally, as more CPs deploy their private CDNs, can we detect “up and coming” CDNs that are not currently in the core of the network but are likely to be in the future?
> We use the concept of k-cores to analyze the structure of the IPv4 AS-level internetwork over the last two decades. We first focus on seven large CPs, and confirm that they are all currently in the core of the Internet. We then dig deeper into the evolution of these large players to correlate observed topological characteristics with documented business practices which can explain when and why these networks entered the core. Next, we repeat the methodology but using IPv6 dataset to compare and contrast the evolution of CPs in both networks. Based on results, we investigate commercial and technical reasons why CPs started to roll out IPv6 connectivity.
> We then take a broader view, characterizing the set of ASes in the core of the IPv4 Internet in terms of business type and geography. Our analysis reveals that an increasing number of CPs are now in the core of the Internet. Finally, we demonstrate that the k-core analysis has the potential to reveal the rise of “up and coming” CPs. To encourage reproducibility of our results, we make our datasets available via an interactive query system at https://cnet.fi.uba.ar/TMA2018/
[…]
> Finally, we study the core evolution of nine other remarkable CPs that belong to the TOPcore but were not included in the Big Seven. Seven of the nine selected ASes are the remaining ASes in Bottger et al.’s [47] TOP15 list, except Hurricane Electric (AS6939) which we do not consider as a CP since it is labeled as Transit/Access in CAIDA’s AS classification [80]. These seven ASes are OVH (AS16276), LimeLight (AS22822), Microsoft (AS8075), Twitter (AS13414), Twitch (AS46489), CloudFlare (AS13335) and EdgeCast (AS15133). The other two ASes are Booking.com (AS43996) and Spotify (AS8403). Interestingly, Booking.com or Spotify are not normally considered among the top CPs, however, they are in both TOPcores.
What else would these companies have to gain by making their games online only? Perhaps game developers even have contractual obligations to uphold, or incintives to include third party network interactions. The presence of Twitch, Cloudflare, and Microsoft on this list are interesting, because Microsoft drives a lot of threat intel and also makes a popular OS among gamers. If you want to reduce network traffic and reduce your reliance on third parties and internet access, migrating from Windows and using Proton on Linux would probably be a step in the right direction for many games that you would want to play single player.
Imagine you're an indie game studio developing an MMORPG, both your server and client is likely under constant development and you may only have one or two actual production servers running your server code.
Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.[1] While adding documentation, support for different systems, while ensuring safety as the server can now be reverse engineered and while possibly being liable to abuse created through those servers. Even though your game (and its clients) aren't tailored to working on any server other than the official one anyway.
At least that's my understanding of the issue.
This proposal is obviously aimed at big publishers like EA and Ubisoft, but it hurts small developers. I argue we should just stop playing EA and Ubisoft games, who are the only ones who continue to pull this crap.
[1]: As TheFreim pointed out, this isn't necessarily required. But the server program has to be released when the official servers are shut down. Which means this possibility has to be prepared for throughout development.
> Imagine you're an indie game studio developing an MMORPG
To my understanding, this wouldn't affect MMORPGs where you're explicitly buying X months of access (so long as you do get the access you paid for, or a refund if it's shut down early) which is how most I'm aware of work.
> Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.[1] While adding documentation, support for different systems,
The proposal requires leaving the game in a reasonably playable state, but not any specific actions like these. In fact the FAQ specifically says "we're not demanding all internal code and documentation".
> while ensuring safety as the server can now be reverse engineered and while possibly being liable to abuse created through those servers
I don't see why the company would be liable for this. Moderation of the private servers would be up to those running the private servers. If there is something to this effect in EU law that I'm unaware of, it seems like it'd already be placing undue burden on games that do currently (or want to) release their server software and that this initiative would be a good opportunity to exempt them from that liability.
> but it hurts small developers
If anything I'd speculate small developers are likely to have less issue releasing server software/code, and more likely to have a game this doesn't even apply to in the first place, giving them an edge over larger publishers.
But even if it were a significant burden, I feel it's really just providing what was already purchased. At the extreme, do you think it'd be okay to take $70 from someone for a singleplayer game, then shut down authentication servers (rendering it unplayable) a few minutes later?
> Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.
This is not accurate. From the FAQ:
> Q: Won't this consumer action result in the end of "live service" games?
> A: No, the market demand and profitability of these games means the video games industry has an ongoing interest in selling these. Since our proposals do not interfere with existing business models, these types of games can remain just as profitable, ensuring their survival. The only difference is future ones will need to be designed with an "end of life" build once support finally ends.
I suggest reading the proposal or /at least/ the FAQ page: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
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> But the server program has to be released when the official servers are shut down. Which means this possibility has to be prepared for throughout development.
... which is why it doesn't pass my smell test.
Say you're working on either a monolithic game server codebase, or just a microservice that's a part of a larger service mesh fulfilling that role. Are you writing any tests? You probably (hopefully) do. So where's that code gonna run the first time before it's even pushed up to version control? Locally. So some extents of it definitely have to run locally, or if you have good test coverage, all of it.
But okay, let's go a layer further. Say you're trying to go into production with this. As the saying goes, everyone has a production environment, but the lucky folks "even" have others. This sarcastically implies that you need to be able to deploy your solution into multiple environments. And you don't want to be doing this manually, because then e.g. you have no CI/CD, and thus no automated testing on code push. That's not even considering multi-geo stuff, because for multiplayer games I imagine latency matters, so you really want to deploy either to the edge or close to it, and will definitely want to be all around the world, at least in a few key places.
So you can test locally, and can deploy automatically. Tell me, what is the hold up then? It would take me approximately one entire minute to give you the binaries for anything I ever touch, because if I couldn't do that, the automation wouldn't be able to do so either. At some point, the bullshit has to end, and that's at operations. Not much docs to write either: if your stuff does anything super super custom, you're doing something very wrong. And respectfully, if the aforementioned do not apply to you, you shouldn't be operating any online service at scale in production for anyone in 2025.
Really the only technical wrenches you can throw into this that I can think of are licensing and dependencies. Neither of these are reasonable spots to be in from an economical or a technical standpoint. Like what, you can't mock other services? How are you testing your stuff then? Can't change suppliers / providers? How is that reasonable from a business agility standpoint?
So clearly if there is a salient technical rationale for this, it's going to have to be a very sharp departure from anything I've ever experienced in non-gaming enterprise, or my common sense.
Regarding all the other points (and this will read dismissive because I've already rambled on way too long and I'm trying to keep it short, I genuinely don't mean it like that):
- if you're writing an MMORPG as a small up-and-coming indie, you're definitely going bankrupt
- if you're writing an MMORPG, I'm pretty sure you'll have more than just one or two servers running, or there's nothing massive about that multiplayer online role playing game after all
- it does not require you to continually release anything
- it does not request you to release documentation (what is there to "document" btw? I'm certainly not imagining too much)
- it does not request you to support different systems
- it does not request you to release anything before EOS, thus, security concerns for the official client are null and void - and even if it wasn't (e.g. sequels), security by obscurity is not a reasonable security story anyways
- the dangerous parts of the reverse engineering efforts still routinely happen without access to server binaries anyways (see all COD games and their players getting hacked to pieces right as we type away)
- possibly liable is not liable, and I trust you're not a lawyer, just like I'm not
- it's just a client-server setup like any other - remember, other environments must be possible to connect to as well, if nothing else then for testing
All of this is completely ignoring how we had dedicated servers and competition events with private setups since forever.
I legitimately cannot imagine that you can cock up an online service architecture and codebase bad enough, that a team of devs and devops/SREs/ops, or even just a few of those dudes, couldn't get something mostly operational out the door in a few day(!) hackathon at most. Even without planning for all this. And how this would skyrocket the costs especially mystifies me. Surely asset development, staffing, operational costs and marketing are the cost drivers here? How would you surpass ALL or even ANY of that? Just doesn't make sense!
I guess the (media) battle is on now.
In some ways I think even this statement by the trade association is already a win - the initiative forced them to explicitly address topics such as private servers, which they'd rather not talk about at all. Their statement also made it easy to ask counter questions regarding offline single-player or actual player compensation on shutdown. (I love the "we understand it can be disappointing, but we give players fair notice" statement, as if players didn't pay money for this)
I don't expect a lot of support from EU politicians for the initiative, as the current Parliament is even more conservative and corporate-friendly than usual. But well, hope dies last, and at least the will of the public seems to be there. (And also the appearance of being a tech regulator has become more popular in Brussels)
So we'll see.
I don't buy these arguments. If game developers don't want to sell games that way then don't. Sell subscriptions instead. Like instead of $60 for a game, $60 one-time fee for a two-year subscription, which afterwards renews automatically in 3 months intervals at no cost until further notice. Same applies to all paid in-game content.
That way the developers can continue offering both games and subscriptions where each type makes most sense. And everybody knows what they are signing up for. People who buy a game get a game which they can play indefinitely. People who buy a subscription know the earliest possible end date and everything beyond that is just bonus.
I don't think this would have any significant impact on the industry.
Publishers would just advertise their games as coming with a 2-year subscription, or whatever. People would have the same expectations as now: the game will be supported for a couple of years, and it will be supported much longer if there's an obvious way that is profitable to the developer.
No publisher would unilaterally want to start advertising games as subscriptions, but if everyone was forced to do it, nothing changes. Perhaps an extra layer of clicking through for the user, like when we mandated all websites must have annoying cookie popups.
Most games won't need it. When every other offline game says "buy" but the games as a service one has to say "rent" for the same price, consumers will notice I think.
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I dont think this is true. If publishers advertized 2 year license, some people would decide to not buy the license. The exact reason why they insist on calling it "buying".
> People would have the same expectations as now
If that premise was true, why would misleading advertisement be the norm right now? Why bother?
Changing it to a subscription WOULD change perception. Most people don't understand the current status quo. When they do know, it would create a market pressure for real game ownership.
The publishers that already apply the model can be forced. And some might decide to do another model instead of doing this model because it affects user’s view. This is the whole point.
Of course, was anyone expecting they would react otherwise, especially with the changes after 32bit gaming across consoles and desktop platforms.
It is all about IP, and like Hollywood nowadays, how to repackaged it in remakes and emulation.
A bit hard if we're allowed to just play the original versions.
Correct. The backends to these online games isn’t complicated, but it is protected. They want the ability to resell the entire service to another game studio to run.
This has happened a lot in the past. EverQuest, Pirates, Lots of mmos have changed studios and with that, the backend services needed to run them.
Now, that said, there are a few countries in the EU that you could reverse engineer the server and it’s totally legal. Some of the best fun I’ve had were on private WoW or Lineage 2 servers.
I think very few people (outside of the industry - important caveat) are opposed to the stated goals of the initiative:
> This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union [...] to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.
The concern that I have is that I have no idea what the actual text of the law is going to be.
You can look at laws like the DMCA, that had a reasonable purpose (made adjustments to the copyright system for the age of the internet) and a royally screwed up implementation that basically everyone can find a problem with.
It's easy to imagine that the laws that pass could be (1) completely neutered by corruption in the EU leading to regulatory capture (2) far too strong and written in a way that imposes unfair burdens on developers (which include indie devs too) or (3) bad just because of technical incompetence of the authors.
I know that there's not much I can do about those things, but that may explain the emotional reactions of some people like e.g. PirateSoftware - nobody actually knows what the resulting law will be like, and everyone familiar with the legislative system knows how bad the outputs can be.
> to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.
Yeah, I like the general goal, but I worry about the corner cases; is an MMO “functional/playable” if you just release a localhost server? Are we forcing indie shops to pay for servers indefinitely now? Great way to ensure no more indie MMOs get built if that ends up being the text interpretation.
And, as you say, the question you should always be asking about EU legislation - how does this affect the small/medium shops’ competitiveness? Counterintuitively, compliance can hit the small guys relatively harder and entrench the big guys.
Not to say that we shouldn’t try to fix the problem. But agree that skepticism about EU regulations has some historical merit.
> is an MMO “functional/playable” if you just release a localhost server? Are we forcing indie shops to pay for servers indefinitely now?
The man behind Stop Killing Games has made it perfectly clear that they do not want to force game developers to continue operating servers. Rather, as you suggest, releasing server binaries would be acceptable. Although a mere "localhost" server would likely not be sufficient, because (if I interpret your suggestion correctly) it takes away the multiplayer funtionality of the game. I think it would be reasonable to require developers to release online multiplayer capable server binaries.
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Ross addresses these things in his videos on the initiative. For one, the game doesn't have to be 100% functional, it just has to do a bare minimum.
They might not even need to release server binaries, even. I would think releasing documentation on how the network commication runs, and adding a box to enter a server IP into the client at EOL would be sufficient. The community, if enough people care, would then be empowered to write their own server implementation without needing the reverse engineering step.
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> compliance can hit the small guys relatively harder and entrench the big guys
This is almost always the case, actually. Regulation and compliance are taxes on the productivity of an organization. And the "shape" of the tax is mostly flat - the burden is sublinear in the size of the organization, so the relative effects on smaller companies are bigger. And smaller companies already have significantly less available resources, and especially less legal resources (no lawyers on retainer), to handle it.
Obviously that doesn't mean that regulation shouldn't be passed, just that you have to write it very, very carefully - think embedded systems rather than web frontend - minimizing complexity and aggressively red-teaming it for loopholes and edge-cases.
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So don’t even try because it might be bad?
Nowhere did I say or imply that - did you respond to the wrong comment by accident?
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This vague handwringing isn't any better. None of us know what the law will end up turning into. But we shouldn't let that stop this being addressed properly in our political institutions. That's what they're there for.
Also, bringing up the DMCA is sort of rich, since it was always just a vehicle for the biggest content companies in publishing, film, television, music and software to protect their property online.
Now we have something that was brought into being by consumers and may finally do something to curb anti-consumer behaviour by companies like this, and you're against it because you have no idea what it'll look like. I just can't, man. What's even the point of legislation if we have to be afraid it'll all be corrupted? Why even have political institutions at all at that point?
And if the end result of this legislation is that videogames in EU aren't licensed or sold but are instead all streamed and you are instead just buying access to stream a game, then what? TO me it's just amazing how the advocates for SKG ignore any possibility that it could make things much worse that they already.
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> imposes unfair burdens on developers (which include indie devs too)
Any such law should include a carve-out so that indie devs and small startups aren't impacted because just the need maintain compliance paperwork can be a burden. Carve out thresholds can be based on a combination of product revenue and units sold. Similar carve outs should generally be part of a lot of government regulations because startup entrepreneurship is so key to job growth, innovation and ensuring more choice for consumers. The best way to keep huge companies honest is making them keep earning their success by enabling smaller, hungrier new competitors laser focused on better serving customer needs.
That said, I do generally agree with your broader point that how regulations are written and enforced matters a lot. Too many start with good intentions but end up being sidestepped, subverted or triggering unintended consequences. If a "Stop Killing Games" regulation is drafted I think it should be narrowly targeted and conceived with the understanding that both the tech and business models will continue rapidly evolving and the market will quickly adapt to sidestep or subvert whatever new rules are put in place. That will likely mean that, realistically, an effective regulation probably shouldn't be as expansive or all-encompassing as we might be imagining from our armchairs.
I'd be happy if the focus was simply on getting large game companies to clearly commit up front what their commitments are over time by listing how long will each aspect of the game will continue to work by type (ie single-player offline, multiplayer self-hosted, multiplayer cloud, feature updates, security updates). Then company management and investors will know to set aside funds to cover server fees for that time period after the final sale. This isn't new or burdensome. Large companies already have accounting practices to accrue future liabilities on their books. When they sell future enterprise services to other companies there's a contract with financial reserves and revenue recognition. Selling a game to consumers with the expectation of future online delivered services should have a similarly spelled out commitment and appropriate financial reserves.
In reality, this may mean some companies choose minimum commitments that we'd all feel are far too short but as long as the consumers know up front what the commitment actually is, the free market can determine over time what costs consumers are willing to pay for which commitments. I expect some companies will try to minimize their financial commitment by making games which could obviously have offline single-player aspects always require online for everything or be subscription-only and only commit to offer the subscription for 1 month after purchase. Let them try and see how the market reacts. Government regulation isn't some magic wand we can wave to just force companies to "do the right thing" or, more specifically, make the products we want and sell them to us on the terms we'd prefer. Companies will either pass the increased costs on to consumers or not go into that business at all. Realistic regulation should focus first on two things: 1) Ensuring a level-playing field for fierce competition and, 2) clear up front disclosure of what the deal is.
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Oh no! Not developer choice!
This is the weakest argument I've ever heard. Compare:
"Stop burning coal? That curtails factory owner choice!" etc. etc.
I'm sure the people behind the movement would love to point out that, yes, that is the entire point.
They claim to protect from illegal content and unsafe communities, but those sound like desperate grasps at straws that are easily disproven. They also misrepresent the basic demands of the petition, as online only games are still allowed.
Just open CS2 and go to the community server tab. There’s a little notice telling you that you might be exposed to unmoderated and unsafe content.
Apparently in 2025 corporate lawyers have forgotten how to write a disclaimer. It’s all BS to protect their short term games.
I would spend way more money on games if they didn’t have a ~5 year life span.
> illegal content and unsafe communities
Those are two arguments which will win over europeans and euro politicians.
This goes beyond games and calls for regulation of anything sold as a product, but working more like a subscription service. Similar issues also affect an increasing number of appliances that rely on apps and connect through manufacturer-hosted services. If the manufacturer goes out of business or shuts down a service, fully working devices can lose some or all of their features. Manufacturers should be required to open up their devices and provide a documented local API, if for no other reason, then to reduce the huge amount of electronic waste created by making devices artificially obsolete.
I think that approaching the problem from the perspective of a physical product, like a smart lightbulb that doesn't work anymore because the manufacturer shut down its servers, would be easier for non-technical people to understand and would likely have a better chance of success.
Of course it does. The whole idea of "Stop Killing Games" is that developers should not be able to summarily kill off a game that people have invested time and money into, just because it's not making them enough money going forward.
Developers should absolutely not have that choice. It's fine if you want to run a live service game where the optimal experience happens during active support. However, unless you as a dev are willing to refund every single purchaser of the game, in full, when you discontinue a game, then you are stealing from purchasers. Moreover, even if you are willing to give a full refund to all players, it's really shitty to just rip an experience away from people, never to be experienced again (whether in a watered-down or limited form, or not).
It's the same reason I don't agree with perpetual copyright, nor a copyright owner's right to suppress a work's availability. In almost all jurisdictions, copyright is intended to be a limited time right, with the rights eventually entering the public domain. If people can't access the work when it would become public domain, then that work is effectively stolen from the public in a way that mere non-commercial copyright infringement can never be theft.
Also, part of the issue is the death of private servers. Game publishers have chosen to revert to centralized servers, rather than allowing private servers. Thus they have also taken on the additional cost of running those servers. Older games can be easily played on private servers to this day, as the community of any moderately popular game will almost always step up to provide the service. Even games you might not expect would be that popular or games that never had private servers - for example, Rock Band 3 only ever supported connecting to Harmonix servers in an official capacity. This support is also discontinued (they still operate the Rock Central servers, but only for Rock Band 4). Yet right now, thanks to reverse engineering, there is a fan-operated server that you can connect to with a slightly modified game. You can even download the fan-created server software (written in Go) and stand up your own server for your friends or for whatever other reason (maybe you want to run a small tournament and use a private GoCentral server to record statistics and have a private leaderboard).
> Game publishers have chosen to revert to centralized servers, rather than allowing private servers. Thus they have also taken on the additional cost of running those servers.
I fail to see the principal difference between a "centralized" and a "private" server here. Just publish the code for running the "centralized" server, as you would do for the private server, and add a possibility to configure which server to connect to in the game?
I could see this becoming an issue when the server is hardwired to require some publisher SSO login, but given how everyone + their dog uses OIDC nowadays, a requirement to make authentication interoperable is only a very mild restriction.
> just because it's not making them enough money going forward.
sometimes it's not even that -- it's to prevent the older version from competing with new releases. See Overwatch 1 -> 2 or Counter-Strike 1 -> 2
It's such a bizarre counter argument. The whole point of the movement is that developers are choosing to harm the medium and should stop.
It's the publishers forcing their hand, to be fair. I don't think any developer who worked for years on a game is thrilled about it not being playable in the future.
Vote with your wallet, there are thousands of games that don't do shady stuff.
>Vote with your wallet
I bought Minecraft from Mojang, years later I am forced to setup a Microsoft account to play the game, or risk downloading a cracked version. They did not offer a refund. Minecraft is a video game where you need to login even if you do not play online. (maybe things changed , I think this MS account thing was a few years back, it worked for my account but I read of people having big issues because some MS assholes ahd to force the Java edition players to use an MS account)
This behaviour should not be legal.
I was forced to not only setup a Microsoft account, but hand over my phone number - after creating an account without a phone number and transferring my Minecraft license over, they immediately locked my account.
Someone at Microsoft should go to jail for this.
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Minecraft is at least reasonably easy to play offline, the account mostly only stores your skins. That said, it may require a third-party launcher now.
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I don't remember this being the case, you could reuse your old MC purchase when they made the transition over.
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Its not always obvious when you buy them which games will still be around a few years later.
Some singleplayer titles from just a few years ago are no longer playable. (Hello, Ubisoft). Meanwhile there are MMOs like guild wars 1, released 20 years ago, still playable today.
Right, exactly. Game companies don't advertise when you buy a game that its single-player features will only work as long as the servers stay up. I'm sure they don't want to. But if players aren't made aware of that fact then it's hard for them to make informed purchasing decisions.
It's obvious enough if you buy on Steam. Any game that says it needs it's own DRM or an account with the publisher is a nope.
Yup
Something I am noticing more and more is how stagnant the North American game industry is. Meanwhile Europe and Japan are still killing it
Larian with BG3 - Europe Cd Projekt with Witcher and Cyberpunk - Europe
Nintendo rocking on as normal Monster hunter wilds and the RE remakes? Capcom, Japan
Elden Ring and Nightreign. FromSoft, Japan
Helldivers 2. Arrowhead Studios, Sweden
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Warhorse Studios, Czech
I cannot remember the last time I bought a new game and had a blast with it from a North American studio. Certainly not a AAA studio anyways
> Certainly not a AAA studio anyways
Almost every time I have spent more than $35 on a game in the past year I have wound up regretting it. It seems as though the quality of games typically increases til that point (exceptions exist, Terraria) and then declines sharply (again, exceptions exist). It has turned out to be a useful signal to be way more careful about a purchase for me.
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You mean you're not a fan of the latest reskin of CoD, or the latest reskin of CS with even more loot boxes?
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was such a breath of fresh air in this regard. If you just want a reasonably priced, good game with no shady stuff but still that AA (arguably AAA) experience I can’t recommend it enough.
And people are. Games sales are slumping in response to a decade of predatory dark patterns and simply not giving the audience what they're asking for.
Just keeping the games playable is a singular issue and in the noise. It's a good issue to single out for regulation.
Everywhere, license agreements that can be changed by the company at any time, pretty much for every game developer that can afford a lawyer to write up said license agreement. They could all start doing shady stuff at any time. Might still leave thousands of games, but they add up to a drop in the bucket of the overall market.
There's fewer games to vote on every year, as conglomerates like Microsoft out vote your wallet a billion times over every time they buy a game studio to embrace, extend and then extinguish.
If looking at AAA publishers, maybe. The indie game scene continues to pump out games, some good, some bad, at half or less of cost of the AAA games. They won't be as polished, but many still deliver an exceptional experience.
there are more games than ever, it's just that microsoft, ubisoft, etc are spending billions on actual psychologists to ensure the populace remains apathetic towards them.
I don't care how smart you are, how much self control you have, whatever, in the face of billions of dollars, voting with your wallet does not stand a chance. The house always wins.
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Or just sign the initiative, so that you maybe don't have to abstain to achieve this goal? I don't understand this mentality.
Americans have been conditioned to blame individuals for everything wrong in society.
> Vote with your wallet
The ratio of me hearing this vs. seeing it actually affect change is maybe 10000:1 at this point.
Why not just vote with your vote instead.
Anyone saying "vote with your wallet" is implicitly saying billionaires deserve more say in the world than you do since they have so much more in their wallet.
Tell them to fuck off.
Look where decades of "voting with our wallets" led us. How some people can still utter that sentence unironically is beyond me at this point.
Your claim that there has been "decades of voting with our wallets" is laughable. Nobody I know who plays games decides to buy them or not based on ideological reasons - they just buy the things that are popular or that their friends play. There's extremely little engagement on these issues.
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I did some looking into this a few days ago, and I can understand the sentiment. I can't understand the proposed implementation. There is a lack of technical discourse and heavy criticism of any negative opinion. I don't want to defend big publishers, I have not bought a new AAA game in many years. I think they are user hostile.
Stop Killing Games is just way too broad. Remove online DRM checks from my single player game? Sure, I have been on board with that for a very long time. Make sure my MMO stays playable forever? You're asking for a miracle. You as a consumer need to be informed about what you're paying for. It's your job.
"Just release the server's source / binary" is a pipe-dream and I figured more people here would understand this. Modern software is super complex, distributed, entangled with external services and dependencies. Often it's not just isolated, should you be forced to release the backend serving all of your (still active) games? Has anyone considered the security implications? Should you be forced to use only libraries that you can distribute? Can you see how this may stifle creativity?
"Just state when the game will go offline" is impossible. The game will go offline when it can't be responsibly funded it anymore. Whether that's 2 or 10 years from now. If a company has to declare when your game service will expire, expect most online games to transition to a subscription model going forward. If the consumer won't have that, expect less of them to exist. It's going to backfire spectacularly. A better idea would be to mandate a minimum support window, and refunds within that window.
What constitutes a "playable state"? Is the anti-cheat in an online FPS integral to playability? Many would argue so, I'll let you think about that one. This movement is riddled with such ambiguities.
I believe if you have a financial incentive not to release source / binaries then that’s a good financial incentive to keep the servers up. If such a mandate doesn’t result in actually releasing anything but instead properly incentivizes the right behavior, I’d still say the movement had won.
> 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.
I find it really frustrating how they phrase things because there is so much BS in almost one sentence. The entire point of having a private server is so that they are no longer in control of these things.
Moreover if I am running a private server:
- It isn't their responsibility to secure players data.
- it isn't their responsibility to remove illegal content.
- it isn't their responsibility to remove "unsafe" (whatever that means) community content.
So how could they be 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.
This is pretty much disingenuous argument that "PirateSoftware" was pushing. They are pretending that a single player mode would need to be created. This isn't what is being requested.
> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only
No problem. Per "Stop Killing Games" initiative, you will only have to provide means for the users to still be able to play those games after you decide to pull the plug on it.
You can, for example, release the server code so that players can keep playing the game somehow, if they so desire. No need to keep supporting your online rent-seeking scheme ad-eternum after it outlived its usefulness.
We need to be frank about what those developers really want though. They want to be able to take away games they previously sold so that players move on to their shiny new online rent-seeking scheme. Allowing people to actually own the games they bought is bad for business.
Fuck this noise and fuck those developers.
If game publishers could in clear writing at time of purchase commit to a set number of years that game will be live then I think that is a good start. For example when the next live service game is released and you go to purchase it there is a clear warning that the publisher has only guaranteed the game to be live for 2 years. Personally that would prevent me from buying the game, but perhaps not others.
The idea that a publisher can sell a live service game and shut it down in 1 month with no legal repercussions is ridiculous to me.
The publisher can't do that. No one can tell the future.
They could be liable if they shut down the servers and make the purchase unusable before the end of the minimum contracted duration.
I don't disagree, but this is just one symptom of what the video game industry has become.
As someone who hadn't played video games since his youth back in the late 80s, 90s, I was astonished when I tried to get back into it a few years ago.
Kernel-level DRM, online checks, €80+ price tags, incomplete games that require DLC, and all this for rushed unfinished broken games. You keep paying though, so the game companies keep pushing ("if they'll put up with this, what else can we get away with?").
If any of this goes through in terms of legislation, it will mostly just have “buy” change into “lifetime subscription” (where as usual, “lifetime” means the lifetime of the service). I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be done, and the article itself alludes to that outcome, but it also means that it won’t stop the killing of games.
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How is forcing manufacturers to state that they are planning to bork your game in the future "increasing the barrier of entry"?
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It makes then accountable for their choices by forcing them to think of a phase-out strategy other than simply abandoning it.
An interesting side observation:
The usual inter country struggles in the Eu might actually play out in favor of customers this time. Game development is stronger in smaller EU countries ( measured in percent of the gdp ) so big countries will not block any initiatives.
---This seems like it's being overly complicated. Isn't one of their requested options just to say that it's a "subscription" or that it may be discontinued some day when you originally "purchase" the game? ---If that option is acceptable to the stop game killing folks, why all this talk about public/private servers, security, portability, etc. ---When you sell it, just say "you are really kinda buying a subscription and we might shut it off in the future, but we'll try to give you some warning.?" ---Why would the industry be against that?
Regulation is not a good answer to bad actors when the problem is too vague. All this is going to do is create burdens the big players can skirt cat-and-mouse style while the small guys struggle beneath them (ie regulatory capture).
I don’t have a good solution but this is not it, very open to the idea that this is a clear/tactical solution and I just haven’t thought enough about it though.
To be honest... in the last 10 years, there were maybe 1 or 2 AAA games I revisited and played multiple times. The quality is getting worse and worse. Every game steals/implements well known, 20 year old mechanics from other games, the story is for 12 year olds, same old shit repeated again and again. Basically aggressive, spoiled children in adult body commandeer 100s of people and create these godawful monstrosities.
Predictable response, they'd rather have complete autonomy to decide what they will do and be the sole arbiter of consumers' rights, while gaming history disintegrates thanks to the double-tap of online-dependency shutdowns and marketplaces that make it a TOS violation to leave your library to someone.
Nothing about "innovation"? Just "choice"?
But as probably many other comments say, if you buy something from Ubisoft you deserve it.
Seems pretty obvious to me that if this passes, big game companies will either re-label all new releases as “subscriptions” and/or just never make a single-player game again. And mostly nothing will change. If you don’t like companies like this, don’t buy their games. There’s literally thousands of indie game companies that don’t abuse their users.
> don’t buy their games
Not a solution. Other people will buy them and outvote you with their wallets. This has already happened. People did buy The Crew, and I doubt that most of them realized that it will be closed 10 years later.
What you just described is a massive improvement over the status quo.
Today, I have no idea when the game I just purchased is going to be disabled.
>and/or just never make a single-player game again
plenty of companies making single player games now would be fine.
I agree with "Stop Killing Games"' vision of what games should be like. But I don't understand why people care to turn it into a movement...
There is SO MUCH choice in games nowadays, including decades of classic games, that people should simply stop supporting player-hostile companies.
Vote with your wallet doesn't work when other people still fork over the cash anyway. Look at microtranactions, universally hated, yet developers/publishers make money hand over fist because enough people are willing to pay.
So maybe it's because people are happy with renting games and don't care to keep playing them forever? I'm just wondering if the concern is shared by most consumers. Stop Killing Games could make games more expensive for the people who are happy with the sad status quo - and they could be the majority.
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This movement seems similar to software licensing to me.
> If you complained that it's too hard to hash the passwords entered by your users or to encrypt medical data, or that you don't feel like complying with GDPR, you'd get rightfully fined out of existence.
Hear, hear.
If this happened all multiplayer titles would turn F2P.
People do not appreciate quite what a narrow path has to be walked by games from an IP standpoint. Code libraries, licensed property, per platform (and platform category) restrictions, general IP restrictions (not showing vehicles being damaged, or UI overlays on certain parts of licensed objects) and so on. This is why in the recent ROG Ally announcement Microsoft could not say all XBox games will run on it, because if it's a PC it's not a console, so various games will not be allowed to be sold on it as those contributing IP rights will have been split up separately.
Simply pretending these very real concerns don't exist is nonsense land. You want games with real vehicles or licensed music? This is what you have to deal with. At least these days they have learned to license music for longer than used to be the case.
This is part of the beauty of such a thing being a law.
If your code library, licensed property etc. does not allow companies to comply with the law, then its value is zero and you won't be able to sell it. So suddenly, all providers of such libraries etc. have to make this possible.
how did they do it in the past? If I can put my Tony Hawks cd from the PS2 into a cd player and enjoy all the DRM music, what changed between now and then?
If music labels refuse to license out their songs like that, then if this law passes, they're going to have to suck it up and play nice again, else lose customers/publishers.
Most of that era consoles would load level data from the CD, and then play the music as cd-da audio. There was no DRM on the music, perhaps because nobody thought of it, but more likely because there wasn't quite enough computing power to do it. PS2 games could be on CD or DVD and could have had cd quality music as a data file reasonably, but PS1 probably not, and cross platform games likely would use cd audio because it's easy.
The choice for licensors was to have the music in the game and available on the cd or not.
For a modern release, DRM music tracks that only play in the game is an option.
We've also learned that the licenses are (or were) often time limited... The publisher can't make new copies after some time, without getting a new license for the audio. Sometimes that's also related to a different format.
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The issue with most of what you're saying here is that all of that works the way it does because it can, not because it has to. Code libraries, for example, may essentially prohibit what is being requested by SKG because they can. However, if they couldn't then they wouldn't. The companies selling the libraries aren't going to simply shut up shop.
Which is just to say, if there's money to be made then businesses will do so within the regulatory framework.
Those are all just decisions the companies made. For future games, the game developers and the companies licensing IP can simply make different decisions. If a large market like the EU creates strong incentives for them, they will make different decisions.
Now, this is not necessarily the case for existing games. Revisiting existing licensing deals can be needlessly difficult. But I'm assuming the proposed regulations will only apply to new games rather than trying to force changes retroactively.
All of those things are concerns. But if video game publishers really needed to figure this stuff out in order to sell units, they would. Contracts would change. But they'd still get signed. Everyone wants money too much. The only hard part is trying to fix this stuff for games which have already signed on the dotted line. Or games which have shipped and disbanded their software teams.
But even then, can't they just opensource what they're allowed to? Even if it doesn't build, it wouldn't take the community long to rip out FMOD or whatever and replace it with working alternatives. Or submit a final patch which removed the part where games phone home before launching in singleplayer mode. Why would that interfere with the licence for 3rd party IP?
IMO if I'm "buying" the game, you can't also remotely disable the thing I bought. (And "buy" is the word they all use!). If you want to remotely disable the game at some point in the future, I'm fine with that so long as they list it very explicitly and loudly on the box. "THIS GAME ONLY PLAYABLE UNTIL 2030". Games publishers need to start being honest and upfront about what we're paying for. Its not an unreasonable ask.
How things are doesn’t prevent how things could be. Studios could negotiate better licensing deals.
anyone ever noticed how so many completely different restaurants food tastes almost exactly the same? it’s because so many of them use the exact same food suppliers to buy their food before they cook it. [0]
gaming over the last few years feels the same way. like they all taste almost the same.
> Simply pretending these very real concerns don’t exist is nonsense land.
i don’t believe this to be true at all.
if all of the things you listed are limiting game development so much, than this isn’t “progress” in the games space. if it’s really that bad, maybe we should regress, start from the basics and let some of the incredible indie studios or midsize studios take the lead who will A) bring us actual originality, not more IP rehashed for the thousandth time, B) not bleed gamers wallets dry and C) lets us actually own the thing we buy.
sooo many amazing games were made in the past that were able to do this and do it well, the difference is they didn’t cry if they “only” made $40 million in profit.
cod3 made like $400 million in the first 24 hours.
the difference now is the AAA studios are sucking all of the air out of the room and not leaving nearly as much room for midsize studios.
[0] sysco, us foods, and pfg supply an absolute massive number of restaurants in the US. sysco alone distributes to something like 700,000 restaurants.
> You want games with real vehicles or licensed music?
Not really if it means that I wouldn't be able to play the game in 10 or 20 years.
The number of people who want that may be higher than you think. It's the only/main reason why the FIFA-games exist.
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This isn't relevant to your points, but thought I'd pipe in to your rhetorical question anyway:
> You want games with real vehicles or licensed music?
The answer is actually no.
These concerns have been raised and addressed. Firstly, I am not sure how cars getting damaged means that multiplayer games have to become F2P - but that's not steelmanning your argument.
One of the major concerns raised has been middle are: components that developers purchase and use in their server implementation. This is often the largest hurdle to many pro-consumer outcomes: the developers can't share anything related because they don't own it.
The most likely outcome after sensible laws are passed is that the industry evolves just as it did with GDPR. Developers will look to other middlewares that are SKG compliant.
Failing that, gamers have routinely shown that they are capable of clean room implementations of server software (WoW and Genshin Impact) - all that needs be done is the client being released with all server auth disabled and some way to specify the server to use. Developers might even be required to provide basic protocol specifications. Essentially, repair it yourself instructions.
This strawman argument you have provided is exactly the same one used by Pirate Software. It relies on a highly specific interpretation of the initiative. The initiative calls for "reasonably playable state," which can have a vast number of outcomes that are different to the single one that you have chosen.
And if the cars do prohibit a game from addressing server concerns and remaining in a reasonably playable state, remove them. The game will continue to be reasonably playable following that.
How would a policy for this only affect EU games? EU has other policies that affect Apple, Microsoft, Google etc. as far as I know, any company that wants to sell/offer a service in EU will need to comply with its policies.
That’s not how it works. The EU does not care about what Apple does in the US. It’s Apple’s choice to either tweak their products to adapt to the laws of their different markets or apply these changes across the board. We’ve seen that with recent iOS versions where EU regulations imposed changes, some of which were done only for devices in the EU.
For some time Microsoft had EU specific versions of Windows.
EULA sometimes differ depending on location because a lot of the bullshit software companies get away with in the US is illegal in other parts of the world.
Another extreme example is the hoops companies have to jump through to sell in China. Again, this generally does not affect the same products in the rest of the world.
It is a problem that we know how to solve.
> The EU does not care about what Apple does in the US.
Well, partially they do. For example when it comes to the Right to be forgotten, there were attempts to apply this also to data which is stored and displayed outside the EU. Only after ECJ ruling (C-507/17) such attempts were stopped.
> For some time Microsoft had EU specific versions of Windows.
Microsoft does have the N (formerly called "Reduced Media") editions of Windows created in response to legal demands from the EU, but these are available worldwide. Other than that it is the same version of Windows, which just behaves differently when it comes to browser choice etc. depending on your location.
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The EU doesn't have to worry about what happens in the rest of the world. The rest of the world can benefit of this anyways.
If anything even comes out of this, the furthest a law could possibly go is to impose a 2 year window (after sale) in which a game needs to work as described.
That would already be great progress. For context Ubisofts the Crew shutdown only after 3 months of stopping sales.
It could also work as a deterrent on making dedicated servers only architecture. If you can disable dedicated servers instantly(instead of 2 years) but enable private servers that might be more cost efficient.
A law can do much more.
Just like the law don't just require that you can return you toxic ham within 2 years of purchase.
Rent-seeking, treaterlite publishers gonna bullshit. Not exactly a surprise they care about money most of all.
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Having followed this initiative quite extensively from the beginning, the most baffling thing has been the underwhelming support from developers themselves, both from studios and individual devs.
You would think the very idea of years of your work being rendered unplayable in an instant would be enough incentive to signal boost any effort against this industry practice.
Instead, developer discourse has revolved around just how hard it would be to do what this is petition is asking for. You are an engineer for crying out loud. If you solved a problem but a new constraint arrives in the form of a law, you figure out how to solve the problem under the new constraint. Just because something is hard, doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
It's almost like flexing your skills and signalling your elite knowledge is more important to people than simply defending what's right.
I think that most developers are just afraid to voice such anti-industry opinion. Gamedev is fairly small industry, so if you piss off wrong people, you might be left without job opportunities.
I feel... uneasy about the idea. Are games art?
If so, are you comfortable telling artists what types of art they can create? I know not everyone is going to agree with me here but it feels like a slippery slope.
Would any art gallery pay for a piece that the artist could walk in and take away whenever they wanted?
This isn't so much about art, more about what you deserve when you pay money for something. People are still free to make whatever they want.
>I feel... uneasy about the idea. Are games art?
Yes, which is precisely why they shouldn't be treated like a commodity. Nobody is telling artists what art they can make, what the initiative is about making sure public continues to have access to works of art.
Which is normal for everything that's considered to be of cultural relevance. Film studios and novelists don't get to burn libraries down the moment someone stops paying them. It's exactly because games are art that preservation and access need to be priorities. Can you imagine if Amazon started to delete books from your Kindle? (I'm pretty sure they tried that once actually, with 1984 no less)
The destruction of art is, in most civilizations, seen as completely obscene. The reason why game companies got away with it was precisely because games had a lower status.
How do you feel about art that changes over time? Temporal pieces. Plays that were only ever to be performed once?
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> are you comfortable telling artists what types of art they can create?
Yes, absolutely. For instance, I think it's fine to prohibit artists to kill animals for the sake of making art. Or humans, but it's already outlawed.
art, shmart. aside the fact that a large part of art is money laundering or tax evasion, what is being asked for is more like banning radioactive or cancerous paint pigment
Once art get sold, it becomes a product and your customers have legal rights in that transaction
Depends entirely on the game. Some are art, games designed by people who love games for the sake of games. Others are things that employ the use of art for the sake of long-term financial gain.
Yes, games are art. Which is why this is so important. Are you comfortable with destroying cultural heritage for the sake of corporate profit? Did you even ask artists working in the game industry what they think about this?
what a strawman. its not about "you cannot draw this" but its more like "please dont use dyes that offgas deadly fumes", a technical regulation not about substance
Talk about strawman, it's literally "I paid for something I don't like, there should be a law!" And you're comparing it to poison gas
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At a macro level, killed games are a good thing for gaming companies. It creates a shortage of playable games so that new games sell and continue to make money.
The biggest competitor to the video game industry is movies (Netflix, Disney plus, etc) and past games.
Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today? If players can play thousands of high quality games for free, why bother paying for a new game?
I suppose the book industry has the same problem, maybe there are some parallels to study from that.
> Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today?
This is something we can answer pretty easily by looking at the book industry. People do enjoy novelty. The pulp sci-fi/fantasy from the 60s-80s is long forgotten save for a few masterpieces, and there is a flow of recent books that people buy and read.
> At a macro level, killed games are a good thing for gaming companies.
But they aren’t good for consumers.
Who cares? This is capitalism, it's all about capital, not consumers. Good for capital == will happen.
It would still be illegal to acquire a copy of a killed game. Their numbers would still dwindle, since they'd be limited to people who bought the game before it was killed.
Until copyright runs out.
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Silly that this is being downvoted, especially since the book industry comparison is an interesting one:
There will always be people like myself who enjoy older (even outdated) books, but even we still buy new books because they are part of the zeitgeist and carry new ideas/developments. It'd be the same for new video games, some people would enjoy older games, but they'd likely still pick up a similar new game that developed something novel.
I guess the real problem here is that video game companies don't want to create anything novel, not least because it's a risk.
I mean, Project Gutenberg and libraries exist and the literature industry hasn't died yet.
These are weak arguments but there are valid ones why I would not think this has a footing, even if I support the attitude. What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine? You can't just rip/disable licensed items out, they may form a significant part of business code. Code and APIs would be needed to be documented. Why just games? What about abandoned Saas offerings? These restrictions might creep over.
I hate live service games like the next guy but legal advisors can bend these to form powerful counter-arguments.
Saas offerings are safe as they don’t let you Buy a thing. They’re very transparently a service. Same with timed licenses. It’s clear what you’re paying for. Most of the time.
With games it’s often not the case. You buy them and then at unspecified moment you might lose a significant portion of functionality or the whole game. At the time you buy a game you don’t know if it’s for a time, what time, or what will stop working.
When I bought WoW it was very clear to me I was buying a service. If blizzard decided after 2 years it wasn’t sustainable and to shut down the game at no point would I be entitled to own it. It was clearly a license to access their service, as long as it exists. Same for any other MMORPG
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Yea I think the problem is that people don't realize how expensive the upkeep of live games are.
Most new releases rely on Multiplayer, the publishers have to come up with creative ways to monetize it.. so they introduce cosmetics, stores, etc in order to fund the ongoing development and cost.
This causes a backlash and eventually the game gets dropped because people don't want to pay a subscription.
I also think many comments are a bit too eager in claiming "oh just publish the code" and "oh just let users host X". It's obviously not that simple. The biggest one for me is that single player games should still be playable offline after servers have been sunset.
I'm sure that with current games, licenses were indeed acquired for a certain limited time. But if you start development and you know you'll have to sunset it according to the rules one day, I'm sure you'll come up with other licenses or just a way to strip out content like that.
What’s the problem with releasing a server executable? As far as I can tell that would be enough to get around this legislation. And I can’t imagine that to be prohibitively expensive.
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If it's really impossible for you to allow a game to remain playable after you abandon it, the only reasonable option is to not sell it at all. Instead you can rent it, with the length of the rental clearly stated up front. Advertising a rental as a sale should be illegal.
Who defined playable? Take Diablo 3 and 4. They are shared world games, are they playable without them? Maybe to you’d but to me they’re not. world of Warcraft has a rich questing experience which doesn’t require playing with other people - is it ok if they just switch off multiplayer content? That’s a different game, IMO.
> What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine?
It's ok, the engine will adjust it if big studios can't use it otherwise. It's just people having to talk to each other.
> Code and APIs would be needed to be documented.
Why? Nobody is talking about forced opensourcing.
Why not apply it to Saas? If you sold lifetime licenses and you don't want to run it anymore, just let your customers self host it. Even better if you can open source it.
> the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers
Nice way to make publishers stop making multiplayer services available to the EU in the first place because deactivating it is illegal when costs outweigh profits.
Great, maybe it will foster innovation among indie studios.
I'm fine with that. Others will come and fill the void.
Sounds good to me! EU gamers will not be taken advantage of.
this has already been addressed but just for you.
they won't leave the biggest global market with almost 500 million potential buyers because they can't rug pull anymore, even if they somehow suddenly don't like money anymore others will gladly take there place.
the same "argument" has been thrown at GDPR which now every single corporation follows.
> Even the singleplayer components [of Ubisoft’s “The Crew (2014) were unusable when the servers were turned off]: [Y]ou just wanting to race around cars in a world with you and other NPCs in it, is no longer viable. Essentially, you didn't "buy" the game, but in a sense were "renting" it for an indeterminate amount of time, a lease that expired due to the publishers and developers no longer wanting to provide that service for you.
Probably true! There is likely some additional revenue that the publisher gets from running servers, even for single-player mode. The question then is what will change in these games if that revenue is no longer there to fund them? Will the quality be lower? Will the price be higher? Will the publishers release new games less frequently? Maybe they just don’t make single-player games anymore?
Maybe they just stop adding hard requirements for online connectivity to their single-players games, which is something which takes more effort to do in the first place?
I worry that they just stop completely shipong single-player mode as that seems easiest.
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Honestly? I think we can do without these predatory practices even at the cost of some games.
And I somehow doubt there’s revenue to make off these single player games being online dependent, because the most probable ways simply wouldn’t fly in Europe due to consumer protections.
Most likely it’s just “anti-piracy” or something like that.
I work for a game company. I am ardently opposed to this idea.
All you will end up with, in the best case scenario that isn't even guaranteed to happen, is extremely mediocre games for which you will have the server executable along with the client.
Whether you like it or not, thanks to piracy and competition (and yes I've heard Gabe Newell's quote on piracy), server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy, and not even just for games. And no, "just release your source code then" is not a valid rule to enforce either.
If you like video games so much but don't like the terms of serivce and price, have you tried making your own? It has never been easier to do so, and there are freely usable code and art assets on hundreds of different platforms for you to attempt.
>is extremely mediocre games for which you will have the server executable along with the client.
opposed to absolutely nothing? yeah i think we can do with "mediocre"
>video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy
if they aren't misleading customers about it sure. make the game a subscription and you can shut it down whenever you want :)
>And no, "just release your source code then" is not a valid rule to enforce either.
nobody said that. the petition explicitly leaves out the "how" because it could possibly run against existing copyright laws.
>have you tried making your own?
ad hominem and irrelevant to the topic. i don't need to have every build a roof to be against building it with asbestos.
Re subscription marketing messaging, totally agree.
Re mediocre, ok that's fine.
Re the "how", then we arent really talking about anything here. Until there is a how, there is nothing to firmly agree or disagree with, so we have to talk in hypotheticals, which we are, and which is semi valuable.
Re making your own, when a company sells you a toilet and it breaks, you fix it yourself or buy a new one. When your 1999 game doesnt run on Windows 11, you fix it yourself or you buy a new one. If you require companies to fix it for you, the small ones will go bankrupt and the big ones will find a loophole.
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> If you like video games so much but don't like the terms of serivce and price, have you tried making your own?
This is such and odd thing to suggest. People want to play the games they paid for, _obviously_ they aren't going to make their own game.
What you have paid for is not a physical copy of something that is guaranteed to work forever.
All you will achieve with this initiative is that that will be clearly labeled now, instead of implied.
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Your games are mediocre now.
It's better to have a mediocre game that one can play, than an exceptional game that one can't.
You're free to make games now, and yet it's most often hard to justify money for a game that isn't a skin on a version of solitaire (on sale).
That's how bad your industry is. So, please, with your warning. As if you have work product to bargain with.
You act as if your industry is busy. Outside of a couple of exceptional studios, and infinite sequels on literally only a few popular formulas (whether or not these formulas are good is another discussion), your industry is largely non-productive. If we are utilizing your metric of good vs mediocre.
I agree with you that there is a mountain of shit in the gaming industry.
Is any other industry different? Are Instagram and Tiktok literally not brainwashing hundreds of millions of people? Do defense companies care that innocents are murdered with their weapons? Do airplane companies face any enforceable moral judgment that they encourage relatively rich people to engage in idle leisure in other countries rather than being productive with their time for society, to which they owe some level of production in exchange for the society that raised them?
The argument knows no bounds. It is a matter of taste.
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> If you like video games so much but don't like the terms of serivce and price, have you tried making your own?
No need to go that far, there's plenty of games sold with better terms of service than the ones your company offers.
Forcing companies to be upfront about this aspect will help concerned consumers choose these instead of yours.
And which company is that?
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It is about truthful advertising. If you are selling a video game, you aren't allowed to yank access to that game away from users.
If you wanna do a subscription or a rental, you have to call it that.
I don't see why forcing companies to stop lying is a bad idea.
ah, yes, for example quake3 an extremely mediocre game that has server executable along with the client? what is this argument even about?
Ok, so your idea is that we will require all companies to release server and client builds, and also the source code as well (?), at some clearly defined point in the future, if they decide to terminate the live service?
Will we also require the same of the smart fridge companies? Will we also require the same of companies that don't sell live services, such as toilets?
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I think there’s a mid ground where industry does nothing except slap a sticker on warning people that game features will sunset in the future, making parts of the game unplayable, perhaps making some commitment like no sooner than December 31, 2030.
It will essentially be the similar thing as the Surgeon General’s warning on a pack of cigarettes or the Parental Guidance logo on an album. The are US things, not sure if EU has similar.
This is already one of the proposed solutions. Although you would have to state a specific date as not to mislead consumers. I would then have to decide if paying 80$ for a game I won't be able to play in the next 5 years is worth it.
Completely and thoroughly agree. That is a very reasonable outcome.
> server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy
It is a legitimate business strategy... for now.
It seems you didn't read the initiative text. The initiative does not force game Devs to release the code or make specific technical demands.
Game Devs only have to make a plan for when the game gets shut down to still allow the users to be able to play the game. How that is archived can be decided by the developers. Of course the law could be different in the future.
But most people do agree that it is bad to intentionally break games that people payed money for. All they are basically are asking for, is that games are built in a way that they can be enjoyed as long as possible (maybe supported by the community). Is that not also in the intention of the game developers?
It might be the intention of some game developers. I can tell you however that the intention of the people who run my company is to make as much money as possible.
My opinion is that you, as a consumer, should reward the companies who treat you best with your money. You should not require the government to do it for you, because if you do, the thing you end up with might not be the thing you receive, sadly.
And yes, this logic holds for most industries, but not all. I for one think there should be stringent rules for food processing, since that can actually kill you, and yet still putrid beef and tainted baby formula are sold on a relatively frequent basis.
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> Whether you like it or not, thanks to piracy and competition ... server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy
The only people you're effecting are legitimate players. Pirates crack the games and have an easier time for it. Unless you're talking about multiplayer games, which wasn't the target of the proposal (though even there I'd argue it's definitely doable).
> I work for a game company
You work for a shit game company.