It’s amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they’re no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.
Digital Fairness Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act/F33096034_en
Just create a voluntary certification that a game or developer does whatever it is you want them to do and boycott anyone that doesn’t.
This is like a law that says guac should be free at Chipotle.
This is more like a law that says libraries can preserve and lend games as well as books.
Which ought to be common sense, but here we are.
Go back to your pirate software streams
I use free and open source software and I understand that the license doesn’t entitle me to burden them to run and maintain a service for me indefinitely.
Pirates are the people who feel entitled to free stuff, even despite the wishes of the creator.
Stop Killing Games initiative doesn’t force developers to maintain the game; it only obliges them to release whatever tools necessary for people to self-host a game server.
This way, if anyone still cares about the game, they can start their own server and keep playing it.
And the stupidest part of this is the ‘omg my IP’ angle from a publisher.
You’ve destroyed this game because it’s not economically viable for you, and therefore the IP of how the server-side operates has no value; these are no longer secrets worth protecting.
If someone else is willing to host it at their cost then the only thing that can do is bolster the franchise. When a niche game has a devoted following that’s willing to build infrastructure to keep playing together, then you know it was a management fuck-up and not a game one that killed it.
There’s the sticking point (well, one of them): sometimes, servers are shut down because the developer wants players to buy a NEW game that they’ll make more money on. If gamers can just play the old game forever, they’re less likely to buy and play the new game whose servers have improved the rent seeking algorithms.
Thank you for clarifying but I still think this has the guac problem, which is the customer dictating “I think this is easy/cheap/free so you should just give it to me.” You don’t know what effort or cost is involved. There could be license entanglements. Running code that you don’t have the source for to be able to patch vulnerabilities in is a bad idea. This stuff should be negotiated voluntarily. I don’t see an arguments about market failure or externalities or monopolies to justify bringing in a regulation.
This is actually addressed as well. The initiative doesn’t oblige currently developed or already released games to have such features, as it recognizes all the financial/legal complications that may arise. It only concerns future games, and refers to the experience of many old games being initially designed with player servers in mind, rendering it possible to play them even now.
It is absolutely possible and normal to do this, and it’s really only the recent practice to act otherwise, which is why Stop Killing Games arose just now.
That being said, of course this decision would affect the developer’s bottom line. First, as another commenter mentioned, they won’t be able to push new games so aggressiely if players can stick to the old one, forcing them to focus on quality and originality of content, which are both more expensive. Second, publishing server code renders them unable to break licenses and steal server code, forcing to make in-house solutions or compromise with open-source. This is, by the way, why Microsoft only now opened the code of MS-DOS - it waited until all the potential lawsuits on IP infringement are expired.
Stop Killing Games will force more transparency, and developers hate that, because they don’t want to admit they manipulated players and broke the law to get here. But they should never have done either in the first place.
This is specifically NOT what is being asked for. Having an end of life plan doesn’t mean running servers forever.
Pirate Software is a guy who has your same exact wrong idea about the Stop Killing Games movement. I’m sorry you independently arrived to the same misunderstanding
What about, and this may blow your mind, you host the servers yourself? If they release the means, anyone who cares can run the servers and allow players to continue to enjoy their games.