The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games
bbc.comThe goal is a good one, but it's too specific. It should not be allowed for a developer or device manufacturer to kill or nerf any product remotely, once it was bought and paid for. This problem is sneaking into other non-game software, and even physical devices! If you buy a thing you shouldn't need to tether that thing to the manufacturer, and it shouldn't be possible to make it useless when they decide to turn down a server.
As a developer or manufacturer, if your software or device absolutely requires a server that costs money to maintain, then your business plan should take that into account: You should be charging customers monthly to keep that service running. You shouldn't promise a one-time payment, take the customer's money and then yank the service away on a whim.
Nobody is asking for free labor to keep services running. I'm asking that you 1. only tether your product to a server if you absolutely need to, and 2. charge for that kind of product monthly so that you can leave it running while you still have customers. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
All this could be instantly fixed by repealing the DMCA's anti-reverse engineering provisions. Simply allow people to solve the problem, and the problem will literally take care of itself. Adversarial interoperability should be enshrined into law. If they won't support the thing, then we will. They just have to stop getting in our way.
It's also necessary to heavily punish any company that tries to leverage the legal system's expenses to financially ruin adversaries, especially individuals, by burdening them with the legal costs of defending themselves for the crime of exercising their rights.
Companies are hypocrites about this. On the one hand they say “we need to shut this down because we’re losing money on it.” On the other hand, asking them to release aspects of the game to self-host the infrastructure: “but that’s our IP and it’s valuable to us.” You shouldn’t be able to have it both ways. Sitting pretty on unprofitable IP in the hopes that it might someday make you money again is a net loss to society.
It's hardly a whim if a game runs 15 years, they announce "our active playerbase is 60 people" and the game shuts down.
I think we need to stop treating it as a dichotomy.
There's an understanding it won't last forever, when you buy a multiplayer game, ans making devs make offline versions in the cases where its trivial is going to bite indie game studios.
Gamers have repeatedly shown they dont like subs. Its hard to model "we want to charge you 40 cents per month, escalating with inflation" but thats what youre asking for
Gaming companies did not need to insert themselves into the process in the first place. I could conceivably continue to locally run Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc forever because there is no external server component.
Not every game has a server architecture like that. There's been a Renaissance of indie multuplayer due to good libraries and third party dependencies.
Pretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.
I'd be 100% for "if your game has an easily releasable server you have to release it on EoS" but this bill isn't it.
Some games are perfectly fine without online features yet they still got shut off. Mirrors Edge Catalyst only used online for leaderboards and challenges, everything else was entirely single player, yet it’s not possible to play it anymore because they wanted to shut off the servers yet designed the game to not run without them, even though it’s a single player game.
That should not be ok. It wasn’t sold with a disclaimer or expectation that it could be switched off.
This is the reason I buy many games twice: once when they release on Steam, and again (if I loved them) when the come out on GOG, with Doom Eternal being the most recent example, but also Doom 2016, Skyrim, Dying Light, Tomb Raider, etc. I want to reward the devs with money for giving me a copy that doesn't need servers to run. It's work to produce it, and it has value for me, so I don't mind paying. CDPR is particularly good about this (obviously, since they run GOG), but the fact that such an amazing AAA company has this stance is amazing to me.
It probably was sold with a disclaimer tbh.
I wish we could target this specifically.
If you have add a "easily releasable" clause then the game companies could just do something that makes it not-so, e.g. a shell company that owns the code and they only "licence" it without permission to release it or whatever would fly under that law.
Yeah I understand it's unworkable; I don't think it's a serious suggestion. It is the cwtegory I want to target.
I personally would just put like a $200k sales carveout and that would make me happy.
Effectively you're saying it's ok to steal, because "it's just from 60 people, c'mon".
Try stealing from 60 different corporations and see how that works out.
Im saying they got years of enjoyment out if it and they probably didn't expect servers to actually stay up forever.
It's not stealing in that sense. You're enshrining "devs can't sell a 1 time payment license to an ongoing service" as a right and I simply disagree.
Your framing relies on devs not being allowed to sell this license. I don't think banning them is healthy.
If they marked the buy button "license" like California will soon mandate, would that suffice for you, or do you actually demand a perpetual experience?
Edit: also corps frequently short each other very slightly all the time. No one makes some outrage about small amounts like that.
Maybe it’s better to start in a smaller, more focused and less controversial topic to set some precedents before trying to boil the ocean.
“Ah, but you didn’t buy a thing, you bought a license to temporarily use a thing in ways we deemed acceptable!” -publishers somewhere
"Here's a device we sold you, but when you first turn it on you need to sign this 30 page contract which says you actually don't own the device, if you are mad at us you have to go to our preferred arbitration, and we reserve the right to turn your device off at any time on a whim because you left a bad review somewhere. Sign it or enjoy your worthless brick which we will not refund. Oh, and now every single manufacturer requires the same thing for this device class. So you can either have a washing machine or hand wash your cloths in your bathtub".
These sorts of EULA should be flat out illegal.
My opinion is that is a fraudulent rental masquerading as a sale.
And any and all EULAs or similar documents presented after a sale should be completely null and void. But any corporation attempting to that should be fined a signficant portion of their revenue. Past that, dissolution of company.
But no, we live in a shit society that someone who signs up for a demo of Disney+ and then has his wife die due to bad food, and they tried to slap indefinite arbitration on him.
https://lawreview.missouri.edu/infinite-arbitration-how-one-...
This whole country feels like one big fucking company store scam.
I don't know how it works in the US but in the UK a contract term that you cannot read before purchase is simply not part of the contract and hence completely unenforceable. As far as I can tell this is the case all over the world, except it seems the US.
Yeah, contract law is simply busted here. If it were sane, these contracts would be deemed null and void. In fact, common contract law does require that both sides be compensated. It doesn't require fair or reasonable compensation and that's the big problem.
But I think there is an argument to be made that the EULA has no compensation. Since payment has already been made for the product, it's completely one sided.
1. Yes.
2. It's not just a country. Sadly this is a worldwide problem, this is the global standard. And it's sickening.
Then they should not be allowed to use words like “buy” in the online stores.
I wish legislators would poison marketing language more frequently in cases like this. It’s bad enough with “unlimited* data”.
That’s the exact excuse used by the publisher in the article.
As well as any audio or video physical media ever made.
"deemed". the past tense is doing a lot of work here.
I don't see how the publisher is relevant here. It would be the developer saying that.
Yeah, it's frankly ridiculous that "smart" devices need internet access. Why shouldn't my smart oven behave exactly like my Brother printer? There's no reason my oven needs access to the internet, it can do everything it needs to do on my local network. My phone should be able to connect directly to it via a scan of the local network subnet or using any number of service announcement technologies that already exist.
And it makes these devices worse. I should be able to control my oven using a simple REST api and home assistant. The fact that in order to interact with my oven with a home assistant I first have to reach out to my manufacture servers is just insane. It's an oven. It only has so many sensors and nobs to twist.
About the only grace I give these manufacturers is the fact that google and apple both make it an annoying pain to maintain applications in their app store. A manufacturer can't simply drop "oven app" once and expect it to be available on the store forever. But that too should be solved with the same regulation that says "Ovens, refrigerators, washing machines, thermostats, and doorbells must not connect to the internet". We can teach the world about VPNs if they want remotely access their devices.
> About the only grace I give these manufacturers is the fact that google and apple both make it an annoying pain to maintain applications in their app store. A manufacturer can't simply drop "oven app" once and expect it to be available on the store forever.
If the app doesn't use the Internet then the natural way to provision it is to have it pre-loaded on the device anyway. Why should the goal of "avoid needing to hit the manufacturer's servers" involve hitting Google's servers?
Worth noting that Brother for a decade or more now often ships their printers with the USB port hidden behind a sticker, and _lots_ of other papers and stickers telling you “you need to connect to wifi!”.
This is silly. No developer should be obligated to support an online game forever.It should not be allowed for a developer or device manufacturer to kill or nerf any product remotely, once it was bought and paid for.Imagine a highly complex online game that requires a few people and tens of thousands a month in cloud costs to keep it running. Now imagine that this game is 25 years old and only has 100 players total left. Are you saying that this developer must maintain the exact same quality of online play for 100 people?
No, what's silly is that you haven't even taken the time to read the initiative. You're coming out with the same incorrect arguments as PirateSoftware did.
What they're saying is (for games that would come out in the future only), is that they need to have an EoL plan for the game.
Let people host their own servers. That used to be a standard feature of multiplayer games.
So release the server code as OSS, data necessary to function & support community servers. Even in a crappy hard-to-support way, the community will usually figure out a way.
IMO, the move from community servers over to matchmaking & vendor only servers being the only viable option was a huge disservice to the long-levity of games. If I find the code around here, I could still get a Tremulous server running today for a few bucks, even if I haven't played that game for 20+ years.
This is why I stopped playing Call of Duty after the original Modern Warfare 2. After self hosting servers were removed, the game became less fun.
Solutions to this modern problem was solved during the dialup and LAN party era. None of those single player games required an online launcher.
Releasing the server code isn't always ideal. There's likely a ton of secrets, hardcoding, and exploits.
Regarding 1 and 2, my pity is mild if this requirement forced companies to follow principles of secure software development, configuration and deployment. Injecting stuff from deployment config is not hard.
3 is valid and can be tricky, as it would depend on when in the software lifecycle the release would be mandatory. If it's in a wind-down or bankruptcy situation, it would be tricky. Though that discussion is similar to the responsible disclosure discussion, isn't it? Exploiters usually already know them.
Try open sourcing a code base that is built up over the last 15 years and most of the devs no longer work there. Thats what you’re asking for many online games.
Not to mention open sourcing the code will subject the company to legal liability if there’s something weird in there like discrimination of some form.
Again, this would not apply to pre-existing games.
> Try open sourcing a code base that is built up over the last 15 years and most of the devs no longer work there. Thats what you’re asking for many online games.
Thats pretty easy actually.
All you have to do is go into the setting page on the git repo and change the settings from private to public.
I'm sure most game devs are able to figure that one out.
Everything else that resolves was that is merely consequences for which I have little pitty for.
The comment you are replying to doesn't argue any such thing, and is pretty clear in its explanation of how your position is perfectly compatible with what is requested.
The author is arguing for it.
This is what the post was saying:
1. No nerfing to the game/service whatsoever. This means you can't just kill online play. Ever.
2. Charge a monthly price or significantly increase the purchasing price.
Clearly neither of these are viable for most games and the game industry.
Nobody has a problem with rentals. Just be up front with the terms and don't try to pretend it's a sale.
That game is called World Of Warcraft.
It had its server reimplemented by enthusiasts [1] with no access to this "one of a kind cloud" for decades now. Heck it even supposedly had game client ported to new engine [2].
> B-but we can't release the binaries due to licensing...
Release the source. As a developer you should be able to write code that allows to stub out all the propriety parts. The community will replace your speedtrees, matchmaking, netcode, anticheats and so on.
Change is hard we get it, but the excuses are on par with any other industry..
> excuses
Exactly!
If you ever want a clear demonstration of the phrase "litany of excuses", all you have to do is post online calling for a game company to provide any kind of post-sale support or user-friendly EOL plan for their game.
1. "Game companies don't make any money, so they can't provide any development support after the sale, which barely pays for initial development!"
2. "Game companies are under immense time pressure so they can't waste time on EOL plans or developing the server to be eventually severable and releasable!"
3. "Game companies cannot release the server binaries because of vague licensing reasons!"
4. "Game companies cannot release the server source code because of other vague licensing reasons and secret sauce IP!"
5. "Game companies cannot release the server source code because of cheating!"
6. "Game companies might not even have the server source code when it's time to EOL the online service! You can't expect them to save a backup!"
7. "The game company might shut down and that means they have to just suddenly pull the plug!"
8. "Servers are expensive and complicated to run, and surely the community wouldn't be able to do it!"
9. "The server source might not compile anymore, and surely the community wouldn't be able to fix it!"
You'll hear variations of these excuses and others whenever you suggest these guys lift even a finger to non-disruptively turn down their game.
what is truly silly, is the practice of online requirements, to operate software.
I find this made up scenario entirely silly. What happena in reality is that games with unnecessary server components get shut down and games with small server component get shutdown. Players are not allowed to run own servers.
Tell gamers how many months, for the advertised price, they will receive a guaranteed level of service and features for.
Then let gamers decide.
Example: If I'm reminded, at purchase time, that this $70 game will work online for 24 months and single-player offline for 36 months, then I can make an informed decision before I buy. Studios would be forced to bring their business plan into visibility and be held to a level of service, and then gamers can't complain when a game is "switched off" according to plan.
This is already implied, just not explicit and quantified in advance.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a game that had early expiry of online already contemplated. And offline play should be rich and complete indefinitely. But I still live in the glorious console cartridge era in my head and in my emulators.
> Tell gamers how many months, for the advertised price, they will receive a guaranteed level of service and features for.
Companies would just default to saying "we reserve the right to shut off online connectivity at any time."
Well, then prevent that via regulation, too. It fatalistic to say "Well, we just can't possibly regulate companies, because they will surely find loopholes and avoid the regulation!" The answer is to write better, more thorough regulation that prevents loopholes. That shouldn't be such a tall order!
Just write a regulation that every game developer has to make a great game, not charge too much, support it for years, and give it away for free as soon as it's not popular. That way, we'll only have great games and archives of great free games.
That's fine if "gamers" are my age, but 3 years for a 12 year old is an eternity. This isn't a thing which can be handled like the cookie consent popups.
Maybe the parental unit of said 12 year old should be involved in there somewhere
Just don't design the game so that, when the business model stops working, every paid copy becomes a brick
i remember when multiplayer games could be connected to a user operated server.
the basic function of a multiplayer server is to keep the players game state synched, large numbers of players, and very fast gameplay vs connection rate and jitter is fly in ointment.
I’m a devils advocate on this argument.
Yes, a big company can take it away, but I think they have to leave it online long enough to get your money’s worth.
So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.
>So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.
This example is humorously short and this is why there is backlash to game companies shutting down games. What about the people who bought it towards the end? They just get nothing? All that time and money spent just gets thrown in the trash because they don't want a cloud bill? They either need to opensource the games and servers or keep supporting them for a decade or longer.
Not everything is economic value. For gamers, an online game can be a community hub, part of their identity, a hobby. It’s not about whether they got their money’s worth, it’s about destroying a virtual “place” they’re emotionally and socially invested, and the specific skill they posses when they’re there.
I think this is the root of it and what the article describes in the first half. I suspect owning a copy of a game will soon be completely eliminated and replaced w the subscription model. Then when subscription dollars stop flowing, the company naturally winds down the service.
Counterpoint: UK law gives you six years to sue if goods are faulty or otherwise not as advertised, why should software be any different?
6 years seems pretty reasonable to expect servers to be up. And wouldnt bankrupt every company giving prorata refunds based on that %
Certainly we'll just move the fig leaf so the free online component of games are now part of a subscription.
Ideally a free subscription through packed in keys and such but we'll probably end up being nickel and dimed even further.
Every developer on videogames has some kind of offline mode already implemented, because its necessary to be able to playtest the game builds on the developer machines. Any argument against SKG is lobbyst nonsense. With the very specific exception of stuff like MMOs. We are seeing cases of pirates being able to play those "turned off games" through cracks and private servers, so there is absolutely 0 reason why the publisher cant already do it.
So who gets to be the arbiter of how much time $70 is worth?
You?
The companies making the games?
Why should they get to destroy games—gone, forever, with no chance of retrieval or resurrection—that hundreds of people put their time and love into, and millions of people want to play, just because they think it'll make this quarter's stock price numbers look better?
Copyright was created to protect the rights of the creator for a limited time to promote the useful arts. Creations are supposed to become part of the public domain once the creator is no longer getting use out of them. Game companies want to break that bargain, scorched-earth style, and ensure that no one can ever use the things that they create to make anything new.
Why would you buy my new game if you're spending all your attention on the one I sold you 10 years ago?
because you made an effort born of true craftsmanship, because you found the properties of the game that appealed to users and preserved them, instead of taking them away, or locking them into a premium paid tier version.
Why would you buy a new bool when old one did not burned out yet?
And you know what ... it is ok for people to buy a thing, keep having a thing and not being forced to buy entirely different thing.
Why should we let these kinds of concerns dictate what happens with our cultural heritage?
Why should profit be the first, last, and only consideration when it comes to deciding whether the art of today is even possible to view tomorrow?
Releasing source code for games (including server part) should help.
Am I the only one finding the dependency on those videos games to be concerning?
Why California's New Save Our Games Bill Could Kill Indie Studios: https://arkvis.com/blog/2026-05-15_why-californias-new-save-...
Im a professional gamedev. There is pretty much no indie on earth who actually depends on cloud systems to work, because that stuff is expensive and indies dont have money. Thats a megacorp thing particularly from AAA publishers. Indies are either singleplayer (this is 0 problem) or they have local servers.
That article is paid for by the lobbysts and completely incorrect and wrong.
Two of my favorite games of all, Chivalry 2 and Hell Let Loose, are indie studio games and this law would make more expensive to make.
Im not sure for Hell Let Loose, but Chivalry 2 is a Unreal game and all unreal games come with a server.exe that works by default and works through direct IP connection. It would cost them 0 and im sure the game could just host servers with the normal client build like all unreal engine games do by default.
This the lobbyist's FUD, and SKG are so up-front with the reasonable constraints that it makes it pretty obvious that this is a paid piece.
Edit: oh, it's yours. Spend 5 minutes understanding exactly what SKG have said they are not asking for.
California AB1921 notably doesn't match those opinions.
> Now it becomes way more expensive for small studios to come out with games that have online features.
Good riddance. Online features suck. Make your game multiplayer or make it singleplayer. Don't add pointless online features.
PS all you need to make sure it works is release the server once you stop supporting it yourself.
> They rely on a huge network of interconnected cloud micro services.
Give people the docker file.
> A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.
That's more AAA stuff not indie.
Any sufficiently popular multiplayer Indy game gets ruined by cheaters.
Related on U.S. developments:
The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
I imagine the end result will be another layer of online subscription.
Good cause, but society has rapidly moved passed them just switching off games after people bought them. Now the hardware production companies for gaming are winding down and not producing gaming computer parts because megacorp datacenter parts have a much higher margin. The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud; a context in which these "stop killing games" arguments will have much less leverage.
Then I will simply stop purchasing games and continue to play old ones that I can run on my computer as I please, online server or just do something better with my time.
The whole thing seems absurd when you remember that no one needs video games. This doesn’t need to be legislated. Let them kill video games and then stop buying their video games if they’re just going to kill it off. Why are people still buying games that cash be killed off?
If enough people are still buying these games then clearly the game being killed off is not an important factor. If it was, they wouldn’t buy them.
What does need to be legislated is how these games and services are marketed: it must be made clear latest date the service is guaranteed to be up.
This is a phase and data center parts are usable for gaming. (Yes even with all the rasterizer and texture units chopped off, we'll have a wrapper that does that work in compute shaders)
> The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud
That might be your future. But as long as there are computing platforms that users can run in their own home there will be games for them.
Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud, and their customers have proven willing to pay higher prices for the types of gaming experience Nintendo will deliver.
Judging by the amount of people saying they've used and enjoyed cloud gaming I'm not as confident as you to make that claim. If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease.
I enjoy low-latency competitive games, and I'd say those are unlikely to get replaced by cloud, because many players notice latency spikes immediately. But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by people who like the feeling of owning their own hardware, or feel the need to have lower latency in games.
I'm sure if someone built a data center within two blocks of my home and I was able to stream from it, many of these issues would disappear as well.
> If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease.
Perhaps, but I never claimed otherwise. Simply that the personal devices that do exist will also have games for them. Computer games were here from the beginning, and they will be here in the end. And even personal devices that were chosen for non-gaming needs can play games, nothing requires games to run only on RGB-infested PCs.
> But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by
Yes, the market dynamics may certainly shift, but that's been the story for decades already. And if cloud gaming were going to be this immediately-better story, things like Stadia and Luna would have performed much better in the market.
I think people worry about the cost-efficiency of how to do gaming in a world where hardware is expensive, but the reason hardware is expensive is because it's being sucked up for AI usage, not for gaming usage. So cloud gaming will also necessarily be expensive by these terms, even if the average cost seems less for a cloud gaming subscription than owning your own PC or console.
Consoles already make you pay for online services. They already sunset games so I think even under the new rules they have the ability to stop that service at any time.
>Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud,
Consoles might as well already be cloud for all you control them. But I guess I should've specified PC gaming. I thought it was indicated from the context of "stop killing games". Also, to be clear, I'll never "cloud" game or use consoles. I'll just remain in the past with old hardware and old (and new indie) games. But the "PC gaming industry" as an economic block larger than movies is dying and that's a shame.
we still got newer companies out of china like moore threads working on gaming gpus, they had to pause new production because of the whole ai shortage but it looks like they might restart. is it usable for any serious gaming right now? no. but its already fighting the nvidia/amd monopoly together with intel.
as long as there is a market the producers will come, even in a super capital intensive industry like this. and it looks like nvidia is partially going back on the whole data center push with rtx spark. its just one high end product but it shows they know a lot of people want local gaming and local inference.
Hardware scarcity and cloud incentives are real, but they're also part of the same broader trend: more dependency on centralized providers, less control for the buyer
fortunately, that's been already attempted and despite the best circumstances imaginable resulted in a much welcome failure.
>On September 29, 2022, Google announced that it would shut down Stadia, citing its lack of traction with users. The service was shut down on January 18, 2023, and Google refunded all purchases for hardware and games made through the Google and Stadia stores.
even more fortunately, further attempts will fail for the same reason - input lag.
some timing-sensitive games such as Clair Obscur (parry) or I Am Your Beast (movement)? sure, they depend on low latency. that said, GeForce Now is, sadly, pretty good nowadays. enough to play a moderately fast paced game such as DEATHLOOP. Ukraine, streaming from Germany. 5 GHz is basically required, but in slower-paced games, on a phone, with 720p streaming, you can get by with 4G.
even games are not really a moat for owning hardware - next Gears with its timing-sensitive reloading mechanic can just get adapted for cloud.
if cloud gaming gets another hype wave for one reason or another, this time I am pretty sure they will lock in a much bigger user base. me personally? still committed to owning my hardware, but I can totally imagine my mother playing some RTS on a GeForce Now-connected tablet and having zero complaints.
Clair Obscur was perfectly playable for me through GeForce Now, for what it is worth, even when hitting parry timing. (N = 1, but a datum nonetheless)
it is possible to adapt to input/network lag, sure. I played Doom 3 at 10-15 FPS in 640x480 and Warcraft 3 with 300ms latency, and I enjoyed it at the time, but I don't think I could endure such underwhelming experiences after many years of much better ones.
honestly I'd still throw a penny for at least a day pass if I'm e.g. traveling. getting that Duollistes or Locust fix on a train looks irresistible
A lot of “yes, but…” in this comment section. Hard to tell if it’s HN playing contrarian as it usually loves to do, or just people so brainwashed they default to defending corporate interests.
Nothing makes me as hopeless for the future as reading people trying to one up the negativity about any initiative at all, and if no one did anything, they’d hit you with the snarky ‘go vote to make your voice heard instead of complaining’
It takes big balls to fight publishers and even more massive to fight the internet and the pseudo-intellectual snark of internet commenters. The entire SKG initiative has my support and perhaps it’s the only thing that might convince me that ordinary citizens actually have any say at all in directing legislation.
Yeah, I'm amazed that it's like that.
The "hacker" part now is completely lost on people. They just don't see the big picture, it isn't just about getting your money's worth. Some people spend their free time playing with other people they've only ever met online. Some people escape into a game after work. Relationships are built in these games, and when a game gets suddenly taken away with no recourse, it's a horrible feeling.
I can't find the best example, but this video is of a guy who plays these "dead" games and tries to find the people who are still playing, getting to know them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FEW7gxci2Q
Some of these people are just lovely, taking the time to show him around, teaching him the ropes. They're just happy that someone is playing the game. This all exists because the developers are still supporting these games. Take a look at the section about Blockland in the video I linked!
You can't make a person see a problem if his livelihood depends on not seeing it.
In my gaming circles, people who work on SaaS solutions are against SKG even though they are avid gamers and even open source contributors. They just recoil on a thought of an EOL plan. Same on HN.
"Think of the indies" is just same old "Think of the children" astroturfing.
Or they have an indie game theyre "making" and being forced to build an EOL plan for a game that will statistically be a flop is silly to them.
I feel a carveout for total says, say $200k USD or less, would be reasonable. Otherwise you're just conscripting indie time.
I was working on a game, but I'm not looking forward to releasing updates everytime steam changes their relay. Considering scrapping multiplayer completely.
Indie game devs don't care about EOL plans because they're not building a game as a service.
If the indie game has multiplayer, it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages. No indie is setting up a proprietary autoscaling game server infrastructure on AWS that they will have to maintain for years and have an end-of-life plan for if the SKG initiative passes.
The only companies that SKG would inconvenience are AAA/live service studios. They have enough money to find a workable solution, or more likely, spend billions in lobbying against this initiative.
Here's an idea, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's not new: instead of forcing all game devs to ensure longevity, just make clear criteria for what constitutes that longevity, and developers that meet them (or promise to meet them when they shut down) can slap a nice bright logo onto their game. Something like the rating system, except it's a line that's only there for games that claim they are "yours forever". Steam would have a filter for it, and so on.
Then you can make the punishments/fines for breaking that promise draconian, since nobody has to opt in.
Most single-player games would have the logo out of the box, gamers would come to expect it for those, and take a good hard look at single player games that don't have it. With multiplayer games it would be more varied, but there would now be a very clear incentive to see if it might not be possible after all to do what is needed to get that label, especially if none of your competitors have it. And most importantly when planning new games, you'd double check every decision would disqualify the game for it.