"Stop Killing Games" failed because it asked for the wrong thing
8h 18m ago by lemmy.zip/u/AppleTea in gaming@lemmy.ml from lemmy.zip
A screenshot of a tweet stolen from reddit, as is lemmy tradition.
You can't compel companies to keep a server up. It's a silly request that was doomed from the start.
But you can make it legal for fans to host their own servers, regardless of the financial success of the game. If "Stop Killing Games" wants to actually achieve something, they should fight for legal protections for fan servers.
Publishers shouldn't be able to issue Cease & Disists for fan self-hosted communities around games who's dev's they've shuttered. Hell, push it one step further, fans should be allowed to host their own servers even when the publisher is still maintaining their own.
TF2 is kinda the gold standard here. Why the hell can't we have community servers for Elden Ring, or League of Legends?
Pretty sure the goal behind Stop Killing Games wasn't to make companies host servers, but force them into an end of life plan that would keep the games playable without the servers.
Better, but that's still too much of an ask for the European legal system. Gotta frame it as consumer rights to do what they will with the software, not as an obligation mandated on the business. One puts an obligation of enforcement on the sate, the other decreases the amount of legal challenges the courts deal with.
If you watch the video by Ross it's pretty clear the EU commission was biased against the effort. Fortunately there's more support in the EU parliament and talk about expanding the digital fairness act.
I'd highly suggest watching the many clips available online on Ross Scott's channel, the SKG channel and whatever clips have been passed around. You're very much misinformed, seemingly only listening to the corpo side. SKG isn't dead nor asked for support in perpetuity. These are lies being pushed by the corpos who care for nothing but having the full comtents of your wallet and have been lying to the EU Commission repeatedly in an alarming number of private meetings that has forced SKG to answer the same four questions for over a year. The only thing this whole debacle has given us so far is prove how corrupt the Commission is. SKG is now working with the EU Parliament, who is majority on-side and several members of which have openly stated their disappointment in the Commission being so blatant, but also not surprised, just like anyone else who's been paying attention.
Keeping a server up in perpetuity has never, ever, not once, been an official demand by the Stop Killing Games movement. I've seen it from French consumer advocate orgs, but please cite who from SKG other than Twitter or Reddit randos have said companies should be obligated to keep their servers up or support the game forever.
Yes, the industry lobby has intentionally kept misrepresenting SKG's argument as that.
What SKG has advocated for according to the movement's documents, presentations and Ross's original ideas, is for a company to provide an end-of-life plan, to ensure that purchasers of a game, still have a game to play that does not require any involvement, support or expense from the provider when they wish to stop supporting the game. This can be achieved in a multitude of ways:
- work in-house or with a contractor to create an offline or LAN mode with some functionality disabled like matchmaking and leaderboards.
- release the server code, even if it requires several enterprise servers to host.
- work with modders to patch the game to not require the provider.
- Sufficiently de-obfuscate the code/remove DRM in a way that it would be trivial for the community to produce a working version.
As for LoL, these are still "actively supported" so is not the target of SKG except for proactive preparation for when Riot doesn't want to continue development and hosting access.
Thank you!
Where did SKG ask for perpetual servers? I need a quote.
You're perpetuating the industry propaganda. Stop Killing Games didn't ask for this, and if you watch the hearing, you'll see that they mention a number of possible approaches while also saying, "we don't ask for any specific solution, just that consumers' rights are upheld."
You should probably learn what they're asking for before claiming they're asking for the wrong thing, bro.
why did you decide to post this without making even the most basic cursory check to see if what you're posting is even remotely true?
- they have not failed yet.
- they have never asked to keep servers up.
Bro, you're literally making the arguments SKG would accept while being "it's asking the wrong thing". The core of what SKG was asking is that if the company stops official support for the game the game should stay at a playable state. It's not making any demands on how those games should stay playable. It's even very open about what constitutes as "playable". For example if PUBG support ended if you'd be able to start a match alone without anyone to play with that would be enough to be "playable". Even if there's no actual game to play as long as you could load into the world it would be enough for SKG.
A near perfect solution for SKG would be exactly your point. Games should come with community servers or whatever infrastructure (software-wise) is necessary to keep the game running. If the publisher wants to shut down their own servers that's fine, fans would just boot up their own servers and there would be nothing to C&D for the publisher because they gave the server software as an EOL plan. But SKG didn't explicitly demand that because corporations would instantly go "That's too far. It's too unreasonable of a claim to force us to give out our proprietary software." The "how" was left deliberately open so that the gaming industry would give anything, even an inch, to preserve games and they couldn't even give that.
SKG did not ask for publishers to maintain servers in perpetuity, they asked for publishers to leave games in a playable state, and didn't require it to be done in any specific way whatsoever. You don't need to perpetuate anti-consumer talking points that have no basis in reality.
OP has to be trolling by repeating industry propaganda.
And FYI, the stop killing games creators knew this would happen from a leaked article months ago, and instead shifted to work with EU Parliament, where they have majority support.
The EU commission just outed themselves as corrupt corporate cronies for nothing, as Stop Killing Games continues.
You can’t compel companies to keep a server up.
That was not what was asked for. In example there is an exception for games you pay monthly, like MMORPGs. Secondly, the request is to patch games or develop them in a way, that servers aren't needed to play them offline when applicable. One example that comes to my mind is (as I'm personally affected) the original Overwatch 1 from 2016 should still work offline, without the servers. At least the training area in example, or fighting against bots if it is possible.