I think your last paragraph highlights exactly how I figured it would work. If you couldn’t provide the servers when you ran out of money, it would show you weren’t complying with the law when you built it. Remember, online multiplayer games existed for a long time without requiring the use of company servers. The Game Awards’ multiplayer game of the year last year is playable via direct IP connection and LAN. Nightingale requires a connection to official servers and was slammed in reviews for not offering the ability for customers to run them themselves like most of Nightingale’s competitors do.
Comment on The "Stop Killing Games" Australian Petition is Live
GlitterInfection@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
- relase the server software to allow players host them themselves
- patch the game to not require company’s server (even if not all features would be functional)
- allow people to create their own servers after official ones are dead (think private MMO servers)
Your petition doesn’t allow for the second option, fyi, but let’s ignore it for the moment.
Let’s take a not uncommon case that causes games to shutdown: a company that ran out of money.
How do you do any of these things legally without paying your now jobless employees?
You need to either release the servers at the same time as the game, which has cost associated with it, or you need to hold funds up front to handle paying for the costs on the backend (i.e you need to pay an insurance premium).
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
GlitterInfection@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
So those things are added risks and costs that will have to be factored into deciding which games to fund and which to not.
So it will reduce the number of multiplayer games that get made.
I am a single player gamer so I selfishly am Ok with that, but less Ok with it being handled in a way that could have other unintended consequences.
As an aside, I don’t know how these petitions work, but would it be helpful to give concrete examples of software that has had this happen and what your perceived solution to it could be?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Great. It should come at great risk to build a product for customers that’s designed to self-destruct. It reduces the number of multiplayer games that we’ll be able to play in a decade. Even bad games should be playable indefinitely, but plenty of these are very good games that simply go through the natural ebb and flow of popularity. The solution is to allow me to host the server, connect to a host directly via IP, play over LAN (which means VPNs work too), etc. If you haven’t seen the Accursed Farms video, the root of this campaign, you should watch that. He sets the bar pretty low just so we have the absolute minimum. The go-to example for this is The Crew for the purposes of this campaign.
And honestly, I’m pretty regularly on the side of free market, let people do what they want with their money, but even if this didn’t bother me because of what this means for preserving the history of an art form, it’s become extraordinarily difficult for me, the consumer, to even know what I’m buying. Games with online requirements often hide it in fine print italics in the Steam page; in the case of games like Palworld, that disclaimer is actually wrong, and you can play offline just fine. Games with LAN often don’t advertise it on the list of features, and I have to either ask an existing owner of the game about it or hope the developer answers my question in the Steam forums. We need consumer protections for this stuff codified into law.
GlitterInfection@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This proposal doesn’t solve any of the issues in your second paragraph, and I wholly agree with you that those should be solved. Those would be much easier to regulate, as truth in advertising is kind of important.
The first paragraph probably feels good to think about, but right now, you don’t have any right to any of that. Perhaps start there if it’s important to you to change things?
Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Just so we’re clear, this is not my petition. It’s related to the Stop Killing Games campaign mentioned in the post description, though it was slightly modified by the author (one of the volunteers helping with the campaign).
I’m not sure I follow your example.
First things first - companies don’t poof out of existence suddenly. Secondly, the whole reason behind the end-of-life proposal is for devs/publishers to have a ready and easy to execute plan in case of ending the official support (whether it’s closing the developer run servers or closure of the company). The whole ideas is that something like that would be planned and prepared for during the development.
GlitterInfection@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I have literally worked at a game company startup that ran out of money and shut down abruptly.
And have you not been paying attention to the news lately? Game companies are shutting down weekly.
Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Fair enough. My experience is mostly tied to companies where even shutting down would be run through a process of sunsetting all projects and tying up as many loose ends as possible before that so my perspective might be a bit skewed.
I can see this being an issue for a small or indie developer but something like Embracer Group shouldn’t have any leeway in that regard - they could absolutely afford keeping a studio (at least a skeleton crew) long enough to release a single server package/patch.
GlitterInfection@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It feels like developing the problem space through examples and situations would be better than trying to think of preferred solutions and working backwards.
It might also be a decent exercise for someone to go through this separately from a consumer protections policy perspective vs a culture preservation perspective, which you mention.
For instance, if the law only applied to corporations that continue to exist past the end of the product, that would be a reasonable consumer protection, but would miss most games that disappear to time from a preservation perspective.
And if preservation is the issue you want to solve, then is this the highest priority in gaming? Maybe this could be solved through a non-profit funding the transitions of server code to the hands of the consumers, or through reverse engineering efforts to rebuild servers for games that have shuttered.
But yeah, it would be nice for this problem to go away, I just hope that attempts at regulating it don’t have bad unintended consequences.