Only if you think the campaign means that companies must pay for the multiplayer servers forever which Ross has said on MULTIPLE occasions is not reasonable and not what he wants.
Giving players the tools to host their own servers or adding LAN functionality, though? That’s entirely reasonable seeing as that’s how multiplayer always used to work. I mean, there are still plenty of Unreal Tournament servers active today without any involvement from the developer in decades.
Especially since, if this initiative works, developers will make games with that functionality in mind.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 month ago
To clarify, your position is it’s ridiculous, or you’re stating that his position is ridiculous?
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
My position is it’s ridiculous. I agree with Thor. Saying all games must exist forever is too vague because I don’t think all games should be forced to exist forever.
Cowboy_Dude@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Per the official Stop Killing Games FAQ: www.stopkillinggames.com/faq (apologies if formatting ends up looking weird)
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
That’s fine for single player games but modifying some massive MMO so that someone can host it on a laptop is literally impossible. This language applies to everything. EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, all of it would need to be able to run on someone’s home computer when they’re purposefully built from the group up to work on massive servers?
Icalasari@fedia.io 1 month ago
They all should still be preserved. The code can be stored without needing servers to be kept open, for example
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
What? I write some code and then delete it and I’m in trouble because I didn’t preserve it?? I really don’t understand this concept at all
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Well, it wouldn’t be retroactive. As a consumer, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to know what I’m buying. If anything, this petition is way softer than my stance. You could get around doing the honest thing of providing the customers the ability to host the servers themselves by just clearly informing the customer at the point of sale how long services will be up for, if you truly want to try to convince people that it’s a service and not a product that they just made worse for business reasons. But they don’t want to do that, because then they can’t sucker people into buying something that isn’t long for this world.
TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Many consider games to be works of art in the same way that music, books, movies, and paintings are. In the same way that historians use the creative works of yesteryear to guage how people during events like World War I, historians of tomorrow need access to games to study the events of our lifetimes.
Book burnings have occurred throughout history and they have been devastating, but many works can still be studied because other copies exist elsewhere. The problem with games is that they’re deliberately designed to self-destruct. Historians 50 years down the line can’t study Fortnite’s mechanics or its evolution because as soon as a new update releases, the servers for the previous chapter of the game are gone. Even if we wanted to preserve just the final release, we can’t because it is far easier for Epic Games to hide or throw away the server source code rather than properly archive it when they inevitably kill the game. This is a huge deal because Fortnite has genuinely had an impact on our culture, for better or worse. Even if it didn’t, it is a technical feat to get a game like that to work well, and programmers need to be able to study the game after the industry inevitably moves on.
To be clear, companies shouldn’t need to maintain their games and software forever. However, there is simply no way to play many games because there are no usable servers for them, which is entirely unacceptable. The initiative simply wants us to be in a world where someone can put in a reasonable amount of effort to play abandoned games, and I don’t think that’s a huge ask.