The Stop Killing Games campaign have revealed their support for a Californian bill related to game server shoutdowns.
Im sorta excited by games that work a bit like an mmo but can be played completely offline like no mans sky.
I’m not even slightly surprised. Sounds like the exact MO of Stop Killing Games.
You don’t have to keep services running forever, that’s not fair at all, but you should have to give people the tools to do it themselves - because people should be able to preserve these experiences.
I don’t agree with the companies having to run the servers forever, imagine how that impacts indie shops.
But when they take the burden of running sole-hosted servers and shut them down, they should have to push some self host able server software for the community.
And single player hands should never require on line functionality.
Good job you agree with SKG. They have said over and over again that they do not think they should have to keep hosting servers indefinitely just not making the thing you spent money on unusable. Wether that be by giving the community server hosting software or in cases of games like the crew just not making single player online only.
Oh, cool. I’ve always heard them say that, thought their support may have been a slight contradiction to their previous statements.
I actually misread what they wanted to do and yes I agree.
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Luckly you agree with SKG. They have always said they are not fighting to force companies to keep servers running. They are fighting for us to have the right to either run them offline or to run our own servers when the game is no longer supported.
There are no requirements under SKG to force them to run games forever just FYI. Their wording is soft on purpose. It could mean running a server still sure, or releasing a dedicated server client, or even releasing the source code so independent developers and open source folks can figure out how to run them themselves.
Overall, this sounds pretty good.
I see there is an exemption for subscription-based MMOs, but no exemption for buy-to-play MMO (like, Guild Wars). I wonder how this bill would impact that market?
I think the assumption is that buy-to-play MMOs tend to be less microservice-based or ‘cloud native’ than subscription ones, such that they are more likely to already feature a monolithic server application. They’re probably thinking games like ARK: SE, and DayZ, rather than Guild Wars. In reality, some sub-based MMOs have monolithic servers (e.g. Mabinogi), and some buy-to-own MMOs have distributed architectures.
This was probably also an easier sell to politicians, by saying, “hey, they said they sold the whole game for that price, so why can they not deliver the whole game, server included?” With a subscription, it becomes harder from a business ‘rights’ perspective to argue that a player who paid for e.g. 1 month of a subscription immediately before the game is retired should be allowed to then own and operate the full game indefinitely, and then becomes a sort of, “how long paying the sub is long enough to ‘own’ the game?” debate. This is especially important because it could impact a lot of non-game software as well, so politicians are much more likely to quash this out of fear of backlash. So they may just be picking their battles.
WRT market impact, I am sure the shittier companies would use the exemption as a loophole, and just make all their multiplayer games subscription-based. I doubt it will encourage more buy-to-own MMOs in the future as well, but I think SKG cares more about the extant software people paid for already, than the market impact.
