Official response from EU Commission after attending invite only party hosted by lobbyists, attended by Ubisoft and other corpos
Open letter from SKG addressing EU Commision (aka industry/lobbyist talking points)
https://x.com/StopKilingGames/status/2062131784926519424
Video from YongYea if you’d like to listen to the situation
This is a valid point against SKG: “In addition, increased cybersecurity and safety risks may arise for players once publishers cease supporting those games, (which in turn can also create or increase reputational risks for publishers).”
I know the game was no longer supported by the company and they had no responsibility, and you know that too, but what about all the mainstream that will read only the title in Facebook or Google News that says “5 million computers hacked because of Grand Theft Auto”
Have you seen the state of older COD games on steam? Hacks that crash your pc, add malware, etc just by walking by a person, crazy stuff.
EA seems to be doing just fine.
That’s a somewhat valid argument against letting servers run indefinetly, but SKG is about a lot more than just that.
They don’t have to delist their games, making them unobtainable, when there is single player content you can do. They also should be forced to remove allways online requirements that are solely there as an anti piracy measure when they shut down the authentication servers.
As for multiplayer only, people have reverse engineered server protocols for some games just so they can spin up dedicated servers themselfs after the official servers shutdown. It would be trivial for a game company to ship a dedicated server file with their game so people can still play it.
The “cybersecurity risk” argument is about equivalent to the “think of the children” argument that’s always used for online age verification. It sounds completely plausible only as long as you don’t read past the headline, but can be dismissed fairly easy after that.
To touch on the multiplayer aspect: it used to be standard procedure for PC games to come bundled with the dedicated server so you could host one yourself.
Even with Battlefield games up to I think BFV, we could at least rent servers (meaning that software is out there somewhere) so hosting them ourselves after a studio drops support should be easy. You can still find servers for basically every old Source game if you look hard enough, same with the og Battlefield games, older CoD titles, etc.
You’re right.
Burning the book in case it might offend some future reader is reasonable.
/S