A European initiative is now underway for videogame preservation and consumer protections against publishers “killing games.”
well, while i understand sunsetting old online multiplayer games because hosting game servers is a non zero cost, i can’t understand the need for singleplayer games to be always connected and rendering them unplayable
The company wouldn’t be required to keep their servers online, just to allow other people to host their own. So it has 0 ongoing cost and maybe few hours of coding during game development.
Unless you are a game developer I would hold off on assuming how much work would be required to do what this proposal asks.
Used to be the norm back in the day though. I’m saying 15 years or so before the old internet disappeared with AWS etc.
Self hosted should be an option and I think this is a reasonable requirement tbqh. Yeah it’s not 0 work but it’s not a hardship either, really, given the many hours that are going to be needed on netcode anyway. Especially if you know this going in to development.
Wat
Building a whole cloud backend is not a few hours work.
Plus I bet most of these companies share cloud tooling so they’ll need to make distinct standalone self host code
Most of what they use built-in in game engines, not their standalone code. It’s a matter of switching the servers used with some minor tweaks.
If you are a European Citizen, sign it. It takes a minute of your time. Not more.
I could see this leading to standardizing and outsourcing multiplayer services, which would be interesting.
That being said, before that happens, as a developer I’d be like: here’s a zip file with all of our proprietary stuff ripped out. Have fun spending the next few months getting it to work well. Congratulations, you’re now supporting a game that did poorly enough for us to drop it.
But seriously, go sign it. Long term it should be a good thing.
Have fun spending the next few months getting it to work well.
judging by some fan mods out there, i think many people would genuinely have a blast doing this (and do a much better job than the original developers)
Sweats in GameSpy
Honestly, it would probably lead to the major distributors also having control over that… So I guess one more yacht for Gaben?
Kinda funny that people on this platform consider that centralization of the service would be a good thing.
On one hand, I’d love to see drop in replacements for steam services, especially something that could be selfhosted. On the other hand, if steam services ever goes down, there are metric megatons of reasons to reverse engineer a solution. The centralisation could end up being standardisation.
I was thinking more of an open API of how the game interacts with multiplayer services, so that in theory anyone could setup a server, or server services. In practice I completely agree with you though. Nobody wants to do the whole “Oh wait, you’re on that server? I have an account with that other server” thing. Steam, or some other party, would just become the defacto place.
The proposal is precisely about not letting your snake ass do that, since it would be no different than spinning a private server, customers shouldn’t have to learn how to analyse network packages and break DRM just to play a game they paid for because you turned off your server.
Either sell it as a subscription or sell it as packaged product, not both.
Just signed it. Took 10 seconds with my ID-Card.
While this would be great for those “online needed to play” games, wouldn’t this also lead to companies preferring subscription models?
I’d assume it’s easier to not include multiplayer in the “base” game and just charge a monthly subscription for the online part. Now the proposed law wouldn’t apply, since the customer only paid for the base game.
It’s pretty obvious what the intention of the writers of the proposal is, but I feel like it could have an opposite effect and push even more to the “games as a service” model those greedy publishers so desperately want.
Still better than the shit we have where Ubisoft just stole my game, The Crew.
That’s part of the intention, either make a service or sell a game, companies are getting it both ways without the responsibility of neither.
The problem is that a lot of companies are already launching dead-on-arrival live service games, so unless they’re willing to make something unique, all they will do is saturate the market further and keep burning money. I don’t think this law would change those incentives much if at all.
