[lopatin]

Can someone please ELI5? I've heard much about it but still, with all the drama, I still don't get it.

SKG is an initiative that will force game publishers to keep a game online, provided that people have paid for it, and the publisher is not bankrupt? Is that right? What does it have to do with democracy?

[TimFogarty]

No, they do not want to force publishers to keep a game online. The initiative just wants developers to provide a way for users to keep using a game after it has gone EOL by allowing users to run their own servers or by no longer requiring internet access.

See the FAQ[1]:

> Aren't you asking companies to support games forever? Isn't that unrealistic?

> A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:

> 'Gran Turismo Sport' published by Sony

> 'Knockout City' published by Velan Studios

> 'Mega Man X DiVE' published by Capcom

> 'Scrolls / Caller's Bane' published by Mojang AB

> 'Duelyst' published by Bandai Namco Entertainment

I'm not sure what the question "What does it have to do with democracy?" is referring to. Some people find that no longer having access to video games they paid for isn't fair so are petitioning their governments for consumer protection against that.

[1] https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

[lopatin]

Thanks, that clears it up. The democracy thing was referring to other comments in this post.

[yndoendo]

A solution to the problem was developed in the late 90s / early 2000.

Games allowed for personally hosted servers and the ability to connect to them. This is how original Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Quake III, Doom 3, Enemy Territory, and more worked. A person did not have to create a user account with the company that produced the title.

Modern day games require an user account for their services and you are only allowed to connect to their servers without being able to self-host.

Self-hosting was very beneficial during dial up days because the local ISP could run the server to reduce connection latency.

Games like Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a great example of how bad it has become.

[caranti]

Some good responses here already. One angle that's not been mentioned yet is informed consent at the time of purchase.

When "buying" not "renting" there is presently no information for the consumer to make an informed choice about what they are purchasing when it comes to a live service game because no end-of-service date is available at the time of making the purchasing decision.

This is in large part why the end of The Crew was problematic for many people.

Had the service end of life been advertised at the point of purchase the consumer could have knowingly "purchased" a time-limited product, or not, but the decision would have been informed.

All this stuff about end-of-life plans, releasing self-hosted servers, patching out online-only stuff and leaving behind an offline-only game, etc, is great, but it's only one of the possible remedies that SKG have been discussing for the last couple of years.

Another perfectly feasible one is not to dress up a time-limited entitlement to participate in a live service as the same thing as an "own forever" product at the point of purchase.

[LorenDB]

SKG will prevent game publishers from making online games unplayable. This could be as simple as releasing the server code and adding a setting to allow custom servers.

Basically the official servers can die, as long as unofficial servers can be used instead.

[Ekaros]

Or more so semi-online games. With some components that should be fully playable offline. There is no reason why these offline components shouldn't continue to operate when servers are shutdown.

[bsjaux628]

What SKG movement want, in short terms, is that game developers/publishers of live service games and online only games be forced, once the games is no longer supported, to provide tools, software, executables to the community to keep the game going. They are using the banner of consumer protection and a public EU initiative to force the EU politicians to debate and come up with a solution.

The drama mostly stems from the fact that the head of the movement is a gamer with no knowledge of either software development or game development, so he has a VERY simplistic view of how a game server-client works and thinks that developers just have a .exe executable running from a raspberry pi that can be uploaded to github and that's it. When people with knowledge call out that there are TONS middleware used to develop a game with their own licenses and that a server nowadays is more than a single machine, he just says: well, this movement is no retroactive so new games will be develop with that in mind and automatically every software vendor will be fine with distributing their code so that everyone can keep playing.

While I support the spirit of the movement, this will ultimately end up with a warning label in a box because real life has more nuances.

[m4rtink]

I think someone with his perspective might be actually a perfect head of the movement. Most people who play games are not programmers & games are becoming a big part of modern culture.

Why should people playing (and paying !) for games really care what bad technical or business decisions have the publishers done when they see part of their culture being killed to save a buck ?

A lot of other important problems have been resolved in a similar manner without every participant in the movement being a technical expert.

[bsjaux628]

In a three way chat between the movement, politicians and the game industry, you need to know the technical details to rebuke the arguments and support your claims.

Also, the technical decisions are not just about saving a buck but getting the game shipped. If my game is about growing vegetables and I want to let the player drive to the state farm, but I don't want to spend time (and money) building my own physics engine for driving, I grab a solution off the shelve with their license and go back to the core of my game, this same thing is repeat for many other things like authentication, anti-cheat, networking, etc

[maccard]

I’m a game developer - this sums up my feelings perfectly.

A lot of this middleware isn’t necessarily even game middleware - think of a turn based game that might use a custom DB instead of mongo or SQL. You’re effectively banning any non game specific middleware from being used or requiring that every company provide a separate licensing path for game developers.

[NooneAtAll3]

> What does it have to do with democracy?

is this going to be the next "think of the children" question?

what's the point of mentioning this?

[lyu07282]

> Is that right?

That's the lie being told to stop stop killing games, so no.