[knollimar]

It's hardly a whim if a game runs 15 years, they announce "our active playerbase is 60 people" and the game shuts down.

I think we need to stop treating it as a dichotomy.

There's an understanding it won't last forever, when you buy a multiplayer game, ans making devs make offline versions in the cases where its trivial is going to bite indie game studios.

Gamers have repeatedly shown they dont like subs. Its hard to model "we want to charge you 40 cents per month, escalating with inflation" but thats what youre asking for

[3eb7988a1663]

Gaming companies did not need to insert themselves into the process in the first place. I could conceivably continue to locally run Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc forever because there is no external server component.

[knollimar]

Not every game has a server architecture like that. There's been a Renaissance of indie multuplayer due to good libraries and third party dependencies.

Pretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.

I'd be 100% for "if your game has an easily releasable server you have to release it on EoS" but this bill isn't it.

[dkersten]

Some games are perfectly fine without online features yet they still got shut off. Mirrors Edge Catalyst only used online for leaderboards and challenges, everything else was entirely single player, yet it’s not possible to play it anymore because they wanted to shut off the servers yet designed the game to not run without them, even though it’s a single player game.

That should not be ok. It wasn’t sold with a disclaimer or expectation that it could be switched off.

[rpdillon]

This is the reason I buy many games twice: once when they release on Steam, and again (if I loved them) when the come out on GOG, with Doom Eternal being the most recent example, but also Doom 2016, Skyrim, Dying Light, Tomb Raider, etc. I want to reward the devs with money for giving me a copy that doesn't need servers to run. It's work to produce it, and it has value for me, so I don't mind paying. CDPR is particularly good about this (obviously, since they run GOG), but the fact that such an amazing AAA company has this stance is amazing to me.

[bentley]

> This is the reason I buy many games twice: once when they release on Steam, and again (if I loved them) when the come out on GOG

It’s the reason I buy most games once, on GOG.

[david_allison]

> Mirrors Edge Catalyst

Are you sure? I played in 2024 on PC and it was playable.

[dkersten]

I tried to play it about two months ago and it pops up a notice and quits. I found on Reddit that the notice is “we are Rory, but servers for this title have been shut down. Thank you very much for playing” which is roughly like what I remember.

According to Wikipedia: “in December 2023, all servers for mirrors edge catalyst were shut down by EA” but that only says online content was disabled.

It’s possible that the game is only unplayable on PlayStation, but still playable (without online features) on PC. But it does seem to still be listed in stores (steam and PlayStation) so I’m not sure exactly what’s going on. I’d have to redownload it to test it again.

[knollimar]

It probably was sold with a disclaimer tbh.

I wish we could target this specifically.

[BlitzGeology91]

> Pretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.

Well, the comment that you replied to said “Gaming companies did not need to insert themselves into the process in the first place.” If the gaming company inserts itself into the process in such a way that the multiplayer part of the game would stop functioning if the game company were to disappear, then the game company is a single point of failure. And it would be a single point of failure that cannot be repaired or replaced by end users. In general, I would consider single points of failure to be design flaws. In this particular case, I would consider it to be a particularly egregious design flaw because it’s actually easier to create a multiplayer game that does not have the design flaw (e.g., local split screen multiplayer, releasing the server binary) than it is to create a multiplayer game that does have the design flaw. In this case, it really is bad design.

Also, I’m highly skeptical that this would have a chilling effect on novel games. Could you give an example of a game that might be chilled in this situation?

[the8472]

If you have add a "easily releasable" clause then the game companies could just do something that makes it not-so, e.g. a shell company that owns the code and they only "licence" it without permission to release it or whatever would fly under that law.

[knollimar]

Yeah I understand it's unworkable; I don't think it's a serious suggestion. It is the cwtegory I want to target.

I personally would just put like a $200k sales carveout and that would make me happy.

[gosub100]

Effectively you're saying it's ok to steal, because "it's just from 60 people, c'mon".

Try stealing from 60 different corporations and see how that works out.

[knollimar]

Im saying they got years of enjoyment out if it and they probably didn't expect servers to actually stay up forever.

It's not stealing in that sense. You're enshrining "devs can't sell a 1 time payment license to an ongoing service" as a right and I simply disagree.

Your framing relies on devs not being allowed to sell this license. I don't think banning them is healthy.

If they marked the buy button "license" like California will soon mandate, would that suffice for you, or do you actually demand a perpetual experience?

Edit: also corps frequently short each other very slightly all the time. No one makes some outrage about small amounts like that.

[skotobaza]

But it's not about multiplayer games or modes. You can't play some single-player games offline as well. And some were even shut down, so you can't play them at all anymore.

[knollimar]

Yeah the movement muddies the two things together, presumably to avoid adding token multiplayer modes to prevent skirting by bad actors.

Single player ones are a no brainer.

[matheusmoreira]

> making devs make offline versions

There's no need to "make devs make" anything. We'll do it ourselves. The corporations just need to stop getting in our way with their idiotic cease and desist letters and injunctions and legal threats.

There's no need for them to spend even one cent of their money or even one second of their time on the matter. They just need to do literally nothing. That's literally all they have to do.

[knollimar]

I don't think there's strong federal pressure in the U.S and Europe is likely bound by international agreement.

This is a root problem, but you can't simply say "void copyright ownership" without crossing international lines.

It's an awkard international committee problem since you can't overwrite the centralized law.

[pbhjpbhj]

Explicit information at time of sale is required, that's a cornerstone of Capitalism.

So companies should be required to either have a server release or meet the their explicit obligation given at time of sale.

So "this game for rent until 1/1/2031". If it flops, they buy out the users, release to make the game work without the company, or maintain servers until they fulfill their obligation.

Capitalism can't refine markets without full information. That means here, how much support a game will get. Whether it's a sale or rent, and so on.

[knollimar]

The SKG movement goes beyond that. 2031 isn't an option for them.

The movement just says a bunch of stuff and expects the important nitty grotty to be figured out, but that part is load bearing for many.

Id support mandating notices. I just don't want indies to have to do this from day 1 before many sales tbh.