> a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.

That is precisely why the SKG initiative mandates it - so that it's available from the start because it's a legal requirement. Without that, you have no financial nor legal incentive and you end up exactly like you mention - reassigning or dissolving the team.

> If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.

"buy" is doing some heavy lifting here. If I buy something, it is mine. If someone else can arbitrarily take it away or stop it working, then it was mis-sold, because what I've really done is rent for an indeterminate period of time. What should be clear up front is whether I'm buying or renting.

The issue SKG tackles is that it's the video game equivalent of wildcatting & oil spoilation. A publishers contracting a small studio create a live service game hoping to strike it rich, often without doing any market research on the viability of their product, and then drop support shortly after launch leaving owners with a bricked copy.

They have this very cushy setup where they triple insulate themselves from risk while publishing games that have less snowballs chance in hell of matching their expectations (next HoK, Genshin Impact, PUBG, LOL, minecraft, fortnite, roblox, WoW).

I and a million others think the software industry needs to move past their infant stage and start taking their own products seriously. Frankly it's shocking regulation didn't come in the 00s.

>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.

You also have a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. People DON'T buy the game, they ARE voting with their wallet. You are doing the equivalent of telling people "If you don't like abandoned wells you shouldn't drive." We like the gushers, you should just pay the actual cost of drilling instead of passing those off on society. That all people would/should stop playing live service games because of the relatively small cost of dead games is just as ridiculous.

I work in games, worked on some of the huge(40+ million players) online live-service games out there, and I have no idea what you're talking about here:

" What isn’t realistic is stamping their feet and demanding that companies make it possible for people to run their own servers for live service games, just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve"

Like....what licencing issues? After the game is "dead" and the parent company doesn't want to support it anymore, we could easily release the source code or even just the executables for the servers. There's nothing complicated about it, it's just some windows executables with a whole load of config files to tell them what to serve and how. I once had to go to a gaming conference with a really basic laptop to setup a local-only version of our servers to host some private lobby of the game - it took all of 30 minutes to set it up. But oh no, players can't have that because what, it's too complicated?

Like, as someone who actually wrote some of these servers for various services in these games, I really don't buy this entire argument that it can't be done. If anything, it's just the people at the top who have no idea about tech dragging their feet and coming up with implausible "what if" scenarios as to why it can't be done. For at least 3 of the games I worked on I could give you a zip file with all the files and you'd have the servers up and running within an hour, given powerful enough hardware. And then what, we can't change the servers the clients connect to? Please. Modders would have that done within 24 hours of release, probably with a nice GUI for players to use.

>> that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.

Yes, and their help isn't needed with any of it, the game is by definition dead at this point, the alternative is the publisher shutting everything down and no one ever playing it again.

>>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.

It's not just about consumer choice - it's also about us losing part of the culture that cannot be restored once shut down.

I say that wholeheartedly as someone who has worked on games that are(for the time being) still online. And in few years they will be inevitably shut down, leading to years of my life and effort being inaccessible to anyone - the only way that you will be able to experience it is through Youtube videos. That's a cultural tragedy, and I'm 10000% for companies being forced through law to include it in their design that _eventually_ the servers have to be released to the public. They don't have to offer any support whatsoever, the communities will figure it out, guaranteed.

You can vote for someone else the next time. Sadly the EU parliament elections turnout is still relatively low in many member states.

I perceive democracy as a company, where people are bosses because they choose their workers. If you're the boss, and your employee uses your money to buy themselves a car instead of representing your interest, you make them pay for this and fire them

> multiplayer games can very well have an offline playable LAN mode

_some_ multiplayer games can, many can't, as they are using a cloud-based multiplayer backend that isn't easily replaceable (see other discussions in this thread). SKG makes no effort to address those differences.

I don't really buy this. From my personal experience, indie devs are more likely to use methods which make their server tech distributable (e.g. Minecraft). Large game publishers appear to go in the opposite direction for control and lineage reasons: "Crew 1 is dead so you need to buy Crew 2 now".

Anyone who gamed before 2005 knows that games do not require magic, expensive, managed remote services. We all used to run our own servers! The GameSpy era!

The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly.

Likewise, the legal risk for small indie games here rounds to zero. Most such games will, at worst, lose access to online leaderboards if their developers shut them down.

Democracy is mob rule when I don’t like it. Democratic activity is populism when I don’t like it.

> [...] running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda [...]

The initiative has no problem with this as far as I know; the backend being an overengineered mess doesn't make it non-compliant with what SKG wants.

I've worked on game backends that would've trivially complied with just a basic executable blob + MySQL, and ones that would've required someone to run 10+ services on AWS (yes, it was entirely stuck on AWS).

With that said I don't think anyone would really be developing things this way in a world where they actually took this type of compliance seriously, and there is no real upside to hyperfocusing like that on third-party platform solutions and so on.

3rd party libraries I agree about, I think it'd force people to actually do things in-house instead, which could be quite the ask for some of them (some of the libraries, and also some of the companies, who sometimes do not possess the talent to solve harder problems, or create their own things).

> games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic

But you don't have to design the backend this way. Especially if you know that you will have to share the binaries when the support for the game ends.

> This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend

Some games that have been open sourced by the developers solved this issue by replacing such library calls with stubs. I think this is an acceptable compromise.

>What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service?

If you still support the game, you can replace those services to keep the game running. If you don't support it (or decided that you don't want to keep supporting it because of the service shutdown), then you just release it with those service calls, and the community will replace them (if they want to of course).

> What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service? What if playfab discontinue their offering, or AWS decide to remove a service that our “mini self hosted server” relies upon. Games aren’t some magical piece of technology, they’re just software like everything else.

Not really an apt comparison (since you mentioned P2P), but providing something like HLDS should solve this, no? Counter-Strike 1.6 has long ended its development but it has (or had) a prolific community servers to this day. If Playfab, AWS remove that service, just use your own hardware.

> The groups hit hardest by this are going to be small-medium developers who are just trying to build a game

How so? Smaller developers don't usually build games that require huge online components that will be hard to release to the public. That's mostly AAA publishers that do so (at least I can't remember the opposite from the top of my head).