Hey! That's exactly what lobbyists against regulations would say!

It's a much smaller set of European citizens, and yet they have a much larger access to lawmakers. So no, it's not idiotic.

> just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve

A lot of things are "impossible" until they become legally required, at which point it's just business as usual.

> and 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

Which is why we need a legal requirement - so that companies plan ahead for this.

> 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.

What you're saying is literally what the lobby groups think SKG is trying to go for. It's not at all what they're asking for. You should maybe take a look at what they are actually proposing and some of the presentations by developers on why it is sensible.

They're not stupid, there has been a lot of groundwork for this over the past 10+ years.

>If they kept it to single player games and a push for games which aren’t multiplayer not to have a

but they are keeping to that. unfortunately

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.

What about the directive would be unimplementable? Please give specifics here. SKG has repeatedly hammered this point: They only pursue this for _new_ games, only care about non-live-service games (games where you have a subscriptions are obviously "rented", and so wouldn't count). What they want is for those games to have an EOL plan built into the game from the start if they want to rely on a server. This doesn't feel like an unreasonable ask, and I'd ask you to show me what exactly about this is complicated.

It's worth noting that they don't mandate a particular plan. A solution can take many forms - multiplayer games could have servers released, _or_ be given a "direct connection" method, or even have a local (no network) multiplayer option, and still be within what SKG was asking for. For singleplayer games, it's even easier, they can just have a killswitch for the "required server" components.

All of this is cheap to do, it just needs to be planned for so that when the time comes, all the tools are in place for the EOL plan to proceed.

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

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

Not sure about the technical reality here - until 2010s, singleplayer games didn't require an Internet connection, and for multiplayer ones you could download a dedicated server application, host it yourself. Only recently it became locked down for the corporate profit; the only party making it hard are the game developers themselves.

What does telling your customers you plan to make a game unplayable if it doesn’t perform exactly as you expect financially have to do with technical reality, pray tell?

What SKG is asking for is not only technical reality but easy to do if you plan for it from the start.

Please actually read the proposed initiative.

> develop your game with offline playability in mind from the beginning

> players churn on their own without social features

you say one thing but the market votes the other way. Game developers are under pressure to turn a profit. If you want a game your way, develop them yourself! Thats how I started making games for myself. Projecting or pressuring others to do so yield no productive consequence.

> 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.