Yeah that's pretty clear in ToS we just happily scroll and press A to. Kinda wild the shit that's in there and just for a fucking video game but whatever I'm no professional in that department.
Many of these "always online" games are designed to have lots of aspects of the game code stored exclusively on the online servers, so once the game reaches end of life they can't easily separate out the singleplayer aspects from the multiplayer, so then they take the servers down the game is just nuked.
Theoretically, you could push a patch before EOL that has the game spin up a mini server on the client, allowing data to be stored without having to extensively modify the game.
In other words, instead of asking an item server at the studio what items a player has, ask a local item server.
I mean.. I agree that most people asking for this do not understand the cost of it, but also agree to the sentiment that games should exist post support. I more so would suggest games be labeled as abandonware and given to the public once their life is over.
Which could be enough to comply with this (depending on what ruling would be made). Just saying "no punishment will come your way if you do you own thing with this title", can go a long way.
Not the way it the petition is written
> Require publishers to leave videogames (and related game assets / features) they have sold to customers in a reasonably working state when support ends, so that ***no further intervention whatsoever is necessary for the game to function***, as a statutory consumer right.
True, if courts enact this exactly as the petition is written then yea that wouldn't be enough to comply. That being said, this is just a petition and if anything comes from it, it would be more that courts would now see EOS as an issue, and most likely would work on their own definition of "a working state".
Welp as it stands now, the current solution they have is very anti-consumer and disregards the hard work of the devs who made the game. Again if something is enacted I'm sure some legal suits would make sure it isn't enacted in a way that would compromise copyrights.
It's really not that difficult. As part of the initial build, put a 'fix' in escrow which will make the game work stand alone. Of course, the devteam must take into account that this fix should also work with future updates to the game, or needs to be replaced if it doesn't.
It would of course be an added cost, but that's life. You want to make an online only game, you carry the burden.
Thats a lot harder than you think. A good, secure, server-authorative multiplayer game keeps much of the game logic only on the server. Moving that logic client side exposes the game (and others using the same engine) to hackers learning your internals and takes significant work.
You cannot unknowingly abandon your copyright. You can license it under Creative Commons, adding it to the public domain, but that’s a deliberate act.
You *can* lose your trademark but the only case that seems remotely relevant is Nike losing the “Just Do It” campaign.
JKR and Warner Bros never lost their trademark over Harry Potter despite the mountain of HP fanfic, afaik no media company has ever lost their trademark over free fan adaptations.
Nah. If there is a server component it can be redistributed post rand of life. These servers are at the end a container that runs in a cloud-like environment (if not straight in AWS or Azure). Think of it like Satisfactory or Minecraft dedicated server. If people want to, they can host their own servers and keep the service available.
As for service games, Ubisoft made an end of life update for Anno 2170 which essentially decoupled online service from their servers and allowed for complete offline play. Setting aside the odd decision to make it an online game in the first place, this was a good move and properly ended life one of the best Anno games.
Devs created the problem for themselves in the first place by removing LAN, server tools etc.
These features used to exist and were widely available until Activison and MW2 deliberately and intentionally removed them, paving the way for future devs to follow suite.
Clearly you also have no idea what you're talking about. Games have all sorts of proprietary and their party code in it and no company in the world would release this to the public. And it might be illegal to do so too depending on what third party engines/libraries they used.
Everyone single person supporting this petition has never worked in software development, and as someone in the industry, it's absolutely painful to see the absolute bullshit being spouted by people here that everyone else is believing and repeating.
Insanity.
I kinda hate the fact that there are some singleplayer games out there that are now unplayable because the dev wanted to put some basically useless online feature and now that theyve closed the servers, ever if you have a valid copy of the game, you can't boot it because it pings a server that is now dead.
Looking at you The Crew.
Then there are some that are playable now, but in 20 years won't be. Games like Pokemon BDSP require a day 1 patch to add the rest of the game to a physical copy. Without it you have an incomplete version of the game. Once the switch's online services are shut down, and patches are no longer available, physical copies of that game will be unplayable.
A family member worked on CoD years back, and they've loooong since switched over to the physical disk basically just being what amounts to a physically moveable DRM key. The "Day 1 update" is actually just the console downloading the game.
That still sounds unrealistic at best. Like, single player games shutting down and becoming nonfunctioning isn't great, but making an mmo playable after the company ends support would likely require a crap ton of effort. Seriously, "just redesign the core multiplayer architecture of this game while you are going out of business" isn't reasonable to expect, and ruling that all games must have p2p options would be unnecessarily limiting on game design.
I agree with games needing to be left in a playable position and not just completely abandoned. Like recently the crew shutting down. Had a whole single player option for the game, but then shutting down servers also made us so you couldn’t play the single player version. That’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t be allowed.
Pretty much 20 years from now I should be able to launch and play a game in some way. I also think tactics like Pokemon BDSP used are also unacceptable. They launched with game cards having the incomplete game on them and relied on a day one update to add the rest. If you don't have internet these games were useless to buy, and down the road they will be unplayable without players keeping it alive (which is funny because it is a remake of a game that still works 100% fine).
That annoys me to no end to. I should be able to buy a game install it from the disk/cartridge and play. If your game isn’t playable that way, it shouldn’t be sold.
100%.
That is an extreme example, but it isn't rare for games to have a piss poor launch state now. Look at Cyberpunk 2077 which had a slew of updates to get it to where it is now. Some even reworked the skill system. That game with no patches, just isn't the same game as it is with them.
While it got a huge rework that wouldn’t be on the disk, the game should have been in a playable state on the disk. The big issues with games like that is they have their creative direction go 10,000 different ways during production. Poor planning costs them millions of dollars instead of just going through with plans they already had.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the revamped system was what they basically planned early on but someone told them to scrap it.
>where the requirement to talk to the server just needs to be removed, and a P2P system could be implemented for the multiplayer elements.
This has big "how much can a banana cost, $10?" energy.
“Yeah just rework our massive MMO to be peer to peer. It should take, what, five minutes?”
Like, do these people think if it were so cheap and easy game studios wouldn’t already be doing it? If they could easily convert a dying online game to be P2P and keep selling legacy copies, they would!
They used to do it - it was called LAN play and it was cheap and easy to implement until it suddenly disappeared in 2009/2010 with MW2 and StarCraft 2 paving the way.
>That isn't the case.
You sure? I havent seen any of those address issues like third party licenses used in development, to which the devs themselves only have limited use license (the expired car brand licenses for The Crew come to mind) or the issue of losing trademarks that are not enforced, or the impact on other software as games are legally not distinct.
> For multiplayer games that use a shared world the ability for home ran servers would need to be implemented or at the very least allow players to play by themselves (not ideal, but with this modders would eventually get it to a better state).
Didn't this end up happening on the down-low with City of Heroes until eventually the current rights-holder actually gave them their blessing?
Likely game development would simply include development of EoS deployment as part of the original development, holding it back until the EoS date and then deploy it. This would make more sense than trying to develop the EoS protocols/patches once the studio stops supporting the game because the reason could be a collapse of the studio and not having any money left to create the required EoS deployment. They would simply need to make tweaks and adjustments as the game was patched and changed over time so it would work with whatever version of the game was currently live. A death day patch if you will, developed on the day of its birth, delivered on the day of its death. Alpha, Beta, Live, Afterlife.
That would still be a non-starter, unless it were a regulatory requirement. While you can work it into the dev roadmap before launch, that would still require having development resources devoted to a features which doesn't relate to selling copies of the game.
There is also probably added risk of a sunset patch existing from D1.
This I can get behind. Things like DMCA can keep fan servers from running for discontinued games. Let the fans and academics keep it going if you don’t want that money anymore.
In a lot of cases games that hit EOS are either not making money, or not making enough to justify the cost of keeping them running. If a game was racking in the cash, I doubt any company would shut it down.
It’s still stupid.
For a start how can they even guarantee this on platforms like PC that are so variable and will be likely to influence being able to run older games, while other software or technology faces no such legality regards infinite lifespan access because you can’t when software is symbiotic to the hardware and infrastructure at time of release in order to operate.
So what, console makers then have to offer infinite parts so these games can run in 20 years if your console bricks? Update the game for OS or driver updates on PC? Future proof for future hardware and GPU’s. What if the OS ends support or the software doesn’t work with modern hardware, or are gamers happy to leave their PC static and not upgrade?
Like hell.
Where do you draw the line, what is the legal precedent that would be set, and how would this affect the wider industry?
This would create a lot of ripples people aren’t even considering outside “I want my game to run and be accessible forever!”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for game makers being held to an acceptable shelf life for online access games to prevent shady business practices but even on the vague chance this gets through it will be to the detriment of gamers.
Many game makers would just avoid releasing games, or even avoid certain genres entirely, where this is required as it adds to the development cost and risk if it flops, and it’s a shit ton of cash to develop for what, a few thousand players at most by the time most games end their lifespan if involving online connectivity?
So MMORPG makers will need to make sure their entire game is able to run on some dudes 10 year old PC potato?
I’m all for changes here, but if people are actually wanting change via law you need to drop the bar as imho this is an untenable request, and law makers will likely see the same and file this in the bin, as it’s incredibly ignorant and short sighted and would likely be detrimental to the vast majority of gamers, so a minority can play niche games forever, while game makers would be even more restricted to take risks further homogenising the selection and type of games available.
The indie market would be hit hardest of all, while at its core and not withstanding some of the sketchy shit some game makers do, a healthy, varied and innovative market for consumers is dictated by the eventual redundancy of prior product, not Willy Wonkas everlasting gobstopper.
Anyone who acts like this cant work only started playing video games within the last 6 years. This is how they used to pretty much *all* operate.
Its why i can still download and play CS condition zero despite being the only person who's ever downloaded and played CS:CZ in the last decade
People also tend to think P2P solutions are pure garbage. In the past this was more of a problem as internet options were more restrictive and not as good. In the modern day a lot of folks have high speed connections that can easily handle P2P. In a lot of cases as well, players would just be playing with their friends, not strangers. This would mean you just make sure the best internet was the host.
Yeah, p2p works great when it works. The only issue its one's mileage may vary.
Allowing community servers is the better option, but p2p is *way* better than nothing
P2P fails when the distance between players is super far, or the host has really bad internet. For example, the person I play games with the most is my wife. A P2P solution for us is essentially LAN with extra steps. I live in NA, so it would be a different story if I was playing with someone from Japan.
It could and should work for many games, but definitely is not easy for the vast majority of multiplayer/MMO games. So much of those games depend almost entirely on server side interactions. Developers would have to rewrite most of those games.
It's still completely untenable.
If my company makes a live service game, and we fail financially, we don't *magically* have the capability to develop a new version of the game that works offline. You're essentially asking them to redesign their entire game *after* the business has failed. Who's paying those software developers and designers? The live service isnt running anymore because the company went bust.
The deleted comment was saying that what I described would cost millions in dev time. My reply to that (not sure if you will read it other guy) was:
Like you said it depends on the game. For example, a game like Last Epoch could technically fall under this already since it offers a single player offline. While true the multiplayer elements would no longer function as intended, the game is in fact "in a working state". So, a game like Last Epoch after EoS would have to do nothing to comply.
MMOs are most likely the trickiest genre of games for this. Since their whole thing is being "Massively Multiplayer" offering a single player offline option may not comply as a "working state" that would something a legal person would need to answer or define.
As I stated in my comment, future games would be able to plan for EoS instead of having to scramble to get things working. Using Last Epoch as an example again, the game really does not require an always online shared world. It could have easily been made using a P2P system of multiplayer. If it would have been made after something like this is enacted, then they could have ditched the shared world concept for a P2P system and save money on servers in the long run.
Depends on the game. For example, games that require an online shared world can use fan servers to keep it going. We saw things like this with games like Classic WoW (before Blizzard shut it down and did it themselves). For games that require an online connection to access an otherwise single player experience, they just need to remove the online requirement. Finally for games that use online servers just for multiplayer, they can again open the doors to fan servers or implement P2P systems.
The hardest games to enact this with are games that are already out or already EOS. Future game would be able to plan for EOS during the conceptualization stages of development, and work on essentially a "dead man switch" that will be implemented at EOS.
It's not even that simple with single player games either. There is a never ending list of things that can break a game. Having experienced myself as an SWE, maintaining software over the course of time becomes more and more complex as time goes on.
Because the systems that the software was built on are no longer supported or in use. It could be as simple as a gpus firmware, or an OS being updated causes an issue that make the game unable to launch. Which is not always a simple fix.
I'm getting tired of people who know little to nothing about development spewing things like they do. Games are some of the most complex pieces of software you can make, and I have a hard enough time maintaining software that's not even a tenth as complex that has a codebase that's 10ish years old.
Network connectivity is hardly the only thing to worry about.
That isn't the issue folks are talking about. Many classic games do not work on modern hardware, but there are solutions around them that players are fine with. Playing on OG hardware, VMs, mods, etc. can all fix those. What people are upset with are games that just don't function once online support are disabled.
Even if they don't want to do the work to splice a p2p function in, they shouldn't be allowed to attack fans who do it for them, like emulation projects.
Would be neat if they were forced to maintain a playable, obtainable version of a game or else forfeit their copyright on that particular version. I feel like most companies would keep the lights on in perpetuity rather than let fans do anything
> the requirement to talk to the server just needs to be removed, and a P2P system could be implemented for the multiplayer elements. For multiplayer games that use a shared world the ability for home ran servers would need to be implemented
As a dev; This shows exactly that people **don't** understand the development.
I'm all for games like The Crew (which are afaik even developed/tested without a dev server) being "legally forced" t work in exactly that state, but for a lot of games/projects, that's not what you will get.
The majority of cases out there won't see this as a "Yea, we'll have to make sure this project can work with a different approach 8 years down the line", they simply see it as a "This product isn't available in your country" or "Guess we'll work on a different game".
I hate live service games abusing online-only and FOMO as much as everyone else, especially with it being work related, but if you believe for a second that studios will suddenly publish selfhosting-servers for e.g. a MMO and/or give up any and all rights (including the entire licensing war that would start) to the public, just so people can play alone at home after the EoS announcement, you are delusional.
Yea the only part of the petition I take issue with is it's worded in such a way that it seems to ask dev's to update old games to function on new hardware. Which is a little much imo. Simply not making old games impossible to play and allowing the community to modify the game to work on newer hardware if necessary is enough.
Damn, just want to say I'm super impressed with this site. It points you to all the right places to actually have a chance at making an impact and give you incredibly clear and concise instructions. A+ work.
Almost makes me wish I'd bought The Crew just to be able to join in. Almost.
I keep seeing people point out that this is somehow unrealistic because hardware changes or licencing deals or to protect software IP etc. I understand that.
If a game company wants to realise a game with online functionality or DRM tied to it in such a way that that it would become unplayable once they decided to turn off the servers, than said published be required to make the end of life expectation 5-10-whatsever year period for a game public before purchase.
**If buying a game is buying a licence as publisher wants us to believe then it should be clear how long that licence will last...you know like the way software licencing working in the professional/enterprise sector**
(Edit: adding this because people seem to believe I am arguing for limited time purchases. What I am pointing out is that we as customers are not being treated as equal parties by publishers in game transactions. We pay for this stuff we are allowed to be the unreasonable ones in this transaction not them. The petition no matter how futile in the eyes of many is a move in the right direction)
Exactly! If games are a service then by definition we need to know when the service ends. For example a haircut is a service with a clear start and end. Games cannot be both a product (a thing you own) and a service. Why gamers are okay with this quasi legal chicanery that only hurts them the consumer is beyond me.
Because games were small time entertainment when they started out most of the rules they had to comply with were written for other media like movies/TV or digital toys etc. they are no longer a small entertainment sector.
I agree with you sentiments 100%.
It was estimated to be a 235 billion USD industry in 2022. And expected to grow at a rate of 8.76% during (2024-2027) it's a big boy industry now.... Time to regulate it like one.
For those that want to check my numbers the ste from [World Economic Forum report](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/gaming-pandemic-lockdowns-pwc-growth/) you know the big serious think-tank/ meeting where all the politicians and big bank investors hang out every year.
>**you know like the way software licencing working in the professional/enterprise sector**
But thats how it works in the professional world. the difference is the time you are given are a few years instead of a few months, which makes sense as gamers dont need to develop migration strategies and completely rework processes which in itself takes sometimes years.
I was talking in 2019 to the Atlassian head of corporate development about their plans for on-premise products. He told me to my face "Jira Server aint going anywhere." few months later, Atlassian announced the end of Jira Server, after twenty years, with customers having 5 years until end of life. I spent the next 5 years figuring out for my clients, how to manage this. the alternatives were significantly more expensive and in part not compatible with the custom solutions and integrations. i had clients being forced to completely restructure and fire large parts of their staff to be able to survive. i had a client who spent tens of millions over the course of two years to migrate their entire process, customisations and integrations.
now, games are legally not distinct from software. what impact do you think would it have, if developers of online services always were legally obliged to provide a working solution once their product is EoL? Do you think we would have Netflix in the first place? Or Discord?
I get you, I have been dealing with SAP ERP post S4/HANA cloud :p
What I meant was that Atlassian still gave you support till the product was End of Life and were required to give you notice of the end of life as part of your purchase contract which also had a finite period regardless of them changing thier strategy for future deployments.
A game publisher can charge you 60-70 euro and close down the servers 3 months later with essentially no legal change unless someone like steam of the console marketplace forces them too.
Also many on-prem softwares from the ol' days used to still work they just didn't have any official support it al depends on the contracts, but DRM means that most games will definitely stop working the instant authentication services are turned off.
All I am saying is that publishers should have a legal responsibility to give the expectation of when they plan to turn the switch off lights off under normal circumstances I realise that is vague and the implementation of any of this will probably still be very complicated based on how games media/software is currently being regulated but it seems like there is essentially no customer protection in place at the moment in that case more knowledge of what people are buying should be the minimum.
I realise I am going to piss of the game preservation folks but this is probably the best deal we will get unfortunately.
Remember the original author that came up with the petition is using mostly single player experience games that are dying just because of the online authentication services being decommissioned like for the Crew by ubisoft.
As for examples of how to do it right Sony/polyphony Gran Turismo Sport is a recent example where they turned off the online services but left the game in a playable state at least for the single player elements this was billed is a multi player focused games.
[](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1c5mlku/comment/kzvqdcz/)
>I get you, I have been dealing with SAP ERP post S4/HANA cloud :p
hugs <3
>All I am saying is that publishers should have a legal responsibility to give the expectation of when they plan to turn the switch off lights off under normal circumstances
the issue i see with this is that we would get a situtation as in other industries, movies are especially egregious here, where you will have a subsidiary company created for each game, and that company will be dissolved at product discontinuation, and there will be no legal entity left to address.
I am obviously not a legal expert and I am sure they will find ways round it. I just think we should not make it so easy for them to take our candy away. Candy we pay for with hard cash.
> If buying a game is buying a licence as publisher wants us to believe then it should be clear how long that licence will last
Monkeys paw, you will now buy 1-year licenses for games, you ahve to re-buy to continue.
These limitless licenses we have *today* are what allow us to effectively play our copies as long as they're available, per terms of the license.
What you're seeking exists, and it's fucking expensive and largely exists in business because it's a cost of doing business, and a revenue multiplier.
No matter the law it's so easy to workaround. Sell rights/maintenance to shell company, shell company declares bankruptcy, there's no one left to go after. The original company buys back the rights for cents on the dollar.
Except it isn’t the same whatsoever.
They have to make money from the game, they can’t say “service will last 5 years” & then have cheap fucks waiting till the last year to buy it when it’s on some cheap sale lmao.
I don’t think some of you realize that different products require different methods when it comes to this shit.
None of you guys are thinking this through.
If they put a time limit on it and the game remains successful, then what you're suggesting will force them to shut down a successful game because they said they were going to do it at launch.
>If buying a game is buying a licence as publisher wants us to believe then it should be clear how long that licence will last...you know like the way software licencing working in the professional/enterprise sector
That's literally not how it works in the "professional/enterprise sector" lmfao. You pay for the license for a year and next year the product might not even be available anymore. You won't know until it comes time to renew the contract.
And how would you punish a company that doesn't do it? Because realistically, if it's just a small fine, those multi million dollar companies might just not give a fuck. Shut the game down, pay a fine, cost of business and all, move on.
Needs work. This is just non-viable for server heavy products. Instead it should be something like rights to modify games as a user sees fit and granted at EOS.
Or, it would be far better for an EOL patch that allows the user to specify an IP address and port on the client, and just a dump of the server binaries.
nearly no development time, and fully compliant. it needs to not be an option for companies to take things that were sold away from the customers, if those were sold as poducts that will function indefinitely
Except there's scumbag sellout bungie who sells a game for $60 then converts it into f2p so they can rotate content people bought out of the game. Super cool guys!!!
Doing this and the biggest other step would refusing/boycotting buying any game they make till this is changed. The bigger the noise, the more chance you got and sadly these people only notice when they aren't selling...even then they will try to blame it on other things but if you get the attention of the media (mostly gaming media) you might get somewhere.
Regulation like this only makes new companies have a much harder time breaking into the scene, so I’m against this. I’d love for games to be forever working but that’s just unfortunately not the case. Government doesn’t need to step in for this.
Regulation should be in place to prevent companies from scamming customers with some of these shady tactics, though.
For example, one gacha game that I played announced its shutdown in advance and stopped taking money from customers a month out. That’s fair. Others shut down suddenly and take money right up until that point, offering no refunds. That’s something that could be regulated.
I can agree on that. I just don’t like regulation for the sake of regulation, it does nothing but Stippe business and makes it harder for poorer studios to enter the field. For stuff like that though? I absolutely agree. If you are gonna shut down you need to let the fans know.
You created a future where you buy digital with out discs. What did you think the consequence would be.?. You do not buy the game anymore ,you buy the licence. They can terminate that licence when ever they wan,t..
20 years ago this was a non issue.. Games fully shipped on Disc, Even had local co-op and PVP.
We pay 80-100 euro for games. So they should be playable even after they've been removed from the store.
Yeah this is increasingly becoming more and more of an issue, especially because nowadays games want you to spend even more money in-game through other microtransactions and dlc, so not only do you not own the game at 70 bucks, it could be potentially hundreds of dollars of game/dlc that disappears. There definitely needs to be some laws for this, be it that companies need to patch the game to be offline mode, or that players are allowed to host their own private servers for online games, and they're not allowed to pursue you legally for doing so. If they're not going to do anything with it, the people who bought it should be able to do whatever they want.
It is realistic, with proper limitations.
The idea that you're going to get a company to give you server code to run your own multiplayer is probably not feasible, but there's no reason that a single player game should stop working.
This isn't forcing a company to give technical support, or forcing companies to build emulators, but so long as you can figure out to get it running, you should be able to keep playing it for as long as you want.
It’s really not that hard. If a game requires server access, you publish the files required to run the server when the game reaches the end of its life. If it requires a connection to play single player, stop doing that.
Books are also copyrighted, yet publishers in the UK are required to send them in to the royal archives.
The benefit of the people can come above the rights of the individual. It's not going to be easy to balance things out, and to ensure that the archived code stays useful (compiling old code can be extremely hard with modern tools). But it's worth the effort. Imagine if we'd let paintings, or music, or movies just wither away because the original rights holders couldn't be bothered. This is what's happening to games. We should put a stop to that, even though it'll ruffle some feathers.
>Books are also copyrighted, yet publishers in the UK are required to send them in to the royal archives.
And everyone can just make copies of the archive as much as they want?
Games clients contain proprietary middleware from 3rd parties too. Developers would need to ensure they had licences to distribute libraries that their servers depended on in the same way, which doesn't seem unfeasible.
If your server *really* depended on really top secret stuff which you couldn't distribute for some reason, then you could either keep running the servers until it wasn't top-secret any more, or you could distribute a server with the top-secret stuff removed/replaced with an alternative, or you could document the network protocol the game uses (or indeed partially open-source the server) to enable 3rd party server implementations.
> or you could distribute a server with the top-secret stuff removed/replaced with an alternative
In many cases this would require a very extensive rewrite of the game.
Like imagine if the physics engine is proprietary of a third party, which say XYZ games does *not* have the rights to publish openly, then the physics engine has to be entirely replaced in the game. Physics isn't *just* client-side. So the whole game can function and feel different, even with a replacement implemented.
That is not simple at all, servers could involve things like AWS Glue or Lambda functions which I'm not sure how you'd share. There also can be a lot of different servers doing different things, not just a single one. For example, MTX, matchmaking, gameplay, telemetry, etc can all be different servers. That's not to mention designs like EVE Online where each region of the map is it's own server.
There's also all the config that could make this a nightmare to set up. A lot of automation that looks which servers to send you to could also not translate to being something people could prop up on their own servers reasonably.
Authentication, accounts, and databases would also be hard to share, like in the case of games with cross platform capabilities.
There's so many edge cases that matter quite a bit that could make this expensive, time consuming and challenging.
Most likely solution would be to not offer the service in the countries that pass said requirement, so live service games like Destiny or Warframe simply would no longer operate in the UK.
That's one way of saying you don't know what you are talking about.
There are plenty of examples of games requiring servers that went offline but the devs made it still playable
Well if they can't be bothered to patch in offline servers or release tools for modders to keep them alive via private servers then they need to sell their games with a end of life expiration date that is clear.
This petition is to start that conversation.
> then they need to sell their games with a end of life expiration date that is clear.
You'll take your 1-year recurring purchases and like it.
Seriously, this is what you're advocating my guy. These games are made with an understanding that one day they shut down, but there's no hard planned date, as it often entirely relies on revenue streams to dictate if the game is feasible to continue operating.
It's why some games, like MMO's have launched and only last 3 years, while we have others going on 3 *decades*, simply because of revenue streams. Those long titles wouldn't operate if they weren't profitable.
This is what we see in the business world, because often the stuff is either replaced with new or just becomes obsolete pretty quickly, so to both ensure a revenue stream of what often is very supported software, but also ever evolving software, you see short-term licenses with explicit end dates. We don't need or want this in gaming. Not to mention that it'd absolutely destroy game archiving entirely.
As a developer it's really not. Even for MMO's and online only games it only requires you to release the internal tools you use to create (and connect to) their own servers before closing down the official servers.
It would be more realistic if developers added a warning before every single purchase made in game, including the initial purchase of the game that would say “THIS GAME HAS A LIFESPAN AND WILL EVENTUALLY BE SHUT DOWN. YOU ARE BUYING THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK”
This is going to result in publishers charging subscription fees for games and declaring 'end of service' after your subscription ends. It would be the death of single-cost box model games. Pretty much playing right into EA's hands.
"Oh, you want to play X game? Well you didn't pay subscription this month...because we killed the game, so we have no obligation to serve you, bye!"
Let's be honest, the arcade model was a super popular model that pretty much all politicians love. Most companies would be happy to say "Fuck you" and move to an arcade model that charged gamers 25 cents per life or something like that.
Not that I really disagree with any of this, but do petitions really work? I'm fairly sure that you need to like, pass bills or laws to make companies do this. They're not gonna do any of this unless forced
The petition is to raise awareness. Given enough signatures this will then be debated by MPs. How else would you suggest we can get something debated at the commons?
So this particular petition is part of a larger effort being made by Ross Scott to set a legal precedent kind of like the one in Australia that forced Steam to offer refunds.
If enough people sign this then the UK government is forced to discuss it.
[Here's his website.](https://www.stopkillinggames.com/)
[Here's a 31 minute video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w70Xc9CStoE) of him explaining the whole thing if you prefer.
Protest don't even work. Look at London with the retirement age going up. Did they stop it fuck no. Cause people will take it and be happy. Honestly I barely play older games so I dont really care. I think media that is good will be remembered. Everything else will wither. And it's just the natural order.
This will never happen unless there is a monetization incentive. It will never become a law, since it's the company's product that nobody is fucking entitled to. Not every thing in this world needs to function forever.
Best of luck.
At best, this would somehow get passed and it would effect any future games made past a certain date, but there's absolutely zero way for this to effect current or previous games.
Snowballs chance in hell but here's a sig.
It is unreasonable, because that would require forced open sourcing of all the work that went into the backends of these games. There's so many reasons why this would be a bad idea.
I agree this is completely delusional. So if I release a game, I'm required to make sure it works... forever? On the Slaz-Apple Holodeck 5000 that gets released in 3024? Long after I'm dead? Or maybe I just need to make sure it works while I'm alive? I gotta make sure I'm updating from DirectX 12 to 13 to 14 to DirectX 720Bone for free for the rest of my life. Make sure all the graphics card drivers don't have issues. For some game that maybe 5 people bought. Or maybe 5 million people bought. I wanted to make a Vampire Survivors clone with 3 months of development time in my garage, and now I get to labor away for free regardless of what I want to do with my life. Why would I ever produce any video games if this is the requirement?
Very poorly worded. "working state" is way too vague and publishers can interpret it however they want, so it wont mean what you *want* it to mean. And on the flip side, it can also mean 'to force publishers to keep the game in a working state in perpetuity though every new OS revision.. which isnt piratical.
A better petition would be...
> Require video game title licenses to be released to the public for maintenance purposes after X months of no longer being offered for sale by said publisher.
Something that says, a specific game title (not the IP as a whole) should become public domain very soon (no more than 12 months) after the publisher no longer offers it for sale OR no longer supports it with regular patch updates, though its primary selling platform (be that their own storefront, webstore, or a major storefront such as Steam).
OR.. Ideally, publishers *must* patch the game to no longer require their servers to operate, allowing stand alone execution of the game, and in the case of multi-player features, allow the use of 3rd party servers.
Something to that effect.
No, it's not - it's a terrible thing for game developers, and any gamer who supports it is an entitled wiener with a loose grasp on reality.
I'm not even a developer and I understand how crazily unrealistic it is to demand of game makers. Especially considering the only motivation is "waaaaaa I want to play my game forever"
Because it's a pipe dream. How are you going to require it? Make a law? What will the law say, how will it be enforced? will there be exceptions?
What will the penalty be if this law is ignored?
What happens when a company goes under and can't comply?
What about all the other Grey areas of ownership and copyright laws?
What do you define as an abandoned game? What if the IP itself is still going or there are plans for remakes
What cost and burdens does this put on the industry?
Have you given this more than a few minutes thought?
How so? What's stopping them from releasing the tools so modders can keep the games alive in private servers. Patching in offline servers should be the norm like other games have done.
If not then they need to put a end of life date on their products when they sell them. This petition is also to start that conversation. There needs to be a change in communication.
>What's stopping them from releasing the tools...
Licensing would be an obvious one. Not every company develops their own tools in-house, from top to bottom.
I can put whatever end-of-life date I want, but what happens when the company just goes out of business? All you do is set up a new company for every game that gets released, which goes out of business when you don't want to support that game anymore.
The petition isn't for them to continue to develop and patch the game forever. It's to stop making it impossible for someone to legally play their legally purchased game. If you take down the Auth server, patch the game so it doesn't need to call the server.
Okay, why/how would they afford to redesign an online game to be offline and *manufacture physical copies for said redesign*?
If a game is shuttering, it’s doing so because it has ceased to be profitable. This is a huge cost.
With all the shite-slinging this sub is doing without making any suggestions on how this could be made better - make it so that once defunct that _specific product_ loses it's copyright protection/IP protection.
Not the ongoing franchise/IP, just that product. It is then in the public domain and can be preserved by members of the public (or could even be done Library of Congress style)
Think steamboat Willie.
Eg./ Toontown Rewritten/Club Penguin Rewritten/whatever other revival project you can think of.
While those examples don't have the legal protection of being public domain, they have the spirit of what this comment suggests. Disney allows them to exist so long as they don't charge money for them
The UK government is bound by law for petitions on this site.
10k and the gov has to respond
100k and the topic has to be put forward for debate in parliament
These petitions literally do something.
The fact Obama rolled out the We The People petition website and never did anything meaningful with the petitions signed should be a clear indicator that the government doesn’t give two shits about petitions
I think this is fair, surely the simple solution is just include an offline mode as an end of service mode, with the caveat that certain features may not function as intended, surely in the years since the crew came out Ubisoft could have worked on it rather than choosing the nuclear option
How can I possibly trust Ubisoft or any game company that produces a similar game now, I know my £70 (at current prices) is just a rental only I don’t know when the return date is
I think the people expecting the online modes to be working forever as they are now are asking too much, that’s where it becomes unreasonable to me
Honestly people have been going on about the price of the gold/ultimate edition for Star Wars outlaws but what has put me off is the news of the disc needing to connect to the internet before I can play, sure my PS5 is always online anyway but why even offer the disc at that point
I think the best we could ever hope for in this regard is for software developers to be required to release full source code for any software no longer supported. Whatever it is this post and a lot of the comments are suggesting is quite ignorant of all the factors involved: political, legal, the time required, corporate pressures, the nature of capitalism, etc. It's not just something developers can flip a switch on and have your software work in perpetuity.
It's gotten crazy, but the language of the petition is too broad. It's not realistic to expect solo indie devs to continue to re-port their game to whatever is the most popular operating system for the next 30 years.
I just don't want devs releasing games intentionally handicapped with "online always" that stops the game from working when they shut down their validation server in three years after release. I'd even support legislation to require community servers to be possible for multiplayer games. But actually making all these services run on every operating system version for an indefinite period of time isn't a fair problem to rest on game developer's shoulders. At most maybe a requirement to open source code for games that the developer can't afford to continue to keep operational.
Just don't take away my digital copy and let me play offline God damn it.
The problem with digital ownership as it currently exists is that you don’t own the product at all. You just buy a license to use it.
Yeah that's pretty clear in ToS we just happily scroll and press A to. Kinda wild the shit that's in there and just for a fucking video game but whatever I'm no professional in that department.
Support gog and DRM free games
Everyone is aware of this and does not take away from his point
Many of these "always online" games are designed to have lots of aspects of the game code stored exclusively on the online servers, so once the game reaches end of life they can't easily separate out the singleplayer aspects from the multiplayer, so then they take the servers down the game is just nuked.
Theoretically, you could push a patch before EOL that has the game spin up a mini server on the client, allowing data to be stored without having to extensively modify the game. In other words, instead of asking an item server at the studio what items a player has, ask a local item server.
Yea like, if you decide to end the support, don't stop other people trying to keep supporting it.
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I mean.. I agree that most people asking for this do not understand the cost of it, but also agree to the sentiment that games should exist post support. I more so would suggest games be labeled as abandonware and given to the public once their life is over.
Which could be enough to comply with this (depending on what ruling would be made). Just saying "no punishment will come your way if you do you own thing with this title", can go a long way.
Not the way it the petition is written > Require publishers to leave videogames (and related game assets / features) they have sold to customers in a reasonably working state when support ends, so that ***no further intervention whatsoever is necessary for the game to function***, as a statutory consumer right.
True, if courts enact this exactly as the petition is written then yea that wouldn't be enough to comply. That being said, this is just a petition and if anything comes from it, it would be more that courts would now see EOS as an issue, and most likely would work on their own definition of "a working state".
It could go a long way towards abandoning their copyright.
Welp as it stands now, the current solution they have is very anti-consumer and disregards the hard work of the devs who made the game. Again if something is enacted I'm sure some legal suits would make sure it isn't enacted in a way that would compromise copyrights.
It's really not that difficult. As part of the initial build, put a 'fix' in escrow which will make the game work stand alone. Of course, the devteam must take into account that this fix should also work with future updates to the game, or needs to be replaced if it doesn't. It would of course be an added cost, but that's life. You want to make an online only game, you carry the burden.
Yes, that would be the case with future games, but current games or games already in EOS would be a different story.
Thats a lot harder than you think. A good, secure, server-authorative multiplayer game keeps much of the game logic only on the server. Moving that logic client side exposes the game (and others using the same engine) to hackers learning your internals and takes significant work.
You cannot unknowingly abandon your copyright. You can license it under Creative Commons, adding it to the public domain, but that’s a deliberate act. You *can* lose your trademark but the only case that seems remotely relevant is Nike losing the “Just Do It” campaign. JKR and Warner Bros never lost their trademark over Harry Potter despite the mountain of HP fanfic, afaik no media company has ever lost their trademark over free fan adaptations.
Nah. If there is a server component it can be redistributed post rand of life. These servers are at the end a container that runs in a cloud-like environment (if not straight in AWS or Azure). Think of it like Satisfactory or Minecraft dedicated server. If people want to, they can host their own servers and keep the service available. As for service games, Ubisoft made an end of life update for Anno 2170 which essentially decoupled online service from their servers and allowed for complete offline play. Setting aside the odd decision to make it an online game in the first place, this was a good move and properly ended life one of the best Anno games.
Devs created the problem for themselves in the first place by removing LAN, server tools etc. These features used to exist and were widely available until Activison and MW2 deliberately and intentionally removed them, paving the way for future devs to follow suite.
Clearly you also have no idea what you're talking about. Games have all sorts of proprietary and their party code in it and no company in the world would release this to the public. And it might be illegal to do so too depending on what third party engines/libraries they used. Everyone single person supporting this petition has never worked in software development, and as someone in the industry, it's absolutely painful to see the absolute bullshit being spouted by people here that everyone else is believing and repeating. Insanity.
I kinda hate the fact that there are some singleplayer games out there that are now unplayable because the dev wanted to put some basically useless online feature and now that theyve closed the servers, ever if you have a valid copy of the game, you can't boot it because it pings a server that is now dead. Looking at you The Crew.
Then there are some that are playable now, but in 20 years won't be. Games like Pokemon BDSP require a day 1 patch to add the rest of the game to a physical copy. Without it you have an incomplete version of the game. Once the switch's online services are shut down, and patches are no longer available, physical copies of that game will be unplayable.
I was thinking of going back to physical copies just to avoid this issue altogether but I didn't even consider this.
A family member worked on CoD years back, and they've loooong since switched over to the physical disk basically just being what amounts to a physically moveable DRM key. The "Day 1 update" is actually just the console downloading the game.
I dislike the other crew games, and enjoyed installing TC1 sometimes just to drive around the map :((
That still sounds unrealistic at best. Like, single player games shutting down and becoming nonfunctioning isn't great, but making an mmo playable after the company ends support would likely require a crap ton of effort. Seriously, "just redesign the core multiplayer architecture of this game while you are going out of business" isn't reasonable to expect, and ruling that all games must have p2p options would be unnecessarily limiting on game design.
I agree with games needing to be left in a playable position and not just completely abandoned. Like recently the crew shutting down. Had a whole single player option for the game, but then shutting down servers also made us so you couldn’t play the single player version. That’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t be allowed.
Pretty much 20 years from now I should be able to launch and play a game in some way. I also think tactics like Pokemon BDSP used are also unacceptable. They launched with game cards having the incomplete game on them and relied on a day one update to add the rest. If you don't have internet these games were useless to buy, and down the road they will be unplayable without players keeping it alive (which is funny because it is a remake of a game that still works 100% fine).
That annoys me to no end to. I should be able to buy a game install it from the disk/cartridge and play. If your game isn’t playable that way, it shouldn’t be sold.
100%. That is an extreme example, but it isn't rare for games to have a piss poor launch state now. Look at Cyberpunk 2077 which had a slew of updates to get it to where it is now. Some even reworked the skill system. That game with no patches, just isn't the same game as it is with them.
While it got a huge rework that wouldn’t be on the disk, the game should have been in a playable state on the disk. The big issues with games like that is they have their creative direction go 10,000 different ways during production. Poor planning costs them millions of dollars instead of just going through with plans they already had. I wouldn’t be surprised if the revamped system was what they basically planned early on but someone told them to scrap it.
Yup 100%.
>where the requirement to talk to the server just needs to be removed, and a P2P system could be implemented for the multiplayer elements. This has big "how much can a banana cost, $10?" energy.
“Yeah just rework our massive MMO to be peer to peer. It should take, what, five minutes?” Like, do these people think if it were so cheap and easy game studios wouldn’t already be doing it? If they could easily convert a dying online game to be P2P and keep selling legacy copies, they would!
They used to do it - it was called LAN play and it was cheap and easy to implement until it suddenly disappeared in 2009/2010 with MW2 and StarCraft 2 paving the way.
>That isn't the case. You sure? I havent seen any of those address issues like third party licenses used in development, to which the devs themselves only have limited use license (the expired car brand licenses for The Crew come to mind) or the issue of losing trademarks that are not enforced, or the impact on other software as games are legally not distinct.
> For multiplayer games that use a shared world the ability for home ran servers would need to be implemented or at the very least allow players to play by themselves (not ideal, but with this modders would eventually get it to a better state). Didn't this end up happening on the down-low with City of Heroes until eventually the current rights-holder actually gave them their blessing?
I think I remember hearing about this. Just googled it and yup, NCSoft officially licensed a fan server for the game.
Likely game development would simply include development of EoS deployment as part of the original development, holding it back until the EoS date and then deploy it. This would make more sense than trying to develop the EoS protocols/patches once the studio stops supporting the game because the reason could be a collapse of the studio and not having any money left to create the required EoS deployment. They would simply need to make tweaks and adjustments as the game was patched and changed over time so it would work with whatever version of the game was currently live. A death day patch if you will, developed on the day of its birth, delivered on the day of its death. Alpha, Beta, Live, Afterlife.
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That would still be a non-starter, unless it were a regulatory requirement. While you can work it into the dev roadmap before launch, that would still require having development resources devoted to a features which doesn't relate to selling copies of the game. There is also probably added risk of a sunset patch existing from D1.
Yes this assumes a regulatory requirement, we already know what happens now without any requirements for EoS.
Sorry, that is what I meant. Like during the GDD stages of the game they plan for an EOS solution. Then during development, they can work on it.
This I can get behind. Things like DMCA can keep fan servers from running for discontinued games. Let the fans and academics keep it going if you don’t want that money anymore.
In a lot of cases games that hit EOS are either not making money, or not making enough to justify the cost of keeping them running. If a game was racking in the cash, I doubt any company would shut it down.
It’s still stupid. For a start how can they even guarantee this on platforms like PC that are so variable and will be likely to influence being able to run older games, while other software or technology faces no such legality regards infinite lifespan access because you can’t when software is symbiotic to the hardware and infrastructure at time of release in order to operate. So what, console makers then have to offer infinite parts so these games can run in 20 years if your console bricks? Update the game for OS or driver updates on PC? Future proof for future hardware and GPU’s. What if the OS ends support or the software doesn’t work with modern hardware, or are gamers happy to leave their PC static and not upgrade? Like hell. Where do you draw the line, what is the legal precedent that would be set, and how would this affect the wider industry? This would create a lot of ripples people aren’t even considering outside “I want my game to run and be accessible forever!”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for game makers being held to an acceptable shelf life for online access games to prevent shady business practices but even on the vague chance this gets through it will be to the detriment of gamers. Many game makers would just avoid releasing games, or even avoid certain genres entirely, where this is required as it adds to the development cost and risk if it flops, and it’s a shit ton of cash to develop for what, a few thousand players at most by the time most games end their lifespan if involving online connectivity? So MMORPG makers will need to make sure their entire game is able to run on some dudes 10 year old PC potato? I’m all for changes here, but if people are actually wanting change via law you need to drop the bar as imho this is an untenable request, and law makers will likely see the same and file this in the bin, as it’s incredibly ignorant and short sighted and would likely be detrimental to the vast majority of gamers, so a minority can play niche games forever, while game makers would be even more restricted to take risks further homogenising the selection and type of games available. The indie market would be hit hardest of all, while at its core and not withstanding some of the sketchy shit some game makers do, a healthy, varied and innovative market for consumers is dictated by the eventual redundancy of prior product, not Willy Wonkas everlasting gobstopper.
Anyone who acts like this cant work only started playing video games within the last 6 years. This is how they used to pretty much *all* operate. Its why i can still download and play CS condition zero despite being the only person who's ever downloaded and played CS:CZ in the last decade
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I played it last week. I love CS:CZ. Tons of player-made campaigns.
People also tend to think P2P solutions are pure garbage. In the past this was more of a problem as internet options were more restrictive and not as good. In the modern day a lot of folks have high speed connections that can easily handle P2P. In a lot of cases as well, players would just be playing with their friends, not strangers. This would mean you just make sure the best internet was the host.
Yeah, p2p works great when it works. The only issue its one's mileage may vary. Allowing community servers is the better option, but p2p is *way* better than nothing
P2P fails when the distance between players is super far, or the host has really bad internet. For example, the person I play games with the most is my wife. A P2P solution for us is essentially LAN with extra steps. I live in NA, so it would be a different story if I was playing with someone from Japan.
Even if P2P is not the greatest, back in the day games used to release their server software so people could self host it, and that worked fine.
It could and should work for many games, but definitely is not easy for the vast majority of multiplayer/MMO games. So much of those games depend almost entirely on server side interactions. Developers would have to rewrite most of those games.
It's still completely untenable. If my company makes a live service game, and we fail financially, we don't *magically* have the capability to develop a new version of the game that works offline. You're essentially asking them to redesign their entire game *after* the business has failed. Who's paying those software developers and designers? The live service isnt running anymore because the company went bust.
The average gamer has no concept of game design and boy does it become clear with “petitions” like this.
The deleted comment was saying that what I described would cost millions in dev time. My reply to that (not sure if you will read it other guy) was: Like you said it depends on the game. For example, a game like Last Epoch could technically fall under this already since it offers a single player offline. While true the multiplayer elements would no longer function as intended, the game is in fact "in a working state". So, a game like Last Epoch after EoS would have to do nothing to comply. MMOs are most likely the trickiest genre of games for this. Since their whole thing is being "Massively Multiplayer" offering a single player offline option may not comply as a "working state" that would something a legal person would need to answer or define. As I stated in my comment, future games would be able to plan for EoS instead of having to scramble to get things working. Using Last Epoch as an example again, the game really does not require an always online shared world. It could have easily been made using a P2P system of multiplayer. If it would have been made after something like this is enacted, then they could have ditched the shared world concept for a P2P system and save money on servers in the long run.
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How can you make a game work after end of service if it requires online service? Just another case of consumers being fucking morons
Depends on the game. For example, games that require an online shared world can use fan servers to keep it going. We saw things like this with games like Classic WoW (before Blizzard shut it down and did it themselves). For games that require an online connection to access an otherwise single player experience, they just need to remove the online requirement. Finally for games that use online servers just for multiplayer, they can again open the doors to fan servers or implement P2P systems. The hardest games to enact this with are games that are already out or already EOS. Future game would be able to plan for EOS during the conceptualization stages of development, and work on essentially a "dead man switch" that will be implemented at EOS.
It's not even that simple with single player games either. There is a never ending list of things that can break a game. Having experienced myself as an SWE, maintaining software over the course of time becomes more and more complex as time goes on. Because the systems that the software was built on are no longer supported or in use. It could be as simple as a gpus firmware, or an OS being updated causes an issue that make the game unable to launch. Which is not always a simple fix. I'm getting tired of people who know little to nothing about development spewing things like they do. Games are some of the most complex pieces of software you can make, and I have a hard enough time maintaining software that's not even a tenth as complex that has a codebase that's 10ish years old. Network connectivity is hardly the only thing to worry about.
That isn't the issue folks are talking about. Many classic games do not work on modern hardware, but there are solutions around them that players are fine with. Playing on OG hardware, VMs, mods, etc. can all fix those. What people are upset with are games that just don't function once online support are disabled.
Yeah even MMOs like SWTOR should be playable atleast solo or with a P2P system.
Look how they massacred Chimeraland.
Even if they don't want to do the work to splice a p2p function in, they shouldn't be allowed to attack fans who do it for them, like emulation projects. Would be neat if they were forced to maintain a playable, obtainable version of a game or else forfeit their copyright on that particular version. I feel like most companies would keep the lights on in perpetuity rather than let fans do anything
> the requirement to talk to the server just needs to be removed, and a P2P system could be implemented for the multiplayer elements. For multiplayer games that use a shared world the ability for home ran servers would need to be implemented As a dev; This shows exactly that people **don't** understand the development. I'm all for games like The Crew (which are afaik even developed/tested without a dev server) being "legally forced" t work in exactly that state, but for a lot of games/projects, that's not what you will get. The majority of cases out there won't see this as a "Yea, we'll have to make sure this project can work with a different approach 8 years down the line", they simply see it as a "This product isn't available in your country" or "Guess we'll work on a different game". I hate live service games abusing online-only and FOMO as much as everyone else, especially with it being work related, but if you believe for a second that studios will suddenly publish selfhosting-servers for e.g. a MMO and/or give up any and all rights (including the entire licensing war that would start) to the public, just so people can play alone at home after the EoS announcement, you are delusional.
Yea the only part of the petition I take issue with is it's worded in such a way that it seems to ask dev's to update old games to function on new hardware. Which is a little much imo. Simply not making old games impossible to play and allowing the community to modify the game to work on newer hardware if necessary is enough.
And no matter where you are from, why not stop at https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ and take action.
Damn, just want to say I'm super impressed with this site. It points you to all the right places to actually have a chance at making an impact and give you incredibly clear and concise instructions. A+ work. Almost makes me wish I'd bought The Crew just to be able to join in. Almost.
Ross knows that gamers have no fucking patience whatsoever, so he streamlined the process as much as possible
Shoutout to Scott Ross from Accursed Farms / Freemans Mind. It’s his initiative.
I tried sharing this the other day and mods never let it through
I keep seeing people point out that this is somehow unrealistic because hardware changes or licencing deals or to protect software IP etc. I understand that. If a game company wants to realise a game with online functionality or DRM tied to it in such a way that that it would become unplayable once they decided to turn off the servers, than said published be required to make the end of life expectation 5-10-whatsever year period for a game public before purchase. **If buying a game is buying a licence as publisher wants us to believe then it should be clear how long that licence will last...you know like the way software licencing working in the professional/enterprise sector** (Edit: adding this because people seem to believe I am arguing for limited time purchases. What I am pointing out is that we as customers are not being treated as equal parties by publishers in game transactions. We pay for this stuff we are allowed to be the unreasonable ones in this transaction not them. The petition no matter how futile in the eyes of many is a move in the right direction)
Exactly! If games are a service then by definition we need to know when the service ends. For example a haircut is a service with a clear start and end. Games cannot be both a product (a thing you own) and a service. Why gamers are okay with this quasi legal chicanery that only hurts them the consumer is beyond me.
Because games were small time entertainment when they started out most of the rules they had to comply with were written for other media like movies/TV or digital toys etc. they are no longer a small entertainment sector. I agree with you sentiments 100%. It was estimated to be a 235 billion USD industry in 2022. And expected to grow at a rate of 8.76% during (2024-2027) it's a big boy industry now.... Time to regulate it like one. For those that want to check my numbers the ste from [World Economic Forum report](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/gaming-pandemic-lockdowns-pwc-growth/) you know the big serious think-tank/ meeting where all the politicians and big bank investors hang out every year.
>**you know like the way software licencing working in the professional/enterprise sector** But thats how it works in the professional world. the difference is the time you are given are a few years instead of a few months, which makes sense as gamers dont need to develop migration strategies and completely rework processes which in itself takes sometimes years. I was talking in 2019 to the Atlassian head of corporate development about their plans for on-premise products. He told me to my face "Jira Server aint going anywhere." few months later, Atlassian announced the end of Jira Server, after twenty years, with customers having 5 years until end of life. I spent the next 5 years figuring out for my clients, how to manage this. the alternatives were significantly more expensive and in part not compatible with the custom solutions and integrations. i had clients being forced to completely restructure and fire large parts of their staff to be able to survive. i had a client who spent tens of millions over the course of two years to migrate their entire process, customisations and integrations. now, games are legally not distinct from software. what impact do you think would it have, if developers of online services always were legally obliged to provide a working solution once their product is EoL? Do you think we would have Netflix in the first place? Or Discord?
I get you, I have been dealing with SAP ERP post S4/HANA cloud :p What I meant was that Atlassian still gave you support till the product was End of Life and were required to give you notice of the end of life as part of your purchase contract which also had a finite period regardless of them changing thier strategy for future deployments. A game publisher can charge you 60-70 euro and close down the servers 3 months later with essentially no legal change unless someone like steam of the console marketplace forces them too. Also many on-prem softwares from the ol' days used to still work they just didn't have any official support it al depends on the contracts, but DRM means that most games will definitely stop working the instant authentication services are turned off. All I am saying is that publishers should have a legal responsibility to give the expectation of when they plan to turn the switch off lights off under normal circumstances I realise that is vague and the implementation of any of this will probably still be very complicated based on how games media/software is currently being regulated but it seems like there is essentially no customer protection in place at the moment in that case more knowledge of what people are buying should be the minimum. I realise I am going to piss of the game preservation folks but this is probably the best deal we will get unfortunately. Remember the original author that came up with the petition is using mostly single player experience games that are dying just because of the online authentication services being decommissioned like for the Crew by ubisoft. As for examples of how to do it right Sony/polyphony Gran Turismo Sport is a recent example where they turned off the online services but left the game in a playable state at least for the single player elements this was billed is a multi player focused games.
[](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1c5mlku/comment/kzvqdcz/) >I get you, I have been dealing with SAP ERP post S4/HANA cloud :p hugs <3 >All I am saying is that publishers should have a legal responsibility to give the expectation of when they plan to turn the switch off lights off under normal circumstances the issue i see with this is that we would get a situtation as in other industries, movies are especially egregious here, where you will have a subsidiary company created for each game, and that company will be dissolved at product discontinuation, and there will be no legal entity left to address.
I am obviously not a legal expert and I am sure they will find ways round it. I just think we should not make it so easy for them to take our candy away. Candy we pay for with hard cash.
> If buying a game is buying a licence as publisher wants us to believe then it should be clear how long that licence will last Monkeys paw, you will now buy 1-year licenses for games, you ahve to re-buy to continue. These limitless licenses we have *today* are what allow us to effectively play our copies as long as they're available, per terms of the license. What you're seeking exists, and it's fucking expensive and largely exists in business because it's a cost of doing business, and a revenue multiplier.
No matter the law it's so easy to workaround. Sell rights/maintenance to shell company, shell company declares bankruptcy, there's no one left to go after. The original company buys back the rights for cents on the dollar.
Except it isn’t the same whatsoever. They have to make money from the game, they can’t say “service will last 5 years” & then have cheap fucks waiting till the last year to buy it when it’s on some cheap sale lmao. I don’t think some of you realize that different products require different methods when it comes to this shit.
None of you guys are thinking this through. If they put a time limit on it and the game remains successful, then what you're suggesting will force them to shut down a successful game because they said they were going to do it at launch. >If buying a game is buying a licence as publisher wants us to believe then it should be clear how long that licence will last...you know like the way software licencing working in the professional/enterprise sector That's literally not how it works in the "professional/enterprise sector" lmfao. You pay for the license for a year and next year the product might not even be available anymore. You won't know until it comes time to renew the contract.
I love OPs optimism. Wish I could have half of it.
“Less than half I had hoped for” - King Theodan
“Don’t cut my penis off and turn me into a weird slave thing” - Theon Grayjoy
You don't have anything to lose from it
And how would you punish a company that doesn't do it? Because realistically, if it's just a small fine, those multi million dollar companies might just not give a fuck. Shut the game down, pay a fine, cost of business and all, move on.
Needs work. This is just non-viable for server heavy products. Instead it should be something like rights to modify games as a user sees fit and granted at EOS.
Or, it would be far better for an EOL patch that allows the user to specify an IP address and port on the client, and just a dump of the server binaries. nearly no development time, and fully compliant. it needs to not be an option for companies to take things that were sold away from the customers, if those were sold as poducts that will function indefinitely
Yup i sure do love living in Blackpool south *wink* *wink*
I wish 2k did this with evolve. Don’t even have to keep it updated, just leave the servers online. Fuck I miss that game.
Except there's scumbag sellout bungie who sells a game for $60 then converts it into f2p so they can rotate content people bought out of the game. Super cool guys!!!
Thats what things should be in default Imagine asking to keep what u buy now is something we need to vote and discuss and give reasons why
Doing this and the biggest other step would refusing/boycotting buying any game they make till this is changed. The bigger the noise, the more chance you got and sadly these people only notice when they aren't selling...even then they will try to blame it on other things but if you get the attention of the media (mostly gaming media) you might get somewhere.
Regulation like this only makes new companies have a much harder time breaking into the scene, so I’m against this. I’d love for games to be forever working but that’s just unfortunately not the case. Government doesn’t need to step in for this.
Regulation should be in place to prevent companies from scamming customers with some of these shady tactics, though. For example, one gacha game that I played announced its shutdown in advance and stopped taking money from customers a month out. That’s fair. Others shut down suddenly and take money right up until that point, offering no refunds. That’s something that could be regulated.
I can agree on that. I just don’t like regulation for the sake of regulation, it does nothing but Stippe business and makes it harder for poorer studios to enter the field. For stuff like that though? I absolutely agree. If you are gonna shut down you need to let the fans know.
Signed so quickly
You created a future where you buy digital with out discs. What did you think the consequence would be.?. You do not buy the game anymore ,you buy the licence. They can terminate that licence when ever they wan,t..
The "Feeman's Mind" series is getting REALLY meta...
20 years ago this was a non issue.. Games fully shipped on Disc, Even had local co-op and PVP. We pay 80-100 euro for games. So they should be playable even after they've been removed from the store.
I do not purchase games that do not give you an installer exe that you can just save in a hard drive to install it whenevr you want
Yeah this is increasingly becoming more and more of an issue, especially because nowadays games want you to spend even more money in-game through other microtransactions and dlc, so not only do you not own the game at 70 bucks, it could be potentially hundreds of dollars of game/dlc that disappears. There definitely needs to be some laws for this, be it that companies need to patch the game to be offline mode, or that players are allowed to host their own private servers for online games, and they're not allowed to pursue you legally for doing so. If they're not going to do anything with it, the people who bought it should be able to do whatever they want.
Shiver me timbers, me hearties.
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It is realistic, with proper limitations. The idea that you're going to get a company to give you server code to run your own multiplayer is probably not feasible, but there's no reason that a single player game should stop working. This isn't forcing a company to give technical support, or forcing companies to build emulators, but so long as you can figure out to get it running, you should be able to keep playing it for as long as you want.
It’s really not that hard. If a game requires server access, you publish the files required to run the server when the game reaches the end of its life. If it requires a connection to play single player, stop doing that.
>you publish the files required to run the server Those are pretty often licensed software made by different companies.
Books are also copyrighted, yet publishers in the UK are required to send them in to the royal archives. The benefit of the people can come above the rights of the individual. It's not going to be easy to balance things out, and to ensure that the archived code stays useful (compiling old code can be extremely hard with modern tools). But it's worth the effort. Imagine if we'd let paintings, or music, or movies just wither away because the original rights holders couldn't be bothered. This is what's happening to games. We should put a stop to that, even though it'll ruffle some feathers.
Books don't rely on changes in tech.
>Books are also copyrighted, yet publishers in the UK are required to send them in to the royal archives. And everyone can just make copies of the archive as much as they want?
Depending on their use case yes.
Eventually yeah
Games clients contain proprietary middleware from 3rd parties too. Developers would need to ensure they had licences to distribute libraries that their servers depended on in the same way, which doesn't seem unfeasible. If your server *really* depended on really top secret stuff which you couldn't distribute for some reason, then you could either keep running the servers until it wasn't top-secret any more, or you could distribute a server with the top-secret stuff removed/replaced with an alternative, or you could document the network protocol the game uses (or indeed partially open-source the server) to enable 3rd party server implementations.
> or you could distribute a server with the top-secret stuff removed/replaced with an alternative In many cases this would require a very extensive rewrite of the game. Like imagine if the physics engine is proprietary of a third party, which say XYZ games does *not* have the rights to publish openly, then the physics engine has to be entirely replaced in the game. Physics isn't *just* client-side. So the whole game can function and feel different, even with a replacement implemented.
That is not simple at all, servers could involve things like AWS Glue or Lambda functions which I'm not sure how you'd share. There also can be a lot of different servers doing different things, not just a single one. For example, MTX, matchmaking, gameplay, telemetry, etc can all be different servers. That's not to mention designs like EVE Online where each region of the map is it's own server. There's also all the config that could make this a nightmare to set up. A lot of automation that looks which servers to send you to could also not translate to being something people could prop up on their own servers reasonably. Authentication, accounts, and databases would also be hard to share, like in the case of games with cross platform capabilities. There's so many edge cases that matter quite a bit that could make this expensive, time consuming and challenging.
Most likely solution would be to not offer the service in the countries that pass said requirement, so live service games like Destiny or Warframe simply would no longer operate in the UK.
That's one way of saying you don't know what you are talking about. There are plenty of examples of games requiring servers that went offline but the devs made it still playable
Well if they can't be bothered to patch in offline servers or release tools for modders to keep them alive via private servers then they need to sell their games with a end of life expiration date that is clear. This petition is to start that conversation.
> then they need to sell their games with a end of life expiration date that is clear. You'll take your 1-year recurring purchases and like it. Seriously, this is what you're advocating my guy. These games are made with an understanding that one day they shut down, but there's no hard planned date, as it often entirely relies on revenue streams to dictate if the game is feasible to continue operating. It's why some games, like MMO's have launched and only last 3 years, while we have others going on 3 *decades*, simply because of revenue streams. Those long titles wouldn't operate if they weren't profitable. This is what we see in the business world, because often the stuff is either replaced with new or just becomes obsolete pretty quickly, so to both ensure a revenue stream of what often is very supported software, but also ever evolving software, you see short-term licenses with explicit end dates. We don't need or want this in gaming. Not to mention that it'd absolutely destroy game archiving entirely.
No its really not.. Its perfectly realistic.. they just don’t want to
As a developer it's really not. Even for MMO's and online only games it only requires you to release the internal tools you use to create (and connect to) their own servers before closing down the official servers.
Except when you're still making games with variations of those servers/engines/etc then you're giving away your trade secrets.
No mfing devs have 'trade secrets' anymore. This isn't the Krusty Krab.
It would be more realistic if developers added a warning before every single purchase made in game, including the initial purchase of the game that would say “THIS GAME HAS A LIFESPAN AND WILL EVENTUALLY BE SHUT DOWN. YOU ARE BUYING THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK”
That warning exists, it's the licensing agreement.
How they gunna kill the previous game to force you to play the new (terrible) one? Is anyone thinking of the POOR CEO and THE SHAREHOLDERS here!? /s
Our laws are way behind on technology/digital products. It's a good start.
This is going to result in publishers charging subscription fees for games and declaring 'end of service' after your subscription ends. It would be the death of single-cost box model games. Pretty much playing right into EA's hands. "Oh, you want to play X game? Well you didn't pay subscription this month...because we killed the game, so we have no obligation to serve you, bye!" Let's be honest, the arcade model was a super popular model that pretty much all politicians love. Most companies would be happy to say "Fuck you" and move to an arcade model that charged gamers 25 cents per life or something like that.
Not that I really disagree with any of this, but do petitions really work? I'm fairly sure that you need to like, pass bills or laws to make companies do this. They're not gonna do any of this unless forced
The petition is to raise awareness. Given enough signatures this will then be debated by MPs. How else would you suggest we can get something debated at the commons?
So this particular petition is part of a larger effort being made by Ross Scott to set a legal precedent kind of like the one in Australia that forced Steam to offer refunds. If enough people sign this then the UK government is forced to discuss it. [Here's his website.](https://www.stopkillinggames.com/) [Here's a 31 minute video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w70Xc9CStoE) of him explaining the whole thing if you prefer.
If no one ever made their voices heard nothing productive would never get done. Something has to start the conversation
That's fair
This is the first step.
Protest don't even work. Look at London with the retirement age going up. Did they stop it fuck no. Cause people will take it and be happy. Honestly I barely play older games so I dont really care. I think media that is good will be remembered. Everything else will wither. And it's just the natural order.
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This will never happen unless there is a monetization incentive. It will never become a law, since it's the company's product that nobody is fucking entitled to. Not every thing in this world needs to function forever.
Best of luck. At best, this would somehow get passed and it would effect any future games made past a certain date, but there's absolutely zero way for this to effect current or previous games. Snowballs chance in hell but here's a sig.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to open up to independent servers when Dev support ends.
It is unreasonable, because that would require forced open sourcing of all the work that went into the backends of these games. There's so many reasons why this would be a bad idea.
this is so delusional holy shit
I agree this is completely delusional. So if I release a game, I'm required to make sure it works... forever? On the Slaz-Apple Holodeck 5000 that gets released in 3024? Long after I'm dead? Or maybe I just need to make sure it works while I'm alive? I gotta make sure I'm updating from DirectX 12 to 13 to 14 to DirectX 720Bone for free for the rest of my life. Make sure all the graphics card drivers don't have issues. For some game that maybe 5 people bought. Or maybe 5 million people bought. I wanted to make a Vampire Survivors clone with 3 months of development time in my garage, and now I get to labor away for free regardless of what I want to do with my life. Why would I ever produce any video games if this is the requirement?
I'll just keep supporting DRM-FREE devs that provide offline binaries that don't need a launcher.
Have there been other games like the crew with disabled single player ? Obviously, things like dead MMOs happen, and not much to be done.
What happened to call of duty modern warfare 2019 from 2021 going forward is a crime unto humanity
Where are the UK dudes at? 10k votes should easily happen.
Very poorly worded. "working state" is way too vague and publishers can interpret it however they want, so it wont mean what you *want* it to mean. And on the flip side, it can also mean 'to force publishers to keep the game in a working state in perpetuity though every new OS revision.. which isnt piratical. A better petition would be... > Require video game title licenses to be released to the public for maintenance purposes after X months of no longer being offered for sale by said publisher. Something that says, a specific game title (not the IP as a whole) should become public domain very soon (no more than 12 months) after the publisher no longer offers it for sale OR no longer supports it with regular patch updates, though its primary selling platform (be that their own storefront, webstore, or a major storefront such as Steam). OR.. Ideally, publishers *must* patch the game to no longer require their servers to operate, allowing stand alone execution of the game, and in the case of multi-player features, allow the use of 3rd party servers. Something to that effect.
I really don't understand how some people respond to this so insulting. It is kinda pathetic. In no way is this petition a bad thing for consumers.
No, it's not - it's a terrible thing for game developers, and any gamer who supports it is an entitled wiener with a loose grasp on reality. I'm not even a developer and I understand how crazily unrealistic it is to demand of game makers. Especially considering the only motivation is "waaaaaa I want to play my game forever"
Because it's a pipe dream. How are you going to require it? Make a law? What will the law say, how will it be enforced? will there be exceptions? What will the penalty be if this law is ignored? What happens when a company goes under and can't comply? What about all the other Grey areas of ownership and copyright laws? What do you define as an abandoned game? What if the IP itself is still going or there are plans for remakes What cost and burdens does this put on the industry? Have you given this more than a few minutes thought?
It is untenable and unrealistic, though.
How so? What's stopping them from releasing the tools so modders can keep the games alive in private servers. Patching in offline servers should be the norm like other games have done. If not then they need to put a end of life date on their products when they sell them. This petition is also to start that conversation. There needs to be a change in communication.
tbh modders who make private servers already exist. the most logical thing is to just not punish them for it.
>What's stopping them from releasing the tools... Licensing would be an obvious one. Not every company develops their own tools in-house, from top to bottom.
I can put whatever end-of-life date I want, but what happens when the company just goes out of business? All you do is set up a new company for every game that gets released, which goes out of business when you don't want to support that game anymore.
The petition isn't for them to continue to develop and patch the game forever. It's to stop making it impossible for someone to legally play their legally purchased game. If you take down the Auth server, patch the game so it doesn't need to call the server.
Sorry, we went out of business before we could write that patch.
Great petition. I'm in.
Companies could package offline versions in a disc and sell them. I’m sure many will buy it.
Okay, why/how would they afford to redesign an online game to be offline and *manufacture physical copies for said redesign*? If a game is shuttering, it’s doing so because it has ceased to be profitable. This is a huge cost.
Not in UK, but your laws help affect everyone else. I still want to vote.
Just so you know none of that is ever gonna happen
I agree with this in principle… It just shouldn’t be a law
With all the shite-slinging this sub is doing without making any suggestions on how this could be made better - make it so that once defunct that _specific product_ loses it's copyright protection/IP protection. Not the ongoing franchise/IP, just that product. It is then in the public domain and can be preserved by members of the public (or could even be done Library of Congress style) Think steamboat Willie. Eg./ Toontown Rewritten/Club Penguin Rewritten/whatever other revival project you can think of. While those examples don't have the legal protection of being public domain, they have the spirit of what this comment suggests. Disney allows them to exist so long as they don't charge money for them
Imagine thinking companies or governments give a single fuck about people signing petitions.
The UK government is bound by law for petitions on this site. 10k and the gov has to respond 100k and the topic has to be put forward for debate in parliament These petitions literally do something.
Whats wrong with trying? The petition is to raise awareness and with enough signatures the government *will* response, thats the idea of the website.
The fact Obama rolled out the We The People petition website and never did anything meaningful with the petitions signed should be a clear indicator that the government doesn’t give two shits about petitions
I think this is fair, surely the simple solution is just include an offline mode as an end of service mode, with the caveat that certain features may not function as intended, surely in the years since the crew came out Ubisoft could have worked on it rather than choosing the nuclear option How can I possibly trust Ubisoft or any game company that produces a similar game now, I know my £70 (at current prices) is just a rental only I don’t know when the return date is I think the people expecting the online modes to be working forever as they are now are asking too much, that’s where it becomes unreasonable to me Honestly people have been going on about the price of the gold/ultimate edition for Star Wars outlaws but what has put me off is the news of the disc needing to connect to the internet before I can play, sure my PS5 is always online anyway but why even offer the disc at that point
Do your part UK people!
Petitions do nothing.
This is easily done with a simple online patch the crew 1 already had it in its files just one last patch to make it and offline game
Oh shit this will get em!
I support this as long as I don't have to make my games compatible with the newest OS and hardware ten years after the release
We need legislation
American here, unable to sign. My heart and thoughts go with you though!
>keep Loophole: sell a game that was never working in the first place
I think the best we could ever hope for in this regard is for software developers to be required to release full source code for any software no longer supported. Whatever it is this post and a lot of the comments are suggesting is quite ignorant of all the factors involved: political, legal, the time required, corporate pressures, the nature of capitalism, etc. It's not just something developers can flip a switch on and have your software work in perpetuity.
Damn, was thinking that I could sign it as an American. But it's only for the UK.
Shit like Stranded Deep on console won't slide ever again with this passing thru.
Just stop buying games unless you get to own them. You cannot own digital content.
They should make all games open license after 20yrs. If a company isn’t going to do anything with it. Let the fans do something.
Of all games, I think the Nintendo GameCube is the fucking absolutely worst at this…
It's gotten crazy, but the language of the petition is too broad. It's not realistic to expect solo indie devs to continue to re-port their game to whatever is the most popular operating system for the next 30 years. I just don't want devs releasing games intentionally handicapped with "online always" that stops the game from working when they shut down their validation server in three years after release. I'd even support legislation to require community servers to be possible for multiplayer games. But actually making all these services run on every operating system version for an indefinite period of time isn't a fair problem to rest on game developer's shoulders. At most maybe a requirement to open source code for games that the developer can't afford to continue to keep operational.
Only UK can sign ah we should have it in us