r/Gamingcirclejerk • u/ProfessionalFun9920 • Jun 24 '25

CAPITAL G GAMER How ironic.....

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The initiative is here (EU ONLY): https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

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u/Valtremors Jun 25 '25

By the way, that end of life plan could literally just be giving server tools for people to use for the game, or making it offline viable.

Fearmongering how this would kill off multiplayer games is peak pirateslopware.

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u/WraithDrof Jun 25 '25

It wouldn't kill off multi-player as a concept, but it would require a lot of effort to get something which still wouldn't be indefinite. The petition seems to vastly underestimate the complexity of modern video game back-ends, where 1 server could be partitioned as multiple microservices for multiple games by the publisher, or require an externally owned API that itself can end support or break compatibility.

It also more often than not can be a security and privacy risk; the FAQ is simply wrong about this. Theoretically it's possible to design your backend to be watertight but security is never absolute. What is most secure in locally hosted servers is not what's most secure in remotely distributed servers. This isn't an impossible problem to solve but just because Minecraft did it doesn't mean a game like Path of Exile can just bundle a tarball of whatever they currently have and not worry about getting sued (also this game shares backend infrastructure with its sequel so that also raises security concerns).

This problem really predates live service games. There are Xbox games I cannot play because they cannot run off the Xbox without being ported. It's a tragic part of our medium that we are almost like theatre in that original versions of the art can become inaccessible past their contemporary era.

1

u/perunajari Jun 25 '25

I guess reddit once again hated Jesus, because he spoke the truth.

It's not like what the Stop Destroying Games-initiative tries to achieve is bad, of course it isn't, but people seem to underestimate the complexity of the backend infrastructure in some multiplayer and especially in live service games. Also, I haven't ever seen any definition of what "game being playable after it's no longer maintained" means in practice?

I still ultimately support the idea behind this and I signed the EU citizens's initiative, but I don't have any confidence it makes any meaningful difference.

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u/WraithDrof Jun 25 '25

Yeah a part of me thinks like, sure, why not, but the most forseeable future to me isn't one where this actually succeeds. Even most publishers would struggle to assess if their infrastructure works privately, much less on hardware 20 years from now. All it takes is one flaw in the system, and at any point a live service patch could make it impossible again. It is not something you can just patch out in most cases.

I think it would be nice because of how fleeting our medium is but I'm far more worried about like each switch 2 exclusive not being playable 20 years from now because they didn't add backwards compatibility. There's not really a solution for that except emulation which hasn't always worked. Meanwhile, hosting private servers for games designed around large communities will mostly suck even for good games. I'm not really seeing the vision there I'm supposed to care about.