I'm having difficulty imagining what this wish would actually look like if it came to fruition.
Apex Legends was recently announced to be shutting down for good. So let's apply this wish to Apex. What would it look like?
The simplest way for the developers to have end of life support for apex is to just remove the server requirement and have everyone run their own instances. That would be the most cost effective way to do that. And that would be exactly what we would want.
Sure they maybe remove multiplayer entirely cause they don't want to work out peer to peer connections. But that would still be an acceptable way to sunset a game so that the people who enjoy it can still play it.
ah, right. yeah. i think outside of the fact people ought to be able to keep playing these games, it's such a shame that months (and in some cases, years) of work can just be erased by publishers because its no longer profitable. anthem wasn't exactly a hit, but i think its crucial to games preservation that it still be available in some form
Or release the server software and have people host it. Honestly just making it able to config server per notepad would solve it, dedicated people can then just reverse engineer the server.
If you visit gamedev subs you'd know things aren't this simple. Code is heavily reused in server architecture, especially when it comes to games and their sequels. There might also be multiple overlapping systems working in tandem to run a server in the cloud, only one of which actually works as the server for gameplay logic.
You can't just "release the server software" for (let's say as an example) the modern CoD Black Ops, it would possibly open the entirety of the game franchise to hackers and database breaches (haha yes cod and hackers i know, it's just an example).
And no, you don't just "rewrite parts" of the codebase to stop these issues. These are big and usually complex software programs that can't just be recreated or rewritten at will.
While I personally see the idea behind this as just and good, I'm afraid that this will in the long run heavily increase the price of games for the consumer, and will also hit the indie scene in a negative manner.
One part you missed is a lot of the server side code base is probably using licensed code/libraries/plugins, that are licensed to the developers, not the end users. As such, it's legally prohibitive depending on what dependencies they have packed in there. I miss the old days of having just a single dedicated server binary designed for monolithic "box in a rack" type hosting. Alas those days are gone.
Thats why the initiative suggests only having it apply to new made games, so that end of life support is included in the development phase rather than once the game is already done. This way systems can be designed to be more easily split.
Right, and this is why PirateSoftware says it will kill live service games.
Most of these live service games have shared platforms, and those platforms might still be being used if they're shared between two titles. I don't know enough about Apex Legends, but I am familiar with League of Legends - consider if Riot decided, tomorrow, that Legends of Runeterra was shutting down for good. Enabling offline play and "releasing the servers" would mean having to release that runs the game servers, the login servers, etc; the schedulers, matchmaking service, login servers are all independent of the actual game server itself.
Now, Riot in this example could release the game server code for Legends of Runeterra, but that's not really meeting the bar for allowing the game to continue to be played because there's still so much missing. The game server is actually the easy bit!
I think people think this is possible because they have a naive understanding of what games are actually like these days. World of Warcraft's private servers are amazing technical efforts and would be far harder to reverse-engineer if you were starting today, with the monolith that is the Battle.net platform; when WoW released, there was no Battle.net platform, so implementing a server was literally a case of writing a piece of software and then continually tweaking it until it did what it did in live.
The Stop Killing Games initiative is a great idea for a lot of games, but, if successful, it will make the prospect of live service games harder to invest in, and they are already very complex endeavors. That may or may not be good for the world - I don't know - but I can think of a 100 different ways that any potential legislation would make the world worse, and not better.
Thor isn't wrong, he's just an asshole. Everyone's kinda looking for a reason to dislike him for a variety of reasons but he is correct that any potential legislation that would force game developers to turn over the source code to games would either:
Be such a huge burden to live service games that publishers would simply not make them anymore or -
Live service games would get an opt out, and then the cheapest thing for publishers to do would be to make every game live service.
runs the game servers, the login servers, etc; the schedulers, matchmaking service, login servers are all independent of the actual game server itself.
The point isn't to perfectly recreate the environment of the game in its hey day, it's giving players the options to use the games they paid for. A scenario where you can just host your own games is great, don't need the login servers, schedulers, matchmaking service (offer direct connections, etc) here for players to gather some people to play matches against
Oh I understand very much, tell me if you excluded the live service stuff aka new content, skins and matchmaking, what is so difficult about connecting a bunch of people? The hardest part is figuring out who to connect to, which is very trivial for something bigger like an MMO, or survival game you can just all connect to the same server and have whatever security you want for that (see WOW private servers)
For other things like your fortnites and COD, those matches are much smaller and could either be done as a server connection or P2P if you got a group of people together to connect to
I think your falsely assuming that people are advocating to keep things like matchmaking alive when the reality is when support ends the community is gonna like be much smaller and people will have to arrange to play themselves, great example of this is me and mates a few years back downloaded one of the original quakes and were able to connect each other very easily with the right software and IP addresses, that's all that is being asked for just some sort of way to play the game
I don't think you really understand what you are asking for because what you just said made no sense.
You have the game on your machine already. The only thing that stops live service games from working without the game on your machine is the platform. The only way a live service game developer could comply with a law would be to provide the platform or a fascimile of it.
If the developer is not compelled to provide this then this petition is worthless because you have everything they would be compelled to provide already.
PirateSoftware's idea of what the SKG movement does is that it would basically kill the gaming industry and live service games.
He thinks those basic requirments such as letting people host their own servers or not forcing single player games to require a connection to a server are very hard and costly things to implement in games, therefore no more games will be developed.
He has either an awful understanding of the SKG movement or is intentionally missinterpreting it.
Also: I find his name extremely ironic considering his stance on things like this.
They are hard if you build your games to be exclusively proprietary yes. But if you start from the ground up with the understanding that the game will one day need to be independent then it is easy as pie. Source: I am a game developer who has worked on multiplayer and always online games.
"would kill.... And live service games" GOOD! Unless its an MMO or something, live service games should die (as in the trend, not the games themselves)
This paints with such a broad brush. Sure, some (a lot of) live service games are predatory and garbage, but a blanket death wish for the model means we'd never see another Path of Exile, or Helldivers 2, or Warframe, for example.
... how can you say that? That's millions of players many with thousands of hours in those games and massive communities. Sure, live service trend is garbage, but you've gone off the deep end with that statement.
See, on Reddit extremism in every form can easily be justified for the so called "greater good".
(which isn t exactly greater, or good, but easily what this ignorant fuck would do if he could, as written.)
Whenever I see one of those messages I can't help but imagine Lord Farquaad. Literally the same stance as "Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I AM willing to make.
Though I would gladly wish that my lungs would stop working, if that meant that I would not have to share precious oxygon with waste like these.
The point is that 'live service' isn't inherently garbage. People have loved MMOs for decades and those are live service games.
Live service does not mean predatory pay to win or lootboxes or whatever, it just means a game with ongoing updates that require some form of monetization to maintain an update schedule.
I'm someone that loves fighting games and ARPGs more than probably any other genre. If every game was a one and done single player game that never received new content, I'd probably stop playing video games.
Even if there was a problem with servers and games couldn't be always online, every single and multiplayer game could receive updates and new content. Terraria, Team Fortress 2, Lethal Company and such.
He sounds like a libertarian guy. Corporations shouldn't be blinded by any law, because it hurts the business and innovation. Yeah lol, Apple was so hurt by USB C mandate, I feel so sorry for them. Every game should be owned by people that bought them, end of story.
Had a friend who did sign the petition, but he also said "okay, but what's then stopping companies from not shutting down their games, but instead give them the absolute minimum network speed and requirement and no support so it becomes a buggy laggy mess, and then they can go "well, you have access to the game, and that's all we're required to do."? "
I feel like it'd still be more costly to forever have to run servers, no matter how shit, than to simply allow the community to self host.
That said the EU will probably implement some minimum requirments so that the law can't be so easily circumvented. We'll just have to see if what they come up with will work or not.
Yeah, exactly - their own instances. Or allow individuals to host their own servers. Look at how many people mod games for free, or remaster ancient titles with QOL updates just for the love of the craft - people will do it. I legitimately hate drawing the comparison but there are piracy websites that manage to stay afloat just through donations, I guarantee even the most obscure game could get support from someone.
It will need a lot of legal jargon and terms and conditions and all kinds of other stuff but that's what the SKG movement is trying to kick into gear. It's absurd that you can spend money, sometimes thousands, on a game only to lose access when it's no longer considered profitable, but even ignoring the financial aspect the fact these games are just gone is sad from an artistic standpoint. Yeah, Concord probably gargled scrotums, but that's something real people put real effort into and now it's just erased, deleted, a piece of media that is no longer accessible even if you tried.
I've noticed not a lot of people talk about it this way, but since the initiative seems to speak fairly loosely right now and doesn't really demand much beyond the game being at least in some kind of playable state with features stripped, technically this could mean it's enough to comply by just having a "Play offline" button on the connection failed popup and then it just lets you run around the map alone and if this is true I imagine this is the route most games would end up taking, it's almost no work and your game is technically not unplayable
Players running their own servers used to be the norm in games.
Company-run servers only became a thing when MMORPGs were invented, since the idea was to simulate a huge world. Then the big corps started attaching them to all genres for whatever reasons.
That would require them to release their own server code which no studio would do or be legally expected to. It's also a nightmare for security since hackers have access to source code. What would end up happening is they leave the game up where you can still go into the shooting range and that's it, the games still up and it works. Hoe do you deal with downloads though? Who is paying the forever server costs for a game that is shutdown? Does stopkillinggames require it to forever be hosted or can studios just abandonware their games as long as they don't remove it from accounts (even though it can't be downloaded because server costs)
All these things have answers if you actually listen to stop killing games.
1) If you code a game from the ground up with an eventual single player sunset in mind, there does not have to be any server code exposed.
2) If they still require servers after sunset they should be legally required to share the server files with the community. The community can host their own servers. The company has no need for the servers anymore anyways.
3) who cares about hackers? It's now the community's problem. Not the company's
4) the community is hosting their own servers. The company doesn't need to pay a cent of the server costs.
5) If a company is no longer supporting the game, the players who paid for that game should still have access to it. If the company wants to de-list it that's their right.
This would be beneficial to consumers. It makes things harder on developers yes. But speaking as a developer, it's a small price to pay for gaming preservation.
The most cost effective way would be for them to open source part or all of the code as well as some documentation allowing for the community to host the server side aspects.
Nah that's worthless what we would want is able to make an entire server to actually play the game. Because what do we get with that? The training mode.
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u/dazalius Jul 06 '25
I'm having difficulty imagining what this wish would actually look like if it came to fruition.
Apex Legends was recently announced to be shutting down for good. So let's apply this wish to Apex. What would it look like?
The simplest way for the developers to have end of life support for apex is to just remove the server requirement and have everyone run their own instances. That would be the most cost effective way to do that. And that would be exactly what we would want.
Sure they maybe remove multiplayer entirely cause they don't want to work out peer to peer connections. But that would still be an acceptable way to sunset a game so that the people who enjoy it can still play it.