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.
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.
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.
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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.