The goal is a good one, but it's too specific. It should not be allowed for a developer or device manufacturer to kill or nerf any product remotely, once it was bought and paid for. This problem is sneaking into other non-game software, and even physical devices! If you buy a thing you shouldn't need to tether that thing to the manufacturer, and it shouldn't be possible to make it useless when they decide to turn down a server.
As a developer or manufacturer, if your software or device absolutely requires a server that costs money to maintain, then your business plan should take that into account: You should be charging customers monthly to keep that service running. You shouldn't promise a one-time payment, take the customer's money and then yank the service away on a whim.
Nobody is asking for free labor to keep services running. I'm asking that you 1. only tether your product to a server if you absolutely need to, and 2. charge for that kind of product monthly so that you can leave it running while you still have customers. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Companies are hypocrites about this. On the one hand they say “we need to shut this down because we’re losing money on it.” On the other hand, asking them to release aspects of the game to self-host the infrastructure: “but that’s our IP and it’s valuable to us.” You shouldn’t be able to have it both ways. Sitting pretty on unprofitable IP in the hopes that it might someday make you money again is a net loss to society.
In my personal opinion, the actual problem there relating to "that's our IP" is the length of copyright.
20 years max will provide plenty of reward for creators. Some work on making copyright protect creators first, preferencing them over later owners, would also be good.
We also need works to be free to use, legislated so, after copyright expires. That would be to prevent, for example, Trade Marks being leveraged against users of works on which copyright has expired.
Our society was designed from the foundations to benefit the owning class, and this is a prime, easily observed example of that. You're completely correct and it doesn't matter, because the point of IP law is to allow people who know nothing to sit on assets they own and make money for doing no work.
If someone wants to argue this position, I would challenge them to explain why anything around IP law exists as it does now if that was not the explicit goal.
The good faith interpretation is that innovation is spurred by having some guarantees that your innovation isn't immediately ripped off. It allows for investing more into R&D.
I'm not saying the current system achieves that, but it is part of the justification.
A good faith interpretation at this point is voluntarily sticking your head in the sand to feign centrism. The purpose of a system is what it does, and ours, too predictably to be mere coincidence, permits capital to endlessly extract value from those actually creating it, to the detriment of those value creators, the people they create value for, and even if they're too dead inside to perceive it, the capital holders themselves.
It's hardly a whim if a game runs 15 years, they announce "our active playerbase is 60 people" and the game shuts down.
I think we need to stop treating it as a dichotomy.
There's an understanding it won't last forever, when you buy a multiplayer game, ans making devs make offline versions in the cases where its trivial is going to bite indie game studios.
Gamers have repeatedly shown they dont like subs. Its hard to model "we want to charge you 40 cents per month, escalating with inflation" but thats what youre asking for
Gaming companies did not need to insert themselves into the process in the first place. I could conceivably continue to locally run Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc forever because there is no external server component.
Not every game has a server architecture like that. There's been a Renaissance of indie multuplayer due to good libraries and third party dependencies.
Pretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.
I'd be 100% for "if your game has an easily releasable server you have to release it on EoS" but this bill isn't it.
Some games are perfectly fine without online features yet they still got shut off. Mirrors Edge Catalyst only used online for leaderboards and challenges, everything else was entirely single player, yet it’s not possible to play it anymore because they wanted to shut off the servers yet designed the game to not run without them, even though it’s a single player game.
That should not be ok. It wasn’t sold with a disclaimer or expectation that it could be switched off.
This is the reason I buy many games twice: once when they release on Steam, and again (if I loved them) when the come out on GOG, with Doom Eternal being the most recent example, but also Doom 2016, Skyrim, Dying Light, Tomb Raider, etc. I want to reward the devs with money for giving me a copy that doesn't need servers to run. It's work to produce it, and it has value for me, so I don't mind paying. CDPR is particularly good about this (obviously, since they run GOG), but the fact that such an amazing AAA company has this stance is amazing to me.
I tried to play it about two months ago and it pops up a notice and quits. I found on Reddit that the notice is “we are Rory, but servers for this title have been shut down. Thank you very much for playing” which is roughly like what I remember.
According to Wikipedia: “in December 2023, all servers for mirrors edge catalyst were shut down by EA” but that only says online content was disabled.
It’s possible that the game is only unplayable on PlayStation, but still playable (without online features) on PC. But it does seem to still be listed in stores (steam and PlayStation) so I’m not sure exactly what’s going on. I’d have to redownload it to test it again.
> Pretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.
Well, the comment that you replied to said “Gaming companies did not need to insert themselves into the process in the first place.” If the gaming company inserts itself into the process in such a way that the multiplayer part of the game would stop functioning if the game company were to disappear, then the game company is a single point of failure. And it would be a single point of failure that cannot be repaired or replaced by end users. In general, I would consider single points of failure to be design flaws. In this particular case, I would consider it to be a particularly egregious design flaw because it’s actually easier to create a multiplayer game that does not have the design flaw (e.g., local split screen multiplayer, releasing the server binary) than it is to create a multiplayer game that does have the design flaw. In this case, it really is bad design.
Also, I’m highly skeptical that this would have a chilling effect on novel games. Could you give an example of a game that might be chilled in this situation?
If you have add a "easily releasable" clause then the game companies could just do something that makes it not-so, e.g. a shell company that owns the code and they only "licence" it without permission to release it or whatever would fly under that law.
There's no need to "make devs make" anything. We'll do it ourselves. The corporations just need to stop getting in our way with their idiotic cease and desist letters and injunctions and legal threats.
There's no need for them to spend even one cent of their money or even one second of their time on the matter. They just need to do literally nothing. That's literally all they have to do.
Explicit information at time of sale is required, that's a cornerstone of Capitalism.
So companies should be required to either have a server release or meet the their explicit obligation given at time of sale.
So "this game for rent until 1/1/2031". If it flops, they buy out the users, release to make the game work without the company, or maintain servers until they fulfill their obligation.
Capitalism can't refine markets without full information. That means here, how much support a game will get. Whether it's a sale or rent, and so on.
Im saying they got years of enjoyment out if it and they probably didn't expect servers to actually stay up forever.
It's not stealing in that sense. You're enshrining "devs can't sell a 1 time payment license to an ongoing service" as a right and I simply disagree.
Your framing relies on devs not being allowed to sell this license. I don't think banning them is healthy.
If they marked the buy button "license" like California will soon mandate, would that suffice for you, or do you actually demand a perpetual experience?
Edit: also corps frequently short each other very slightly all the time. No one makes some outrage about small amounts like that.
All this could be instantly fixed by repealing the DMCA's anti-reverse engineering provisions. Simply allow people to solve the problem, and the problem will literally take care of itself. Adversarial interoperability should be enshrined into law. If they won't support the thing, then we will. They just have to stop getting in our way.
It's also necessary to heavily punish any company that tries to leverage the legal system's expenses to financially ruin adversaries, especially individuals, by burdening them with the legal costs of defending themselves for the crime of exercising their rights.
"Here's a device we sold you, but when you first turn it on you need to sign this 30 page contract which says you actually don't own the device, if you are mad at us you have to go to our preferred arbitration, and we reserve the right to turn your device off at any time on a whim because you left a bad review somewhere. Sign it or enjoy your worthless brick which we will not refund. Oh, and now every single manufacturer requires the same thing for this device class. So you can either have a washing machine or hand wash your cloths in your bathtub".
My opinion is that is a fraudulent rental masquerading as a sale.
And any and all EULAs or similar documents presented after a sale should be completely null and void. But any corporation attempting to that should be fined a signficant portion of their revenue. Past that, dissolution of company.
But no, we live in a shit society that someone who signs up for a demo of Disney+ and then has his wife die due to bad food, and they tried to slap indefinite arbitration on him.
Yeah, contract law is simply busted here. If it were sane, these contracts would be deemed null and void. In fact, common contract law does require that both sides be compensated. It doesn't require fair or reasonable compensation and that's the big problem.
But I think there is an argument to be made that the EULA has no compensation. Since payment has already been made for the product, it's completely one sided.
I don't know how it works in the US but in the UK a contract term that you cannot read before purchase is simply not part of the contract and hence completely unenforceable. As far as I can tell this is the case all over the world, except it seems the US.
It may actually be the case in the US. The problem is it's really hard to take something like this to court.
For starters, the arbitration clause is designed to make sure that these cases never get to the supreme court. Lower courts see an arbitration clause and say "Thank god, I don't want to deal with this" and are more than happy to sweep cases that way to unload their docket. Once in arbitration, any ruling made has no precedent setting value. The arbitration process is itself designed to drive up legal costs.
But even if that arbitration clause wasn't there or a judge decides to hear the case, it's incredibly expensive to take someone to court. Hundreds if not millions of dollars in fees. The US doesn't have a "loser pay" system, instead both sides are responsible for their own legal fees. Further, the US doesn't have any sort of public civil litigators. We barely have criminal defenders.
The best case scenario is that some sort of class action is built up. But that's really hard and isn't likely to address the contract itself. Even if it does, it'll only be the one contract for the one manufacturer.
Big legal fees, limited applicability, likely burden shifting from public courts. The only way this gets addressed would be through regulation or new laws outlawing the practice.
Yeah, it's frankly ridiculous that "smart" devices need internet access. Why shouldn't my smart oven behave exactly like my Brother printer? There's no reason my oven needs access to the internet, it can do everything it needs to do on my local network. My phone should be able to connect directly to it via a scan of the local network subnet or using any number of service announcement technologies that already exist.
And it makes these devices worse. I should be able to control my oven using a simple REST api and home assistant. The fact that in order to interact with my oven with a home assistant I first have to reach out to my manufacture servers is just insane. It's an oven. It only has so many sensors and nobs to twist.
About the only grace I give these manufacturers is the fact that google and apple both make it an annoying pain to maintain applications in their app store. A manufacturer can't simply drop "oven app" once and expect it to be available on the store forever. But that too should be solved with the same regulation that says "Ovens, refrigerators, washing machines, thermostats, and doorbells must not connect to the internet". We can teach the world about VPNs if they want remotely access their devices.
> About the only grace I give these manufacturers is the fact that google and apple both make it an annoying pain to maintain applications in their app store. A manufacturer can't simply drop "oven app" once and expect it to be available on the store forever.
If the app doesn't use the Internet then the natural way to provision it is to have it pre-loaded on the device anyway. Why should the goal of "avoid needing to hit the manufacturer's servers" involve hitting Google's servers?
Worth noting that Brother for a decade or more now often ships their printers with the USB port hidden behind a sticker, and _lots_ of other papers and stickers telling you “you need to connect to wifi!”.
It should not be allowed for a developer or device manufacturer to kill or nerf any product remotely, once it was bought and paid for.
This is silly. No developer should be obligated to support an online game forever.
Imagine a highly complex online game that requires a few people and tens of thousands a month in cloud costs to keep it running. Now imagine that this game is 25 years old and only has 100 players total left. Are you saying that this developer must maintain the exact same quality of online play for 100 people?
So release the server code as OSS, data necessary to function & support community servers. Even in a crappy hard-to-support way, the community will usually figure out a way.
IMO, the move from community servers over to matchmaking & vendor only servers being the only viable option was a huge disservice to the long-levity of games. If I find the code around here, I could still get a Tremulous server running today for a few bucks, even if I haven't played that game for 20+ years.
Regarding 1 and 2, my pity is mild if this requirement forced companies to follow principles of secure software development, configuration and deployment. Injecting stuff from deployment config is not hard.
3 is valid and can be tricky, as it would depend on when in the software lifecycle the release would be mandatory. If it's in a wind-down or bankruptcy situation, it would be tricky. Though that discussion is similar to the responsible disclosure discussion, isn't it? Exploiters usually already know them.
Try open sourcing a code base that is built up over the last 15 years and most of the devs no longer work there. Thats what you’re asking for many online games.
Not to mention open sourcing the code will subject the company to legal liability if there’s something weird in there like discrimination of some form.
> Try open sourcing a code base that is built up over the last 15 years and most of the devs no longer work there. Thats what you’re asking for many online games.
Thats pretty easy actually.
All you have to do is go into the setting page on the git repo and change the settings from private to public.
I'm sure most game devs are able to figure that one out.
Everything else that resolves was that is merely consequences for which I have little pitty for.
No, what's silly is that you haven't even taken the time to read the initiative. You're coming out with the same incorrect arguments as PirateSoftware did.
What they're saying is (for games that would come out in the future only), is that they need to have an EoL plan for the game.
Let people host their own servers. That used to be a standard feature of multiplayer games.
Why do gamers need protection? Games aren't essential resources. There's zero reason you have to buy a game that doesn't allow users to run servers. Why would you prevent gamers who don't care from buying these games?
Well there's kind of motte-bailey going around where the law effort is of course focusing on the thing they might win, while common commenters demand vastly more unrealistic things.
yes. It's very easy, and free. Don't make servers that only you can run. That's how it used to work, and theres no structural barrier to it beyond greed.
for existing services built in stupid ways, this may be impractical. After such a law is passed, services won't be built in stupid ways in the first place.
> yes. It's very easy, and free. Don't make servers that only you can run. That's how it used to work, and theres no structural barrier to it beyond greed.
Only works for games where you don't have saved states in the game. For example, counter strike.
For a game like World of Warcraft, how do you suppose to make this work?
are you aware that people do regularly run private servers of world of warcraft? It might pose problems for their monetisation model, but nobody says they have to release the server code on launch day, just that it should be released eventually, before they shut everything down. Though note that games like TF2 are famous for pioneering loot boxes etc yet have large cultures of private server hosts.
Similarly, counter strike was famous for having a thriving community of private servers before they released cs:go
The comment you are replying to doesn't argue any such thing, and is pretty clear in its explanation of how your position is perfectly compatible with what is requested.
There is no need for the developer to do anything. We'll do it ourselves. Just release the source code. Or actually don't, we'll reimplement the entire game if we care enough. Just don't get in our way.
It had its server reimplemented by enthusiasts [1] with no access to this "one of a kind cloud" for decades now. Heck it even supposedly had game client ported to new engine [2].
> B-but we can't release the binaries due to licensing...
Release the source. As a developer you should be able to write code that allows to stub out all the propriety parts. The community will replace your speedtrees, matchmaking, netcode, anticheats and so on.
Change is hard we get it, but the excuses are on par with any other industry..
If you ever want a clear demonstration of the phrase "litany of excuses", all you have to do is post online calling for a game company to provide any kind of post-sale support or user-friendly EOL plan for their game.
1. "Game companies don't make any money, so they can't provide any development support after the sale, which barely pays for initial development!"
2. "Game companies are under immense time pressure so they can't waste time on EOL plans or developing the server to be eventually severable and releasable!"
3. "Game companies cannot release the server binaries because of vague licensing reasons!"
4. "Game companies cannot release the server source code because of other vague licensing reasons and secret sauce IP!"
5. "Game companies cannot release the server source code because of cheating!"
6. "Game companies might not even have the server source code when it's time to EOL the online service! You can't expect them to save a backup!"
7. "The game company might shut down and that means they have to just suddenly pull the plug!"
8. "Servers are expensive and complicated to run, and surely the community wouldn't be able to do it!"
9. "The server source might not compile anymore, and surely the community wouldn't be able to fix it!"
You'll hear variations of these excuses and others whenever you suggest these guys lift even a finger to non-disruptively turn down their game.
I find this made up scenario entirely silly. What happena in reality is that games with unnecessary server components get shut down and games with small server component get shutdown. Players are not allowed to run own servers.
Tell gamers how many months, for the advertised price, they will receive a guaranteed level of service and features for.
Then let gamers decide.
Example: If I'm reminded, at purchase time, that this $70 game will work online for 24 months and single-player offline for 36 months, then I can make an informed decision before I buy. Studios would be forced to bring their business plan into visibility and be held to a level of service, and then gamers can't complain when a game is "switched off" according to plan.
This is already implied, just not explicit and quantified in advance.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a game that had early expiry of online already contemplated. And offline play should be rich and complete indefinitely. But I still live in the glorious console cartridge era in my head and in my emulators.
Well, then prevent that via regulation, too. It fatalistic to say "Well, we just can't possibly regulate companies, because they will surely find loopholes and avoid the regulation!" The answer is to write better, more thorough regulation that prevents loopholes. That shouldn't be such a tall order!
Just write a regulation that every game developer has to make a great game, not charge too much, support it for years, and give it away for free as soon as it's not popular. That way, we'll only have great games and archives of great free games.
Then just regulate the term Great. You can regulate everything. Just send in the troops to force gamedevs to only make Red Alert 2, objectively the government derived best possible game. Any deviation from Red Alert 2 will be severely punished.
Force them to list an effective annual subscription fee more prominently displayed than any “purchase” price. If they can’t guarantee any level of service, the license is assumed to be valid for one day, and their game ‘costs’ thirty thousand dollars.
That's fine if "gamers" are my age, but 3 years for a 12 year old is an eternity. This isn't a thing which can be handled like the cookie consent popups.
Part of this is simply fixed by a tweak to copyright that if the IP isn't available for sale at a reasonable price the copyright no longer applies. Games, books, movies, music, etc.
The point of copyright is to increase the amount of creative works available to people by making the production financially viable. If companies aren't making the works available, or taking released works and making them unavailable, copyright has failed.
> While the copyright law is intended to serve the purpose of enriching the general public through access to creative work, it is important to understand that the copyright law imposes no obligation upon creators to make their copyrighted works available. As a result, an unpublished work that is never distributed to the public receives the same copyright protection that a published work would receive.
The article is a bit misleading-- it doesnt make it clear that par of the problem is even single player games stop working when access to a server is lost
My lateral solution: don’t let the companies use the words “purchase” or “buy”, force them to use the words “rent” or “license”.
You can only use the words “purchase” or “buy” if you can install / move the files to a device that is completely airgapped from the internet and continue to use the product indefinitely. Extend it to movies and music as well.
Use established language to enable consumers to make an informed decision.
This is a good step, but it's not enough on its own. The core issue with game licenses is that they can be terminated at any time for any reason. There needs to at least be a well-defined timespan for the license. But of course that'd be seen as an "expiration date" and no publisher wants to put that on their game.
Well calling it a license in the first place is a strong step towards requiring an expiration as well. Licenses are rarely indefinite in scope, if I understand correctly.
i remember when multiplayer games could be connected to a user operated server.
the basic function of a multiplayer server is to keep the players game state synched, large numbers of players, and very fast gameplay vs connection rate and jitter is fly in ointment.
>So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.
This example is humorously short and this is why there is backlash to game companies shutting down games. What about the people who bought it towards the end? They just get nothing? All that time and money spent just gets thrown in the trash because they don't want a cloud bill? They either need to opensource the games and servers or keep supporting them for a decade or longer.
Not everything is economic value. For gamers, an online game can be a community hub, part of their identity, a hobby. It’s not about whether they got their money’s worth, it’s about destroying a virtual “place” they’re emotionally and socially invested, and the specific skill they posses when they’re there.
I think this is the root of it and what the article describes in the first half. I suspect owning a copy of a game will soon be completely eliminated and replaced w the subscription model. Then when subscription dollars stop flowing, the company naturally winds down the service.
Every developer on videogames has some kind of offline mode already implemented, because its necessary to be able to playtest the game builds on the developer machines. Any argument against SKG is lobbyst nonsense. With the very specific exception of stuff like MMOs. We are seeing cases of pirates being able to play those "turned off games" through cracks and private servers, so there is absolutely 0 reason why the publisher cant already do it.
> Every developer on videogames has some kind of offline mode already implemented, because its necessary to be able to playtest the game builds on the developer machines.
Not guaranteed. Many just run a local server, either in-process or externally. Minecraft's singleplayer mode actually runs a server in-process internally. This simplifies development because singleplayer is conceptually the same as playing alone on a server.
This gets more complicated when there are infrastructure servers in the mix for things like player state, matchmaking, etc. You would bypass that in development but they are required for normal play while being external to the game server.
So who gets to be the arbiter of how much time $70 is worth?
You?
The companies making the games?
Why should they get to destroy games—gone, forever, with no chance of retrieval or resurrection—that hundreds of people put their time and love into, and millions of people want to play, just because they think it'll make this quarter's stock price numbers look better?
Copyright was created to protect the rights of the creator for a limited time to promote the useful arts. Creations are supposed to become part of the public domain once the creator is no longer getting use out of them. Game companies want to break that bargain, scorched-earth style, and ensure that no one can ever use the things that they create to make anything new.
because you made an effort born of true craftsmanship, because you found the properties of the game that appealed to users and preserved them, instead of taking them away, or locking them into a premium paid tier version.
A lot of “yes, but…” in this comment section. Hard to tell if it’s HN playing contrarian as it usually loves to do, or just people so brainwashed they default to defending corporate interests.
Nothing makes me as hopeless for the future as reading people trying to one up the negativity about any initiative at all, and if no one did anything, they’d hit you with the snarky ‘go vote to make your voice heard instead of complaining’
It takes big balls to fight publishers and even more massive to fight the internet and the pseudo-intellectual snark of internet commenters. The entire SKG initiative has my support and perhaps it’s the only thing that might convince me that ordinary citizens actually have any say at all in directing legislation.
The "hacker" part now is completely lost on people. They just don't see the big picture, it isn't just about getting your money's worth. Some people spend their free time playing with other people they've only ever met online. Some people escape into a game after work. Relationships are built in these games, and when a game gets suddenly taken away with no recourse, it's a horrible feeling.
I can't find the best example, but this video is of a guy who plays these "dead" games and tries to find the people who are still playing, getting to know them.
Some of these people are just lovely, taking the time to show him around, teaching him the ropes. They're just happy that someone is playing the game. This all exists because the developers are still supporting these games. Take a look at the section about Blockland in the video I linked!
You can't make a person see a problem if his livelihood depends on not seeing it.
In my gaming circles, people who work on SaaS solutions are against SKG even though they are avid gamers and even open source contributors. They just recoil on a thought of an EOL plan. Same on HN.
"Think of the indies" is just same old "Think of the children" astroturfing.
Or they have an indie game theyre "making" and being forced to build an EOL plan for a game that will statistically be a flop is silly to them.
I feel a carveout for total says, say $200k USD or less, would be reasonable. Otherwise you're just conscripting indie time.
I was working on a game, but I'm not looking forward to releasing updates everytime steam changes their relay. Considering scrapping multiplayer completely.
Indie game devs don't care about EOL plans because they're not building a game as a service.
If the indie game has multiplayer, it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages. No indie is setting up a proprietary autoscaling game server infrastructure on AWS that they will have to maintain for years and have an end-of-life plan for if the SKG initiative passes.
The only companies that SKG would inconvenience are AAA/live service studios. They have enough money to find a workable solution, or more likely, spend billions in lobbying against this initiative.
> it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages
This is drifting some from the original specific topic toward the broader conflict, but, not for everyone involved, surely? Will the audience run your server binary, under normal circumstances? Or will they say “Wow, you couldn't even be bothered to put up some basic servers for free? Jeez, you're saying I have to set up a whole account somewhere else and pay them just so I can have a multiplayer game, or set up weird-looking technical shit on my computer that might expose me to hackers? Nobody else asks me to do this, what is this bullshit”? Of course there are intermediary options here (one of which I describe below), but those don't necessarily let you do the “we didn't want to be in the hosting business” plan straightforwardly, so you might still have to take on a lot of the fixed planning costs.
The incentive gradient among consumers tilting so hard in the direction of indefinite active support becoming table stakes seems to be a core part of the vicious cycle here. “I shouldn't have to set stuff up” implicitly cedes control; if they're not doing the coordination, then someone is, and that someone gets hidden responsibility and power without compensation or effective voice, which is an unstable combination by default. This is a similar issue to what happens with convenient, centralized, subsidized social media and chat platforms.
Minecraft is actually an interesting borderline case here: the player license authentication and name/appearance binding is all centralized, and that could suddenly go away and leave everyone in the dark, but individual world servers can be run independently and there are a number of third-party hosting businesses based on this. Microsoft later felt compelled to offer Realms as a first-party means of setup, but IIRC those do take a recurring fee so it's not in the same unstable zone. But then we have a separate issue where, as far as I can dimly tell, a lot of people started expecting “game companies do the work to keep us safe on Their Platform” as, again, table stakes, and so they implemented non-repudiable digital signatures in chat to allow people on non-centrally-hosted servers to still report each other's chat messages to central moderation, which I must assume is another ongoing cost. (In the modded world there are mods that strip this.)
Good cause, but society has rapidly moved passed them just switching off games after people bought them. Now the hardware production companies for gaming are winding down and not producing gaming computer parts because megacorp datacenter parts have a much higher margin. The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud; a context in which these "stop killing games" arguments will have much less leverage.
Then I will simply stop purchasing games and continue to play old ones that I can run on my computer as I please, online server or just do something better with my time.
The whole thing seems absurd when you remember that no one needs video games. This doesn’t need to be legislated. Let them kill video games and then stop buying their video games if they’re just going to kill it off. Why are people still buying games that cash be killed off?
If enough people are still buying these games then clearly the game being killed off is not an important factor. If it was, they wouldn’t buy them.
What does need to be legislated is how these games and services are marketed: it must be made clear latest date the service is guaranteed to be up.
This is a phase and data center parts are usable for gaming. (Yes even with all the rasterizer and texture units chopped off, we'll have a wrapper that does that work in compute shaders)
> The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud
That might be your future. But as long as there are computing platforms that users can run in their own home there will be games for them.
Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud, and their customers have proven willing to pay higher prices for the types of gaming experience Nintendo will deliver.
Judging by the amount of people saying they've used and enjoyed cloud gaming I'm not as confident as you to make that claim. If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease.
I enjoy low-latency competitive games, and I'd say those are unlikely to get replaced by cloud, because many players notice latency spikes immediately. But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by people who like the feeling of owning their own hardware, or feel the need to have lower latency in games.
I'm sure if someone built a data center within two blocks of my home and I was able to stream from it, many of these issues would disappear as well.
> If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease.
Perhaps, but I never claimed otherwise. Simply that the personal devices that do exist will also have games for them. Computer games were here from the beginning, and they will be here in the end. And even personal devices that were chosen for non-gaming needs can play games, nothing requires games to run only on RGB-infested PCs.
> But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by
Yes, the market dynamics may certainly shift, but that's been the story for decades already. And if cloud gaming were going to be this immediately-better story, things like Stadia and Luna would have performed much better in the market.
I think people worry about the cost-efficiency of how to do gaming in a world where hardware is expensive, but the reason hardware is expensive is because it's being sucked up for AI usage, not for gaming usage. So cloud gaming will also necessarily be expensive by these terms, even if the average cost seems less for a cloud gaming subscription than owning your own PC or console.
Consoles already make you pay for online services. They already sunset games so I think even under the new rules they have the ability to stop that service at any time.
>Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud,
Consoles might as well already be cloud for all you control them. But I guess I should've specified PC gaming. I thought it was indicated from the context of "stop killing games". Also, to be clear, I'll never "cloud" game or use consoles. I'll just remain in the past with old hardware and old (and new indie) games. But the "PC gaming industry" as an economic block larger than movies is dying and that's a shame.
fortunately, that's been already attempted and despite the best circumstances imaginable resulted in a much welcome failure.
>On September 29, 2022, Google announced that it would shut down Stadia, citing its lack of traction with users. The service was shut down on January 18, 2023, and Google refunded all purchases for hardware and games made through the Google and Stadia stores.
even more fortunately, further attempts will fail for the same reason - input lag.
some timing-sensitive games such as Clair Obscur (parry) or I Am Your Beast (movement)? sure, they depend on low latency. that said, GeForce Now is, sadly, pretty good nowadays. enough to play a moderately fast paced game such as DEATHLOOP. Ukraine, streaming from Germany. 5 GHz is basically required, but in slower-paced games, on a phone, with 720p streaming, you can get by with 4G.
even games are not really a moat for owning hardware - next Gears with its timing-sensitive reloading mechanic can just get adapted for cloud.
if cloud gaming gets another hype wave for one reason or another, this time I am pretty sure they will lock in a much bigger user base. me personally? still committed to owning my hardware, but I can totally imagine my mother playing some RTS on a GeForce Now-connected tablet and having zero complaints.
it is possible to adapt to input/network lag, sure. I played Doom 3 at 10-15 FPS in 640x480 and Warcraft 3 with 300ms latency, and I enjoyed it at the time, but I don't think I could endure such underwhelming experiences after many years of much better ones.
Hardware scarcity and cloud incentives are real, but they're also part of the same broader trend: more dependency on centralized providers, less control for the buyer
we still got newer companies out of china like moore threads working on gaming gpus, they had to pause new production because of the whole ai shortage but it looks like they might restart. is it usable for any serious gaming right now? no. but its already fighting the nvidia/amd monopoly together with intel.
as long as there is a market the producers will come, even in a super capital intensive industry like this. and it looks like nvidia is partially going back on the whole data center push with rtx spark. its just one high end product but it shows they know a lot of people want local gaming and local inference.
Sorry - I didn't get this comment? I mean isn't strange that people get to live in a digital reality that is dependant on a servers that could be taken down instead of being embedded in physical reality that we call life?
Im a professional gamedev. There is pretty much no indie on earth who actually depends on cloud systems to work, because that stuff is expensive and indies dont have money. Thats a megacorp thing particularly from AAA publishers. Indies are either singleplayer (this is 0 problem) or they have local servers.
That article is paid for by the lobbysts and completely incorrect and wrong.
It's not just clouds systems. SKG might not cover it but what happens if Steam hypothetically shuts down? Many games are built on the Steamworks API for things like matchmaking and networking. Those will stop working if Steam is gone which could bring down many multiplayer titles with it, even if the games have local servers.
Im not sure for Hell Let Loose, but Chivalry 2 is a Unreal game and all unreal games come with a server.exe that works by default and works through direct IP connection. It would cost them 0 and im sure the game could just host servers with the normal client build like all unreal engine games do by default.
Just no. There's zero reason (other than greed as you can rent your own server) as to why you can't run your own server with Chivalry 2, likely no reason for Hell Let Loose either. I ran a Chivarly 1 server for years, its just an unreal game with a server browser, its not an mmo or pubg like matchmaking style that requires more infrastructure to run. And even if you did that, you could still allow people to run their own private servers, just have an old style server browser, which comes out of the box with engines like Unreal.
> Now it becomes way more expensive for small studios to come out with games that have online features.
Good riddance. Online features suck. Make your game multiplayer or make it singleplayer. Don't add pointless online features.
PS all you need to make sure it works is release the server once you stop supporting it yourself.
> They rely on a huge network of interconnected cloud micro services.
Give people the docker file.
> A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.
If they run it themselves, probably. Indies are more likely to use free services like Steamworks and Firebase which can be pulled out from under them for any reason.
Here's an idea, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's not new: instead of forcing all game devs to ensure longevity, just make clear criteria for what constitutes that longevity, and developers that meet them (or promise to meet them when they shut down) can slap a nice bright logo onto their game. Something like the rating system, except it's a line that's only there for games that claim they are "yours forever". Steam would have a filter for it, and so on.
Then you can make the punishments/fines for breaking that promise draconian, since nobody has to opt in.
Most single-player games would have the logo out of the box, gamers would come to expect it for those, and take a good hard look at single player games that don't have it. With multiplayer games it would be more varied, but there would now be a very clear incentive to see if it might not be possible after all to do what is needed to get that label, especially if none of your competitors have it. And most importantly when planning new games, you'd double check every decision would disqualify the game for it.
As a developer or manufacturer, if your software or device absolutely requires a server that costs money to maintain, then your business plan should take that into account: You should be charging customers monthly to keep that service running. You shouldn't promise a one-time payment, take the customer's money and then yank the service away on a whim.
Nobody is asking for free labor to keep services running. I'm asking that you 1. only tether your product to a server if you absolutely need to, and 2. charge for that kind of product monthly so that you can leave it running while you still have customers. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
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