Stamau123Statement on Stop Killing Games - VIDEOGAMES EUROPE
ampersandrew“Our Board”:
Epic Games, Take Two, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Bandai Namco, etc.
Aielman15I trust these people with every cell of my body.
Essence_of_MehHere are the board members of this organisation in case someone is curious about their relevancy/neutrality on the matter:
- Hester Woodliffe – Chair (Warner Bros. Games)
- Canon Pence (Epic Games)
- Kerry Hopkins (Electronic Arts)
- Ian Mattingly (Activision)
- Klemens Kundratitz (Embracer)
- Qumar Jamil (Microsoft)
- Clemens Mayer-Wegelin (Nintendo of Europe)
- Cinnamon Rogers (Sony Interactive Entertainment)
- Matt Spencer (Take 2)
- Alain Corre (Ubisoft)
- Alberto Gonzalez-Lorca (Bandai Namco Entertainment)
- Karine Parker (Square Enix)
- Mark Maslowicz (Level Infinite)
- Felix Falk (game)
- Nicolas Vignolles (SELL)
- David Verbruggen (VGFB)
- Nick Poole (UKIE)
You know, the people who “ensured that the voice of a responsible games ecosystem is heard and understood” (direct quote from their website).
Warner Bros games shouldn’t have any level of authority on anything
if gabe could come out with a statement that if steam had to shut down for some reason he’d try to make sure people get to keep playing their games they have downloaded he’d probly cause these guys to have an aneurysm, but I doubt even gabe would go that far
He did say something similar years ago if I recall correctly but we never got any details and it was so long ago it’s hard to guess whether that’s still the plan. Reassurance or update on that wouldn’t be unwelcome, that’s for sure.
It was a long time ago, but I thought I heard Steam would release the encryption keys.
Either way it’s pure speculation considering something truly massive would have to happen for Steam to even get to this point.
You can (could?) reach out to Steam Support, and this is part of the email they reply with:
“In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network, measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.”
Not sure if they ever expounded upon those details though.
To my knowledge, they have not.
My question is, what is this group as an entity, and why does their opinion matter? Are they an ngo-style advocacy group, or an actual governing body of some kind?
It’s a group representing the biggest publishers in the industry, used as a front to pretend they’re able to self-regulate when it comes to consumer laws vs business wants. So no, not a governing body but more of a cartel or lobbying group, I guess? One with A LOT of money on the line and enough lobbying power to push against things like the Stop Killing Games campaign the moment they feel threatened.
Okay, so more World Economic Forum, less Electronic Frontier Foundation?
Sounds like we need more EFF’s of video games then.
Yeah, that tracks - it’s a business organisation first and foremost. And yeah, we definitely do.
NONEOh They are scare. That’s Good.
audaxdreikAbsolute trash statement, I really hope this bites them.
They’re just repeating a lot of the same misinformation that Pirate Software had been saying, the exact things that had riled the gaming community and caused this latest wave of action. We’re already primed to discount the points they’re trying to make and it shows exactly how disingenuous they’re being.
Positively, I hope this reflects some true fear on their end.
Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
As has been stated over and over and over again, private servers used to be an option until the industry decided they weren’t any more. If the result of this is that it forces the industry to not make shitty, exploitative games, that’s still a win for the consumers. I would rather have no game at all rather than something that psychologically tries to exploit my FOMO and drains my wallet.
VitteliusIt’s also a strawman argument. Because yes, developers have less to no control over the operation of private servers. Yes, that means they can’t moderate those servers.
But
This initiative only covers games, not supported anymore by the devs anyway. Meaning legally speaking everything happening to private servers would be literally not their concern anymore. And new legislation, should it come to that, would spell that out.
For sure, 💯
- secure players’ data: there should be no sensitive player data being stored on a private game server like that anyways, you’re connecting to a server, not logging into a service
- remove illegal content: not the developer’s responsibility in this case, it’s the responsibility of the private server (admittedly this could get messier with net neutrality and safe harbor stuff? unclear, but point remains, it’s still not the developer’s responsibility here)
- combat unsafe community content: ditto. Not the the responsibility of the developer but the private servers. It’s often been argued that the smaller communities of private servers do a BETTER job of moderating themselves)
- would leave rights holders liable: HERE IT IS! We can’t let you self host something like Marvel Rivals due to all the copyrights and trademarks and brand protections. How dare you!
Same for the “online only design” argument. The moment they decide it’s not viable anymore and they want to shut it down: what does it matter to them, what players do with it? As long as they offer the service themselves, no one is bugging them. (Although I would absolutely be in favor of also getting self hosting options right from the start, I am realist enough to accept, that this would indeed lower economical feasibility of some projects.)
That part of the argument is slightly different. If I understand the press statement correctly, what they are saying is: “Some servers can’t, on a technical level, be hosted by the community”. And that’s not a straw man (arguing against something never asked for), that’s just a lie. We have access to all the same stuff as the industry (AWS etc). Hosting these kinds of servers might be very expensive, but the initiative only asks for a way to keep games alive not for a cheap way (though I would prefer a cheap way of course)
I imagine it’s rather licensing. If they have to provide the software at some point, they can’t use components they are not allowed to distribute. And I agree, that this will impact development costs. But with the law in place, this is not an unexpected cost but one that can be factored in. Might be, that some live services are then no longer viable… but I don’t care. There are more games than anyone could play and games are cancelled or not even started to develop all the time for various reasons. One more or less is just noise.
ZagorathDevs have numerous options for how to address the SKG initiative. The top three that come to my mind are:
- Release server binaries (along with modifying clients to have a setting to connect to the right server)
- Modify multiplayer to work over LAN (good when the server’s only/main job is matchmaking)
- Modify the game itself to no longer require online connectivity
In the case of live service games, I would suggest option 3 is the most appropriate. If the main gameplay is singleplayer, but it’s online so you can dole out achievements and gatekeep content, the answer is simple: stop doing that. Patch it to all work in-client. And keep in mind that this will be a requirement at end-of-life from the beginning. If it’s an unexpected requirement, that’s going to be a huge development cost. If it’s expected, making that EOL change easy to implement will be part of the code architecture from the start.
Comes to mind as an example that already exists, …steampowered.com/…/MEGA_MAN_X_DiVE_Offline/
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I am doing my part! STOMPS on EA’s logo.
Beat me to it!
“many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only”
So change your design? The corporate mind cannot comprehend this.
paraphrandWhy could you turn a battle royal game into a local only split screen game for 2-4 people?
Why not?
I tried to pick the most obvious example of an online only title.
What’s the plan with a 100 player battle royal game?
Edit: the guy I replied to chose to quote someone saying a game is online only, and their suggestion was to change that.
And then ya’ll come in with replies about keeping it online only, and they have 55 upvotes as of this edit.
As long as people can host a server instance, does it matter?
Hypothetically, even if it costs 1000$ per hour in AWS fees to get the required hardware to run that, at least you have the option to, alternatively have a peer to peer option to play smaller version on a LAN with a max of however many players your own network can support, there could be many implementations, which at the end of the day would still allow you to play the game when the official servers (authentication or room hosts) are shuttered and inaccessible
The main point of SKG is that currently, we, as customers, are not even getting the short end of the stick, we are getting no stick, despite having paid for it.
And ultimately, at the end of the day, not our problem to try to figure this out, the point is we’re unhappy with the current situation and want things to change.
That’s not “changing that” it’s keeping it online only.
The initiative’s issue isn’t with them being online-only (though personally people hate it). The initiative aims for games to have the ability to have a reasonable state of playability past the end of life.
This is for all kinds of games - single-player, multiple player, live service, only only. The point is to keep what you paid for.
Of course it’s not. That’s why I made my initial reply.
There are, it may surprise you to learn, different types of game that have online connectivity for different reasons. And the appropriate EOL response may differ across those games.
“Live-service” games where the main gameplay is singleplayer but an online connection is required so they can enforce achievements and upgrades (…and “anti-piracy” bs) may be best served by simply removing the online component so it can all be done locally.
Online competitive games can be switched to a direct connection mode.
MMOs and other games with large numbers of users and a persistent online server can be run on fan-operated servers, so long as (a) the server binary is made available, and (b) the client is modified to allow changing settings to choose a server to connect to (it could be something as simple as a command-line flag with no UI if the devs are being really cheap).
You guys…
I picked an actual “online only” example for a reason. Yet everyone is jumping around talking about other things.
Turning a battle royal into a lan only game sounds like the solution I was expecting in my replies. And then yeah, you can even route that over the internet.
But that’s not changing the design, really. It’s providing the infrastructure needed to run it, even if it’s lan only, and would need more to run it over the internet.
But that’s not changing the design, really
Depends on what one means by “change the design”. It doesn’t make a fundamental change to the deeper architecture of the game, no. But it does require some relatively superficial changes, which are themselves a design problem of sorts.
Enabling the ability for purchasers to specify an arbitrary server to connect to would require a design change compared to how most games are recently. That feature used to be standard in the early years of online gaming.
We had online-only multiplayer games in the early 2000s with self-hosted servers supporting over 60 players per map. It’s absolutely possible to do better with today’s tech.
Man. Y’all really think I’m talking about networking design?
I thought we were talking about gameplay design. That’s why I picked 100 player battle royal.
“Change the game design” implies that, to me. I didn’t pick a single player experience with always online requirements. Or a 4 player game with online matchmaking and no direct connect options.
There’s such a strong, and obsessive need among a bunch of people on this topic to explain and explain, and not parse the precise thing being asked.
There’s also a lot of people who conflate having the opinion that the effort will fail due to its approach and the person/people behind it with not wanting it to succeed.
What I’m doing is poking at how people are behaving and how they talk about this initiative. And how the messaging is confusing and all over the place. It takes 5 people racing to explain it to me when I understand perfectly, and lay out a specific case. Yet no one replies to explain how my example would work.
I’m not the only one who sees this initiative as misguided, and mis framed.
Sorry for coming off like a troll, usually my outlier questions get responses instead of people acting like they are here.
I’ve really dug a bit too deep on this one, and I’ll try to stop replying now.
If you understand perfectly, you’ve yet to demonstrate this. The ask is to remove superfluous, anti-consumer design elements like always-online connections for single-player games, or shuttering official servers with no mitigation plan for those who wish to play the game after this occurs, and people have asked for changes to these, specific sorts of anti-consumer design choices. Meanwhile, you’re over here big brain posting about “That’s not a design change! Now, turning a 100-player online battle royale game into a single player JRPG, that would be a design change!” It’s no great wonder that you’re being treated as either a troll or an idiot when you’ve manage to misunderstand something so fundamental, while confidently insisting time and again that you alone get it, and everyone is just misguided.
I can find a community for a fighting game from 2012 to get together every Thursday night for a 30-person tournament via Discord. 100 people in a battle royale could work much the same.
That fighting game is not online only, I bet.
I replied to someone saying that an online only game should change their design.
It’s not online only, but this Thursday night get-together is online-only.
Hosting your own server and playing multiplayer games over LAN is playing offline. Is that what you’re asking?
You can host the server on the same machine the game is running on, it’s not uncommon during development especially the early stages.
Give players a copy of the server so they can host their own, or patch the game to allow direct connections like games used to have in the 90s and 00s?
That sounds like an online only title. I thought we were going to “change the design.”
What do you mean?
Changing the design happens during the pre-production. This will not effect any games retroactively. As unfortunate as it is, until the EU parliament decides on a law or regulation all games destined to die will die.
I mean, taking a 100 person battle royal and changing it so dramatically would be quite odd to do.
I picked an extreme example for discussion reasons.
It’s possible to host your own Arma server that can handle 100 players. Ironically Arma has a Battle Royale mode. It’s not rocket science.
Sounds like that’s the answer to my reply then. Not all this other noise people have posted. 😏
What exactly is this dramatic change that you think would have to happen?
I think it mostly revolves around how you get 100 players together for a good game. The match making part. I’m skeptical of the quality of match making, but that’s not a showstopper for people committed to playing. But if we set aside the need for someone to maintain hosting, then it becomes peer to peer or a lan party, or a combination of the two.
I remember what it was like rounding up and wrangling 80 people to raid in WoW back in the day.
And none of this is a showstopper I don’t see why we can’t talk about that. It’s not like discussing the difficult edge cases or the feasibility of the details could harm things.
My initial question in this thread framed changing the game design, not networking stack. So it was about making it all local/same screen only. An absurd example on purpose.
I think it mostly revolves around how you get 100 players together for a good game. The match making part.
This part is not really what the initiative is about. The initiative can't guarantee you'll be able to find 100 other people to play with. Even matchmaking (unless it's somehow made integral to the game) is not really relevant to the initiative. What the initiative is concerned with is preservation of games. To give a specific example, if you're able to organize 100 people to play the same game the initiative wants you to have the technical capability to set up the game for 100 people. And to give a more real life example, Anthem is shutting down at the start of 2026. That means if me and my 2 friends get nostalgic and want to play Anthem in 2027 we literally cannot, the game won't run. But if what SKG wants to achieve would be a reality right now then EA would have to have a way for me to set up whatever is necessary for me and my 2 friends to play Anthem together, be it some kind of server binary or P2P solution or source code or whatever, doesn't matter how the company wants to solve this as long as it works. That's what SKG is about.
My initial question in this thread framed changing the game design, not networking stack. So it was about making it all local/same screen only. An absurd example on purpose.
SKG isn't saying companies should make BR-s local/split screen. It's only concerned with keeping games in a playable state. SKG doesn't alter the game design unless the technical stack required to keep the game running is somehow integral to the design of the game. SKG deliberately leave the "how a game should be preserved" open so publishers/developers could preserve games how they see fit. If the publishers/developers want to rip out the multiplayer and replace it with local/split screen that's how they've decided to preserve their game. That is not really criticism of SKG, that's just a bad faith argument that can be made only because SKG isn't as restrictive as people claim it to be.
And specifically in your example the design of a BR game does not need to change at all because the only thing preventing some BR-s from being preserved is the fact that you cannot set up your own servers.
The initial post you replied to was talking about changing the design, not the game design. I think the thread got off course because you interpreted that as game design. As long as users can host the servers themselves, the game design can remain exactly the same. Even if the game can only be played when it’s orchestrated by museum curators or something, that’s still preferable than the game being totally dead. If you’ve ever been to PAX East, there’s always a room with a full networked game of Steel Battalion multiplayer via LAN. Every controller was $200 back in the day, plus everyone needs an Xbox and TV. It was highly unlikely that anyone could ever play this game without Xbox Live, but it can still be done, so where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I don’t have a problem if someone wants to turn a battle royale into a 4 player game.
If someone wants to host something bigger, that’s cool too.
I think there would be room in the market for a group to host servers for abandoned games.
It’s not terribly difficult or costly to set up a cloud host if you remember to put the cost restrictions on, so there’s one more option for multiplayer games.
That’s for games in the past, games going forward could be designed better. But for games that have already been made, there’s no reasonable way to redesign games that have already been published. Any redesign will change the game instead of preserving it, and you’ll never get the original devs back together with the original tech stack in order to do any major changes. But smaller things like getting old games to be able to point to different servers isn’t a big problem.
Seems like your reading comprehension is lacking, so I’m going to encourage you to reread the entire exchange up to this point. If you can’t figure it out, you’re not someone worth discussing with.
What “online only” means is the need to authenticate to a proprietary server. After logging in, you are then (potentially) directed to a random server to play on.
If you are not online, you cannot authenticate and therefor not be directed to a server. This means you cannot play the game. When the authentication server and infrastructure behind the game is taken offline, the game becomes unplayable, because it is online only.
If a final patch were to be made where either a private authentication server would be made available for you to self-host, or authenation to be completely removed, you could play the game either offline on your device locally or LAN, or online by anyone who cares enough to host a server with the game logic. It would no longer be “online only” since you would have a choice. You can choose to play offline, or choose to play online.
If a game actually needs servers beyond the authentication part, then those should be made available too, so that anyone, again, can play locally or online.
It’s logical that if game servers are made available, a game can never be “online only” again, because you could host the server on your pc and connect to localhost.
Your whole argumentation about “online only” game design falls completely flat. You are mixing concepts that have nothing to do with one another.
A game can be a battle royale by design, gameplay wise, and have the ability to host your own servers by design, technical architecture wise.
Quake Live used to be online only. You could not host your own servers. They released for steam and made it possible to host your own servers. The old authentication system was taken down, logins are no longer required, and now you just launch the game and pick a server in a built in server browser. It should be the standard and Quake Live should serve as an example of how it should be done.