this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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I love the concept, but how would this play out? Servers cost money to operate and maintain. And publishers aren't interested in losing control of an IP or supporting them indefinitely.
So what is the goal here? Single player mode? Old school LAN partys?
Open source hostable dedicated servers, or P2P connection with an open source federated matchmaking server would be ideal imo. Just let us host the servers pls.
Releasing server binaries (nobody in the context of this petition is asking for source code) is one option. Single player mode is another. Everything you'd wanna know is on https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ . Exact wording of laws and the like comes in a later phase, as with every initiative ever it will be up to the lawmaking body to make that.
They don't have do do that.
They don't have to do that.
They don't have to do that.
Now that I wrote that thrice, I feel like it reads as passive aggressive, but that wasn't the intention. Anyway, the only requirement is to not brick the game, which shouldn't be a problem for any game that contains a singleplayer mode.
For online-multiplayer-only games the publisher would actually have to work some solution, which costs money. I'm interested to see how that goes.
They should be forced to make the server software available for self-hosting and the game itself configurable so that you can acess these alternate servers if they decide to shut down their servers.
Some sort of playable experience after official support has ended. The proposal doesn't specify what that has to look like because different games might require different solutions.
It can be a single-player mode it can be dedicated servers or p2p with an open api for third parties to handle matchmaking. It can just be adding bots.
And sometimes it just means removing always on DRM. A lot of games would be perfectly playable offline if it wasn't for that.
Dedicated servers, or anything else that requires ongoing financial input from the publisher\developer is explicitly not put on the table as an option, as that would be unreasonable, and likely impact indies far worse that AAA studios.
The demand is that the game be left in a fully operational state, or be provided with the means to make that possible (server binaries, online-drm removal).
I meant dedicated servers in the sense of developers releasing the server binaries for the community to host and operate.
My previous comment was easy to misunderstand in that regard, as the term describes a UX flow more than making a technical distinction
Once upon a time, companies released server softwares for games, there were whole companies/websites/communities dedicated to hosting servers for multiplayer games, usually distributed geographically to allow usable ping, completely outside the control of the original publisher. Modded servers for games like Quake 2 allowed very creative play.
Various ways. They could release a local server mode single player mode to play those games solo (assuming the game really does not have a proper single player architecture). Or they release the server software itself so that the community can host their own servers for others to play on.