The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games • Hacker News Board

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#81

Post by sph » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 7:56 PM UTC

knollimar wrote: post #59

junaru wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comple…

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.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#82

Post by dkersten » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 7:58 PM UTC

knollimar wrote: post #65

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#83

Post by dkersten » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 7:58 PM UTC

mysterydip wrote: post #15

ryandrake wrote: post #9

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 dow…

“Ah, but you didn’t buy a thing, you bought a license to temporarily use a thing in ways we deemed acceptable!” -publishers somewhere

Then they should not be allowed to use words like “buy” in the online stores.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#84

Post by stale2002 » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #76

tetha wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simi…

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.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#85

Post by gosub100 » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

knollimar wrote: post #51

ryandrake wrote: post #9

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 dow…

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…

Effectively you're saying it's ok to steal, because "it's just from 60 people, c'mon".

Try stealing from 60 different corporations and see how that works out.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#86

Post by watwut » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #33

ryandrake wrote: post #9

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 dow…

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…

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.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#87

Post by mpyne » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

xpct wrote: post #13

mpyne wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 immediatel…

> 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.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#88

Post by watwut » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 8:07 PM UTC

0x59 wrote: post #29

danaris wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Why would you buy my new game if you're spending all your attention on the one I sold you 10 years ago?

Why would you buy a new bool when old one did not burned out yet?

And you know what ... it is ok for people to buy a thing, keep having a thing and not being forced to buy entirely different thing.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#89

Post by cwillu » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 8:19 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #14

ryandrake wrote: post #9

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 dow…

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.…

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!”.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#90

Post by rpdillon » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 8:21 PM UTC

dkersten wrote: post #82

knollimar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discl…

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.