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Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

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Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#71

Post by Farbklex »

danieltanfh95 wrote: post #63
hodgehog11 wrote: post #7

As is stated in the article, but is not clear just from the headline, this was not an unexpected outcome from the initiative. The Commission did not seek discussions with SKG, and spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups. SKG was prepared for this, and their intention has been to join up with the group putting together the new Digital Fairness Act, since the objective there is very simi…

wrong, the commission did discuss with SKG, but the entire group had their head in the sand when reasonable people asked SKG to respect technical reality and resubmit a better, reality-focused proposal as SKG 2.0. They ban anyone not in their echo chamber.

The technical reality is: - that singel player games don't need a persistent online connection - that it is not that complicated if you develop your game with offline playability in mind from the beginning - multiplayer games can very well have an offline playable LAN mode (Age of Empires 2 is currently sold as "Definitive Edition" which does not work offline in LAN unless you connect to Xbox online services first)

The gaming industry did way too much stupid shit in the last few years and just needs to take it a notch back.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#72

Post by maccard »

sph wrote: post #40
TheTaytay wrote: post #17

As written, wouldn’t this result in fewer online games? Maybe dramatically fewer?

90% of games have no online conponent, and run in perpetuity after purchase. The multiplayer games usually ship with a server binary you can place on any machine you control. This only affects AAA game studios that produce micro transaction slop and live services. The exact same that are lobbying against any sort of regulation. The gaming industry will be fine.

> 90% of games have no online conponent, and run in perpetuity after purchase

So those games are unaffected regardless of this law.

> This only affects AAA game studios that produce micro transaction slop and live services. The exact same that are lobbying against any sort of regulation.

F2P live service games are specifically excluded from this though, which presumably is what you mean by micro transaction slop. This affects every game, from a 1 man developer who uses steam for p2p all the way up to activision and call of duty. The groups hit hardest by this are going to be small-medium developers who are just trying to build a game, not Ubisoft (who are the reason for instigating this whole thing).

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#73

Post by acron0 »

drorco wrote: post #56
eskori wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree with the first point; it would have been great showing a list of supporters from the game industry. Not that I am an expert in this matter, though. However: > The EU will view this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers. How could SKG be an attack on gamedevs? What changes in the life of someone in gamedev if the onlin…

If you're actually curious, to gate a taste of the cost of compliance, I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc. On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want a accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc…

I don't really buy this. From my personal experience, indie devs are more likely to use methods which make their server tech distributable (e.g. Minecraft). Large game publishers appear to go in the opposite direction for control and lineage reasons: "Crew 1 is dead so you need to buy Crew 2 now".

Anyone who gamed before 2005 knows that games do not require magic, expensive, managed remote services. We all used to run our own servers! The GameSpy era!

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#75

Post by skotobaza »

maccard wrote: post #68
DexesTTP wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would result in fewer online games that stop working altogether when the publisher wants to stop it. All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this. It's really not that complicated. Not "free", of course, but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.

Game developer here. If it were “just” that easy I’d love to support this. > All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this You’re making a huge assumption here both about the scope of the law, and about how straightforward this is to do. I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would b…

> games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic

But you don't have to design the backend this way. Especially if you know that you will have to share the binaries when the support for the game ends.

> This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend

Some games that have been open sourced by the developers solved this issue by replacing such library calls with stubs. I think this is an acceptable compromise.

>What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service?

If you still support the game, you can replace those services to keep the game running. If you don't support it (or decided that you don't want to keep supporting it because of the service shutdown), then you just release it with those service calls, and the community will replace them (if they want to of course).

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#76

Post by pdpi »

drorco wrote: post #56
eskori wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree with the first point; it would have been great showing a list of supporters from the game industry. Not that I am an expert in this matter, though. However: > The EU will view this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers. How could SKG be an attack on gamedevs? What changes in the life of someone in gamedev if the onlin…

If you're actually curious, to gate a taste of the cost of compliance, I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc. On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want a accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc…

The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly.

Likewise, the legal risk for small indie games here rounds to zero. Most such games will, at worst, lose access to online leaderboards if their developers shut them down.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#77

Post by xeyownt »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #53
hodgehog11 wrote: post #7

As is stated in the article, but is not clear just from the headline, this was not an unexpected outcome from the initiative. The Commission did not seek discussions with SKG, and spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups. SKG was prepared for this, and their intention has been to join up with the group putting together the new Digital Fairness Act, since the objective there is very simi…

I'd say this shows how corrupted elites are. If the "democratic" entity spends all the time with lobbyists, and not the initiative which started the discussion, this speaks volumes.

Seeing your comment, the base seems more corrupted than the elite. The corruption they suffer is to see everyone as being corrupted.

Think about it: how you would implement such directive and make it implementable... Now you see the problem.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#78

Post by skotobaza »

maccard wrote: post #72
sph wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of games have no online conponent, and run in perpetuity after purchase. The multiplayer games usually ship with a server binary you can place on any machine you control. This only affects AAA game studios that produce micro transaction slop and live services. The exact same that are lobbying against any sort of regulation. The gaming industry will be fine.

> 90% of games have no online conponent, and run in perpetuity after purchase So those games are unaffected regardless of this law. > This only affects AAA game studios that produce micro transaction slop and live services. The exact same that are lobbying against any sort of regulation. F2P live service games are specifically excluded from this though, which presumably is what you mean by micro transaction slop. Thi…

> The groups hit hardest by this are going to be small-medium developers who are just trying to build a game

How so? Smaller developers don't usually build games that require huge online components that will be hard to release to the public. That's mostly AAA publishers that do so (at least I can't remember the opposite from the top of my head).

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#79

Post by Farbklex »

TheTaytay wrote: post #17

As written, wouldn’t this result in fewer online games? Maybe dramatically fewer?

Less "unnecessary" online games. To give you one tame example: Age of Empires 2 released in 1999 and is fully playable offline either as a single or multiplayer game via LAN. It has received two re-releases as AoE 2 HD edition and AoE 2 Definitive Edition. The Definitive Edition does not work offline for multiplayer games anymore. It is still the same game with updated graphics and engine but it is still just Age of Empires 2.

In order to play an actuall "Local Area Network" game, you first need to connect to the online Xbox Service. Only then will "Multiplayer" be available as an option and only then you can actually select "Local Area Network" as the "server region" for the match.

All for an updated re-release of a game from 1999.

I was at the AoE 2 DE launch LAN event at a Microsoft Store with big YouTubers and everything. They could not play LAN because right at launch, the online servers crashed due to the load. No one played a multiplayer game at this LAN...

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#80

Post by hobofan »

skotobaza wrote: post #75
maccard wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game developer here. If it were “just” that easy I’d love to support this. > All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this You’re making a huge assumption here both about the scope of the law, and about how straightforward this is to do. I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would b…

> games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic But you don't have to design the backend this way. Especially if you know that you will have to share the binaries when the support for the game ends. > This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend Some games that have been o…

So now you have shifted to goal post from "providing a simple runnable binary" (not feasible due to baked in third-party licensing) to "open sourcing the game code, so people can rewrite the game to patch the missing parts".

The few examples you point out as "open source released with stubs" are also usually games that are decades old and cultural landmarks, where there was economic incentive from the right holders (good PR) to release them (e.g. Quake). This isn't tennable for your typical game that has to shut down online services because it's financially unsustainable.

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