Stop Killing Games • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop Killing Games

#111

Post by dijit » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:11 PM UTC

abetusk wrote: post #94

nerdjon wrote: post #8

This is basically advocating for open source games which is a completely different story than what stop killing games is trying to do. There are tons of closed source games that have zero online component to them. I don't see how you can actually argue that this is a good thing, especially when they say: > The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. A…

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. Pretty dismissive, no? Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards. Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe [2]. Solarus has a donation page [3]. I'm sure there are many more examples that span the spectrum of payment…

> Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.

OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. The community only got access to the servers when they had declined to 20-30 concurrent players. So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.

> Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe

Teeworlds doens't pay its staff a living wage, those donations went to server infrastructure.

According to developers of the most popular open-source games themselves, open-source games have not been commercially successful... it is very common for them to only cover operating costs via community donations, and many projects have a player base actively opposed to any monetisation model.[0]

Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.

[0]: https://80.lv/articles/inside-the-open-source-games-in-searc...

FD: I speak from a position of being in the AAA gaming space for 11 years, so I have an economic incentive to... not lose my job due to the collapse of industry- but I'd like you all to be able to enjoy my creations after it's no longer possible for me to run it for you; I want a solution too!

Re: Stop Killing Games

#112

Post by nkrisc » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:11 PM UTC

promano wrote: post #65

jl6 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game budgets were a lot lower 20 years ago, so maybe modern AAA games with $100m+ budgets can only exist in a world where every possible customer can be maximally shaken down.

Maybe we need a separate campaign, "Kill Games": any games whose existence requires players being "shaken down" should not be allowed to exist.

Or “You Don’t Need to Play Video Games”.

I enjoy playing video games but I recognize them for what they are: a luxury past-time that is not necessary for life and one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#113

Post by strbean » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

john_strinlai wrote: post #79

fragmede wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs. > So, we'd have to work on slimming that down ...why? My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.

> My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on. if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation. the spirit of the law is that i can reasonably spin up an instance of the server for me and my friends to play.

If a game is popular enough for anyone to care, some turbonerd will get the server running on a massive cloud instance, and then people will be able to play the game.

Fans have reverse-engineered and stood up servers for tons of games with no access to the server binaries. The idea that they wouldn't figure it out when given much better resources (server binaries or source code) is crazy.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#114

Post by dijit » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

strbean wrote: post #101

dijit wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is true for the californian legislation, but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction) - nor the direction of the authors article, and like I replied in a sibling response: it's not like people would be pleased to get our binaries. Second: anti-cheat itself is a fucking joke. A crutch, a last ditch hail-mary because we ran out of time to batten down the hatches or thing…

> but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction) Where can we find information about the direction the EU is going on this? AFAICT there has just been one meeting on the topic?

There's been... a lot more than just one meeting.

https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/news/14th-valid-initia...

https://commission.europa.eu/european-citizens-initiative/me...

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/stop-destroying...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXdmoeaYZ9Y

https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/news-media/news/eesc-debates-e...

Re: Stop Killing Games

#115

Post by tayo42 » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #63

F3nd0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As not a game dev myself, may I ask for clarification? How does ‘Stop Killing Games’ legislation kill any sort of multiplayer games specifically? Aren’t there already games which don’t have the problem the movement is trying to solve? Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? I feel like I may have misunderstood your point or am just lacking a lot of important…

Well, ok, you grasped at a few issues there that go off in different directions. The issue with "Stop Killing Games" is that the legislation doesn't currently look like anything, it's a broad appeal and the solution for studios will depend on where it finally lands. If it lands in the realm of "Games must be released FOSS after x years" then, aside from the fact that a lot of the times we don't own the copyrights to…

We used to have player run servers for years. Is it some lost skill to write software that way?

Re: Stop Killing Games

#116

Post by eckesicle » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC

My father was a printer his entire life. I went with him to work one day when I was around 12 years old. He loaded up a box of, what seemed to me a random selection of flyers, booklets and other printed goods in his car, and together we drove to the National Archives (in Sweden).

He explained to me that every media artifact of cultural significance would be stored there in three (I believe) copies for future generations to enjoy, or researchers, or historians.

I was given a tour by an archivist there and this became a core memory of mine.

I was always at unease growing up, wondering what would happen to video games when they no longer became popular. Would I be able to enjoy them when I got older? Would my children ever be able to play the games that shaped my teenage years?

The discussion around the matter of Stop Killing Games always devolves to one around free labour or around infringing the rights of the creator, but at some point, when a game, or a film, or a book is no longer monetised, makers of cultural works should be obliged to archive and ensure that our shared cultural heritage and identity is preserved for the future.

Film makers, authors, printers, ad agencies, music producers, and many others are already obliged to do this in many countries.

Why should video game producers be exempt?

It's just better for all of us, and our children, if these works of art are preserved, and that at an insignificant effort and cost, compared to the cost of developing it.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#117

Post by croisillon » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

Altern4tiveAcc wrote: post #95

PSA for anyone considering reading it: this article is full of LLMisms and was probably generated from a prompt. That being said, I agree with the premise. Most of those cultural preservation issues wouldn't be a problem if users had control over their computing. The problems caused by game servers going offline aren't necessarily specific to games, and the cultural preservation aspect can be applied to other program…

> a $70 purchase turn into a useless desktop icon

and so it begins...

Re: Stop Killing Games

#118

Post by stefan_ » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #40

I'm confused, does the author (or prompter, it would seem) of this article really feel entitled to game servers running indefinitely?

The author doesn't give a fuck about games, which is why this article is pure slop.

If you decide the LLM should write your "passion blog post", it gives off immediate "soulless Linked grifter" vibes.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#119

Post by stale2002 » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:24 PM UTC

DSMan195276 wrote: post #93

F3nd0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As not a game dev myself, may I ask for clarification? How does ‘Stop Killing Games’ legislation kill any sort of multiplayer games specifically? Aren’t there already games which don’t have the problem the movement is trying to solve? Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? I feel like I may have misunderstood your point or am just lacking a lot of important…

> Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? It's a question of when, not if - you're not going to pay to keep the servers online forever. What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't? If they're bad enough then plenty of people will not be interested in taking that risk by making such games.

> What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't?

How about "the government forces you to release the code"? That's seems fair.

Unless you hid your source code in USB drives under your bed, the government can probably just force GitHub (or similar )to release it. I bet they've got it backed up.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#120

Post by dangus » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 9:25 PM UTC

F3nd0 wrote: post #23

nerdjon wrote: post #8

This is basically advocating for open source games which is a completely different story than what stop killing games is trying to do. There are tons of closed source games that have zero online component to them. I don't see how you can actually argue that this is a good thing, especially when they say: > The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. A…

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > > Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that. What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between soft…

This is largely how open source game engines like OpenMW or OpenTTD work: the game engine is reverse engineered, and the art is something the end user provides by downloading/owning a legitimate retail copy.

And that’s really great, but this model is ultimately not realistic for most game developers.

It’s not like productivity software where the code of the product isn’t the majority of the value being delivered. Gitlab is happy to give away their source code because a bunch of enterprise integrations, support, cloud hosting, and features are paywalled.

Game developers really just can’t do this model. If the game is open source it’s going to be far too easy to pirate the game. The economics of single player games largely revolve around the strength of sales in the first month or two.

This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.

For a AAA game where it needs to sell millions of copies at a high price to break even on its huge production budget, game companies can’t risk a high piracy rate. Just look at GTA 6, a game with a production budget of multiple Avatar films.