Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice • Hacker News Board

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#311

Post by skotobaza » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

drwiggly wrote: post #303

skotobaza wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's true. Most people pay for what's being currently promoted. So "voting with wallet" doesn't really work, because you will be outvoted by majority of people who don't know what they're getting into. That's why gacha games and other lootbox-heavy ones are most profitable. This is where "vote with your wallet" brought us.

Voting with your wallet does work, possibly others don't share in your tastes.

It would be fair, but when you go online, everyone (and I mean everyone) shares their distaste for modern gaming industry and its practices. Yet, those practices still bring the most money to this day. So does it mean that people go against their principles? Or is it just another "vocal minority" situation?

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#312

Post by tmtvl » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 5:27 PM UTC

SamuelAdams wrote: post #205

At a macro level, killed games are a good thing for gaming companies. It creates a shortage of playable games so that new games sell and continue to make money. The biggest competitor to the video game industry is movies (Netflix, Disney plus, etc) and past games. Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today? If players can play thousands of high quality games for free, why bother pay…

I mean, Project Gutenberg and libraries exist and the literature industry hasn't died yet.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#313

Post by thrance » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

throw10920 wrote: post #300

skotobaza wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's true. Most people pay for what's being currently promoted. So "voting with wallet" doesn't really work, because you will be outvoted by majority of people who don't know what they're getting into. That's why gacha games and other lootbox-heavy ones are most profitable. This is where "vote with your wallet" brought us.

You're confused about the meaning of "voting with your wallet". > But it's true. It's not - you're talking about something else entirely. When @umvi says "vote with your wallet" they mean buy things whose values you support . You, and GP @thrance, are not describing that - you're describing people buying things on autopilot without respect to values - the exact opposite. So, no, we haven't had decades of "unsuccessfu…

Then why do you call it "vote with your wallet" and not "buy stuff you like"? If you don't intend for your purchase to weigh in on anything, why do you call it "voting"?

If that's truly what you mean by "vote with your wallet", then yeah, we're on the same page. I almost only play solo games, most of them indie.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#314

Post by Volundr » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

techjamie wrote: post #288

theptip wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state. Yeah, I like the general goal, but I worry about the corner cases; is an MMO “functional/playable” if you just release a localhost server? Are we forcing indie shops to pay for servers indefinitely now? Great way to ensure no more indie MMOs get built if that ends up being the text interpretation. And, as you say, the question you should always be asking ab…

Ross addresses these things in his videos on the initiative. For one, the game doesn't have to be 100% functional, it just has to do a bare minimum. They might not even need to release server binaries, even. I would think releasing documentation on how the network commication runs, and adding a box to enter a server IP into the client at EOL would be sufficient. The community, if enough people care, would then be emp…

Online games like MMOs and live service games generally have tooling for developers to run the game on their local machines for obvious reasons. Releasing said tooling would also be an option.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#315

Post by throw10920 » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

tmtvl wrote: post #309

throw10920 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confused about the meaning of "voting with your wallet". > But it's true. It's not - you're talking about something else entirely. When @umvi says "vote with your wallet" they mean buy things whose values you support . You, and GP @thrance, are not describing that - you're describing people buying things on autopilot without respect to values - the exact opposite. So, no, we haven't had decades of "unsuccessfu…

The problem with democracy: people on average have average intelligence and you don't solve difficult problems with average intelligence. That being said, it's still better than anything else we've tried.

Right - I'm also hand-waving a bit here and lumping democratic republics in with "true democracies" for the sake of simplicity, but you're absolutely correct.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#316

Post by jt2190 » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

dragonmost wrote: post #275

jt2190 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry that they just stop completely shipong single-player mode as that seems easiest.

This might happen to so extent but a big part of the market is single player games, so those companies would also lose a large portion of their profit

Ok, but the context of the article (which I quoted) is multi player games with a single player mode. Of course single player games don’t need and often don’t have a server, so whether or not they make up a large part of the market is irrelevant here.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#317

Post by skotobaza » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 5:49 PM UTC

chickenzzzzu wrote: post #298

skotobaza wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is much trouble in re-releasing and remastering games, since the company does not forfeit its IP and it doesn't give anyone else the right to publish the same game. Plus no one suggests that the company should instantly release the server binaries or source code upon game's release. Only when they themselves stop profiting from it. For instance, with WoW, you currently have unofficial servers, but…

I don't think the companies should be required to release server executables ever, and yes especially not at release. Let me try to argue against my own point with WoW as an example then. You say there are unofficial/private servers. Are these server builds downloadable online somewhere? It doesn't matter if it was from a leak, a reverse engineering effort, etc. Or are they the guarded property of the groups running…

> I don't think the companies should be required to release server executables ever

I still don't get why. If the company stops profiting from the product, they shouldn't care if people self-host it. Unless, of course, the company wants to force their playerbase to another project that does currently generate profit.

> Are these server builds downloadable online somewhere?

Not that I know of.

>once a reliable build exists, inevitably it will be hosted in China and Russia and so on, and now you have a serious competitor to deal with who doesn't need to follow the same laws as you

That's true, but it's not a problem for Blizzard, rather for those who host those unofficial servers. Because the main competition will be among them.

>why would you pay a quite high monthly price for the official thing

Mainly because of the quality. The official servers are fully functional, get regular maintenance and updates. While unofficial servers can go offline easily, they lack latest content, not all quests might work etc.

So if, for some reason, Blizzard can't keep their servers in good shape, but the community can, then it's Blizzard's fault if people start leaving official servers. And what if Blizzard intentionally starts making the service worse and worse to shift people to their other game (whatever it may be)? In this case I think that having an option like unofficial servers is good for community. Not good for Blizzard, yes, but good for people that just want to play the video game that they've been playing for 20+ years. This is what SKG is about.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#318

Post by Levitating » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 5:49 PM UTC

gryn wrote: post #8

> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control. seems like 'video games europe' is gearing up to lobby/influence the lawmakers to distort this initiative. the bare minimum would be to ban these kind of things from describing themselves as products inste…

>> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only

> that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.

I think the criticism isn't centered around single player games at all, but rather MMORPGs and the likes.

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#319

Post by throw10920 » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 5:50 PM UTC

thrance wrote: post #308

throw10920 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your claim that there has been "decades of voting with our wallets" is laughable. Nobody I know who plays games decides to buy them or not based on ideological reasons - they just buy the things that are popular or that their friends play. There's extremely little engagement on these issues.

You proved my point: "voting with your wallet" will never work. DLCs, microtransactions, lootboxes... They all got normalized alarmingly quickly, despite numerous calls to "vote with your wallets" every single times . We need regulations, isolated individuals have no power against a system built to extract the most out of them.

> You proved my point: "voting with your wallet" will never work. DLCs, microtransactions, lootboxes... They all got normalized alarmingly quickly, despite numerous calls to "vote with your wallets" every single times.

Factually incorrect. There are numerous instances of consumers complaining, leaving bad reviews on Steam, refunding games, or stopping buying games because of their values, and the studios/producers actually changed the thing. Helldivers 2's mandatory PSN account is one of the most recent instances of that happening.

Factually, consumers will band together to take collective action, and when they do, there are positive effects. The problem is apathy, not lack of power.

> We need regulations, isolated individuals have no power against a system built to extract the most out of them

This is literally self-contradictory. If individuals can't "vote with their wallets" to achieve change (which, as I described above, empirically does happen), then individuals in a democracy also can't vote to enact their will on the system - and those regulators are appointed by those elected representatives.

Make up your mind - does voting work, or does it not?

Re: Game publishers respond to Stop Killing Games claim it curtails developer choice

#320

Post by Levitating » Sun, Jul 06, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

perching_aix wrote: post #11

> 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. How? Can't wait to hear them substantiating this tidbit, because from a regular enterprise operations viewpoint this does NOT pass the smell test.

Imagine you're an indie game studio developing an MMORPG, both your server and client is likely under constant development and you may only have one or two actual production servers running your server code.

Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.[1] While adding documentation, support for different systems, while ensuring safety as the server can now be reverse engineered and while possibly being liable to abuse created through those servers. Even though your game (and its clients) aren't tailored to working on any server other than the official one anyway.

At least that's my understanding of the issue.

This proposal is obviously aimed at big publishers like EA and Ubisoft, but it hurts small developers. I argue we should just stop playing EA and Ubisoft games, who are the only ones who continue to pull this crap.

[1]: As TheFreim pointed out, this isn't necessarily required. But the server program has to be released when the official servers are shut down. Which means this possibility has to be prepared for throughout development.