We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws. Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. 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. We welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policy makers and those who have led the European Citizens Initiative in the coming months.
  • Vittelius@feddit.orgEnglish
    55·
    19 hours ago

    It’s also a strawman argument. Because yes, developers have less to no control over the operation of private servers. Yes, that means they can’t moderate those servers.

    But

    This initiative only covers games, not supported anymore by the devs anyway. Meaning legally speaking everything happening to private servers would be literally not their concern anymore. And new legislation, should it come to that, would spell that out.

    • aksdb@lemmy.worldEnglish
      24·
      19 hours ago

      Same for the “online only design” argument. The moment they decide it’s not viable anymore and they want to shut it down: what does it matter to them, what players do with it? As long as they offer the service themselves, no one is bugging them. (Although I would absolutely be in favor of also getting self hosting options right from the start, I am realist enough to accept, that this would indeed lower economical feasibility of some projects.)

      • Vittelius@feddit.orgEnglish
        15·
        19 hours ago

        That part of the argument is slightly different. If I understand the press statement correctly, what they are saying is: “Some servers can’t, on a technical level, be hosted by the community”. And that’s not a straw man (arguing against something never asked for), that’s just a lie. We have access to all the same stuff as the industry (AWS etc). Hosting these kinds of servers might be very expensive, but the initiative only asks for a way to keep games alive not for a cheap way (though I would prefer a cheap way of course)

        • aksdb@lemmy.worldEnglish
          15·
          18 hours ago

          I imagine it’s rather licensing. If they have to provide the software at some point, they can’t use components they are not allowed to distribute. And I agree, that this will impact development costs. But with the law in place, this is not an unexpected cost but one that can be factored in. Might be, that some live services are then no longer viable… but I don’t care. There are more games than anyone could play and games are cancelled or not even started to develop all the time for various reasons. One more or less is just noise.

          • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
            16·
            18 hours ago

            Devs have numerous options for how to address the SKG initiative. The top three that come to my mind are:

            • Release server binaries (along with modifying clients to have a setting to connect to the right server)
            • Modify multiplayer to work over LAN (good when the server’s only/main job is matchmaking)
            • Modify the game itself to no longer require online connectivity

            In the case of live service games, I would suggest option 3 is the most appropriate. If the main gameplay is singleplayer, but it’s online so you can dole out achievements and gatekeep content, the answer is simple: stop doing that. Patch it to all work in-client. And keep in mind that this will be a requirement at end-of-life from the beginning. If it’s an unexpected requirement, that’s going to be a huge development cost. If it’s expected, making that EOL change easy to implement will be part of the code architecture from the start.

    • audaxdreik@pawb.socialEnglish
      181·
      19 hours ago

      For sure, 💯

      • secure players’ data: there should be no sensitive player data being stored on a private game server like that anyways, you’re connecting to a server, not logging into a service
      • remove illegal content: not the developer’s responsibility in this case, it’s the responsibility of the private server (admittedly this could get messier with net neutrality and safe harbor stuff? unclear, but point remains, it’s still not the developer’s responsibility here)
      • combat unsafe community content: ditto. Not the the responsibility of the developer but the private servers. It’s often been argued that the smaller communities of private servers do a BETTER job of moderating themselves)
      • would leave rights holders liable: HERE IT IS! We can’t let you self host something like Marvel Rivals due to all the copyrights and trademarks and brand protections. How dare you!