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.
Why could you turn a battle royal game into a local only split screen game for 2-4 people?
Give players a copy of the server so they can host their own, or patch the game to allow direct connections like games used to have in the 90s and 00s?
That sounds like an online only title. I thought we were going to “change the design.”
Seems like your reading comprehension is lacking, so I’m going to encourage you to reread the entire exchange up to this point. If you can’t figure it out, you’re not someone worth discussing with.
What do you mean?
Changing the design happens during the pre-production. This will not effect any games retroactively. As unfortunate as it is, until the EU parliament decides on a law or regulation all games destined to die will die.
Any games that are grandfathered in, would be done so by the good will of the corporations if they do wish to.
I mean, taking a 100 person battle royal and changing it so dramatically would be quite odd to do.
I picked an extreme example for discussion reasons.
It’s possible to host your own Arma server that can handle 100 players. Ironically Arma has a Battle Royale mode. It’s not rocket science.
Sounds like that’s the answer to my reply then. Not all this other noise people have posted. 😏
What exactly is this dramatic change that you think would have to happen?
I think it mostly revolves around how you get 100 players together for a good game. The match making part. I’m skeptical of the quality of match making, but that’s not a showstopper for people committed to playing. But if we set aside the need for someone to maintain hosting, then it becomes peer to peer or a lan party, or a combination of the two.
I remember what it was like rounding up and wrangling 80 people to raid in WoW back in the day.
And none of this is a showstopper I don’t see why we can’t talk about that. It’s not like discussing the difficult edge cases or the feasibility of the details could harm things.
My initial question in this thread framed changing the game design, not networking stack. So it was about making it all local/same screen only. An absurd example on purpose.
This part is not really what the initiative is about. The initiative can’t guarantee you’ll be able to find 100 other people to play with. Even matchmaking (unless it’s somehow made integral to the game) is not really relevant to the initiative. What the initiative is concerned with is preservation of games. To give a specific example, if you’re able to organize 100 people to play the same game the initiative wants you to have the technical capability to set up the game for 100 people. And to give a more real life example, Anthem is shutting down at the start of 2026. That means if me and my 2 friends get nostalgic and want to play Anthem in 2027 we literally cannot, the game won’t run. But if what SKG wants to achieve would be a reality right now then EA would have to have a way for me to set up whatever is necessary for me and my 2 friends to play Anthem together, be it some kind of server binary or P2P solution or source code or whatever, doesn’t matter how the company wants to solve this as long as it works. That’s what SKG is about.
SKG isn’t saying companies should make BR-s local/split screen. It’s only concerned with keeping games in a playable state. SKG doesn’t alter the game design unless the technical stack required to keep the game running is somehow integral to the design of the game. SKG deliberately leave the “how a game should be preserved” open so publishers/developers could preserve games how they see fit. If the publishers/developers want to rip out the multiplayer and replace it with local/split screen that’s how they’ve decided to preserve their game. That is not really criticism of SKG, that’s just a bad faith argument that can be made only because SKG isn’t as restrictive as people claim it to be.
And specifically in your example the design of a BR game does not need to change at all because the only thing preventing some BR-s from being preserved is the fact that you cannot set up your own servers.
The initial post you replied to was talking about changing the design, not the game design. I think the thread got off course because you interpreted that as game design. As long as users can host the servers themselves, the game design can remain exactly the same. Even if the game can only be played when it’s orchestrated by museum curators or something, that’s still preferable than the game being totally dead. If you’ve ever been to PAX East, there’s always a room with a full networked game of Steel Battalion multiplayer via LAN. Every controller was $200 back in the day, plus everyone needs an Xbox and TV. It was highly unlikely that anyone could ever play this game without Xbox Live, but it can still be done, so where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I tried to pick the most obvious example of an online only title.
What’s the plan with a 100 player battle royal game?
Edit: the guy I replied to chose to quote someone saying a game is online only, and their suggestion was to change that.
And then ya’ll come in with replies about keeping it online only, and they have 55 upvotes as of this edit.
Hosting your own server and playing multiplayer games over LAN is playing offline. Is that what you’re asking?
I can find a community for a fighting game from 2012 to get together every Thursday night for a 30-person tournament via Discord. 100 people in a battle royale could work much the same.
That fighting game is not online only, I bet.
I replied to someone saying that an online only game should change their design.
It’s not online only, but this Thursday night get-together is online-only.
As long as people can host a server instance, does it matter?
Hypothetically, even if it costs 1000$ per hour in AWS fees to get the required hardware to run that, at least you have the option to, alternatively have a peer to peer option to play smaller version on a LAN with a max of however many players your own network can support, there could be many implementations, which at the end of the day would still allow you to play the game when the official servers (authentication or room hosts) are shuttered and inaccessible
The main point of SKG is that currently, we, as customers, are not even getting the short end of the stick, we are getting no stick, despite having paid for it.
And ultimately, at the end of the day, not our problem to try to figure this out, the point is we’re unhappy with the current situation and want things to change.
Also note that none of this is retroactive, will only apply to games released in the future, so having an end of life plan as a requirement from the get-go is pretty simple to work on when nothing was done yet.
That’s not “changing that” it’s keeping it online only.
Enabling the ability for purchasers to specify an arbitrary server to connect to would require a design change compared to how most games are recently. That feature used to be standard in the early years of online gaming.
We had online-only multiplayer games in the early 2000s with self-hosted servers supporting over 60 players per map. It’s absolutely possible to do better with today’s tech.
Man. Y’all really think I’m talking about networking design?
I thought we were talking about gameplay design. That’s why I picked 100 player battle royal.
“Change the game design” implies that, to me. I didn’t pick a single player experience with always online requirements. Or a 4 player game with online matchmaking and no direct connect options.
There’s such a strong, and obsessive need among a bunch of people on this topic to explain and explain, and not parse the precise thing being asked.
There’s also a lot of people who conflate having the opinion that the effort will fail due to its approach and the person/people behind it with not wanting it to succeed.
What I’m doing is poking at how people are behaving and how they talk about this initiative. And how the messaging is confusing and all over the place. It takes 5 people racing to explain it to me when I understand perfectly, and lay out a specific case. Yet no one replies to explain how my example would work.
I’m not the only one who sees this initiative as misguided, and mis framed.
Sorry for coming off like a troll, usually my outlier questions get responses instead of people acting like they are here.
I’ve really dug a bit too deep on this one, and I’ll try to stop replying now.
There are, it may surprise you to learn, different types of game that have online connectivity for different reasons. And the appropriate EOL response may differ across those games.
“Live-service” games where the main gameplay is singleplayer but an online connection is required so they can enforce achievements and upgrades (…and “anti-piracy” bs) may be best served by simply removing the online component so it can all be done locally.
Online competitive games can be switched to a direct connection mode.
MMOs and other games with large numbers of users and a persistent online server can be run on fan-operated servers, so long as (a) the server binary is made available, and (b) the client is modified to allow changing settings to choose a server to connect to (it could be something as simple as a command-line flag with no UI if the devs are being really cheap).
You guys…
I picked an actual “online only” example for a reason. Yet everyone is jumping around talking about other things.
Turning a battle royal into a lan only game sounds like the solution I was expecting in my replies. And then yeah, you can even route that over the internet.
But that’s not changing the design, really. It’s providing the infrastructure needed to run it, even if it’s lan only, and would need more to run it over the internet.
Depends on what one means by “change the design”. It doesn’t make a fundamental change to the deeper architecture of the game, no. But it does require some relatively superficial changes, which are themselves a design problem of sorts.
The initiative’s issue isn’t with them being online-only (though personally people hate it). The initiative aims for games to have the ability to have a reasonable state of playability past the end of life.
This is for all kinds of games - single-player, multiple player, live service, only only. The point is to keep what you paid for.
Of course it’s not. That’s why I made my initial reply.
Why not?