alt Hacker NewsThey spent their time to talking to people who are willing to actually engage with the problem at hand rather than just heckling from the sidelines. Every time I’ve seen SKG mentioned I start with some sympathy for the perspective and rapidly remember they’re just not at all serious, and have no idea what they’re talking about.
If they kept it to single player games and a push for games which aren’t multiplayer not to have a clean kill switch for all online bits so that they continue to work after the servers go away that would be fine. Push for multiplayer first games to require a defined support period like the EU requires for consumer IoT hardware now. What isn’t realistic is stamping their feet and demanding that companies make it possible for people to run their own servers for live service games, just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve, and a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
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> If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
"buy" is doing some heavy lifting here. If I buy something, it is mine. If someone else can arbitrarily take it away or stop it working, then it was mis-sold, because what I've really done is rent for an indeterminate period of time. What should be clear up front is whether I'm buying or renting.
The issue SKG tackles is that it's the video game equivalent of wildcatting & oil spoilation. A publishers contracting a small studio create a live service game hoping to strike it rich, often without doing any market research on the viability of their product, and then drop support shortly after launch leaving owners with a bricked copy.
They have this very cushy setup where they triple insulate themselves from risk while publishing games that have less snowballs chance in hell of matching their expectations (next HoK, Genshin Impact, PUBG, LOL, minecraft, fortnite, roblox, WoW).
I and a million others think the software industry needs to move past their infant stage and start taking their own products seriously. Frankly it's shocking regulation didn't come in the 00s.
>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
You also have a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. People DON'T buy the game, they ARE voting with their wallet. You are doing the equivalent of telling people "If you don't like abandoned wells you shouldn't drive." We like the gushers, you should just pay the actual cost of drilling instead of passing those off on society. That all people would/should stop playing live service games because of the relatively small cost of dead games is just as ridiculous.
I work in games, worked on some of the huge(40+ million players) online live-service games out there, and I have no idea what you're talking about here:
" What isn’t realistic is stamping their feet and demanding that companies make it possible for people to run their own servers for live service games, just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve"
Like....what licencing issues? After the game is "dead" and the parent company doesn't want to support it anymore, we could easily release the source code or even just the executables for the servers. There's nothing complicated about it, it's just some windows executables with a whole load of config files to tell them what to serve and how. I once had to go to a gaming conference with a really basic laptop to setup a local-only version of our servers to host some private lobby of the game - it took all of 30 minutes to set it up. But oh no, players can't have that because what, it's too complicated?
Like, as someone who actually wrote some of these servers for various services in these games, I really don't buy this entire argument that it can't be done. If anything, it's just the people at the top who have no idea about tech dragging their feet and coming up with implausible "what if" scenarios as to why it can't be done. For at least 3 of the games I worked on I could give you a zip file with all the files and you'd have the servers up and running within an hour, given powerful enough hardware. And then what, we can't change the servers the clients connect to? Please. Modders would have that done within 24 hours of release, probably with a nice GUI for players to use.
>> that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
Yes, and their help isn't needed with any of it, the game is by definition dead at this point, the alternative is the publisher shutting everything down and no one ever playing it again.
>>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
It's not just about consumer choice - it's also about us losing part of the culture that cannot be restored once shut down.
I say that wholeheartedly as someone who has worked on games that are(for the time being) still online. And in few years they will be inevitably shut down, leading to years of my life and effort being inaccessible to anyone - the only way that you will be able to experience it is through Youtube videos. That's a cultural tragedy, and I'm 10000% for companies being forced through law to include it in their design that _eventually_ the servers have to be released to the public. They don't have to offer any support whatsoever, the communities will figure it out, guaranteed.
> a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
That is precisely why the SKG initiative mandates it - so that it's available from the start because it's a legal requirement. Without that, you have no financial nor legal incentive and you end up exactly like you mention - reassigning or dissolving the team.