If you aren’t already aware of it (and in the EU) please sign the stopkillinggames.com petition so companies can’t just drop “support” (that these days means kill) games when they feel like it.
It will never work
It worked for USB C? And y’all have alternate app stores over there too. I don’t believe it’s unrealistic to guarantee that a product you sell will remain functional after support ends.
Eh, we’ll see. USB C and other app stores made Apple gain less money, whereas this petition would make it cost more to implement such a thing, and could be a sizeable problem for specific games which heavily relies on proprietary algorithms or just the game itself, such as mmorpg, small companies…
It’s honestly very little work to implement a way for a game to be offline… Basically just remove the method that checks for a server and that’s it…
What could be a bit more costly would be releasing server implementations so people can host their own game servers, but it should still be expected… Actually it wouldn’t be that hard IF it’s taking into account from the get go coz you can just release the last release before being shut down and that’s it
An online-only game without server requirement… isn’t a game anymore
And yea, if the law only applies in a couple of years, then all good since devs can take that in mind, which makes it a lot easier
It is if there’s ways to shift the server connection to a community hosted server…
Even if it doesn’t work, I’d at least want to let people try and get practice doing something about a problem (even if that’s just leaving a comment on social media to direct others to sign a petition that will eventually get lawmakers’ attention with enough signatures based on that country’s laws, because that still has more chance for good than yet another comment about X Thing Bad. Even though I agree with a lot of Lemmy’s X Thing Bad takes), makes them more likely to do something in the future. At least they can walk away saying “I tried”. Some people might see no guarantee of results for their time and think of it as time wasted, and that is their choice, but I don’t really see a reason to say “that’ll never work” without any offer of alternative. Most charitably, you are trying to save them time and disappointment, trying to prevent a “it didn’t work, activism does not work, I’ll never do anything like that again” attitude if it fails, but I think a lot of people are just seeing the comment as pointless negativity.
What are you suggesting? That on once a game goes online it’ll require the company by law to keep it running forever? How many companies would still release games that requires backend if they knew it’s a never ending endeavour even if they’ll lose money from it?
Running the infrastructure to host the game’s baceknd requires money, and releasing the server code as binary or open source is not something that’ll happen.
So what is the end goal?
As you are not a gamer, I’ll try to make it simple.
If a game ask for an online connection, is usually for three reasons:
- multiplayer, or some kind of social interaction
- drm, to make it harder to cheat, or redistribute cracked versions of said game
- telemetry, either to know how players plays their game, or to sell you as an ad target
When the publisher decide to stop the online component, to save a buck, it often mean the game stops working altogether because of the DRM part, as it basically refuses to start without the proper authorization from the now defunct server.
The petition do not ask them to keep running the server indefinitely, but rather to
- make it possible to bypass the DRM always online part to be able to play the single player part, if there is one. In most case, it is a simple change to do, a function to modify in order to always return “true” (game can be played)
- allow the end user to self host the server. It doesn’t mean open-sourcing it, just to release the server software and allow to point to another server than the defunct ones
In both case, the code already exist, and the changes required are minimal, so why not do it? It costs barely anything to the devs/publisher, and gives the game a second life, even without official support.
But they don’t. Mostly out of greed, to push people to buy the newest, micro-transaction infused game they wish to sell, sometimes even the same game with half the content replaced by micro-transaction (Overwatch 2 being the perfect example).
They don’t want an older, maybe better game to overshadow their new shiny cash grab.Interesting how strongly you are opposing an idea that noone proposed, which you would have known had you taken a look at the petition.
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From the FAQ of stopkillinggames.com website
Q. Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?
A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way.
Releasing the server code as binary is how it used to work, and there’s no reason it can’t work that way again. It’s one of several ways to satisfy the petition.
Oh for fuck sake, this has never been a good argument, and people who keep repeating these argument-questions (almost like they’re a copy paste) either never read what Stop Killing Games demands, or lack the reading comprehension necessary to understand it.
The third option would be malicious sabotage, but I’m hoping it’s just one of the two stupidity options.
It is kinda crazy how these always pop up immediately.
Yeah I could not comment so quick unless I programmed something to do it for me…
You know you can still play Unreal Tournament online against other people? That game came out in 1999!
The problem you sketch has been solved already.
All it takes is for the game developer to release the server binaries. And for fans of the game to run servers.
The companies could shut down their servers, if they at the same time would release the software needed to run the servers. This would allow the creation of community servers, without any costs or responsibilities for the companies
There was a time when multiplayer games all came with dedicated server binaries.
Required games and games studios to build the game to be played offline or have the ability to self host the server.
It would require devs to start planning for indefinite support during development. Wether that means releasing server software and the source code or not making the game reliant on servers in the first place is up to them.
Better service for the community. Take a look over towards Spellbreak for a second and you’ll see a community that has taken what Proletariat had given them after an acquisition by Blizzard and started doing private servers to keep their game functional. I think there’s much to learn from this End-of-Service model, perhaps we could have more privately hosted servers to reduce their overhead if companies truly loved their fanbase; might even be feasible to follow that model from the start for f2p games so the official servers are more capable for tourneys and the like. Either way the goal is end user satisfaction, so if those means are preservation or archival like with Yu-Gi-Oh! Cross Duel, then so be it the fanbase does what they want ultimately, but we just ask companies to offer their olive branch so that all their precious arts don’t drown in the ever expanding sea of data.
Am not a gamer, and am not informed about your little battle. So i asked a quesion, not made an argument. From the responses to my questions it is obvious how spoiled and toxic your community is. Good luck 🩷
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Just click the link and inform yourself. Could have answered the question yourself within minutes.
It’s clear you do not actually want answers at all. I hate your pretentious attitude.I clicked, and saw an incoherent wall of text. It is not that important for me to understand what you’re whining about, and you fail to deliver your point in a manner which will result in any sympathy.
You are treating silliy video games as if it’s a matter of life and death. Why would anybody take you seriously? You make ot so easy for them to milk you for money. I suggest grow up.
“Oh no, it isn’t a 20s TikTok video!1! How could anyone understand such gibberish neatly organized text with detailed explaination of why preserving games is important!11!1”
But seriously, you are on a community about games, define yourself as not being a gamer, and clearly show you have no idea of the topic at hand, why do you even bother engaging in this conversation?
Just leave us, silly gamers, try to protect the medium we share and love, and continue on your way.
I doubt anything here is of any worth to you.
FAQ page has your exact question answered - saved you one click from the link above. Clearly a lot of effort has been put into the site because online spaces we’ve enjoyed can’t be enjoyed any further even if we were interested in maintaining them ourselves as volunteers.
Its like the 6th on the lost or something. Clearly a lot of thought.
Running the infrastructure today is not the same as it was back when unreal was first released, for many many reasons.
Gamers are by and large toxic and ignorant. The ask isn’t as straightforward as they make it seem. It would require changes to the binaries and client code beforehand. This doesn’t come for free. All the examples of ‘how it used to work in the past’ are predicated on the specific choices of development to go that route. If an application and server are not architected that way then releasing the server binaries do nothing for the community.
I’d agree for an MMO, which can be quite complex server-wise. But most “online single player” would be quite easy to modify.
I’m a software developer who worked with asynchronous online systems.
A simple disk caching system could replace any uploaded data, and any online call can be written to work with cached data with a few line of code. Heck, on some frameworks you could write a simple middleware to make it work without changing a line of the original code.
I could do it on such game in less than a week on a language I don’t know, and probably a day or two on one I know about.Yeah exactly but I don’t think anyone here is capable of comprehending that.
They’re patching it to be playable offline, but only if you’ve previously downloaded the game.
Why not just leave that version up instead of delisting it? They could even sell it. Would be seen as a success story for preservation instead of another loss, and it’s especially baffling because it’s a fully avoidable loss.
Yeah, they’ve just ensured the only way a person can play it is through piracy. Very smart move, WB, very smart…
According to the bean counters this will save them $17/month in hosting costs
Do you even have to pay hosting costs, if you put a game on steam or does valve not distribute your game for free?
If I’d have to guess the bigger issues with a game like this would be licensing or that delisting allows some form of tax advantageous asset depreciation.
Valve hosts it for “free” (30 to 15% of every sale), yes.
I’m guessing this game has some phone-home DRM or something, and maybe it’s only required the first time it’s executed after installation ? They could of course just give the game a patch that removes it but I guess they don’t want to anger
the lineinvestors and make it go down by working even a second on a “discontinued” game.You don’t pay anything to steam other than the initial 100 bucks or so, and the cut they take
Pretty sure hosting costa arent it, the only thing possible woyld be licensing issues for the IP’s otherwsie they could leave it on steam forever and STILL make money off of sales. There are games that do this by making the players host their own servers each match.
But they own the IPs…
I would venture to guess it’s to avoid potential licensing issues that could arise down the road that they don’t want to deal with.
Were any characters in the game not owned by Warner Bros?
Potentially, I don’t exactly know all the rights owners.
But just looking at the roster, I’d assume Arya Stark might be the most complicated. While HBO falls under WB, unsure if ol’ George signed away all rights to the character. And there’s always future deals too, since rights holders can change hands.
This game leaves behind a legacy of extremely funny poor decisions and mistakes, culminating in becoming one of the few games that got to be shut down twice.
The worst part, the demo was actually pretty good.
They literally could have released this game with mod support, and sold it for $20 and it would have been a fun party game.
Instead, they kept going on with BS games as a service.
Games as a Service wasn’t even the fatal flaw here. Brawlhalla is another platform fighter that is doing just fine off that model. The dev team for MultiVersus just couldn’t handle the project, for one reason or another.
A lot of speculation on the specifics of what went wrong, plenty of players looking for who to blame, but there will probably never be any reliable or concrete info on what exactly happened.
It’s really gross how people’s games can just be disappeared these days. GaaS is a terrible business model.
It’s not just limited to games…
We see it most prevalently in games because the gaming industry is massive. But this can also happen to your car… Or your fridge…
Here’s a fun story:
There were these few blind people who volunteered to have cybernetic implants that would help them (partially) see. The company went under, the patent is held by a patent troll, but the people still have those implants in their head… Which have now either shut down or are malfunctioning…
Hack the planet, indeed.
It’s not going anywhere until people stop playing the games.
I’m not playing them as hard as I can.
Live service games have been failing constantly, so unless the change is happening already I don’t think they’re deterred. That perpetual revenue stream is some exec’s idea of a lottery ticket.
Same here. There’s been a few games I’ve seen on here recently that look interesting, even some “indie” titles, but as soon as I get to the Steam page and it lists online only, I’ve lost all interest.
Miss me with that bullshit.
It’s not going anywhere until people stop
playing the gamesspending ridiculous amounts of money in them.Fixed that for you. The problem isn’t the casual players, it’s the people spending $500+ worth of skins and battle passes on one game. Those are the reason GaaS are so successful.
If people play, it becomes popular, which attracts more players, which attracts spending. Even if you spend $0, you are still supporting the type of game it is by playing it.
Not to mention the GAAS titles which are competitive in nature. The whales thrive on having a mob of casual players they can crush with their P2W advantage. If the whales were only matched against other whales, they’d win less and play less.
The catch is a free to play online gaming service isn’t a “game you own” in most cases.
There are a very small number of games where a changing world is a benefit to the game, although sometimes the approach also means skimping on some development before going live.
Helldivers 2 is an example of a game that benefits from the changing world approach of GaaS and it doesn’t have predatory monetization. Playing the game gives enough in game currency to buy optional equipment needed for the changing world even if you only play a few hours a week. Heck, play it more regularly and you can afford most of the thematic warbonds which again and not necessary. The changing world and adding more enemy units keeps the game fresh over time, and the evolving story is like playing a giant semi shared campaign. You play a small part in a shared experience. I don’t think doing the game as a single or coop campaign would have been a better experience.
That said, when they do end the ongoing campaign at some point it would be awesome to have some kind of automated system campaign for people to still do things. It wouldn’t be as focused, but it would extend the game’s life.
MultiVersus was hurt by trying to do SaaS because they added more predatory monetization after the beta where it was bad enough and tried to milk it for everything to the detriment of the gameplay. It is a great example of a game where the SaaS approach was terrible, and that is the case for the vast majority of SaaS games.
It’s going offline. You can still play it.
If you never owned it then it doesn’t matter.It’s not my game. I only wanted to talk about what they did wrong. Kinda just doing armpit farts at the funeral, yanno?
Lol i like that phrasing. Yeah i hear ya
I think you more mean live service specifically. It’s a little distinct
The business model isn’t terrible, it makes money, but it is terrible for the consumer
If the business model were successful, then the GaaS model wouldnt be full of bloated corpses of failed projects
If you think that GaaS means that you have more failed projects, then look at how many normal games failed before launch.
GaaS means you have ongoing expenses after launch in a way that normal games do not. The costs are higher, but they keep chasing the much larger reward that only a super small percentage will ever achieve.
The business model isn’t terrible, it makes money, but it is terrible for the consumer
I am aggressively opposed to anything that is profitable at the expense of the consumer. That is a terrible business model.
Multiversus was one of the most mismanaged projects I’ve seen. Released in open beta for months, shut down for a year, re-released as literally the same game but worse and with more microtransactions, then quickly died.
Shame. It was fun to play for a while.
It really sucked because Smash Bros is basically the only other big platform fighter on the market. Multiversus was set up to actually be a viable alternative to smash, it was massively popular at first, and they had such an amazing library of characters to pull from. The game had everything going for it. And they just blew it. So badly.
The Nickelodeon fighter game is still available I believe, but you’re still right in that there’s still basically nothing to hold a candle to Smash Bros.
Rivals of Aether II is a more realistic contender to Smash. It had a really good turnout at Combo Breaker this year.
I bought the first Nickelodeon game a couple months after it released, and the online was already dead, I literally couldn’t find a match. Just went ahead and got a refund on it.
The beta was fun, although the monetization was bad even back then.
But the official release made all the wrong decisions to amplify the worst parts of gameplay and dial up the monetization. It was like they got all the player feedback backwards.
I think the mismanagement comes from thinking that any fighting game can keep up with the cadence and business model of League of Legends. You’ll see this again with 2XKO, even if they’ve got a year’s worth of character releases already done ahead of time to give them a head start.
This game could have easily been another Marvel Rivals. An absolute success using its strong IPs in a game type that is underrepresented. There’s no other big name doing Smash Bros style combat, and definitely not outside of Nintendo’s platform. The elements were all there to make this a successful game, but they completely blew the execution.
Another problem is the game director overhyping and saying “any character is possibile” and he wasn’t limiting it to warner bros’s IPs but if you’re going to do that, then they honestly should have made the game launch with at least one 3rd party character.
The reason that games are even hosted on “official” servers like these is to ensure the company can take the game down once the devs run out of time o the contract they made for all the IP’s they use in said game. Otherwise its possible AND has been done before to let the players machines spin up a server each match.
That could be one reason, at least in a game such as MultiVersus with different IPs being used.
But they still lock down servers to their own shit when they own it all anyway and it’s because they also sell you crap to have in the game. If you had your own server, you could just give yourself the stuff they sell since all those things are still in the game somewhere and the only barrier between you and the content is their servers checking to see if you paid for them.
The only issue was having to have a “matchmaking” server but even then, steam has the tools to replace that entirely.
I watched some streamers play it and was just wondering why they weren’t anymore. Now I know!
