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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.
Absolute trash statement, I really hope this bites them.
They’re just repeating a lot of the same misinformation that Pirate Software had been saying, the exact things that had riled the gaming community and caused this latest wave of action. We’re already primed to discount the points they’re trying to make and it shows exactly how disingenuous they’re being.
Positively, I hope this reflects some true fear on their end.
As has been stated over and over and over again, private servers used to be an option until the industry decided they weren’t any more. If the result of this is that it forces the industry to not make shitty, exploitative games, that’s still a win for the consumers. I would rather have no game at all than something that psychologically tries to exploit my FOMO and drains my wallet.
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.
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.)
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)
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.
Devs have numerous options for how to address the SKG initiative. The top three that come to my mind are:
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.
Comes to mind as an example that already exists, https://store.steampowered.com/app/2183650/MEGA_MAN_X_DiVE_Offline/
For sure, 💯