11mo ago

If 1 million people sign a petition, a ban on rendering multiplayer games unplayable has a chance to become law in Europe

www.pcgamer.com

A European initiative is now underway for videogame preservation and consumer protections against publishers "killing games."

88 comments

well, while i understand sunsetting old online multiplayer games because hosting game servers is a non zero cost, i can't understand the need for singleplayer games to be always connected and rendering them unplayable
- The company wouldn't be required to keep their servers online, just to allow other people to host their own. So it has 0 ongoing cost and maybe few hours of coding during game development.
  
  Unless you are a game developer I would hold off on assuming how much work would be required to do what this proposal asks.
  
  Wat
  Building a whole cloud backend is not a few hours work.
  Plus I bet most of these companies share cloud tooling so they'll need to make distinct standalone self host code
- There's actually nothing wrong with no longer supporting a game you developed. The problem is these scummy bastards make sure no one can support the game or run it privately after they abandon it.
- I can't understand the "need" for the server to be hosted by the company. Our computers are just as good.
  
  Well look at gta online, moders and hackers have so much more power when the session isn't run by the company. it alao allows them to find exploits much easier if the server tools are available to run locally. Also If you don't want people being able to give themselves all the weapons and money and mess up your game that means game states can't transfer between servers which means you could invest weeks in a campaign only to have the server close.
  I prefer locally hosted stuff but there are obvious benefits which draw game companies to choosing to control the hosting process
- Looking at you hitman...
If you are a European Citizen, sign it. It takes a minute of your time. Not more.
- Who are u to tell me what to do ?
  
  lol you downvoted yourself. I like it
  
  Their username is there with their comment
I could see this leading to standardizing and outsourcing multiplayer services, which would be interesting.
That being said, before that happens, as a developer I'd be like: here's a zip file with all of our proprietary stuff ripped out. Have fun spending the next few months getting it to work well. Congratulations, you're now supporting a game that did poorly enough for us to drop it.
But seriously, go sign it. Long term it should be a good thing.
- Oh, it would be super fun if you're into the game, as long as it doesn't become a job, which it might.
- Sweats in GameSpy
  Honestly, it would probably lead to the major distributors also having control over that... So I guess one more yacht for Gaben?
  Kinda funny that people on this platform consider that centralization of the service would be a good thing.
  
  On one hand, I'd love to see drop in replacements for steam services, especially something that could be selfhosted. On the other hand, if steam services ever goes down, there are metric megatons of reasons to reverse engineer a solution. The centralisation could end up being standardisation.
  
  I was thinking more of an open API of how the game interacts with multiplayer services, so that in theory anyone could setup a server, or server services. In practice I completely agree with you though. Nobody wants to do the whole "Oh wait, you're on that server? I have an account with that other server" thing. Steam, or some other party, would just become the defacto place.
- The proposal is precisely about not letting your snake ass do that, since it would be no different than spinning a private server, customers shouldn't have to learn how to analyse network packages and break DRM just to play a game they paid for because you turned off your server.
  Either sell it as a subscription or sell it as packaged product, not both.
- I'm old enough to remember when dedicated servers were the norm.
  Oh sweet times before the matchmaking
Just signed it. Took 10 seconds with my ID-Card.
While this would be great for those "online needed to play" games, wouldn't this also lead to companies preferring subscription models?
I'd assume it's easier to not include multiplayer in the "base" game and just charge a monthly subscription for the online part. Now the proposed law wouldn't apply, since the customer only paid for the base game.
It's pretty obvious what the intention of the writers of the proposal is, but I feel like it could have an opposite effect and push even more to the "games as a service" model those greedy publishers so desperately want.
- Still better than the shit we have where Ubisoft just stole my game, The Crew.
  That's part of the intention, either make a service or sell a game, companies are getting it both ways without the responsibility of neither.
  
  Prepare for it to be official that you own nothing.
- The problem is that a lot of companies are already launching dead-on-arrival live service games, so unless they're willing to make something unique, all they will do is saturate the market further and keep burning money. I don't think this law would change those incentives much if at all.
- The reality is GaaS is exteremely hard to success. Every one success GaaS, there are probably 20 or 50 failed one that we even never heard.
This is limited to EU members, yes? Not anyone in Europe?
- I assume so. I signed it earlier. You can either fill out a form or use your ID to verify your identity online.
  If your country shows up in the list, then it should work. https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
  Its currently at 121.000 out of 1.000.000 and it has only been live for 3 days.
  This is the link to the general overview of the petition. https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en#
  
  Yeah sadly my country isn't listed - but I'll cheer you all on from afar!
- Anyone can sign, even from outside of EU, but the votes needed for petition to go through will only count from EU members.
Cool!
Tbh I just want a ППШ блять.
- What's an RRSH?
  
  Lmao fixed. Hadn't had my coffee yet, thanks.
- Idk, seems pretty accurate considering the overall pattern in the industry..
- Nice write-up, but really not helpful since it has nothing at all to do with what is actually proposed in the initiative.
- If the price is too high on an already unprofitable game it's still just going to lose money. It would probably be cheaper to just let the community run servers for them.
The current language in this proposal is far too vague and has the potential to do more harm than good...I would hold off on signing this until a better proposal is made
- Care to explain your point with some detail?
  If this fails, I doubt we'll see a second proposal. So I think it would be fair to measure any arguments you make as why no action is better than the proposal.
  Correct me if I am wrong, but this petition doesn't decide the wording of any law just ensures it is brought to attention of EU lawmakers and discussed right?
- If the petition hits it target, the politicians are forced to discuss it which would include agreeing workable language. It would not automatically become the law with the proposed language.
  
  We're gonna rely on the same group of people who wanted to ban memes to be able to draft a policy that differentiates between MMO's, live service games, and single player games that need to be connected to the Internet? Naw dog ..I ain't trusting them old farts....VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET.
Why did they have to make it political ?
- Because making a law requires politics (???)
- What do you mean by political?
  
  It’s a meme, based on how gamerz cry when a female or black main character in a game.
- Hah!
Wouldn’t they just not release the games instead?
- Unlikely. They don’t want to lose the entire European market.
  
  For a few specific games? Yeah they could stand to lose, it’s not every game in their catalog.
- That would cut them off from a huge market. Just look at bad actors like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. They comply with EU laws, since losing the market would hurt them too much financially.
  
  For a few specific games? Yeah they could stand to lose, it’s not every game in their catalog.
  Totally different situation.
- I don’t feel like reading the article, but I’m guessing if they want to release a multiplayer game that you have to pay for, and they want to shut down their servers (making the game unplayable), maybe they would be required to release their server software so people can host themselves.
  
  Yes, that’s part of the proposal. Another part is that you should be able to play the game even if you don’t have access to the servers.

88 comments