Please keep signing the petition, to prevent games from being intentionally destroyed by publishers like what happened to The Crew.
You deserve to keep the games you bought with your hard-earned money.
Please keep signing the petition, to prevent games from being intentionally destroyed by publishers like what happened to The Crew.
You deserve to keep the games you bought with your hard-earned money.
Just so you know the process. Ross isn’t the one who wrote the petition, as he is American and only EU citizens are allowed to use the platform. So a bunch of peeps gathered together and drafted this petition. He only sparked SKG, but this is a community driven campaign across the entire world.
Or both people don’t understand the same thing and misconstrue from there.
I mean… yeah, but when the people in question are professionals or experts in the field (let’s say we’re talking about Faliszek and whoever the Pirate Software guy is, I’m not filing a resume to this conversation) and the other one is… not, Occam’s Razor starts to look perilous.
Because you’re all giving me homework I started to listen to the Pirate Software videos referenced in the other guy’s videos (and man, we are reaching flat earther levels of Youtube cross-referencing here). It seems that, like Faliszek he’s coming at it from the perspective that live games are not the problem here.
I would disagree, this isn’t about shutting down single player games or single player components of games. This is about preservation, including preservation of live service games.
That doesn’t mean I agree with “Ross” (is that a first or last name? I can’t tell). If the problem is preservation, then the requirements aren’t what he says they are. The point isn’t to keep everybody’s game running in some magical rebuilt server somewhere. It’s to keep some representative sample of the server code that can either be spun up to recreate the game or at most used as a starting point for a community server replacement.
But on the flipside… well, yeah, maybe that adds a bunch of cost if you force it on the developer. Maybe the real answer is to let the community reverse engineer the server if they want to, whether the publisher likes it or not. Maybe there’s some intermediate body playing a role here.
Of the discussion under Faliszek’s post on BS, perhaps the response that makes the most sense to me is this:
https://bsky.app/profile/dungenrobot.com/post/3lsdg2udgbc2s
The interesting point is, that this petition is not about live service games as Ross again stated in the very linked video. He does not demand Companies to turn those live service games into self hostables or outright single player games. Thats ridiculous.
And no, again, this is not about live service games!! This is about games that can be perfectly played offline but can’t “legally” as it has a server component for whatever reason (let it be DRM, or Matchmaking).
Remember the time when games came with the ability to host your own server (unreal tournament, quake, warcraft, trackmania,…) and we somehow lost that ability in the name of profit and monetary incentives?
Forcing the work on developers? They already wrote the server software (otherwise they couldn’t host matchmaking eh?) no this is absolutely about the Publishers.
Well, then I disagree with the guy because he doesn’t go far enough.
I mean, I disagree with you, because the stuff on his website and on his Youtube channel does not at any point claim that live service games should be allowed to go offline.
But I don’t care if he says it, I’m saying it: live games should be preserved in some form.
For the record, games came with the ability to host your own server when the server was not handling matchmaking and handling discrete games with a beginning, an end and a handful of players.
That is still very much a thing. In some cases you can self-host servers (Terraria, since it’s in the news today), in others you can rent a server (Conan Exiles, if I remember correctly).
But what you can’t do there is run global matchmaking or have oversight over the entire game. This isn’t a problem of “writing the server software”, it’s a problem of having a centralized infrastructure to handle the parts of the game that aren’t related to an individual session. “Server software” doesn’t come in interchangeable “server software units” you can exchange or move from wherever the developer is hosting them to a local computer. That’s not an easy transition to make. That’s where saying things like these starts making devs scoff at you and stop taking you seriously.
But that doesn’t mean I’m fine with those live service games dependent on a larger infrastructure going away entirely. I do want to find a form of storage and preservation for them. Maybe that form means they’re still not playable at all times for people who paid for them, but I do care about them as cultural artifacts existing in some form.