Most match-based FPS don't do that anymore, as it's susceptible to DDOS. Whether a LAN-like mode is otherwise still feasible/acceptable by todays game quality standards is debatable.
> Provide server binaries for self-hosted servers
This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
> Now, please give me an example of a game that doesn't fit within that framework if you want to continue this argument.
Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
> you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment
Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
If they're not actually allowed to sell their product, then they shouldn't pretend they're selling it. They should be clear that it's a rental by offering it as a subscription only in that case and thus not be bound by that requirement.
>
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
And gamers at large shouldn't pretend that they are going to be shelling out money for subscriptions. There is a reason that even most MMOs switched away from mandatory subscription pricing (apart from the outlier of WOW), and it's not to make the publishers filthy reach, but often barely viable.
"We released MyGame 3 a month ago, sales aren't looking great, announce EoL for MyGame 1 we released 6 years ago to get those bums off it." (or the more charitable version where money's tight and the AWS costs aren't helping)
How is LAN susceptible to DDoS? I think you're thinking of P2P, unless you're worried about your LAN buddies trolling you I guess.
Regardless, whether the quality of LAN games is good or not is wholly irrelevant to the SKG initiative. If players want to play an apparently inferior version of the game, they should be allowed to, and LAN is hardly going to be an inferior version of the game anyways.
> This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
Comparing your game to a SaaS app is an interesting approach, because SaaS apps are generally sold as subscriptions, not one-time purchases that would otherwise immply ownership. If the game is genuinely SaaS-like, maybe price it like one and stop selling it like a regular product.
Also this would only really be the case for AAA games, and they have more than enough cash to figure out a proper sunsetting strategy.
Again, it doesn't have to be a perfect experience or anything near it, as long as people can somehow keep playing the games they paid for, even if they're the ones to bear the costs of hosting (which isn't even a rare thing in gaming, there's many old games with community servers out there that to this day have healthy playerbases).
In my experience the community servers usually beat the experience on dedicated servers anyways though, modders are usually more passionate and have more freedom to make things work well than the devs do. See the shenanigans with Titanfall 2's servers as an example.
> Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
The games being cited to defeat this legislation are indie titles with small userbases and tight margins. The legislation is being discussed largely because of what EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do to games with millions of paying customers. Letting the hardest edge case set the ceiling for consumer protection is a convenient outcome for the people least affected by it.
And regardless, games like Minecraft and Terraria started off as small-studio indie games that built their own networking without Photon or anything like it. The self-hosted server support is a huge part of why those communities are still thriving today, many years later. The "it's too complex without third-party services" argument is newer than the practice of indie devs doing it themselves.
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
The implication that informed consumers are a problem for the industry is a pretty damning admission about how the industry currently operates.
I didn't say that. Games don't to P2P anymore because it's susceptible to DDOS. LAN as alternative to Internet P2P may have seperate drawbacks (but may obviously disregard DDOS protection).
> The legislation is being discussed largely because of what EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do to games with millions of paying customers. Letting the hardest edge case set the ceiling for consumer protection is a convenient outcome for the people least affected by it.
Then propose some legislation that actually deals with that and doesn't in its communication ignore the cost of retrofitting games for all developers of games with any online component. But that's not how SKG riles up it's base of support.
> The implication that informed consumers are a problem for the industry is a pretty damning admission about how the industry currently operates.
This doesn't have anything to do with informed consumers / uninformed consumers. My comment was about the unwillingness of customers to pay for monthly subscriptions.
> consumers are a problem for the industry
They honestly are. My main reason for not going into game development is the incredible entitlement from the customerbase. I understand that situations like Control or The Crew suck, but those should be individual class action lawsuits. But instead everyone wants to impose legislation on essentially all online games, even those they purchase for less money than a coffee at Starbucks. And all that just to apparently be fine with buggy, laggy, borderline playable versions of the game, with worse matchmaking UX.
That things you bought stop working is not unique to video games with online components. I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore.
As it has been said many times already, the initiative does not propose any "retrofitting" for existing games.
> the incredible entitlement from the customerbase
The ability to be able to play the game in the future is not entitlement, it's a normal thing. If you car stops working because the authentication servers are down, do you consider yourself entitled as well? I hope not. Why should games be different?
> That things you bought stop working is not unique to video games with online components. I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore
But modern titles stop working on modern systems, so it's not comparable. We can still play older games via different means. But with games that use online connection that's not the case when the servers get shut down.
SKG and the people signing the petitions aren't legislators, the entire point of this initiative is to actually talk to legislators. It's not their job to propose a hyper-specific law on day 1, it's the job of the legislators to do so. And so far, it has been met with nothing but bad faith attacks on things they have never claimed to want, such as...
> ...the cost of retrofitting games ...
SKG has made it abundantly clear that they don't want any kind of law or legislation to be applied retroactively. There would be absolutely no retrofitting forced on anyone, it would only affect new games released after legislation passes. Similarly to how you didn't have to re-manufacture your old phone model to add a USB-C port into it, you don't have to do anything with your already-released games.
> ... the incredible entitlement from the customerbase
People expect to buy a product and to be able to use it however they'd like, without getting scammed and having it yanked from them down the line? How entitled of them!
> And all that just to apparently be fine with buggy, laggy, borderline playable versions of the game, with worse matchmaking UX.
Again, how is that anyone's problem other than the person who bought the game and is presumably happy to keep playing it? If it has reached EOL, then it's better the game remain playable somehow, regardless of how buggy or bad of an experience it is, than to just fully lose access to it. I'd say no experience is worse than a buggy one.
> I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore.
You can extremely easily emulate all of these, including on your phone, and hell Windows has native support for many games with their compatibility modes out of the gate, so yes, you could indeed play games from the 90s if you still wanted to. We've still got Doom (1993) being ported to anything that has a transistor in it to this day. In fact, looking over a list of 90s games, pretty much all of them are still playable! Monkey Island (1990!), Wolfenstein 3D ('92), Myst, the OG Warcraft, Quake is still being played competitively to this day, Civ 2, the original Diablo, the list goes on for a while and many of these games have healthy playerbases to this day.
Ever heard of GOG (Good Old Games)? It's in the name, their entire business is predicated on making retro games runnable on modern systems, and oftentimes even improving on them massively by pre-patching community patches and things of that nature.
As a sidenote, looking at lists of old games it's quite depressing how much we've lost in more recent times. I can and do still boot up games from my childhood, and many of them with vibrant & healthy communities to this day, yet there are newer games from a few short years ago that are now completely dead because the devs decided to pull the plug on them. AoE II "Enhanced" Edition doesn't even have LAN functionality without first connecting to their servers! The original game that this is a remaster of you can still play today with literally 0 issues! That is the exact issue with this crap, we're pretending like it's impossible to build games with longevity in mind when we've been doing it for the better part of 2 decades already.
We're talking about EOL plans here. You don't have to care about DDOS.
> This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).
I have multiple issues with this framing:
1. We're talking about regulation about _future games_ that haven't been made yet. SKG doesn't want to regulate existing games. So we're not talking about retrofitting an EOL plan on games that already rely on complex backend. If you're planning for it from the get-go, getting an architecture that isn't so cloud-reliant isn't that complicated.
2. Even if we accept the premise that a game _absolutely needed_ a cloud only architecture to function for one reason or another, that doesn't prevent releasing the architecture binaries.
3. Licensed libraries may have redistribution prohibitions _today_, but should EOL regulations come in place, you'd find that those libraries would quickly move to allow redistribution for EOL purposes, as otherwise studios would just _not use them_.
> Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.
AFAICT, Photon Fusion is fully compliant with SKG already - it supports games where one player is the "host" and all comms are P2P. Players can direct connect to one another. While it does work better with a STUN server or with Photon's cloud, they are not *necessary* for the game to function.
Photon's Voice offering might be different, but turning that off for an EOL plan is totally acceptable according to the SKG's wanted regulation - they would fall within the same category of "extra services" that aren't part of the core game.
And _furthermore_, of the three games you cited, I know for sure that PEAK and CW are playable fully offline. They're already SKG-compliant even if photon fusion was somehow not. I haven't played Gorilla Tag or looked into it, but I think I've already made my point clear.
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
WoW still has active players in the millions. FF14 has a 25k peak concurrent players in the past 24h. There are other success stories. But sure, it "tanks your playerbase".
I don't know about the EU effort, but the California bill would apply to any game that is released on or after January 1, 2027. That's not enough time to plan for the "changes from the get-go."
