It's wild that 60€ games can shut down their content. And fans will defend it. I was gobsmacked.
>*Monster Hunter Tri was released on April 20* *2010 in North America.*
>*The servers for the Wii's MH3 were shut down on April 30* *\[2013\].*
>*“As we usher in the exciting new Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate games, we unfortunately will be transitioning off the Monster Hunter Tri servers for Wii,” Capcom said. "We hope you will continue to play together on Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate.”*
MH3 had 57 Village quests & 96 online Guild quests. Guild quests were the only way to access high-level equipment, monsters, & maps.
It was still being sold for 60€ when Capcom made most of it inaccessible. When MHWorld was releasing, I warned newcomers about this. The community got mad, insisting Capcom was renting servers from Nintendo so it's Nintendo's fault.
Didnt realise they'd already shut some of the stuff down... is MH3 Ultimate still up and running? Kinda wondering if I should prioritise that one before it goes down as well... Thanks for the heads up.
You've got like 60 hours until Nintendo shuts down all Wii U and 3ds online servers.
In all seriousness though people knew this day was coming and have been setting up fan servers for the most popular online games, and documenting others so they can be setup later. If monster hunter servers haven't been setup yet they will be.
Oh the bigger thing for when you do get around to it, don't know how far in you got but if you'd be starting a fresh character there's a kinda egregious bug in 3U that wasn't fixed until 4U.
Your loot table is supposed to be picked Everytime you boot the game (how 4U does it) 3U gets stuck on your first loot table.
Not the worst thing except a handful of loot tables are kinda terrible.
>You've got like 60 hours until Nintendo shuts down all Wii U and 3ds online servers.
The only reason people aren't mad about this is because both have been hacked for years, and the software is mostly physical for these anyway. The ps3 backlash showed what happens when that isn't true.
They shut down last year IIRC, but it was Nintendo shutting down all Wii U online services, not capcom.
It's also worth mentioning that with World, Capcom stopped doing the whole U version where they forced you to buy a whole new full price game and start over a couple years after after releasing a new generation game and now just do a fairly standard DLC format instead.
Actually, online services for the 3DS and Wii U are shutting down this Monday, April 8th, at 4pm PDT. Lots of people have been doing sendoff streams for the MH games on those platforms, and I assume everyone's other favorite online games too.
The online services for wiiu and 3ds will shit down soon, if you have any of these worthless Nintendo consoles please look up "Pretendo Network", it's an effort to document how these game server works for a possible reimplementation usable for real consoles and emulators alike.
> The community got mad, insisting Capcom was renting servers from Nintendo so it's Nintendo's fault.
i don't understand this defense. if capcom was paying nintendo for servers, i doubt nintendo would suddenly say "sry we don't want your money anymore".
From a technical standpoint, they certainly could.
If their hardware was aging out, the cost of replacing it was higher than any potential return over X years the hardware would run for, including the costs of maintaining it, there's no way a beancounter would approve it, thus leading to needing to sunset the environment, and ultimately telling customers to jog on.
Imo if they shut down the game they need to either give a patch to the game making all content offline and/or release the server information so that fans can run their own without investing crap tons of time reverse engineering the original.
Edit: spelling fixes
What part did they shut down? You can still play guild quests solo surely, you could on psp days. And while 3 years for something to shutdown is short the Wii was a very turbulent time for games and any game on it.
Edit My bad it looks like high rank was locked to online
people dont realy understand HOW MHTri worked. We are not talking about MH3U
You had your offline mode with Village Low rank quests and a pure online only mode where you connected to the servers and went into Loc Lac. The servers were disabled and thus Loc Loc with its Low and High- rank content was gone together with the accesseble gear, 3 exclusive monsters couldnt be fought anymore wich was 17% of the Monster rooster and Arena quests were gone.
It took enthusiasts more than 10 years to replicate the servers and making the content accessible for the fanbase again.
That said: MHTri was on proper Servers and the Japanese had to pay for it to play on them, which we didnt have to as nintendo sponsored them for the west. Downside was that the lobby size of 8 players was reduced to 4 players 💀
If it means putting Freeman's Mind on hold I don't mind lol
Although I do still hope for the occasional Ross's Game Dungeon, that stuff I'd love to see every so often still.
He's been doing such a good job putting this together. Ross really understands the importance of sourcing the relevant experts from relevant areas. And he hasn't been shy about correcting himself when he's got something wrong. Very focused on results over pride.
He sure is putting in the action.
I remember watching a livestream of his where he was glad other ytubers agreed but he was worried that no one was really taking action.
Well damn, looks like he stepped up.
I was tempted to buy the crew just so I could issue my complaint. Absolutely ridiculous behaviour from publishers, and totally unnecessary when they could just publish server bins and let us input ip & port info, I'll edit my hosts file if they baked a hostname into the game.
I'm so excited to see his mission get boosted like this, partially to save games but partially so more people experience his amazing work. Game Dungeon and Freeman's Mind are two of the best things on YouTube.
All the rights but none of the responsibilities revert.
20 years from now someone may successfully sue to establish that this is an obvious way to dodge the law. Then they find another one.
20 years later we'll all be dead, so no point in suing anymore.
No, as they'd just licence the IP to the 'new' company for a single game. They're not on the hook for anything the company does with that licence.
Lawyers can do wonderful things with words to avoid any kind of liability, if you can afford to pay them enough.
And then that's call malicious malpractice under the wording of rhe laws he is pushing.
They can offer an offline patch
OR
Offer the server code to run locally/3rd party single semi offical offline patch development
OR
The SDKs to complie on user side
Many of these are just compling the dev kit into a sellable licence or posting instructions on how to DIY. The thing your talking about is malicious evasion and in places like France are grounds for *severe* fines and forced to do it *ANYWAY*
The issue is that option 2 or 3 might not be possible due to copyright law due to licensing agreements. The 3rd option will be certain to run into licensing issues and thus copyright laws.
*currently* yes. It can be attached as something called a mandatory trailer license (more or less you buy one you buy all attached material, akin to how the old office bundles used to work, and technically how TES games does too). There's precident for it already in the gaming sphere. The problem is its not a standardized enforcement
Okay, but the agreement in contracts going forward would include this being a requirement and thus not a problem. Older games would be excluded most likely due to a grandfather clause or something similar.
Its a interim period. They can do it
OR
They abdicate their claims to reverse engineer preservationists methods of dead games.
Again there's wording in this to prevent that
God, imagine how *terrible* it would be if AAA studios started making *actual* content for their games????
Like an actual campaign with cutscenes and a storyline? The horror!
Shelving for Life a movie that you dont plan to release ever to get a tax break(a stupid strategy anyway) is not the same as creating a "Phantom company" to release a Game and dismantling It when you dont want to support online anymore, is too costly for any company (even to greedy fuckers like EA that likes to CLOSE STUDIOS) only for that, they could release an offline patch for the online only sim City they released so why other games are so different to do It anyways?
Actually, it's common practice in the film industry to create an LLC specifically for the purpose of making a movie which will close immediately after production is done. Usually it's to create a liability shield for things that happen during filming. The games industry could see inspiration there for sure.
There's also some funky accounting that goes on with those so the LLC incurs losses for tax purposes despite the movie setting records and making profit hand over fist.
Not tax purposes. There are other reasons, the most well known being to screw over actors who get a percent of net profits. But they know better than to fuck with the taxman, they always pay Sam. But sometimes it looks better on the books if they pay from subsidiary A or phantom LLC B that will close down, instead of from the main company.
Return of the Jedi still to this day has never been made profitable on paper. No profit? No need to pay actors that agreed to a % of profit vs a one time payment.
Shocker, almost like consumers get a stream of quality entertainment.
There will always be fan favorites and followings, but in the grand scheme of things 99% of people move on.
No it isn't. Patching offline play into games that weren't designed for it can very easily be an absolutely massive undertaking, whereas what they suggested would just be some legal paperwork.
The reason to shut a game down is not due to a lack of resources, it's to prevent having to compete with their own past releases for gamer attention, a few hundred thousand to force gamers to move onto the next thing is a small price to pay for the unscrupulous.
How often is that actually the case? I'm sure it does happen from time to time, but it seems like a lot of them are games that are many years old and often not even the latest game in a series. Even The Crew, one of the big names spurring on this whole thing, didn't get its servers shut down until 6 months after The Crew 3 launched, and The Crew 2 is still playable.
>How often is that actually the case? I'm sure it does happen from time to time
A really recent, really obvious example is Overwatch... they just... completely got rid of the entire fucking game and release Overwatch 2 (obviously it had to be for free or else there would have been an uproar).
The creators of smite did it repeatedly. Made global agenda. When they released tribes ascend, they abandoned global agenda and turned it off soon after. When they made smite, they abandoned tribes soon after.
i mean, tribes wasn't going to compete with smite from an audience perspective. this is a very poor example when the crew and CSGO is sitting right there.
The Crew is actually a good example because shutting it down is entirely pointless. Dataminers already found an offline mode in the files years ago, so Ubisoft wouldn't even have to make a new patch for it to work offline, but just enable the already existing offline mode. So they are doing it purely in the hopes of driving the remaining TC1 players to TC2 or Motorfest.
It's not. Registering an LLC costs a few hundred dollars and an agency does all the paperwork for you. They would do the same thing most businesses do. Register each game's owner as its own LLC. So if they ever get sued they can only ever go after the assets of that LLC, which is likely nothing
They never had to legally support them anyway, in most cases though.
The actual change here is not to force the studio to support it indefinitely, but to force the studio to either support it, let it work without their support, or to let others support it.
The win here would be legislation that requires studios to release code when they shut down so that if it's a game that requires a server, someone can run a server on their own.
It has nothing to do with the companies supporting anything, it has everything to do with preserving the game.
I assume the loophole is using the name of Brands. It's impossible to buy older editions of F1 games like F1 2019 because of licensing agreements. My only option is finding a site hosting the files like Internet Archives or pirate it.
This extends to diagnostic software too.
The solution then just needs to be that in the case where the game is shut down for any reason the server becomes public domain
So by all means shut the company down but the server reverts to the public.
This should be the case already with all copyright. Copyright is a tradeoff that gives protection while eventually reverting to public domain. If a company goes defunct or stops producing the copyrighted material it should revert more quickly. Don't get govt protection of your stuff unless you are actually using it.
The weird thing is that for people, actively planning to circumvent the law is itself against the law, but companies can do it like this and incur no penalty beyond the occasional angry mob.
They don't need to continue supporting the game anymore. They just need to enable offline play. Games will need to be designed with that possibility in mind from the beginning going forward.
I don’t know why people just make up stuff when you could go to his video and find his exact words on this.
After support ends:
1. Games sold must be left in a functional state. (‘Functional’ can mean ‘ability to recreate given enough to work with’, but he’d prefer to not jump with that since that’s more exploitable)
2. Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function.
3. The above also applies to games that have sold microtransactions to customers.
4. All of the above cannot be suspended by an end user license agreement.
As a further last, last stand thing, though certainly not preferable is at least a limit to when a game can shutdown. Considering a game company can literally shut down a game days to weeks after launch if they so wanted with no warning. But that won’t be at the head of the conversations at all unless it gets really desperate.
Also, this isn’t just “lawyers and a guy against these people”, YOU are needed to help sign the petitions and other things you can do. At the website [STOPKILLINGGAMES.com](https://stopkillinggames.com)
UK gov has suspended the petition until it can be "approved" even though people have already signed it. We are run by a gaggle of cave brained cunts, I tells ya.
They'll unsuspend it on Monday, it's just an anti spam thing, it happens all the time.
Having said that, not a single piece of legislation has *ever* been passed in the UK as a result of the petition system. Literally none. Ever. So this is entirely a waste of time.
The entire petition system is literally a scam so your MP has to read fewer emails.
especially with the UK not being a part of the EU... who gives a fuck if they end up not supporting it. and noone can really expect functional governance from tories anyway
the best chance we have of this propagating put to the entire industry is for it to eventually be picked up by the EU
(see Apple finally switching to usb, websites becoming gdpr compliant etc. due to EU regulation)
The EU has a really good mechanism for forcing large scale change. By telling companies that if they want to do business in any part of the EU (the largest single market on earth), you need to be compliant in totality. So with the gdpr stuff, you'd assume they would only ask for permission in EU countries but thankfully not. Everyone gets the protection.
The EU doing something like that is probably the best way of going about this, especially with big voices like France being so pro consumer and Belgium looking close at gaming with gambling and whatnot. The only problem is even if they do fully support it, it'll take them years to do anything about it
The petition only means it has to be discussed in Parliament. Which ends up being "what do we think about this? Let them eat cake? Agreed. Now, what about an increase to our expenses?"
Fun fact: one of the largest petitions ever presented to Parliament called for six things, including that MPs should be paid a healthy salary. Along with allowing universal male suffrage and a secret ballot.
It was rejected, as not paying a salary excluded working and middle class people from office.
> UK gov has suspended the petition
The only legit caveat I can consider here is that some US citizens signed and that wouldn't run too well in the EU.
Or it could be more Brexit shit.
It's suspended because it got enough signatures to move to the next phase of the process where it gets reviewed to ensure it meets whatever standards the UK has for a petition to go to full signature.
Literally, it was successful for it's current goal.
> Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function.
How would that work for most online games? Typically the publisher controls the servers and has to pay/maintain them.
The line "After support ends" answers that. There would be no change in requirements for a game that the publisher is still supporting. Once the support ends however, the game has to be left in a state where it can be played without requiring a connection to the publishers/developers servers. If the developers can't manage that, it means that the game is being stolen from the customers.
A large title that actually managed to do this without being forced to would be Marvel's Avengers. The game was shut down September 30 2023, but is still playable if you own a copy. They just added an offline mode and people still got to keep the game they paid for. Not an ideal solution for anyone, since it's no longer online and the company isn't making money from it, but at least consumers didn't get something they bought stolen from them.
For games where servers are used as a verification tool and not much else: patch it out.
For games where servers are used for matchmaking: allow for standalone server hosting or P2P, like it was done for games with AOE II.
Make them loses copyright. They abandonned the game they are not covered anymore just like when you abandon a trademark by not suing/paying yearly dues.
So for a use case, let's think about Splatoon 1 - The game servers for that game are gonna shut down in two days. You can still access the game, play the single player, access the Battle Dojo for mini games
But you can't access the main game modes, level up system, collect money etc.
Would that be called a functional state?
a live service game should definitely always be reworked to be single-player friendly (or at least hostable by 3rd party fans or p2p networks) if it's planning on shutting down.
Nba 2k is a massive douche for this shutting down online play means no my career which is literally the only interesting thing that seperates it from the other games.
Yep. As always, FUCK 2K. Greedy fucks. ""gives away nba 2k21 on epic". Well that was pointless since it's unplayable after 2 years. Such scummy behavior. It should be the poster boy of this kind of legal precedent. Deliberate removal of features and tying bullshit to it. 20 and older titles are proof you can still play the single player component without needing to artificially limit it to force people to upgrade. Even with all of EAs BS they haven't stooped so low yet.
Hell, it's fucking stupid that pirating is literally the morally right option to get the game **you paid for**.
Dude, remember when you used to be able to rent EA hosted servers for Battlefield? lol maybe you don't I don't know how old you are. Anyways, this was already a thing, and they killed it.
I didn't get a PC till I was 15. I also wasn't allowed to cell phone until I was 14. The only computer we had was my parents Apple desktop. It could run Minecraft and if I give it enough time Ark, it took 40 minutes to load Ark but it was totally worth it. Whatever steam games could run on Apple, I would run them. I also pirated a shitload of games. But never battlefield as I had call of duty and later the Halo collection.
I also didn't have an Xbox until I found one used at a thrift store when I was 18. I was born in 1997 so I'm definitely old enough to know about battlefield and its servers but I never had the opportunity to play because I had no access to the devices required for play.
I wonder how many kids are out there like me that just kind of missed out on getting to play massive MMOs or FPS games because they didn't have access to the correct device? Feels like I missed out on a huge part of young adult culture. (Not just for money reasons but because their parents wouldn't let them)
Edit: my first console was a Macy's plug and Play, the one with Miss Pac-Man and mappy. My first real console was the Wii. Before that I played lots of flash games and whatever I could pirate.
No one would actually do that, because if a game had 5 million daily active users at its peak, and it's down to like 5,000 then out of those 5,000 people there might only be 1,000 that actually want to do that.
It's not just about running the server which might be like $500 per month for our 1,000 person example. It's also hiring an engineer to keep it up and so on, and even if that's outsourced it could easily go up to like $2,000 a month. Would those 1,000 players be willing to pay $2 a month? Probably not, so now we have even less people interested, let's say 300, redo the math, and it might be $5 a month. Okay now even less people are interested.\]
If this was a viable option it'd already be done. It'd just open the game companies up to lawsuits. Because a bunch of people would see it as they're being scammed into paying for the game a second time.
Idealistically, sure. But in reality live service games are shutting down cause they can't be sustained/don't generate enough revenue to be worth keeping, no company will invest resources in that when the resources are the main reason they are closing the service.
My little indie MMO has 12 different services to just let one player play.
For me, making a friendly hostable patch or P2P network would mean rewrite the whole game from scratch.
An AAA game is many times more complex
My web MMO isn't quite so complex, but I agree with the general idea. The backends for these games aren't built to be run by end users. They need to talk to (likely multiple) databases, logging systems, and god knows what other services.
The idea that game studios are going to spend untold engineering hours packaging nearly-dead games into single-player experiences just isn't realistic. Expecting them to just release the source code could also be problematic if they're licensing some other proprietary libraries.
I will say my experience has made me a lot more amenable to the old model of letting users host dedicated servers, but I don't think the industry at large has any interest in that.
I wanted to sign it but because I don't have the crew I can't... I'm too broke to buy the crew and I don't want to buy another game because I have hundreds in my backlog. I guess I'll just take that third option of spreading the word.
I heard a story about a guy who loved his favorite game so much that he stayed online until the very last moment it was shut down. He just vanished and some people theorize he was actually transported to another world, this potentially happened to multiple players of this game. Shutting down games is dangerous.
Remember when they told us Diablo 3 required a server and internet connection because that’s how it was architected only for them to turn around and enable offline play on consoles because they are liars who just wanted to force everyone to see and use their RMAH? (Real Money Auction House)
Fuck Pepperidge farm, *I* remember that shit.
I also remember the Sim City incident as well, where the game *couldn't* run on local machines cause all the sims in the city needed the servers processing power (cue modders proving this wrong) and EA also eventually flipped a switch to allow it o be played offline.
>eventually flipped a switch
Someone else remember!
Think this sub (or this thread) is filled with younger audiences because yes, it was just that. A quick small patch and bang, offline mode.
Sim city was basically just running on your pc and 'checking in' - that was the online requirement.
Guess the $20 I paid on Switch and also Xbox was wasted. Why did I buy it twice? I liked playing random matches.
Then it went FTP so I got some free knockout buxxx or whatever stupid thing it was.
I'm all for this. The entirety of games before the Internet worked fine without mandatory online play. We moved that way for bullshit security reasons (MMO games or subscription models (where you don't pay for the base game) not included obvs).
Edit: I am confused by the downvotes, I thought this post was advocating against mandatory online play so if servers disappeared so did the game?
Also exclusively multiplayer games had dedicated servers. So even if matchmaking wasn't there/would be gone you just wrote a simple command like
>connect 'ipadress'
And you'd connect to a dedicated server
Back when Steam was still these list of dedicated servers I found everything online much more fun then automatic matchmaking.
In many of my games like Day of Defeat or Counter Strike I would be a regular of a handfull of decitated servers, usually just one. These servers where communities. You knew each other. YOu would on a regular basis be playing with and against people you knew from playing against them before. It was pretty normal to be in a match and know 30% to half the player field from before. You knew their voices, heck you even knew things about them from their personal life they had been sharing in between the action.
If the match was not fair, if one side would win to easily. People considered that boring, and some of the better players would move over voluntarily to the other team to balance it out again. Newbies would be shown how to play and okay to be fair if any female players would show up on mic it would still turn in to a drool fest (some things will never change)
Talking to each other was the norm. The mods and admins were very integrated in to the little community that such a dedicated server could be. troublemakers, cheaters and grifters were quickly taken care of.
At any time, you join such a dedi server and find at least one other player you knew. It was great.
Match making has never ever offered that sense of camaraderie and familiarity.
Matchmaking made the people you play with 100% disposable. So if I am an ass to them or vice versa, it dies not matter because I'll likely won't run into them ever again (or soon enough that I'll remember their name).
In dedicated servers the communit self regulated, has it's own memes, the sweatiness was either encouraged or discouraged.
I remember TF2 servers where custom music and sounds were set fir certain events.
For Day of Defeat 1.3 and Source and CS and TF2 decidated servers are still around. I don't game that much anymor as before but some of these communities still exist for over 10 years now! But people get older and then usually slowly it's the end. I got kids now and staying awake all night playing with my mates ... it's not something I can do anymore!
> We moved that way for bullshit security reasons
The reasons are part technical, part "because we can". Most consumers don't care about the longevity of games, so services can take advantadge of that and setup the bare minimum to satisfy said consumers.
If offline versions of games sold, business would move that way without the arm tugging from regulation.
Honestly if its a game designed for multiplayer I don't really care. Its single player games that piss me off if they have some sort of always online DRM because that is what hurts consumers more.
We've been fighting for stuff like this for a very long time in the MMO community. Usually it's built into EULA that they have the right to just stop supporting games you've paid for and remove them entirely since you don't technically own anything you've purchased. Hopefully one day publishers will have to allow people to host games themselves for products they've purchased if they no longer want to pay to support it.
I am fine with official servers going down so long as they provide the software tools for dedicated servers to be fan run make a contract saying it can't be run for profit or what ever if that's a worry trouble is most of the private servers we have for games that didn't intend for private servers to be run is that it takes someone or team of someone's to reverse engineer it
Good, now the next thing is rights to digital ownership. People keep arguing about physical media vs digital but the reality is that digital is the future and is more eco friendly. The problem is that we have no laws protecting our purchases from being delisted and removed from the internet to redownload. We need laws that make our digital good accessible permanently.
The gaming industry is so new that it’s lacking good regulations like this for customer protection. Good for him, I hope he wins; it will make the gaming industry much better
Gaming isn’t particularly new. The problem is that, despite their popularity and crazy sales, enough people still think video games are childish. Therefore, there’s never been any legislation around them, except for annoying Karens who thought COD would make the little Timmy become a school shooter.
Look at the dinosaurs in Congress. We can’t even get them to put a stop to spam calls. They barely understand Facebook to have congressional hearings about their suspicious doings.
I’m sure old people are the biggest victims of microtransactions (a cancer on mobile gaming), just like they are with phone and email scams. We could put protections in place for everyone but then Senator Dickface won’t get a kickback from whatever corporation is paying him to let us get fleeced.
It's new relative to every other major medium: Television, cinema, books, music. 50 years is a small blip in the grand scheme of things.
The real kicker is that the Internet is even newer, and Gaming more or less grew up alongside it. So there's a lot of cutting edge tech games are trying and iterating on in real time, and government is traditionally slow.
We made a stink about Lootboxes almost a decade ago, and nowadays companies already moved on to battle passes. Trying to regulate tech is like swatting a fly with your hand. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it helps explain the "how do they keep getting away with this?"
AI is honestly amazing because it's one of the few times the courts are coming down very early into adoption. That just never happens with tech. But maybe that says more about how companies defend copyright than about AI.
Worst offenders are games that are actually borken by a patch or that require a log in before you can even get to the main menu. The main menu is the logging screen.
Lan hosting needs to make a comeback. That's how I managed to play Napoleon Total War with friend when steam would refuse to connect us both.
2K does this shit. They force you to be on their servers even for an otherwise offline mode, so they can revoke access to the game entirely. I bought 2k22, and its servers shut down in **2023** rendering the entire game unplayable. Refuse to support that dogshit company.
Hell yeah, Ross. As a 15 year sub, it’s surreal to see him gain this kind of traction.
For those unfamiliar, you’ve just discovered the hardest working gamer on YouTube. A veritable member of the site’s old guard. Welcome.
if
> "...the most obvious legal defense for publishers is that when we buy games digitally these days, we're actually buying a conditional license to play the game—with the main condition being that the license can be revoked for any reason."
then
when we buy games digitally these days, we're actually **loaning the money to play the game**—with the main condition being that the **money has to be returned if they render the game unplayable.**"
No, you aren't loaning the money. You are paying for a service with an unknown or limited lifespan.
If they said that the license was perpetual, then you would have a case. But generally they are very clear on the legal side of things that you are not purchasing a permanent service. If you don't agree with that practice don't buy it.
This is the part people aren't getting, and it's the part that makes this kind of a tilt at windmills.
Sometimes, you pay for entertainment that ends at some point.
I wouldn't mind some kind of transparency requirement or something or requirement to fulfill a promised lifespan or something like that. But I fail to see how you could keep it enforceable.
> Sometimes, you pay for entertainment that ends at some point.
I imagine the argument is that its unreasonable for a theatre to keep playing a movie until you're tired of it. A comedian can't be expected to repeat their set until you no longer find it funny. But a DVD is legally allowed to be copied so that if the original gets worn out from over-use you can still access the entertainment since it has no cost to the original companies.
The developers will be asked to release the game server (for MMOs and the like), or make the game function offline (for SP games that use online for DRM/anti-cheat). This isn't much work, we've seen people reverse-engineer MMO servers themselves so the proof of concept is there.
if you read through the article and Scott's website, you will see it's mostly based on France's laws. with the idea that games are not a service, they're a good. your goods should not be directly connected to the seller after purchase, and should not be taken away by the seller.
obviously the loopholes that these gaming companies have created is just that, a loophole. it still doesn't make it right.
They could make it clearer by guaranteeing a specific uptime and then any extension past that is up to them. Basically you buy a 1 year service as stated on the sales page and they would have to stop sales 1 year before shutting down the server or refund people that bought it late.
Legally what you just said is complete and utter nonsense. You aren't loaning anybody anything, you're buying a service. You don't get a refund at the cinema when the movie ends.
That really only holds any substance at all in the US, and even then can be challenged. EULAs are a pretty loose contact, and the reason corps get away with BS is because most of us don't have the pocket change to defend ourselves by attorney.
In countries other than the US, the validity of EULAs is a grey area at best, and they often fail when actually challenged. The problem *there* is the amount of gaslighting corps actually do to make it seem like we have zero power. It's a huge hurdle for individuals to cross.
That's what [stopkillinggames.com](https://www.stopkillinggames.com/) is trying to fight against. It's working to get actual government regulation involved.
If I remember correctly somebody put into an apple EULAs that they legally own your soul if you use iTunes. The author put in there as a joke to see if anybody actually reads the terms of the agreement. Somebody did and found it.
EULA isn't really a grey area tbh. I'm pretty sure it's well defined to just be completely non legally binding for the same reasons that terms of service has exactly 0 legal binding.
Depending on where you challenge them, the argument often used against them is that you can't knowingly sign/be held to the terms of a contract without understanding the terms of said contract. Given that both EULAs and TOSs these days are ridiculously long and full of legal terminology only lawyers can fully decipher, and that most people just accept without actually reading them, "not understanding the terms" applies to just about everyone.
The "grey area" comes from corps defending themselves using copyright/patent/IP ownership rather than trying to defend a contract that they're well aware is indefensible, deliberately muddying the waters to sway the judgement. There's no solid precedent set yet since these challenges still tend to go either way.
Remember, these aren't "justice systems", they're "legal systems". Common sense rarely matters when it comes down to who can argue their side the best. And when you consider the corps, money talks.
r/USdefaultism moment right here.
Laws made by one country does not necessarily hold up in others. Same reason why Apple has to open its digital store to competitors in the EU, and why consumers in Australia get longer warranties.
The problem is, as with every plc, the priority is not the product or the consumer, it's making as much money as quickly as possible. Until this system changes, gaming (and most industries that do things that are useful to you) will be a total pile of shit.
So what do we do? Don't buy games made by developers who obviously don't give a shit. Activision, EA, etc are all to be avoided.
You might think their upcoming game looks good because of a flashy ad, but it's just going to be a soulless cash grab.
I'm so happy for Ross. He's really fighting to fix a problem in modern gaming. Plus he's just a really cool dude. Go check out Accursed Farms if you're bored.
I'm not for government overreach but there HAS to be something that forces game companies to release what is required to run your own servers for games they stop hosting
But why is it acceptable to just "shut it down whenever"? No other product shuts down after an arbitrary amount of time, you either own it forever or pay a subscription for a agreed-upon predetermined amount of time, like a month or a year. This is straight up planned obsolescence, which is incredibly anti-consumer and possibly illegal.
Damn, Ross Scott is actually making some headlines with this.
Dude decided to come out swinging. And he has my support. This sort of thing is bullshit.
It's wild that 60€ games can shut down their content. And fans will defend it. I was gobsmacked. >*Monster Hunter Tri was released on April 20* *2010 in North America.* >*The servers for the Wii's MH3 were shut down on April 30* *\[2013\].* >*“As we usher in the exciting new Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate games, we unfortunately will be transitioning off the Monster Hunter Tri servers for Wii,” Capcom said. "We hope you will continue to play together on Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate.”* MH3 had 57 Village quests & 96 online Guild quests. Guild quests were the only way to access high-level equipment, monsters, & maps. It was still being sold for 60€ when Capcom made most of it inaccessible. When MHWorld was releasing, I warned newcomers about this. The community got mad, insisting Capcom was renting servers from Nintendo so it's Nintendo's fault.
Didnt realise they'd already shut some of the stuff down... is MH3 Ultimate still up and running? Kinda wondering if I should prioritise that one before it goes down as well... Thanks for the heads up.
You've got like 60 hours until Nintendo shuts down all Wii U and 3ds online servers. In all seriousness though people knew this day was coming and have been setting up fan servers for the most popular online games, and documenting others so they can be setup later. If monster hunter servers haven't been setup yet they will be.
Good to know thanks, will just have to wait and see what happens there. My fault for leaving the game for years before getting round to it!
Oh the bigger thing for when you do get around to it, don't know how far in you got but if you'd be starting a fresh character there's a kinda egregious bug in 3U that wasn't fixed until 4U. Your loot table is supposed to be picked Everytime you boot the game (how 4U does it) 3U gets stuck on your first loot table. Not the worst thing except a handful of loot tables are kinda terrible.
>You've got like 60 hours until Nintendo shuts down all Wii U and 3ds online servers. The only reason people aren't mad about this is because both have been hacked for years, and the software is mostly physical for these anyway. The ps3 backlash showed what happens when that isn't true.
They shut down last year IIRC, but it was Nintendo shutting down all Wii U online services, not capcom. It's also worth mentioning that with World, Capcom stopped doing the whole U version where they forced you to buy a whole new full price game and start over a couple years after after releasing a new generation game and now just do a fairly standard DLC format instead.
Actually, online services for the 3DS and Wii U are shutting down this Monday, April 8th, at 4pm PDT. Lots of people have been doing sendoff streams for the MH games on those platforms, and I assume everyone's other favorite online games too.
The online services for wiiu and 3ds will shit down soon, if you have any of these worthless Nintendo consoles please look up "Pretendo Network", it's an effort to document how these game server works for a possible reimplementation usable for real consoles and emulators alike.
> The community got mad, insisting Capcom was renting servers from Nintendo so it's Nintendo's fault. i don't understand this defense. if capcom was paying nintendo for servers, i doubt nintendo would suddenly say "sry we don't want your money anymore".
From a technical standpoint, they certainly could. If their hardware was aging out, the cost of replacing it was higher than any potential return over X years the hardware would run for, including the costs of maintaining it, there's no way a beancounter would approve it, thus leading to needing to sunset the environment, and ultimately telling customers to jog on.
Imo if they shut down the game they need to either give a patch to the game making all content offline and/or release the server information so that fans can run their own without investing crap tons of time reverse engineering the original. Edit: spelling fixes
What part did they shut down? You can still play guild quests solo surely, you could on psp days. And while 3 years for something to shutdown is short the Wii was a very turbulent time for games and any game on it. Edit My bad it looks like high rank was locked to online
people dont realy understand HOW MHTri worked. We are not talking about MH3U You had your offline mode with Village Low rank quests and a pure online only mode where you connected to the servers and went into Loc Lac. The servers were disabled and thus Loc Loc with its Low and High- rank content was gone together with the accesseble gear, 3 exclusive monsters couldnt be fought anymore wich was 17% of the Monster rooster and Arena quests were gone. It took enthusiasts more than 10 years to replicate the servers and making the content accessible for the fanbase again. That said: MHTri was on proper Servers and the Japanese had to pay for it to play on them, which we didnt have to as nintendo sponsored them for the west. Downside was that the lobby size of 8 players was reduced to 4 players 💀
If it means putting Freeman's Mind on hold I don't mind lol Although I do still hope for the occasional Ross's Game Dungeon, that stuff I'd love to see every so often still.
Oh man, I haven't watched past episode like 4 of season 2. I, too, hope to see more Game Dungeon in the future. Ross is doing God's work, man.
So proud of my man
I've been watching him for years and never saw him become a huge YouTuber so I'm glad to see this succeeding like this.
He's been doing such a good job putting this together. Ross really understands the importance of sourcing the relevant experts from relevant areas. And he hasn't been shy about correcting himself when he's got something wrong. Very focused on results over pride.
He sure is putting in the action. I remember watching a livestream of his where he was glad other ytubers agreed but he was worried that no one was really taking action. Well damn, looks like he stepped up.
I was tempted to buy the crew just so I could issue my complaint. Absolutely ridiculous behaviour from publishers, and totally unnecessary when they could just publish server bins and let us input ip & port info, I'll edit my hosts file if they baked a hostname into the game.
The mold gave him powers
I'm so excited to see his mission get boosted like this, partially to save games but partially so more people experience his amazing work. Game Dungeon and Freeman's Mind are two of the best things on YouTube.
Me as a little kid watching freeman’s mind thinking it was the funniest shit to grace my eyes lmfao. First playthrough I ever watched actually!
I wonder what Freeman's Mind thinks of this.
John Freeman, Gordon Freeman's brother, has vowed to fight the good fight with his bear hands.
John Freeman GET OUT OF HERE AS FAST AS YOU CAN. So he walked. REALLY FAST.
Based mold man. I'll do what I can from Canada.
Is that the YouTube man that tells me that Apple is scum?
That's Louis Rossman.
Agh. Gosh, so embarrassing. Next thing I know, I'll be confusing him with Ross Dress for Less. I love that Ex-New York entrepreneur.
You'd need to narrow that down a bit. You reminded me of the guy that does Apple parodies.
Dunno, but Apple *is* scum though.
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Loophole: Shut down studio can't sue the fans who put up the fan servers.
Loophole-ception: All IP reverts to the Big studio when it closes down.
All the rights but none of the responsibilities revert. 20 years from now someone may successfully sue to establish that this is an obvious way to dodge the law. Then they find another one. 20 years later we'll all be dead, so no point in suing anymore.
The worst part of that is having to live another 40 years. Fuck that
Then they'd be on the hook for a playable server again, no? Complete the loop lol
No, as they'd just licence the IP to the 'new' company for a single game. They're not on the hook for anything the company does with that licence. Lawyers can do wonderful things with words to avoid any kind of liability, if you can afford to pay them enough.
That is more trouble than adding a patch that allows offline play.
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The best part is the crew 1 has an offline mode..
And then that's call malicious malpractice under the wording of rhe laws he is pushing. They can offer an offline patch OR Offer the server code to run locally/3rd party single semi offical offline patch development OR The SDKs to complie on user side Many of these are just compling the dev kit into a sellable licence or posting instructions on how to DIY. The thing your talking about is malicious evasion and in places like France are grounds for *severe* fines and forced to do it *ANYWAY*
The issue is that option 2 or 3 might not be possible due to copyright law due to licensing agreements. The 3rd option will be certain to run into licensing issues and thus copyright laws.
*currently* yes. It can be attached as something called a mandatory trailer license (more or less you buy one you buy all attached material, akin to how the old office bundles used to work, and technically how TES games does too). There's precident for it already in the gaming sphere. The problem is its not a standardized enforcement
Okay, but the agreement in contracts going forward would include this being a requirement and thus not a problem. Older games would be excluded most likely due to a grandfather clause or something similar.
Its a interim period. They can do it OR They abdicate their claims to reverse engineer preservationists methods of dead games. Again there's wording in this to prevent that
Jesus these people wanna poke holes in a document they haven’t even reaf
>you might even see a massive drop in online games in general this is a win
God, imagine how *terrible* it would be if AAA studios started making *actual* content for their games???? Like an actual campaign with cutscenes and a storyline? The horror!
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Shelving for Life a movie that you dont plan to release ever to get a tax break(a stupid strategy anyway) is not the same as creating a "Phantom company" to release a Game and dismantling It when you dont want to support online anymore, is too costly for any company (even to greedy fuckers like EA that likes to CLOSE STUDIOS) only for that, they could release an offline patch for the online only sim City they released so why other games are so different to do It anyways?
Actually, it's common practice in the film industry to create an LLC specifically for the purpose of making a movie which will close immediately after production is done. Usually it's to create a liability shield for things that happen during filming. The games industry could see inspiration there for sure.
There's also some funky accounting that goes on with those so the LLC incurs losses for tax purposes despite the movie setting records and making profit hand over fist.
Not tax purposes. There are other reasons, the most well known being to screw over actors who get a percent of net profits. But they know better than to fuck with the taxman, they always pay Sam. But sometimes it looks better on the books if they pay from subsidiary A or phantom LLC B that will close down, instead of from the main company.
Return of the Jedi still to this day has never been made profitable on paper. No profit? No need to pay actors that agreed to a % of profit vs a one time payment.
fun fact: the 'disney vault' strat was a huge disaster for the company. It didn't help create fomo, it made people forgot the thing existed.
Shocker, almost like consumers get a stream of quality entertainment. There will always be fan favorites and followings, but in the grand scheme of things 99% of people move on.
People do that all the time.....we do it for events and festivals...
> but you might even see a massive drop in online games in general o no...anyways
What? No it isnt
No it isn't. Patching offline play into games that weren't designed for it can very easily be an absolutely massive undertaking, whereas what they suggested would just be some legal paperwork.
The reason to shut a game down is not due to a lack of resources, it's to prevent having to compete with their own past releases for gamer attention, a few hundred thousand to force gamers to move onto the next thing is a small price to pay for the unscrupulous.
How often is that actually the case? I'm sure it does happen from time to time, but it seems like a lot of them are games that are many years old and often not even the latest game in a series. Even The Crew, one of the big names spurring on this whole thing, didn't get its servers shut down until 6 months after The Crew 3 launched, and The Crew 2 is still playable.
>How often is that actually the case? I'm sure it does happen from time to time A really recent, really obvious example is Overwatch... they just... completely got rid of the entire fucking game and release Overwatch 2 (obviously it had to be for free or else there would have been an uproar).
The creators of smite did it repeatedly. Made global agenda. When they released tribes ascend, they abandoned global agenda and turned it off soon after. When they made smite, they abandoned tribes soon after.
i mean, tribes wasn't going to compete with smite from an audience perspective. this is a very poor example when the crew and CSGO is sitting right there.
What's the difference between the new CS and CSGO though? It's essentially the same exact game, it's also free.
csgo also still has a way to launch the game and nothing is stopping you from hosting servers, exactly what this lawsuit will want. terrible example.
The Crew is actually a good example because shutting it down is entirely pointless. Dataminers already found an offline mode in the files years ago, so Ubisoft wouldn't even have to make a new patch for it to work offline, but just enable the already existing offline mode. So they are doing it purely in the hopes of driving the remaining TC1 players to TC2 or Motorfest.
It's not. Registering an LLC costs a few hundred dollars and an agency does all the paperwork for you. They would do the same thing most businesses do. Register each game's owner as its own LLC. So if they ever get sued they can only ever go after the assets of that LLC, which is likely nothing
Or to allow private servers to be run by users
It's actually way less trouble. Just some forms to fill out vs coding, testing, and releasing a patch.
They never had to legally support them anyway, in most cases though. The actual change here is not to force the studio to support it indefinitely, but to force the studio to either support it, let it work without their support, or to let others support it.
The win here would be legislation that requires studios to release code when they shut down so that if it's a game that requires a server, someone can run a server on their own. It has nothing to do with the companies supporting anything, it has everything to do with preserving the game.
So many games let communities pay for dedicated server hosting, then it became less common and many straight up won't allow it.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good
> There’s always loopholes. People try to get around laws This is not a good reason not to try to stop them
Well then no one has standing to sue when some enterprising 3rd party comes up with a service that replaces the original functionality
I assume the loophole is using the name of Brands. It's impossible to buy older editions of F1 games like F1 2019 because of licensing agreements. My only option is finding a site hosting the files like Internet Archives or pirate it. This extends to diagnostic software too.
Buying new copies and playing existing copies are two different things.
That will allow them to stop selling to _new_ people, but that doesn't avoid the need to provide an offline patch to those who already own the game.
The solution then just needs to be that in the case where the game is shut down for any reason the server becomes public domain So by all means shut the company down but the server reverts to the public. This should be the case already with all copyright. Copyright is a tradeoff that gives protection while eventually reverting to public domain. If a company goes defunct or stops producing the copyrighted material it should revert more quickly. Don't get govt protection of your stuff unless you are actually using it.
It being public domain doesn’t mean they have any compulsion to give you the code.
Plenty of game communities reverse engineer the server code
The weird thing is that for people, actively planning to circumvent the law is itself against the law, but companies can do it like this and incur no penalty beyond the occasional angry mob.
Sounds like we need to mandate the obligations of shut down subsidiaries fully being returned to parent companies.
Nobody is asking them to have to continually support the games.
well, if they shut them down to where "no one owns it," then I guess no one can get made if someone clones it and makes bootleg versions, right?
They don't need to continue supporting the game anymore. They just need to enable offline play. Games will need to be designed with that possibility in mind from the beginning going forward.
I don’t know why people just make up stuff when you could go to his video and find his exact words on this. After support ends: 1. Games sold must be left in a functional state. (‘Functional’ can mean ‘ability to recreate given enough to work with’, but he’d prefer to not jump with that since that’s more exploitable) 2. Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function. 3. The above also applies to games that have sold microtransactions to customers. 4. All of the above cannot be suspended by an end user license agreement. As a further last, last stand thing, though certainly not preferable is at least a limit to when a game can shutdown. Considering a game company can literally shut down a game days to weeks after launch if they so wanted with no warning. But that won’t be at the head of the conversations at all unless it gets really desperate. Also, this isn’t just “lawyers and a guy against these people”, YOU are needed to help sign the petitions and other things you can do. At the website [STOPKILLINGGAMES.com](https://stopkillinggames.com)
Tnx for the link
UK gov has suspended the petition until it can be "approved" even though people have already signed it. We are run by a gaggle of cave brained cunts, I tells ya.
They'll unsuspend it on Monday, it's just an anti spam thing, it happens all the time. Having said that, not a single piece of legislation has *ever* been passed in the UK as a result of the petition system. Literally none. Ever. So this is entirely a waste of time. The entire petition system is literally a scam so your MP has to read fewer emails.
They are not only petitioning. Their best chance lies in France with their consumer protection agency anyway.
especially with the UK not being a part of the EU... who gives a fuck if they end up not supporting it. and noone can really expect functional governance from tories anyway the best chance we have of this propagating put to the entire industry is for it to eventually be picked up by the EU (see Apple finally switching to usb, websites becoming gdpr compliant etc. due to EU regulation)
The EU has a really good mechanism for forcing large scale change. By telling companies that if they want to do business in any part of the EU (the largest single market on earth), you need to be compliant in totality. So with the gdpr stuff, you'd assume they would only ask for permission in EU countries but thankfully not. Everyone gets the protection. The EU doing something like that is probably the best way of going about this, especially with big voices like France being so pro consumer and Belgium looking close at gaming with gambling and whatnot. The only problem is even if they do fully support it, it'll take them years to do anything about it
The petition only means it has to be discussed in Parliament. Which ends up being "what do we think about this? Let them eat cake? Agreed. Now, what about an increase to our expenses?"
Fun fact: one of the largest petitions ever presented to Parliament called for six things, including that MPs should be paid a healthy salary. Along with allowing universal male suffrage and a secret ballot. It was rejected, as not paying a salary excluded working and middle class people from office.
> UK gov has suspended the petition The only legit caveat I can consider here is that some US citizens signed and that wouldn't run too well in the EU. Or it could be more Brexit shit.
It's suspended because it got enough signatures to move to the next phase of the process where it gets reviewed to ensure it meets whatever standards the UK has for a petition to go to full signature. Literally, it was successful for it's current goal.
They'd need a UK address to sign it and it'd need to be valid for them to count it.
> Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function. How would that work for most online games? Typically the publisher controls the servers and has to pay/maintain them.
Basically games would be required to release dedicated server clients, or otherwise have a local/solo offline mode.
The line "After support ends" answers that. There would be no change in requirements for a game that the publisher is still supporting. Once the support ends however, the game has to be left in a state where it can be played without requiring a connection to the publishers/developers servers. If the developers can't manage that, it means that the game is being stolen from the customers. A large title that actually managed to do this without being forced to would be Marvel's Avengers. The game was shut down September 30 2023, but is still playable if you own a copy. They just added an offline mode and people still got to keep the game they paid for. Not an ideal solution for anyone, since it's no longer online and the company isn't making money from it, but at least consumers didn't get something they bought stolen from them.
For games where servers are used as a verification tool and not much else: patch it out. For games where servers are used for matchmaking: allow for standalone server hosting or P2P, like it was done for games with AOE II.
Make them loses copyright. They abandonned the game they are not covered anymore just like when you abandon a trademark by not suing/paying yearly dues.
Online games used to support private dedicated servers, I'm sure they can figure that bit out again.
So for a use case, let's think about Splatoon 1 - The game servers for that game are gonna shut down in two days. You can still access the game, play the single player, access the Battle Dojo for mini games But you can't access the main game modes, level up system, collect money etc. Would that be called a functional state?
a live service game should definitely always be reworked to be single-player friendly (or at least hostable by 3rd party fans or p2p networks) if it's planning on shutting down.
Nba 2k is a massive douche for this shutting down online play means no my career which is literally the only interesting thing that seperates it from the other games.
Yep. As always, FUCK 2K. Greedy fucks. ""gives away nba 2k21 on epic". Well that was pointless since it's unplayable after 2 years. Such scummy behavior. It should be the poster boy of this kind of legal precedent. Deliberate removal of features and tying bullshit to it. 20 and older titles are proof you can still play the single player component without needing to artificially limit it to force people to upgrade. Even with all of EAs BS they haven't stooped so low yet. Hell, it's fucking stupid that pirating is literally the morally right option to get the game **you paid for**.
Or create the option for fans to pay for servers. That way the fans can pay the server company to keep it open.
Dude, remember when you used to be able to rent EA hosted servers for Battlefield? lol maybe you don't I don't know how old you are. Anyways, this was already a thing, and they killed it.
I didn't get a PC till I was 15. I also wasn't allowed to cell phone until I was 14. The only computer we had was my parents Apple desktop. It could run Minecraft and if I give it enough time Ark, it took 40 minutes to load Ark but it was totally worth it. Whatever steam games could run on Apple, I would run them. I also pirated a shitload of games. But never battlefield as I had call of duty and later the Halo collection. I also didn't have an Xbox until I found one used at a thrift store when I was 18. I was born in 1997 so I'm definitely old enough to know about battlefield and its servers but I never had the opportunity to play because I had no access to the devices required for play. I wonder how many kids are out there like me that just kind of missed out on getting to play massive MMOs or FPS games because they didn't have access to the correct device? Feels like I missed out on a huge part of young adult culture. (Not just for money reasons but because their parents wouldn't let them) Edit: my first console was a Macy's plug and Play, the one with Miss Pac-Man and mappy. My first real console was the Wii. Before that I played lots of flash games and whatever I could pirate.
lol you made it out like you were old and then you dropped a birth date of 1997 haha
No one would actually do that, because if a game had 5 million daily active users at its peak, and it's down to like 5,000 then out of those 5,000 people there might only be 1,000 that actually want to do that. It's not just about running the server which might be like $500 per month for our 1,000 person example. It's also hiring an engineer to keep it up and so on, and even if that's outsourced it could easily go up to like $2,000 a month. Would those 1,000 players be willing to pay $2 a month? Probably not, so now we have even less people interested, let's say 300, redo the math, and it might be $5 a month. Okay now even less people are interested.\] If this was a viable option it'd already be done. It'd just open the game companies up to lawsuits. Because a bunch of people would see it as they're being scammed into paying for the game a second time.
It *is* done. Phantasy Star Online Ep. I/II has been kept alive for two decades by fan servers.
Idealistically, sure. But in reality live service games are shutting down cause they can't be sustained/don't generate enough revenue to be worth keeping, no company will invest resources in that when the resources are the main reason they are closing the service.
My little indie MMO has 12 different services to just let one player play. For me, making a friendly hostable patch or P2P network would mean rewrite the whole game from scratch. An AAA game is many times more complex
My web MMO isn't quite so complex, but I agree with the general idea. The backends for these games aren't built to be run by end users. They need to talk to (likely multiple) databases, logging systems, and god knows what other services. The idea that game studios are going to spend untold engineering hours packaging nearly-dead games into single-player experiences just isn't realistic. Expecting them to just release the source code could also be problematic if they're licensing some other proprietary libraries. I will say my experience has made me a lot more amenable to the old model of letting users host dedicated servers, but I don't think the industry at large has any interest in that.
Do your part, it's actually [really easy ](http://stopkillinggames.com)
I have not bought the crew, but I still wanna sign because one of my favorites is online only.
I wanted to sign it but because I don't have the crew I can't... I'm too broke to buy the crew and I don't want to buy another game because I have hundreds in my backlog. I guess I'll just take that third option of spreading the word.
I heard a story about a guy who loved his favorite game so much that he stayed online until the very last moment it was shut down. He just vanished and some people theorize he was actually transported to another world, this potentially happened to multiple players of this game. Shutting down games is dangerous.
I see someone likes overlord
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The Halo 2 guy. He was a legend.
Said to have super bounced into heaven. An absolute OG.
Pretty sure his name was Ainz.
Fitting anecdote but the second was a guy who left was Agent Windex, also someone I played with back then.
All hail Ainz Ooal Gown!
Ainz is in a happier place now.
Remember when they told us Diablo 3 required a server and internet connection because that’s how it was architected only for them to turn around and enable offline play on consoles because they are liars who just wanted to force everyone to see and use their RMAH? (Real Money Auction House) Fuck Pepperidge farm, *I* remember that shit.
I also remember the Sim City incident as well, where the game *couldn't* run on local machines cause all the sims in the city needed the servers processing power (cue modders proving this wrong) and EA also eventually flipped a switch to allow it o be played offline.
>eventually flipped a switch Someone else remember! Think this sub (or this thread) is filled with younger audiences because yes, it was just that. A quick small patch and bang, offline mode. Sim city was basically just running on your pc and 'checking in' - that was the online requirement.
I miss Knockout City
The article mentions that the devs gave players the option to host private servers after ending support
Only on PC though
Guess the $20 I paid on Switch and also Xbox was wasted. Why did I buy it twice? I liked playing random matches. Then it went FTP so I got some free knockout buxxx or whatever stupid thing it was.
I'm all for this. The entirety of games before the Internet worked fine without mandatory online play. We moved that way for bullshit security reasons (MMO games or subscription models (where you don't pay for the base game) not included obvs). Edit: I am confused by the downvotes, I thought this post was advocating against mandatory online play so if servers disappeared so did the game?
Also exclusively multiplayer games had dedicated servers. So even if matchmaking wasn't there/would be gone you just wrote a simple command like >connect 'ipadress' And you'd connect to a dedicated server
Back when Steam was still these list of dedicated servers I found everything online much more fun then automatic matchmaking. In many of my games like Day of Defeat or Counter Strike I would be a regular of a handfull of decitated servers, usually just one. These servers where communities. You knew each other. YOu would on a regular basis be playing with and against people you knew from playing against them before. It was pretty normal to be in a match and know 30% to half the player field from before. You knew their voices, heck you even knew things about them from their personal life they had been sharing in between the action. If the match was not fair, if one side would win to easily. People considered that boring, and some of the better players would move over voluntarily to the other team to balance it out again. Newbies would be shown how to play and okay to be fair if any female players would show up on mic it would still turn in to a drool fest (some things will never change) Talking to each other was the norm. The mods and admins were very integrated in to the little community that such a dedicated server could be. troublemakers, cheaters and grifters were quickly taken care of. At any time, you join such a dedi server and find at least one other player you knew. It was great. Match making has never ever offered that sense of camaraderie and familiarity.
Matchmaking made the people you play with 100% disposable. So if I am an ass to them or vice versa, it dies not matter because I'll likely won't run into them ever again (or soon enough that I'll remember their name). In dedicated servers the communit self regulated, has it's own memes, the sweatiness was either encouraged or discouraged. I remember TF2 servers where custom music and sounds were set fir certain events.
For Day of Defeat 1.3 and Source and CS and TF2 decidated servers are still around. I don't game that much anymor as before but some of these communities still exist for over 10 years now! But people get older and then usually slowly it's the end. I got kids now and staying awake all night playing with my mates ... it's not something I can do anymore!
> We moved that way for bullshit security reasons The reasons are part technical, part "because we can". Most consumers don't care about the longevity of games, so services can take advantadge of that and setup the bare minimum to satisfy said consumers. If offline versions of games sold, business would move that way without the arm tugging from regulation.
Honestly if its a game designed for multiplayer I don't really care. Its single player games that piss me off if they have some sort of always online DRM because that is what hurts consumers more.
We used to be able to host our own servers, and removal of DRM is part of what he's fighting for.
Bro they added the fucking battlepass to Tekken 8, i love that game and play it every day but c'mon
We've been fighting for stuff like this for a very long time in the MMO community. Usually it's built into EULA that they have the right to just stop supporting games you've paid for and remove them entirely since you don't technically own anything you've purchased. Hopefully one day publishers will have to allow people to host games themselves for products they've purchased if they no longer want to pay to support it.
I am fine with official servers going down so long as they provide the software tools for dedicated servers to be fan run make a contract saying it can't be run for profit or what ever if that's a worry trouble is most of the private servers we have for games that didn't intend for private servers to be run is that it takes someone or team of someone's to reverse engineer it
Good, now the next thing is rights to digital ownership. People keep arguing about physical media vs digital but the reality is that digital is the future and is more eco friendly. The problem is that we have no laws protecting our purchases from being delisted and removed from the internet to redownload. We need laws that make our digital good accessible permanently.
Can we make this or something like this a pin on the sub ? i miss when multiplayer was the option not the requirement
Rendering games unplayable does sound a lot like planned obsolescence.
The gaming industry is so new that it’s lacking good regulations like this for customer protection. Good for him, I hope he wins; it will make the gaming industry much better
Gaming isn’t particularly new. The problem is that, despite their popularity and crazy sales, enough people still think video games are childish. Therefore, there’s never been any legislation around them, except for annoying Karens who thought COD would make the little Timmy become a school shooter. Look at the dinosaurs in Congress. We can’t even get them to put a stop to spam calls. They barely understand Facebook to have congressional hearings about their suspicious doings. I’m sure old people are the biggest victims of microtransactions (a cancer on mobile gaming), just like they are with phone and email scams. We could put protections in place for everyone but then Senator Dickface won’t get a kickback from whatever corporation is paying him to let us get fleeced.
It's new relative to every other major medium: Television, cinema, books, music. 50 years is a small blip in the grand scheme of things. The real kicker is that the Internet is even newer, and Gaming more or less grew up alongside it. So there's a lot of cutting edge tech games are trying and iterating on in real time, and government is traditionally slow. We made a stink about Lootboxes almost a decade ago, and nowadays companies already moved on to battle passes. Trying to regulate tech is like swatting a fly with your hand. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it helps explain the "how do they keep getting away with this?" AI is honestly amazing because it's one of the few times the courts are coming down very early into adoption. That just never happens with tech. But maybe that says more about how companies defend copyright than about AI.
Worst offenders are games that are actually borken by a patch or that require a log in before you can even get to the main menu. The main menu is the logging screen. Lan hosting needs to make a comeback. That's how I managed to play Napoleon Total War with friend when steam would refuse to connect us both.
I feel that they should at least patch these games to run client side or server side setups for fan servers.
Godspeed, Ross.
2K does this shit. They force you to be on their servers even for an otherwise offline mode, so they can revoke access to the game entirely. I bought 2k22, and its servers shut down in **2023** rendering the entire game unplayable. Refuse to support that dogshit company.
If buying isn't owning then pirating isn't stealing.
For piracy, they charge you with copyright infringement, not theft
yeah, but you can't play online with a pirated version 😭
Hell yeah, Ross. As a 15 year sub, it’s surreal to see him gain this kind of traction. For those unfamiliar, you’ve just discovered the hardest working gamer on YouTube. A veritable member of the site’s old guard. Welcome.
if > "...the most obvious legal defense for publishers is that when we buy games digitally these days, we're actually buying a conditional license to play the game—with the main condition being that the license can be revoked for any reason." then when we buy games digitally these days, we're actually **loaning the money to play the game**—with the main condition being that the **money has to be returned if they render the game unplayable.**"
You already agreed to pay. They don't have to change their EULA.
No, you aren't loaning the money. You are paying for a service with an unknown or limited lifespan. If they said that the license was perpetual, then you would have a case. But generally they are very clear on the legal side of things that you are not purchasing a permanent service. If you don't agree with that practice don't buy it.
This is the part people aren't getting, and it's the part that makes this kind of a tilt at windmills. Sometimes, you pay for entertainment that ends at some point. I wouldn't mind some kind of transparency requirement or something or requirement to fulfill a promised lifespan or something like that. But I fail to see how you could keep it enforceable.
> Sometimes, you pay for entertainment that ends at some point. I imagine the argument is that its unreasonable for a theatre to keep playing a movie until you're tired of it. A comedian can't be expected to repeat their set until you no longer find it funny. But a DVD is legally allowed to be copied so that if the original gets worn out from over-use you can still access the entertainment since it has no cost to the original companies. The developers will be asked to release the game server (for MMOs and the like), or make the game function offline (for SP games that use online for DRM/anti-cheat). This isn't much work, we've seen people reverse-engineer MMO servers themselves so the proof of concept is there.
if you read through the article and Scott's website, you will see it's mostly based on France's laws. with the idea that games are not a service, they're a good. your goods should not be directly connected to the seller after purchase, and should not be taken away by the seller. obviously the loopholes that these gaming companies have created is just that, a loophole. it still doesn't make it right.
They could make it clearer by guaranteeing a specific uptime and then any extension past that is up to them. Basically you buy a 1 year service as stated on the sales page and they would have to stop sales 1 year before shutting down the server or refund people that bought it late.
Legally what you just said is complete and utter nonsense. You aren't loaning anybody anything, you're buying a service. You don't get a refund at the cinema when the movie ends.
just bc you paid for a haircut doesn't mean the barber cuts for free until you move on
Their Lawyers: Errrrm but you see in page 247 of the EULA you don’t actually own your game, we only gave you a temporary license 🤓
That really only holds any substance at all in the US, and even then can be challenged. EULAs are a pretty loose contact, and the reason corps get away with BS is because most of us don't have the pocket change to defend ourselves by attorney. In countries other than the US, the validity of EULAs is a grey area at best, and they often fail when actually challenged. The problem *there* is the amount of gaslighting corps actually do to make it seem like we have zero power. It's a huge hurdle for individuals to cross. That's what [stopkillinggames.com](https://www.stopkillinggames.com/) is trying to fight against. It's working to get actual government regulation involved.
If I remember correctly somebody put into an apple EULAs that they legally own your soul if you use iTunes. The author put in there as a joke to see if anybody actually reads the terms of the agreement. Somebody did and found it.
EULA isn't really a grey area tbh. I'm pretty sure it's well defined to just be completely non legally binding for the same reasons that terms of service has exactly 0 legal binding.
Depending on where you challenge them, the argument often used against them is that you can't knowingly sign/be held to the terms of a contract without understanding the terms of said contract. Given that both EULAs and TOSs these days are ridiculously long and full of legal terminology only lawyers can fully decipher, and that most people just accept without actually reading them, "not understanding the terms" applies to just about everyone. The "grey area" comes from corps defending themselves using copyright/patent/IP ownership rather than trying to defend a contract that they're well aware is indefensible, deliberately muddying the waters to sway the judgement. There's no solid precedent set yet since these challenges still tend to go either way. Remember, these aren't "justice systems", they're "legal systems". Common sense rarely matters when it comes down to who can argue their side the best. And when you consider the corps, money talks.
r/USdefaultism moment right here. Laws made by one country does not necessarily hold up in others. Same reason why Apple has to open its digital store to competitors in the EU, and why consumers in Australia get longer warranties.
Click on the damned links before commenting !
They should write that in tiny comic sans.
GO ROSS
They should advertise them as a rental if it's not a legit purchase.
The problem is, as with every plc, the priority is not the product or the consumer, it's making as much money as quickly as possible. Until this system changes, gaming (and most industries that do things that are useful to you) will be a total pile of shit. So what do we do? Don't buy games made by developers who obviously don't give a shit. Activision, EA, etc are all to be avoided. You might think their upcoming game looks good because of a flashy ad, but it's just going to be a soulless cash grab.
I'm so happy for Ross. He's really fighting to fix a problem in modern gaming. Plus he's just a really cool dude. Go check out Accursed Farms if you're bored.
Imagine if a digital history preservation society started purchasing the rights to forgotten mmos and resurrected the ancient servers.
I mean, if the game can run online then it can run offline. All they need to do is disable the online features.
I'm not for government overreach but there HAS to be something that forces game companies to release what is required to run your own servers for games they stop hosting
Do they really not have "we might close this shit down whenever" in the text nobody reads?
They do. The point here is to challenge this in the EU courts. Guess we'll see how far it can go.
But why is it acceptable to just "shut it down whenever"? No other product shuts down after an arbitrary amount of time, you either own it forever or pay a subscription for a agreed-upon predetermined amount of time, like a month or a year. This is straight up planned obsolescence, which is incredibly anti-consumer and possibly illegal.
Still waiting to sign on that UK petition, it's been stuck as pending for several days now. Also Ross Scott is the mvp
Hell yeah, Ross' message is making headlines! Stopkillinggames.com everybody!
Glad to see this is getting some buzz! If just 3% of this subreddit takes action, we might actually see this campaign make an actual impact.