this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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Stop Killing Games
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[EU] Stop Killing Games:
The grassroots movement to legislate that games be left in a playable state after they're no longer supported by the developer.
Milestones:
(40.17%) Petition
7/7 Countries reached.
Goals:
(44.40%) of the signatures will be reached at this rate.
217 days / 31 weeks / 7 months left.
Final Day: 31/7/2025.
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Are people actually advocating for game publishers to have to keep the servers running forever? That would seem a bit of an unreasonable ask. I think a reasonable compromise would be that if they plan to shut down the servers, the publisher should have to release the server side software.
No, that’s not what stop killing games is about. What’s demanded is that the games remains in a playable state even if servers are shut down.
What about multiplayer games? The server side is always going to be a necessity for those games.
So then release the server side data. Or unlock the game from the need of a server, or allow users to create their own servers.
My guess they won’t coz server code recycled for future games. Nobody will play for CoD MWBOCW187 coz with server code published you can just mod older server and pay the only fair price of new game which is 0.00 €$
Who's talking server side code? just releasing the compiled server binary should be enough. Just like games typically are released as binaries and assets, and not as source code.
Can you decompile the server binary? Yes you can! But you can also decompile the game to work without the server or with a makeshift server. Either is just a lot of work that few people are willing to do.
Protecting the server code is rather useless if the game can be cracked, since then you can also play the game for '0.00 €$'.
I mean this isn’t about asking the companies nicely to do this. We are asking law makers to enforce this by law. We are past asking corporations to not be crap.