A screenshot of a tweet stolen from reddit, as is lemmy tradition.

You can’t compel companies to keep a server up. It’s a silly request that was doomed from the start.

But you can make it legal for fans to host their own servers, regardless of the financial success of the game. If “Stop Killing Games” wants to actually achieve something, they should fight for legal protections for fan servers.

Publishers shouldn’t be able to issue Cease & Disists for fan self-hosted communities around games who’s dev’s they’ve shuttered. Hell, push it one step further, fans should be allowed to host their own servers even when the publisher is still maintaining their own.

TF2 is kinda the gold standard here. Why the hell can’t we have community servers for Elden Ring, or League of Legends?

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
    53·
    1 day ago

    Keeping a server up in perpetuity has never, ever, not once, been an official demand by the Stop Killing Games movement. I’ve seen it from French consumer advocate orgs, but please cite who from SKG other than Twitter or Reddit randos have said companies should be obligated to keep their servers up or support the game forever.

    Yes, the industry lobby has intentionally kept misrepresenting SKG’s argument as that.

    What SKG has advocated for according to the movement’s documents, presentations and Ross’s original ideas, is for a company to provide an end-of-life plan, to ensure that purchasers of a game, still have a game to play that does not require any involvement, support or expense from the provider when they wish to stop supporting the game. This can be achieved in a multitude of ways:

    • work in-house or with a contractor to create an offline or LAN mode with some functionality disabled like matchmaking and leaderboards.
    • release the server code, even if it requires several enterprise servers to host.
    • work with modders to patch the game to not require the provider.
    • Sufficiently de-obfuscate the code/remove DRM in a way that it would be trivial for the community to produce a working version.

    As for LoL, these are still “actively supported” so is not the target of SKG except for proactive preparation for when Riot doesn’t want to continue development and hosting access.