Sooooo…. There's been a bit of drama²⁾ but Stop Killing Games successfully issued a petition to the European Parliament. This means parliament will have to have a serious discussion of this issue and may or may not think about doing something about it with laws. Once the petition reached the signature threshold, we got word from our local lobbying corruption group “VideoGamesEurope”, stating what they think about the issue. It's a joint, open letter from a multitude of corporations that say they'd rather not. Let's dive into it!

So, let's just ignore that it boldly claims “must be a matter of choice” (according to whom?), this introductory paragraph already misses the point. First of all, in a lot of cases this is not about online services. As discussed in the case of The Crew, we are talking about removing the online part of a game that is already 90% offline. This paragraph talks about online services, ie. servers, and not only did we never want them in the first place, you are perfectly free to discontinue them whenever. This is not about taking away a corporation's choice whether or not to discontinue online services for a game. You can stop them whenever. This is about what to do after you discontinue them. Discontinuing online services is, and forever will be, your choice. What we want is at least a shippable offline product and/or a mechanic that lets communities run their own online services.

What you mean to say here is that video game companies can highly value the player's wallets, which does indeed take a bit of up-front investment. Players overwhelmingly disagree with your regular new content, experiences (???), patches and updates (difference?³⁾), hence why you typically have to resort to the shadiest business and marketing/player psychology tacticts to extract their hard-earned money. Keyword gambling, FOMO and so many more. Yes, video games companies definitely put significant investment into even more engaging and manipulative monetization methods.

Ultimately though, what are you even trying to say? That games are a risky endeavor? Yeah! They always have been, we have decades of precedent, and yet there's thousands of games out there that were perfectly successful but are still playable, even after the developers shifted to different projects.

The mere inclusion of the suggestion to make companies obligated to maintain games servers indefinitely speaks to the absolute cluelessness of the writer. Mario Kart servers have typically been shut down quite a while after their release and that has never been a drama. We aren't stupid, we understand that we cannot expect a games company to keep their games servers turned on forever. However, there is a difference between what Nintendo did with Mario Kart Wii and what Ubisoft did with The Crew, and this is the problem we want to see addressed. Yes, that will raise the cost of making games, but to just throw out “this will have a chilling effect on game design in Europe” is ridiculous. What they are saying here is that they want to claim for themselves the right to be able to go out of their way to make games that will break once they abandon them. Y'know, making a functional product should have been the accepted standards, yet here are these people telling us that they want the express right to go out of their way to design their product in such a way as to make it unusable once discontinued by the developer.

The only thing that Stop Killing Games wants to achieve is to make it illegal for corporations to force their games to be walled gardens. For developers programming a new game, they will already be dealing with all the interfaces that connect a game client with a server, and they can choose to either hard-code them or, if instructed otherwise, expose them to the players. Both takes about as much work, this is just a matter of whether a games company wants it or not. Programmers aren't stupid, especially not the ones working at your own company, they already are looking at all the tools that would be necessary to do what Stop Killing Games wants, it's only about how these tools are used. Companies want them to be used in a way that turns their game into a walled garden, but it would only take telling them not to do so to comply with the stated goals of Stop Killing Games.

Example: Expose a host URL for players to connect to their own game servers. For walled gardens this means that the programmer will be adding a predefined URL that cannot be changed by the user. Fortnite will only ever connect to Fortnite servers. To comply with Stop Killing Games, all it would take is to make this URL a user-declared variable. Whether to write out an URL yourself or to let the user write one in REALLY isn't that much difference in work. It will NOT have a “chilling effect” on the games industry in Europe. If you program your game to be open like this at every step of the way - in the same way that currently a lot of games are programmed at every step of the way to be closed - then this will make no difference under the bottom line. Even server browsers have been a thing since before the 2000s. Every single game with a server browser proves that you're full of shit.

Addendum: Turns out that games aren't just a thing in Europe. These people speak like only Europeans buy their games, even though they absolutely will continue to make games and ship them to the rest of the world. US, Japan, China, we have a lot of strong video game markets in the world, and changing your product to adhere to EU customer protection law will almost always be worth it for the additional, massive games market we have over here. Changing products regionally to adhere to a specific country's law has been a thing since forever and it is almost always worth it for companies.

The appropriate and reasonable thing to do is to not create walled gardens in the first place. But even then, what does this statement even mean? It's not “appropriate” for some games to be made playable after the end of developer support? For some audiences it's not “reasonable” to let them experience your game after a certain amount of time?? The only useful thing you're saying here is that for some games this might be a financial burden they cannot bear. And, you know what, at that point I don't even care. If your company is going bankrupt after trying out some kind of game, it turns out to not work and then that's the end of the company? Sure, whatever. No burden on you to still do stuff with your game.

But these are not the kinds of games we are talking about. The Crew was backed by Ubisoft, the reason their ship is sinking right now is because they refused to make their game The Crew playable after its end of life. They're a multimillion dollar company, it is absolutely and perfectly reasonable and appropriate to either 1) not create a walled garden in the first place or 2) rip out the online check that is the only thing between you and an excellent, purely offline (90%), gaming experience.

Stop Killing Games is about assholes, not the small company that dared an endeavor into video games and died. But the response we get is from aforementioned assholes pretending to be a small company that died. Which is ironic because the actual, small companies that actually die also happen to be the ones most likely to have genuine passion for their games and who will not just let their games die.

Sadly, this is largely true. Legally speaking, games companies can do whatever with their games. They can put them up, change them, pull them down, wreck it or take a massive dump on it and all we do is paying licenses to get to watch them do it. This is also conceptually how they could loophole their way out of it, they could turn their game into a black screen and call it the finished product, which then wouldn't even need any changes to function as intended. Whether this should be legal is a different question, but as it stands this is the EULA and TOS we agree to when buying games licenses to games.

Yes, national or international law supersedes contents of a TOS or EULA, as long as such law exists in the first place. At this point in time, a law prohibiting games publishers from doing shit with their games does not exist, so they conceivably can just do fuck all with them. This is why platforms like Steam are ticking time bombs, as they can just shut down at any moment and send you a big “fuck you” with a picture of a middle finger. The only reason they don't is because - at this moment - it's more profitable to continue doing what they're doing. Once it's not, they can shut down and the thousands you or someone you know invested into video games could be gone forever.

However, the statement claims that “these IP rights enable investment”. Enable investment. This is not correct. Even if games are mandatory to be left in a playable state, there is nothing preventing anyone from making investment into new games. Yes, just a tad of extra foresight would be required, because publishers and programmers now have to structure their game in a way that allows home users and communities to self-host once official support ceases.

Requiring forethought in the design process of a product is not new. There are a myriad of legal considerations for all kinds of programs, think of all the rules and regulations for road cars, especially internationally: Designing a car means collecting a list of all the applicable expectations a car needs to fulfill - what kinds of lights, emissions, vehicle dimensions, parts dimensions, weight, the list of limitations will not end⁴⁾ and frankly it must be a miracle to Video Games Europe to think that with so many rules anyone can still invest into auto-making. Or rather video games publishers have been enjoying what us Germans call “Narrenfreiheit” - a position of being special, in that one is allowed to do things that would be considered unacceptable for anyone else. They love their special treatment and they would like to keep it.

Well, it is, in fact, very clear what the initiators of the Stop Killing Games petition seek to achieve as a legal change. It appears IS a requirement to provide a very specific form of end-of-life plan where the game is altered to enable private servers to operate. The industry then goes on to list reasons for why this isn't possible.

This is the most corpo-bullshit you will ever hear in the gaming sphere. The only time a company will do something about player safety and harmful or illegal content/conduct is when it gets so bad it begins to hurt the game's reputation or if they are forced to do so by law, and even then they dedicate the least possible amount of reasources you can possibly get away with. If anyone has ever played any major online video game, you know how terribly ineffective their player moderation tools are, especially against cheating. As far as I see it, Video Games Europe will tell you about “player safety” and “ooh if we can't moderate these spaces, people will be exposed to harmful content” while at the same time campaign against legislation that would force publishers to properly monitor and take moderation action against users on their platform (game) - something that Facebook would do, for example. These companies do NOT want or care about moderating their platforms, and it being levied here as an argument is purely political pawn-pushing.⁵⁾

OK so first of all: If your game is programmed from the ground up to be ultimately opened up to the public, most of this isn't an issue. Games that let you self-host have been around for decades and is about as risky for publishers as games that do not let you self-host. All kinds of games come with a small applet that let you turn the current machine into a server for a game, and that really isn't so hard. You don't even have to release any code whatsoever, as the applet can come pre-compiled. There is decades of precedent for this and has worked perfectly fine for all that time and, no, your game isn't “too complex” for this kind of stuff. And, again, for most of the games we are talking about here we don't even want server software, we just want publishers to remove the always-online requirement of their games, as 95% of their content is already fully offline.

Besides that - yes, games vulnerabilities are a thing. Not so much for the publisher - once they made the game playable they are out of the question - but if a vulnerability is found, it might affect users. This is not a reason to fully shut down a game, though.

Again, most games are offline anyway, and the ones that are not are played by people who play at their own risk. Even when Nintendo themselves ran the servers for older Mario Kart games, there were always exploits that could genuinely brick other player's devices. This is the kind of stuff Video Games Europe is talking about here. However, that kinda shit never proliferated, and the community is well equipped to create custom patches for those kinds of things. Yes, we play at our own risks, this is just a minor exit clause “we don't accept any liability for damages to your system”. And lastly, let's not talk about kernel-level anticheat and the security risks coming with that.

Mates, you are investors, don't talk shit to engineers. There are engineers in your own programming department and there are engineers in the games communities. It will be fine, alright? Let this be our problem, as long as you just let us have any of these problems to begin with. If your server architecture is so hideously and prohibitively complicated then that is kinda its own problem, but even that isn't that much of a problem. Identify interfaces and expose them to users, some basic server packages and that is it. Again, ideally your game is designed to be open this way from the beginning so that such “prohibitive costs” would never even come up years or decades after the initial release when only a small audience remains.

Stop Killing Games isn't retroactive, it does not target existing games. Therefore, only future games will be affected. And to those: Design your shit properly. Your engineers and architects aren't stupid, tell them that you want your games designed in such a way that it can properly transition into an open product later in time. If you don't, that's on you - and even then it's not that hard to make the necessary changes.

What, y'all think I have more choice now? Now, that The Crew is shut down? Now that games like F1 2020 and such are pulled from the store specifically so that I can only buy the newest version of the game? My choice was to play The Crew 1 and get a friend of mine a copy of F1 2020, but companies are using what they have to strip me of choice, while telling me that it would be bad for me if it was any other way. To talk like streaming and licensing gives you any sort of control is ridiculous, whether it's for movies, shows, books or video games.

Anyway. Disregarding the fact that it's already questionable to choose to invest into a game you know you will not be able to properly support or to provide proper end-of-life service for… what proportions are we talking about here? They make it out like opening up their product is a major investment that will seriously threaten the financial security of the company. Yes, such a requirement will minimally increase production cost, but to act as if those are serious, substantial costs that would actually influence an investor enough to make a difference is just plain laughable. What I would like to see here is the full list of changes to game code that would have been necessary to make a game like The Crew run offline, and how many man-hours that would have taken. Those costs will be minimal, investors will not be scared away and the jobs will continue to exist. It's actually kinda hard to come up with a statement that couldn't at least fool someone, yet somehow they have found one that literally nobody on this whole world would be stupid enough to fall for.

Also, why do they keep talking about end-of-life plans as something they seemingly can only think about once they are not making money anymore? Like, you realize you can properly plan for this during the initial investment AND during the time the game is released, yes? You don't have to wait with this until nobody is playing the game anymore and revenue is limited. The necessary interfaces can be prepared and readied long before the game is even released, and when support for the game ends you'd literally just need to flip a switch to let users access them.

Ahhh I hate brand law. This is actually correct to a degree. Some brands seem to be extremely protective of their reputation and will force products to be altered significantly to be acceptable for them. Car brands for example don't like video games with modding support, or they have limitations for what they want the car to be allowed to do or not in the game⁶⁾. Nintendo is very strict with what content it puts into their games or their console at large, Disney is similar and therefore Formula 1 has banned swearing in their programming (especially drivers, who are now facing fees and penalties if they swear on the broadcast⁷⁾) to align with Disney's values.

Is this good and appropriate? No. I think brands are being a bit bonkers and overreach into things they really shouldn't have an influence in but, unfortunately, this is the capitalistic reality of our times. Money speaks, and if that means cutting away from the experience just to get a sponsor or brand on board, it's worth it. If these sponsors or brands now have to accept that their appearance in games will not be as tightly controllable as it used to, that might genuinely have an influence on their decision-making.

On the other hand, this is the market. Brands can choose or choose not to be on board with things. Merely allowing the game to be run in the way it used to changes nothing tangibly about how a brand is perceived, unless proper modding does come. Modding can be made very difficult if a publisher really wants to, and they often do want to and often do make it very difficult. However, you can make modding very hard while still allowing private, self-hosted servers. In this case, pretty much nothing would change about the game and it's only a matter of brands realizing that nothing would really change (which they would absolutely have to since with such a law in place they would not be able to get their brands into games at all without allowing games to be opened up).

This applies for both sponsors and your own brand. If you are the publisher of a game, your own brand in here is affected in the same way that external brands would be affected (ie. no brand is really affected in the first place).

It is kind of funny to think about reputational damage: When The Crew was shut down by Ubisoft, that WAS the ultimate reputation damage. In fact, it was so damaging that they realized putting end-of-life plans into their games actually WAS possible and financially viable, so The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest have now been promised to get proper offline modes once they stop being supported. Turns out, they, just like hundreds of publishers in the decades before them, actually are capable of such a feat. All the engineering constraints, all the branding constraints, all the player safety and all the cybersecurity constraints suddenly weren't a problem anymore at all. All it took was a threat to Ubisoft's revenue.

And remember, many of these problems wouldn't go away even with a large enough budget. The player safety and cybersecurity aspect in particular just cannot be lastingly fixed. Yet, we still have promises for offline modes. Seems like those aren't as prohibitive as they are made out to be, huh? Assuming they actually do an offline mode, they even got the investors on board! What a crazy world we live in.

Yeah, so there used to be a time in which we actually owned the games we bought. This was never a problem. It's only now that we don't own games and instead just license them, that this is even something to talk about. Effective copyright protection to them seems to mean that they can only protect their IPs by reserving to themselves the right to take away your game from you at any moment for any reason. Again, these people have absolute Narrenfreiheit and they got a bit too used to it. The problem here is game licensing as a business model, which they would really like to maintain because it gives them absolute freedom and control over their product. And honestly, that's okay! Whatever, Stop Killing Games isn't about ending games licensing (although I would agree with that, too). If publishers want to pull their games from stores then that is not the business of the Stop Killing Games campaign, we just want the games to be playable indefinitely for those who do buy a license.

Eyyy, now we're actually getting somewhere. I think this is principally the core of why the industry does not want the proposed changes to happen. Older games can compete with the newer ones. Why buy Fifa 25 when you can still play the game you bought in 2020. This is why more and more companies are pulling older games off the store shelves. This is particularly problematic for companies who publish yearly rehashes - NBA, FIFA, F1, if it's got a year number or a 3 and upwards at the end of the title, it's probably⁸⁾ a repetition of a product that already existed and would genuinely take away from newer titles, as players from the old game have little to no reason to pay full price again. Killing games is the point, so fuck you, Forza Horizon 4. Fuck you, Hitman. Fuck you, The Crew.

The other thing, trademark holders being held responsible for actions undertaken by a third party? Are you insane? Apart from the fact that this happens virtually never, those would be smashed for being frivolous and, oh my god, let's not think about publisher legal departments and the things they spend most of their work day on. Their lawyers are eating well, I'll say that much.

There is no risk of getting sued. Lawsuits are prohibitively expensive to the point that drama in small games communities pretty much never escalates into legal action. And why against a trademark holder, anyway? The risk of lawsuits exists only for someone who is paranoid (and probably paralegal, if we're being honest). Again, lawsuits happen, but there is only a minimal increase in that risk.

Even today I can still buy DVDs with movies on them. This works perfectly fine. They have copy protection, sure, but no “additional rights” are being forfeited to me. I am granted the right to keep watching the movie forever, that's the only right I get in addition to what I would get from a one-time license. All they are saying here is that they oppose the concept of ownership in general. No DVDs, not CDs, no printers without weird subscriptions, no anything that you actually, genuinely just have.

The fact that they mention “reproduction rights” in particular is funny. It's not like we have mechanisms for that since decades (copying protection), and that every game, movie show etc already have a splash screen telling you “unauthorized copying or distribution is illegal”. You are not giving any reproduction rights away by allowing games to be ran offline. If anything, you just make the game easier to be copied, which is paranoid in its own right, but that doesn't forfeit any legal rights or control. It's just nonsense.⁹⁾

The Stop Killing Games initiative is not retroactive. Any licensing issues that may arise are not a genuine problem if it becomes standard for contracts to include an end-of-life clause. Either way, it is hard to imagine that such licensing issues are really as problematic as they are made out to be, as games with licensed works in them (Need for Speed is particularly famous for using licensed music) or licensed middleware have been produced and sold (and continue to get sold today) for decades. Games living indefinitely used to be the standard, yet here its claimed that this is nearly impossible for reasonably sized games. It just is not a “copyright infringement” to build your game in a way that lets players continue to enjoy a game even after you stop actively supporting it. Once you changed your game, your company is out of the equation anyway.

This industry response is wrong on every level. The Crew Unlimited shows us that making what SKG wants is absolutely possible. It can be done with foresight, it can be done retroactively, it can even be done retroactively as a community which does not have a single bit of source code and works against game encryption. And for all this talk about making things happening, it seems the easiest answer, one we haven't even talked about yet, is to just literally release the server binaries. That is your own code, the code that your own programmers wrote, there is absolutely no problem in just handing that out to the public, you are the holder of the copyright to that code. You have literally every single option at your disposal. Do it the long way, or do it the easy way, we just want it to happen at all.