Ramblings

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~~Title:Stop Killing Games~~

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<WRAP centeralign>[[Law]]/[[Consumer Protection]]/[[Video Games]]/\\
<fs xx-large>Stop Killing Games</fs></WRAP>\\
Stop Killing Games is a consumer rights protection advocacy movement. It aims to effect a change in law to force game development studios to leave games in a playable state after their discontinuation. It supports a petition called "Stop Destroying Video Games".\\
<wrap lo>Side note, there is a legal distinction between the movement "Stop Killing Games" and the EU petition "Stop Destroying Video Games". While they cooperate, they are legally distinct. This page and also VideoGameEurope's response to the petition will refer to it/them as "Stop Killing Video Games", even though both the industry and even me are getting it wrong, legally speaking.</wrap>

Games are a piece of interactive media with a profound effect on our lives. At the least they become memorable experiences, at the best they shape us as human beings and our maturity and accompany us for the rest of our lives. Like a good book, song, or like a good movie, games deserve to be preserved such that the generations after us can still experience greatness (or terribleness, for that matter), all pieces of art that influenced humans in one way or another deserve to be re-experienced by yourself or others((Or at least they should be preserved in such a way that people CAN re-experience them if they so choose.)).

Now, with movies and music this used to be a straightforward process: You buy them on CD or DVD and you have a copy that can now be endlessly re-watched and resold by and to whoever wants to experience it, potentially for the rest of time. When the storage mediums break they (the movies and songs) will hopefully be backed up to another. This is getting a lot more difficult these days with streaming and, it turns out, that is actually a problem in and of itself, but usually already existing shows can always be watched at least //somewhere// for a service subscription fee. If you're sneaky, you may even get ahold of the raw audio or video files to make yourself completely independent from any kind of service provider.

For the longest time, this is how it worked with games as well. You would buy a disc of the game, run the installer on your machine and you would be set. You could now play the game until the end of time, rediscover it 20 years from now, or your heir could inherit it and play it as a retro game (provided they have a compatible device). This is how we still play the earliest Super Mario games, or how we play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. These are transgenerational benchmark games, setting the standards to which games are held to this day, to a big part because players actually still **get** to experience these games today.

Unfortunately, over time there has started to set in a trend by which games more and more often have some kind of dependency that breaks them when the development studio ends support for them. When this dependency is pulled, the game becomes unplayable. Typically, this is an "Always Online" requirement, by which the game will boot you back to the main menu the second is loses connection to a home server. To be clear, it's not just that the game wants to be connected to the internet //in general//, it wants to be connected to a specific server operated by the development team. When the game is eventually sunset by the games studio, they will shut down the server and then, any time a player attempts to play the game, they will not be able to do anything in it besides looking at the main menu.

One of the most prominent examples of this is [[The Crew]], an always-online multiplayer racing game that //actually// won't let you play the game at all ever since Ubisoft decided to discontinue support. Some games have better justification than others for being online-only. Point in case, The Crew is one of the weaker examples as it not only already //has// an offline mode buried and locked away in the code, its content is also ~90% offline content that would work perfectly fine if just allowed to do so. It is at the sole discretion of the developer to decide whether to let you actually access that content and, for those 90%, there is absolutely no reason to not let you. The same goes for the reboot [[Hitman: World of Assassination]], which demands you be connected to their servers at all times and will refuse to let you properly access its content without connection or developer support.

There are other games where it makes at least a bit more sense, take [[Fortnite]]. Fortnite is essentially an online only game not just by technicality, but by //nature//. There is no genuine offline aspect to the game, all its content plays out in the 100-player free for all primary game mode. Obviously, if that game is ever phased out and the servers get shut down, there won't be much in it left to do. This isn't arbitrary like in The Crew where it's just developer discretion, in Fortnite the majority of the game's appeal actually //is// streamed live from a server (ie. other players, what they do, events, etc.). Essentially, Fortnite servers //cannot// be shut down without making the game effectively unplayable.

Either way, whether you have somewhat good reasons (like Fortnite), or pretty shitty reasons (The Crew), there is no getting around the fact that none of these reasons are actually //enough// justification. Neither The Crew nor Fortnite are games so aggressively interwoven with remote infrastructure that they couldn't be changed to make them playable without requiring developer resources/oversight. Games like Fortnite, which rely on multiplayer as their primary game mode, will always require some sort of //server//, but that is never expected of the developer to provide indefinitely. The goal of Stop Killing Games is NOT to force developers to commit themselves to maintaining server support for a game indefinitely. If a developer no longer wishes to expend money on server upkeep, what Stop Killing Games //wants// is to make it such that the community around that game is allowed to host their own servers.

Games communities have always been willing to host their own servers. They do that for old games like every Mario Kart that has online play and they even do that for modern games: Wreckfest is a game that is played primarily online and whose entire focus is on community servers. The Wreckfest developers host two or three servers of their own, but there are thousands out there hosted by communities that you could play on right now. So, when a game like Fortnite eventually ends, all Stop Killing Games asks for is to change the game's code as to //allow// users to connect to community-hosted servers.

If you are a game that does NOT rely primarily on online servers, like The Crew, then Stop Killing Games asks to have their online-only requirements stripped altogether. Not during its lifetime, but at least when the game is sunset, so that people can continue to play these games even after the developer ends support. There is no reason to disable the engines of all cars just because the manufacturer stops producing replacement parts for that car. If the engine of your car called home every time you tried to start it, asking if its manufacturer still produces replacement parts for that car and refusing to actually turn on from the day the manufacturer stops producing replacement parts, you'd be rightly pissed. That is a check //they// built into the car just to make it stop turning on, there is absolutely no //need// or even a good reason to have this check in place.

====== State of things & Industry Response ======
Sooooo.... There's been a bit of drama((Keyword PirateGames. If you have no clue what this means: Lucky you! Just a guy on the internet saying nonsense about things he has no clue about. Basically like me!)) 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 <del>lobbying</del> 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!

===== Foreword =====
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The decision to discontinue a video game’s online services is multi-faceted and is never 
taken lightly and must always be a matter of choice. When it does happen, the industry 
ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with 
local consumer protection laws.
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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.

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Online video games evolve over time after their initial release, providing consumers with regular 
new content, experiences, patches, and updates. This is highly valued by players and is required 
to compete in the market. It involves significant, ongoing development expenditure over years, 
sometimes decades. Video games companies put significant investment into creating and developing the best interactive entertainment and experience for their passionate player bases.
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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?((Ohhh, they mean patches as in bug fixes, and updates as in content updates. Gotcha.))), 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.

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The right to decide how, when, and for how long to make an online video game services
available to players is vital in justifying this cost and fostering continued technical 
innovation. As rightsholders and economic entities, video games companies must remain 
free to decide when an online game is no longer commercially viable and to end continued 
server support for that game.

Imposing a legal obligation to continue server support indefinitely,
or to develop online video games in a specific technical manner that will allow permanent use,
will raise the costs and risks of developing such games. It will have a chilling effect on game 
design, and act as a disincentive to making such games available in Europe.
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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.

<wrap lo>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.</wrap>

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While there are video games companies that have elected to enable their online games to live 
beyond that is being proposed their commercial viability, this is and must always be a matter of 
choice as it will depend on what is reasonable and appropriate for the specific game, games 
company, and audience.
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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.

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All video games, whether digital or physical copies, are licensed. As is the case with virtually all digital works when consumers purchase online games, regardless of the country of sale, what 
they acquire is a personal license to access and play the copy of the game they have purchased 
in accordance with the game’s terms of service. The consumer does not acquire ownership of that video game. These clear intellectual property rights underpin the entire market and enable 
the strong investment that the industry has seen for decades. There is no legal uncertainty about 
the status quo of video games.
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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 <del>games</del> 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 end((And this is just for one single country!)) 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.

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It is not clear what the initiators of the stop killing games petition seek to achieve as a legal change. It appears to be a combination of a requirement to provide online services for as long as a consumer wants them, regardless of price paid, and/or a requirement to provide a very specific form of end-of-life plan where the game is altered to enable private servers to operate. We do not believe these are proportionate demands.
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Well, it is, in fact, very clear what the initiators of the Stop Killing Games petition seek to achieve as a legal change. It <del>appears</del> 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.

===== 1. Reduced or No Player Protection =====
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Requiring games to run on private servers would result in the inability for games companies to continue to protect players from illegal or harmful content or conduct, as their moderation and player safety teams would no longer be involved. In particular cheating could become rampant without proper enforcement. Reporting systems designed to allow players to flag problematic content and behaviour to games companies would no longer operate as intended or would have to be disabled entirely. The absence of effective moderation systems would create a less safe environment for consumers and may foster the proliferation of undesirable content while simultaneously frustrating the ability for EU Digital Services Coordinators to act against such content.
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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.((To be very clear, these people are businessmen. They don't care and arguably don't even //know// about platform moderation until someone who's actually bright gets a statistic pushed into the investor's next revenue meeting. If the businessmen consider that statistic to be enough of a threat to their revenue, they may allocate some resources, but at every step of the way is this only ever a //statistic// for them. They don't ever even see what platform harassment is like, what it looks like, how it feels. It's a number to be minimized back into an acceptable range. This does not even mean actually reducing the harassment, it just means giving players the //feeling// like they can do something about it, even if they statistically cannot.))

===== 2. Increased Security Risks =====
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Releasing game code or server binaries to facilitate the creation of private servers operated by players could expose games companies and consumers to bad actors, malware, data breaches, and DDOS attacks.
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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//.

===== 3. Significant Engineering and Architectural Challenges =====
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Allowing players to run private servers would present significant engineering and architectural challenges for many games, due to the way in which such online features are integrated with other proprietary systems and services required for the game. Creating a private-server compatible version would be a prohibitive cost, in some cases years or decades after the game’s initial release when only a small audience remains.
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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.

===== 4. Negative impact on investment in games, jobs, growth and consumer choice =====
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Ensuring an online game can work without official server support, requires a significant investment of engineering resources making it a very costly exercise for video games companies. Many of the costs that games companies would incur in implementing an end-of-life plan would have to be incurred towards the end of the commercial life of the game, when it is no longer commercially viable to continue support. Requirements to implement such plans could lead to less risk taking, fewer investment projects in developing new games, and potentially fewer jobs. Ultimately, it could lead to increased costs for consumers and less choice.
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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.

===== 5. Reputational Harm =====
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Allowing players to run private servers, with online interaction possibilities could result in players using those games in ways that don’t align with the games companies’ brand values, leading to a negative association with the brand, thereby harming its reputation.
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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 game((No running over pedestrians, for example.)). 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 broadcast((Remember, F1 is a global motorsport with millions of viewers, much like the NFL or NBA. Swearing is just a natural part of those events.))) 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.

===== 6. Erosion of Intellectual Property Rights =====
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Mandating games companies to keep their online games operable post-official support would undermine their rights and autonomy in deciding how their intellectual property is utilised. There is a vital interest in maintaining effective copyright protection, including protection against circumvention of technologies that control access to copyrighted video game software, where such circumvention is undertaken in circumstances that would lead to the unauthorised public exploitation of games.
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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.

===== 7. Competition from Community-Supported Versions =====
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Such a requirement could lead to community-supported versions of games competing with official versions, potentially jeopardizing the financial investments of the video games companies. This would lead to confusion between trademarks, and the original trademark holder may be held responsible for actions undertaken by a community supported version.
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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 probably((Exceptions exist, Cyberpunk 2077 etc.)) 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.

===== 8. Forfeiture of Licensing and Reproduction Rights =====
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Allowing consumers to create or run modified copies of online games would necessitate games companies to either license additional rights or refrain from enforcing them, effectively leading to a forfeiture of control over these rights.
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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.((Yes, I understand that signs with "Do not distribute illegally" don't stop anyone from distributing the product, but the point is that you do not give anyone additional //rights//. Point 8 is about the //rights//. No additional rights are being granted to anyone, especially not for unauthorized distribution.))

===== 9. & 10. Constraints from 3rd-party IP and 3rd-party services =====
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Games companies often utilize third-party software and services, which may have licensing terms restricting their use to the commercial life of the game or prohibiting sublicensing to players, thereby hindering the modification or patching of games for private servers. In particular this could jeopardize and infringe the copyright of the musical works and lead to legal action from these right holders on the basis of unauthorised exploitation of their works.

Games depend on third-party services such as platforms on which the game is offered to the consumer. Releasing the code for those services, which would be necessary should a legal requirement allow player communities to run a game, may not be possible as this would potentially be an IP infringement. Furthermore, game company's servers are increasingly run on the cloud. If cloud servers are discontinued, which sometimes happens, this necessitates either shutting down older titles or creating costly workarounds. The latter may not always be possible.
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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.

====== Closing Statement ======
This industry response is wrong on every level. [[The Crew#The Crew Unlimited|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.