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[ANSWERED] What's going on with some person seemingly called "PirateSoftware" and the stop killing games campaign?
(lemmy.abnormalbeings.space)
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Thats literally what I just outlined as what would have to happen.
Oh yeah, just do that, as if that's a super duper easy task to do.
Sorry mate but for most games doing this would mean the game just doesnt even work anymore, because "direct connection" means no concept of an account anymore, and if everything is tied to your account, the whole damn game doesn't work now.
If the game in any way shape or form has any concept of a "login", you are already screwed without any easy solution.
Sure, that's valid, but thats one piece of one example
Now realize that a single game may have several of these APIs it depends on because thats how we build stuff nowadays, so you have potentially multiple things you need to re-implement from scratch. It's possible, sure, but by this point you've effectively remade a very large amount of the game from scratch so who cares now.
Quite often a "Game server" could be dozens of separate pieces, and maybe a couple of those could be released, but even then what if parts of that executable have still in use proprietary pieces that are used in other games they own?
You just can't apply these sorts of rules to software, they arent physical products and they don't work the same way.
It'd be sorta like if discontinued and you demanded they open license the entire car, even though maybe 60% of that car's parts are proprietary things that are also still used in
So if you tried to force them to open license you'd be also demanding they open license parts of
And you can see how that's not gonna be good for them.
The backend server stack hosts a set of tightly intertwined services that conform to an Application Programming Interface. You quite literally do not need to provide the entire stack designed for multi-hundred-thousand concurrent players just to satisfy that interface the game clients are expecting. It costs time and money, but they could damn well just create an implementation designed for simpler, small-scale hosting.
If you designed it for that eventuality, yeah, it's easy to do. Trying to retrofit that into an existing system designed solely to run at cloud scale is a bloody nightmare, and that's not at all what SKG is asking for.
Counterexample: private World of Warcraft servers. They implemented their own, and it's worked fine for them.
The account system is just another API. The client uses it to authenticate, and the dedicated server uses it to verify the client authentication. Fuck, even Minecraft and it's poorly-designed multiplayer can do that. As long as the client and server use the same auth provider, you can still have "accounts" without relying on Mojang's insanely censorship-happy official login system.
I've made this exact same argument you're giving here, and yeah, I know it's not easy. I sympathize with indie developers who are over-designing their server architecture and might not have the resources to do this, but a AAA game studio can afford to hire more developers for their next game instead of C-suite bonuses.
I also made this argument before, and it is valid criticism. It's worth pointing out that the valuable and reusable proprietary parts are the infrastructure and design, not the game logic.
I'm not an entitled twat. I understand that there are legal challenges and big, open-ended questions on how developers could actually pull this off. Making large, consumer-exploitative developers like Epic, Bungie, or Blizzard have to work harder isn't a good enough reason to make me discount an entire consumer-rights movement.
This just goes back to the other issue:
If your country demands the game devs contort and twist their architecture to suit that country's demands, they just wont release it in your country at all.
Sorry but thems the breaks.
You'll have to get way more than the entirety of the EU on board with this to make any change. Youd have to get China and the US on board at the same time
If you target only one of them, that country will decline because it would just argue "you'd fuck up our industry and everyone would leave to [other country] for sales"
And good luck getting the EU, US, and China to all simultaneously agree to this sort of thing, lol.
I mean, hey: it worked to make Apple finally drop their proprietary charging connector. As long as the cost of losing business in the EU is higher than designing an EOL transition for games and hiring developers to actually do it, it's in their best interests.
I hate to break it to you but the EU is not that strong of a market lol
People seriously underestimate the cost of this sort of thing, companies do NOT want to hand out copies of their proprietary software to the public.
The pretty much always have tonnes of important shit baked into it that still gets used in their newer software, so even if its old stuff, it still has bits and bobs in it that matter for their newer stuff they just put out.
But also just, in general, companies are not gonna be chill with people demanding they give them a copy of their backend software. It's just not gonna happen, and the EU is definitely the weaker of the 3 major markets. Companies are just gonna go "lol, now you don't get to play online I guess" instead.