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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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The EU already mandates minimal service life for things like security updates. I don't see why it won't make it past courts. Hell, under EU laws regarding warranty, games publishers are probably already forced to either run game servers for a minimum of two years (or offer alternatives such as full refunds). This concept is just extending the mandated warranty in a sense. As for the software itself, manufacturers are under tons of regulation when it comes to support and availability of replacement parts in various industries. Entitlement does play a role, but that may very well be in the fact that consumers are simply entitled to access to the goods and services they purchased.
Also, there's nothing stopping companies from releasing alternative servers when their main servers turn off. Games used to come with dedicated servers for free. Companies just decided not to do it anymore because they can make more money with their current strategy. While the games are being sold, these companies make hundreds of millions or even billions of profit. The cost of their servers remaining available is just part of their profit forecast.
None of this will fail because it would be impossible to make happen. The real question is probably if consumers have more power than the video games lobby. I doubt they do. The proposal goes against the financial incentives of video game publishers, so they'll try to convince lawmakers not to bother. If their attempts fail, there's a chance certain games won't make it into the EU if such a law passes, or that certain content won't be available, but it's not like nobody will make games anymore.
A more realistic scenario of a law like this will have game publishers state an expiration date on their software. They already have to when it comes to security updates, but they'll probably have to put a sticker on it like "this game/DLC will stop working after 2026" and let consumers decide whether to buy the product or not.
Aside from the fact it's proprietary stuff they own... you can't just mandate that a company must release stuff they own to the public. They own it, they can do whatever they want with it.
This is the far better parallel to draw imo, and has the best chance of meaning anything.
Except for the fact for most games the online play is an extra feature and not the core game. And thus all game devs have to do is argue that "the game still works in offline play" and this won't apply to those games anyways.
Oh god no, it's way more complicated than that.
Modern game servers for major games are simply just not designed to be run locally bare metal. They're often in the form of complex stacks of multiple moving parts, shit like entire k8s deployment stacks with like 12 distinct resources, many of which might be tightly coupled to implementation details.
Such that even if they release that part public, it still wouldn't work because it depends on other pieces that literally don't exist anymore.
A great example of this is simply any login process.
It's super likely they have an auth server they run that you login to.
They use that auth server for multiple things, not just this 1 game.
They release, say, v2.4 of their game server program in 2025, it's tightly coupled to the auth server v1.7 api.
It works for about 4 months before they update to fix some stuff on their auth server, now their auth server is v1.8 annnnnd...
Now that v2.4 copy of your game server stops working cuz it's not compatible with v1.8 of their auth system, so it's now just dead.
You can't mandate they keep updating their old code on a game they don't support anymore.
So... you're fucked anyways.
You can't mandate they release their auth server cuz it's still in active use and you really don't want to expose the inner workings of the auth system to hackers for them to inspect.
So yeah, it's just not happening, sorry.
Designing a server to be self hosted is a critical choice you make very very early on in development. If it wasn't designed that way from the start, its useless to ask for a copy of it for self hosting, it will stop working eventually when external upstream apis stop being compatible.
They don't need to reslsse stuff they own to the public if they keep the servers running of course. And they can alter their client side software to accept a third party game server and let the fans do the rest. Kind of what the EU has forced Meta to do through the Digital Markers Act.
No, they have to abide by the law. Apple, Google, Meta, and many other billionaire tech companies have already been forced to alter and open up access to their software. Hell, games companies have already been forced to remove lootboxes in "their property".
And the games where this is only a minor feature will be hit the least by the proposed legislation, if at all. Same reason the cybersecurity legislation mandating the availability of software patches doesn't affect devices without network connectivity much. An RC car doesn't need firmware updates, an app-controlled RC car has terrible costs associated with it if you don't build your code right.
I know that. But that doesn't mean someone else can't run the same protocol on bare metal. Just give gamers the ability to hook into someone else's server after shutdown and you'll be fine, probably. Make it part of your sunsetting strategy. Beats waiting for governments to come down and make you alter games you intended to drop in ways you don't want to modify through lawsuits and regulatory pressure.
Plus, you think the people developing the netcode need to provision a full multi continent cloud every time they test their protocol?
Wow, good thing they were mandated by law to release a v1.7 server so v2.4 of their game still works! After all, the servers have been shut down, so v2.4 is the very last version the developer will need to care about. Barring the mandatory support period for the Cyber Resilience Act, of course. Or maybe they could make backwards compatible APIs, though I doubt game developers still know how to these days.
First of all, sure you can. It'd be stupid, but you can.
There it is. Choice. That choice can be influenced. For instance, "you cannot sell your game in the EU" is a good reason to reconsider that choice. Or maybe "figure out what"'ll cost us more, the EU fine or having a few devs release a self-hosted server" for products developed while the law enters into effect.
What upstream APIs? The game has been abandoned. The server code is no longer being worked on. The auth is done server-side on servers they don't even control. There is no upstream to break.
You seem to take the current state of the game development industry and extrapolate from the game publisher's point of view what would be achievable without losing money. That's not how the law works. The law doesn't care. It the law says "no visible blood in your zombie game", you either don't release in Germany or you find a way to comply. Nobody in the government cares about the complexity of remodeling games, all the hard work the colour designers did, the way the shaders were written, it just says "get rid of the blood or fuck off". In this case, the law would say "make your game work or fuck off".
Games worked like this for a decade. They can be made to work like this again. "Modern" doesn't mean "better", it just means "different" when it comes to game servers. The only thing stopping games companies from doing that, is the financial incentive not to. Threaten 'em with a couple billion dollars of fines and they'll realign their incentives. It worked great for social media companies and ad agencies.
Some free-to-play video games would definitely fuck off. The companies willing to put up half a dev's time every month to sync their protocol changes to their self hosted servers will be there to take gamers' money they would've spent on the free to play stuff. There are billions at stake, and games companies are legally obligated to gobble up as many of their billions for their shareholders as they can.
If you mandate that they have to keep the servers running, they just wont bother providing access to the game in your country in the first place, because that would be absolutely insane. Any company would look at that and go "fuck that" and now if you live in that country, you just cant play the game, good job!
Same as above, if you make a law that causes the company to be unable to operate (you have asked something stupid of them) they just won't even provide the game in your country. If the EU passed something like this it would instantly hamstring their entire gaming industry and they'd very very quickly lose a tonne of people who leave to go work in saner places.
Same as above
This all costs money. Enormous amounts of money. If you make it cost too much money to provide the game in your country, they just wont even show up in the first place, so now you don't get to play it at all.
Then they ABSOLUTELY would never even think about providing the game in your country. Do you understand how insane it is to try and force a company to release their propietary STILL LIVE auth backend? Do you understand how huge of a security risk that is? No company would EVER be cool with that.
"Hey do we want to also spin up servers for our game in [country]?"
"If we do, that country has legally mandated if we shut the game down we have to release copies of the game and everything needed to run it to the public, which would include our still live auth servers and etc that our other games depend on"
"Oh, that's insane, no nevermind I guess they don't get to play our game then, lol"
You'd be incredibly naive to think this is a sane ask of any company, no one will do it. Ever.
Pretty ubiquitously the answer will be "don't release it in the EU at all, fuck em" because for most companies doing this would actively have huge downsides on the games performance.
What you need to wrap your head around is the complicated tech stacks that back these online systems aren't chosen for funises, they serve a purpose. These systems allow companies to reduce downtime, improve performance, provide telemetry and real time monitoring, etc etc. They use these for a reason.
If you tell the company "If you wanna be able to release your game in EU, you either have to commit to keeping your servers on, or, you have to fuck up your entire tech stack and ruin your games performance", they'll just go "Guess we won't release in the EU then lol"
Yeah, because they didn't offer the massive multitude of features that people expect of them today.
If you don't want these online features to be so popular, stop buying games that have them
And yet... crazy as it sounds, they still make tonnes and tonnes of money. Almost as if tonnes of other gamers out there like them and pay for them.
Legally mandating companies have to commit suicide to sell in your country isn't going to make them do it. It's just gonna make them stop selling the game in your country.
Correct, and the issue is what is being asked of this movement is so insane to try and comply with that "dont release in [country]" is the better answer
Sorry but that's just the breaks. You'll have to go convince a billion zoomers to stop paying for online microtransaction laden DLCs if you wanna make any actual headway here.