The Stop Killing Games campaign began with the outrage over the video game titled The Crew was discontinued and made completely unplayable for anyone who had purchased it in the past (which is nothing more than stealing from consumers in my opinion). After the campaign ran for a while, a European citizens’ initiative was launched to pass a law that would force video game publishers to leave their games in a playable state if they decide to stop supporting them.
Surprisingly, this has sparked controversy in the gaming community – one notable anti-SKG voice is Jason Thor Hall, commonly known as Pirate Software. I and many others in the gaming community have a lot of respect for him and his opinions, as Thor has been working in the industry for a long time. But despite all that respect, his response video to the Stop Killing Games campaign contains many fallacies and complete misunderstandings of the law it is advocating.
He makes a few points in the video, but the main ones are that licenses don’t last forever, servers cost money, and that publishers have to give up their intellectual property to allow players to run their servers. All of these can be problems with the campaign, but when you think about it and look at examples from games that already exist, you realize that there isn’t really a major problem with the campaign that won’t be solved by legislation itself.
First, let’s look at the cost of running servers – obviously, hosting them for hundreds or even thousands of players is very expensive. You need powerful hardware, you need to hire people to make sure it doesn’t break down, and you have to pay the exorbitant electricity bills to do it. Asking companies, and especially indie developers, to host servers when the game is no longer profitable is outrageous, but that’s not the only way to keep it playable after its end of life. The solution already exists in every Valve online title ever – let players host their own dedicated servers. To make it work, all you need to do is make the server files public and connect to the server you want – which, in the worst case, is no more than a few hours of work.
But this is related to the other problem: publishers would have to give up some of the intellectual property if they released server files to the public. But they just don’t do it. I can’t imagine a TeamFortress2 Server on my computer, and yet I still have no rights to any TF2-related intellectual property. One could argue that for MMO games, releasing the server files to the public would mean that they would profit from the experience and thus infringe on the publishers’ intellectual property rights, but I disagree. This could be solved in two very simple ways: Publishers could either just upload the server files after They stop running their own servers or they could have a copy of the server files that don’t include monetization. The first option works because if they’ve already given up on the game, they shouldn’t have a problem with other people making a small profit by running their own servers. The second option works because it’s just a bit of work and then no one can make money off their intellectual property.
With The Crewand other games that have licensing agreements, there is the most complicated problem: what happens when the licensing agreements expire? And to that I say: basically nothing. You give the player base the ability to run their own servers, then simply remove the listing from the store and let people who have already bought the game keep it and play on their own servers. It’s not like there aren’t already single-player titles with time-limited licensing agreements – for example The Legend of Korra was a game with the Avatar The license was canceled and the title was removed from all stores after it expired, but buyers can still play it to this day.
Now we can address the last major issue, which is that fewer live service games would be produced if this law were passed, because any solution on the list would cost publishers more time and money than they can now put into their titles. The logic behind this is understandable, but the numbers completely contradict this – live service games bring in a lot of money – look at how much profit Fortnite made for Epic or Overwatch2 for Blizzard. The time and cost of making their games compliant is so small compared to their profits that I would roll on the floor laughing if they complained about this law. As for smaller and independent publishers, if someone takes the time to develop a full live service game and has the money to run servers for it for even a few weeks, they could spare a few hours to enable private servers. And to prevent people from making money from their game while it’s still in use, they could simply not release the server files until they decide to abandon the project.
In his second video on the subject, Thor pointed out another problem related to monetization: people could run exploits and bots on the main servers, quit the game, and then run their own private servers, charging for access. As an example of this case, he gave TeamFortress2and yes, that happened in this particular title, but that’s it. I can’t think of anything that happened in any other Valve online title or live service experience. Except Titanfall 2and you know what saved it? A company that creates private servers for games – Northstar. Sure, the worst thing that could happen with this initiative is that this phenomenon that we have seen in TF2 will happen a little more often, which is annoying, but it’s more than worth it for consumers to be able to own the games they purchase. I’ve heard from the community that there are some copyright issues with online games when the server binaries use third-party code that developers aren’t legally allowed to distribute, which is of course true. But I think it’s more than fair to require publishers to separate the third-party files they’re not allowed to distribute from the main server code. We shouldn’t begrudge putting a little more work into video game development – especially considering that nearly every new release lately is a buggy mess.
Finally, Thor claims that this initiative doesn’t really preserve live service games, as the state they would be left in if most players quit would be bad, and that some experiences would just have to sell a license for it to be revoked for cheaters. Well, the first point is simply wrong – look at Counterstrike 1.6; it’s still as fun as it was back then. With private servers running, people still play old games that were popular and discontinued by the publisher when they can. A game doesn’t have to stay in top shape forever to be preserved; it just has to be playable. As for the second point, there are other ways to ban people than removing their access to something they paid money for, mainly blacklisting them from the official servers. There’s no reason not to allow hackers to play on HvH servers, play against friends with cheats to troll, or just run their own server and do whatever they want on it. What a player should buy is the game, the strings attached part should be access to the official servers. As for the other points in his second video, that is about refuting other specific arguments that are not my arguments, so I see no reason to address those points.
So yes, the problems in Thor’s videos do indeed exist and require more thought and work on the part of game publishers and developers – but there are solutions on the part of publishers, and the benefit to players if this initiative is adopted is immensely greater compared to the damage done to publishers. So there is no reason why we should bother adding a few more hours of work to every game. If a publisher decides that a game is not worth making just because it would mean two or three more hours of work that will not bring them any profit, the world is probably better off without that particular game – a bad gaming experience is worse than no gaming experience at all. Therefore, I will continue to support the Stop Killing Games campaign and call on every European citizen to sign the initiative.
