The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

I think we need to stop treating it as a dichotomy.

There's an understanding it won't last forever, when you buy a multiplayer game, ans making devs make offline versions in the cases where its trivial is going to bite indie game studios.

Gamers have repeatedly shown they dont like subs. Its hard to model "we want to charge you 40 cents per month, escalating with inflation" but thats what youre asking for

It's also necessary to heavily punish any company that tries to leverage the legal system's expenses to financially ruin adversaries, especially individuals, by burdening them with the legal costs of defending themselves for the crime of exercising their rights.

And it makes these devices worse. I should be able to control my oven using a simple REST api and home assistant. The fact that in order to interact with my oven with a home assistant I first have to reach out to my manufacture servers is just insane. It's an oven. It only has so many sensors and nobs to twist.

About the only grace I give these manufacturers is the fact that google and apple both make it an annoying pain to maintain applications in their app store. A manufacturer can't simply drop "oven app" once and expect it to be available on the store forever. But that too should be solved with the same regulation that says "Ovens, refrigerators, washing machines, thermostats, and doorbells must not connect to the internet". We can teach the world about VPNs if they want remotely access their devices.

  It should not be allowed for a developer or device manufacturer to kill or nerf any product remotely, once it was bought and paid for.

Imagine a highly complex online game that requires a few people and tens of thousands a month in cloud costs to keep it running. Now imagine that this game is 25 years old and only has 100 players total left. Are you saying that this developer must maintain the exact same quality of online play for 100 people?

Companies would just default to saying "we reserve the right to shut off online connectivity at any time."

The point of copyright is to increase the amount of creative works available to people by making the production financially viable. If companies aren't making the works available, or taking released works and making them unavailable, copyright has failed.

Even the "Copyright Alliance" acknowledges this: https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai...

> While the copyright law is intended to serve the purpose of enriching the general public through access to creative work, it is important to understand that the copyright law imposes no obligation upon creators to make their copyrighted works available. As a result, an unpublished work that is never distributed to the public receives the same copyright protection that a published work would receive.

the basic function of a multiplayer server is to keep the players game state synched, large numbers of players, and very fast gameplay vs connection rate and jitter is fly in ointment.

This example is humorously short and this is why there is backlash to game companies shutting down games. What about the people who bought it towards the end? They just get nothing? All that time and money spent just gets thrown in the trash because they don't want a cloud bill? They either need to opensource the games and servers or keep supporting them for a decade or longer.

You?

The companies making the games?

Why should they get to destroy games—gone, forever, with no chance of retrieval or resurrection—that hundreds of people put their time and love into, and millions of people want to play, just because they think it'll make this quarter's stock price numbers look better?

Copyright was created to protect the rights of the creator for a limited time to promote the useful arts. Creations are supposed to become part of the public domain once the creator is no longer getting use out of them. Game companies want to break that bargain, scorched-earth style, and ensure that no one can ever use the things that they create to make anything new.

Ideally a free subscription through packed in keys and such but we'll probably end up being nickel and dimed even further.

The whole thing seems absurd when you remember that no one needs video games. This doesn’t need to be legislated. Let them kill video games and then stop buying their video games if they’re just going to kill it off. Why are people still buying games that cash be killed off?

If enough people are still buying these games then clearly the game being killed off is not an important factor. If it was, they wouldn’t buy them.

What does need to be legislated is how these games and services are marketed: it must be made clear latest date the service is guaranteed to be up.

That might be your future. But as long as there are computing platforms that users can run in their own home there will be games for them.

Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud, and their customers have proven willing to pay higher prices for the types of gaming experience Nintendo will deliver.

>On September 29, 2022, Google announced that it would shut down Stadia, citing its lack of traction with users. The service was shut down on January 18, 2023, and Google refunded all purchases for hardware and games made through the Google and Stadia stores.

even more fortunately, further attempts will fail for the same reason - input lag.

as long as there is a market the producers will come, even in a super capital intensive industry like this. and it looks like nvidia is partially going back on the whole data center push with rtx spark. its just one high end product but it shows they know a lot of people want local gaming and local inference.

That article is paid for by the lobbysts and completely incorrect and wrong.

Good riddance. Online features suck. Make your game multiplayer or make it singleplayer. Don't add pointless online features.

PS all you need to make sure it works is release the server once you stop supporting it yourself.

> They rely on a huge network of interconnected cloud micro services.

Give people the docker file.

> A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.

That's more AAA stuff not indie.

Edit: oh, it's yours. Spend 5 minutes understanding exactly what SKG have said they are not asking for.

The "hacker" part now is completely lost on people. They just don't see the big picture, it isn't just about getting your money's worth. Some people spend their free time playing with other people they've only ever met online. Some people escape into a game after work. Relationships are built in these games, and when a game gets suddenly taken away with no recourse, it's a horrible feeling.

I can't find the best example, but this video is of a guy who plays these "dead" games and tries to find the people who are still playing, getting to know them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FEW7gxci2Q

Some of these people are just lovely, taking the time to show him around, teaching him the ropes. They're just happy that someone is playing the game. This all exists because the developers are still supporting these games. Take a look at the section about Blockland in the video I linked!

In my gaming circles, people who work on SaaS solutions are against SKG even though they are avid gamers and even open source contributors. They just recoil on a thought of an EOL plan. Same on HN.

"Think of the indies" is just same old "Think of the children" astroturfing.