The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games
46 points - today at 4:16 PM
Sourceryandrake
today at 5:10 PM
The goal is a good one, but it's too specific. 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. This problem is sneaking into other non-game software, and even physical devices! If you buy a thing you shouldn't need to tether that thing to the manufacturer, and it shouldn't be possible to make it useless when they decide to turn down a server.
As a developer or manufacturer, if your software or device absolutely requires a server that costs money to maintain, then your business plan should take that into account: You should be charging customers monthly to keep that service running. You shouldn't promise a one-time payment, take the customer's money and then yank the service away on a whim.
Nobody is asking for free labor to keep services running. I'm asking that you 1. only tether your product to a server if you absolutely need to, and 2. charge for that kind of product monthly so that you can leave it running while you still have customers. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Maybe itâs better to start in a smaller, more focused and less controversial topic to set some precedents before trying to boil the ocean.
mysterydip
today at 5:31 PM
âAh, but you didnât buy a thing, you bought a license to temporarily use a thing in ways we deemed acceptable!â -publishers somewhere
"deemed". the past tense is doing a lot of work here.
"Here's a device we sold you, but when you first turn it on you need to sign this 30 page contract which says you actually don't own the device, if you are mad at us you have to go to our preferred arbitration, and we reserve the right to turn your device off at any time on a whim because you left a bad review somewhere. Sign it or enjoy your worthless brick which we will not refund. Oh, and now every single manufacturer requires the same thing for this device class. So you can either have a washing machine or hand wash your cloths in your bathtub".
These sorts of EULA should be flat out illegal.
Yeah, it's frankly ridiculous that "smart" devices need internet access. Why shouldn't my smart oven behave exactly like my Brother printer? There's no reason my oven needs access to the internet, it can do everything it needs to do on my local network. My phone should be able to connect directly to it via a scan of the local network subnet or using any number of service announcement technologies that already exist.
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.
> 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.
If the app doesn't use the Internet then the natural way to provision it is to have it pre-loaded on the device anyway. Why should the goal of "avoid needing to hit the manufacturer's servers" involve hitting Google's servers?
aurareturn
today at 6:09 PM
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.
This is silly. No developer should be obligated to support an online game forever.
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?
The comment you are replying to doesn't argue any such thing, and is pretty clear in its explanation of how your position is perfectly compatible with what is requested.
aurareturn
today at 6:15 PM
The author is arguing for it.
This is what the post was saying:
1. No nerfing to the game/service whatsoever. This means you can't just kill online play. Ever.
2. Charge a monthly price or significantly increase the purchasing price.
Clearly neither of these are viable for most games and the game industry.
Nobody has a problem with rentals. Just be up front with the terms and don't try to pretend it's a sale.
KolibriFly
today at 5:56 PM
[dead]
emptybits
today at 6:19 PM
Tell gamers how many months, for the advertised price, they will receive a guaranteed level of service and features for.
Then let gamers decide.
Example: If I'm reminded, at purchase time, that this $70 game will work online for 24 months and single-player offline for 36 months, then I can make an informed decision before I buy. Studios would be forced to bring their business plan into visibility and be held to a level of service, and then gamers can't complain when a game is "switched off" according to plan.
This is already implied, just not explicit and quantified in advance.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a game that had early expiry of online already contemplated. And offline play should be rich and complete indefinitely. But I still live in the glorious console cartridge era in my head and in my emulators.
KolibriFly
today at 5:50 PM
Just don't design the game so that, when the business model stops working, every paid copy becomes a brick
Iâm a devils advocate on this argument.
Yes, a big company can take it away, but I think they have to leave it online long enough to get your moneyâs worth.
So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, thatâs fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.
operatingthetan
today at 5:43 PM
>So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, thatâs fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.
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.
elondaits
today at 5:20 PM
Not everything is economic value. For gamers, an online game can be a community hub, part of their identity, a hobby. Itâs not about whether they got their moneyâs worth, itâs about destroying a virtual âplaceâ theyâre emotionally and socially invested, and the specific skill they posses when theyâre there.
I think this is the root of it and what the article describes in the first half. I suspect owning a copy of a game will soon be completely eliminated and replaced w the subscription model. Then when subscription dollars stop flowing, the company naturally winds down the service.
RobotToaster
today at 5:46 PM
Counterpoint: UK law gives you six years to sue if goods are faulty or otherwise not as advertised, why should software be any different?
Certainly we'll just move the fig leaf so the free online component of games are now part of a subscription.
Ideally a free subscription through packed in keys and such but we'll probably end up being nickel and dimed even further.
So who gets to be the arbiter of how much time $70 is worth?
You?
The companies making the games?
Why should they get to destroy gamesâgone, forever, with no chance of retrieval or resurrectionâthat 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.
Why would you buy my new game if you're spending all your attention on the one I sold you 10 years ago?
amazingamazing
today at 5:56 PM
I imagine the end result will be another layer of online subscription.
Good cause, but society has rapidly moved passed them just switching off games after people bought them. Now the hardware production companies for gaming are winding down and not producing gaming computer parts because megacorp datacenter parts have a much higher margin. The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud; a context in which these "stop killing games" arguments will have much less leverage.
Then I will simply stop purchasing games and continue to play old ones that I can run on my computer as I please, online server or just do something better with my time.
The whole thing seems absurd when you remember that no one needs video games. This doesnât need to be legislated. Let them kill video games and then stop buying their video games if theyâre 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 wouldnât 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.
KolibriFly
today at 5:58 PM
Hardware scarcity and cloud incentives are real, but they're also part of the same broader trend: more dependency on centralized providers, less control for the buyer
> The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud
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.
Judging by the amount of people saying they've used and enjoyed cloud gaming I'm not as confident as you to make that claim. If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease.
I enjoy low-latency competitive games, and I'd say those are unlikely to get replaced by cloud, because many players notice latency spikes immediately. But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by people who like the feeling of owning their own hardware, or feel the need to have lower latency in games.
I'm sure if someone built a data center within two blocks of my home and I was able to stream from it, many of these issues would disappear as well.
Consoles already make you pay for online services. They already sunset games so I think even under the new rules they have the ability to stop that service at any time.
>Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud,
Consoles might as well already be cloud for all you control them. But I guess I should've specified PC gaming. I thought it was indicated from the context of "stop killing games". Also, to be clear, I'll never "cloud" game or use consoles. I'll just remain in the past with old hardware and old (and new indie) games. But the "PC gaming industry" as an economic block larger than movies is dying and that's a shame.
trumpdong
today at 4:58 PM
This is a phase and data center parts are usable for gaming. (Yes even with all the rasterizer and texture units chopped off, we'll have a wrapper that does that work in compute shaders)
vitalyan1234
today at 6:03 PM
fortunately, that's been already attempted and despite the best circumstances imaginable resulted in a much welcome failure.
>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.
we still got newer companies out of china like moore threads working on gaming gpus, they had to pause new production because of the whole ai shortage but it looks like they might restart. is it usable for any serious gaming right now? no. but its already fighting the nvidia/amd monopoly together with intel.
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.
A lot of âyes, butâŠâ in this comment section. Hard to tell if itâs HN playing contrarian as it usually loves to do, or just people so brainwashed they default to defending corporate interests.
Nothing makes me as hopeless for the future as reading people trying to one up the negativity about any initiative at all, and if no one did anything, theyâd hit you with the snarky âgo vote to make your voice heard instead of complainingâ
It takes big balls to fight publishers and even more massive to fight the internet and the pseudo-intellectual snark of internet commenters. The entire SKG initiative has my support and perhaps itâs the only thing that might convince me that ordinary citizens actually have any say at all in directing legislation.
You can't make a person see a problem if his livelihood depends on not seeing it.
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.
phyzix5761
today at 5:54 PM
Why California's New Save Our Games Bill Could Kill Indie Studios: https://arkvis.com/blog/2026-05-15_why-californias-new-save-...
This the lobbyist's FUD, and SKG are so up-front with the reasonable constraints that it makes it pretty obvious that this is a paid piece.
Edit: oh, it's yours. Spend 5 minutes understanding exactly what SKG have said they are not asking for.
> Now it becomes way more expensive for small studios to come out with games that have online features.
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.