With publishers pushing more and more towards “live service games” / Games as a Service (games with a strong online component that tend to drive recurring spending under various forms of monetization), more and more players have come to know the disappointment of seeing one of their games become unplayable, one way or another. We could even describe those products as “exploitation services (🇫🇷)“, though it’d be a bit on-the-nose.
This “evolution” is both saddening and damaging for the player experience. For a while, what used to disappear were mere multiplayer modes, which could of course be very appreciated, but remained an addition to the main game experience (one could think of Metal Gear Online, for example). More recently, there was a quick degradation of service for games where the multiplayer component is important (for example, service deterioriations on Call of Duty games when the game’s publisher is still raking in profits from content sales).
Now, more and more, even content that was meant for solo play and that barely, if at all, benefits from online features, ends up being affected by arbitrary end of service, with a recent example in The Crew, which acted as a trigger for many to recognize the tendency we just described.
This is the context in which the Stop Killing Games initiative was started, with the goal of ending such practices. STJV supports the initiative, both because we believe it is entirely feasible to meet its demands, and because those demands are reasonable expectations from players and in the interest of games preservation.
In particular, we invite any person living in the European Union to sign the petition to the European Commission in order to promote the initiative and request the EU to push it into law.
As for why we support this initiative, here is our reasoning:
The initiative’s demands are feasible
The initiative as described in the European petition proposes a simple rule: a project must have an “exit plan” when they shut down the services. Does your studio make a solo game without online components? Congratulations, you have nothing to do. Does the game actually include online content? There’s a myriad of possibilities to explore – many of which have already been experimented on other projects, sometimes even in games viewed as classics. Here are a few of them:
- Keep the servers running if they’re not too costly (but we wouldn’t want to make a dent in EA’s CEO’s salary, poor soul!);
- Plan for content that doesn’t require online connection to remain playable after the servers close (as Ubisoft promised they would for the follow-up games to The Crew);
- Provide the necessary code to run one’s own server within the community, allowing those who want to keep playing online to do so on their own (see the appendix on City of Heroes below).
Those are only suggestions, and the initiative doesn’t aim at making any of those mandatory, but solely to require a solution to exist. On that topic, let’s dive into the disingenuous answer from Video Games Europe, the European lobby of video games publishers:
the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws
How gracious of them to respect the law, well deserving of praise. Good news: the initiative aims at having laws changed to fix the problem, so publishers will have their work cut out for them!
Private servers are not always a viable alternative option
This is why no one is saying that private servers should be the only solution expected of studios.
In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
This is insanity. This argument, which was repeated by unscrupulous commentators, is at best ignorant and at worst a bald-faced lie: if the law changes, companies adapt. The industry is constantly following legal or technological evolutions, why would things be different here?
As such, the publishers’ stance is completely indefensible. The initative doesn’t make revolutionary demands, and if those C-suit execs had spent a modicum of time asking their dev teams, they’d probably have been told that nothing is impossible and that solutions are definitely out there.
The demands are logical and legitimate
First of all, let’s ponder on the fact that this phenomenon of abandonned games is singular. It’s a riff on planned obsolescence that’s particularly agressive, with a perfectly functional product being destroyed remotely by the company that made it. If there are paralles to be drawn with the world of consumer electronics, where for example smartphones run out of update coverage, at least the object itself is left functional.
Under the guise of a digital economy that would get rid of the most basic rules of commerce because it’s different, this is once again pure disdain from publishers towards the audience and their clientele. As game developers, we would love nothing more than for the games we made to remain playable, but due to penny-pinching measures or a lack of care, projects end up discarded even as players wanted to keep playing the game they paid for. How would one feel about a cinema studio sneaking into one’s home to burn the Blu-Rays of their movies?
The Stop Killing Games campaign also brought back talks about video games preservation. In France, the BnF legal deposit of video games (🇫🇷). However that’s not a perfect solution: what use is it to safeguard physical versions of games if the publisher can make them useless by cutting off access to the servers it needs to run? Dozens of people devote their time to safeguarding ancient games that run on equally old hardware, but the challenge today is to face this new wave of degradations. At the turn of the millennium, the favored tech for online play was using community servers, which means many of those games can still run today even if the publisher has no more involvement with them. A quarter of a century later, the demands are merely to return to those good practices!
Appendix: City of Heroes’ “exit strategy”
A strong example of what such legal efforts could facilitate can be found in City of Heroes Homecoming
City of Heroes, a popular MMORPG, went through the layoffs of its dev studio and subsequent closure of its servers in 2012, even though the game was profitable a little over a year after switching to a hybrid monetization scheme to fit the then burgeoning free to play model and new content to come had been announced.
On August 31st 2012, Paragon Studios (who had taken over after the departure of the game’s original creators Cryptic Studios) announced its closure and that servers for the game would shut down 3 months later, on November 30th 2012, by publisher order and without recourse.
Faced with this brutal decision from NCSoft (the publisher who also oversee ArenaNet, the studio behind the Guild Wars series), the community gathered to ask them to hand over the licence and exploitation rights, as well as the game and servers’ source code, to allow them to continue working on the game. The developers themselves supported this proposal, and we later learned that they were in talks with NCSoft to obtain independance and the rights to the game.
NCSoft stayed silent for many years, refusing to sign off on selling the licence to the developers at the last minute during an effort to revive the game in 2014, never answering any of the community or the press’ requests, and leaving the game and licence unused all this time.
On April 15th 2019, information surfaced about a « private » server that ran the game’s last known version existing for 6 years. 3 days later, the source code for the server leaked, and the community mobilized to create new instances, all while NCSoft went and threatened the servers’ creators with legal action.
The community ignored those threats, and among the servers that emerged, one of them, Homecoming, was able to not only restore the game’s content, but also add updates that the original studio wanted to implement but couldn’t deploy before the game’s closure.
On January 4th 2024, after nearly 5 years of threats and negotiations with NCSoft, the publisher ended up offering the City of Heroes Homecoming team an official (but limited) licence to run the game.
It took over 11 years between the game servers’ sunset and the validation of a « private » as official to play a game whose return the community never stopped hoping for.
This illustrates that it’s possible, provided the fan community is involved, to keep games requiring a complex infrastructure running, but more importantly, if legislation such as that championed by Stop Killing Games had existed back when the game got shuttered, this ordeal could have lasted months instead of 11 years.