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.
These sorts of EULA should be flat out illegal.
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.
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?
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?
Yes, a big company can take it away, but I think they have to leave it online long enough to get your money’s worth.
So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s 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.
Edit: oh, it's yours. Spend 5 minutes understanding exactly what SKG have said they are not asking for.
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.
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, they’d hit you with the snarky ‘go vote to make your voice heard instead of complaining’
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 it’s the only thing that might convince me that ordinary citizens actually have any say at all in directing legislation.
The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
Ideally a free subscription through packed in keys and such but we'll probably end up being nickel and dimed even further.
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.
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.
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 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.
>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.
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.