We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws. Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. 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. We welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policy makers and those who have led the European Citizens Initiative in the coming months.
There are third party options for this.
Liable for what? A service everyone knows they’re no longer providing? Are car manufacturers still liable for 50 year old rusty cars people still drive? Can Apple today be held liable for a software vulnerability in the Lisa or the Mac II?
Then don’t design games that way. Don’t make games like these. This is good news, actually.
It’s crazy how they act like no one else could run a server for a live service game.
We used to fucking buy and rent servers to game on our own private servers.
Its wild how this disappeared and all server structure just got consolidated into shit like AWS and Azure.
Minecraft, the game that sold the most copies in history, has a huge infrastructure of community-hosted servers, some with tens of thousands of players playing at the same time. The community has created different flavors of the server software, optimized it, added mod support and even reprogrammed parts of it.
At this point, it’s hard for me to believe how someone could say a community can’t run game servers with a straight face.
The whole “ITS A LIVE SERVICE IT CANT JUST BECOME SINGLE PLAYER” argument fundamentally misses every single easy point about community hosted servers.
It’s the most prevalent, and also most stupid argument I keep seeing pop up.
I agree, the liability for user content in community hosted games is just pure bullshit excuses.
online-only is not bad, some mechanics just work like that. that’s totally fine. Just release the server code when you don’t want to host any more.
I know. I like online content as well. Some of the games I spent the most hours in (Warframe, Helldivers 2) are these kinds of games. But if a corpo lobbying group is forcing the choice between “Enshittified always online” or “never any online content ever anymore” I’ll choose the latter.