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--- stop_killing_games [2025/07/29 12:09] – ultracomfy
+++ stop_killing_games [2025/09/01 12:21] (current) – ultracomfy
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+~~NOTOC~~
 ~~Title:Stop Killing Games~~
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 ====== State of things & Industry Response ======
+Sooooo.... There's been a bit of drama((Keyword PirateGames. If you have no clue what this means: Lucky you! Just a guy on the internet saying nonsense about things he has no clue about. Basically like me!)) but Stop Killing Games successfully issued a petition to the European Parliament. This means parliament will have to have a serious discussion of this issue and may or may not think about doing something about it with laws. Once the petition reached the signature threshold, we got word from our local <del>lobbying</del> corruption group "VideoGamesEurope", stating what //they// think about the issue. It's a joint, open letter from a multitude of corporations that say they'd rather not. Let's dive into it!
-Sooooo.... There's been a bit of drama((Keyword PirateGames)) but Stop Killing Games successfully issued a petition to the European Parliament. This means parliament will have to have a serious discussion of this issue and may or may not think about doing something about it with laws. Once the petition reached the signature threshold, we got word from our local <del>lobbying</del> corruption group "VideoGamesEurope", stating what //they// think about the issue. It's a joint, open letter from a multitude of corporations that say they'd rather not. Let's dive into it!
 ===== Foreword =====
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 If you program your game to be open like this at every step of the way - in the same way that currently a lot of games are programmed at every step of the way to be //closed// - then this will make //no// difference under the bottom line. Even server browsers have been a thing since before the 2000s. Every single game with a server browser proves that you're full of shit.
-<wrap lo>Addendum: Turns out that games aren't just a thing in Europe. These people speak like only Europeans buy their games, even though they absolutely will continue to make games and ship them to the rest of the world. US, Japan, China, we have a lot of strong video game markets in the world, and changing your product to adhere to EU customer protection law will almost always be worth it for the additional, //massive// games market we have over here. Changing products regionally to adhere to a specific countrie's law has been a thing since forever and it is almost always worth it for companies.</wrap>
+<wrap lo>Addendum: Turns out that games aren't just a thing in Europe. These people speak like only Europeans buy their games, even though they absolutely will continue to make games and ship them to the rest of the world. US, Japan, China, we have a lot of strong video game markets in the world, and changing your product to adhere to EU customer protection law will almost always be worth it for the additional, //massive// games market we have over here. Changing products regionally to adhere to a specific country's law has been a thing since forever and it is almost always worth it for companies.</wrap>
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 Yes, national or international law supersedes contents of a TOS or EULA, //as long as such law exists in the first place//. At this point in time, a law prohibiting games publishers from doing shit with their games does //not// exist, so they conceivably //can// just do fuck all with them. This is why platforms like Steam are ticking time bombs, as they can just shut down at any moment and send you a big "fuck you" with a picture of a middle finger. The only reason they don't is because - at this moment - it's more profitable to continue doing what they're doing. Once it's not, they can shut down and the thousands you or someone you know invested into video games could be gone forever.
-However, the statement claims that "these IP rights enable investment". **Enable** investment. This is //not// correct. Even if games are mandatory to be left in a playable state, there is nothing preventing anyone from making investment into new games. Yes, just a tad of extra foresight would be required, because publishers and programmers now have to structure their game in a way that allows home users and communities to self-host once official support ceases.
+However, the statement claims that "these IP rights enable investment". **Enable** investment. This is //not// correct. Even if games are mandatory to be left in a playable state, there is nothing preventing anyone from making investment into new games. Like, you can invest into the design of a new car and sell it as a whole, this is how the market worked for decades - it is not "necessary" to force users into a "seat heating subscription", that kind of thing does not "enable" investment. Investment has always been a thing. Yes, just a tad of extra foresight would be required, because publishers and programmers now have to structure their game in a way that allows home users and communities to self-host once official support ceases.
 Requiring forethought in the design process of a product is not new. There are a myriad of legal considerations for all kinds of programs, think of all the rules and regulations for road cars, especially internationally: Designing a car means collecting a list of all the applicable expectations a car needs to fulfill - what kinds of lights, emissions, vehicle dimensions, parts dimensions, weight, the list of limitations //will// not end((And this is just for one single country!)) and frankly it must be a miracle to Video Games Europe to think that with so many rules anyone can still invest into auto-making. Or rather video games publishers have been enjoying what us Germans call "Narrenfreiheit" - a position of being special, in that one is allowed to do things that would be considered unacceptable for anyone else. They love their special treatment and they would like to keep it.
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 ====== Closing Statement ======
-Friends, we have come a long way. Back in 2024 the game [[The Crew]] was shut down. Less than two years later, the brilliant minds from [[The Crew#The Crew Unlimited|The Crew Unlimited]] have almost completely reverse-engineered((Technically speaking, that is not what they did. They are using packet interception.)) the game to create a server emulation tool, putting Ubisoft to shame.
+This industry response is wrong on every level. [[The Crew#The Crew Unlimited|The Crew Unlimited]] shows us that making what SKG wants is absolutely possible. It can be done with foresight, it can be done retroactively, it can even be done retroactively as a community which does not have a single bit of source code and works against game encryption. And for all this talk about making things happening, it seems the easiest answer, one we haven't even talked about yet, is to just literally release the server binaries. That is your own code, the code that your own programmers wrote, there is absolutely no problem in just handing that out to the public, //you// are the holder of the copyright to that code. You have literally every single option at your disposal. Do it the long way, or do it the easy way, we just want it to happen at all.
-Not only does the game already have a built-in offline mode that would just need to be switched on by the devs, the Crew Unlimited team have single-handedly proven every corporate mastermind behind this "Industry Response" wrong: It works. It's possible. It's not even that much effort.
-The reason The Crew Unlimited needed next to two years to make it happen is because they had to work their way from outside of the game back into it. They had to start the game, see what signals it is trying to send to a server, then try around giving it responses until something worked. They had to figure out the basic formatting of the game's communication, the syntax it expects, how inter-player connectivity is handled, how the game interprets missions and free roam, and so much more. On top of that, most actual //content// of the game is handled by the server, so they also had to completely write up a system for savegames, user accounts, storing what cars the player owns, player statistics, which missions they have completed, they had to rewrite a loot system, they basically had to rebuild most of the game's technical aspects from scratch. Considering that they started with zero, had to break through the game's nasty encryption ((Which is extremely aggressive even for industry standards, almost as if they went out of their way to prevent end users from ever doing something with the game.)) and single-handedly reverse-engineered every single signal the game and server could be sending to each other, fully including syntax and parameters, plus also writing an entire backend for inventories, profiles, progression, loot, netcode, etc. etc. it is a //wonder// they did it in less than two years.
-However, it also shows that it's really not that hard. It is absolutely possible. The Crew is, if anything, one of the more infrastructurally complex games. The developers would have had 99% of the necessary code because, well, they have a running copy of the literally right in front of them. This is a //search and replace// job at best, or a //copy paste// job at worst. Nobody has any business in saying that it's so prohibitively difficult. We're not stealing anyone's kidney, either. All we want is that if we buy a DVD of a movie, we want to be able to still watch the movie in three years, instead of it turning into E-Waste for no good reason.