> Yes, and it was an awful experience with a fraction of the playerbase.
“awful experience”? That’s a very very surprising thing to read. My personal experience has been the exact opposite. I’ve personally experienced two types of games:
1. Games where you can choose a server manually (i.e., by using a server browser or by manually entering an IP address).
2. Games where you have let some sort of matchmaking system choose a server for you.
For games in the first category, I end up building up a favorites list of servers where I fit in and am appreciated. For games in the second category, I am not able to do that. As a result, I get a lot of hate.
I love being cheery and spreading positive vibes in voice chat. Some people like it when I do that. Other people hate it when I do that because they think that my behavior is gay and because they hate gay people. For games in the first category, I am able to avoid the haters by playing on servers where haters are not welcome. For games in the second category, I have to just hope that I get lucky. In practice, I end up being unlucky so often that it makes me never want to play games that fall into the second category.
So from my perspective, the older way of doing things was not an awful experience. It’s the newer way of doing things (the way that allows for games to be killed) that has been an awful experience.
> TF2 server browser, where many of the good servers were also not publicly listed and head to be discovered outside of the game is also not really a tractable option.
I love TF2. I play it all the time. I didn’t know that there was a bunch of good servers that are not publicly listed and had to be discovered outside of the game. Could you link to some of them? I would love to check them out.
> I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would be fine. I’ve also worked on games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic - running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda, and massive third party dependencies. Getting a “mini self hosted server application” out of this is a rewrite.
This is a good point. For some games, complying with a Stop Killing Games law would be easy. For those games, the developers could simply drop a server binary over the fence like you mentioned. For other games, complying with a Stop Killing Games law would be much more difficult. For those other games, the developers would have to put in significant effort or refund customers once the game is killed.
That being said, I think that what we are talking about here is short-term pain for long-term gain. In the short-term, adaptation will be difficult for some developers, but those developers will eventually learn how to make games that allow players to host their own servers on their own infrastructure.
> Pretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.
Well, the comment that you replied to said “Gaming companies did not need to insert themselves into the process in the first place.” If the gaming company inserts itself into the process in such a way that the multiplayer part of the game would stop functioning if the game company were to disappear, then the game company is a single point of failure. And it would be a single point of failure that cannot be repaired or replaced by end users. In general, I would consider single points of failure to be design flaws. In this particular case, I would consider it to be a particularly egregious design flaw because it’s actually easier to create a multiplayer game that does not have the design flaw (e.g., local split screen multiplayer, releasing the server binary) than it is to create a multiplayer game that does have the design flaw. In this case, it really is bad design.
Also, I’m highly skeptical that this would have a chilling effect on novel games. Could you give an example of a game that might be chilled in this situation?
> The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.
Personally, I’m a big fan of this idea. I really like the way that games like Doom do things: the engine itself is FOSS, but in order to play Doom, you need DOOM.WAD which is proprietary and must be purchased. DOOM.WAD doesn’t contain any code (it only contains graphics, sounds, level geometry, etc.) so you don’t have to run any unfree software in order to play Doom.
However, there are some people in the free software movement that disagree with me. The Free Software Foundation maintains a wiki called the Free Software Directory. Here’s a quote from the Free Software Directory’s rules for what can and cannot be included in the Free Software Directory [1]:
> Edge Cases
> This is not static information. Policies about adding non-free code obviously don't change, however the way projects are licensed or the way they interact each other is definitely subject to change.
> […]
> • If software is freely licensed but is bundled with artwork that is not, do we consider the program to be free? From RMS "Images and sounds need to be free if they are essential parts of the software. But if they are just decoration, and easily replaced, then they do not have to be free." Sound and artwork fall into the category of essential for interactive games. Logos on otherwise utilitarian projects do not.
That being said, that same set of rules also says [2]:
> Free programs
> Software needs to meet the free software definition to be listed at the Free Software Directory as well as follow these guidelines and requirements for entries.
> […]
> • The software program itself should not package any program-data, art assets loaded by the program, or software which is under a nonfree license. If art or data is available for the game under a nonfree license but not packaged directly with it, that is a different matter and one we should be more flexible about.
Those two quotes seem like they were written by two different people who have opposite opinions on this topic, but IDK.
Anyway, my point is: I really like it when games do that, but it seems that at least some people in the free software movement disagree.
> To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit.
No, it doesn’t. It just requires that we go back to making multiplayer games the old-fashioned way (the good way). Descent 3 was released in 1999. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer to this day if you want to [1], and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop you from doing so. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer because Descent 3 allows you to host your own servers and allows you to manually enter IP addresses in order to connect to servers (this is necessary because the services that Descent 3’s in-game server browsers depend on no longer exist). Descent 3’s source code was released in 2024 [2] which certainly helps with multiplayer preservation, but I can tell you that a small number of people definitely did play multiplayer Descent 3 in 2023 when the source code was not yet available.
Descent: Underground was released to Steam Early Access in 2015 [3]. Unlike the previous Descent games, Descent: Underground (or at least, that iteration of Descent: Underground) was pretty much multiplayer-only. The developers of Descent: Underground did not allow players to host their own Descent: Underground servers. (I think that they had some plan to allow for hosting your own servers in the future, but that didn’t get implemented in time). At some point, the official servers for that version of Descent: Underground were shutdown. As a result, you can no longer play Descent: Underground’s multiplayer.
The fact that I can play the multiplayer for a 27-year-old game, but I can’t play the multiplayer for an 11-year-old game is unsurprising. Many older multiplayer games did not have fatal design flaws that would cause them to die after certain period of time. Many newer multiplayer games do have such fatal design flaws. The good news is that this means that we already know how to stop killing multiplayer games. We just have to go back to doing things the way that we used to do them.
(In fact, some games don’t even need to “go back to doing things the way that we used to do them”. Take Counter-Strike 2, for example. Counter-Strike 2 was released in 2023 and does indeed allow players to host their own servers.)
The statement “the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games” is absolutely ridiculous.
> At this rate, how likely is it that Codeberg is just going to become a wasteland of abandoned ideological forks (with the exception of one or two major projects) by next year?
> There are no self-destruct mechanisms put into games.
That’s not accurate. I used to play the Android version of EA Tetris [1]. I liked the game so much that I paid to remove ads from it. One day, I opened the game, and the game told me that I wasn’t allowed to play it unless I installed an update for it. I installed the update, and launched the game again. The game then told me that I would not be allowed to play it after a specific date. After that date passed, I tried opening the game again, and it refused to let me play the game.
For more examples of games that contain self-destruct mechanisms, see the Stop Killing Games wiki [2].
> But at least by going down that road, you end up with more games, better games, and people learning skills throughout the process. And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.
Yes, but in that scenario, some really good games would still die. So it would good to make it illegal to kill games in addition to making more games.
> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
I mean, in the short term, yes, the Stop Killing Games movement is demanding that others do some work for them. But, in the long term, the Stop Killing Games movement is asking for others to do less work.
The only reason why games are being killed are because companies are putting in extra effort to include self-destruct mechanisms in games. If a company doesn’t want to bother disarming these self-destruct mechanisms, then there is a simple solution: don’t create the self-destruct mechanisms to begin with. It’s much easier to create games that don’t have self-destruct mechanisms.
I’m a strong supporter of demanding that companies stop doing bad things and that they put in effort to undo the bad things that they have already done.
Eh, I don’t really think that this is an “or” situation. I think that this is an “and” situation. The last time that I set up Xash3D FWGS, I had to copy files from the version of Half-Life that I own on Steam into a different folder so that those files could be loaded by Xash 3D FWGS. I haven’t tried Xash 3D FWGS in a while, but it looks like you still have to do that [1]. Also, are you sure that the Steam version of Half-Life is Windows only?
“awful experience”? That’s a very very surprising thing to read. My personal experience has been the exact opposite. I’ve personally experienced two types of games:
1. Games where you can choose a server manually (i.e., by using a server browser or by manually entering an IP address).
2. Games where you have let some sort of matchmaking system choose a server for you.
For games in the first category, I end up building up a favorites list of servers where I fit in and am appreciated. For games in the second category, I am not able to do that. As a result, I get a lot of hate.
I love being cheery and spreading positive vibes in voice chat. Some people like it when I do that. Other people hate it when I do that because they think that my behavior is gay and because they hate gay people. For games in the first category, I am able to avoid the haters by playing on servers where haters are not welcome. For games in the second category, I have to just hope that I get lucky. In practice, I end up being unlucky so often that it makes me never want to play games that fall into the second category.
So from my perspective, the older way of doing things was not an awful experience. It’s the newer way of doing things (the way that allows for games to be killed) that has been an awful experience.
> TF2 server browser, where many of the good servers were also not publicly listed and head to be discovered outside of the game is also not really a tractable option.
I love TF2. I play it all the time. I didn’t know that there was a bunch of good servers that are not publicly listed and had to be discovered outside of the game. Could you link to some of them? I would love to check them out.