My position is it's ridiculous. I agree with Thor. Saying all games must exist forever is too vague because I don't think all games should be forced to exist forever.

[–] Cowboy_Dude@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago (19 children)

Per the official Stop Killing Games FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq (apologies if formatting ends up looking weird)

Q: Aren't you asking companies to support games forever? Isn't that unrealistic?

A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:

'Gran Turismo Sport' published by Sony 'Knockout City' published by Velan Studios 'Mega Man X DiVE' published by Capcom 'Scrolls / Caller's Bane' published by Mojang AB 'Duelyst' published by Bandai Namco Entertainment etc.

[–] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca -2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (18 children)

That's fine for single player games but modifying some massive MMO so that someone can host it on a laptop is literally impossible. This language applies to everything. EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, all of it would need to be able to run on someone's home computer when they're purposefully built from the ground up to work on massive servers?

[–] echomap@fedia.io 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

People have been running private wow servers for a long time now apparently, so it seems possible for mmos.

[–] aksdb@lemmy.world -1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not a fair comparison. The private servers were written with the small hosting in mind. They would very likely never scale to what Blizzard has in place. For all I know, Blizzard could run their stuff on a Mainframe with specific platform optimizations against an IBM DB2.

But I also don't think this has to be transferable to a local setup without effort either. Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.

[–] Ookami38@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You found the point. It's not about having it scale to the level the official servers are at. It's about preserving it in some fashion, so that the dedicated few can still experience it. We don't need thousands, we need a few dozen. And, if developers develop with this design philosophy - that eventually the game servers will be shut down and we have to release a hostable version at end of life, then the games can be written from the ground up with that implementation in mind.

[–] aksdb@lemmy.world -1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Such an architecture is typically shit. Building a system that is simple AND scales high won't work. Complexity usually gets added to cope with scale. If we don't allow companies to build scalable (i.e. complex) systems, we simply won't get such games anymore.

Again: I am completely in favor of forcing devs to release everything necessary to host it. I am not in favor of forcing devs to target home machines for their servers, when their servers clearly have completely different requirements. That's unrealistic.

[–] hswolf@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Its not said that they need devs to target home machines, it says they need to give the resources so people can host it themselves, period.

Also, tell me you've never worked with scalable infrastructure without telling me you have never worked with it.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of games, including MMOs, that are privated hosted, and by that I don't mean hosted in a basement potato.

Look at Ragnarok servers, there are hundreds of them, DEDICATED servers, with all the newest technology, for an old game nonetheless.

Have you ever seem how massive the infrastructure are for those big minecraft multi-servers? Thousands and thousands of concurrent players.

Im not asking you to research what you're talking about or anything, but if you clearly dont know what you're talking about, refrain from sharing your opinion so you may not negatively influence a similar minded person.

[–] aksdb@lemmy.world -1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Its not said that they need devs to target home machines, it says they need to give the resources so people can host it themselves, period.

Before attacking me with such an arrogant rant, maybe read what I wrote.

I said:

Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.

So of course it's about releasing anything (!) at all.

I simply said that you can't compare a small fan project like a WoW self hosted server with Blizzards infrastructure and the requirements to have a high available setup for millions of players.

ArenaNet is quite open about their infrastructure and you can see that this is far from trivial, but also allows them to have zero downtime updates. That is a huge feat, but also means that self hosting that thing will be a pain in the ass. Yet I would not want them to not do this just so it could be easily (!) self hosted some time in the distant future.

[–] hswolf@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

Fair enough.

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