stop killing games and the death of technical literacy

the stop killing games movement is currently widely discussed. in my humble opinion, it's important to signal to companies that the consumer is fighting for their right to own things they bought. that's why i would encourage my readers to support the initiatives if they are either a part of EU or the UK.

so, why am i talking about it in this short blog post, if i am considering myself a supporter? i have never seen this much (technical) misinformation being spread around. the discussions i have seen, have mostly boiled down to implementation details, for example if/why not studio X could split of their server implementation in a way it could be distributed.

the technical implementation details do not matter, because in short, the law that may (or may not) get created does not affect any existing games or games that were in development before it came into effect ¹.

any game that starts development after the new law passed, will have to consider the implication and have a plan for the games lifecycle.

did you ever ask yourself why modern game development is so constrained, that a simple request, like being able to run (single player) games without internet or after a service has been shut down is nearly impossible to do for game studios?

it boils down to developers taking shortcuts (and therefore saving money on development). while in earlier games, studios had to do their own implementations including for example matchmaking or communication, in today's world everything is bought from external suppliers and integrated into the final product. Some modern games famously don't even have any of their own assets, but buy everything in the store of their preferred game engine (we call the more obviously lazy ones "asset flips"). this also affects service / single player "always online" games. if licenses of bought components restrict delivery of even binary code to the end consumer, it's only feasible to run them within restricted environments, like machines (read "someone else's computer" or "the cloud") of the publisher of the game.

the companies taking this concept to another level are the hyperscalers (for example Amazon AWS). they build tools (especially for servers and operations) to ease the development and deployment of modern games. in the case of AWS the benefits are usually pay-as-you-go model (lower costs), no scaling issues and much less development effort. the only downside is portability. Amazon and other companies in this space don't want developers to easily be able to move to competitors, so they make it harder for things to work without their proprietary components. and these components are both trade secrets and highly protected by legal contracts (because they make the vendor a lot of money).

so what if a company just stitches together many such components to create a game with the least possible amount of effort? and what is the outcome if this law passes?

1. game developers can no longer use restrictive tools and libraries to build games, because they need to consider the new law.
2. because of this the development costs increase.
3. the price of the games and development time increase.
4. development companies and publishers will reach out to the providers to develop tooling and libraries that fit the new laws and permit distribution.
5. if the specific vendor does not allow distribution under the new law, they will go out of business. new tools and libraries that are less restrictive replace them (over time).
6. things will return to status quo with better protections and outcomes for customers.

what if i told you that there is a workaround planned for the companies that can not implement any technical solution for this issue?

just be transparent with your customers

• if you plan to shut down the game in 5 years or whenever profits decrease, let the customer know before he buys the game. let the customer decide if they want to buy your game if they can only play it for 2 years.
• give the customer early notice if you run into any issues. try to find a solution to help the customer retain at least part of the value of your game.
• refund the customers some part of the sales price if you can no longer fulfill your side of the contract (e.g if the customer no longer being able to use the product within the timeframe they paid for when they bought the game).

only with these changes can we move towards a future where the customers own what they paid for.