Not a week comes by without a reminder about https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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'member when we were able to self host servers of our games? I member. CoD4 was awesome because of that, later the pirated version of MW2 too. These games (the first MW and MW2) are still alive because of that.
Is Enemy Territory still alive?
Cod WAW has user servers but they stopped paying for their anti cheat so vanilla servers either block you or are fudged
Plutonium fixes this
we should push for them to release server software
Not quite as important as the right to repair, but close in spirit: I would love to see a legal requirement for shut-down online games to release the server specs needed for the community to replace/maintain them.
Edit: And data export for existing players, so our game progress can be reconstructed on community servers, of course.
stopkillinggames.com
One of their ideas is allow private match/self hosted online services for any game that shuts down it's servers.
shutting down most central servers is a death sentence anyway. I'm not putting another decade of grinding into a private server when my Diablo 3 characters are gone.
Yeah... For battle royal and extraction shooters I think it would also be pretty hard to come close to the experience on private servers.
Granted, I wouldn't mind being able to play e.g. Hunt Showdown with some friends on a private server/in a private match. It wouldn't be what it is today, but it could still be fun.
It's not like games with large populations are really getting shut down anyways. The games that are killed are already dead for most people. I really only am bothered by it when it's a clearly single player/offline friendly game.
BRs never caught my interest but I always assumed they where a clean slate each game, which is actually the perfect kind of game for private servers.
The thing about them is you need people to be at close to the same skill level or they're just not fun.
Agreed. But not impossible. Insignia got original Halo 2 Xbox Live servers back online. Most nights you can find a game easily with 20-40 people online during peak hours. It requires a soft mod and maybe 1-2 hours of set up to get online. If anyone could just turn on their old Xbox and play, I'm confident those numbers would be in the hundreds at least.
Allowing people to run private servers is an easy way to allow those that want to play to keep playing in an era where most games have some level of online functionality.
It requires a soft mod and maybe 1-2 hours of set up to get online.
My Xbox 360 is gathering dust because, unlike all my other consoles, I am not able to mod it myself :/ (softmod).
I did not know the original Xbox had a softmod though.
honestly copyright law shouldn't apply to games that are no longer fully playable for any reason
But it does for proprietary code.
I’ve found that most people on this site don’t care about copyright in any form, so they’ll just ignore it like everything else
Well, when companies are cutting off people's purchases and wiping works from our cultural history, a little bit of disregard for the law that is complicit with it is pretty much necessary.
Say, it's through copyright violation that we can still play games from Mario Maker 1 even though the servers were shut down. People figured out how to copy it even though they weren't allowed to.
If this is wrong, maybe the law should be fixed to provide a proper path.
This is not enough, the code is old with vulnerabilities that will be exploited with automation nowadays. To correctly do this you need open source server code, or to have it maintained.
This is not enough, the code is old with vulnerabilities
You have misunderstood. I am not talking about continuing to run the old server binaries.
What do you mean by specs then? The protocol? The "protocol" is the ABI of the server binary, the logic of it. The networking protocol is super simple. You need the server code for replicating any server.
I mean whatever is needed for the community to replace/maintain the servers, just as I said.
That would obviously include the network protocols, but might also include data structures, API contracts, map data, timetables, and any number of other things.
I wrote in general terms deliberately, since it would mean different things for different games, and to allow for the possibility of releasing source code instead of descriptive specs.
(And no, source code is not the only way to do it. If that were the case, the community-developed game servers that have been made through reverse engineering could never have existed.)
I really hope that governments, especially the EU, recognise the isse server shutdowns and games being lost to history poses. It should be illegal for companies to make your already purchased games unplayable if not community hosted alternatives exist.
On that note it should also be fully legal to emulate and freely distribute any game that isn't on sale anymore. Years of cultural history are being destroyed for corporate profit.
What any corporation hears:
[some noise] for corporate profit
I don't really expect a business to be forced to run a game in perpetuity, but at least they shouldn't be allowed to C&D you from doing it if they aren't.
They would never have such expectation if they simply allowed players to host it to begin with. This used to be the norm, until companies figured out that it's easier to control, monetize and force obsolescence to push players into a newer product if they are the only ones hosting servers.
I'm a developer. It's work to do anything, code doesn't grow on the LLM tree yet. That's a feature that would have to be implemented. Anything you ask the business to put effort in is a negative to the cause (and the cause is good), something for the businesses to latch onto to stop the law from changing.
The best argument you can make is 'let us figure it out, just don't sue us'. Anything else you get is a blessing.
It's work to do anything, but we routinely see small indie studios managing to release player-hosted games just fine, while large studios don't bother. Even though it also costs them more to run all the servers on their own. So I'm not so sure it's just a matter of saving costs.
I agree. Hell, older games could be put on digital stores right now. The PS3 had a ton of PS1 emulated classics, and even then there were a bunch left off for unknown (or licensing) reason.
If you're playing on ps3 or emulation you can play online using lbpunion.com they're currently looking into ps4 support, but just know that it requires CFW.
Welcome to the world of tomorrow. Who we all helped to make.
This is fun because I have no idea what this is because I was immediately bombarded with ads.
Guy shouts “welcome to the world of tomorrow” from Futurama EP 1 when Fry gets unfrozen.
Could have been an image with a caption.
It's a very fitting quote for an ad barrage
We "all helped" as in people in charge gave us no choice and we didn't choose the choices we didn't have.
Hell, even then there's still people fighting to preserve and host games on their own regardless.
Sounds like they tried to patch some security vulnerabilities and it broke something so catastrophic that they would need do to a major re-write.
Does this also break the single player portion?
No. Just the online components.
Never played it, but this news is always sad, hopefully the community is in the works of archiving this, of already did.
Shame there wasn't more notice. I'm sure the community would have tried to do something.
Thanks a lot, Biden! ~/s~
O7
O7
I don't trust them as a company. They basically gave up on dreams even though it was actually a moderately successful product.
But they became really obsessed with their vision of what the product should be rather than adding the content that the player base wanted.