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[ANSWERED] What's going on with some person seemingly called "PirateSoftware" and the stop killing games campaign?
(lemmy.abnormalbeings.space)
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Aside from the fact it's proprietary stuff they own... you can't just mandate that a company must release stuff they own to the public. They own it, they can do whatever they want with it.
This is the far better parallel to draw imo, and has the best chance of meaning anything.
Except for the fact for most games the online play is an extra feature and not the core game. And thus all game devs have to do is argue that "the game still works in offline play" and this won't apply to those games anyways.
Oh god no, it's way more complicated than that.
Modern game servers for major games are simply just not designed to be run locally bare metal. They're often in the form of complex stacks of multiple moving parts, shit like entire k8s deployment stacks with like 12 distinct resources, many of which might be tightly coupled to implementation details.
Such that even if they release that part public, it still wouldn't work because it depends on other pieces that literally don't exist anymore.
A great example of this is simply any login process.
It's super likely they have an auth server they run that you login to.
They use that auth server for multiple things, not just this 1 game.
They release, say, v2.4 of their game server program in 2025, it's tightly coupled to the auth server v1.7 api.
It works for about 4 months before they update to fix some stuff on their auth server, now their auth server is v1.8 annnnnd...
Now that v2.4 copy of your game server stops working cuz it's not compatible with v1.8 of their auth system, so it's now just dead.
You can't mandate they keep updating their old code on a game they don't support anymore.
So... you're fucked anyways.
You can't mandate they release their auth server cuz it's still in active use and you really don't want to expose the inner workings of the auth system to hackers for them to inspect.
So yeah, it's just not happening, sorry.
Designing a server to be self hosted is a critical choice you make very very early on in development. If it wasn't designed that way from the start, its useless to ask for a copy of it for self hosting, it will stop working eventually when external upstream apis stop being compatible.
If you mandate that they have to keep the servers running, they just wont bother providing access to the game in your country in the first place, because that would be absolutely insane. Any company would look at that and go "fuck that" and now if you live in that country, you just cant play the game, good job!
Same as above, if you make a law that causes the company to be unable to operate (you have asked something stupid of them) they just won't even provide the game in your country. If the EU passed something like this it would instantly hamstring their entire gaming industry and they'd very very quickly lose a tonne of people who leave to go work in saner places.
Same as above
This all costs money. Enormous amounts of money. If you make it cost too much money to provide the game in your country, they just wont even show up in the first place, so now you don't get to play it at all.
Then they ABSOLUTELY would never even think about providing the game in your country. Do you understand how insane it is to try and force a company to release their propietary STILL LIVE auth backend? Do you understand how huge of a security risk that is? No company would EVER be cool with that.
"Hey do we want to also spin up servers for our game in [country]?"
"If we do, that country has legally mandated if we shut the game down we have to release copies of the game and everything needed to run it to the public, which would include our still live auth servers and etc that our other games depend on"
"Oh, that's insane, no nevermind I guess they don't get to play our game then, lol"
You'd be incredibly naive to think this is a sane ask of any company, no one will do it. Ever.
Pretty ubiquitously the answer will be "don't release it in the EU at all, fuck em" because for most companies doing this would actively have huge downsides on the games performance.
What you need to wrap your head around is the complicated tech stacks that back these online systems aren't chosen for funises, they serve a purpose. These systems allow companies to reduce downtime, improve performance, provide telemetry and real time monitoring, etc etc. They use these for a reason.
If you tell the company "If you wanna be able to release your game in EU, you either have to commit to keeping your servers on, or, you have to fuck up your entire tech stack and ruin your games performance", they'll just go "Guess we won't release in the EU then lol"
Yeah, because they didn't offer the massive multitude of features that people expect of them today.
If you don't want these online features to be so popular, stop buying games that have them
And yet... crazy as it sounds, they still make tonnes and tonnes of money. Almost as if tonnes of other gamers out there like them and pay for them.
Legally mandating companies have to commit suicide to sell in your country isn't going to make them do it. It's just gonna make them stop selling the game in your country.
Correct, and the issue is what is being asked of this movement is so insane to try and comply with that "dont release in [country]" is the better answer
Sorry but that's just the breaks. You'll have to go convince a billion zoomers to stop paying for online microtransaction laden DLCs if you wanna make any actual headway here.