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We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws. Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create. We welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policy makers and those who have led the European Citizens Initiative in the coming months.
Why could you turn a battle royal game into a local only split screen game for 2-4 people?
Give players a copy of the server so they can host their own, or patch the game to allow direct connections like games used to have in the 90s and 00s?
That sounds like an online only title. I thought we were going to “change the design.”
Seems like your reading comprehension is lacking, so I’m going to encourage you to reread the entire exchange up to this point. If you can’t figure it out, you’re not someone worth discussing with.
What “online only” means is the need to authenticate to a proprietary server. After logging in, you are then (potentially) directed to a random server to play on.
If you are not online, you cannot authenticate and therefor not be directed to a server. This means you cannot play the game. When the authentication server and infrastructure behind the game is taken offline, the game becomes unplayable, because it is online only.
If a final patch were to be made where either a private authentication server would be made available for you to self-host, or authenation to be completely removed, you could play the game either offline on your device locally or LAN, or online by anyone who cares enough to host a server with the game logic. It would no longer be “online only” since you would have a choice. You can choose to play offline, or choose to play online.
If a game actually needs servers beyond the authentication part, then those should be made available too, so that anyone, again, can play locally or online.
It’s logical that if game servers are made available, a game can never be “online only” again, because you could host the server on your pc and connect to localhost.
Your whole argumentation about “online only” game design falls completely flat. You are mixing concepts that have nothing to do with one another.
A game can be a battle royale by design, gameplay wise, and have the ability to host your own servers by design, technical architecture wise.
Quake Live used to be online only. You could not host your own servers. They released for steam and made it possible to host your own servers. The old authentication system was taken down, logins are no longer required, and now you just launch the game and pick a server in a built in server browser. It should be the standard and Quake Live should serve as an example of how it should be done.
I tried to pick the most obvious example of an online only title.
What’s the plan with a 100 player battle royal game?
Edit: the guy I replied to chose to quote someone saying a game is online only, and their suggestion was to change that.
And then ya’ll come in with replies about keeping it online only, and they have 55 upvotes as of this edit.
As long as people can host a server instance, does it matter?
Hypothetically, even if it costs 1000$ per hour in AWS fees to get the required hardware to run that, at least you have the option to, alternatively have a peer to peer option to play smaller version on a LAN with a max of however many players your own network can support, there could be many implementations, which at the end of the day would still allow you to play the game when the official servers (authentication or room hosts) are shuttered and inaccessible
The main point of SKG is that currently, we, as customers, are not even getting the short end of the stick, we are getting no stick, despite having paid for it.
And ultimately, at the end of the day, not our problem to try to figure this out, the point is we’re unhappy with the current situation and want things to change.
Also note that none of this is retroactive, will only apply to games released in the future, so having an end of life plan as a requirement from the get-go is pretty simple to work on when nothing was done yet.
That’s not “changing that” it’s keeping it online only.
You can host the server on the same machine the game is running on, it’s not uncommon during development especially the early stages.
Hosting your own server and playing multiplayer games over LAN is playing offline. Is that what you’re asking?
I can find a community for a fighting game from 2012 to get together every Thursday night for a 30-person tournament via Discord. 100 people in a battle royale could work much the same.
That fighting game is not online only, I bet.
I replied to someone saying that an online only game should change their design.
It’s not online only, but this Thursday night get-together is online-only.
Why not?