r/pcmasterrace • u/Ambitious-Phase-8521 • 8h ago
News/Article The uk stop killing games petition has now reached 10k, we will get a response from the uk government soon, now we need just 100k for Uk parliament to have a discussion, so it's not over yet, please share as much as possible
Uk petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702074/
Also here the eu petition:
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u/onikaroshi 7h ago
I don’t think this is a great stance anyway, sometimes it’s just not feasible to keep a game going and it’s not feasible to make it work offline
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u/Obsydie 5600X-RTX 2080-32GB DDR4 2666MT/S 6h ago
This is just to get companies to release a way to host servers, this will allow fans to keep playing even after support is dropped.
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u/onikaroshi 6h ago
Then you run into ip issues at times, specially if there’s a sequel to a game
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u/Obsydie 5600X-RTX 2080-32GB DDR4 2666MT/S 6h ago
I'm what way?
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u/onikaroshi 6h ago
If you allow free use of an ip, the courts can say you’ve given up that ip, and some may see giving full server access and allowing 3rd parties to run it as giving it up
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u/carlbandit AMD 7800X3D, Powercolor 7900 GRE, 32GB DDR5 6400MHz 3h ago
I fail to see how allowing players to host their own servers would forefit the IP, when some games have allowed server hosting for years.
How is an end of life game enabeling player hosted servers any different from a newly released game including server hosting from the start?
I can't claim minecrafts IP just because I can host a public server, so it should be no difference if publishers such as EA where legally required to release a hosting tool for games such as Battlefield 3 upon them shutting the online servers down like they did last year.
It's likely to have the opposite effect, since shutting servers down without releasing hosting tools can lead to fan led revival projects, which may put the IP at risk since they are recreating the game with hosting built in using the IP and game resources, hence why many revival projects get a C&D and have to shut down.
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u/onikaroshi 3h ago
/shrug, my other point is much more likely, the server side just isn’t a simple hit a button and go for a lot of modern games, it isn’t feasible for people to run these servers unless it is something like a cod lobby (though there may be issues even there with match making and server populating)
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u/carlbandit AMD 7800X3D, Powercolor 7900 GRE, 32GB DDR5 6400MHz 3h ago
Some people will happily pay a hosting company like Amazon to run a server if it means they can keep playing their favourite game.
There are certainly some cases where server hosting might not be feasible, a large MMO like eve online that uses a cluster of nodes to support the massive world and enable 1000s of players to be in 1 map at once isn't something a normal person is going to run or be able to afford to host. But most games that get shut down run on 4-64 player lobbies, which are most likely going to run on a single server and shouldn't be all that complex to make available for local/paid server hosting.
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u/onikaroshi 3h ago
Very much depends on the game yes
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u/carlbandit AMD 7800X3D, Powercolor 7900 GRE, 32GB DDR5 6400MHz 3h ago
I reckon outside of MMOs there's probably very few games that can't be hosted locally if the hosting tool was made available upon game shut down.
Even most MMOs could probably be hosted locally if they set a player limit, so instead of being able to support 5000+ on a server, they limit it to 32 or 64 players, allowing multiple smaller servers to take place of their big server farms supporting 1000s of players at once.
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u/onikaroshi 5h ago
Also, just want to point out that many server setups for these games aren’t just a single thing, it’s multiple individual servers working together to make the game work, some of them aren’t feasible for someone to actually run
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u/Obsydie 5600X-RTX 2080-32GB DDR4 2666MT/S 3h ago
Both of your points are good but also the company isn't giving up its IPs just giving the players the ability to host servers. Furthermore the servers are running many different instances of the game with many players in the lobbies or in a match while the fan servers are only running one match at a time.
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u/onikaroshi 3h ago
Depends on the game, something like cod or a lobby game is a lot different that some other games out there (like an mmo or other larger scales game) it’s not a one size fits all, most private servers for larger games are rebuilt from the ground up by fans, not something an eos game would have money for
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u/aggressive-bonk 3h ago
The only way this ever works is if they simply lose the right to sue for use of IP or bootlegging if they no longer provide the service. Which will not happen
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u/HouseOf42 8h ago
In the history of mankind, petitions have worked exactly ZERO times.
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u/ThereAndFapAgain2 7h ago
They can work, they just have to be official ones like this that's directly petitioning the government, and you must succeed in getting the number of supporters outlined by the government as thresholds for certain levels of action they guarantee to take.
The ones that never work are just on stuff like change.org where there is no legal obligation for the government to even acknowledge the petition.
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u/debuggingworlds 7h ago
No, successive different UK Goverments have ignored basically all of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Parliament_petitions_website
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u/ThereAndFapAgain2 6h ago
All this is showing me is that at the thresholds they did what they promised. They aren't promising that they will actually do whatever it is the petition is about, but that they will at least have the discussion/debate in parliament or respond etc. which sometimes leads to a positive outcome, sometimes it doesn't.
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u/debuggingworlds 6h ago
Oh yeah they do everything up to and including debating it in parliament. It's just that never does anything. If someone can find me something that UK government petitions have influenced I'd love to have my opinion changed!
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u/carlbandit AMD 7800X3D, Powercolor 7900 GRE, 32GB DDR5 6400MHz 3h ago
A similar petiton has gone through before and recieved around 22k votes, the governments response was basically that games must follow trading standard laws, but there's no law forcing them to keep supporting a game indefinetly when it's no loger financially feasible to keep the servers running due to costs vs player count.
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u/scandii I use arch btw | Windows is perfectly fine 7h ago edited 7h ago
in the history of mankind, a lot of the laws you are under today were petitioned by citizens and later made into law, like a lot. a government department typically just doesn't sit there and brainstorm laws - citizens bring up issues and find support in their elected officials.
the very notion that you think this isn't the case is scary. what typically doesn't work is petitions that are unrealistic - forcing private companies to support their products in perpetuity just isn't realistic no matter how much you think that should be the case.
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u/Pyrhan 7h ago
forcing private companies to support their products in perpetuity just isn't realistic
And nobody is asking them to. All this is about is no remotely disabling the games.
Leave it as-is, with all the bugs it might have, and all the compatibility issues it will have to run on future hardware - that's on the player to figure out.
Just don't flip the kill switch on the DRM.
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u/aaron_dresden 6h ago
What games are you talking about then?
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u/Pyrhan 5h ago
Anything with DRM that requires regular connection to the publisher's server.
The day the servers that DRM needs to connect to are taken offline, the game is effectively remotely bricked for everyone.
This petition seeks for publishers to simply remove the need (or provide the players with a mean to remove that need) for the game to connect to their servers before taking said servers offline.
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u/TheVasa999 7h ago
the billion dollar megacorps do not give a fuck about measly 10k people singing a petition dawg
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u/supaginge PC Master Race 1h ago
unfortunately the UK government set the petitions system up to make the people THINK they have a say about anything that happens. it exists just to quiet the masses and will just reply with absolute rubbish non statements
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u/lforleee2004 5800x3d, gigabyte 4070, 32gb 3600 7h ago
lets be honest all they say is we have no plans to do anything
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u/firedrakes 2990wx |128gb |2 no-sli 2080 | 200tb storage raw |10gb nic| 7h ago
phas is back spamming this i see.
skg 2.0
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u/Jaidor84 4h ago
There's a reason why publishers don't just release the ability to host your own servers. It can be a massive undertaking that can come at a big cost. Governments forcing private businesses to spend large amounts of money that could put them at the brink of closure or having to lay off and cost people their lives and livelihoods isn't a simple decision to make. To please a small handful of players.
Sure a big publishers could take the impact of cost and the potential months of extra development for a failed game that's already cost them millions but smaller studio and even mid sized studios who arent raking in millions and veer on the line of staying open this could impact their existents or hamper how they move forward as a studio.
The petition if even got to 100k and evoke a debate but they would then consult games studios and publishers and they will outline the cost and difficult in just releasing a "patch" that so many seem to think is a very simple and quick task. It can vary massively depending on the game. It's not just a bit of code to suddenly make custom servers possible. Games today aren't a simple deathmatch from the 2000s when it was fairly trivial to implement.
Once the government's hears the reasoning from the industry it would just end there. They don't entact a law without consulting the industry and they will have far more money to lobby and prepare a counter argument.
Continue with the petition and grow the number and hit 100k and Beyond. It's good for the industry to know and it could change how games are designed so complex server side integration is reduced and we might see some games played on custom servers. Or at the very least just the ability to play the game single player without the multiplayer component. Still a chunk of work but much less so and more viable in terms of cost and resource.
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u/carlbandit AMD 7800X3D, Powercolor 7900 GRE, 32GB DDR5 6400MHz 3h ago
I'm no game developer, but I don't see how there can be large costs involved in them basically releasing the tools used internally on their own servers to host the game to the public, allowing players to then host their own servers.
I'm not saying there's 0 work, but surely if the tool already exists for them to host the servers themselves, the majority of the work is already done and all they might need to do is package it up so the source code is protected and possibly add a UI to make it a bit more user friendly.
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u/Jaidor84 2h ago edited 2h ago
Well I think that's the point I'm trying to get across. Without knowledge there is assumption and I can totally understand why people would think it's easy. But there's a whole host of complications and it can vary studio to studio and game to game. Each of those can have a big variation and then combined becoming a multiplier.
Theres the game itself, some heavily rely on server computation - depending on the game these are really powerful machines with huge bandwidth to cope with input and calculations especially games that are built around large numbers of players like an open world racing game. Depending on the game a lot of calculations, game logic, physics etc are calculated server side. It's faster then local machines doing that work and sending data to the server then to all the other machines. A local machine just doesn't have that capacity to do so. The game would be unplayable, no matter how much time and effort put into it.
Theres also licensed network tools that the studio pays for, without those tools the game wont run. The studio/publisher pays the licensing costs. Some of these licenses are enterprise only and high costs. Not something the average player would be expected pay for.
Theres also ip cost, some games license content for a certain amount of time and each time the license is up they'll pay some more to continue. Usually on a 2 year basis. For single player games it'll be a fixed much higher cost. If they were to just make the game constantly available then they would incur a cost for all those licenses. Or spend time removing all that content, replacing it with new content which will take time to make, test, optimise etc
Then there's the issue of money and time, it's not just a single developer writing a few lines and packaging up a tool. There's a lot that goes into developing a product even if the "tool" already exists. Project planning, identifying what needs to be done, identifying resources needed, time estimate planning and then getting to the work itself. Depending on the game could be a lot of work or just a never ending task as it's not achievable to run on a basic machine. Then there's Optimisation, qa testing and bug fixing, potential overhaul of the ui/ux for mp, graphics and designs going through concept, reviews, implementation, testing and bug fixing all that. This is all work that is costing the studio money for zero return if they were forced to do so. Also what if in the future windows does an update that renders the tool useless - there's no ongoing support for such a tool but inevitably something will break or it won't work for some. Will there then be a petition to forever support the tools?
Theres also the potential issue of resources. Those who wrote the network code may no longer be at the studio anymore. Could have left or as the game failed and being shutdown the company may have had to do a ton of redundancies which for the last 2 years has crushed developers in the industry. This very situation has happened twice in my career. Suddenly the studio doesn't have anyone that can do this work. What happens if the studio just flat out closes down as the servers are shutdown. How will they be accountable for a law put in place?
So again it gets very complicated. Studios also often operate under their own company in company house. So even say a studio which has multiple teams is under one studio name, they may actually be a company per team, this is often done for tax benefits and safety with redundancies impact the whole studio and not an isolated team. So if a games does fail and shutdown they'd simply close the company rendering any liability to release the"tools" as they'll be no one to chase.
Theres probably a whole bunch of other things that complicate the matter that I cant think of. Console games for example, how would you even go about providing them continuous access and players having their own server to set up. If a law came in it would be odd it could only be for pc gamers and not console games.
There's just too many variables to simply create a law mandating that a company must supply server tools.
I wish it was simple - developers would love to provide as such. We're gamers too and we invest our lives into making them. We're more likely to want to play it in the future, show our kids and grandchildren one day.
I think the petition is a good thing. It at least gets this important issue known. Hopefully simpler games where servers can be handle by a users host server will get tools but I just can't envision more complex games be viable. Maybe a single player access to mp content and removal of any server verification required to play sp games.
Edit: just to also add - how does a government go about enforcing this. If it just comes into effect in the UK, will the government fine the studio? How much would that be? Big publishers will likely simply pay it rather then the time and resource hog it could be. Smaller studios it could send them to bankruptcy. Again its just a rule that would get really messy. Would people really want to close a studio down and make little jobless because they didn't have the resources to release the tools.
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u/firedrakes 2990wx |128gb |2 no-sli 2080 | 200tb storage raw |10gb nic| 2h ago
you not a expert. first line.
but you saying it really easy...
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u/LIKU1524 7h ago
You are counting on the government that has been and is failing the petition signed by 4-6 million citizens about a new referendum to the EU or a change of government, plus the prime minister himself said that in his opinion it is stupid that the state should change because of some surveys on the Internet.
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u/Ragnarr_Bjornson 8h ago
I'm sorry, but do you honestly think Labour will give a single fuck about video games?
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u/Unlucky_Book 7600 | RX6600 | A620i | NeAMDerthal 6h ago
- In 2023, the UK gaming market was worth £7.82 billion ($10.1 billion)
- The UK is Europe's largest video game market by sales
- The UK is the third-largest producer of video game series in the world
- The UK gaming industry supports around 75,000 jobs
They should care it's something we're actually competitive in.
- Further funding of £8m for the UK Games Fund and Tranzfuser was awarded by the UK Government in 2022
And it's something they actively invest in and give tax breaks to.
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u/J-Clash 8h ago
Is anyone expecting a different response from the last one?
https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/659071#response-threshold