geteilt von: https://feddit.org/post/2071604
This is your somewhat regularly scheduled Stop Killing Games update.
Stop Killing Games is an European Citizens Initiative aiming to keep games playable even after their developers and publishers have stopped supporting it.
Germany has hit the threshold sometime yesterday evening. France has also started to catch up. They are still below 50% but there growth over the last couple of days has been the biggest. Netherlands and Denmark are still in the low 90s.
The milestone comes on the eve of this years Gamescom in Cologne, Germany which is set to kick off today. SKG is not going to have an official presence there. (I've checked with the organisers) But if you are attending and want to help spread the word I'm happy to share official marketing material, either in the form of flyers or the files for flyers, so you can print your own. They come in both German and English. If you want some, send me a DM.
Relevant links:
That's most games. The only games that don't work that way are multiplayer games that run off of servers. The request is that developers give you the ability to run your own multiplayer server.
So a dev creates a game and nobody signs up to play it. They decide to shut down their servers. Following the rules, they'd have to give players the ability to run their own server. Now anyone can create a server and play it for free, or worse, a large studio runs a successful server and charges people to play a game they didn't make. This change shouldn't apply to server based multiplayer games.
The software to run a server for a game is different from the client software. I have to buy Minecraft to be able to download and use the client, but the server is freely available for anyone to host their own server.
Developers almost always release their server software for free if they offer it. The user is providing a service to the developer by offering another server for the community to use without the developer having to pay for it. There's no reason to charge for it.
You can even password protect your server and put it behind a patreon or other exclusive membership, but it's hard to compete with free servers. You have to offer some kind of special experience.
Everything you're complaining about has been common practice in the PC space for decades.
So why the law change?
Because some of my favourite games died this way. City of Heroes was closed by its owner but is being kept alive by its community and is a great example of what Stop Killing Games is advocating for, while Firefall is completely dead and never coming back. This problem will only get worse if we don't stop it now.
Firefall was shutdown in 2017. Has the problem gotten worse in the 7 years since it has been shutdown?
Before Firefall I also lost access to Chromehounds multiplayer, which was a very fun and unique mech combat game. That was in 2010 and the first time I genuinely felt the need for something like SKG.
Since the death of Firefall, I know Tera has been saved by its community but many other games have not. Among the more notable losses: Warcraft 3 and Overwatch both had their Blizzard-maintained versions permanently changed and Overwatch 1 is not playable at all. Warcraft 3 requires retail copies (out of production for many years) or piracy to play the original.
There are many more, I cannot possibly list them all.