Sorry Pirate Software, But Stop Killing Games Isn’t Bad

The Stop Killing Games campaign started from the outrage after the videogame titled The Crew shut down and was made completely unplayable for everyone who has purchased it in the past (which, as far as I’m concerned, is nothing short of stealing from the consumers). After the campaign has been ongoing for a while, a European Citizens’ Initiative to pass a law forcing videogame publishers to leave their games in a playable state if they decide to stop supporting them.

Surprisingly, this has sparked controversy among the gaming community — with a notable anti-SKG voice being that of Jason Thor Hall, commonly known as Pirate Software. I, and many others in the gaming community, have immense respect for him and his opinions, seeing as Thor has been working in the industry for a long time. But even with all this respect, his response video to the Stop Killing Games campaign has a lot of fallacies and complete misunderstandings of the law it’s pushing.

There are a few points he pushes in the video, but the main and most important ones are licences not lasting forever, servers costing money, and the publishers having to give up their intellectual property to allow players to run their servers. While all of these can be issues with the campaign, when you think about it and look at examples from already existing games, you realise there isn’t really any major problem with the campaign that won’t be naturally solved during legislation. 

First, let’s look at the cost of running servers — obviously hosting them for hundreds or even thousands of players is very expensive. You need to have strong hardware, hire people to make sure it doesn’t fail, and pay the exorbitant electricity bill for them. Asking companies, and even more so indie developers, to host servers after the game has stopped being profitable is outrageous, but that’s not the only way to make it playable after its end of life. The solution already exists in every online Valve title ever made — let players host their own dedicated servers. Making it work is as simple as releasing the server files to the public and patching in a way to connect to the server you want — which is not more than a few hours of work in the worst-case scenario.

This, however, ties into the other issue — publishers would have to give up part of the IP if they were to release server files to the public. Except they kind of just… don’t. I can run a Team Fortress 2 server on my computer right now, and yet I still have zero rights to any TF2-related intellectual property. You could argue that in MMO games, releasing the server files to the public would mean letting them profit off the experience, thereby hurting the publishers’ intellectual property rights, but I disagree. This could be solved in two very simple ways: the publishers could either only upload the server files after they stop running their own servers or they could have a copy of the server files that don’t have any monetisation in them. The first option works because if they already gave up on the game, they should have no problem with other people making a small profit from running their own servers. The second option works because it’s only a little bit of work, and then no one can make money off of their IP. 

With The Crew, and other games that have licence deals, there’s the most complicated issue — what happens once the licence deals are over? And to that, I say: nothing, basically. You give the playerbase a way to run their own servers, then just remove the listing from the store, and let people who already bought the game keep it and play on their own servers. It’s not like single-player titles with limited-time license deals don’t already exist — for example, The Legend of Korra was a game with the Avatar licence, and once it expired, the title was delisted from all stores, but people who bought it can still, to this day, play it. 

Now we can tackle the last major problem, which is that fewer live-service games would be made if this law passes because every solution in the list would take more time and money from the publishers than they have to put into their titles now. The logic behind this makes sense, but the numbers completely disagree — live-service games make a lot of money — look at how much profit Fortnite made for Epic or Overwatch 2 for Blizzard. The time and cost it would take to make their games compliant with this law are so tiny compared to their profits that if they would complain about this law, I’d be on the floor laughing. As for smaller and indie publishers — if someone takes the time to develop a complete live-service game and has the money to run servers for it for even as little as a few weeks, they could spare a couple of hours to make private servers possible. And to prevent people from monetising over their game while it’s still in service, they could just not release the server files until deciding to abandon the project. 

In his second video on the topic, Thor has pointed out another problem related to monetisation — people could run exploits and bots on the main servers, kill the game, and then run their own private servers that they charge for entry. As an example of this happening, he gave Team Fortress 2, and yes, that has happened in that specific title, but that’s it. Hasn’t happened in any other online Valve title or any other live-service experience I can think of. Except Titanfall 2, and you know what saved it? A company that creates private servers for games — Northstar. Sure, the worst thing that could happen with this initiative is that this phenomenon we saw in TF2 will be a bit more common, which sucks, but it is more than worth it for consumers to be able to own their purchased games. Something I’ve seen pointed out by the community is that there are some copyright problems for online games if the server binaries use third-party code that the developers can’t legally distribute, which is true, sure. But I think requiring publishers to separate the third-party files they’re not allowed to distribute from the main server code is more than fair, we shouldn’t frown upon adding a bit more work into making videogames — especially considering almost every new release lately is a buggy mess.

Finally, Thor claims this initiative doesn’t actually preserve live-service games because the state in which they would be left after most of the playerbase quit would be bad and that some experiences need to only sell a licence so it could be revoked for cheaters. Now, the first point is just wrong — look at Counter-Strike 1.6; it’s still as fun as it was back then, with private servers running, people still play old games that were popular and killed by the publisher if they can. A game doesn’t have to stay at its prime forever to be preserved; it just needs to be playable. As for the second point, there are other ways to ban people than revoking their access to something they paid money for, mainly blacklisting them from the official servers. There’s no reason to not allow hackers to play in HvH servers, play with cheats against friends to troll, or just run their own server and do whatever in it. The thing a player should be purchasing is the game, the conditional part should be access to the official servers. As for the other points in his second video, they’re about refuting other specific arguments, which are not my arguments, so I see no reason to tackle those points.

So yes, the problems in Thor’s videos do exist and require some more thinking and work on the part of game publishers and developers — but there are solutions on the publishers’ side, and the benefit to gamers if this initiative passes compared to the harm caused to publishers is immensely bigger, so there’s no reason why we should concern ourselves with adding a few hours of work to every game. If a publisher decides that it’s not worth making a game just because there would be an extra two or three hours of work that won’t result in any profit to them, the world is probably better off without this particular game — a bad gaming experience is worse than no gaming experience. So I will continue to support the Stop Killing Games campaign and urge every European citizen to go sign the initiative.