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.
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 do you mean?
Changing the design happens during the pre-production. This will not effect any games retroactively. As unfortunate as it is, until the EU parliament decides on a law or regulation all games destined to die will die.
Any games that are grandfathered in, would be done so by the good will of the corporations if they do wish to.
I mean, taking a 100 person battle royal and changing it so dramatically would be quite odd to do.
I picked an extreme example for discussion reasons.
It’s possible to host your own Arma server that can handle 100 players. Ironically Arma has a Battle Royale mode. It’s not rocket science.
What exactly is this dramatic change that you think would have to happen?
I think it mostly revolves around how you get 100 players together for a good game. The match making part. I’m skeptical of the quality of match making, but that’s not a showstopper for people committed to playing. But if we set aside the need for someone to maintain hosting, then it becomes peer to peer or a lan party, or a combination of the two.
I remember what it was like rounding up and wrangling 80 people to raid in WoW back in the day.
And none of this is a showstopper I don’t see why we can’t talk about that. It’s not like discussing the difficult edge cases or the feasibility of the details could harm things.
My initial question in this thread framed changing the game design, not networking stack. So it was about making it all local/same screen only. An absurd example on purpose.
The initial post you replied to was talking about changing the design, not the game design. I think the thread got off course because you interpreted that as game design. As long as users can host the servers themselves, the game design can remain exactly the same. Even if the game can only be played when it’s orchestrated by museum curators or something, that’s still preferable than the game being totally dead. If you’ve ever been to PAX East, there’s always a room with a full networked game of Steel Battalion multiplayer via LAN. Every controller was $200 back in the day, plus everyone needs an Xbox and TV. It was highly unlikely that anyone could ever play this game without Xbox Live, but it can still be done, so where there’s a will, there’s a way.