Love Him or Hate Him, Pirate Software’s Jason “Thor” Hall was Right All Along
This is an opinion piece by clymax. It does not represent the opinions of FFV Central or of any other contributor or player of the FFVC community.
clymax is a romhacker and aspiring indie dev who has familiarity with IP in the realm of gaming. His flagship hacks include the Whirlwind mod for FFV and the Item Randomizer for The Battle of Olympus. You can follow clymax’s projects via FFVC or YouTube.
The “Stop Making Games” initiative has put forth a proposal that is highly destructive to prospects of future live service games being made.
Significantly, the proposal does not allow any off-ramp for live service games to exist in their current form.
Developers (and publishers) should have the right to design and honestly advertise a game as one that they can sunset at will for any reason or no reason.
Players should have the right to fully knowingly choose to play such games. That is, players should have the right to fully knowingly rent or license a game if they so choose.
Players should not have the right to deprive other players from types of games they willingly and fully knowingly play if they so choose.
That is, players should not have the right to stand in the way of other players when such players wish to rent or license a game.
Neither do they have the right to deprive developers from the right to design and honestly advertise a type of game they choose to make.
Just because certain players will not be paying customers should not mean that a game should be banned from the marketplace altogether.
The proposal, which effectively requires server binaries to be relinquished on sunsetting a game, with no off-ramp for a developer not to do so, deprives the live-service game developer of private property rights over the server binaries, such as copyright and trade secret, regardless of how the game is advertised.
As a result, developers ranging from indie to AAA would—and frankly, should—conceivably in many cases cancel or refrain from starting a live service project altogether.
What will this mean for consumer choice?
In the case of indie devs, one can imagine that in today’s competitive markerplace, in many cases they are sustained only by a passion for what they set out to make.
Having bureaucrats boss devs around in telling them what games they can make and how they must make such games: what do you think it does to that passion?
Do you think it would lead to more or better games being made?
Do you think it would lead to more people wanting to become devs?
As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It is a grave mistake to evaluate a campaign based on its intent rather than its logical outcome.
Hence, this post names the campaign based on the latter and not the former.
If players want to see live service games with post-sunset plans for staying operational, the solution is to lower barriers to entry so that more of such games can be made and outcompete their sunsetting counterparts.
The solution is not to raise barriers to entry through more regulation, which also hurts indie devs disproportionately compared to AAA studios.
For a vibrant gaming landscape tomorrow with honestly advertised games that cater to the broadest range of gaming tastes, oppose the “Stop Making Games” initiative—at least in its current form as of this writing—until an off-ramp is put in place.
Otherwise, it will replace what we have today with an even bigger problem: certain games many of us would have loved, no longer being made.
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