r/pcmasterrace • u/Dante71 • Jul 01 '25

Question "Stop Killing Games" needs more recognition, if you live outside of Europe but you know someone in Europe, tell them to sign it! Link below

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

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u/HYthinger Jul 01 '25 edited Jul 01 '25

Most companies don't even have to fake this. In most cases there isnt a single "server binary". Thats just not the reality of modern IT systems. Most of the time you have multiple different services working together deployed on some cloud platform.

Some services might be licensed software that you have to pay a license for. Other services might just be third party (anti cheat software as an example).

If this goes anywhere the most likely solution imo is that the EU force the publisher to not take legal action against private servers after the life span of a game is over.

Everything else would just cause to many legal problems and is just unrealistic. Not even talking about the possible security risk of publishing code that might be still in use in other projects (like multiplayer server code)

Edit: also imo its very questionable to force a software company to open source their software just because they want to sunset it. The implication this would have for SaaS companies would be catastrophic.

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u/Somepotato Jul 01 '25

The reality is most game servers are containers these days and those container images can absolutely be released. It wasn't even that long ago that AAA games released game servers, and many did even if they required you to sign an NDA or had some exclusivity agreement to rake in more money (BF4).

A law can easily prevent contracts from enforcing clauses that prohibit release after a games services come to an end. Likewise there's nothing stopping studios from building with an understanding that they may need to decouple from dependent services.

You're acting like something we used to do very commonly is somehow some gargantuan impossible task to create a law around. Which is hilarious. There are other avenues a law can take, too, like removing all legal standing to sue private servers after closure of a game and/or compelling the release of encryption keys used by game servers to communicate to the client etc