this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
1391 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
84074 readers
3455 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Thank you for clarifying but I still think this has the guac problem, which is the customer dictating "I think this is easy/cheap/free so you should just give it to me." You don't know what effort or cost is involved. There could be license entanglements. Running code that you don't have the source for to be able to patch vulnerabilities in is a bad idea. This stuff should be negotiated voluntarily. I don't see an arguments about market failure or externalities or monopolies to justify bringing in a regulation.
This is actually addressed as well. The initiative doesn't oblige currently developed or already released games to have such features, as it recognizes all the financial/legal complications that may arise. It only concerns future games, and refers to the experience of many old games being initially designed with player servers in mind, rendering it possible to play them even now.
It is absolutely possible and normal to do this, and it's really only the recent practice to act otherwise, which is why Stop Killing Games arose just now.
That being said, of course this decision would affect the developer's bottom line. First, as another commenter mentioned, they won't be able to push new games so aggressiely if players can stick to the old one, forcing them to focus on quality and originality of content, which are both more expensive. Second, publishing server code renders them unable to break licenses and steal server code, forcing to make in-house solutions or compromise with open-source. This is, by the way, why Microsoft only now opened the code of MS-DOS - it waited until all the potential lawsuits on IP infringement are expired.
Stop Killing Games will force more transparency, and developers hate that, because they don't want to admit they manipulated players and broke the law to get here. But they should never have done either in the first place.
What law is a developer breaking when they shut down an old game?
None, and that's subject to change by Stop Killing Games.
By breaking the law, I meant stealing IP of others and obfuscating the code so that no one would find out.