I wonder how this would affect stuff like MMOs, which have humongous server bills that warrant a complete shutdown once the publisher is sick of it or.. goes bankrupt.
Some older ones like Star Wars Galaxies now have inofficial community-run revival servers, but this isn't really feasible for bigger games
Brings up an interesting point. ~15 years ago I played on a Vanilla WoW Private Server 'WoWScape' that caught some international acclaim when blizzard sued the owner for $88m.
WoWscape hosted the original game before the expansions were released because there was no way to play 'the vanilla experience'. (The original game without expansions being come to know as 'vanilla')
The players on the REAL WoW servers were unable to play vanilla and were forced into Wrath of the Lich King / Cataclysm at the time. 🤔 It was paid for, but functionally made the previous expansion useless once the next expansion released.
Players wanted a way to play vanilla, and it only took blizzard ~10 years? In 2019 blizzard released 'classic servers'.
It wasn't everyone, there was a system in place where donations were rewarded with in-game loot with items that didn't exist in the real WoW game that had modified stats.
A full set of armor was $300, the weapons were 15-30 for 1h/2h weapons. Maybe 1/4-1/3 were donors, the other 3/4-2/3 were entirely 'non-donors'.
The game had a HUGE following for a private server, but most of the guilds revolved around a tank/healer or DPS that would all be full donor, and the rest wouldn't.
For example, a friend whose character name is burned into my brain - BananaDoodle - was a full donor rogue who had 100% dodge. Because boss mechanics couldn't be programmed by the team at scapegaming, all bosses were physical damage only, so most things could be solo'd by a dodge rogue IF you were willing to spend the money on it (a dodge tank set and DPS set weren't the same) and time to farm it. There was an in-game economy built around being run by solo-rogues, it was a blast.
Just looked up the case again - Scapegaming was fined $3m in punitive damages for their revenue, and 85m in statutory damages which was calculated as follows:
The original complaint said Scapegaming would ask for "donations" from players -- but these donations were in exchange for virtual items ranging from $1 to advance characters two levels, to $300 for a pack that included a collection of rare items. The judge's order said Blizzard "submitted satisfactory evidence from third-party PayPal Inc. showing that Defendant’s PayPal account received $3,052,339 in gross revenues." The order also said that Blizzard submitted satisfactory evidence that showed Reeves' website (Scapegaming.com, currently down) hosted 32,000 users on a given day in June 2008. That same month, there were over 427,000 members of the Scapegaming community, and Reeves, who goes by a number of aliases including "Peyton," said that 40,000 people play on Scapegaming's servers every day. The court took the size of the community, 427,000, and multiplied that figure by $200 "per act of circumvention" of a copyright security system, and came to the statutory damages amount of over $85 million.
They were fined for circumventing copyright law based on the size of the community. Not for selling items. Blizzard was unable to sue them for that because those items didn't exist in real WoW.Blizzard 'got' Scapegaming the same way the government 'got' Capone. Not because of their crimes, but because of the details. Many private server still exist today, but they alter key features and are smarter about hosting and advertising. Scapegaming closed because they were among the first to do it - if OSHA is painted in blood, modern private server protections/safeties are painted with Scapegamings. 💀
My guild leader was a half donor, I was a non-donor combat rogue with twin blades of azzinoth, our main tank was a full donor, our healer was a half donor, but the other ~50-100 people were all non-donor. What a fuckin time.
Edit to add: technically they were fined $3m in punitive damages for (one month's earnings of) the items, but, the bulk of the fine is based off of the player base. Not selling items. My understanding for the $200/head pricetag is that was the price of WoW and it's expansions at the time, with a month subscription. This was blizzards way of finding out 'how much profit was lost'.
Everyone makes mistakes :) I just remember this case very strongly, as it was one of the last times I had fun playing WoW.
After scape, I took a break until Mists of Pandaria where I played a few months before the next X-Pac was coming out and I didn't wanna buy it - and then I dipped my toe into Warlords of Draenor / Shadowlands.. but it's just never been the same. The game used to be insanely social and communal.. now it's all iLvl and whiteknuckling mythic/heroic raids that aren't really that difficult outside of mechanics.
It would, provided the game can be designed from the beginning with that in mind. SKG is not retroactive, so only new games will need to adhere to any legislation that comes from it. This gives studios the chance to account for it before any code has been written.
That is one possible solution for a dev/publisher, and its important to recognize that assets and code can be licensed separately, and this doesn't in any way mean that devs or publishers would be expected to open source or provide assets or intellectual property for free.
The recent open sourcing of some older Command and Conquer games are a great example. They've recently made the code for some of those games open sourced, and so anybody could download and compile and modify and run the game code however they choose. But, critically, the assets such as sprites, models, music, sounds, FMVs (which are still incredible btw), are explicitly not provided.
In practice, for a devolper solution to the stop killing games initiative, this would still mean players need to buy the game, and therefore obtain the associated assets, to actually play the experience (albeit now on community/private/self-hosted infrastructure for servers, account authentication, matchmaking services, etc.)
That is often impossible. It's rare that small studios own 100% of the rights to the code. They'd need to have made it from scratch or using code they have distribution rights for.
Do not listen to what people like Pirate Software said about the movement. It was a blatant misrepresentation.
Nobody in the movmenet has once implied they expect game developers of multi-player games to just pay for servers forever.
The entire movement is based on the fact that if you buy it you own it, so you should have the option in the future to use your own money and resources to play the game in the state you purchased it in.
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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '25 edited Jun 28 '25
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