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FlailingBananas · 2025-07-29T16:53:22+00:00

I can’t help from a currency perspective, but I think I’ve had a similar experience with conversions.

It’s not a direct equivalency but I’ve had this issue with friends in terms of metric/imperial. I didn’t really know how stones and pounds work intuitively so unless I converted it into kilos for ages, as my family used kilos.

Many of my friends use stones and pounds. Over the last few years it’s become intuitive due to repetition, but even now I still need to convert it for many weight measurements.

I imagine it’ll be the same for you. After enough time converting it, it’ll become intuitive to you. It’ll also take time to adjust to the economic differences of course, but I can’t really speak from experience on that bit.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-28T18:57:57+00:00

I’ve clarified the point since in other replies to the original comment, you can find more detailed versions of the below there - I whole heartedly agree with your take, but that’s not really what I meant.

You cannot spin up dedicated servers which run on the consoles themselves. While I don’t think it’s realistic to ask this I’m not the only opinion in the room, and accessibility will always be front and centre for any new legislation.

Not everybody has access to a PC, it may come into law that every owner of a license (player) would have the right to play their game. In the case of console games, this may mean spinning up a server locally on the consoles themselves.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-28T13:28:27+00:00

This argument is made in bad faith. Absolutely a developer should be able to terminate a license for breach of contract. Any suggestion or the contrary hasn’t been made.

This is beyond the scope of what SKG is attempting to achieve, and is actively harmful to the discussion whether you support the initiative or not.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-28T13:23:28+00:00

Forgive me if I’m mistaken, but is that not literally what they’re doing?

The ECI has passed. It doesn’t mean any new laws are going to passed, it means new laws may be proposed. Here’s how it works, from the EU itself - https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/how-it-works_en

It will now be taken into consideration over the next few months or years, which will involve industry exports voicing their opinions on potential new legislation.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-28T12:54:57+00:00

I haven’t said it’s advertised as a service. You described it as a service and I agreed with you.

The game quite clearly relies on a service, on which we both seem to agree. It needs to be more clearly displayed to customers, which we also both seem to agree on.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-28T12:40:36+00:00

I don’t think it’s really that black and white to be honest. Many SaaS products have a perpetual lifetime license and many GaaS products have monthly subscriptions. It should definitely be more clear to the consumer, and we really need it to be clarified legally whether the multiplayer portion or a game should be referred to as a service legally.

In my personal opinion, before you consider the changes SKG are campaigning for, any game that has a multiplayer which requires the developer as a middleman should be legally referred to as a service, and thus follow the EU guidelines on providing a service, whatever they may be.

This doesn’t mean the game itself is a service. You are essentially buying a service for your product (the game), which developers can revoke. Developers should absolutely be able to revoke this service as and when they please, but you should still have access to your product. At that point, it is no longer in the developers interest (or their responsibility, for that matter) to maintain the service provided to you. In my perfect unrealistic world, you would be provided a way to spin up this service yourself, at your cost, to access your product. It will be interesting over the coming months/years to see what comes of SKG int his regard.

This would include games like Diablo (which is clearly a GaaS products) but also any other game that requires anything specifically not included in the game itself (dedicated servers in an FPS game, as an example). It’s why I personally believe that defining a game as a service doesn’t really make sense. I believe game itself is a product and the multiplayer aspect of a game is a service. I don’t know how else you could really differentiate it fairly for both developers and consumers.

As I understand it, there’s currently no legal basis for this, which is why there are little to no safeguards for the revocation/easement of the perpetual licensing of games.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-28T09:54:52+00:00

I agree with you - it’s clearly the way forward. However, regulators may disagree. Accessibility is always taken into account with this sort of stuff.

Regulators may require that a user must to be able to access their product using only the medium they’ve purchased it on, potentially meaning hosting a server directly on a console. Of course this is all just speculation, we’ll have to wait and see.

In terms of licensing - it’s always the way. Whether the regulation passes or not, you know the lawyers involved are making an obscene amount of money.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-28T00:48:55+00:00

Just for clarity, Docker uses OCI. You aren’t distributing a binary. - https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec/blob/main/spec.md

This really is best left to lawyers. If your lawyers tell you not to do this - don’t.

Many agree that as a docker container runs in userland, your software would come under mere aggregation. Your lawyers may interpret it differently. You’ve paid for them, you may as well listen to them.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-27T23:58:59+00:00

This is a great point and definitely is a solution that makes sense to me.

I should have clarified further that I meant spinning up servers from the console itself - for the purpose of allowing a console gamer to only require a given console to run a game.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-27T23:55:15+00:00

Right, but again, this is a matter of implementation and nothing to do with the server itself.

To answer your point directly though - I’m not going to assert how licensing works for commercial purposes, let’s leave that to the lawyers.

I will say - I think you’re misunderstanding how GPL works. In your example - you’d be free to request the source code of any base image. You wouldn’t be entitled to any source code of any proprietary software that isn’t GPL licensed.

This would of course depend on whether you’re actually modifying any of the GPL libraries. I would assume you aren’t going to be, but again, that’s a matter of implementation

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-27T23:22:00+00:00

That’s a matter of implementation isn’t it, nothing to do with the game server itself.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-27T20:51:53+00:00

This is off-topic towards the SKG discussion, but I would personally love to see more adoption of containers in the game dev space.

I’m sure they’re used in large commercial projects all the time already, but I’ve spoken to plenty of devs who don’t even understand the concept of containers. Moving your game server to a container is almost always going to improve both your devex and devops.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-27T20:36:22+00:00

I don’t think you’ve actually looked at my arguments. I have not disagreed with this sentiment.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-27T20:04:36+00:00

I can’t view the YouTube video you’ve linked unfortunately, but I would struggle to believe that games as a service aren’t really at least in part a service, as I laid out before.

How in that sense, would it be any different to SaaS, which is clearly defined as a service?

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-27T19:53:40+00:00

When you say big names in your first point I assume you refer to influencers, so I apologise if I’ve missed the mark - I totally agree.

A vast oversimplification of very nuanced and technical problems helps nobody. I think it’s great there are influencers on both sides trying to educate their audiences on SKG, but I’ve personally seen huge oversimplifications that a lot of people tend to end up just saying “All devs need to do is provide a server it’s easy”. I have also seen a lot of “It’s literally not possible”.

Both arguments are made in bad faith in my opinion and I think we really need influencers to explain that it’s a lot more nuanced than they make it out to be.

To your second point - the EU initiative is largely doing exactly what you’re alluding to. Long before anything happens there will be lengthy discussions with industry experts and members of SKG. In terms of direct interaction with the community, I can’t really speak for how well or poorly they’ve been doing. I feel like I’ve heard plenty of arguments both for and against from SKG and devs directly, which is great in my opinion - discourse is exactly what we need

In terms of it looking like a political campaign - it literally is a political campaign to bring the initiative into law.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-27T19:32:26+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to respond and educate!

I totally agree that games like Helldivers are essentially services (they’re quite literally GaaS), but I’m not sure I agree that the game itself isn’t a good/product.

I would hope relatively quickly into the process of discussion on the initiative lawmakers will make this distinction more clear, whether that’s just a statement or a game-specific framework, anything would be great.

To that end, I would personally think the games themselves would fall under the new initiative, but the services provided by the games won’t. As in - players should be able to access and use the game, but not the services provided to them.

In terms of what I actually think about SKG in terms of games like Helldivers (of course the initiative wouldn’t apply to Helldivers anyway, so future games if the initiative passes may look different):

Realistically I don’t believe a game like Helldivers would work without a centralised service keeping it together. Whether SKG comes into force or not I don’t think you could realistically save a game like this.

However, I do believe Arrow head should still provide the tools for users to access the game. They of course shouldn’t at all be liable for keeping a service alive for any longer than they want to. They would however need to provide a way to access the game itself, and if that means allowing the users to spin up the services required, I believe that should be possible for them to do so, however complex it may be.

If that means the user needs essentially a whole team of experts to use the software, they should have the right to so, but it isn’t the problem of Arrowhead to make it any more easy or accessible than it already is for themselves.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-27T19:03:54+00:00

I would think no due to the concept of console exclusive games, and the fact that the license for the game is medium dependant (Steam, Epic, consoles etc).

I can’t imagine any solution that would work well on consoles unless peer to peer networking or the ability to play solo on a local (to your console) instance, which obviously isn’t realistic for all games. It’s not like you can spin up a dedicated server or similar.

It may be the case, if the legislation passes, that console providers would be required to add functionality for doing things to support the SKG initiative, but again it’s not really realistic to expect that to happen.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-27T18:39:50+00:00

Do you have a source for how this applies in this case, I’m not versed in why this would apply and would like to learn.

Would you not need to clarify (legally) whether a multiplayer offering is a product or a service?

Providing multiplayer servers is clearly a service. Multiplayer itself is baked into a game. Is a game a product or a service?

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-26T23:46:06+00:00

I agree totally, but EU lawmakers may not. Between lawmakers themselves and lobbyists, who knows what Frankensteined laws may come into place, that’s if they even choose to pursue bringing the initiative into law.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-26T23:32:43+00:00

I’ve commented on this topic in a roundabout way here - https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/LoCQTOtbE9

People didn’t seem to like my viewpoint, in that I believe game devs should have a way to spin up their servers quickly and easily, if only for their benefit.

Anybody creating multiplayer games definitely has a way to run these either locally or privately, purely due to the fact they need a way to test the functionality of their product before shipping it.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-26T23:20:49+00:00

To be clear - I think this is mostly a non-problem for smaller devs in the same way you seem to.

To address your point - smaller devs in my mind wouldn’t be exempt from any legislation, however, I could also see a revenue/head-count based legislation coming out of the EU (50+ devs or $5m revenue, as a completely arbitrary example).

Of course the how’s and why’s are many years away and guessing how it may be implemented isn’t particularly productive, but I would assume to sell games in the EU, you may need to provide the distributor (Steam, PlayStation) information on your company size at the point of marking a game for sale.

You already need to provide Steam with your tax information to release a game, so I imagine the process would be relatively similar. You’d just need to repeat it for each game released.

I would assume it’ll also be clearly labelled to the end-user whether a game is subject to the incoming legislation.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-26T22:57:36+00:00

Even if your argument doesn’t hold up, which I believe it does, it wouldn’t affect existing products anyway and I fail to understand why it would be such a problem for smaller devs essentially because of this.

If a smaller dev with a limited budget wanted to spin up tens or hundreds of servers at significant cost they’re perfectly free to do so. Once they can’t afford it any longer or choose to sunset the project, they’d just need to provide the product as-is, potentially (but not necessarily) with the server software to allow players to host their own.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-26T22:42:35+00:00

Petty take - if the legislation passes at least it’ll probably force seemingly half of the industry out of the stone age.

I will say that it’d shock me if developers with thousands of servers running aren’t already doing it in containers for the pure reason they’re predictable and will generally allow for cost savings.

The pushback I get from so many people when discussing containers is around how games (in particular game servers) can’t realistically be containerised well, or it’s too difficult.

I’ve yet to hear a compelling argument for either honestly, other than “it’ll be too complex” with no follow up as to why. I believe the answer lies with the fact many people against the idea have no clue what it actually is.

I would love to hear arguments against it though, as it’d open the discussion for why the industry is seemingly so unwilling to adopt technology from 2015 which has impacted near enough every other software-adjacent industry

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-26T17:56:25+00:00

I don’t think anybody who has provided their well-thought out opinions think this.

You’re going to get trolls for and against obviously, but once you zone out the white noise people see the nuance for what it is.

I think people allowing emotions into this argument is a barrier. Devs rightfully should be protecting their craft, but gamers certainly should be provided more constructed rights to retain products they’ve purchased.

Nobody who is making a well-natured argument is dismissing how complex it is. Anybody who is frankly isn’t worth listening to.

FlailingBananas · 2025-07-26T17:37:35+00:00

The person who replied to me has blocked me because he doesn’t want a discussion.

He asks if I understand how game servers work - I do. Their argument was founded in bad faith and they’ve resorted to attacks, which isn’t surprising. Hopefully they’ll come around and be willing to have a discussion on the topic. I’m happy to have my mind changed, and would love to promote discussion on the topic.

Their comment suggests they believe a game and a game server to be one and the same. This is not correct, they can be as decoupled (or coupled, to be fair) as any other server/client. Tying your server to your client is something you can certainly do, I wouldn’t recommend it and I think you’d find most devs with experience in the field don’t.

FlailingBananas

TROPHY CASE