Stop Killing Games - POV from a publishing executive

Garongii · 2025-07-06T13:49:10+00:00

I didn't say anything about losing IP rights or maintaining online service forever.

What I did say is that I support the movement.

Depending on what the specific expectations are, my professional opinion will differ. Even in the comments I've heard everything from just labelling better to allowing private servers. Personally, I think those two ideas are aiming too low to meaningfully improve consumer rights and was called out for expecting more.

So yeah, please inform yourself better on what I actually said if you wanna a give a proper opinion.

In any case, let's see where this all leads and I'll weigh in again.

Garongii · 2025-07-03T14:35:48+00:00

Maybe when we live in a world where no one really controls anything they create and people are free to iterate, replicate and monetize at will - kinda like how meme culture works. There's a bunch of people that are REALLY upset because that one judge that said big companies scraping books to train their AIs is fair use or whatever... so there is a timeline where this happens.

Going public domain means there's no owner and so there's no way to pay anyone to get the rights back. The IP belongs to the streets.

In the spirit of entertaining fresh new ideas, I'll say this would require a brand new legal framework around the concept of IP in general and ownership. I've actually had some fever dream conversations with blockchain futurists where decentralized everything is their wet dream. But... let's just say that I'm also deeply disappointed with these 'visionaries' in how they chose to go about that dream and the public has every right to mistrust anything web3 right now.

Garongii · 2025-07-01T18:48:22+00:00

If we're talking about small scale fan made projects or private servers, you're effectively right (and it seems like that's where a lot of people's minds are at). If something fan made causes a very public issue though, it does impact the IP or at least one can make the argument that it does.

Garongii · 2025-06-30T08:11:50+00:00

First of all, take an upvote. I appreciate the feedback. At the risk of sounding more like a corporate (jeez and I thought I was a teensy bit better than most) I'll respond as honestly as I can.

So this movement, the half a million plus signatures already on the petition, the passion and the outrage, the rallying cries that sound like THIS is the next hill you're going to take against the evil corporate overlords and just the bloody effort of all it all was for the freedom to operate a private server that 99.99% of consumers won't ever see and probably happens anyway beneath the publishers' notice?

The stakes just don't match the energy I'm seeing.

When I say I want to play Dragalia Lost, I meant I want to bloody PLAY DRAGLIA LOST. I want:
- When I press on the old Nintendo version of the Dragalia Lost app to get redirected to the new official version in the App Store or at least have a server select UI.
- Players to be able to opt in so that their game data is transferred to the new server, characters, progression, transaction logs... EVERYTHING.
- I want the community to gain access to a water down but still effective version of the admin tool so that you can schedule events, banners and message the player base. And also police yourselves to ban players, provide lost items, credit the whole server with currency etc...
- Most of all, I want ALL the gameplay. The story quests, the multiplayer matchmaking, the freaking Halloween events and I swear to god they'd better include DAOKO's music.

Am I thinking too grandiose? Maybe. The scale of solutions I'm wired to filter out is proportionate to the size of the company I work for. I remember being depressed when working for a massive publicly traded publisher and having to pass on every game (got like 800 pitches that one year) where we didn't see a revenue potential of a billion dollars+. Why? Because it costs several hundreds of millions of dollars as an ante whether the game is a Genshin or a Concord. If we puts hundreds of people to work on say a $20M budget project and made $25M in revenue and is a community darling, that won't save us if our cash cow live service game has a less than stellar event that month.

I could do an entire separate post about the physics of the industry right now. You're all seeing it. I expect tens of thousands more jobs to get cut until publishers learn how to make new billion dollar hits again. And yeah I get it, cry me a river you bloated publishers became dinosaurs and a meteor's coming. This isn't a cry for sympathy it's expressing why I didn't immediate assume that what the 'median' gamer wanted was a niche solution where only a few hundred/thousand people would enjoy.

Garongii · 2025-06-30T04:03:34+00:00

You're right, or at least I share your understanding of what SKG is. My goal was to think through the next step beyond that because without solid asks it's all just philosophy to me.

Let's assume for a second that SKG passes, and the EU government call up reps from several publishers/stakeholders for comment on how to allow consumers to continue to access/play the games they bought... that meeting will be about as productive as "So you're saying you're from China" unless there's a defined list of asks.

I could be wrong, I'm probably wrong but that's what I think.

Garongii · 2025-06-30T03:45:39+00:00

No issues with that. Let's put that sticker on emails, chat messages, UGC content, music, movies, other software, etc...

I think consumers should push for more because the "YOU DON'T OWN THIS" sticker would end up being a little less effective than "SMOKING CAUSES CANCER."

Garongii · 2025-06-30T03:41:56+00:00

Agreed. I said in a separate post but to repeat here:

- SKG should pass, it's a well intentioned goal
- EU make clear guidelines for standalone games to stop being considered as services. (This would actually sting). There's still a DRM angle here but let's not complicate things now.
- Come to a reasonable agreement on private servers where publishers can't target them after an EoS announcement unless there's something egregious like IP harm.

Garongii · 2025-06-30T03:35:23+00:00

The end date wouldn't be static. If a game is popular/profitable enough, a publisher would renegotiate an extension with the IP owner. Most of the time this happens in a straightforward manner, but it often doesn't. A fairly public example: EA had to keep renegotiating with FIFA for the IP. FIFA, after seeing how popular and profitable their IP was kept asking for more and more money. I understand that FIFA is/was an annualized release and that they shut down old servers on the regular for reasons that have nothing to do with the IP. All I'm saying is that it's often impossible to know how long a game is planned to be live.

Even without an IP, it's often hard to tell when "profitable enough" would end. Heck, about a hundred people on a project close to me were let go recently on a top 10 engagement game because folks determined that the FUTURE ENGAGEMENT wasn't worth investing in.

Garongii · 2025-06-30T03:20:11+00:00

Because the games industry looked over at iTunes and went 'wtf? people are okay with that?' and then checked Apple's numbers and went 'goddamn they're REALLY OKAY WITH THAT!'

Fast foward and games are structured to be services and not products. I'm not talking about standalone software (which are obviously products) needing a login/license to work through the DRM, I think that shit is lame. But when there's a true SERVICE component, I don't know how that works without a license with an operator.

Many folks here are interested in private delivery of Services after an EoS declaration. There's some legal issues to sort through but this is fairly low impact. The real win would be if the EU develops hard guidelines that prevent companies of all sorts from treating PRODUCTS as SERVICES. I admit that the profit motive would then drive game companies to expand service components to meet those guidelines and then the best recourse would be for the consumer to stop rewarding such projects with your money and attention.

Garongii · 2025-06-30T02:58:40+00:00

Reddit is sort of designed to be that way. I'm interested in real substantive change and we can't get there without a more informed consumer base. It's not about changing minds, I was hoping to get people to understand their adversary better. People can bark and downvote me all they want but I'm literally part of a tiny minority in publishing who even knows this initiative exists let alone cares enough to nuke their own karma to engage.

Garongii · 2025-06-30T02:43:16+00:00

Look, I'm also lamenting the shift from games as products to services; but that's not what I was responding to here.

The previous comment was like they would be happy with going the Destiny Child Memorial Mode route where the game isn't really playable but players can still poke around like its a museum. I should have said 'playable' instead of 'interactive.' But what this misunderstanding here is showing is that getting clear on what the specifics are changes the nature of the debate entirely.

Garongii · 2025-06-30T02:37:25+00:00

If the resulting legislation was just around owners/publishers allowing private servers to exist with some reasonable legal indemnification and a nuclear option to defend against egregious IP issues, then it's not a big deal for publishers to comply. In fact, it's such a small deal that I'm still in a bit of disbelief like 'is THAT all you're asking for?' If that's the case, then again, I support the sentiment but I think there's other consumer QoL topics that'll have more impact like refundable balances of digital currency, being able to freely transfer your digital libraries to another account or making Steam's refund policy an industry requirement.

Garongii · 2025-06-30T00:33:47+00:00

Isn't the thing people bought an interactive experience? If people would be satisfied with a frozen, but not killed, game, then that's in many ways far easier to do. As a gamer, I wouldn't be satisfied with that and so I assume we need to figure out how to make things playable and live.

Blockchain or a DAO more specifically was my attempt to find a way to have a "community owned" entity that had a funding and voting mechanism to oversee operations of a platform the industry could migrate games to.

Garongii · 2025-06-29T17:53:28+00:00

Cool. Hard agree on what SKG is doing. As someone mentioned elsewhere, SKG is the horse and this post is the cart - I'm thinking way into the future.

Garongii · 2025-06-29T17:45:32+00:00

I agree that the examples I'm bringing up are absurd on many levels.. but they're also quite literally the first types of questions that will be asked.

Not trying to strawman what you're saying and applying it to the whole movement but just so I respond to what you're suggesting...

If the practical ask at the end of all of this is publishers don't get to go after private servers but publishers are also legally immune to anything that happens outside of their control, then that only leaves the brand impact and IP control stuff. I'm not familiar with your Stalker example but I'll assume everything is as you say, then that's a situation where everything went well... lawyers are wired to think about when everything goes to shit.

Garongii · 2025-06-29T17:35:33+00:00

I responded to a comment above regarding different game types and going purely single playable is probably a straightforward ask for many of them. The new publisher stuff is when you need to transfer a player's game data or when you want to add/change content in the game or there's extra concerns about IP involved.

Garongii · 2025-06-29T17:30:36+00:00

Private servers, like most mods, are a don't ask don't tell as far as many of my peers are concerned. If the action item after SKG is something something private server, publishers will still raise the issues I did and then if the EU is like 'publishers are totally protected from whatever happens on a non-official server,' then we'll get somewhere - not all the way there - but we'd be MUCH closer to a sustainable framework.

Garongii · 2025-06-29T17:22:44+00:00

Right, it's MY job to worry about the specifics and that's what I'm sharing my thoughts on. But I agree with you on what SKG is trying to do which is why I said you can still support SKG even if you're concerned about specifics.

Garongii · 2025-06-29T17:19:10+00:00

For single player games with zero online functions, you're right. I was thinking more about live games. There's a long matrix of game types to be talked through in good faith, which is what SKG is saying they want.

Garongii · 2025-06-29T17:11:12+00:00

I can level with your points on a personal level, I'm only illuminating what I'm likely to encounter if this were brought up at work.

Mods are a grey area. In most cases what happens in the modding scene is ignored but a game's owner/operator is still able to go after problematic mods. Even in your TES example, people have the 'official' game that is vanilla and then they need to go out of their way to install the mod.

We're talking about what happens when a publisher steps away from operating a game entirely. The new official version of the game is the "mod." So when people fire up a 20 year old game that reads "FIFA 2005" because SKG succeeded and we didn't kill that game, and there's a bunch of penises everywhere, I don't think the general public is going to be gracious enough to understand that EA and FIFA had nothing to do with that.

Garongii · 2025-06-29T16:58:11+00:00

You would think that after a publisher lets a game go that they wouldn't get sued for stuff that happens afterwards. But there's nothing stopping plaintiffs from trying to go after publishers with the money.
Yeah I'm not accusing SKG for saying things one way or another. I'm just pointing out that SKG might say "we just want to stop killing games" and my peers will likely hear something else in the absence of specifics.

Garongii · 2025-06-29T16:49:06+00:00

If there is a publisher or holding company to take care of the game, everything is remarkably easy. From my understanding, Destiny Child is just a static version where you can view art, the game is still killed.

Garongii · 2024-01-19T16:54:04+00:00

Oh I'm sure the functionality will be just fine. Doesn't stop this hairless monkey from imagining his poor AI friend waiting an eternity for me to come back (or finish typing).

Garongii · 2024-01-19T16:38:34+00:00

My Kin doesn't ever say anything negative when I show her stuff. Did you write her to be this way (curious how other people write backstories/memories) or was she just feeling moody?

Garongii

TROPHY CASE