Imagine the company that runs the water treatment plant for your city is going out of business. Maybe their rights to pump from a certain lake are expiring and only 20 houses in the city use the water they treat and they don’t feel like that’s worth renewing the rights for.
Now, in the real world, you’d have another company handling the water as they stop because water is so important, but let’s pretend you have a choice of many different pipes full of water coming to your house and you really like that one, similar to how you might have a favorite car racing game.
You know that the water is going to stop coming through that pipe and you don’t want to connect your faucet to any of the other pipes for some reason that isn’t important for this metaphor.
So what you do is petition the government to force the water treatment company that’s going out of business to modify your faucet so it can continue giving you the water you like even after the pipe stops providing water.
You think this is reasonable because the faucet has always provided you the water you like and you only paid to have the pipes installed, not to keep the pipes, so you’re pretty sure the water being delivered to your house forever is a good that you own, not a service that the water treatment company is providing.
“After all,” you think, “I’ve never seen the water treatment company in my faucet. They must not be very important to the water that’s coming through here.”
Could they make a smaller version of the water treatment plant that you can run yourself out of whatever water you have nearby? It would probably not be physically impossible.
But the budget they are working with is one of a company that has 20 customers and is going out of business. They’re not going to be able to do that for free with no engineers.
Could a group of motivated volunteers invent a small version of the water treatment plant that works well enough so that you’re happy?
This is what would be known in video games as an MMO Private Server.
Do those volunteers get help from the company that they’re replacing? No. They don’t need it, and the company likely can’t legally provide it.
A video game doesn’t need to be profitable for someone to keep it running. There are plenty of multiplayer video games that don’t turn a profit and yet keep running as hobby projects. I run a few of those.
There are also big games that might not turn a profit but which generate goodwill toward that company. For example, Left 4 Dead 2 has many official servers and zero microtransactions. Once you buy the game, that’s all the money Valve will ever get from you for that game. And yet they keep the servers running because you liking Valve and you liking Steam is worth more to them than how much it costs them to run the servers.
If you’re running an MMO and for the past three years, only twenty people have played it on average, you’re going to do the calculations and decide that the resources you’re spending keeping that game running are better spent elsewhere. You can use those servers to add capacity to a game people actually play, or for your next project.
With the calculation working as it should, you’re not even losing 20 people worth of goodwill. Some of those people will understand that services do eventually close and they probably have other favorite games you provide. A few of them might get angry, but that’s what, ten people? A big company can afford to make ten people angry if it makes a thousand people happy.
But in this specific case, it didn’t upset ten people. Or twenty people. The outrage from this one MMO that less than a bus full of people still cared about being shut down was escalated more and more, to the point where someone who hadn’t played or thought about the game for nearly a decade was petitioning a continent’s leadership to change their laws to change the completely reasonable decision you just made into a crime. And 155,000 people signed that petition so far.
I don’t know how ECI(2024)000007 is going to end, but I can imagine only two outcomes:
Maybe nothing happens because forcing a company to perform an expensive redesign of a system that they’re discontinuing and can no longer sell at all (such as, in the specific case of the MMO “The Crew” which is what sparked this petition and remains the only game mentioned on the petition’s website at the time of this post, due to licenses for the depiction of branded cars expiring after a decade) or to share code that they cannot safely distribute (such as code that is also used in multiplayer games that still have an active playerbase that could result in an attack on those players’ computers) or that they cannot legally distribute (it is very common for games to have code that is licensed under NDA from many different companies) makes no sense.
Or maybe the petition does go through and there’s a law in every European country that states that when a multiplayer video game goes offline, the developers of that game are required under some penalty to rewrite the code of the game in order to keep it running after they’re gone.
And in the latter case, assuming there’s a grace period before the law takes effect, you’re going to see the end of many, many multiplayer games that simply cannot do that.
@ben i think the most plausible outcome would be copyright exemptions for abandonware, so that drm could be legally bypassed by modders, similarly to how copies of other media can be already made for personal and non-commercial use