Ars Live recap: How can we stop publishers from killing their own games?
Ars Live recap: How can we stop publishers from killing their own games?
Ars Live 回顾：我们该如何阻止游戏发行商“杀死”自己的游戏？
This week, Ars hosted a live discussion with Ross Scott about the Stop Killing Games movement and its ongoing efforts to ensure that games remain playable even after the original publisher shuts down the online servers undergirding them. 本周，Ars 举办了一场与 Ross Scott 的直播讨论，主题是“停止杀死游戏”（Stop Killing Games）运动。该运动致力于确保游戏在原始发行商关闭其背后的在线服务器后，依然能够继续运行。
Scott talked with Ars Technica Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland, saying he felt the situation around long-term game access was already “intolerable a decade and a half ago” and that he “kept hoping someone else would kick this off, [someone] more experienced or knowledgeable, but it felt like nothing was happening.” Scott said he felt making the effort to organize a movement against the practice was like “[drawing] the short straw on this, essentially.” Scott 在与 Ars Technica 资深游戏编辑 Kyle Orland 的对话中表示，他认为长期游戏访问权的问题“在十五年前就已经令人无法容忍了”。他曾“一直希望有经验更丰富或知识更渊博的人能发起这项运动，但感觉什么都没发生。”Scott 说，他觉得组织一场反对这种做法的运动，本质上就像是“抽到了下下签”。
During the conversation, Scott noted how the standard practice of shutting down game access for any reason, at any time, with minimal notice, would seem ludicrous in other areas of life: Let’s say… the plan was to shut down [a game] in five years if it didn’t do well. That needs to be communicated then, if you want to go down that road, because this manner of things doesn’t really apply to other goods and services. Compared to, let’s say you got… a warranty for a product, and it doesn’t tell you a year or two; it just tells you, ‘Well, we’ll tell you when it expires.’ Or an insurance policy: ‘Yeah, we’ll tell you when your insurance policy expires.’ Like that would trip up other laws than that. 在谈话中，Scott 指出，这种以任何理由、在任何时间、仅提前极短通知就关闭游戏访问权限的惯例，在生活的其他领域简直荒谬至极：“假设……计划是如果游戏表现不佳，五年后就将其关闭。如果你想走这条路，那就必须提前告知，因为这种做法在其他商品和服务中根本行不通。试想一下，如果你买了一个产品的保修服务，它不告诉你保修期是一年还是两年，只是说‘嗯，到时候我们会通知你什么时候过期’。或者一份保险单写着：‘是的，我们会通知你保险什么时候过期。’这在其他法律层面是完全站不住脚的。”
From the technical side, Scott said that when a publisher plans ahead for the end of an online game, the costs to transition to third-party servers can often be minimal: I think many developers will back me up on this, that if you’re planning for this from the beginning, where that’s an established requirement, we need to have some way to run this game at end of life, while you’re designing it. As I understand it, the cost can be extremely low then because it comes down to developing the game differently rather than having to have all these additional costs. Because even online, most online-only games, as I understand it, have what are called local test environments. Because let’s say it does depend on Amazon servers to host their game, but there’s an interruption, or it’s down for a while, or there’s incompatibility that they missed. Well, then you don’t want all your development to come to a standstill because of that. So you usually have to have some version of the server that’s operational that you can kind of keep testing. If they already have that, that’s half the battle right there. 从技术角度来看，Scott 表示，当发行商为在线游戏的终结提前做规划时，过渡到第三方服务器的成本往往微乎其微：“我相信许多开发者会支持我的观点：如果你从一开始就将此作为一项既定要求进行规划，即在设计游戏时就考虑到游戏生命周期结束后的运行方式，那么成本会极低。因为这归根结底是开发方式的不同，而不是额外增加成本。据我所知，即使是纯在线游戏，大多数也有所谓的本地测试环境。假设游戏依赖亚马逊服务器托管，但如果出现中断、宕机或未发现的兼容性问题，你肯定不希望整个开发工作因此停滞。所以，你通常必须拥有一个可运行的服务器版本来持续测试。如果他们已经有了这个，那问题就已经解决了一半。”
Scott also said he has been disappointed by the way the EU Parliament has handled the movement’s concerns so far, but he remains hopeful for action in the near future: One of the biggest problems we faced on this is so many governments and ruling bodies aren’t sure how the law applies to this. So I figured, OK, if we can have a million people coming to the EU commission saying, ‘Hey, please resolve this.’ Even if they don’t agree with it, clarify the law on this. Like, do we have protections on this? I thought, OK, they’ll look at that and they’ll settle it one way or the other. Nope. Instead, they managed to just dodge it in every way and say, “Oh, yeah, we’ll let the courts in each country handle this, even though our part of our job is to harmonize policy across the member states.” In my opinion, they’re not doing their job. Not because they disagree with us but because of their charter for this. But during that time, all the attention from that helped us to gather a lot of support and attention from EU Parliament. And they’ve been very favorable to what we’re trying to do. And right now, we’re scheduled, so far so good, to get included into the Digital Fairness Act, which, it’s a complete coincidence, but it happens to cover many issues that we’re practically a perfect fit for. Scott 还表示，他对欧盟议会迄今为止处理该运动诉求的方式感到失望，但他对不久的将来采取行动仍抱有希望：“我们面临的最大问题之一是，许多政府和管理机构不确定法律如何适用于此。所以我心想，好吧，如果我们能让一百万人向欧盟委员会呼吁‘请解决这个问题’，即使他们不同意，至少也能澄清相关法律。比如，我们对此有保护吗？我以为他们会审视并做出裁决。结果并没有。相反，他们想方设法回避，说‘哦，我们会让各国法院处理此事，尽管我们的职责之一是协调各成员国的政策。’在我看来，他们没有尽职。不是因为他们不同意我们，而是因为他们的章程限制。但在那段时间里，由此引发的关注帮助我们获得了欧盟议会的大力支持。他们对我们的目标非常赞同。目前，我们进展顺利，有望被纳入《数字公平法案》（Digital Fairness Act）。这纯属巧合，但该法案恰好涵盖了许多与我们诉求高度契合的问题。”