It is kinda crazy how these always pop up immediately.

Just click the link and inform yourself. Could have answered the question yourself within minutes.
It's clear you do not actually want answers at all. I hate your pretentious attitude.

FAQ page has your exact question answered - saved you one click from the link above. Clearly a lot of effort has been put into the site because online spaces we've enjoyed can't be enjoyed any further even if we were interested in maintaining them ourselves as volunteers.

Releasing the server code as binary is how it used to work, and there's no reason it can't work that way again. It's one of several ways to satisfy the petition.

Even if it doesn't work, I'd at least want to let people try and get practice doing something about a problem (even if that's just leaving a comment on social media to direct others to sign a petition that will eventually get lawmakers' attention with enough signatures based on that country's laws, because that still has more chance for good than yet another comment about X Thing Bad. Even though I agree with a lot of Lemmy's X Thing Bad takes), makes them more likely to do something in the future. At least they can walk away saying "I tried". Some people might see no guarantee of results for their time and think of it as time wasted, and that is their choice, but I don't really see a reason to say "that'll never work" without any offer of alternative. Most charitably, you are trying to save them time and disappointment, trying to prevent a "it didn't work, activism does not work, I'll never do anything like that again" attitude if it fails, but I think a lot of people are just seeing the comment as pointless negativity.

You know you can still play Unreal Tournament online against other people? That game came out in 1999!

The problem you sketch has been solved already.

All it takes is for the game developer to release the server binaries. And for fans of the game to run servers.

Gamers are by and large toxic and ignorant. The ask isn't as straightforward as they make it seem. It would require changes to the binaries and client code beforehand. This doesn't come for free. All the examples of 'how it used to work in the past' are predicated on the specific choices of development to go that route. If an application and server are not architected that way then releasing the server binaries do nothing for the community.

Hack the planet, indeed.

I clicked, and saw an incoherent wall of text. It is not that important for me to understand what you're whining about, and you fail to deliver your point in a manner which will result in any sympathy.

You are treating silliy video games as if it's a matter of life and death. Why would anybody take you seriously? You make ot so easy for them to milk you for money. I suggest grow up.

Its like the 6th on the lost or something. Clearly a lot of thought.

Running the infrastructure today is not the same as it was back when unreal was first released, for many many reasons.

Yeah exactly but I don't think anyone here is capable of comprehending that.

From the FAQ of stopkillinggames.com website

Q. Aren't you asking companies to support games forever? Isn't that unrealistic?

A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way.

Games as a Service wasn't even the fatal flaw here. Brawlhalla is another platform fighter that is doing just fine off that model. The dev team for MultiVersus just couldn't handle the project, for one reason or another.

A lot of speculation on the specifics of what went wrong, plenty of players looking for who to blame, but there will probably never be any reliable or concrete info on what exactly happened.

Interesting how strongly you are opposing an idea that noone proposed, which you would have known had you taken a look at the petition.

That could be one reason, at least in a game such as MultiVersus with different IPs being used.

But they still lock down servers to their own shit when they own it all anyway and it's because they also sell you crap to have in the game. If you had your own server, you could just give yourself the stuff they sell since all those things are still in the game somewhere and the only barrier between you and the content is their servers checking to see if you paid for them.

Yeah I could not comment so quick unless I programmed something to do it for me....

You're not a gamer but you know how the server infrastructure has changed since Unreal released decades ago. Shove off, dickhead.

You are weird, probably why no one likes you. At least you have games

you dumb fucks won't be able to maintain your own infra since you spend all your time playing games.

This whole ordeal is so moronic

What I'm proposing is for you to get a life and realize how pathetic you all sound

As you are not a gamer, I'll try to make it simple.

If a game ask for an online connection, is usually for three reasons:

• multiplayer, or some kind of social interaction
• drm, to make it harder to cheat, or redistribute cracked versions of said game
• telemetry, either to know how players plays their game, or to sell you as an ad target

When the publisher decide to stop the online component, to save a buck, it often mean the game stops working altogether because of the DRM part, as it basically refuses to start without the proper authorization from the now defunct server.

The petition do not ask them to keep running the server indefinitely, but rather to

• make it possible to bypass the DRM always online part to be able to play the single player part, if there is one. In most case, it is a simple change to do, a function to modify in order to always return "true" (game can be played)
• allow the end user to self host the server. It doesn't mean open-sourcing it, just to release the server software and allow to point to another server than the defunct ones

In both case, the code already exist, and the changes required are minimal, so why not do it? It costs barely anything to the devs/publisher, and gives the game a second life, even without official support.

But they don't. Mostly out of greed, to push people to buy the newest, micro-transaction infused game they wish to sell, sometimes even the same game with half the content replaced by micro-transaction (Overwatch 2 being the perfect example).
They don't want an older, maybe better game to overshadow their new shiny cash grab.