It’s amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they’re no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.
Digital Fairness Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act/F33096034_en
Games should be required to have reproducible source for all components (client and server) sent to whatever the European equivalent of the Library of Congress is, to be made available in the Public Domain whenever the publisher stops publishing them.
I like it. If the publisher no longer sells/supports the full game as purchased, then they no longer to get to complain about people pirating it.
I don’t like instantly throwing it public domain, that’s the wrong license to use. I think Creative Common CC BY-NC-SA would be more appropriate. (Credit the original, no commercial use, and any modified/redistributed version must follow same license).
This will prevent xbox from taking all the old PlayStation games, stealing an emulator, and selling them under game pass to people that don’t know those games are freely available.
I’d also add the game must be available as an individual 1-time purchase. If it’s only available as a bundle or subscription service (like game pass), that doesn’t count.
The Public Domain isn’t a “license.” It’s simply the default state of a work when copyright is no longer being enforced for it. I’m saying that copyright should immediately expire for any published work that is no longer being made available by some entity with the right to do so (phrased carefully so as not to break copyleft licenses, BTW) and that anyone should be able to get it directly from a government archive of all Public Domain works.
As for selling Public Domain works, that’s always been allowed and I don’t see any particular reason to change it, provided that regulatory capture doesn’t result in the public archive being the digital equivalent of hidden away in a disused lavatory in a locked basement with a sign saying “beware of the leopard.” If the free option is prominent and well-known but you want to pay money for some reason anyway (in theory, because the person selling it added value in some way), that’s your business.
I’m going to hard disagree on NC.
If the original publisher decided to dump their IP, and someone else has a good enough idea to make money off of it, they absolutely should.
BY-SA gets you the same vibe and encourages the new IP to keep making new content and allows others to do the same.
I agree, if an IP is abandoned then someone else should be allowed to do something with it.
For this post I was talking about the game that was already made and distributed, not just the idea or characters.
I’ll use Mario Kart 1 for example, if Nintendo doesn’t sell that game anymore, then the game is made publicly available.
If the IP is still in use that A) doesn’t exclude Mario Kart 1 form becoming available, B) doesn’t allow competitors to sell modern Mario Kart games (trademark) and C) prevents someone from taking a 30 year old game and just reselling it on their store.
IPs are much more messy to handle, as it’s less a final product and more of a concept. Creative rights should stay with the creative people not a publisher.
If Nintendo decides to drop Mario, but the actual creator of Mario still wants to work with a different publisher, they should be able to do that before the IP becomes freely available for anyone to take over.
This is one of the points that a French MEP brought up during the meeting. If this is pursued it could as a side effect open up space for digital “orphaned works” which would be fantastic.
It’s not even an issue of “orphaned works.” Every work becomes Public Domain eventually; that’s the point of it.
In fact (according to originalist American sensibilities, at least) the entire point of copyright law is “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts” (i.e., to enrich the Public Domain) to begin with! Allowing works to be copyrighted (essentially, borrowed back from the Public Domain temporarily so the creator can profit, thus incentivizing the creation of works) is merely a means to that end, not some sort of moral entitlement.
Copyright and patent are a compromise.
Society is iterative. Every work of art or technology is significantly based on prior work. So if you go to the extremes, where “I intented it, it is mine forever and passed to my children” society stalls as technoligarchs never license their patents. If you go full blyatski and outlaw personal ownership, you get Soviet Russia, a nation whose contribution to global culture has been a few ballets, some long depressing books and precisely one video game, because nobody is given incentive or even opportunity to create anything, so they don’t.
Give us a full copy of your work, enough information to make a full copy of it. This will be held in trust by the government. We will give you full, exclusive right to monetize your invention for a couple decades, and the copy stored with the government is the stake in your claim, the proof you need to win your lawsuit. After those couple decades are over, the idea becomes public property. Our inventors get to make a living, society gets to progress.
Copyright has gone cancerous, with terms lengthened far beyond a human lifetime to benefit major corporations and not individual creators. We need to fix that.
If you go full blyatski and outlaw personal ownership, you get Soviet Russia, a nation whose contribution to global culture has been a few ballets, some long depressing books and precisely one video game, because nobody is given incentive or even opportunity to create anything, so they don’t.
To be fair, Soviet Russia probably has a bunch more stuff than that; we just don’t know about it because it didn’t get translated and distributed to the West. The “Dr. Livesey Walk” meme is from a Soviet cartoon, for example.
I can only assume artists got funded by government grants or something, IDK. It probably did result in a lot less of it being created than in the West, though.
(Also, I think the ballets and books you’re alluding to might’ve been pre-Soviet?)
Anyway, I completely agree that copyright and patents are a compromise, and that the pendulum has swung way too far to the side of rights-holders at the moment.
(I was thinking of the likes of Shostakovich, born 1906 died 1975, but he did symphonies, not ballets? I think of Soviet performance art and I smell orchestra pit.)
Not sure about public domain. Perhaps a non-commercial license would be best - this way fans can carry on the work, but others wouldn’t be tempted to profit off of the IP.
The original duration of copyright was 14 years. Why should we legally stop anyone else from making a knockoff?
whatever the European equivalent of the Library of Congress is
Yeah! Um… what is that again?
¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
If no such thing exists, they should create it.
If a studio is using the same base architecture for online services as a game that is currently active, you want developers to share their current live architecture and code?
Yes.
If they don’t like it, they can keep supporting their older stuff. Or better yet, rethink their decision to impose a “live service” business model now that they’d actually be held accountable for it, and consider going back to giving users the means to run their own servers.
(Also, by the way, “security by obscurity” is bullshit. If disclosing their server-side code leads to exploits, that just means they’re fucking incompetent. I have no sympathy at all.)
Set the launch arguments of any Unreal game to “-log” and get back to me on how many lines of log types LogEOS* it spits out before the main menu loads. That usually interfaces SteamOSS, so if there are a low amount of EOS logs they will show up as LogSteamOSS. That is the best hint I can give.
It sounds like you’re trying to “hint” at the idea that a bunch of games are using Epic Online Services and/or the Online Subsystem Steam API associated with it, but beyond that I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make.
If you’re trying to obliquely cite that as some kind of counterexample where it’s reasonable for a game’s source code to remain secret just because part of it is that library, then no, it fucking isn’t. I can’t tell whether EOS has the source code available along with the rest of the Unreal engine or not, but if not, it ought to be and IDGAF about any excuses Epic might have for not making it so.
If you are so hell bent on being right or knowing the answer. You could sign all of the Steam, Epic, and SDK NDAs to get access to all of the documentation.
LOL, what? You’re the one trying to make a point here, not me. Spit it out. I’m not gonna do your fucking work for you!
This would be the only type creative work that would be burdened like this.
I find it paradoxical that we’re trying to save the gaming industry by burdening (mostly) small developers. Larger studio will no longer be able to abuse the system, but complying will be easy for them.
For indies and small to medium studios though? They struggle enough as it is. Adding the burden of compliance on top is not a great idea.
If we could legally categorize studios in a meaningful way, and therefore target the big ones and leave indies alone, I would support such an idea.
This would be the only type creative work that would be burdened like this.
It’s the only type of creative work that needs to be burdened like this, as all other types of works have always been “self-contained” (for lack of a better term) with no continued reliance on the publisher after the purchase.
Ditto with older games, BTW: you’ll notice that this “Stop Killing Games” movement didn’t start until the game industry started using tactics like DRM and “live service” architectures to forcibly wrest control away from the gamers. Before that, people could just keep playing their cartridges and CDs and even digital downloads, and hosting multiplayer themselves using the dedicated server program included with the game, in perpetuity and everything was just fine.
The industry got fucking greedy and control-freakish, and this is the inevitable and just attempt for society to hold it accountable.
I find it paradoxical that we’re trying to save the gaming industry by burdening (mostly) small developers. Larger studio will no longer be able to abuse the system, but complying will be easy for them.
I find it weird that you’re making what seems to me to be a strawman argument about “burdening (mostly) small developers,” as I’d say they are mostly not the ones trying to do this bullshit where they try to retroactively destroy art and culture because it stops being profitable enough. Indie studios typically don’t design their games to use publisher-operated servers with ongoing costs attached in the first place, let alone to self-destruct when they shut off!
I find it weird that you’re making what seems to me to be a strawman argument about “burdening (mostly) small developers,” as I’d say they are mostly not the ones trying to do this bullshit where they try to retroactively destroy art and culture because it stops being profitable enough. Indie studios typically don’t design their games to use publisher-operated servers with ongoing costs attached in the first place, let alone to self-destruct when they shut off!
Releasing source code isn’t without extra work. My point is, unless you make sure to specifically target the companies abusing gamers, you’re going to mainly hurt the part of the industry that is not the problem.
There’s no need to release any source code if your game doesn’t require an internet connection to your server to run in the first place.
Do you think only big studios make games that need an internet connection? Or why is this comment relevant?
The important part is “to your server”.
Mostly big studios/publishers put “always online” requirements in single player games for a start. And even if it’s not only big studios, those requirements can be omitted without effort (if anything it reduces effort to not put them in).
Multiplayer games are a different beast, but I’d argue that yes, small studios rarely make games that exclusively rely on the developer’s own servers for multiplayer. That is because they are smaller studios and server architecture for a multiplayer game is a big investment for them. Even if I’m wrong there, future games can be designed with the legislation in mind (this would not affect existing games retroactively) and don’t have to keep using centralized server architecture for everything.
Again, I never disagreed with the issue: (90%) solo games requiring an internet connection disappearing suddenly is a major issue in the gaming industry
I disagree with the solutions people want for it, which I find shortsighted.
And yes, such a legislation would force to rethink some designs, and force using one over the other not because it fits the final product better, but because it does not have the additional pressure of compliance. And that, I think, makes it a poor solution.
What I’d like to see is something similar to minimal warranty in the EU. So, a game has to provide X years of playability, clearly shown on the product page/box. They can guarantee longer if they wish. They then have a legal obligation to keep it online. Add to it a mandatory warning X years before shutdown.
Then the consumer is no longer deceived, and the studio has less pressure to comply with EoL requirements.
And why not make releasing the source code a viable way to comply with these requirements, and have a special label for “forever playable” games, either fully singleplayer or through code release.
Just don’t force every studio to release their codebase.
It’s not “extra” if it’s a legal requirement.
More to the point, I’m not saying it has to be licensed as Free Software or that it has to be made immediately public. I’m saying that a copy needs to be sent to a government archive, regardless of how messy it is, so that the government can make it public later when the company doesn’t care anymore.
This shows me you don’t work anywhere near software. It is not as easy as you think it is.
Don’t try being reasonable, the SKG people don’t understand reason.
Removed by mod
Why are you lying about what I wrote? I never claimed the publisher should be forced to maintain it forever.
What part of sending the source to the government archive did you not understand?
And then what? Why are we storing these old games. Move on with your lives. Art doesnt last forever, its not supposed to. But you want publishers to put in extra effort to preserve them, and then have governments put in effort to preserve them, apparently forever.
Its funny how its the people playing the games who want them preserved forever rather than the people making the games, isn’t it. The people making them have pointed out multiple problems with this idea, but who cards about them right?
The people who make the games dont give a fuck about you. Why the fuck do you think we would care about what they want?
Presumably because you want what they can provide you. Its not rocket science my guy.
Oh I see, you’re just a troll who keeps lying and spreading FUD. Reported.
To think all of this happened because one person really liked The Crew of all things.
Entire Linux gaming happened because one guy wanted to play Nier Automata on it. Don’t underestimate some one guys.
Source?*
*In a “I’m interested in the story” sense rather than a “PROVE IT” sense.
DXVK was the last (IMO) major key in enabling proper Linux gaming.
Here’s a short interview with the creator of DXVK.
Prior to this Wine was able to run some simple Windows applications, but games (which heavily rely on GPU acceleration) lagged quite a bit behind since DirectX is a Windows exclusive graphics API. Instead, on Linux we have Vulkan which is similarly feature rich, but an open standard. DXVK translates DirectX API calls to Vulkan, which GPUs on Linux can understand, similar to how Wine translates Windows syscalls to the Linux alternatives. Even though Wine existed for a long time, DXVK’s development started quite a bit later.
To be absolutely clear, wine could run many games just fine, I was playing WOW, Starcraft 2, and many others perfectly. However, Directx 11 was new, and wine had a harder time with itml. DXVK Was created specificially to run DX11 Games in WINE, and is amazing, but it wasn’t just “some simple applications” at the time
What a thoughtful and concise overview of the situation. Thank you.
According to this source the guy is called Philip Rebohle and he wrote a translation layer called DXVK that lets you run DirectX stuff on Vulkan.
Wine doesn’t seem to be related to that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)
Edit: it is, see comments below
It is.
Very roughly, think of DXVK as a plugin for WINE, that dramatically enhances its capabilities with 3D rendering.
Then Proton is essentially a further refinement of WINE, DXVK, other things.
However Proton is a refinement just for gaming. Other kinds of applications may run worse on Proton than on Wine.
Double post but:
To prove both our points further, I just had to do a custom Lutris install and configuration to get the old Bungie game ‘Oni’ actually working.
tl:dr - Modern, current (9/10) Proton can’t handle .NET 2.0 properly, apparently, when I have a 64 bit system and its only made for 32 bit… and/or the engine that Bungie used for this is apparently … essentially custom… theres nothing quite like it, according to the Oni2 people/website of people who’ve been reverse engineering it for like 20 years now and still haven’t totally figured it out.
I had to jump down to the wine 8 custom lutris version, basically.
extremely odd.
True!
And technically, there many many variants of Proton, some bleeding edge, some more stable, some highly specified to work with particular games.
Theres also uh, soda, used by Bottles… which is… kind of a hybrid between standard WINE and Proton…
And then if we get into all the specific possible dependency packages, other more specific sort of modules… it gets very complicated very fast.
Wine makes Windows applications work in Linux. Wine solved a lot of issues with translation, but most Windows games use DirectX for their graphics, which is proprietary to Windows.
DXVK translates DirectX to Vulcan (Open Source graphics API used in Linux), allowing GPUs on Linux to run DirectX games.
My boxed copies of Loki games beg to differ.
Even crazier, he doesn’t even particularly like it. He just didn’t think it should become vaporware.
Some people actually have principles, actually stand on business… apparently this is quite a rarity these days.
Always has been - most people (me likely included) will just who whatever is cheaper.
It’s not even a particularly good game. It’s more just the principle of the thing.
But what does Pirate Software think of the situation? That’s what I really need to know.
His dad worked at Blizzard, y’know.
I saw a random youtuber actually figure this out.
Get banned from Prirate Software’s chat speed run, Any%.
He made an account, joined, and just politely asked what Thor thought of the recent SKG EU Parliament hearings.
Total Elapsed Time to Ban: Approximately 9 seconds.
Thor then muttered about not wanting to hear anything from any SKG assholes.
Dude is a literally terminal stage narcissist.
Incredible
To think that the guy that wrote Freeman’s Mind would go on to such heights. Proud of you, Ross.
He says in his videos “I’m just some guy who wants to play video games, I don’t know how to lead a movement. But uh, here we are I guess!” He’s spent a massive amount of time and effort on it, when he just happened to end up the spokesperson. Incredibly cool guy.
i think he tried to bail once and then realized he isn’t allowed to
I believe he said if this fails, he’s done since it’s just been too much work. Then he managed to get a million signatures to be seen in front of eu parliament, so he’s back in it.
I’m pretty sure he wanted the Stop Destroying Games crew to take over after signatures passed, but someone must have told him he’s the face of the campaign now :p
I found where he talks about it https://youtu.be/HIfRLujXtUo?t=52m44s
He essentially says “ya there are no next steps, so if this fails, I’m done, not because I don’t care anymore but because there’s nothing left to do!” I don’t think he wanted to be the one in charge in the first place xD
Ironically, those are the correct people to be in charge. Anyone else is usually a narcissist, or at least has narcissistic tendencies getting in the way of actual progress.
Started watching since Ross started the Game Dungeon series and watching him develop hate for game killing real time to talking at EU Parliament - what a journey! Now if the rest of gaming community had this much care and spine.
Freeman’s Mind is such a comfort to return to every now and then. Ross has one of those Homer Simpson voices that make me feel warm and at peace just listening to.
what is that weird fake blizzard grifter with the hair doing now is he alive still
I think his mod team quit/got fired yesterday so I’m guessing not to well.
damn what happened yesterday
Sort of but it’s also because these things take forever. If you want to put something forward to the European parliament you best submit the petition while you’re still in the womb.
I still think the petition was a bit hamstrung by being sort of vaguely defined. I think it initially got rejected because it did sort of sound like it was trying to force developers to continue support for servers indefinitely. Now that the clarification has been made that they were simply need to open source project I think the politicians more open to the idea.
The initiative was very clear that there is no expectation of support from the developers after support has ended. There was nothing vague about it except for the disinformation PirateSoftware was putting out.
Hamstrung by being vague? Vague is EXACTLY what you want for these types of things, theres less specificity to get hung up on and reject, while the general idea can be expanded upon and legislated in detail once they agree with the core concept. Please dont listen to that pirate guy, he’s terminally brain damaged.
I know he is, but did you know he also worked in blizzard?
did sort of sound like it was trying to force developers to continue support for servers indefinitely.
Y’know, except the part where he very explicitly said that wasn’t what SKG was asking for.
Yes that was the second time it was raised the first time they just dismissed it with some generic response saying to refer to the current protection laws.
i’m in tumblr and the posts about that vote was circulating there from day one, screencaps steadily increasing in vote number while i never saw it on reddit/lemmy or other places with some kind of algorithm as opposed to the simple reverse chronological feed that is tumblr’s current default. i read the notes - people were reposting it elsewhere and it just disappear into the void. it was around 70% but was also very fast approaching the deadline when it exploded in popularity because of that guy.
in a way algorithms both almost killed and saved that petition - but there was a concerted, months long active action by uncountable number of people, a tremendous effort to save the petition and keep it going.
It might have also have incredible timing. The EU is all digital sovereignty, and suggesting opening up something as a solution might actually been seen as a positive.
I’m not totally sure, but I watched one vid about him a year ago and now yt slams me with recs for vid about him. If titles are to be believed he’s completely crashed out and not doing well at all which makes me very happy, but I’m not cursing my algo for another year by clicking.
Tl;Dr is that the SKG drama made drama farmers on YouTube look closer at him and discover that he’s an egotistical piece of shit that lies to make himself look better, and he’s basically the new yandere dev with his game heartbound (making little to no progress over 10ish years while blaming the community for not being grateful/recognizing his genius/etc.).
I saw some vid thumbnails a day or two ago that were talking about his mods eating him alive or something, so I’m not sure what all that more recent drama is about. I am current on his shitty dev abilities and his stupid self insert game unfortunately.
I have another account that I used to search for things that I don’t want affecting my feed but actually I don’t look at my feed because it sucks now anyways and everything is boring on that website and I would rather read a book because then I get laid
Who will win?
One million angry gamers, or one little bribey boy?
We shall see.
Yeah, if you think they’re reacting positively to this wait til you see how they react to EA cracking open their checkbook. Oh, wait, that one will happen behind closed doors.
I don’t think that will happen especially if you consider the current political climate and how many European countries specifically want to move away from American tech.
Ubisoft is French. Embracer Group is Swedish. Plenty of money even if they ignore the Americans or Saudis or whichever shady group owns EA now.
This is a masterclass in “pick your one thing in life and focus on that.”
I’m highly pessimistic that the spirit of this legislation, which I wholly support, can ever be enshrined in law with enough specificity that it works the way we want it to in the cases where we need it to, without becoming a truly undue burden on small developers or forcing all publishers to just work around it in some way: like taking everything to a subscription model going forward.
undue burden on small developers
Uuh, more often than not, the small devs already make their games indefinitely playable and preservable, just out of a love for the medium.
No actual artist wants their work to have an expiry date.
Legal enforcement is only needed for the passionless big publishers that shutter games just to funnel players into purchasing their latest releases.
It’s mentioned in the parliament presentation. Only a small minority of game publishers engage in this BS, but it’s ALL the big ones, meaning the problem is experienced by the vast majority of consumers.
We’ve had the technology since stone ages, quit lying about this so called burden. All it takes is to not be greedy.
Spoken like someone who’s never had to implement regulatory measures in software.
The regulatory measure in this case is solved by “don’t make it require the player to be online”. That removes a complication, it doesn’t add one.
For multiplayer games it is solved by “make them like we already did in the fucking 90s, where players could run their own servers”.
I’d only be repeating myself.
You haven’t really adressed my points in any way. It’s of course up to you, but as long as you haven’t, there’s no reason to be smug.
Perhaps you could elaborate on what ‘regulatory measures’ you are referring to that would run counter to the argument. I can take that overly simplistic phrase a number of ways ranging from “doesn’t make sense at all” to “maybe I could discuss the nuance”, but it’s impossible to continue a discussion based on the dismissive vague comment.
I would, but it’s video games and the mood in the room is not one of curiosity and discussion, but of pounding fists on the table. But suffice it to say that people think they can explain a law like this in two sentences while I despair that it can even be written at all, even with 100 pages, and function recognizably.
If you want an example, take Texas SB2420, the recent age verification law which said “the App Store has to ask your age and then tell developers so they can only show age appropriate content.” And now go read the full text, which I did at work. And look up Apple and Google’s implementation guidance and API specs. A “simple” thing people think can be explained in a few words is much, much more complex underneath. Like I said, I don’t even think this law can be written and come out the way we want it to.
Kinda seems like you are pounding more tables than I am. Can’t wait for a future when little timmy needs to nag his parents any time a fortnite or roblox update happens. Almost like these laws are written by out of touch simpletons who don’t understand tech.
The difference in your scenario is that it is enforcing a regulation, rather than being bound by it.
Yes, enforcing a regulation, particularly with different requirements by geography is a nightmare. You have to translate the law to code, and make it conditional based on some mechanism of determining jurisdiction.
However, a regulation like “you will ensure you will not require online connectivity for single player games, or if multiplayer you will ensure that third parties are able to keep hosting to keep the experience whole once you stop” is not a nightmare of nitpicky local regulations to navigate. The law doesn’t need to map to code, it just governs the human behavior/decisions.
For example, there are various ‘password’ laws, and it’s no huge deal to comply, since you only have to honor some strictest common law and you don’t need software to implement the regulatory rules.
All they have to do is give up the rights. If they can’t afford it, I guarantee I’m there is a web somewhere that will do it for free.
Yeah. I have similar feelings. And I don’t think the social media fervor is helping things sometimes. There needs to be a certain level of precision in what is being asked for, and I see lots of broad statements about what laws should prevent from happening from random individuals. Using words like “kill switches” when required servers are taken offline. Or demanding every game have a direct networking mode or LAN options in addition to matchmaking or platform facilitated matchmaking.
Yes it’s video games and people want what they want and always think it’s simpler to deliver than it is.
I imagine you see the undue burden as a mandate to keep running the game servers yourself when you have no income to do so.
Once upon a time, the norm for exclusively online games was to provide a hostable server so that any third party could host, because the game companies didn’t want to bother with hosting themselves, so at most they owned or outsourced a hosted registry of running servers, and volunteers ran instances.
Then big publishers figured out that controlling the servers and keeping the implementation in-house was a good way to control the lifespan of games, and a number of games kept it closed.
So the remedy is to return to allowing third party hosting, potentially including hooks for a third party registry for running game servers if we are talking more ephemeral online instances like you’d have in shooters. One might allow for keeping the serving in-house and only requiring third party serving upon plan to retire the in-house game.
I really hope this goes through for obvious reasons. But it would be a 2 fer because it exposed the Pirate Games A hole as a neoi baby narcissist.
The full hearing has some gems such as Catarina Vieira drowning the EU Parliament in gamer memes
That was such a cool way to demonstrate how these iconic games became a part of our culture. They should be able to be archived and preserved like any art.
At 20 minutes if you’re having a hard time. Finding it.
I admit, it was Densely packed xD
Wow! Absolute gold.
Just found out about Stop Killing Games from Path of Titans releasing a skin where proceeds go to this cause! I of course am now a proud owner of the skin.
Hopefully we wont see bad actors just pivot to f2p and have a few microtransactions to actually unlock the games.
Some mobile games already work that way where they claim to be f2p but it‘s just a demo of the actual game with ingame purchases for the other levels. However annoying, it‘s not flat out scamming customers like shutting down servers months after release is. Perhaps devs should still be required to label it as a demo just in case though.
Helpful tip. Don’t buy trash games that do that.
I played and enjoyed a game based on this principle (Dreadnought). I ran out of bullshit I wanted to buy to keep the game going. Also the whole community was probably a few hundred people at the end. It eventually shut down. Not that there would be much to do solo but fan-run servers would’ve been cool.
Dreadnought was awesome, unfortunate that it wasn’t populare …
As long as it’s still a one time purchase, with no clear mention of an end of life timeline, that is just buying a game with extra steps. They mention microtransactions and things like paid DLC in their plans too.
Man fuck Axel Voss! Damn copyright shill. Guess we can take solace in the fact that he seemed to be the only one clearly taking the publishers side here.
And if I’m not mistaken, the European Commission representative argued in his reply to Voss (around 12:20) that “collective management organisations” or “cultural heritage institutions” might well be allowed to preserve games that are not commercially available anymore already under the current framework.
Wup, there’s management. Let me guess what they’re talking about.
“You, sir, are mad! Dinosaurs are reptiles! They must be cold-blooded!”
“Now, you listen and you listen good: Birds are one of the closest living relatives to dinosaurs we have. And I don’t need to tell you they’re all warm-blooded.”
“Do you know how difficult it is to maintain thermostasis for an animal so large? They’re cold-blooded, I tell you!”
“Let me tell you something. There’s evidence to suggest that Velociraptors had feathers. Feathers! What does that tell you?”
It’s amazing that Ross Scott has gone from delivering the funnies to absolute morale boosting for the gaming media.
Hi5 for also being a Ross fan since waaaaaaaay before all this Stop Killing Games stuff happened.
The man needs a trophy of a hand gripping a crowbar -> ‘For meritorious service in the defense and preservation of video gaming’.
He’ll always be what Freeman sounds like to me.
This is what a honest lobby looks like
Right? They represent a few million people instead of like five large companies.
Just create a voluntary certification that a game or developer does whatever it is you want them to do and boycott anyone that doesn’t.
This is like a law that says guac should be free at Chipotle.
This is more like a law that says libraries can preserve and lend games as well as books.
Which ought to be common sense, but here we are.
Lending library books is based on the doctrine of first sale, and the idea that you can resell and lend physical objects.
Running a service is not the same as selling a standalone physical good.
To extend that analogy, this would be like an obligation of the author to make their manuscripts available.
A lot of things seem like common sense of you have an overly simplistic view of the world.
I’m not going to play perfect analogies hunter with you.
The point is, it’s human to preserve interesting things, and it’s corporate to thoughtlessly destroy.
The whole purpose of laws is to keep corporations in check without physically cutting the heads off of the parasites that run them.
We keep forgetting that. (But it’s not my head, so maybe I shouldn’t keep bothering to talk about it.)
Anyway, disused game server code can (and should) be shared after it is no longer profitable, rather than being speculatively bought and sold in a phantom portfolio before being accidentally lost.
And companies that want to make a big deal about how their server code is sacred magic - can just keep running the servers, to prove they aren’t just bullshitting.
Go back to your pirate software streams
I use free and open source software and I understand that the license doesn’t entitle me to burden them to run and maintain a service for me indefinitely.
Pirates are the people who feel entitled to free stuff, even despite the wishes of the creator.
Stop Killing Games initiative doesn’t force developers to maintain the game; it only obliges them to release whatever tools necessary for people to self-host a game server.
This way, if anyone still cares about the game, they can start their own server and keep playing it.
Thank you for clarifying but I still think this has the guac problem, which is the customer dictating “I think this is easy/cheap/free so you should just give it to me.” You don’t know what effort or cost is involved. There could be license entanglements. Running code that you don’t have the source for to be able to patch vulnerabilities in is a bad idea. This stuff should be negotiated voluntarily. I don’t see an arguments about market failure or externalities or monopolies to justify bringing in a regulation.
This is actually addressed as well. The initiative doesn’t oblige currently developed or already released games to have such features, as it recognizes all the financial/legal complications that may arise. It only concerns future games, and refers to the experience of many old games being initially designed with player servers in mind, rendering it possible to play them even now.
It is absolutely possible and normal to do this, and it’s really only the recent practice to act otherwise, which is why Stop Killing Games arose just now.
That being said, of course this decision would affect the developer’s bottom line. First, as another commenter mentioned, they won’t be able to push new games so aggressiely if players can stick to the old one, forcing them to focus on quality and originality of content, which are both more expensive. Second, publishing server code renders them unable to break licenses and steal server code, forcing to make in-house solutions or compromise with open-source. This is, by the way, why Microsoft only now opened the code of MS-DOS - it waited until all the potential lawsuits on IP infringement are expired.
Stop Killing Games will force more transparency, and developers hate that, because they don’t want to admit they manipulated players and broke the law to get here. But they should never have done either in the first place.
What law is a developer breaking when they shut down an old game?
None, and that’s subject to change by Stop Killing Games.
By breaking the law, I meant stealing IP of others and obfuscating the code so that no one would find out.
Pirate Software is a guy who has your same exact wrong idea about the Stop Killing Games movement. I’m sorry you independently arrived to the same misunderstanding
What about, and this may blow your mind, you host the servers yourself? If they release the means, anyone who cares can run the servers and allow players to continue to enjoy their games.
Developing and running server-side software is my job. It’s a lot easier said than done to take software designed only to run inhouse and make it easily installable and runnable in other environments. The typical project will have tangled deployment processes and hard coded secrets and tons of baked in assumptions.
Are they required to open source the code? That’s a licensing issue that might be impossible. Do they have the license to redistribute their dependencies? Did they vendor them, making it hard or impossible to untangle?
Just releasing binaries is no good. All code needs to be maintained. Vulnerabilities get discovered and need to be patched.
Some of the biggest botnets on the planet are Internet of Things devices that never get security updates. They’re a scourge.
No, this is like a law that says once you paid for the guac they can’t come around to your table later and piss in it to make you buy a new pot of the new and improved guac they just released.
I was thinking along the line of them yoinking the guac right from under your nose, even if you weren’t finished yet.
Feels to me more like kicking you out of Chipotle at closing time.
Servers cost money. Making server side code available takes effort and money. It’s the issue of positive versus negative rights. The difference between being entitled to food stamps (you have to give me) versus having the right to hunt (you have to let me). Of course we have food stamps, but that’s funded by the government, it’s not an obligation for grocery stores to give food away.
The point of the guac analogy is the entitlement to say that you as a consumer gets to dictate a price singlehandedly.
Chipotle isn’t closing though. They still want to sell you games. Just new ones.
Servers cost money.
Yes
Making server side code available takes effort and money.
No. Why do I know this? Because it was the norm until way into the 2000s for games to just have a server browser and people running their own servers. That only changed when publishers increasingly wanted to keep players inside their own infrastructure to better sell them microtransactions and subscriptions. Without those, the one time cost of creating standalone server code for a release to the users is easily offset by not having to run your own servers for the game.
There are a number of different possible architectures for online features. Games don’t have to be designed in a way that makes it difficult to release server code after EOL. And if they still are after this regulation passes, the studios and publishers only have themselves to blame.
The point of the guac analogy is the entitlement to say that you as a consumer gets to dictate a price singlehandedly.
Which is why it’s a flawed analogy, because this is not about prices. It’s about what you as a customer get to do with the product you bought after you bought it. And it’s about if it’s ok to even design a product in a way where those rights can’t be guaranteed.
