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
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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.
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.
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.
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
The first second generation Blizzard employee!
I have no clue what Pirate Software is (from context it could be a game developer?), but it sounds like they already hint at an alternative solution in the name.
He’s a spoiled nepo-baby who had a dogwater take and instead of learning and growing from it has doubled-down.
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
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
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.
Maybe that’d be an excuse for the first reaction, but pirate also literally watched the second video then claimed exactly the opposite of what the video actually said.
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 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.
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.
I don’t see how this would put any additional burden on smaller devs. Small teams usually don’t make always-online type games because they’re very complex and expensive
Take Among Us. It is not some huge bullshit live service game, but it makes use of the internet. It was created by a small developer.
The game includes local network play which is a good thing because I assume it would have to under this law, so it can play “offline.”
Do we think that local network play was zero effort to include? Would it really have no effect on small developers if they all had to include this always?
I know what you mean about small indie games being simple but the reality is a little more complex than that image. Small developers do also create online games. They aren’t big shit shows like Fortnite but that doesn’t mean they don’t use the internet.
No one ever wants to hear that it’s more complicated than they think it is, but that’s the truth virtually all the time.
I understand the core case that this man wants to stop. But laws have to be written for all, with precise language, and can’t just say “you know the kind of game we’re talking about.”
And that’s where this gets difficult.
If you can make a multiplayer game over the internet, you can make a multiplayer LAN mode or even share the server implementation or give API specifications to allow the community to make their server software
Yeah I think there’s some promise in “open the source” as a remedy here. Because that doesn’t really put any onus on the game maker. They can keep making games exactly as they do now, but if they want to utterly walk away from a title, they have to open the source.
I think the complications with this would come from IP and copyright law, licensing, etc. for example, if the developer licensed any other software (or music or whatever) in order to make the game, do they actually have the rights to open source all of that? Perhaps not.
It’s kind of like accelerating the public domain thing. Very interesting remedy for this situation, but extremely complex legally, I would guess.
The music/artwork thing is usually not a problem since the license can just not cover art like many open source licenses already do
But then how could anyone use it? If it’s to download and run at home, you can get away with it. But in many of these cases they’re saying open source it so volunteer group XYZ can host a server and keep the game alive. Wouldn’t group XYZ be vulnerable to copyright action?
The artwork and music is usually on the client side (and if it’s not, the programmers need to get good lmao) so it’s really not a problem
But in many of these cases they’re saying open source it so volunteer group XYZ can host a server and keep the game alive
open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for usage, modification from its original design, and publication of their version (fork) back to the community
(copied 1:1 from wikipedia, i was too lazy to write it myself)So no, open source don’t mean that a specific group keeps the server game alive by hosting a server but that the server code is aviable to the public to do whatever they want;
Another solution is making the code Source-available (like some companies already do: eg Mojang) or just distributing a copy of the server for people to use, without being open sourc
Small teams and indies use things like photon to make multiplayer games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m about to cry
If only people were willing to fight this hard for important things…
I see this kind of reaction a bit, but the fact is if you win on one topic you have a foundation to argue other topics.
It’s a Trojan horse issue on all ownership rights and right to repair issues.
Yeah if this won I’d hope it would lead to the “stop killing hardware” movement next.
Oh there’s always someone isn’t that there’s always someone in the comments section that says something like this.
So you enjoy anti-consumer practices?
Yes, since I consider 100 other consumer related issues more important than old video games it obviously means I love anti-consumer practices.
Think about the bigger picture here. Its not about video games, thats the example. The issue is companies pulling the rug out from consumers, thats what the case is about.
Clearly all this got attention because it was promoted among gamers. Stop Killing Games is not using games as an example, that’s the only thing they are fighting for. Yes, we’re lucky that this may be expanded to other practices but it’s not why it got the support it has. Tell same people to boycott Amazon because of their anti-consumer practices and there will be no reaction. Because most people don’t care about general issues like consumer rights, only about the things that affect them personally.
Thats not how law works
I think there is a decent case to be made that the systematic and irreversible destruction of contemporary art for no good reason whatsoever is a pretty cut-and-dry act of barbaric destruction of culture. And preventing that is generally considered a worthwhile thing.
I didn’t say it’s not worthwhile or that games have no value or that it’s not a valid case. I’m just saying there are many more important things than couple of games and it would be nice if people were able to organize and fight for them the same way as they fight for some entertainment.
If there’s anything to learn here it’s that you absolutely can follow in Ross’s footsteps and organize a movement that will fight for what you deem important. He said multiple times “I’m doing this only because nobody else does, not because I’m a good fit for this”.
“let’s not do this because it’s not as important as X” is a bad argument, because the alternative is not that Ross suddenly picks some other topic and starts to drive it, the alternative is that nothing happens at all.
Where’s the line?
I would say things that actually affect people’s lives like worker rights, wealth inequality, pollution or energy transformation. Not things that just slightly limit their vast entertainment options.
I would say preserving any kind of human creation is a valid cause. Like that lady that taped all TV program in the 90s. Like 90% of early celluloid films were melted for glue.
valid != important
And this is also human creation
So we need you to tell us what is valuable and what isn’t? Have you ever been to a museum, passing by some rocks and broken plates?
The plates you’ve seen in museum, were you able to eat out of them? Were they preserved for their utility of as artistic/informative pieces?
The video games, do people want to preserver them for display or do they want to still play them?
I’m not saying video games are not valuable and you can’t try to preserve them. I’m saying there are not that important. Right to repair, personal computing, data protection and open standards are for example more important. I haven’t seen influencers and the influenced fight for those things as hard as they fight for couple of old games.
Give credit where credit is due.
Yeaaah that’s
kind of how I feel about hundreds of people rushing the beagle experimentation facilities but doing fucking dance routines and yoga at ICE detention centers
I mean one of those faces consequences for its actions if it kills a protester, the other less so
Sure, it’s not vital to our survival or freedom, but ownership over digital media is a pretty damn big deal in the current age.
It’s more about maintaining infrastructure than ownership. If you buy a game on Steam and Valve can later delete it from your library it’s about ownership. If a company shuts down the central server and the product stops working it’s more about planned obsolescence. The same issue affects many IoT devices, not just video games, and I think protecting those is more important as it affect more consumers and generates e-waste.
But I know stop killing games just gets a lot of coverage on lemmy because there are a lot of gamers here. I’m sure people also write petitions and talk in EP about more important topics like climate change and human rights.
We can do many things!
If this gets passed, then maybe you can run on a “stop killing IoT devices” platform and get that done - referring to the game decision that’s already a law.
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.
And the stupidest part of this is the ‘omg my IP’ angle from a publisher.
You’ve destroyed this game because it’s not economically viable for you, and therefore the IP of how the server-side operates has no value; these are no longer secrets worth protecting.
If someone else is willing to host it at their cost then the only thing that can do is bolster the franchise. When a niche game has a devoted following that’s willing to build infrastructure to keep playing together, then you know it was a management fuck-up and not a game one that killed it.
There’s the sticking point (well, one of them): sometimes, servers are shut down because the developer wants players to buy a NEW game that they’ll make more money on. If gamers can just play the old game forever, they’re less likely to buy and play the new game whose servers have improved the rent seeking algorithms.
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.
run and maintain a service for me indefinitely
This is specifically NOT what is being asked for. Having an end of life plan doesn’t mean running servers forever.
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.
