Case in point is "Redbox Revokes Access to All Previously Purchased Content After Bankruptcy": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076807
How many times has Microsoft done it with music? How many times have companies that are still in business disabled older devices that are still perfectly functional in hopes to sell newer devices and/or get people to sign up for subscriptions, while not allowing end user access to their own devices?
California and Massachusetts have made some steps to correct this. I'd love to see more.
The rest of it could be taken care of with consumer choice, but effectively you don't have a choice with the big platforms.
I get that it shouldn't be required to provide communication between the device and some app but it should at least be required to do it's basic function? (can't be remote shut off, can't stop working if no internet, can't stop working if it can't contact servers, ...)
Example: My wife gave me a google mini that I use as a talking alarm clock. That's all: what time is it, please set an alarm. Period. Recently it told me it no longer works because I didn't install "Google Home" on my phone. Nothing changed on the device or its circumstances. Someone at Google decided to make a change that broke it.
I use to type the ip from a security cam and get a web page with a video stream on it. I thought it was hilarious when it turned into a 404.
This was not the immediate goal though, because if it gained any traction it would get so much pushback from the major industry players that passing new regulation would be effectively impossible.
A TL;DR of the whole situation is, there are currently no laws that keep publishers from selling you software and intentionally breaking it, leaving you with nothing. Games are a unique version of this; you can't just download an open source clone because there almost never is one due to copyright issues.
(this does not apply to subscription-based software, the license terms are clear that your use expires with the subscription)
The obvious and clearest response is simply this: If you as a publisher are so convinced that your game is obsolete... make the remote server source available under a permissive license to your existing license holders. Better yet - plan for releasing a copy of it at development time.
You don't even need to make the license permissive to everyone, or for everything (open source). You just need to make it possible for those who have purchased your product to continue to use the product, and there are MANY ways to do that which don't involve your consistent labor.
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Basically - To directly address your point: If the alternative is that the publisher does crap like completely disable single player experiences because they've shut down remote licensing servers... fuck them.
That's not a company I think should be allowed to exist. If we can't limit them this way... them I'd be fully in favor of mandating they return the full purchase price of the item to every purchaser.
That purchase price represent your customer's labor.
You are basically just saying "give up all rights to the ip you've sank a ton of money and time into"
If that's not desirable for a product because of the desire to make money, then allowing end user configuration should be something that comes with a fixed date (this product will require our servers for the first five years, then it's open to any servers, for example) or with an update when the company decides to stop running their servers.
Saying it "mandates labor" is inaccurate insofar as requiring that software not be used to facilitate illegal harassment, DoS, distribution of child porn, et cetera isn't considered "mandating labor". It's the cost of doing business, and suggesting that the cost is high is wildly inaccurate.
It isn't? Who doesn't consider that mandating labor? It literally is mandating labor. Also, why do you use the word facilitate? Obviously that's illegal, what you mean to say is actively preventing the use of for that purpose, which btw is not mandated, companies do it to cover their own ass when they have the resources to.
Normally this honesty would cost them money because their competitors would have better (more persuasive) marketing, but a law could force every company to be honest at the same time so that the relative ranking of each company does not change.
> Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher.
> The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.
Perhaps there is a disconnect between the policy intent and the understanding?
This is probably covered by "reasonable means to continue functioning" and the answer will be "there are no reasonable means".. but the comment parent's point somewhat stands.
Even moving a DLC check can be complicated. When you game is done, do you disable all DLC since you can't verify someone purchased it, or do you make it freely available? Who will pay for that additional data streaming (assuming it's not on something like Steam) ?
I am not disagreeing with the wish of the initiative, just providing some food for thought on the potential costs to a company.
Yes, I don't think they understand that running these games isn't free, modifying the games to be self hostable is not free, and giving away the code for other people to run it is ip suicide.
The worker is paid for their labor regardless.
Look at the case of Massive Entertainment and World in Conflict [1]. All reasons for not doing something similar boil down to decisions made early on in development.
Pass this law, fine. Just expect to pay $100 for a game + a monthly fee to play it online
The goal is to require publishers to leave the game in a working state when they end support.
For single player focused games, this means removing the phone-home verification or drm so it can function offline.
For multiplayer focused games, this means allowing users to run their own server. It DOES NOT mean keeping official servers running forever.
I'm sure there's going to be someone saying "NOOOOO they'll have to do more work to make sure the game is still playable!" Ok, and? You're saying they should legally be allowed to sell the game on a DVD that self-destructs after a year because it's "too much work" to sell non-destructing discs? This is why new regulations are needed, because this is a bad practice that only recently started, and it needs to be stopped before it gets worse.
And also it needs to be clear this DOES NOT APPLY to games that have a monthly subscription fee like WoW, or games that are completely free to play.
> For single player focused games, this means removing the phone-home verification or drm so it can function offline.
I really doubt that anyone would dispute that. If we are only talking about that, its just fine.
> For multiplayer focused games, this means allowing users to run their own server. It DOES NOT mean keeping official servers running forever.
This is where it gets confusing, since then you say:
> And also it needs to be clear this DOES NOT APPLY to games that have a monthly subscription fee like WoW, or games that are completely free to play.
That should be clear from the petition but why are those 2 a distinction? You have to buy WoW, its expansions, and pay a subscription fee.
Why is that inherently different from buying an online only game, that you just don't have to pay a subscription for? For example, Guild Wars 2. For any reason that mattered it is identical to WoW when it comes to the server side of things. Except it doesn't have a subscription.
If we really are going to make that distinction, it should have been in the petition. I had the same problem with the website that was discussing the Crew, critical information about what exactly we were talking about was missing and actually what we were talking about only came up after discussing it here.
> Because this is a bad practice that only recently started, and it needs to be stopped before it gets worse.
This petition also really needs examples of this, because I struggled to find an example so so far the only ones presented as games that are unplayable because of phoning home is NFS Underground and The Crew. When the petition is making it out to be a much larger and wide spread problem than it currently is.
https://invidious.private.coffee/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
Alternative YouTube link:
For GW2, any new regulations would apply normally because you bought a product(the game), not a service(a subscription). So yeah, they'd have to let you host a sever when they shut official servers down.
Completely free games don't apply because... they're free. You have not entered into a legal contract with the publisher because no money was exchanged. They're not obligated to keep supporting a free product.
If you thought the wording on the petitions is confusing, you might want to tell the guy behind it directly. ( rosswscott at google's mail service). It was actually revised by... probably many people and some things may have been lost in repeated edits.
(I can find a list of games that have been killed off. I'll have to reply to this later because I saw it linked in a video and I can't remember which one it was)
yes, that's how servers work. You don't own anything. You didn't pay for support. If you don't like that risk, don't play on games with no LAN hosting.
But consumer demands have risen and clearly they stopped caring about local hosting, especially since they are spoiled by dedicated servers and their optimizations. So I don't think the scheme is going away.
>And also it needs to be clear this DOES NOT APPLY to games that have a monthly subscription fee like WoW, or games that are completely free to play.
oh cool. I guess we'll be getting a lot more F2P titles. These console companies should be caught up to what is standard in mobile by the time any bills pass. I think they'll try subs for a short spell, but quickly default back to f2p.
How many games actually only phone home and have been rendered unplayable for that reason?
I am struggling to find any examples of this happening, but I am sure there are a few. Unless I am missing it, I don't even see an example listed here.
If the game relies on servers for data, online play, or other things that is a completely different beast. That isn't just, "oh it was rendered unplayable". No it was an online game and the servers were shut down. It sucks but thats the nature of moving away from p2p online games.
To be very clear here, I agree with this when it comes to single player games. But as its written, it has the potential to conflate 2 massively different issues (as the Crew discussion did last time) that it should be very clear on those distinctions and I would love examples.
A non-exhaustive list of games I have operated servers for: Freelancer, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2, Counterstrike, Space Engineers, Minecraft.
We know how to solve this problem. Companies don't want to, because they make more money out of lock-in live service games. We're allowed to tell our lawmakers to tell them tough shit. Build games to be used after servers are decommissioned, or don't built games.
To my knowledge you are talking about games that all of the core data is stored on the client side and don't rely on updates being able to be applied to servers on data required for the game to work.
How would you propose WoW, FFXIV, or other MMO's continue to be run after? There are fan projects to make private servers for some of those but those rely on data and processes running on the sever's. Controlling bosses, NPC's, events, and other things.
It isn't realistic to expect that these companies would release the source code for their servers. Companies re-using code and components for other projects is very much a thing.
Operating servers paid with company budget makes more money than offloading the compute to customers' computers paid on customers' dimes? What?
No, the reason multiplayer games have moved away from peer-to-peer to hub-and-spoke is because it's easier for the customers. Most people frankly cannot and moreover do not want to be sysadmins when they just want to play their vidja gaemz. This becomes even more of a poignant issue with more "normies" and "casuals" becoming gamers.
Hub-and-spoke Just Works(tm) Out Of The Box(tm) so long as the hub exists, and that's something the majority of people desire and appreciate.
I'm obviously not speaking with regards to games that must be hub-and-spoke (eg: MMOs) or games that do so for no good reason (eg: Hitman World of Assassination).
sounds rather dramatic no? Just don't play badly managed games. If others want to be grifted, a fool and their money...
I know that there are games that only phone home or require an online connection to play online like Kingdom Hearts (which is particularly frustrating on my steam deck).
That part of this I am not disputing.
From the way this is written it sounds like this is a big problem that keeps happening for single player games, but I am struggling to find a ton of examples.
I fully agree that the single player part of that should still be playable. (And multiplayer if its p2p but i assume it is not).
I don't quite understand why this petition did not list examples of this happening, since I assume some game caused someone to make this petition.
But I still stand by what I originally said that we need to distinguish between games that are offline for no good reason (Like NFS Underground) and games like WoW if/when that shuts down.
Game purchases were originally linked to a Mojang account, and even single-player mode required you to log in at least once before you could play. Fair enough.
The servers are still up, but they forced people to migrate from Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts. There was a reasonable grace period, but I didn't want a Microsoft account, so now I can't legally play the game anymore.
I mean, that's a reasonable choice you made. Unfortunate, but 2.5b dollar aquisitions by a tech conglomerate will do that.
Fortunately, that situation is exceedingly rare.
The entire Xbox Series catalog, for starters. You can't even setup the console without phoning to Microsoft's servers. Meaning units not already associated with an account will become paperweights once Microsoft inevitably kills support.
It hasn't happened so far, but I'm sure you'll be right one day and we'll all be collectively begging for mega-corporations' forgiveness.
Any entity that doesn't want to abide by these rules would be a good riddance anyway and it would give room for customer-respecting alternatives to flourish. That's a win-win.
It has happened, many, many times.
Apple's newest features (both iPhone mirroring and AI) are a great example, so are Meta's. A lot of accessibility tech (like Meta's new glasses or their feature allowing the blind to identify people in photos) is also impacted.
There are many more examples, most local American newspapers just straight out can't be accessed from the EU for example.
The more laws like these we have, the less attractive the EU is going to be for foreign companies to enter. We're on the way to turn into another South Korea, with their shitty local apps for everything and banks that still required Active X controls and Internet Explorer in the early 2020s.
how would that be different from you simply choosing not to play the game as a personal choice? Why get the government involved?
Well, good luck, but this is a pretty high bar.
Does that mean it can apply to open source license as well?
First people are not taking into account proprietary software licenses. We used software to build the servers we didn't have a distribution license for, only a server license. Ripping that out was non-trivial work if even possible. That doesn't include the proprietary internal platform stuff like crypto validation, telemetry, harm reporting, etc.
I was the only one from the studio working on the server feature directly, client and server. At the time I was the only one with that skillset. It would have taken me around 3 months to change the client to work with non-auth'd servers. This may sound long but we didn't have standard apis; it took me 2 weeks to get TLS working. Beyond that it would have been another 3-5 months to do legal and security review to make sure we hadn't introduced a platform vulnerability through a malicious server, work we skipped originally because we were able to lock everything down internally.
The servers would have taken another 2 months or so to setup. However they were built to some very specific software and specific to AWS, if I were to change it to not be cluster based, run in a single app, I'd call it 6 total.
None of this includes documentation or making it nice. So we're talking a year with marketing, documentation, testing, etc. Which is a large percentage of what it took me to build the server features in the first place.
This was also a little big planet / mario maker type feature, not full on multiplayer / match making. I would greatly increase my estimate for those.
Instead, with that same time I: 1) helped greatly improved the internal engine tools, speeding up all of the developers and artists enabling them to do more on the next game, 2) Built internal and external player telemetry getting us a lot better QA coverage and great details on what players were doing which helped our DLC, 3) altered the server feature for internal use as well, letting us publish several extra free missions for the main game and DLC to fill in parts that were missing, 4) build a render farm which improved the artists cycle time from weeks to hours. 5) taught several of the more technical artists C++ to bind UI to shader features saving developer and artist time. Not doing each of these would materially have diminished the game or subsequent titles.
And finally, before you downvote, I did in fact work to make the system work after we shut it down, just not the same way people want to mandate. I ensured that it would work locally and all of your downloaded content was saved. I also make it trivially easy for us to dump the database to s3 json for the top 10,000 missions, well into the long tail. And finally and most importantly, I spent time making the system as cheap as possible to run, which turns out to be THE key feature for businesses. It's been 13 years and I'm not at the studio anymore and and the servers are still running, mainly because they cost almost nothing to run.
Maybe big studios could amortize this over time. It'd make smaller studios much less likely to build the server features in the first place. Many might chose to close to not deal with it and re-form. It would have made us think twice, so really I think it'd have a chilling effect, not the effect you want.
