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Yes, you would have to make sure your server application adheres to software licenses before release, just like you do with the client application, or any other piece of software a company may use or release. What popular libraries are we concerned about no longer being usable because of this? Remember, this is server architecture. Networking libraries? ENet is distributable, so is Valve's GameNetworkingSockets.
Yes, it'd ask developers to write their servers with this possible/inevitable transition in mind. Developers will plan ahead for that, and I have a very hard time imagining the server architecture would change much at all. A dedicated company-owned server is just a beefier home computer with load balancers and matchmaking. Drop those two, slap a server list on the client, and you're golden.
This is great news!
If anything, some people seem to have this weird faith in regulation that makes them think if some politician is promising to fix something via legislation, then it will get fixed, regardless of how the law is actually written or how it will work out in practice. California in particular is full of regulations that feel good but are either ineffective or has unintended consequences. See prop 65 which litters the state with vaguely worded warning messages that provide next to zero useful information, or prop 13 which massively disincentivizes home building and effectively makes new homeowners subsidize the property taxes of those who bought before them.
You can be supportive of regulations. I am supportive of many regulations. But I don't just support a regulation because it is great news that makes me feel warm and fluffy. I want well thought out regulations that don't neuter themselves with exemptions and don't easily lead to undesirable consequences. If this makes me an irrational anti regulation crusader, then off to Antioch, CA I shall go.
This is what I fail to see an explanation of anywhere in these comments. WHY would this law make a subscriber-based revenue model so much more enticing? WHY would this law make single-purchase games with multiplayer servers suddenly so non-viable from a business perspective?
The latent assumption I keep seeing is that the mere existence of a regulation in an area will drive people away from that model, but that's simply not how businesses operate. It's a cost/benefit analysis. So what is the cost?
There are so many games (like Hitman: WoA, which I love btw) that "require" online access in order to provide the same functions that previous games by the same devs provided fully offline (e.g. keeping track of your weapon unlocks).
This is just clawing back some of the consumer protections that the "we're not selling you a product, we're selling you a temporary and arbitrary license that we reserve all rights over" BS snuck around.
- It causes cancer? Make sure you add a warning label.
- they lost PII? Make sure we collect the fine. What's that; they can't afford it? Don't waste the resources, then. There's other opportunities out there.
Most games have code and design decisions that hark back 25+ years. Every single unreal engine game for example is based code written in the mid 2000s and some parts of the engine really feel like it. Online components are developed the same way. If you made a multiplayer game 10 years ago and it was successful, your next game is going to be built on top of that. I’ve seen places that use stored procedures in Oracle DB for gameplay logic, others that rely on any number of SQL server specific tricks. Closed source dotnet frameworks, proprietary AWS services, if you can think of it there’s probably a game shipped on it. You’re also making the assumption that the server is a neatly coupled thing.
Am I responsible for providing a fallback to EOS, or Steam, or playfab in case their services are decommissioned?
What about the licenses for the code that affects other areas - we have a GPL’ed library here that we can use but now all of a sudden the vitality of the license means we have to replace it?
Who defines “ordinary use of the game”?. If the game has a multiplayer component, to some large number of users that can construe “ordinary use”. call of Duty is the best example of this (although COD is probably one of the games with the best track record here).
This is going to result in games moving more towards the Hollywood studio model - start up a company, launch a game and wind down the company for the next project. People who rely on that already unstable industry will be given even less stability due to this.
> I have a hard time imagining the server architecture would change much
That’s great - I’m sure if it’s that little work you’re willing to do it for all of those games companies.
> A dedicated company-owned server is just a beefier home computer with load balancers and matchmaking. Drop those two, slap a server list on the client, and you're golden
Game backends are just like Other backends. Some use event queues, microservices, third party APIs, licensed components. This adds a burden that no other software is expected to carry - it’s perfectly fine for Google to drop support for their devices but a 25 person company needs to go back and fix all their old games if they want to keep selling them?
In this case, the company offering this service should be responsible for making it possible to host the service independently before discontinuing it. However, games that use such standardized services are actually less problematic in practice. For Steam, for example, there is the Goldberg Steam Emulator, which emulates Steam’s online features. Games that do not have additional DRM or any extra features but simply use the standard Steamworks SDK for multiplayer can be played entirely without the Steam client or server using this emulator. Even for services that had already been shut down, like Gamespy back then, Openspy quickly emerged as an alternative. Not all games worked right away, but the community fixed most of the issues very quickly. So, in the end, the games that use some kind of custom solution built by the developer themselves are much more important.
So AWS are now contractually required to offer all of their managed services to be self hostable or they can’t be used in games?
> For Steam, for example, there is the Goldberg Steam Emulator
So open source reverse engineered solutions are ok? Why aren’t they acceptable for games instead of the underlying platform? Why is it ok for a game that uses steam for online services but not epic (as there’s presumably no equivalent emulator), or an in house tech?
> Games that do not have additional DRM or any extra features but simply use the standard Steamworks SDK for multiplayer can be played entirely without the Steam client or server using this emulator
And those games are unaffected by anything that will come from this law.
35 years ago, in 1991, the vast majority of games were programmed in assembly, directly fiddling with the hardware registers. If you wanted to port your game to a new system, you were basically making a new game. There were some exceptions where systems shared enough internal components to make code reuse viable; these almost universally resulted in worse experiences for the players. Think like ZX Spectrum ports to Amstrad or MSX; or Atari ST ports to Amiga.
If someone in that development context suggested writing all games in a high-level portable language, using common development frameworks licensed by multiple companies, and calling exclusively into standards-defined graphics and audio APIs, they'd be laughed out of the room. And yet, within a decade, basically all games were written in C/C++, using third-party engine code like RenderWare, which had abstracted versions of all the major rendering APIs developers needed to touch. Game porting went from "rewrite your game for each console" to "replace these SDK functions here, make sure it builds, and add another entry onto the QA matrix". And as a result, near-identical multi-platform releases became the norm rather than the exception.
The vibes I'm getting from your post are the same as how a game developer might react to someone in 1991 demanding all games sim-ship on every economically viable platform[0]. It's easy to get lost in the chaos of existing development and assume that because we currently build game servers like shit today, that they have to be built like shit.
The reality is that the state of affairs being mandated by the law is what game developers originally shipped. The original Unreal's multiplayer architecture included dedicated server binaries that shipped with the game itself and could be run by any interested party who wanted to play with people. This is a server architecture that is proven and works; everything from Quake to Team Fortress to Minecraft shipped server binaries you can just run. Likewise, on console, multiplayer services were hosted on one of the consoles playing the game, which, while not providing the best experience, made third-party revivals of those services fairly straightforward.
It is specifically MMOs and "live service" games that moved away from these proven server architectures to the cowboy-coded spaghetti code messes that you are referencing. The California law referenced here is specifically a forcing function for good development practice. All the gameplay-critical server-server components of a particular game should be able to fit in a single binary you can just ship to anyone who should have access to them.
You posed some more specific questions about how a game should fall back. I am not a lawyer and I am not involved with California's law, but I suspect a fallback to the online services of the platform the user bought the game from would be "good enough". Adding that fallback to your QA matrix during major development would probably be the most effective way to make sure it actually works. The ability to point the game binary at a specific IP would be preferred, especially on PC, but I doubt you'll get Nintendo to cert that.
As for Google, I actually do think the current state of affairs regarding software support for smartphones is unsustainable and stupid. It's only even a thing because of toxic max-security[1] in the smartphone market. On PC, we can just install whatever OS we want; it's specifically the tying between OS vendor and phone hardware that we are at the mercy of the vendor's release schedule.
[0] At the time that would include SNES, Mega Drive, IBM PC-compatibles, Macs, Amigas, Atari STs, X68000, PC-98...
[1] https://tom7.org/httpv/httpv.pdf
The problem in this instance is not that the legislation effectively mandates that companies move away from particular server architectures (I mean, there's room to debate the wisdom of that, but it is a pretty explicit goal of many proponents of this law). But if you want to seriously push companies to do that move, you also have to recognize the ways to actually entice them to do that. And you know what is a very good way to ensure noncompliance with your regulation? Tell companies they have 6 months to make core architectural rewrites of not only to-be-released games, but games that they are currently selling and expect to continue selling. That kind of timeframe is just not possible.
The "we're not distributing it" loophole is why the AGPL exists. So yeah, even though you can technically not violate the gpl by not distributing the server, don't do that, it's scummy. Better to just not use gpl code at all.
If you license something under GPL, that necessarily means you’re okay with people making local changes and not sharing them. If you aren’t okay with that, then don’t use the GPL.
For me, that means I use a mix of AGPL and MIT depending on project.
Handing over a standalone server to the public is a massive engineering, financial, and legal headache. Modern multiplayer games rarely run on a single isolated program. They rely on a huge network of interconnected cloud micro services.
A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.
Disentangling the actual game logic from these third party platforms like AWS or Epic Online Services requires months of rewriting code. At that point you're basically re-inventing the wheel on so many technologies that your costs go up exponentially.
Games are rarely built entirely from scratch by a single company and are usually packed with licensed proprietary third party software. Because the studio doesn't own the rights to distribute these proprietary tools to the public for free then releasing a standalone server forces them to spend extensive legal and development hours stripping out the restricted code and replacing it with open source alternatives.
Releasing server code also exposes the inner workings of the company's technology. If a studio uses the same proprietary engine or backend framework for their active money making games then releasing the server code for a dead game essentially hands hackers and competitors a roadmap to exploit their current profitable titles.
From what I can tell this one doesn't include provisions to protect indie shops/solo devs. The entire time spent developing a game is a net loss until release (and probability wise, probably still a loss then). So this is adding more upfront cost to devs.
The bill text I found is also one of the more generic versions I've seen. Specifically this line
>the ordinary use of the game
This is quite broad. I've seen some supporters of this style bill push for 'offline play' being a requirement. For instance, an mmo raid may require 20 players. If after the death of the game getting 20 players is impossible, I have seen people push for ai (just the game version) so it would be possible, or a patch to make the content possible for 1. Each of which are development time that serves no benefit to making money.
There's also the likelihood of the server architecture requiring many moving pieces. Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.
Now the day 1 proponents would probably focus on the obvious provide the server exe cases, but these are concerns down the line.
Also at least this one doesn't do the 'development bond' idea I've seen to protect against the entity going bankrupt, essentially requiring every dev to pay for some sort of insurance before releasing the game (more costs for indie devs).
That seems a bit silly to my eyes, self-hosting a server seems sufficient. But not included in this bill, so not an issue here
> Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.
In this specific case, it's not so hard to imagine a single home computer handling the traffic of 100 connected users for a game of battle royale, the server compute for those kinds (baked-in world, low physics) games can be cheaper than running an instance of the game. Just some physics calculations, networking, and game state.
The main point would be if you start development from the premise that your server executable will be released to the users, the architecture/performance considerations are not that different at all.
Except devs aren't, and shouldn't, be developing under that assumption, they should be developing under the assumption their game will be successful. You don't want to be giving your pitch to investors and have to go "we aren't using AWS services because when we fail we'll provide the exes to the users".
And if you think they need to change, your just admitting this will cost devs more (and when it costs devs more, it raises the barrier of entry, in an industry where failure is already the norm).
The most obvious example is pretty much any form of inviting a player/having idenities. The storage of users and inviting them is what brings in the scaling complexities in your average online game, and that's when you'd use a service harder to have a self hosting equivalent of.
There are already several Fortnite servers available for self-hosting. Fans have created these on their own without access to the official code, and they run on a standard PC or a custom-built server using off-the-shelf hardware. One example of this is Project Reboot, which is publicly available on GitHub. People use it to play older Fortnite seasons or to play the game with friends on unsupported platforms like Linux.
The real reasons to not just toss your backend over to the community and make it their problem are business reasons like 'it will dilute our brand' or 'it is a violation of licensed IP'. Or embarrassing reasons like 'we have lost the source code' or 'we can no longer build new executables'.
If you wanted to trigger a HN rant, topics should always include regulation, particularly in regard to nuclear power, guns, freedom of speech or taxation.
Since I don't know their backgrounds and don't have any background working with video game company executives it's hard to tell which options are more likely.
For example one commenter in this thread said:
>See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs.
This is an objectively true and prove-able statement. What is irrational about that?
WRT regulation the only thing that matters is the incentives that it creates.
>If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only.
This is a valid concern and a real incentive if that’s how the law works. What is irrational about this argument?
Gaming has already gone though a period of pushing subscription games, and most died, since people generally didn't want to pay a fee per game they played. That only left the big players in that space, while everybkdy else went back to releasing games the normal way. I fail to see why things would go a different way this time around.
Regulation also creates jobs, even bad regulation, so there's almost a Keynesian argument to be had about its relationship to our economic system.
I mean in a literal sense I guess it's true but only in a way that has zero connection to the post. They might as well have told me a fun fact about crickets. If it's supposed to argue against this regulation then their actual point stops being objectively true and it probably is irrational to bring up those car standards without way more justification.
It's all about limiting foreign build vehicle encroachment on US market.
All this says is that it's possible for regulations to have negative, unintended consequences. It's about as relevant as reminding your friends that some restaurants are not very good when you're picking a place to eat. It's not relevant when we're talking about something specific and the field of things is varied.
> WRT regulation the only thing that matters is the incentives that it creates.
Sure. What are the negative incentives?
>If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only.
Why? What is the incentive away from one-time purchases? Is it cost? Where is that cost coming from?
Interestingly, restaurant food is typically less healthy, more expensive and less tasty than what you can make at home. Eating out should be the exception, not the rule, which plays directly plays into the anti regulation argument.
There's nothing wrong with having an ambitious attitude, but why not be ambitious seek to build a better tech-biz ecosystem that is actually pro consumer and pro human..
People seem to think there's only one way, and that way is letting capital owners behave however they want incase they're also in that position one day.
Can't wait for the posts 10 years from now asking what happened to indie devs.
This bill alone won't do it, but as you pass regulations it gets harder and harder for a regular person to participate.
The worst rendition I've seen of this bill for Europe requires basically a development bond/retainer to 'ensure' there's dev time available to develop offline features. I.e, extra costs for devs who already by the numbers lose money releasing a game.
I believe this is the key paragraph. I wonder if this will be an incentive towards making more games qualify for those exceptions. I think the previous cases where this act would apply are few but good thing they wouldn't increase under this act.
If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only. A win for gamers' rights, I suppose.
by the way, why wasn't this bug fixed long ago?
Also, with a subscription the customer has VERY different expectations, compared to a one time purchase. As in, they expect the access to go away once they no longer pay.
Yes, please, produce more "games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely".
How is that incentivizing offline games? Half of the service game focused industry would be exempt
Does anyone know how this should be interpreted?
Maybe to have a concrete example, let's take Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (RCT2), with OpenRCT2 as a sort-of mod for it, but imagine that RCT2 was originally a subscription game where you paid per month to play it and that it terminated before OpenRCT2 started. Existing copyright laws already prohibit continued distribution, which OpenRCT2 doesn't do, so does this change anything? Does this law move what used to be civil (copyright) cases into criminal law (so there needs not exist a rights-holder to file suit; the state can just push cases as they see fit)? Could the OpenRCT2 devs still (as I believe they hitherto can) release a 'donation version' with bonus gimmicks if they so wanted, or would that be classified as a sale of something that enables playing the original RCT2 and so illegal?
If you want an answer to your "continuous cost without continuous revenue" riddle, the answer is in-game purchases, DLC, attracting new accounts over time, and the unspoken unadvertised promise "we can cut our losses at any time and shut down servers." This lattermost incentive is what is unhealthy for the market and what should be regulated to no longer be an incentive (short of having peer- or community-hosted servers, at least).
Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)
Meanwhile, yes, there are single purchase games with an online model, and they fail and get shut down because they were never sustainable to begin with. The bill would arguably cover something like the FPS-of-the-years which are intended to grab everyone's attention for a few months and then die off when the company needs you to buy the next version of the title because they get no recurring revenue from you continuing to play the current one. (See Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.)
The required connection and authentication was likely an anti-piracy measure, so kind of doubly yeah.
Online head to head games like Street fighter? Maybe RTS games like Dawn of War?
Pay Day.
Seems like all of these would be hit and will move to freemium or subscription.
That would be the case if the publisher had any intent to actually keep the service online. Empirically they do not, hence the law.
Eh, it sounds unintuitive, but in practice it's extremely common. Almost every first-person shooter (well, you could really expand that to "almost every competitive multiplayer game") made by major studios is either a one-time purchase or entirely free. The ongoing revenue comes from cosmetics and other in-game goodies.
This sort of economy makes sense when you consider consoles (especially back in the day), where it's easy to get people to buy a disc but hard to get people to sign up for a subscription.
> (b) This section does not apply to any of the following:
> (2) Any digital game that is advertised or offered to a person for no monetary consideration.
This solely refers to the game being available for free, not for any additional powerups or cosmetics being available for free.
Then they will shut down the company when they want, and there will be nobody to come for.
We need to culturally accept things like "zero day law patches" for loopholes and unintended consequences. Legislators, don't just pass a law, see it incentivizing something unintended, and then throw up your hands crying "Well, we tried!" Patch the law as soon as the bad behavior starts!
Creating sub-companies is common business practice that even small businesses use. Like if a small company wants to buy a building, they may form an LLC to hold the property to isolate that risk from the rest of their business.
Or cap them to a reasonable standard: 100% of revenues derived from the game.
Whenever the topic of regulating companies comes up, there's way too much fatalistic "Oh dear, we can't possibly incentivize good corporate behavior because companies are oh-so-clever and there's just no way to handle all the edge cases they will exploit!"
We'll never get anywhere at all if we simply give up the moment someone forms a shell LLC.
A big problem with lawmaking systems in the USA at all levels of government is that the change/revision process is virtually nonexistent. Laws are not adjusted as requirements change and understanding shifts. Regulation is hard in that environment, but the optimal amount of it is certainly much greater than "none at all".
It's simply not possible to maintain a functioning society without regulations on at least some things at least some of the time. Anti-regulation dogma is just propaganda by rich people who would become richer if their preferred bad behavior wasn't prohibited by regulation.
This is a weird thing to be legislating on.
> 'it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely. It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.'
The only winners are lawyers. NOT gamers. The lawyers always like to call their laws "protect X" lol
Yah, right!
I do wish this had been around when Firefall [1] shutdown, haven't really bothered with live service games since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefall_(video_game)
I doubt companies are going to go all in on subscription games, since that's more or less been tried and failed, and only WoW and a few others are left standing from that. Or maybe they'll try and fail, since the temptation is just too great (think Sony and Concord trying their luck with hero shooters, even though everyone with threw or more brain cells knew it would never make back what it cost).
Perhaps a workaround is to just have 1 server online indefinitely. Technically the online services are still functional - the match queue times would just be very, very large.
If bills like this pass, there'd be financial pressure on middleware providers to allow distribution at end-of-life (or for their component to be easily severed) else they'd lose out on all customers selling games in California/EU/etc.
People far too often forget the absolutely vital aspect information plays in the free market, and anything that increases information (for example, how long a good should be expected to continue to function) is a net good, when compared to a complete lack of information about that.
That would violate the law.
From Day 1 any Doom client could be a multiplayer server and this is how it worked for almost all games - Descent, Quake, C&C etc...
I guess they could just strip our the parts of the server code that they don't have the rights to redistribute, but then it wouldn't be functional.
The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release. Any sanitation of this binary further condemns this as a silly idea because now you are also compelling the individual or business to do additional (presumably unpaid) work so that arbitrary consumers can use their products or services indefinitely.
Games are interesting because players will sink a lot of time and sometimes money in and so it goes beyond a smart alarm clock or a fitness tracker imo.
It's entertainment. It's ok for entertainment to end, especially when it's this cheap. There aren't any situations where I haven't gotten my money's worth out of a title I've played for 1000+ hours.
> Alternatively, why not just align your incentives with the user and charge subscriptions.
Because most people balk at subscriptions. And that's kind of the answer to a lot of "why don't they just" questions in this area. They can't release the server because of proprietary libs, but they're using those because it's way, way, way cheaper than not doing that and the people who write those libs really know what they're doing. People won't buy your game at the price you'd need to set to do everything in house.
We already obligate them to do other basic necessities for consumer protection such as refunding or replacing faulty products
Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing. A typical scenario would be a game developed as a fork of a proprietary codebase which was licensed from another company. Forcing the licensee to release material would infringe on the rights of the licensor.
The second that becomes a legal requirement with associated penalties, developers will stop licensing technology under those kinds of terms.
https://www.ea.com/news/update-on-ea-titles-hosted-on-gamesp...
Laws trump contracts.
This is not unpaid work as they had already received payment at the time of purchase of the game. They should take into account the cost associated with this work at the time of sale.
This also isn't relevant to third-party code obtained under license. It is a de facto restriction on code dependencies, which may significantly increase development costs.
I agree that it's shitty that buyers can lose access to a game they bought, but I really struggle to see how this could function practically.
Nowadays, this is much less of a "can" and more of a "definitely is" :(
Based on what I see as (non-game) security consultant in terms of service complexity, what modern FOSS projects consider a normal container constellation, and on what I see from at least one indie dev whom I personally know. It has been a topic I've brought up since he put so many hours into it and the game is fun and the binary didn't even run if you don't have a compatible Google Play Services version, much less the various back-ends that it connects to for accounts, level data, level thumbnails, matchmaking, etc. until you even get to the real-time multiplayer server
Government forced speech includes food companies needing to add ingredient labels on packaging including allergen info, landlords needing to notify tenants before entering their homes, stores having to post accurate prices for the products they sell, and employers having to provide workers with safety data sheets for the hazardous materials they work with. These are all perfectly reasonable. Thanks to government forced speech we have more freedom/rights and better lives.
The answer to companies committing fraud is not "buyer beware".
The problem is, where to even start? I would think EFF would be spearheading something like this, but I haven’t come across anything. There have been attempts in the past, but they don’t seem to have ongoing support.
No clue if the market will go for that but it would meet the issue head on. “Companies will provide server binaries” on the other hand feels like pure fantasy.
Overall I’m glad folks are trying to do something about this.
I wonder if they will do something similar for software
Edit: If this was just about local games it’d be simple
(Not an ideal source btw: "This article was originally written in Korean and translated with the help of NC AI." The Bill is tiny can be read at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... )
> 'AB 1921' is one of the first instances of bringing these demands into the institutional fold. Under the bill, companies selling digital games released or resold after January 1, 2027, must provide at least 60 days' notice before terminating service. Furthermore, they must ensure that purchasers can continue to access the game—such as by providing an alternative version or a patch—and must offer refunds if doing so is not possible.
I get that some developers are going to be irked by this, and I get that there will now be some perverse incentive to move to a 'subscription-only' model.
Now that the Stop Killing Games movement has overcome the major hurdle of landing actual legislative change from zero, its not much of a step from this point to extend these protections to anti-consumer practices around subscription-based games too, if they prove abusive.
It's not just about consumer rights, it is also about preserving and promoting arts and culture that can and are passed down through the next generation, which, ironically, helps keep growing and sustaining the industry.
Imagine what arts and culture might be like, seemingly everlasting copyright lifetimes notwithstanding, if Nintendo yanked Super Mario World from everyone because the online services to keep running the game simply costed too much or because the Mario franchise wasn't 'meeting profit expectations'. [Yes, I realise Super Mario World didn't have an 'online' component in the 90s, but imagine if it did...]
Remember that not too long ago it was very common place to self-host servers for games, and for quite a few this is still possible (such as DayZ and Minecraft). Thanks to community efforts, it is also still possible to play long abandoned online games that were once locked behind authentication and server listing providers, such as Battlefield 2 (previously fronted by GameSpy) that has been revived with BF2Hub (bf2hub.com).
Some games[1][2] even have a resurgence after long being forgotten. The revival of Dark Ages wouldn't have happened, and old friendships rekindled, if it was switched off because 'profit'.
Yes, Battlefield 2 had an offline component and could be still played sans GameSpy and BF2Hub, though a big part of the experience and culture around the game was the online community and gameplay against other real humans that made it so successful.
Relatively speaking (and legal/licencing complications aside) it is really not that difficult, especially for games publishers that cash in multiple millions of dollars in raw profits, to patch out authentication server mechanisms controlled by the publisher, and/or release the authentication/game server software binaries or source freely but unsupported after their deprecation date.
The legislation is designed to make these pro-consumer ethics at the forefront of game design. Video games are a big contributor to culture and human connection, and permitting companies to both freely yank a product that someone rightly paid for without compensation - you will own nothing and be happy about it - and kill off parts of our culture, is a horrible place to be as a society.
[1] https://youtu.be/FIFty-O4rOE [2] https://youtu.be/0zNtATsb5eg
According to the bill text I can find, notice does not matter. The exceptions are subscriptions, f2p, or simply already offline games.
If you sell a product for money, you don't then get to later take the product away and keep the money.
I don't think you could sell "for as long as the developer supports the game" specifically, since that'd be an illusory promise (no actual obligation if the product can be revoked immediately), making the contract unenforceable and the customer entitled to restitution (a refund).
"infinite support" is pretty much just "leave the customer with the product they bought working". There doesn't need to be any ongoing costs.
Gamers simply don't have the impression that they're getting value from the "support," rather than getting shafted come end of life.
For a lot of games the current situation is essentially the same as "The OS is no longer profitable enough, so the developer prevents you from using it"
You should be able to make software that has a limited lifespan if you want. I just think that's fine. Games should not be special.
Now imagine your kids never being able to watch them.
Same for books.
Same for music.
Games are an art form distinct from the above, and can in many ways be more powerful than they are. I've played games that toyed with my emotions in ways few movies can.
As such, they need to be preserved just as all the above categories.
I'm incredibly glad I can still play most of my 80's and 90's DOS games. People playing games now should still be able to play them. At least the ones that can be played "locally".
Moreover, if a game is art, it is a form of speech, no? And compelled speech seems like a moral violation.
Online games are a service that have art in them. That is why they come with licenses and privacy policies. They are an actual service that already has consumer protections.
Hand waving any criticisms or attempts at regulating them because they are "art" is deeply dishonest.
Would you feel the same if your phone permanently bricked itself because the vendor decided it was out of date and they just don't feel like supporting it anymore?
If you sell a product for money, you don't have the right to take that product away and keep the money.
And yes, I think it should be legal for a hardware product (like Spotify's "Car Thing" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Thing) to stop working because they don't want to support the online component. It's fine to get mad at the company, but I think it should be legal to do.
I don't think that's a reasonable reading of what it means to "buy a game", by most people's interpretation of the word "buy".
Regardless of that, the neat thing about regulation is that we don't have to settle for that interpretation, and instead force the one that's better for the consumer!
And Apple will no longer sell you a phone, but a license to use it. And it will brick itself when they decide (or when you try to open/repair it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the...
Before Curiosity ever reared its ugly cube, Ian Bogost's game Cow Clicker, released July 21, 2010, actually monetized delaying the Cowpocalypse from its scheduled one-year termination date of July 21, 2011 until September 7, 2011:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker#%22Cowpocalypse%22...
>"Cowpocalypse" event and conclusion
>In 2011, an alternate reality game known as the "Cow ClickARG" was held, where a series of clues from the "bovine gods" eventually revealed that a "Cowpocalypse" would occur on July 21, 2011 (exactly one year since the original release of the game). From then on, every click made by players would deduct thirty seconds from a countdown clock leading to the Cowpocalypse. However, players could extend the countdown clock by paying to supplicate with Facebook Credits: paying 10 credits would extend the countdown by a single hour, while 4,000 would extend the countdown by an entire month.
>After $700 worth of extensions, the countdown clock expired on the evening of September 7, 2011. At this point, the game remained playable, but all the cows were replaced by blank spaces and said to have been raptured. Bogost intended the Cowpocalypse event to signal the "end" of the game to players; when addressing a complaint by a fan who felt the game was no longer fun after the cow rapture, Bogost responded that "it wasn't very fun before."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110605
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Gamedate – A site to revive dead multiplayer games
I want to recreate the server for Peter Molyneux's "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?", but put a life changing Rightward-Facing Cow from Ian Bogost's social commentary game "Cow Clicker" inside the cube, instead of a huge disappointment and a pack of broken promises and lies and hype and literal promises of godhood and credits and royalties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981916
DonHopkins on July 4, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Cow Clicker (2010)
A decade ago attempted to troll Peter Molyneux at the Unity3D "Unite 2012" conference after his insufferably vainglorious keynote presentation of his "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?" Cube Clicker game, jokingly guessing that the big secret inside the box was a cow, but he just didn't get the joke, even after I explained it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380418
DonHopkins on Sept 5, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Bullfrog After Populous
His Cube game was the epitome of dopamine addiction games, all that was wrong with Zynga/Facebook games, the rage at the time. Nothing at all original about that: a total cop-out of game design.
When Peter Molyneux gave his insufferably vainglorious keynote presentation of Cube at the Unity3D Unite conference at Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, I chatted him up afterwards and attempted to troll him by guessing that the big surprise in the box was a cow.
I don't think he got the point that I was trying to make an ironic reference to Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker, which is a parody of and social commentary on dopamine games.
I tried to explain the joke to him, and he still didn't get it. At least Ian Bogost had the self awareness to design Cow Clicker in the service of making a critical statement about game design, and the capacity of shame to be embarrassed when it was an accidental run-away success.
Unite 2012 : Keynote - Founders & Peter Molyneux (The BS starts at 1h 8m 21s -- It's been 8 years since I saw this live, and it's much worse than I remembered, especially now knowing how it turned out!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24AY4fJ66xA&t=1h08m21s
>1h 48m 06s, with arms spread out like Jesus H Christ on a crucifix: "Because we can dynamically put on ANY surface of the cube ANY image we like. So THAT's how we're going to surprise the world, is by giving clues about what's in the middle later on."
http://www.cowclicker.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
>In the wake of a controversial speech by Zynga's president at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2010, Bogost developed Cow Clicker for a presentation at a New York University seminar on social gaming in July 2010. The game was created to demonstrate what Bogost felt were the most commonly abused mechanics of social games, such as the promotion of social interaction and monetization rather than the artistic aspects of the medium. As the game unexpectedly began to grow in popularity, Bogost also used Cow Clicker to parody other recent gaming trends, such as gamification, educational apps, and alternate reality games.
>Some critics praised Cow Clicker for its dissection of the common mechanics of social network games and viewed it as a commentary on how social games affect people.
https://qz.com/34024/life-really-is-a-game-with-a-lot-of-cli...
>Life really is a game—with a lot of clicks—and then you die
>Curiosity is just the latest in a series of social experiments that rely on user interactions with seemingly no point. Of course, Zynga is the king of this phenomenon, providing games full of sticky and addictive action that encourage more clicks for the sake of clicks. Arbitrary value becomes real value, even when it’s not meant to. Just ask Ian Bogost, who created the satirical social game Cow Clicker that went on to such absurd popularity that he felt compelled to continue developing it, trapping himself in an ironic loop that refuses to end. In Cow Clicker, you literally click one cow every six hours to collect Mooney, which lets you buy other cows to click on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27324466
DonHopkins on May 29, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatan...
Is Peter Molyneux a scammer? Or just a pathological liar who believes his own hype? He made some fantastic games in the past, but then...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux
The Lesson of Peter Molyneux
https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyne...
Peter Molyneux - Dreamer? Or Con Man?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62-J4KDMAIk&ab_channel=Shott...
Peter Molyneux Interview: "I haven’t got a reputation in this industry any more"
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...
>RPS: Do you think that you're a pathological liar?
>Peter Molyneux: That's a very...
>RPS: I know it's a harsh question, but it seems an important question to ask because there do seem to be lots and lots of lies piling up.
>Peter Molyneux: I'm not aware of a single lie, actually. I'm aware of me saying things and because of circumstances often outside of our control those things don't come to pass, but I don't think that's called lying, is it? I don't think I've ever knowingly lied, at all. And if you want to call me on one I'll talk about it for sure.
Subscription games already always had a "no pay, no play" expectation, so I don't see any problem with that carveout. The only real problem I can see is that in-game purchases in free to play games are not additionally explicitly named. (Though, "no monetary considerations" shouldn't include ftp + mtx)
Also, most gamepass games are available for purchase as well, so I don't see the problem there either, except the possibility that a game is removed from gamepass so you lose access despite paying, but that's something for the courts to figure out.