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nerdjon 2 days ago [-]
This is basically advocating for open source games which is a completely different story than what stop killing games is trying to do.
There are tons of closed source games that have zero online component to them.
I don't see how you can actually argue that this is a good thing, especially when they say:
> The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.
F3nd0 2 days ago [-]
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
>
> Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.
What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.
It uses an independent reimplementation of the code of a Zelda game from the GameCube and combines them with the assets from the actual game to make native binaries for various platforms, which blows my mind a bit but demonstrates the power of this sort of split abstraction.
F3nd0 2 days ago [-]
Yes! And there are many other re-implementation projects, like OpenMW, OpenGothic, fheroes2, and others, which allow you to play the games if you can provide the original assets. Largely for older games, but the point stands.
Adding on to this but I'm not sure if it's 1:1 what you're talking about.
PokeMMO is a online Pokemon Fangame that combines the first 5 generations of games. From what I gather, this is possible because it is up to the user to provide the ROMs, so litigious Nintendo cannot say they are re-distributing copyrighted material
saghm 1 days ago [-]
Does it only use the assets from the original games, or also the scripting? If the former, then I'd say it's basically the same concept that I'm talking about, but with making a new game using the existing assets rather than reimplementing an existing one. If it uses the scripting as well and then provides some extra stuff to merge them and put it online, I'd say it's a slightly different (but still extremely cool!) thing.
dpoloncsak 18 hours ago [-]
I'm not entirely sure...I know the battle AI is custom, and a few moves are still not implemented. This makes me lean towards "they're scripting it themselves" but it could be a hybrid of the two for all I know
saghm 2 days ago [-]
OpenMW has been on my list to try out for a while now, I should have thought of that one. I hadn't heard of OpenGothic, but I also only recently started learning about that game at all with the remake coming out soon, so I might need to add that to my list as well!
This makes me think, is there one of those "awesome" lists for open game reimplementations? If not, someone should make one...
(edit: Thanks for the multiple great replies on this! Now I have even more stuff to go through to add to my lists, and I love having that problem)
F3nd0 2 days ago [-]
Yes, there is <https://osgameclones.com/>. Note that not all of the listed games are free software, but many are.
worble 2 days ago [-]
Luxtorpeda maintains a pretty comprehensive list of game reimplementations
Unfortunately, open source projects traditionally have a poor AI record. And when (sometimes, contrary to tradition) they make a fully-fledged AI, it plays at a super-expert level and ruins the fun of both campaigns and single-player, turning a simple walk into Saving Private Ryan. I'd call it "made by maniacs for maniacs."
zuzululu 2 days ago [-]
WTF!
That is impressive there is OSS Gothic 2
I wonder if its legal, how is it MIT
saghm 2 days ago [-]
Presumably from the same methodology they laid out in the parent comment: clean-room reimplementation of the code is fair game, and you have to bring-your-own-assets (ostensibly from a legal copy of the original game, but however you do it is your own choice, not anything the people providing the free code need to be concerned with).
doctorpangloss 1 days ago [-]
what power, exactly? that nintendo doesn't care about these guys for some idiosyncratic reason?
saghm 1 days ago [-]
The power to have a game natively on platforms it was never implemented on before but look identical to the original. To me, that's honestly cooler and more desirable than emulation; the fact that it's also more defensible from an IP standpoint is just a nice bonus.
I also wouldn't say that "respecting the limits of IP law" is particularly idiosyncratic either; you can make the case that IP owners like Nintendo often overreach due to the inherent advantage of being a large company with a lot more resources than a smaller open source project, but I don't really see it as worthwhile to call them out for not doing that in some cases.
doctorpangloss 1 days ago [-]
IP law is peak law nerd, regular lawyers can't make any definitive statements about IP situations, what makes you think that you could?
saghm 22 hours ago [-]
Do you honestly think that most lawyers couldn't tell you that downloading the Linux source code for personal use is legal under IP law, or that dumping games from a Nintendo Switch and serving them on a website for public download is a violation?
If you think that neither of those definitive statements are something regular lawyers could tell you, I think we just have mutually incompatible perceptions of reality. Otherwise, you're claiming that the boundary between what's transparently a legal or a violation and what's murky is itself obvious, which doesn't really make sense if you don't think that regular lawyers even understand IP law.
It honestly just seems like you're trying to pick a fight for reasons that are not really clear to me. You initially responded derisively to my use of the word "power" to describe a form of abstraction, and when I responded to clarify it, you ignored that part of my response in favor of focusing on a different part and starting a new argument about that.
doctorpangloss 16 hours ago [-]
> those definitive statements are something regular lawyers could tell you
go ahead and ask. non-IP lawyers will tell you to talk to IP lawyers. another way to think of your two questions is, "in what scenarios would ... be permissible and not permissible, in your opinion?" if you were sincerely interested in learning something.
16 hours ago [-]
1 days ago [-]
joegibbs 1 days ago [-]
But why? Both the programmer and the artist have to eat, they both take pride in their work. What is the rationale for treating one side differently to the other?
tempaccountabcd 12 hours ago [-]
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JacobKfromIRC 1 days ago [-]
There's also the free culture movement, which generally believes all creative works should be free, not just software.
There are many people who would advocate for free software and not free culture, but jxself has also written in support of free culture: https://jxself.org/drm_and_free_culture.shtml
That post is from 15 years ago, so of course he could have changed his views since then (but I don't see any evidence of that in this case).
fasterik 15 hours ago [-]
Why is there a distinction between software and art? Can't you make the same argument on both sides, either that artists should make their work freely available, or that programmers should retain the rights to their work?
qq66 1 days ago [-]
I don't see the logic in why art would be treated differently than code, and there is a lot in modern games that are not clearly one or the other (hitboxes? animations? lighting effects?)
2 days ago [-]
BlitzGeology91 1 days ago [-]
> The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.
Personally, I’m a big fan of this idea. I really like the way that games like Doom do things: the engine itself is FOSS, but in order to play Doom, you need DOOM.WAD which is proprietary and must be purchased. DOOM.WAD doesn’t contain any code (it only contains graphics, sounds, level geometry, etc.) so you don’t have to run any unfree software in order to play Doom.
However, there are some people in the free software movement that disagree with me. The Free Software Foundation maintains a wiki called the Free Software Directory. Here’s a quote from the Free Software Directory’s rules for what can and cannot be included in the Free Software Directory [1]:
> Edge Cases
> This is not static information. Policies about adding non-free code obviously don't change, however the way projects are licensed or the way they interact each other is definitely subject to change.
> […]
> • If software is freely licensed but is bundled with artwork that is not, do we consider the program to be free? From RMS "Images and sounds need to be free if they are essential parts of the software. But if they are just decoration, and easily replaced, then they do not have to be free." Sound and artwork fall into the category of essential for interactive games. Logos on otherwise utilitarian projects do not.
That being said, that same set of rules also says [2]:
> Free programs
> Software needs to meet the free software definition to be listed at the Free Software Directory as well as follow these guidelines and requirements for entries.
> […]
> • The software program itself should not package any program-data, art assets loaded by the program, or software which is under a nonfree license. If art or data is available for the game under a nonfree license but not packaged directly with it, that is a different matter and one we should be more flexible about.
Those two quotes seem like they were written by two different people who have opposite opinions on this topic, but IDK.
Anyway, my point is: I really like it when games do that, but it seems that at least some people in the free software movement disagree.
Dwarf Fortress is a modern example of that paradigm.
wtetzner 1 days ago [-]
As far as I know Dwarf Fortress is entirely closed source.
ZeWaka 12 hours ago [-]
I was speaking in the sense that the base game is free and you can buy it with non-ascii graphics for a price.
However,
The "raws" that drive the game are completely configurable and accessible by a user.
It's more like the engine being closed source and the gamedata being source-available. Modding isn't quite the right word - that implies it being less open.
You can delete stuff from being present in your game, add new plants or objects, new diseases, etc.
Also related, the game has been opened up with Lua scripting thanks to Putnam's efforts, for even more powerful procedural addons.
This is largely how open source game engines like OpenMW or OpenTTD work: the game engine is reverse engineered, and the art is something the end user provides by downloading/owning a legitimate retail copy.
And that’s really great, but this model is ultimately not realistic for most game developers.
It’s not like productivity software where the code of the product isn’t the majority of the value being delivered. Gitlab is happy to give away their source code because a bunch of enterprise integrations, support, cloud hosting, and features are paywalled.
Game developers really just can’t do this model. If the game is open source it’s going to be far too easy to pirate the game. The economics of single player games largely revolve around the strength of sales in the first month or two.
This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.
For a AAA game where it needs to sell millions of copies at a high price to break even on its huge production budget, game companies can’t risk a high piracy rate. Just look at GTA 6, a game with a production budget of multiple Avatar films.
MYEUHD 1 days ago [-]
Games will get pirated regardless whether they're on GOG or not.
> This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.
Likewise, Cyberpunk 2077 was released on GOG 4 months after the Steam release. And IIRC the game's revenue didn't cover its costs until ~2 years later.
All three of the examples I gave are $50 or more.
Podrod 1 days ago [-]
You're wrong about Cyberpunk, it was released on both platforms on the same day. I mean it was CD Projekt's own store front.
MYEUHD 16 hours ago [-]
You're right. My bad. I was looking at the price changes in gogdb, and price tracking started a few months after launch. But the details page shows the Global release date and the GOG release date.
I think you are at least partially reinforcing my point here. Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.
Two of the three examples are solidly in the realm of indie titles.
Yes, there are big release games on the platform. I see, for example, that Silent Hill f is on GOG.
I will generally agree that piracy eventually happens, but a lot of DRM has made piracy impractical for critical early weeks of a game's release.
I think different video game publishers have different opinions on the matter and both sides have a lot of validity. I also think that different types of games have different rates of piracy, as it can be a crime of convenience or not.
If your game's demographics skews more educated, affluent, and/or older, I would imagine that piracy rates will be lower. Perhaps your game is more popular in some countries over others that have different laws and/or cultural norms surrounding piracy.
MYEUHD 16 hours ago [-]
> Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.
Ah I see. Yeah I actually thought that would be pretty strange since it was CD Projekt Red’s store.
trinsic2 1 days ago [-]
I'd argue that games being open source and being pirated does mean you can't make money. I think you are looking at this backwards, like the rest of the industry. You don't need to force people to buy your stuff by making it closed and preventing people from getting at your stuff for free.
THe people that matter will compensate you if you make something that matters to them.
The whole idea that you need to force people to by your stuff through restrictions is a perverse way of looking at the world.
dangus 9 hours ago [-]
I think the piracy rate probably varies a lot by demographic and overall target audience, and that for some types of games and publishers a lot of the draconian DRM makes a lot of sense from a pure dollars and sense standpoint.
A certain type of player just checks for cracked versions first even though they have the money to buy the game and for that person Denuvo buying the publisher a few weeks/months of a crack not being available is worth the investment.
I suspect that a lot of the most famous examples of big budget games with no DRM at all have an older, more educated, and more affluent demographic.
felipellrocha 2 days ago [-]
To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit. It just takes the idea to its logical conclusion. As a game developer, if this thing passes, I would just not build multiplayer ever anymore.
hhjinks 22 hours ago [-]
Why not? Minecraft is the second most selling game of all time and comes with a freely distributable and hostable multiplayer component. How would this legislation have stopped that from happening?
dijit 2 days ago [-]
as a game dev myself, agreed.
I’m guessing nobody here has ever actually tried to make games, let alone multiplayer ones. It’s not “oh just make it better” we’re usually already stretching the limits of what’s possible financially and time wise to get a working (fun) product.
You can add burdens all you want, but that means the games get simpler.. because they can’t be made cheaper (price sensitive customers) and time is finite in that context. something has to give.
F3nd0 2 days ago [-]
As not a game dev myself, may I ask for clarification? How does ‘Stop Killing Games’ legislation kill any sort of multiplayer games specifically? Aren’t there already games which don’t have the problem the movement is trying to solve? Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? I feel like I may have misunderstood your point or am just lacking a lot of important insight.
DSMan195276 1 days ago [-]
> Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place?
It's a question of when, not if - you're not going to pay to keep the servers online forever. What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't? If they're bad enough then plenty of people will not be interested in taking that risk by making such games.
stale2002 1 days ago [-]
> What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't?
How about "the government forces you to release the code"? That's seems fair.
Unless you hid your source code in USB drives under your bed, the government can probably just force GitHub (or similar )to release it. I bet they've got it backed up.
DSMan195276 1 days ago [-]
The government will release it with all the copyrighted code and assets that's owned by a bunch of third-parties?
Ex. if I license my artwork, music, characters, code library, etc. to a game developer and they don't create a legally releasable version of their server, then the government will forcibly break our licensing agreement and I just get screwed?
BlarfMcFlarf 1 days ago [-]
If everyone in the industry knows what the rules are, you can make contracts and agreements and licensing that works with those rules.
knollimar 1 days ago [-]
Ab1921 in california doesn't propose this. Its either an offline copy, a copy that works without servers, or 100% refund. Basically patch or refund.
I can't wait to see "you haven't met your patch obligations" on a balance sheet and a full indie game being underwater
runevault 1 days ago [-]
So you're assuming game devs write every line of code in their server infrastructure. First, could be using a third party library you have license to use on a limited number of machines that make up your backend servers. Second you could be paying for third party API access to something like snowflake.
You either have to rip out the code (which may or may not break the server, but still requires developer time to do) or write replacement code which likely takes even more dev time to do or you would have done it instead of paying for the library/access to the service.
trinsic2 1 days ago [-]
I think this will bring everything back to where it needs to be. We depend way to much on third party stuff as it is.
duped 1 days ago [-]
Genuinely curious - what third party closed source dependencies are they using? Like what is their purpose?
dijit 1 days ago [-]
Audio subsystems (wwise, fmod).
Physics subsystems (havok, ISI).
Procedural systems (Gaea, Houdini)
Vegetation (Speedtree)
VFX subsystems (Nvidia Gameworks)
First party SDKs (Sony Playstation, Microsoft NDK, Horizon/Quest).
Pathfinding (Kytheria, Mercuna)
Cutscenes/Videos (Bink)
UI (Rive, Neosis)
Networking (Photon, Coherence)
Theres… thousands more, if you’d like me to continue.
duped 1 days ago [-]
On the web backend?
dijit 23 hours ago [-]
The backend isn’t web technologies.
duped 17 hours ago [-]
I mean it absolutely is, but that's not an answer to the question.
dijit 17 hours ago [-]
Of the 7 AAA games I’ve been part of making, not a single one used HTTP (well, not as a primary driver of anything), HTML, CSS or anything that could be construed as a “web technology” so, what are you talking about please?
duped 16 hours ago [-]
s/web/networked computers/g
What I'm saying is you have programs running on user machines, and programs running on your machines. There's an interface between those two over a network. There's a problem that consumers face today where they pay to play games that are not functional without data flowing over that interface.
There's a claim that implementing the backend side of that interface is so complex and impossible or too difficult/time consuming/etc to design in a way without 3rd party dependencies.
I'm asking: what are those 3rd party libraries doing? And why can't you design server APIs and client code in a way to provide a different backend if consumers need to do it themselves when you stop supporting the game?
dijit 16 hours ago [-]
idk, lets use things you know.
Why do you use Ruby on Rails, why not rewrite it so you can release it without relyig on that?
duped 15 hours ago [-]
I'm not interested in hypotheticals. In AAA games that you have worked on, concretely what 3rd party code did your servers rely on that would prevent you from distributing either the server itself or sufficient description of the servers' behavior to allow a reimplementation?
And even if we're talking hypotheticals: stupid example. I haven't worked on a backend where the actual server infrastructure wasn't open source, trivial to open source because it was first party, or irrelevant because the only thing that matters would be the API and protocols, which again, trivial to make open.
dijit 13 hours ago [-]
I don’t care.
Get a job in industry and see for yourself.
I’m not going to break confidentially to sate your ignorance.
duped 12 hours ago [-]
I'm actively trying to remove my own ignorance of the domain which is why I posed the question! You're not breaking confidentiality by saying "I need X to solve Y problem which is offered by Z and we can't expose even the application layer interfaces." Right now it sounds like you don't have an answer, or even understand the question.
Getting all defensive and not answering it doesn't really help your industry's case here.
dijit 10 hours ago [-]
So when you told me that games use web tech on the backend, that was you getting rid of your ignorance?
Ok, lets talk about the kinds of things we need.
Networks have latency, so we need to smooth/correct for that.
Our connections need to be authenticated, so we need middleware to handle tokens, because we don’t hand-roll that. On a binary protocol.
Our physics engines are complicated: we don’t usually write our own from scratch; and the server needs physics to simulate the world.
Shall I continue?
TylerE 1 days ago [-]
A very large percentage of multiplayer games keep the backend in an MS SQL or Oracle cluster.
duped 1 days ago [-]
Sure but you don't link in Oracle/MS's database cluster orchestrators to your server, right?
TylerE 1 days ago [-]
THat really depends on how you define "the server",doesn't it? The intent of the bill seems to be a thing that actually play that game.
duped 16 hours ago [-]
The "server" being the computer program not running on a user device. The intent of the initiative is to allow people to substitute or replace that program to allow the game to continue to function even if the original publisher/developer disables access to it.
It's pretty obvious to me as a gamer and engineer what the intent and design constraints are here, so I'm just wondering what makes this seem impossible?
mvdtnz 1 days ago [-]
Web servers, message brokers, physics engines, anti cheat, fraud detection, flood mitigation, ranking systems, chat moderation, match making systems. There are thousands of possible components which may have been licensed in any given game server system. In some cases the entire game engine runs on the server.
duped 1 days ago [-]
I guess what surprises me here is how much of this is 3p code that couldn't possibly be distributed. Like why would you not be using an open source web server, or widely available message broker? Things like chat moderation/match making/anti cheat/etc seem like add on services that would be implemented per game (well, maybe not match making) and aren't relevant to the problem that the "stop killing games" people are trying to solve.
mvdtnz 1 days ago [-]
Frankly it's none of your business why, and it's completely irrelevant. The fact is that this 3p code exists and this law needs to account for it or it's unworkable.
duped 17 hours ago [-]
This is kind of needless aggression that doesn't help non domain experts understand.
I've worked on a lot of complicated and deeply optimized networked applications. They're almost all closed source. I know exactly how I would design a system to support these kinds of initiatives. What I'm curious about is why that's impossible for game developers, because either I'm missing something, or game developers are just bad at software design.
simbosambo 17 hours ago [-]
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1 days ago [-]
TylerE 1 days ago [-]
And how do they force release of all the proprietary dependencies? Overriding contract law is a hell of a lift, and a terrible precedent.
The whole "Stop Killing Games" movement is deeply misguided, and most of the people supporting it have absolutely no clue about how software or anything computer related actually works.
mvdtnz 1 days ago [-]
And you're... in favour of this kind of doctrine...?
dijit 2 days ago [-]
Well, ok, you grasped at a few issues there that go off in different directions.
The issue with "Stop Killing Games" is that the legislation doesn't currently look like anything, it's a broad appeal and the solution for studios will depend on where it finally lands.
If it lands in the realm of "Games must be released FOSS after x years" then, aside from the fact that a lot of the times we don't own the copyrights to our own assets or certain code (they're on license for a single release) the second issue is how to release it.
First: the online backend for The Division or Destiny are just... not possible to run. The backend is fused to the products via a slurry of certificate pinning and object serialisation, with some things happening only on the server.
"Un-fusing" them is, basically impossible at this point; so the question is: can you build such a system without them being fused together in the first place?
The answer is: yes, but only by slowing down development. It would become much more about defining our boundaries and working on a "slim" version of the backend, or stubbing the backend completely. Obviously this is a lot of effort. The thing is we only barely managed to get a functional system, so adding an extra year for programming isn't going to be possible, we'll have to "cut" features that are hard to make.
"So, why don't you just release the server".
Well, that's a good question, we could remove the certificate pinning we have on the client, and the entitlement checks, stub out all the code that relies on third party APIs and give you a server binary.
But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.
So, we'd have to work on slimming that down, or building things in a totally different way: which means "seamless" darkzones and safehouses becomes impossible.
THEN you have the issue of releasing a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product, which we already had a major issue with.
So, most likely, we just make single player games.
Honestly, the industry is moving that way anyway because unless you've been doing it for a while making multiplayer games is really hard from a game design standpoint and there's an ongoing operational cost which people are a bit too price sensitive to support.
That's why Massive released The Division 1 & Division 2 but then pivoted to doing single-player games like Star Wars and Avatar which only retains the most basic multiplayer elements.
ashdnazg 2 days ago [-]
> But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.
As far as I understand that situation is accepted by the initiative. The requirement is not that it works on any specific hardware or software stack, just that it can theoretically work.
> a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product
Anti-cheat solutions aren't required to be released, and if there are bugs in the server, they might even be found and patched by the community.
dijit 1 days ago [-]
What you're saying is true for the californian legislation, but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction) - nor the direction of the authors article, and like I replied in a sibling response: it's not like people would be pleased to get our binaries.
Second: anti-cheat itself is a fucking joke. A crutch, a last ditch hail-mary because we ran out of time to batten down the hatches or things were changed so often from the start of the project to the end that we couldn't add safety into the protocol design properly.
Exposing how our systems think about how you move, how you shoot, when AI ticks, when loot ticks, behaviour trees and how phase transitions are computed: gives an attacker a hell of a lot of leverage.
To put this into broader easier to understand terms: ask yourself why it's so easy to cheat in Unreal Engine games vs Battlefield.
It's not the anti-cheat. It's the complexity of digging through the engine and knowing what the memory is doing and what the server is doing.
strbean 1 days ago [-]
> but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction)
Where can we find information about the direction the EU is going on this? AFAICT there has just been one meeting on the topic?
Seems like that's... one more substantive meeting?
First link is announcing the initiative was submitted, second is a private meeting where the initiative was presented to the comission by the organizers.
Then there was a public meeting on 16 April 2026 and a public meeting on 20 May 2026.
Is there a specific part of one of those meetings that indicates they want to go a different direction than the California bill?
From the last link:
> If designed responsibly, most games that connect to the internet can operate indefinitely without publisher support. This has been a customer expectation for over 50 years. We are open to any solution that solves the problem. We are flexible on specifics and implementation by publishers. We understand that not all game features may be operable in a discontinued game. We are not seeking ongoing support from publishers after a game has been discontinued
This sounds like the California bill would address these issues.
edit: Particularly, I'm wondering if there is any serious push for release of binaries / source code prior to the end-of-life of a game, which seems to be of particular concern.
dijit 1 days ago [-]
theres a lot of pre-meetings, some major meetings (the ones you mentioned) and talks about getting legislation into other acts.
The fact here is pretty simple: they have not indicated any support for the californian style legislation and they aren’t done yet either. The californian model is also very direct and instructive and EU laws tend to be broad frameworks, so they’ll definitely be different in some way, but unsure if they’ll encompass each other.
I can’t say what way they will definitely go, but it seems naïve to presume the californian stance given how disparate the solutions are from with in the SKG movement itself.
I’m watching it closely, obviously, but nobody knows where it will go. But this is like a 500-sided dice, the odds are low that a solution cleanly overlaps.
singpolyma3 1 days ago [-]
> But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.
This doesn't seem like much of an obstacle? Can buy or rent such without too much trouble.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
>Can buy or rent such without too much trouble.
for... thousands of dollars a month.
the goal of the regulation is that regular people can keep playing their games. not just rich people.
singpolyma3 20 hours ago [-]
Only one group needs to do it for everyone to keep playing. Everyone running their own server isn't very interesting for multiplayer... Usually you'd do it in groups.
nearbuy 14 hours ago [-]
Most of the time, no group of players will run a server at that cost. So regular players still can't play.
It's not unheard of though. WoW and City of Heroes had/have large, expensive fan servers. But realistically, this legislation would save maybe 0-2% of games in the thousands-per-month cost range. According to the parent commenter, we might lose many more than that from the legislation causing studios to decide not to make them to begin with.
Games with cheap servers are a different story.
tayo42 1 days ago [-]
We used to have player run servers for years. Is it some lost skill to write software that way?
dijit 1 days ago [-]
It's not a lost skill.
Spinning up a binary and replicating actors across two computers that both have a connection string to a server is.. for all intents and purposes: easy.
Where it falls down is when you start to have complex interactions with AI that's serverside, or you have a dynamic world that changes based on player behaviour, or you have cross platform requirements, integrations with companion apps and above all: matchmaking.
If you're a looter-shooter, there's a whole host of complicated interactions too.
A game like Apex Legends could probably distribute their server binary, but if you require online, as in, not just a single match, but an economy- a dynamic matchmaker and a dynamic world (meaning: when you kick a box it stays kicked) and a persistent account (you keep your loot): then that doesn't work well anymore.
The interactions are just too complex to batten down reliably, they'll be exploited, there'll be no fun, or: it just won't be possible for certain features, regardless of safety.
You can see how this looks by trying to use one of the many unofficial versions of Runescape.
hodgehog11 1 days ago [-]
This is the whole spirit of the "Stop Killing Games" argument though: you don't need to keep any of that stuff once support drops. It just needs to be "functional", in the most basic possible sense. If there are no players, no economy, no advanced AI, because it was all disconnected, that's considered fine.
The response of "but that isn't any fun!" is totally irrelevant; you can't preserve the initial experience, but you can preserve the basic software itself so that players still have something to mess with.
Programming-wise, this requires a little more emphasis on a modular implementation that needs to be considered from the start. Otherwise, it seems pretty straightforward. Or am I missing something?
F3nd0 1 days ago [-]
Wow, thank you for the detailed answer! I understand your point much better now.
I still think ‘kills any sort of multiplayer games’ (what the other dev said) is a gross exaggeration, since you list some ways this could be made to work, but it sounds like some things would cost significantly more resources and need to be done differently. But hey, maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Plus, there are multiplayer games which aren’t quite as resource-intensive on the server side.)
dijit 1 days ago [-]
I think what I'm trying to explain is that we barely make it work by the skin of our teeth, and adding more requirements means fewer features.
The extra point I made was that it's actually kind of costly to run these systems, and I promise you publishers would love to push that cost onto the community with community run servers (think: CS1.6) but the reason they don't is because developing systems that way takes much longer and cannot be properly secured (mostly due to cheating but also from an entitlement standpoint).
So, I think either multiplayer games will get much more basic, with simple gameservers. No more large multiplayer RPGs.
Or, there will be fewer multiplayer games, because it's even more risk in an already risky business.
kmeisthax 1 days ago [-]
I'm not sure what you mean by "no more large multiplayer RPGs" here. It's not technically impossible to have community-hosted MMO servers. Hell, most MMORPG publishers have to have an active legal team specifically to shut those down.
As for community run servers being longer to develop... wait, what? How is that the case, when that used to be the standard way multiplayer got built prior to everyone trying to chase World of Warcraft? I can understand the anti-cheat argument, and I will begrudgingly acknowledge that you can't exactly force third-party servers to run your anti-piracy checks. But none of that is a technical argument. That's an argument about business risks, and publishers all jumped on the live service bandwagon because they consider their customers' control over their own games to be a business risk.
fragmede 2 days ago [-]
> the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.
> So, we'd have to work on slimming that down
...why? My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.
dijit 2 days ago [-]
Community backlash will be fierce if it's not actually runnable.
Ubisoft doesn't have the most stellar reputation for example (I don't work there anymore) so people look at things we do by accident as if they are intentionally malicious.
Also, the California law is one law, the EU is also looking at this and it's likely to look different - that's why "Stop Killing Games" doesn't really mean anything yet, even people within the movement have differing definitions.
ashdnazg 2 days ago [-]
The key is communication. If the company says the binary has a certain min. requirement, then the vast majority of people will accept that.
Of course there'll be idiots, but I doubt you'll see a stronger backlash than to a company shutting down the servers without any solution, like they can do now.
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
>My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.
if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation.
the spirit of the law is that i can reasonably spin up an instance of the server for me and my friends to play.
strbean 1 days ago [-]
If a game is popular enough for anyone to care, some turbonerd will get the server running on a massive cloud instance, and then people will be able to play the game.
Fans have reverse-engineered and stood up servers for tons of games with no access to the server binaries. The idea that they wouldn't figure it out when given much better resources (server binaries or source code) is crazy.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
>The idea that they wouldn't figure it out when given much better resources (server binaries or source code) is crazy.
i wasnt implying they couldnt figure it out.
i was implying that you would have to be an incredibly rich turbonerd to stand up a massive cloud instance for some of these games. which sort of defeats the entire goal of the regulation.
greiskul 1 days ago [-]
Or maybe 100 years from now, your toaster will be powerful enough to run the game.
To me this is about both preserving the access to what consumers purchased, but also future preservation of art.
Copyright is not a natural right. It is a monopoly granted by the government to creators, specifically with the goal of the progress of art and science.
Games that completely die because their servers are shut off, in my opinion should just lose copyright outright. Why should the people via the government provide you with a monopoly on publishing something that you have stopped publishing?
ashdnazg 1 days ago [-]
Kind of depends on the definition of no one.
If the company puts an artificial proof of work demanding a rack of the latest data center GPUs, that should be illegal.
If the binary has the same hardware requirements that the company used when the service was up, I see it as totally fair.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
true, but i think this would be exceptionally difficult (if not impossible) to enforce.
ubisoft would surely be willing to spend an extra $500k on server hardware while developing a $25MM game, and subtlety bloat their server-side code so that they can say "this is the hardware we had to use to run it".
there are a million ways to slow down code/increase hardware requirements that look plausible.
stale2002 1 days ago [-]
> if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation.
This isn't the 2000s. People can rent a computer out of a data center. This isn't some hard problem here.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
>People can rent a computer out of a data center.
how much does 190GiB of RAM and 38 CPUs go for, hourly?
dijit 1 days ago [-]
Cheapest I could find on AWS was $1.848/hr for the compute, no storage.
$1,349.04/Month
(m6g.12xlarge in us-east-1)
apnorton 1 days ago [-]
I'm not a gamedev, but there's a more insidious issue with the CA "Stop Killing Games" legislation that was just passed --- namely, a Ship of Theseus problem.
Pick your favorite game today that you purchase once, then have long-term free multiplayer support. Something like, idk, Fortnite before it was made F2P in 2017. Games like these evolve their content over time: sometimes minor changes, like rebalancing guns or matchmaking, but sometimes these are major changes, like completely redoing the map or altering fundamental mechanics. There can also be seasonal events that are designed to be available for a limited time.
The obvious question, then, is: is it "OK" that significant parts of the multiplayer experience changed after you purchased the game? In the spirit of people who prioritize game preservation, the answer should be "no, that's destroying part of the game and losing it to history." If we accept that interpretation, then we end up killing live service games. On the other hand, if we allow significant parts of the multiplayer experience to change, then we've neutered the legislation, because the easy workaround is to slowly patch out all online features until you're left with a husk of what was originally sold.
California's legislation [1] attempts to dodge this by phrasing things in terms of "ordinary use" of the game, but the definition of "ordinary use" is quite vague and will absolutely be the subject of some court case at some point.
---
Of course, there's a bunch of other side effects to the "general" notion of "make games usable past end-of-life," too:
- You might be able to use certain open source libraries on the server side because you are not distributing them to the user, and thereby don't have to open source your server. However, if you were required to distribute a binary, that could pose issues.
- You could have a dependency on an expensive piece of software (e.g. an enterprise Oracle DB license), and be unable to package that with the download.
- You could have a dependency on another online service (e.g. AWS Game Development Services [2]) that discontinues an API you depended on, and would require massive rework to be able to release a functional binary at end of life.
- You could have a dependency on an internal system at your company that you aren't willing to release the IP for yet, due to its use in another game
This is true, but the issue is not with the content, it's with the ability (or rather inability) to access any of the content past some point. Even if only the latest content is left accessible after EOL, it will still be better than having nothing at all. The older content can be added back, no matter how finicky it can sometimes be.
Regarding the dependencies, no one is forcing the developers to release closed ones, you can replace them with stubs. But it will be beneficial from a developer to think about it beforehand - how they will implement online systems with additional requirement of EOL etc. It's not an implementation problem, but rather an architectural one.
drnick1 1 days ago [-]
> I’m guessing nobody here has ever actually tried to make games, let alone multiplayer ones.
One possibility is to charge for online play on the "official" server. This can be done regardless of the availability of source code.
Another possibility is to release the source code when the game reaches its end of life.
habinero 1 days ago [-]
> Another possibility is to release the source code when the game reaches its end of life.
You might not have permission to, if it uses a lot of third party libraries.
skotobaza 1 days ago [-]
It's not a problem, you can replace such function calls with stubs and document it. Some games that released their source code already did that.
throwaway85825 1 days ago [-]
A game that can no longer be played at all is very simple but also not very fun.
BlitzGeology91 1 days ago [-]
> To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit.
No, it doesn’t. It just requires that we go back to making multiplayer games the old-fashioned way (the good way). Descent 3 was released in 1999. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer to this day if you want to [1], and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop you from doing so. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer because Descent 3 allows you to host your own servers and allows you to manually enter IP addresses in order to connect to servers (this is necessary because the services that Descent 3’s in-game server browsers depend on no longer exist). Descent 3’s source code was released in 2024 [2] which certainly helps with multiplayer preservation, but I can tell you that a small number of people definitely did play multiplayer Descent 3 in 2023 when the source code was not yet available.
Descent: Underground was released to Steam Early Access in 2015 [3]. Unlike the previous Descent games, Descent: Underground (or at least, that iteration of Descent: Underground) was pretty much multiplayer-only. The developers of Descent: Underground did not allow players to host their own Descent: Underground servers. (I think that they had some plan to allow for hosting your own servers in the future, but that didn’t get implemented in time). At some point, the official servers for that version of Descent: Underground were shutdown. As a result, you can no longer play Descent: Underground’s multiplayer.
The fact that I can play the multiplayer for a 27-year-old game, but I can’t play the multiplayer for an 11-year-old game is unsurprising. Many older multiplayer games did not have fatal design flaws that would cause them to die after certain period of time. Many newer multiplayer games do have such fatal design flaws. The good news is that this means that we already know how to stop killing multiplayer games. We just have to go back to doing things the way that we used to do them.
(In fact, some games don’t even need to “go back to doing things the way that we used to do them”. Take Counter-Strike 2, for example. Counter-Strike 2 was released in 2023 and does indeed allow players to host their own servers.)
The statement “the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games” is absolutely ridiculous.
Hard agree. I think it would be a genuine service to the world if it was no longer feasible to make the modern style of multiplayer game. The older games were not only not beholden to a company continuing to run servers, they were more fun.
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
this was written (or 'output') by someone (or something) that clearly has not thought of the knock-on effects of those freedoms.
they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".
by all means i 100% agree that an ostensibly single player game should not be locked behind a login or telemetry, and that platforms like steam should not be able to lock you out of playing games you paid for. but i dont think forcing the whole free software thing would work out how the author is imagining it.
singpolyma3 1 days ago [-]
We have decades of real world experience which shows this is not true. People buy things they could otherwise get for free with a bit of work all the time.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
you aren't getting a company to build baldurs gate 3 and hope they recoup the costs from ko-fi donations.
real world experience is that most companies do not offer their software for free, and open source developers either have to get sponsored or have to constantly solicit donations.
donations do not typically cover multi-million dollar, multi-year development cycles.
ben-schaaf 1 days ago [-]
BG3 is actually a perfect counterexample here. It doesn't have DRM, doesn't require an online account to play and uses direct connections for multiplayer. Nothing needs to be done to preserve it.
john_strinlai 20 hours ago [-]
right, but if BG3 had to be free as in FSF free, it would not have been made.
singpolyma3 16 hours ago [-]
This is almost certainly untrue. it would have cost the same amount and all the same people would have bought it for all the same reasons.
john_strinlai 16 hours ago [-]
>and all the same people would have bought it for all the same reasons.
you have to be trolling, right?
if people can get the game for free, because freedom 2 demands the game be freely redistributable by anyone with no restrictions, people are not going to pay for it. they are going to get it for free.
singpolyma3 16 hours ago [-]
This is not true in practise. In practise people can get the software for free no matter what the license is. And in practise people click the "buy on steam" or "buy on Google play" button and you still make money.
trinsic2 1 days ago [-]
Everything you are talking about appears to me as AAA. There will be many game companies that dont think it's worth the time to do this for the reasons you describe, but IMHO they shouldn't exist in the first place. The way online only games are made right now is destroying the game industry so im glad to see them go. We will see better iterations of games once the bloat is removed.
singpolyma3 20 hours ago [-]
Obviously not. No one is talking about donations
john_strinlai 20 hours ago [-]
if the games are free, and we aren't talking about donations, how are the studios being paid?
singpolyma3 16 hours ago [-]
Same way as now. Selling the game.
Free as in freedom not as in price
john_strinlai 16 hours ago [-]
>Free as in freedom not as in price
free as in freedom = i give away the game to everyone i know for free, and the studio loses out on those sales.
edit: oops, just noticed you are the same person i suspect is trolling. so, probably best for us both to end the conversation here.
singpolyma3 16 hours ago [-]
Definitely not trolling. On the contrary I run a profitable business where all the code is free software. As do many many other people.
It's fine to say you don't think it works in theory. But in practise many people have made their living this way for many years.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 1 days ago [-]
>they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".
fyi, there are tens of torrent trackers with every game/movie/album/etc under the sun. had been for two decades.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
i was unaware torrenting copyrighted content was made legal, thanks for the update
sapphicsnail 1 days ago [-]
I think their point was that lots of media is easily piratable but still makes money and companies continue to produce more of it.
1 days ago [-]
trinsic2 1 days ago [-]
Yep another lost soul at the parent that thinks piracy equals death.
john_strinlai 20 hours ago [-]
that is not what i think.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 1 days ago [-]
>they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
yes, i wrote that.
right now that would be illegal to do in most jurisdictions.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 1 days ago [-]
despite that, people have been doing that for over two decades, but publishers continue to publish.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
right. that is because most people would rather buy the game than take the risk of downloading it illegally. if you remove the risk, the math changes.
publishers also have legal recourse. remove that and the publisher's math changes.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 1 days ago [-]
people pay for convenience. when was the last time you heard about someone being prosecuted for pirating something?
tmtvl 1 days ago [-]
Just yesterday when I saw the Leonhart French video about the NVIDIA piracy case.
luqtas 2 days ago [-]
you don't need to liberate your project to GPL or whatever OSS to let users distribute them via torrent or at least being able to backup the DRM-free installer... i bet most if not all AAA games have their crack into the pirate land in less than a week after or even before release
F3nd0 2 days ago [-]
> […] in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".
This is exactly what has been happening for years, only illegally. If it became legal, I imagine far less people would end up buying the game, though probably still more than just one.
But again, games are more than just software, so the four freedoms do not enable this.
2 days ago [-]
figmert 2 days ago [-]
As the article mentions, these arguments are basically all the arguments of the FSF, and everything Richard Stallman pushed for since the 80s. So yes, there has been plenty of thought, scrutiny, improvements, etc. 40 years of it in fact.
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
>So yes, there has been plenty of thought, scrutiny, improvements, etc. 40 years of it in fact.
what percent of businesses follow the FSF freedoms and turn a profit?
i would love it if i could get all my games for free, and legally give additional copies to all my students, family, and friends. but the developers pumping out those games probably want to see some sort of return more substantial than whatever trickles into their ko-fi account. they'll just stop developing games and go into CRM software or whatever.
singpolyma3 1 days ago [-]
I don't see how "what percent" is the right metric. There are hundreds of such companies (I work for one) but it's a small percentage due to other factors (mainly it not being the default way most founders think about these things)
figmert 2 days ago [-]
Not really my point. My point is more that you suggested no one has thought about this, but yes, they have.
To answer your question, there have been plenty of business who have created and published free software (albeit plenty have later closed them). Notable examples are Databricks, Hashicorp, Mongodb, RedHat.
Sure they've built a moat on top of their free software, but they have (or had) free software regardless.
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
>My point is more that you suggested no one has thought about this, but yes, they have.
i didnt say no one has thought about free software.
i said that this specific llm that output this article did not think about how the freedoms would work in todays gaming industry.
there are dozens of issues that immediately pop into my head, mostly specific to gaming, which are not mentioned or addressed at all.
singpolyma3 1 days ago [-]
lol. The article is obviously not written by an LLM.
throwaway85825 1 days ago [-]
If the game is being sold it has to be supported, and if it's supported no legislative requirement applies.
john_strinlai 20 hours ago [-]
my comment is in response to the demand that games be free, not the legislation
cogman10 2 days ago [-]
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
> Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.
My reading of this was it was in terms of multiplayer games and servers. It was that the server should be freely redistributable and accessible. Much like you can download and run a minecraft server without owning a minecraft license.
The next sentence
> A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files.
avaer 1 days ago [-]
We need a version of "open source" that requires you to pay a reasonable ($60) price to get a copy.
That's kind of against the usual notion of "open source" but it's the only way this would work in e.g. the game industry, as currently factored.
Studios won't pay people millions of dollars to make games if the return on investment is zero other than helping all of your non-open source competitors.
I do think it's doable, but nobody's done this successfully yet.
xmprt 2 days ago [-]
> redistribute copies
I read this more as game sharing. For example, say I buy a game and my friend also wants to play the game. In the past, I could just give them the disk and we both enjoy it. But today, with DRM and one use keys, this isn't possible. The game industry survived 20 years ago so there's no reason it can't survive without DRM and with sharable keys.
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
>For example, say I buy a game and my friend also wants to play the game. In the past, I could just give them the disk and we both enjoy it.
the difference being that only one person could enjoy it at a time. the math is a bit different when one person can put a copy of their game up online and let thousands of people enjoy it for free at the same time.
there is a happy medium somewhere between intrusive DRM and demanding games be free.
jl6 2 days ago [-]
Game budgets were a lot lower 20 years ago, so maybe modern AAA games with $100m+ budgets can only exist in a world where every possible customer can be maximally shaken down.
promano 2 days ago [-]
Maybe we need a separate campaign, "Kill Games": any games whose existence requires players being "shaken down" should not be allowed to exist.
nkrisc 1 days ago [-]
Or “You Don’t Need to Play Video Games”.
I enjoy playing video games but I recognize them for what they are: a luxury past-time that is not necessary for life and one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow.
skotobaza 1 days ago [-]
> one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow
I get what you are trying to say, but in general video games offer unique experience that no other media can provide - interactivity, e.g. exploring different worlds with different mechanics. I think this experience can invoke something in people that no other media can replicate. So I think we will lose something important if it suddenly vanishes.
abetusk 1 days ago [-]
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
Pretty dismissive, no?
Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.
Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe [2]. Solarus has a donation page [3].
I'm sure there are many more examples that span the spectrum of payment options and cover different permutations of being online or offline.
To me, the deeper question is what are you actually purchasing? The bytes? The convenience? A slice of server resources? Developers and artists time?
I'm happy to give money to projects that I use, especially if it creates less friction than trying to go outside of the payment method and if the project is libre/free. I'm willing to pay for proprietary content but I have little expectation about what kind of service they're providing, especially they fold.
If there's a libre/free option, I would much prefer to invest in it. If there's a proprietary option that is asking for resources, I'm much less prone to give since it's clearly a transactional relationship.
> Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.
OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. The community only got access to the servers when they had declined to 20-30 concurrent players. So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.
> Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe
Teeworlds doens't pay its staff a living wage, those donations went to server infrastructure.
According to developers of the most popular open-source games themselves, open-source games have not been commercially successful... it is very common for them to only cover operating costs via community donations, and many projects have a player base actively opposed to any monetisation model.[0]
Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.
FD: I speak from a position of being in the AAA gaming space for 11 years, so I have an economic incentive to... not lose my job due to the collapse of industry- but I'd like you all to be able to enjoy my creations after it's no longer possible for me to run it for you; I want a solution too!
abetusk 1 days ago [-]
> OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period.
Reference? The source was dedicated to the public domain in early 2018, which coincides with the release of the game [0].
> So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.
This is a complete fabrication.
> Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.
Making a living from open source software is hard, game or no. Making a living as a game developer is hard to begin with and many proprietary games are not commercially successful or viable.
My point was that the ecosystem is a lot more complex than your reductive analysis.
This is cool and all, but it’s been proven a million times over that surviving on donations sucks. One of the reasons a new field gets innovation in partly because it brings so many people hungry for profit in to give it a go. If your only motivation is art and “maybe someone will toss me a buck on occasion”, we’ll have as many software devs as we do street performers.
flohofwoe 24 hours ago [-]
The blog post is a bit of an incoherent mess.
The key point should be to make it legal to use and reverse-engineer abandonware (e.g. games that the developer or publisher has abandoned).
First we'll need a realistic legal definition for 'abandonware' where the abandonware's IP is automatically going into the public domain after a game has been abandondend by the publisher, and the next step must be to legalize 'pirating' and reverse-engineering abandonware.
singpolyma3 1 days ago [-]
Given that I can already get a copy of any game in existence without paying, the quoted text isn't even a change from the status quo really.
trinsic2 1 days ago [-]
>That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
The AAA industry are already destroying the gaming industry with there shit games and stupid DRM pratices. This would be returning balance to the game industry.
jmyeet 1 days ago [-]
It's not really advocating for open source games despite evoking Richard Stallman and Free Software.
A lot of people get all up in their feelings when it comes to "private property", like (hypoerbolic) "if they allow redistribution of abandonware, they might take everything" and it's just not justified. It used to be, for example, that copyrights on books weren't automatically granted and they were much shorter terms. You had to apply for copyright renewals. Why? Because of orphaned works and it was viewed that if nobody held an interest that they asserted, it was in the public good to place that in the public domain.
Abandonware follows the same principles. The arguably controversial part is that "abandonware" here includes "forced obsolescence". And I 100% agree that if you, as the publisher, make a game nonfunctional (or even greatly reduced functionality) then people should have the right to make those games work.
The most egregious cases are like Simcity 5, which was made online for literally no reason (other than "because piracy"). They tried to sell online features but that wasn't the reason.
The idea that this kills the entire gaming industry is just slippery slope hyperbola.
m463 1 days ago [-]
yeah.
I think a more achievable model might be more like GOG, but with online.
GOG games remain closed source, but are downloadable and playable offline with no DRM.
But there's nothing about online/multiplayer play in the GOG equation.
adamrezich 1 days ago [-]
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
> Am I missing something serious here
Only just that the video games industry as we've known it for the past few decades is basically already dead—at best, it's a hollowed-out husk of what it once was.
skotobaza 1 days ago [-]
"Few decades" is a stretch I think. More like one decade.
adamrezich 13 hours ago [-]
I meant that the games industry is a few decades old, and it's been dead for about a decade and a half or so now.
ryandrake 2 days ago [-]
If I subscribe to a service for $M/mo, I expect that service to work as long as I pay for it. If the maintainer of that service decides to turn it off and no longer charge me money, then so be it. I subscribed with eyes open about the lifetime that $M got me.
If I buy a product for $N one-time charge, I expect that product to work basically forever, until it physically breaks or wears out. I have woodworking tools over 50 years old. I would never expect Craftsman to sneak into my garage one day and destroy them because "they're old and unsupported and I should just buy new ones." I don't expect Toyota to repossess my car because it's hard to supply parts for old cars and they really just need me to buy another one.
So why is it OK for a software developer to just arbitrarily decide to flip a switch and remove my ability to use a product I paid for?
EDIT: I realize I am arguing for subscription pricing for software, which I am generally against. But for a game that requires a server operating in order to function, perhaps subscription pricing is more appropriate at least for that kind of game. It's still not appropriate for games or tools that run natively and don't have a significant reason for their logic to reside in a server.
delichon 2 days ago [-]
Because we don't have a right to a continuing service that requires their labor unless they agreed to it. A buyer should discount the value of products that rely on ongoing services accordingly.
See also 'Juicero'.
ryandrake 2 days ago [-]
If a software requires a server component that is costly to run, then I would expect the software developer to charge a subscription in order to use it, rather than offering it as a one-time charge and then destroying it when they realize letting me continue to use it is costly.
dijit 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, but gamers in particular are against subscriptions and micro-transactions.
Only one gets away with it: World of Warcraft.
Rohansi 1 days ago [-]
You also pay for expansions in WoW which are a one time fee, for each expansion. The latest one includes previous ones so you don't need to pay for all eleven of the, but if you're an active player you would absolutely pay for all of them.
trinsic2 11 hours ago [-]
Then switch to a subscription model. nobody is forcing you to operating your service indefinitely. Just don't sell something, the say you are not supporting it any longer and remove the ability to use a purchased product.
jasonlotito 2 days ago [-]
> Because we don't have a right to a continuing service that requires their labor unless they agreed to it
There are carve-outs in the legislation for this. It's a moot point.
marcosdumay 1 days ago [-]
So it's ok for companies to misrepresent their subscription services as a "single-payment" acquisition and pull the brought product away form their customers when they want?
delichon 1 days ago [-]
No, if they materially misrepresent their product like this it is fraud and a crime. A new law isn't needed if a prosecutor or plaintiff can show the misrepresentation.
knollimar 1 days ago [-]
Like what? I read it and don't see workabke carveouts.
preommr 1 days ago [-]
> So why is it OK for a software developer to just arbitrarily decide to flip a switch and remove my ability to use a product I paid for?
I see this argument repeated, and it's made exactly like this where it sets up a strawman and then brings up software.
No one is coming into your computer to repossess your software.
They are either turning off their servers, OR they are ending a subscription.
If you have a bus pass, you can do anything you want with the card. Your chisels being 50 years old, has nothing to do with you being able to ride the bus forever just because you bought a one-month pass.
cwillu 1 days ago [-]
> They are either turning off their servers
…that are unnecessarily being checked by the local software before the local software will run the local offline functions.
preommr 1 days ago [-]
That is irrelevant to the topic of ownership since you bought the product, you can now update the code.
If you want, you can now change that behavior.
Whether that's allowed by the TOS and what the consequences to that are is also a separate issue. At that point, people shouldn't buy the product if they disagree with the conditions.
JacobKfromIRC 23 hours ago [-]
> At that point, people shouldn't buy the product if they disagree with the conditions.
I think a problem with this idea is that terms of service can be difficult to understand. For example a lot of licenses or terms of service forbid "reverse engineering" entirely. In my mind, "reverse engineering" is just trying to understand something based on observing what it does, and even though a legal agreement is probably using a more strict definition, how am I supposed to know where the boundary is? "Reverse engineering" isn't usually defined in the agreement itself. And if what I want to do is considered "reverse engineering", it might not be legally enforceable anyway.
Sometimes I buy a physical object, take it home, and then open it and find conditions that I would have disagreed with if I knew about them. I've noticed this with books, but the same could happen with software. I don't know if conditions like that would be legally enforceable, but I think the complexity of understanding this makes individual decisions about what conditions to accept a poor solution to what Stop Killing Games is trying to solve.
The Steam Subscriber Agreement [1] seems to prohibit reverse engineering games (referred to as "content" in the agreement), but I guess I'm misunderstanding it because some GPL games are on Steam (e.g. SuperTux [2]).
I agree that people shouldn't buy a product if they disagree with the conditions, but I think this is too complicated for most people to do for every product. Maybe some of these conditions should be illegal to even put in a terms of service, even if they already aren't enforceable.
No you should be clear that its not purchased product but a subscription. Don't expect people to buy into the model that people can take away your right to use a product as you wish.
0xy 2 days ago [-]
Why do you deserve free labor from a game developer that you paid a nominal amount to 10 years ago, not to mention infrastructure costs.
At no point did you purchase unlimited free online service forever, by the way. The game developer did not promise that, and you hold no contract with them mandating free labor and infrastructure perpetually.
It's the equivalent of paying $10 to enter an all-you-can-eat restaurant and complaining when they kick you out at 10pm while you say that you haven't technically had ALL you can eat yet.
cogman10 2 days ago [-]
I purchased a toy that I expect to be able to continue playing with long after the company that made that toy loses interest in it. I don't expect the company to run servers for my toy, I can do that if they gave that opportunity.
The way the industry currently operates is you show up to an all you can eat buffet, pay your $10, and then they give you a 30 page contract that you have to sign before you can start eating. You are further SOL if you sign that contract at 4:40 and they decide "well, today we are going to close at 5pm because there's not enough people here. This isn't profitable to us".
Once upon a time, all games operated like this. I could buy half life and run a half life server locally and all my friends could play half life together without valve ever getting in the middle. That didn't cost valve anything to support that. It was all part of the price of purchase of half life.
Heck, for games like Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2, 3rd parties like MSN hosted their own 3rd party services for matching players together. We still hosted the servers, but MSN did the match making. And when they stopped that service, it didn't matter. We can still host and play DF2. Theoretically another 3rd party could start up to match make again.
0xy 1 days ago [-]
Games explicitly do not promise online features remain available perpetually. No reasonable consumer would assume perpetual access, either.
I also completely disagree that "it doesn't cost Valve anything to run Half Life". Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone. Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all. Newsflash, Steam games have CEG DRM and will not function for long periods of time without Steam.
Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.
cogman10 1 days ago [-]
> Games explicitly do not promise online features remain available perpetually. No reasonable consumer would assume perpetual access, either.
Explicitly through a contract you HAVE to sign AFTER the purchase. That's a big problem I have with this model. It's not made explicit until after the purchase.
And, it is reasonable to expect because, as I said and other old game players can attest to, this was the status quo for games ~15 years ago. This was a change in living memory.
> Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone.
How about Quake 1/2/3? I pulled half life just as an example. Valve is making those updates because they want to, not because they have to.
> Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all.
Ok, Again Quake or Dark forces 2. But also, it's only technically incorrect today. It wasn't when HL was originally released. Valve had to backport in it's integration to the valve servers. That is, they technically had to put in effort to make the game tie to their servers.
But also, I can still dust off my old HL cds, install it, and play it without the steam integration. I can even patch it to a pre-steam version and game with people that aren't using the pre steam version.
> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.
That's really only because steam has gone out of it's way to install DRM on top of the games. They have purposely broken my games to be dependent on their services.
None of this makes your argument better, in fact it's a highlight of the broken nature of the games industry.
ryandrake 1 days ago [-]
> And, it is reasonable to expect because, as I said and other old game players can attest to, this was the status quo for games ~15 years ago. This was a change in living memory.
I fear an entire generation is growing up thinking that it is normal and acceptable that products you buy can be remotely disabled by the developer, manufacturer or vendor when it suits them, with no recourse to the person who bought the product.
This is one of those tech nerd debate hills I'm willing to die on: It should be totally unacceptable/illegal for someone else to remotely nerf or destroy a product you bought and paid for.
0xy 1 days ago [-]
You just finished praising Steam, the company responsible for the proliferation of DRM technology that does exactly what you claim to hate.
If Steam goes offline, billions and billions of dollars of games go with it. The online ones, the offline ones, all of it. Gone forever. Some will not function at all without Steam servers.
Steam pioneered remote DRM attestations for PC gaming, remote product key validation, always-online dependencies on Steamworks and more.
ryandrake 1 days ago [-]
You might be thinking someone else. I never praised Steam. It should be totally unacceptable that Steam shutting down would cause the disappearance of billions of dollars of people's games.
Telaneo 1 days ago [-]
> No reasonable consumer would assume perpetual access, either.
I expect perpetual access to my game the same way I expect access to my books. Most of my multiplayer games can still be played without involving a clown server somewhere (either by hosting one myself, or by playing over LAN). This is somewhat skewed by me not having bought many of the offending games, but it's clearly not an impossible feat. It's not even a big ask. And yet it's still not done.
> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.
The mere existence of that workaround means I still get to play my game. There aren't any workarounds for most of the games Stop Killing Games care about, since developing them requires enormous amounts of man-hours reverse engineering, while the devs could do the same in a fraction of the time (or at the very least give people a head start!).
ianburrell 1 days ago [-]
I have books that link to online content. I've had one that had printable workbook that that no longer worked because the site had disappeared.
Are you going pay the extra money to the developers to keep the servers running? What will people choose, the 5 year support for game that might never play again, or the forever support? Game companies will raise prices, by a lot, if forced to maintain or release games.
Telaneo 1 days ago [-]
The web archive kind of solves this problem.
Beyond that, I think the authors of your books are idiots for not making whatever content they have online not just a bundled part of the book (throw in a CD or thumb drive or whatever, not my problem. Solve it however you want. Just™ actually solve it). I've had the same happen with a quiz book I found, which had the answers online, with just a QR code in the book, which then lead to a 404 page. They could have just printed a few extra pages of answers in the back, but they didn't, and I mock them for it. They're fucking morons. Thankfully quiz questions tend to be easily googleable.
> Are you going pay the extra money to the developers to keep the servers running?
No, because you don't need to do that to have a playable game.
> Game companies will raise prices, by a lot, if forced to maintain or release games.
Good thing they don't need to do that then.
cwillu 1 days ago [-]
> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.
That's funny, because most of my steam games will happily run with the network cable unplugged
Rohansi 1 days ago [-]
> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.
Not true. Some games distributed via Steam will continue to work because they do not use (or require) Steamworks.
throwaway85825 1 days ago [-]
Maybe the product stops working tomorrow maybe 10 years from now. Consumers shouldn't have to gamble. If sellers don't like it they need to tell consumers the end date like a subscription does. That's at least honest.
ryandrake 2 days ago [-]
I'm not asking for free labor. I'm asking that if someone sells me a product for a one-time cost, then I expect that product to continue working as it did when I bought it. If ensuring it "continues working" represents a cost to the developer, then they should reconsider charging one-time for the product.
2 days ago [-]
stronglikedan 2 days ago [-]
> they should reconsider charging one-time for the product
You wouldn't be able to afford it. It's well known at the time of purchase that online games will eventually become obsolete. Comparing that to tools is comparing apples to oranges.
Now, I do think that game companies should be compelled to make their servers available for others to host and maintain if they decide to stop hosting and maintaining them themselves. Some do, but all should be required to.
wxre 1 days ago [-]
Okay well how about my EVSE (EV car charger)? Much more akin to a tool. I can't configure it now because it relies on a cloud interface and the company that sold it to me changed hands several times and now doesn't operate in the US. Now it's stuck thinking I want it limited to 28 amps rather than the 50 amps my new car can use.
Telaneo 1 days ago [-]
You should be entitled to a fix for that, yes (say, some way to connect it to Home Assistant, or just a physical switch somewhere). That or your money back so you can buy an equivalent product that isn't broken.
I've seen discussions about this exact topic in Europe, but it's a hard topic to tackle, since the relevant services will usually shut down bell beyond five years, and by that time, the statute of limitations will have run out, so even if the product could in theory have lasted for 20+ years longer if you could just have it talk to the computer in your closet, or just flipped a switch to turn it into a dumb-mode where is still does the basics you don't need a clown for, you're out of luck.
ryandrake 1 days ago [-]
Yea, it should not be even remotely acceptable that a physical device like an EV charger, installed in the home for the purpose of doing something in the home, can suddenly be nerfed simply because the manufacturer went out of business.
If this were normal, my car would suddenly stop working if Toyota went out of business.
jasonlotito 2 days ago [-]
> At no point did you purchase unlimited free online service forever, by the way.
The legislation specifically carves out for things like this.
> Why do you deserve free labor from a game developer that you paid a nominal amount to 10 years ago, not to mention infrastructure costs.
The legislation doesn't add this requirement at all.
> It's the equivalent of paying $10 to enter an all-you-can-eat restaurant and complaining when they kick you out at 10pm while you say that you haven't technically had ALL you can eat yet.
No. It's paying $10 and eating until 10pm and then leaving because they are done.
Your entire comment just reads as someone who has made assumptions about what is being asked for rather than actually looked into it.
Just the opening of your first two paragraphs proves that.
2 days ago [-]
Altern4tiveAcc 1 days ago [-]
PSA for anyone considering reading it: this article is full of LLMisms and was probably generated from a prompt.
That being said, I agree with the premise. Most of those cultural preservation issues wouldn't be a problem if users had control over their computing.
The problems caused by game servers going offline aren't necessarily specific to games, and the cultural preservation aspect can be applied to other programs as well. This essay explain what those problems are in a very accessible manner: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
andai 1 days ago [-]
> If a certain activity is essentially your own, then maintaining your full control over it requires that you do it using your copies of free programs, running them on computers you control. Doing it in any other way is SaaSS because it denies you the control you deserve.
The word deserve is interesting here.
There's a social sense (based on the just world fallacy, see also Karma), and a natural sense (by natural law, you deserve whatever you are able to get).
In the natural sense, which is the only real one, a person deserves computing freedom if they are able and willing to obtain it. If they care, and if they're willing to work for it.
It's the same way with freedom in other contexts. If you don't care, at least not enough to defend it... well, we can see the results of that.
I think Stallman is using the word deserve here in the sense that computing freedom should be some kind of human right. That's an admirable position, but I don't think I see it catching on. (Heck, regular freedom is still pretty niche, especially globally, and computing freedom is a strict subset.)
metabagel 1 days ago [-]
> PSA for anyone considering reading it: this article is full of LLMisms and was probably generated from a prompt.
Possibly, but it doesn't appear that way to me.
addandsubtract 1 days ago [-]
"Freedom 2" makes zero sense:
> A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files. Freedom 2 ensures that the community has the legal right to share the server software
In most online games, only the developer has the "server files". You'd need access to them first to even share them. Freedom 2 should be access to server files, if anything.
croisillon 1 days ago [-]
> a $70 purchase turn into a useless desktop icon
and so it begins...
eckesicle 1 days ago [-]
My father was a printer his entire life. I went with him to work one day when I was around 12 years old. He loaded up a box of, what seemed to me a random selection of flyers, booklets and other printed goods in his car, and together we drove to the National Archives (in Sweden).
He explained to me that every media artifact of cultural significance would be stored there in three (I believe) copies for future generations to enjoy, or researchers, or historians.
I was given a tour by an archivist there and this became a core memory of mine.
I was always at unease growing up, wondering what would happen to video games when they no longer became popular. Would I be able to enjoy them when I got older? Would my children ever be able to play the games that shaped my teenage years?
The discussion around the matter of Stop Killing Games always devolves to one around free labour or around infringing the rights of the creator, but at some point, when a game, or a film, or a book is no longer monetised, makers of cultural works should be obliged to archive and ensure that our shared cultural heritage and identity is preserved for the future.
Film makers, authors, printers, ad agencies, music producers, and many others are already obliged to do this in many countries.
Why should video game producers be exempt?
It's just better for all of us, and our children, if these works of art are preserved, and that at an insignificant effort and cost, compared to the cost of developing it.
Telaneo 1 days ago [-]
> I was always at unease growing up, wondering what would happen to video games when they no longer became popular. Would I be able to enjoy them when I got older? Would my children ever be able to play the games that shaped my teenage years?
The worst thing, at least to me, is that the worst case scenario, as long as the devs don't go out of their way to kill a game permanently, is still not all that bad.
There's emulation, there's virtual machines, there's dicking about with config files, and there's just buying the old hardware outright. Even old, obscure and fiddly games can be played if you put in the effort. Even the old and obscure will very often be out there on the web, and even if it isn't, you can eventually get hold of a physical copy (and then make a good example and make it available yourself!).
But the moment there's a clown server dependency involved, that's it. You've lost before you've even begun. Sometimes a miracle happens, or someone dedicates their entire life to restoring that one game, and we thank them, for they are doing capital G God's work. But preservation can't depend on miracles.
djaro 17 hours ago [-]
Games in general are a very difficult thing to preserve because of how they are often "on-going" things rather than definitive objects like books or films. Minecraft has gone through 27 major version updates, most of which having had in the range of 3-10 sub-versions. So that's potentially ~100 versions, just for Java edition. Should all of those be archived? Or just the final version, when it one day arrives? At this point, the Minecraft from 2014 and from 2026 are completely different games. And at least for Minecraft, there's mostly just stuff added. What about games in which major features regularly get removed, like Fortnite? There, the "last" version will lack many of the games most famous attributes.
Maybe we should just accept that big online games are more like cultural happenings than media objects. In the future, you simply might not be able to play Fortnite, in the same way you can never visit Woodstock again. It's just something you had to be at.
Telaneo 15 hours ago [-]
> So that's potentially ~100 versions, just for Java edition. Should all of those be archived?
Minecraft is a great example here, because the answer it brings to the table is yes. You can play any version of Minecraft (barring some really early versions that are lost to time) natively in the launcher. Yes, even the stupid sub-versions. If Minecraft can do it just fine, I see little reason other games can't (barring licencing issues, ugh).
> What about games in which major features regularly get removed, like Fortnite?
Give the option to revert back. Provide the relevant files so someone can do it by themselves. Be a decent human being.
> Maybe we should just accept that big online games are more like cultural happenings than media objects.
Fuck off. You had to be there for WoW Classic too. Doesn't mean we can't still have it. There are WoW Classic server up right now, with people playing it. Not that that has much to do with Blizzard (they caved only after illicit Classic servers became stupid popular, and it's not like setting up those servers was an easy feat).
esikich 1 days ago [-]
I think in the AI age, it might not be so bad. There's a small online game that I played years ago that I checked in on 2 days ago to see if it was still running, it was with a handful of people playing it. So I downloaded the client to pop in. It had aged really poorly so I thought, fuck it, let's see if Codex can reverse engineer the client, maybe I can build another one. I let it cook and came back an hour later to check on it. It had pulled out all the assets, a bunch of enums for different game states and animations, etc, and had started doing network protocol reverse engineering by building a bare bones client and pointing it at localhost. It had figured out how to authenticate and was already figuring out how to decode the game state from raw packets. I shut it down so my IP wouldn't get banned, but I was floored it was able to do that much in an hour.
joegibbs 1 days ago [-]
I don't think there are any major problems with the current system except the length of copyright. If copyright got reduced to 20 years after the creation of the work I think that we would have a more dynamic economy. Old games could have their servers reverse-engineered (in 5 years this will undoubtedly be incredibly easy unless AI hits a wall for no reason). Companies would have to work on something new - no more 50 years of a franchise. Enough resting on the laurels!
For a multiplayer game, especially for something like an MMO where there's lots and lots of content that exists only on the server, there's an interesting question. How do you keep the game going? Do you force the company to release a full working server with all of its content? I'm not opposed to that, but it's a much taller ask than "allow the end users to keep using their clients."
But then who's allowed to run servers? Can I modify the servers and mod them and republish my changes? Does killing the game also need to cancel any copyright on any server-side assets?
But then we need to get into licensing. What if Fortnite goes offline and they publish their server assets? Does that give me the right to use Naruto and Family Guy avatars on my homebrew server?
roywiggins 2 days ago [-]
Pangram flags this as 100% LLM output fwiw
brendanfinan 2 days ago [-]
I am beyond tired of reading "This isn't X. It's Y"
that happens at the end of nearly every paragraph here
wilg 2 days ago [-]
WIW: nothing
zzo38computer 1 days ago [-]
They are right that Free software is important, not only games but other stuff as well; I agree with the ideas they mention in this article.
Freedom 1 is also important for understanding the rules of the game in case it is not documented very well; changing which server it connects to is not the only issue (and a well-designed FOSS program would have an option to configure which server it connects to without needing to recompile it).
(In some cases, other people figure out the rules of the game independently and might write independent FOSS implementations (in one case, I have done this for a single-player game; other people have also done for other games). In this case, it may be less of a problem (if the FOSS implementation is actually correct and complete (and might even have less bugs than the original and/or other improvements)), and both official and unofficial implementations can continue to be used.)
qweqwe14 2 days ago [-]
It's not pee-pee — it's poo-poo.
krupan 2 days ago [-]
The discussion here is amazing! Takes me right back to the early days of Linux and discovering Free Software. How will developers eat?? Who would write software for free?? These people clearly didn't think this through!! Amazing to hear it all again, lol!
Let's think about it. Free software just applies to the source code. Artwork, logos, even trademarked names are not Free. Support, services, and documentation can also be non Free. This is the Red Hat business model and they make a ton of money.
Right now several very popular games are free or almost free to install and play. The game studios make money off of in game purchases. There's no reason that couldn't continue.
Games could be Free but connecting to the server for multiplayer would of course cost money.
What about anti cheating? I think motivated software engineers working together around the world could come up with solutions to this. Or (and?), good social engineers could come up with incentives/punishments that heavily encourage fair play. I worry about this one the least. Here's one idea that my son just made me aware of this morning. Some game he was playing allowed him FPV of his teammates after he was eliminated from the round. He saw his teammate could see through walls. This angered my son and he called the teammate out. The cheating was defeated.
usef- 1 days ago [-]
Have there been commercially successful free software games?
If the code was Free Software, how would you sell in-game purchases? Note that if it were just 3d models for your character, others could sell them too, likely cheaper without the overheads of developing the base game. Note that the article is advocating for multiplayer code to be open too.
I love free software, but I don't see how it was works in practice with games unless you're talking about open sourcing years later. Games seem different in usage and development than operating systems.
Telaneo 1 days ago [-]
> Have there been commercially successful free software games?
2048 had in-game ads that you could buy your way out of. You couldn't just install the ad-free version, because iOS is locked down. You could on Android, but not everyone is tech-savvy enough to actually do that.
usef- 1 days ago [-]
Oh yes, I know open source games existed, but did any raise enough to pay wages of a team?
ps. I personally played Threes first, which 2048 copied without the style and made free. I admit I was slightly disappointed for the original devs that the copy became significantly more well known. It wouldn't be my first example of the benefits of open source.
Telaneo 1 days ago [-]
Full team, no. Probably not even just the one guy who made 2048, unless maybe you count minimum wage. It's hard to know what he earned of ads and such, but I can't imagine it being anything massive.
krupan 8 hours ago [-]
Have there been commercially successful free software games?
I'm not aware of anyone that has even tried to do that. That doesn't mean it's impossible.
captn3m0 2 days ago [-]
The discussion is so bad because the article is.
There’s so many nuances around assets, trademarks, copyright, monetisation, cheatware(?), multi-player etc but the article ignores all of it and goes for the straight freedom angle. How do you even have in-game purchases when you can’t control client code? Do we even have a single example of FOSS and mainstream game that made money and was multiplayer?
Terrible slop and I am flagging it.
phendrenad2 1 days ago [-]
> Who would write software for free??
We make software a public good and fund it at the government level.
krupan 8 hours ago [-]
Linux and all the other free software argues that that is not needed
itvision 2 days ago [-]
I love it but how do people tolerate the Steam launcher? Why is it a requirement to launch ages old games that lost support aens ago and do not even support Windows 10/11 and the best way to launch them is under emulation or virtualization, e.g. in Windows XP, but modern Steam is not compatible with XP, so ... you're screwed?
Valve could have made `steam.dll` optional for really old games but DRM is DRM and it's here to stay.
Telaneo 1 days ago [-]
> Valve could have made `steam.dll` optional for really old games but DRM is DRM and it's here to stay.
It mostly is if you digging a bit. Yes, it should work out of the box, but at least it's possible to make it work. When the battle of getting games to not permanently break is still being fought (not to mention that there's (somehow?!) significant sentiment that games permanently breaking isn't an actual problem), there's little wonder why the battle of inconvenient DRM isn't really happening.
mohamedkoubaa 2 days ago [-]
I'm confused, does the author (or prompter, it would seem) of this article really feel entitled to game servers running indefinitely?
Gamemaster1379 2 days ago [-]
> or if it is illegal to modify the game client to point to a fan-run server
This would suggest entitlement to be able to allow the game to function in any capacity. They aren't expecting the developer to host it, but the legal right of someone to host it and the capacity for anyone to direct their client to it.
krupan 2 days ago [-]
No. Didn't you read the whole thing?
stefan_ 1 days ago [-]
The author doesn't give a fuck about games, which is why this article is pure slop.
If you decide the LLM should write your "passion blog post", it gives off immediate "soulless Linked grifter" vibes.
mrguyorama 2 days ago [-]
I can still play Quake without Id spending any of their own money running servers.
That's literally all anyone wants
Community run servers were killed because there's a possibility the community run servers would let you play with content you (gasp!) didn't pay for, as happened with TF2, so they can't possibly let you have that option! If they don't get $6 for a texture file, the world will end!
And don't give me bullshit about "But they would have to put extra effort into building that", as if nearly every game server application provided to players has ever been anything other than a random exe file with no documentation and critical flaws that require third party hacks to fix. Pretty much anything built on Unreal or the Source game engine had a ready to go server by default, or with a checkbox.
Hell, even nothing more than a carveout in the DMCA to allow people to legally reimplement servers after shutdown would buy a lot of goodwill. This carveout is only needed because the DMCA dramatically limited your legal rights in respect to software products just a couple decades ago.
mattbis 1 days ago [-]
Stop playing games ;
Can't see how an independent developer would ever be able to do this. We need more independent things not less... this would be my concern.
Better legislation would be to force developers to at least allow people to run their own servers.
throwaway85825 1 days ago [-]
That's more or less what this is.
M95D 1 days ago [-]
I don't understand what all the fuss is about. There are so many old games on GOG to play for 10 lifetimes. On a 1GB RPi.
Telaneo 15 hours ago [-]
There are many old books in the Library, and yet I still choose to buy new ones.
M95D 2 hours ago [-]
The way I see it, new books = new information; new games = worse gameplay, worse story, with new graphics => money spent updating GPU/CPU/memory getting very little in return
stuaxo 1 days ago [-]
I think they are taking a limited[1] but pragmatic approach.
[1] This is still way more than the industry would want.
If the are successful we will see quite a bit more open source.
enmerk4r 2 days ago [-]
Free games aren't as crazy an idea as one might think, the same way open-source projects like Blender are able to make quite a bit of money. If any of you are fans of space simulator games, I'd check out Kitten Space Agency by RocketWerkz. Their intention is to make this game not only free but DRM-free, so that users can legally put it on a thumb drive and share it with each other. You can also play it entirely offline. Because it's an educational game that's a spiritual successor to a beloved Kerbal Space Program with a significant cult following, they are hoping to continue the project via donations and by partnering with educational institutions. We'll see if this works out for them, seems a little ambitious, but I really hope they set a precedent.
mortsnort 1 days ago [-]
Stop killing games before they even get made by putting unnecessary burdens on developers.
HDBaseT 1 days ago [-]
PirateSoftware alt account.
2001zhaozhao 2 days ago [-]
> If you're a gamer who has watched a $70 purchase turn into a useless desktop icon overnight, you're entirely justified in your outrage.
If you're a gamer whose game became unplayable from cheaters running hacked clients because the game's developer decided to share their source code online, you're entirely justified in your outrage.
applfanboysbgon 2 days ago [-]
> What gamers are actually experiencing is the inherent injustice of proprietary software.
The inherent injustice of developers being able to eat? The entire reason we're in this mess of a field is because of this ideological purity crusade. We could have a world where independent developers make a modest living producing good software that people pay a reasonable amouunt for, but because everyone expects everything for free, the majority of developers are forced into working for soulless corporations, who make the money that pays their salaries with the most predatory software imaginable, spamming ads, tracking, and microtransactions all over "free" software.
You also always have control over the programs that run on your own computer. Reverse engineer it if you care; the tools have always been there. The article mentions DRM, which is almost always bypassed, and private servers, which people do host -- so where's the lack of control, exactly? You just feel entitled to be given everything on a silver platter, you can't even be bothered to put effort into taking free stuff. Give me a break.
To be clear, I am fully in support of Stop Killing Games. Especially given the annoying copyright regime around hosting private servers, legislation to mandate some kind of fallback for termination is helpful. But trying to pin this cause to this horrible movement that has done 100x more harm than good? No thanks.
F3nd0 2 days ago [-]
> You also always have control over the programs that run on your own computer. Reverse engineer it if you care; the tools have always been there.
It’s never been about what’s possible in theory, but what’s feasible in practice. By the same kind of logic you apply here, every country in the world is as good as democratic because you can work your way to free elections eventually, even if it takes a while.
applfanboysbgon 2 days ago [-]
The literal next sentence after your quote was addressing the feasibility, of which it is clearly feasible because people actually are reverse engineering games at scale.
F3nd0 2 days ago [-]
The point I was trying to make is that understanding and modifying software to do your bidding is significantly more feasible if you already have the source code than if you have to reverse-engineer it yourself, to an important degree.
applfanboysbgon 2 days ago [-]
Sure, and then it's significantly less feasible for developers to eat, to an important degree. It just comes across as entitled - it's too much effort to reverse engineer, give everything to me for free! Never mind that it can be done, I don't want to do it, I'm entitled to 10,000 manhours of free labour because software yearns to be free!!!
F3nd0 1 days ago [-]
I think your rhetoric is needlessly antagonistic.
The idea of free software follows from fairly simple logic: You should be in control of your computer and any software that runs on it should be distributed under form and licence which facilitate this. It’s not about what the software wants or how much work people owe you; it’s about enabling you to own your computing when the code is literally already there. Surely you can disagree with that without making up (in my view) silly-sounding arguments for the other side?
1 days ago [-]
wilg 2 days ago [-]
It should be legal to make and sell proprietary software with whatever server entanglements you want as long as they are clearly disclosed.
If customers and care about open source and free software games, they will support them. There is no need to dictate the funding model people want to use for art or software products. This is an industry with an unbelievable amount of competition.
2 days ago [-]
phendrenad2 1 days ago [-]
Proprietary software itself is regressive.
We need to get to a place where all consumer-focused apps and games include full source code, including any server necessary to play multiplayer or store cloud files.
In this I see Stop Killing Games as a half-measure that the industry supports to avoid us waking up and realizing what we should have.
willmadden 2 days ago [-]
Idiots putting their noses where they don't belong. We do not need legislation for this. It would kill the gaming industry.
dombiscoff 1 days ago [-]
It just wouldn't
willmadden 18 hours ago [-]
Did you read the article?
>The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
>The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
It's forcing all games to be open-source. If you develop a big video game with an eight or nine figure budget and your customers are free to distribute and modify your product you will lose everything.
djaro 17 hours ago [-]
All of these freedoms would only kick in after the developer shuts down official servers, after which the product is discontinued and not generating income anyway.
It wouldn't affect game developers at all, the only change would be that they have to upload the server file's code when they decide to stop supporting the game, so that players can continue it themselves.
willmadden 17 hours ago [-]
That's not clear from the article. Even if that's the case, it still gives away the studio's IP the moment they discontinue the game. Counter strike wouldn't exist if these "freedoms" were in effect when half-life ended support.
skotobaza 1 days ago [-]
The industry was doing fine without online-only games.
triyambakam 2 days ago [-]
Every time I read this I think it means to "stop games that promote killing"
tosti 2 days ago [-]
Yes, please. Also ask yourself why that old tumble dryer, fridge, amplifier, vacuum cleaner and water cooker from 40+ years ago refuse to die while modern units die about the same week the warranty expires.
They make you buy new or else the manufacturers fear going out of business. It's just sad that this has extended to practically everything.
truelson 2 days ago [-]
Not always planned obsolescence. Good ol' "only the cheapest survive" plays a role, too.
paulryanrogers 2 days ago [-]
Never heard that phrase. I think their point is the most cheaply made units aren't surviving into the future. They're just getting replaced often.
Unless perhaps it means only companies selling the cheapest are surviving. Which also doesn't seem broady true.
Maybe we can say "whoever sells the cheapest acceptable units survives".
krupan 2 days ago [-]
Amazing nitpicking of the phrase, well done
triyambakam 2 days ago [-]
A variation of Hanlon's Razor
econ 2 days ago [-]
I have a vision for an art exposition where common tools and household items are enriched with remote shut down technology. Devices that have no business being smart like a hamer, a tire iron, a lug Wrench and perhaps shoes.
The entrance will feature the obvious candidates that normally use electricity then gradually transition into things like a manual powered citrus juicer for which the battery is only for contract enforcement and planned obsolescence
everyone 2 days ago [-]
Apparently one reason cars from the 90's last longer than new ones (which almost always fail in some way immediately after warranty expires) is the advancement and increased usage of computer modelling / simulation.
In the 90's they had pretty much mastered car manufacturing and made parts which they were certain would outlast the warranty, erring on the side of caution they mostly ended up making parts that lasted much longer than the warranty.
Now, with computer modelling and simulations, they can accurately design a part to be as cheap as possible to make while being just durable enough to last for the duration of the warranty.
D4A did a good video on it.. https://youtu.be/SeMZGICNSMg?si=sideQIwNBr9s9QW6
wilg 2 days ago [-]
Is there evidence this is actually true? When I’ve looked I’ve found the historical reliability is overstated and also ignores cost, availability, and environmental impact of manufacturing and using newer appliances and devices. Lots of older things were heavy, resource intensive, and overbuilt. Quality items are still available today for all of this stuff, probably cheaper than in the past in most cases.
wegwerper 2 days ago [-]
Wonder why this author felt the need to destroy his article with LLM content / proofreading?
Submissions on HN with interesting titles keep ending up being revealed as AI slop halfway down towards them making their point.
Authors: you don't need this. Don't disrespect your reader's time with LLM slophancement.
2 days ago [-]
lowbloodsugar 1 days ago [-]
Oh fuck off. [1]
To elaborate, if I make a creative experience, that requires a server, and sell it to you for $70, and you play it for a year, that's your $70 of value right there. That's the moral argument.
Every single games company faced with this issue is now going to change the terms of service to note that the $70 "includes free two year subscription, paid up front!", and if the lawyers get pissy about that they'll sell two versions: one that is $0, but doesnt work until you sign up for the $70 per month subscription. That's the legal argument.
What this comes down to is "I have the right to decide what my $70 actually paid for". No you don't. What you paid for is what you paid for. Now piss off.
No, the moral argument is "I want to be able to (re)play the experience ten years from now". If the servers aren't available in any form (so I can't event self-host), then it's an issue. That is the moral part, not the financial one.
lowbloodsugar 16 hours ago [-]
“What you want” isn’t a moral issue. It’s an entitlement issue. I want a Ferrari. $70 doesn’t buy a Ferrari just like it doesn’t buy unlimited expense running a server or the intellectual property of that server.
Fascinating to me that, on the one hand, so many people up in arms about AI stealing work from poor devs but then here you are demanding free use of their work because you made a one time payment ten years ago.
"Well, just make it open source, so anyone can run it". Ok, and someone sets up a server and modifies it to be "Nazi world" still using my recognizable assets. Do I have any rights there, to stop my IP from bieng used for that purpose? Is "IP" a dirty word? Isn't IP what we're up in arms about AI stealing?
You haven't thought it through.
skotobaza 14 hours ago [-]
When I buy a game, I do not expect the developer or the publisher to keep the servers open for unlimited time. But since I paid for the game, I expect to be able to play it. Like it always has been. You see it as entitlement, I see it as a normal thing. If you buy a Ferrari and it stops working just because some servers got closed, I expect you to be "entitled" as well. It's absolutely normal to expect things that you paid for to keep working. And knowingly disable the servers rendering a game (or a car) unplayable is immoral. It already happened multiple times. And it will happen again.
Regarding the argument about modification of the assets - I don't see the issue. Nobody will hold the publisher responsible for what other people do. You can already do that with e.g. Counter Strike - host your own server, take an official Valve map and replace some textures with something inappropriate. No one will blame Valve for this, since they do not host those servers.
So I have thought it through. Also, AI has nothing to do with this, not sure why you bring it up...
djaro 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, as a society we can collectively decide what companies should and shouldn't do. It's called living in a society with rules and regulations.
> Every single games company faced with this issue is now going to change the terms of service to note that the $70 "includes free two year subscription, paid up front!", and if the lawyers get pissy about that they'll sell two versions: one that is $0, but doesnt work until you sign up for the $70 per month subscription.
So if you make it illegal for companies to lie and say they are selling you a game, only to then take it away, they will instead... be honest and tell you how long the game will be supported? Great!
lowbloodsugar 16 hours ago [-]
It won’t be a lie it will be a contract. It will be the opposite of a lie. You will then have to decide if you want to spend $70 on a game that you an are only guaranteed to get a year out of. Maybe you won’t. But at least we’ll be spared your entitled tantrums.
There are tons of closed source games that have zero online component to them.
I don't see how you can actually argue that this is a good thing, especially when they say:
> The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.
What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.
It uses an independent reimplementation of the code of a Zelda game from the GameCube and combines them with the assets from the actual game to make native binaries for various platforms, which blows my mind a bit but demonstrates the power of this sort of split abstraction.
https://openmw.org/
https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic
https://ihhub.github.io/fheroes2/
PokeMMO is a online Pokemon Fangame that combines the first 5 generations of games. From what I gather, this is possible because it is up to the user to provide the ROMs, so litigious Nintendo cannot say they are re-distributing copyrighted material
This makes me think, is there one of those "awesome" lists for open game reimplementations? If not, someone should make one...
(edit: Thanks for the multiple great replies on this! Now I have even more stuff to go through to add to my lists, and I love having that problem)
https://luxtorpeda.org/packages
That is impressive there is OSS Gothic 2
I wonder if its legal, how is it MIT
I also wouldn't say that "respecting the limits of IP law" is particularly idiosyncratic either; you can make the case that IP owners like Nintendo often overreach due to the inherent advantage of being a large company with a lot more resources than a smaller open source project, but I don't really see it as worthwhile to call them out for not doing that in some cases.
If you think that neither of those definitive statements are something regular lawyers could tell you, I think we just have mutually incompatible perceptions of reality. Otherwise, you're claiming that the boundary between what's transparently a legal or a violation and what's murky is itself obvious, which doesn't really make sense if you don't think that regular lawyers even understand IP law.
It honestly just seems like you're trying to pick a fight for reasons that are not really clear to me. You initially responded derisively to my use of the word "power" to describe a form of abstraction, and when I responded to clarify it, you ignored that part of my response in favor of focusing on a different part and starting a new argument about that.
go ahead and ask. non-IP lawyers will tell you to talk to IP lawyers. another way to think of your two questions is, "in what scenarios would ... be permissible and not permissible, in your opinion?" if you were sincerely interested in learning something.
There are many people who would advocate for free software and not free culture, but jxself has also written in support of free culture: https://jxself.org/drm_and_free_culture.shtml
That post is from 15 years ago, so of course he could have changed his views since then (but I don't see any evidence of that in this case).
Personally, I’m a big fan of this idea. I really like the way that games like Doom do things: the engine itself is FOSS, but in order to play Doom, you need DOOM.WAD which is proprietary and must be purchased. DOOM.WAD doesn’t contain any code (it only contains graphics, sounds, level geometry, etc.) so you don’t have to run any unfree software in order to play Doom.
However, there are some people in the free software movement that disagree with me. The Free Software Foundation maintains a wiki called the Free Software Directory. Here’s a quote from the Free Software Directory’s rules for what can and cannot be included in the Free Software Directory [1]:
> Edge Cases
> This is not static information. Policies about adding non-free code obviously don't change, however the way projects are licensed or the way they interact each other is definitely subject to change.
> […]
> • If software is freely licensed but is bundled with artwork that is not, do we consider the program to be free? From RMS "Images and sounds need to be free if they are essential parts of the software. But if they are just decoration, and easily replaced, then they do not have to be free." Sound and artwork fall into the category of essential for interactive games. Logos on otherwise utilitarian projects do not.
That being said, that same set of rules also says [2]:
> Free programs
> Software needs to meet the free software definition to be listed at the Free Software Directory as well as follow these guidelines and requirements for entries.
> […]
> • The software program itself should not package any program-data, art assets loaded by the program, or software which is under a nonfree license. If art or data is available for the game under a nonfree license but not packaged directly with it, that is a different matter and one we should be more flexible about.
Those two quotes seem like they were written by two different people who have opposite opinions on this topic, but IDK.
Anyway, my point is: I really like it when games do that, but it seems that at least some people in the free software movement disagree.
[1]: <https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:Requi...>
[2]: <https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:Requi...>
However,
The "raws" that drive the game are completely configurable and accessible by a user.
It's more like the engine being closed source and the gamedata being source-available. Modding isn't quite the right word - that implies it being less open.
You can delete stuff from being present in your game, add new plants or objects, new diseases, etc.
Also related, the game has been opened up with Lua scripting thanks to Putnam's efforts, for even more powerful procedural addons.
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Raw_file
And that’s really great, but this model is ultimately not realistic for most game developers.
It’s not like productivity software where the code of the product isn’t the majority of the value being delivered. Gitlab is happy to give away their source code because a bunch of enterprise integrations, support, cloud hosting, and features are paywalled.
Game developers really just can’t do this model. If the game is open source it’s going to be far too easy to pirate the game. The economics of single player games largely revolve around the strength of sales in the first month or two.
This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.
For a AAA game where it needs to sell millions of copies at a high price to break even on its huge production budget, game companies can’t risk a high piracy rate. Just look at GTA 6, a game with a production budget of multiple Avatar films.
> This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.
This is not always the case. For example this game will be available on GOG on day 1. In fact you can pre-order it now: https://www.gog.com/en/game/gothic_1_remake
As another example, this game was released on GOG 5 months after the Steam release: https://www.gog.com/en/game/clair_obscur_expedition_33
Likewise, Cyberpunk 2077 was released on GOG 4 months after the Steam release. And IIRC the game's revenue didn't cover its costs until ~2 years later.
All three of the examples I gave are $50 or more.
https://www.gogdb.org/product/2093619782#details
Two of the three examples are solidly in the realm of indie titles.
Yes, there are big release games on the platform. I see, for example, that Silent Hill f is on GOG.
I will generally agree that piracy eventually happens, but a lot of DRM has made piracy impractical for critical early weeks of a game's release.
I think different video game publishers have different opinions on the matter and both sides have a lot of validity. I also think that different types of games have different rates of piracy, as it can be a crime of convenience or not.
If your game's demographics skews more educated, affluent, and/or older, I would imagine that piracy rates will be lower. Perhaps your game is more popular in some countries over others that have different laws and/or cultural norms surrounding piracy.
It turns out I was wrong about Cyberpunk. It was released on GOG on day 1. https://www.gogdb.org/product/2093619782#details
The price chart on gogdb mislead me.
THe people that matter will compensate you if you make something that matters to them.
The whole idea that you need to force people to by your stuff through restrictions is a perverse way of looking at the world.
A certain type of player just checks for cracked versions first even though they have the money to buy the game and for that person Denuvo buying the publisher a few weeks/months of a crack not being available is worth the investment.
I suspect that a lot of the most famous examples of big budget games with no DRM at all have an older, more educated, and more affluent demographic.
I’m guessing nobody here has ever actually tried to make games, let alone multiplayer ones. It’s not “oh just make it better” we’re usually already stretching the limits of what’s possible financially and time wise to get a working (fun) product.
You can add burdens all you want, but that means the games get simpler.. because they can’t be made cheaper (price sensitive customers) and time is finite in that context. something has to give.
It's a question of when, not if - you're not going to pay to keep the servers online forever. What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't? If they're bad enough then plenty of people will not be interested in taking that risk by making such games.
How about "the government forces you to release the code"? That's seems fair.
Unless you hid your source code in USB drives under your bed, the government can probably just force GitHub (or similar )to release it. I bet they've got it backed up.
Ex. if I license my artwork, music, characters, code library, etc. to a game developer and they don't create a legally releasable version of their server, then the government will forcibly break our licensing agreement and I just get screwed?
I can't wait to see "you haven't met your patch obligations" on a balance sheet and a full indie game being underwater
You either have to rip out the code (which may or may not break the server, but still requires developer time to do) or write replacement code which likely takes even more dev time to do or you would have done it instead of paying for the library/access to the service.
Physics subsystems (havok, ISI).
Procedural systems (Gaea, Houdini)
Vegetation (Speedtree)
VFX subsystems (Nvidia Gameworks)
First party SDKs (Sony Playstation, Microsoft NDK, Horizon/Quest).
Pathfinding (Kytheria, Mercuna)
Cutscenes/Videos (Bink)
UI (Rive, Neosis)
Networking (Photon, Coherence)
Theres… thousands more, if you’d like me to continue.
What I'm saying is you have programs running on user machines, and programs running on your machines. There's an interface between those two over a network. There's a problem that consumers face today where they pay to play games that are not functional without data flowing over that interface.
There's a claim that implementing the backend side of that interface is so complex and impossible or too difficult/time consuming/etc to design in a way without 3rd party dependencies.
I'm asking: what are those 3rd party libraries doing? And why can't you design server APIs and client code in a way to provide a different backend if consumers need to do it themselves when you stop supporting the game?
Why do you use Ruby on Rails, why not rewrite it so you can release it without relyig on that?
And even if we're talking hypotheticals: stupid example. I haven't worked on a backend where the actual server infrastructure wasn't open source, trivial to open source because it was first party, or irrelevant because the only thing that matters would be the API and protocols, which again, trivial to make open.
Get a job in industry and see for yourself.
I’m not going to break confidentially to sate your ignorance.
Getting all defensive and not answering it doesn't really help your industry's case here.
Ok, lets talk about the kinds of things we need.
Networks have latency, so we need to smooth/correct for that.
Our connections need to be authenticated, so we need middleware to handle tokens, because we don’t hand-roll that. On a binary protocol.
Our physics engines are complicated: we don’t usually write our own from scratch; and the server needs physics to simulate the world.
Shall I continue?
It's pretty obvious to me as a gamer and engineer what the intent and design constraints are here, so I'm just wondering what makes this seem impossible?
I've worked on a lot of complicated and deeply optimized networked applications. They're almost all closed source. I know exactly how I would design a system to support these kinds of initiatives. What I'm curious about is why that's impossible for game developers, because either I'm missing something, or game developers are just bad at software design.
The whole "Stop Killing Games" movement is deeply misguided, and most of the people supporting it have absolutely no clue about how software or anything computer related actually works.
The issue with "Stop Killing Games" is that the legislation doesn't currently look like anything, it's a broad appeal and the solution for studios will depend on where it finally lands.
If it lands in the realm of "Games must be released FOSS after x years" then, aside from the fact that a lot of the times we don't own the copyrights to our own assets or certain code (they're on license for a single release) the second issue is how to release it.
First: the online backend for The Division or Destiny are just... not possible to run. The backend is fused to the products via a slurry of certificate pinning and object serialisation, with some things happening only on the server.
"Un-fusing" them is, basically impossible at this point; so the question is: can you build such a system without them being fused together in the first place?
The answer is: yes, but only by slowing down development. It would become much more about defining our boundaries and working on a "slim" version of the backend, or stubbing the backend completely. Obviously this is a lot of effort. The thing is we only barely managed to get a functional system, so adding an extra year for programming isn't going to be possible, we'll have to "cut" features that are hard to make.
"So, why don't you just release the server".
Well, that's a good question, we could remove the certificate pinning we have on the client, and the entitlement checks, stub out all the code that relies on third party APIs and give you a server binary.
But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.
So, we'd have to work on slimming that down, or building things in a totally different way: which means "seamless" darkzones and safehouses becomes impossible.
THEN you have the issue of releasing a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product, which we already had a major issue with.
So, most likely, we just make single player games.
Honestly, the industry is moving that way anyway because unless you've been doing it for a while making multiplayer games is really hard from a game design standpoint and there's an ongoing operational cost which people are a bit too price sensitive to support.
That's why Massive released The Division 1 & Division 2 but then pivoted to doing single-player games like Star Wars and Avatar which only retains the most basic multiplayer elements.
As far as I understand that situation is accepted by the initiative. The requirement is not that it works on any specific hardware or software stack, just that it can theoretically work.
> a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product
Anti-cheat solutions aren't required to be released, and if there are bugs in the server, they might even be found and patched by the community.
Second: anti-cheat itself is a fucking joke. A crutch, a last ditch hail-mary because we ran out of time to batten down the hatches or things were changed so often from the start of the project to the end that we couldn't add safety into the protocol design properly.
Exposing how our systems think about how you move, how you shoot, when AI ticks, when loot ticks, behaviour trees and how phase transitions are computed: gives an attacker a hell of a lot of leverage.
To put this into broader easier to understand terms: ask yourself why it's so easy to cheat in Unreal Engine games vs Battlefield.
It's not the anti-cheat. It's the complexity of digging through the engine and knowing what the memory is doing and what the server is doing.
Where can we find information about the direction the EU is going on this? AFAICT there has just been one meeting on the topic?
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/news/14th-valid-initia...
https://commission.europa.eu/european-citizens-initiative/me...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/stop-destroying...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXdmoeaYZ9Y
https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/news-media/news/eesc-debates-e...
First link is announcing the initiative was submitted, second is a private meeting where the initiative was presented to the comission by the organizers.
Then there was a public meeting on 16 April 2026 and a public meeting on 20 May 2026.
Is there a specific part of one of those meetings that indicates they want to go a different direction than the California bill?
From the last link:
> If designed responsibly, most games that connect to the internet can operate indefinitely without publisher support. This has been a customer expectation for over 50 years. We are open to any solution that solves the problem. We are flexible on specifics and implementation by publishers. We understand that not all game features may be operable in a discontinued game. We are not seeking ongoing support from publishers after a game has been discontinued
This sounds like the California bill would address these issues.
edit: Particularly, I'm wondering if there is any serious push for release of binaries / source code prior to the end-of-life of a game, which seems to be of particular concern.
The fact here is pretty simple: they have not indicated any support for the californian style legislation and they aren’t done yet either. The californian model is also very direct and instructive and EU laws tend to be broad frameworks, so they’ll definitely be different in some way, but unsure if they’ll encompass each other.
I can’t say what way they will definitely go, but it seems naïve to presume the californian stance given how disparate the solutions are from with in the SKG movement itself.
I’m watching it closely, obviously, but nobody knows where it will go. But this is like a 500-sided dice, the odds are low that a solution cleanly overlaps.
This doesn't seem like much of an obstacle? Can buy or rent such without too much trouble.
for... thousands of dollars a month.
the goal of the regulation is that regular people can keep playing their games. not just rich people.
It's not unheard of though. WoW and City of Heroes had/have large, expensive fan servers. But realistically, this legislation would save maybe 0-2% of games in the thousands-per-month cost range. According to the parent commenter, we might lose many more than that from the legislation causing studios to decide not to make them to begin with.
Games with cheap servers are a different story.
Spinning up a binary and replicating actors across two computers that both have a connection string to a server is.. for all intents and purposes: easy.
Where it falls down is when you start to have complex interactions with AI that's serverside, or you have a dynamic world that changes based on player behaviour, or you have cross platform requirements, integrations with companion apps and above all: matchmaking.
If you're a looter-shooter, there's a whole host of complicated interactions too.
A game like Apex Legends could probably distribute their server binary, but if you require online, as in, not just a single match, but an economy- a dynamic matchmaker and a dynamic world (meaning: when you kick a box it stays kicked) and a persistent account (you keep your loot): then that doesn't work well anymore.
The interactions are just too complex to batten down reliably, they'll be exploited, there'll be no fun, or: it just won't be possible for certain features, regardless of safety.
You can see how this looks by trying to use one of the many unofficial versions of Runescape.
The response of "but that isn't any fun!" is totally irrelevant; you can't preserve the initial experience, but you can preserve the basic software itself so that players still have something to mess with.
Programming-wise, this requires a little more emphasis on a modular implementation that needs to be considered from the start. Otherwise, it seems pretty straightforward. Or am I missing something?
I still think ‘kills any sort of multiplayer games’ (what the other dev said) is a gross exaggeration, since you list some ways this could be made to work, but it sounds like some things would cost significantly more resources and need to be done differently. But hey, maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Plus, there are multiplayer games which aren’t quite as resource-intensive on the server side.)
The extra point I made was that it's actually kind of costly to run these systems, and I promise you publishers would love to push that cost onto the community with community run servers (think: CS1.6) but the reason they don't is because developing systems that way takes much longer and cannot be properly secured (mostly due to cheating but also from an entitlement standpoint).
So, I think either multiplayer games will get much more basic, with simple gameservers. No more large multiplayer RPGs.
Or, there will be fewer multiplayer games, because it's even more risk in an already risky business.
As for community run servers being longer to develop... wait, what? How is that the case, when that used to be the standard way multiplayer got built prior to everyone trying to chase World of Warcraft? I can understand the anti-cheat argument, and I will begrudgingly acknowledge that you can't exactly force third-party servers to run your anti-piracy checks. But none of that is a technical argument. That's an argument about business risks, and publishers all jumped on the live service bandwagon because they consider their customers' control over their own games to be a business risk.
> So, we'd have to work on slimming that down
...why? My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.
Ubisoft doesn't have the most stellar reputation for example (I don't work there anymore) so people look at things we do by accident as if they are intentionally malicious.
Also, the California law is one law, the EU is also looking at this and it's likely to look different - that's why "Stop Killing Games" doesn't really mean anything yet, even people within the movement have differing definitions.
Of course there'll be idiots, but I doubt you'll see a stronger backlash than to a company shutting down the servers without any solution, like they can do now.
if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation.
the spirit of the law is that i can reasonably spin up an instance of the server for me and my friends to play.
Fans have reverse-engineered and stood up servers for tons of games with no access to the server binaries. The idea that they wouldn't figure it out when given much better resources (server binaries or source code) is crazy.
i wasnt implying they couldnt figure it out.
i was implying that you would have to be an incredibly rich turbonerd to stand up a massive cloud instance for some of these games. which sort of defeats the entire goal of the regulation.
To me this is about both preserving the access to what consumers purchased, but also future preservation of art.
Copyright is not a natural right. It is a monopoly granted by the government to creators, specifically with the goal of the progress of art and science.
Games that completely die because their servers are shut off, in my opinion should just lose copyright outright. Why should the people via the government provide you with a monopoly on publishing something that you have stopped publishing?
If the company puts an artificial proof of work demanding a rack of the latest data center GPUs, that should be illegal.
If the binary has the same hardware requirements that the company used when the service was up, I see it as totally fair.
ubisoft would surely be willing to spend an extra $500k on server hardware while developing a $25MM game, and subtlety bloat their server-side code so that they can say "this is the hardware we had to use to run it".
there are a million ways to slow down code/increase hardware requirements that look plausible.
This isn't the 2000s. People can rent a computer out of a data center. This isn't some hard problem here.
how much does 190GiB of RAM and 38 CPUs go for, hourly?
$1,349.04/Month
(m6g.12xlarge in us-east-1)
Pick your favorite game today that you purchase once, then have long-term free multiplayer support. Something like, idk, Fortnite before it was made F2P in 2017. Games like these evolve their content over time: sometimes minor changes, like rebalancing guns or matchmaking, but sometimes these are major changes, like completely redoing the map or altering fundamental mechanics. There can also be seasonal events that are designed to be available for a limited time.
The obvious question, then, is: is it "OK" that significant parts of the multiplayer experience changed after you purchased the game? In the spirit of people who prioritize game preservation, the answer should be "no, that's destroying part of the game and losing it to history." If we accept that interpretation, then we end up killing live service games. On the other hand, if we allow significant parts of the multiplayer experience to change, then we've neutered the legislation, because the easy workaround is to slowly patch out all online features until you're left with a husk of what was originally sold.
California's legislation [1] attempts to dodge this by phrasing things in terms of "ordinary use" of the game, but the definition of "ordinary use" is quite vague and will absolutely be the subject of some court case at some point.
---
Of course, there's a bunch of other side effects to the "general" notion of "make games usable past end-of-life," too:
- You might be able to use certain open source libraries on the server side because you are not distributing them to the user, and thereby don't have to open source your server. However, if you were required to distribute a binary, that could pose issues.
- You could have a dependency on an expensive piece of software (e.g. an enterprise Oracle DB license), and be unable to package that with the download.
- You could have a dependency on another online service (e.g. AWS Game Development Services [2]) that discontinues an API you depended on, and would require massive rework to be able to release a functional binary at end of life.
- You could have a dependency on an internal system at your company that you aren't willing to release the IP for yet, due to its use in another game
[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
[2]: https://aws.amazon.com/gametech/
This is true, but the issue is not with the content, it's with the ability (or rather inability) to access any of the content past some point. Even if only the latest content is left accessible after EOL, it will still be better than having nothing at all. The older content can be added back, no matter how finicky it can sometimes be.
Regarding the dependencies, no one is forcing the developers to release closed ones, you can replace them with stubs. But it will be beneficial from a developer to think about it beforehand - how they will implement online systems with additional requirement of EOL etc. It's not an implementation problem, but rather an architectural one.
One possibility is to charge for online play on the "official" server. This can be done regardless of the availability of source code.
Another possibility is to release the source code when the game reaches its end of life.
You might not have permission to, if it uses a lot of third party libraries.
No, it doesn’t. It just requires that we go back to making multiplayer games the old-fashioned way (the good way). Descent 3 was released in 1999. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer to this day if you want to [1], and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop you from doing so. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer because Descent 3 allows you to host your own servers and allows you to manually enter IP addresses in order to connect to servers (this is necessary because the services that Descent 3’s in-game server browsers depend on no longer exist). Descent 3’s source code was released in 2024 [2] which certainly helps with multiplayer preservation, but I can tell you that a small number of people definitely did play multiplayer Descent 3 in 2023 when the source code was not yet available.
Descent: Underground was released to Steam Early Access in 2015 [3]. Unlike the previous Descent games, Descent: Underground (or at least, that iteration of Descent: Underground) was pretty much multiplayer-only. The developers of Descent: Underground did not allow players to host their own Descent: Underground servers. (I think that they had some plan to allow for hosting your own servers in the future, but that didn’t get implemented in time). At some point, the official servers for that version of Descent: Underground were shutdown. As a result, you can no longer play Descent: Underground’s multiplayer.
The fact that I can play the multiplayer for a 27-year-old game, but I can’t play the multiplayer for an 11-year-old game is unsurprising. Many older multiplayer games did not have fatal design flaws that would cause them to die after certain period of time. Many newer multiplayer games do have such fatal design flaws. The good news is that this means that we already know how to stop killing multiplayer games. We just have to go back to doing things the way that we used to do them.
(In fact, some games don’t even need to “go back to doing things the way that we used to do them”. Take Counter-Strike 2, for example. Counter-Strike 2 was released in 2023 and does indeed allow players to host their own servers.)
The statement “the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games” is absolutely ridiculous.
[1]: <https://tsetsefly.de/>
[2]: <https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/descent-3-programmer-relea...>
[3]: <https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/18969>
they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".
by all means i 100% agree that an ostensibly single player game should not be locked behind a login or telemetry, and that platforms like steam should not be able to lock you out of playing games you paid for. but i dont think forcing the whole free software thing would work out how the author is imagining it.
real world experience is that most companies do not offer their software for free, and open source developers either have to get sponsored or have to constantly solicit donations.
donations do not typically cover multi-million dollar, multi-year development cycles.
you have to be trolling, right?
if people can get the game for free, because freedom 2 demands the game be freely redistributable by anyone with no restrictions, people are not going to pay for it. they are going to get it for free.
Free as in freedom not as in price
free as in freedom = i give away the game to everyone i know for free, and the studio loses out on those sales.
edit: oops, just noticed you are the same person i suspect is trolling. so, probably best for us both to end the conversation here.
It's fine to say you don't think it works in theory. But in practise many people have made their living this way for many years.
fyi, there are tens of torrent trackers with every game/movie/album/etc under the sun. had been for two decades.
right now that would be illegal to do in most jurisdictions.
publishers also have legal recourse. remove that and the publisher's math changes.
This is exactly what has been happening for years, only illegally. If it became legal, I imagine far less people would end up buying the game, though probably still more than just one.
But again, games are more than just software, so the four freedoms do not enable this.
what percent of businesses follow the FSF freedoms and turn a profit?
i would love it if i could get all my games for free, and legally give additional copies to all my students, family, and friends. but the developers pumping out those games probably want to see some sort of return more substantial than whatever trickles into their ko-fi account. they'll just stop developing games and go into CRM software or whatever.
To answer your question, there have been plenty of business who have created and published free software (albeit plenty have later closed them). Notable examples are Databricks, Hashicorp, Mongodb, RedHat.
Sure they've built a moat on top of their free software, but they have (or had) free software regardless.
i didnt say no one has thought about free software.
i said that this specific llm that output this article did not think about how the freedoms would work in todays gaming industry.
there are dozens of issues that immediately pop into my head, mostly specific to gaming, which are not mentioned or addressed at all.
> Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.
My reading of this was it was in terms of multiplayer games and servers. It was that the server should be freely redistributable and accessible. Much like you can download and run a minecraft server without owning a minecraft license.
The next sentence
> A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files.
That's kind of against the usual notion of "open source" but it's the only way this would work in e.g. the game industry, as currently factored.
Studios won't pay people millions of dollars to make games if the return on investment is zero other than helping all of your non-open source competitors.
I do think it's doable, but nobody's done this successfully yet.
I read this more as game sharing. For example, say I buy a game and my friend also wants to play the game. In the past, I could just give them the disk and we both enjoy it. But today, with DRM and one use keys, this isn't possible. The game industry survived 20 years ago so there's no reason it can't survive without DRM and with sharable keys.
the difference being that only one person could enjoy it at a time. the math is a bit different when one person can put a copy of their game up online and let thousands of people enjoy it for free at the same time.
there is a happy medium somewhere between intrusive DRM and demanding games be free.
I enjoy playing video games but I recognize them for what they are: a luxury past-time that is not necessary for life and one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow.
I get what you are trying to say, but in general video games offer unique experience that no other media can provide - interactivity, e.g. exploring different worlds with different mechanics. I think this experience can invoke something in people that no other media can replicate. So I think we will lose something important if it suddenly vanishes.
Pretty dismissive, no?
Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.
Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe [2]. Solarus has a donation page [3].
I'm sure there are many more examples that span the spectrum of payment options and cover different permutations of being online or offline.
To me, the deeper question is what are you actually purchasing? The bytes? The convenience? A slice of server resources? Developers and artists time?
I'm happy to give money to projects that I use, especially if it creates less friction than trying to go outside of the payment method and if the project is libre/free. I'm willing to pay for proprietary content but I have little expectation about what kind of service they're providing, especially they fold.
If there's a libre/free option, I would much prefer to invest in it. If there's a proprietary option that is asking for resources, I'm much less prone to give since it's clearly a transactional relationship.
[0] https://onehouronelife.com/
[1] https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/no_copyri...
[2] https://www.teeworlds.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=446
[3] https://www.solarus-games.org/about/donate/
OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. The community only got access to the servers when they had declined to 20-30 concurrent players. So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.
> Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe
Teeworlds doens't pay its staff a living wage, those donations went to server infrastructure.
According to developers of the most popular open-source games themselves, open-source games have not been commercially successful... it is very common for them to only cover operating costs via community donations, and many projects have a player base actively opposed to any monetisation model.[0]
Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.
[0]: https://80.lv/articles/inside-the-open-source-games-in-searc...
FD: I speak from a position of being in the AAA gaming space for 11 years, so I have an economic incentive to... not lose my job due to the collapse of industry- but I'd like you all to be able to enjoy my creations after it's no longer possible for me to run it for you; I want a solution too!
Reference? The source was dedicated to the public domain in early 2018, which coincides with the release of the game [0].
> So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.
This is a complete fabrication.
> Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.
Making a living from open source software is hard, game or no. Making a living as a game developer is hard to begin with and many proprietary games are not commercially successful or viable.
My point was that the ecosystem is a lot more complex than your reductive analysis.
[0] https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/commits/master/no_cop...
The key point should be to make it legal to use and reverse-engineer abandonware (e.g. games that the developer or publisher has abandoned).
First we'll need a realistic legal definition for 'abandonware' where the abandonware's IP is automatically going into the public domain after a game has been abandondend by the publisher, and the next step must be to legalize 'pirating' and reverse-engineering abandonware.
The AAA industry are already destroying the gaming industry with there shit games and stupid DRM pratices. This would be returning balance to the game industry.
A lot of people get all up in their feelings when it comes to "private property", like (hypoerbolic) "if they allow redistribution of abandonware, they might take everything" and it's just not justified. It used to be, for example, that copyrights on books weren't automatically granted and they were much shorter terms. You had to apply for copyright renewals. Why? Because of orphaned works and it was viewed that if nobody held an interest that they asserted, it was in the public good to place that in the public domain.
Abandonware follows the same principles. The arguably controversial part is that "abandonware" here includes "forced obsolescence". And I 100% agree that if you, as the publisher, make a game nonfunctional (or even greatly reduced functionality) then people should have the right to make those games work.
The most egregious cases are like Simcity 5, which was made online for literally no reason (other than "because piracy"). They tried to sell online features but that wasn't the reason.
The idea that this kills the entire gaming industry is just slippery slope hyperbola.
I think a more achievable model might be more like GOG, but with online.
GOG games remain closed source, but are downloadable and playable offline with no DRM.
But there's nothing about online/multiplayer play in the GOG equation.
> Am I missing something serious here
Only just that the video games industry as we've known it for the past few decades is basically already dead—at best, it's a hollowed-out husk of what it once was.
If I buy a product for $N one-time charge, I expect that product to work basically forever, until it physically breaks or wears out. I have woodworking tools over 50 years old. I would never expect Craftsman to sneak into my garage one day and destroy them because "they're old and unsupported and I should just buy new ones." I don't expect Toyota to repossess my car because it's hard to supply parts for old cars and they really just need me to buy another one.
So why is it OK for a software developer to just arbitrarily decide to flip a switch and remove my ability to use a product I paid for?
EDIT: I realize I am arguing for subscription pricing for software, which I am generally against. But for a game that requires a server operating in order to function, perhaps subscription pricing is more appropriate at least for that kind of game. It's still not appropriate for games or tools that run natively and don't have a significant reason for their logic to reside in a server.
See also 'Juicero'.
Only one gets away with it: World of Warcraft.
There are carve-outs in the legislation for this. It's a moot point.
I see this argument repeated, and it's made exactly like this where it sets up a strawman and then brings up software.
No one is coming into your computer to repossess your software.
They are either turning off their servers, OR they are ending a subscription.
If you have a bus pass, you can do anything you want with the card. Your chisels being 50 years old, has nothing to do with you being able to ride the bus forever just because you bought a one-month pass.
…that are unnecessarily being checked by the local software before the local software will run the local offline functions.
If you want, you can now change that behavior.
Whether that's allowed by the TOS and what the consequences to that are is also a separate issue. At that point, people shouldn't buy the product if they disagree with the conditions.
I think a problem with this idea is that terms of service can be difficult to understand. For example a lot of licenses or terms of service forbid "reverse engineering" entirely. In my mind, "reverse engineering" is just trying to understand something based on observing what it does, and even though a legal agreement is probably using a more strict definition, how am I supposed to know where the boundary is? "Reverse engineering" isn't usually defined in the agreement itself. And if what I want to do is considered "reverse engineering", it might not be legally enforceable anyway.
Sometimes I buy a physical object, take it home, and then open it and find conditions that I would have disagreed with if I knew about them. I've noticed this with books, but the same could happen with software. I don't know if conditions like that would be legally enforceable, but I think the complexity of understanding this makes individual decisions about what conditions to accept a poor solution to what Stop Killing Games is trying to solve.
The Steam Subscriber Agreement [1] seems to prohibit reverse engineering games (referred to as "content" in the agreement), but I guess I'm misunderstanding it because some GPL games are on Steam (e.g. SuperTux [2]).
I agree that people shouldn't buy a product if they disagree with the conditions, but I think this is too complicated for most people to do for every product. Maybe some of these conditions should be illegal to even put in a terms of service, even if they already aren't enforceable.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1572920/SuperTux/
At no point did you purchase unlimited free online service forever, by the way. The game developer did not promise that, and you hold no contract with them mandating free labor and infrastructure perpetually.
It's the equivalent of paying $10 to enter an all-you-can-eat restaurant and complaining when they kick you out at 10pm while you say that you haven't technically had ALL you can eat yet.
The way the industry currently operates is you show up to an all you can eat buffet, pay your $10, and then they give you a 30 page contract that you have to sign before you can start eating. You are further SOL if you sign that contract at 4:40 and they decide "well, today we are going to close at 5pm because there's not enough people here. This isn't profitable to us".
Once upon a time, all games operated like this. I could buy half life and run a half life server locally and all my friends could play half life together without valve ever getting in the middle. That didn't cost valve anything to support that. It was all part of the price of purchase of half life.
Heck, for games like Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2, 3rd parties like MSN hosted their own 3rd party services for matching players together. We still hosted the servers, but MSN did the match making. And when they stopped that service, it didn't matter. We can still host and play DF2. Theoretically another 3rd party could start up to match make again.
I also completely disagree that "it doesn't cost Valve anything to run Half Life". Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone. Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all. Newsflash, Steam games have CEG DRM and will not function for long periods of time without Steam.
Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.
Explicitly through a contract you HAVE to sign AFTER the purchase. That's a big problem I have with this model. It's not made explicit until after the purchase.
And, it is reasonable to expect because, as I said and other old game players can attest to, this was the status quo for games ~15 years ago. This was a change in living memory.
> Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone.
How about Quake 1/2/3? I pulled half life just as an example. Valve is making those updates because they want to, not because they have to.
> Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all.
Ok, Again Quake or Dark forces 2. But also, it's only technically incorrect today. It wasn't when HL was originally released. Valve had to backport in it's integration to the valve servers. That is, they technically had to put in effort to make the game tie to their servers.
But also, I can still dust off my old HL cds, install it, and play it without the steam integration. I can even patch it to a pre-steam version and game with people that aren't using the pre steam version.
> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.
That's really only because steam has gone out of it's way to install DRM on top of the games. They have purposely broken my games to be dependent on their services.
None of this makes your argument better, in fact it's a highlight of the broken nature of the games industry.
I fear an entire generation is growing up thinking that it is normal and acceptable that products you buy can be remotely disabled by the developer, manufacturer or vendor when it suits them, with no recourse to the person who bought the product.
This is one of those tech nerd debate hills I'm willing to die on: It should be totally unacceptable/illegal for someone else to remotely nerf or destroy a product you bought and paid for.
If Steam goes offline, billions and billions of dollars of games go with it. The online ones, the offline ones, all of it. Gone forever. Some will not function at all without Steam servers.
Steam pioneered remote DRM attestations for PC gaming, remote product key validation, always-online dependencies on Steamworks and more.
I expect perpetual access to my game the same way I expect access to my books. Most of my multiplayer games can still be played without involving a clown server somewhere (either by hosting one myself, or by playing over LAN). This is somewhat skewed by me not having bought many of the offending games, but it's clearly not an impossible feat. It's not even a big ask. And yet it's still not done.
> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.
The mere existence of that workaround means I still get to play my game. There aren't any workarounds for most of the games Stop Killing Games care about, since developing them requires enormous amounts of man-hours reverse engineering, while the devs could do the same in a fraction of the time (or at the very least give people a head start!).
Are you going pay the extra money to the developers to keep the servers running? What will people choose, the 5 year support for game that might never play again, or the forever support? Game companies will raise prices, by a lot, if forced to maintain or release games.
Beyond that, I think the authors of your books are idiots for not making whatever content they have online not just a bundled part of the book (throw in a CD or thumb drive or whatever, not my problem. Solve it however you want. Just™ actually solve it). I've had the same happen with a quiz book I found, which had the answers online, with just a QR code in the book, which then lead to a 404 page. They could have just printed a few extra pages of answers in the back, but they didn't, and I mock them for it. They're fucking morons. Thankfully quiz questions tend to be easily googleable.
> Are you going pay the extra money to the developers to keep the servers running?
No, because you don't need to do that to have a playable game.
> Game companies will raise prices, by a lot, if forced to maintain or release games.
Good thing they don't need to do that then.
That's funny, because most of my steam games will happily run with the network cable unplugged
Not true. Some games distributed via Steam will continue to work because they do not use (or require) Steamworks.
You wouldn't be able to afford it. It's well known at the time of purchase that online games will eventually become obsolete. Comparing that to tools is comparing apples to oranges.
Now, I do think that game companies should be compelled to make their servers available for others to host and maintain if they decide to stop hosting and maintaining them themselves. Some do, but all should be required to.
I've seen discussions about this exact topic in Europe, but it's a hard topic to tackle, since the relevant services will usually shut down bell beyond five years, and by that time, the statute of limitations will have run out, so even if the product could in theory have lasted for 20+ years longer if you could just have it talk to the computer in your closet, or just flipped a switch to turn it into a dumb-mode where is still does the basics you don't need a clown for, you're out of luck.
If this were normal, my car would suddenly stop working if Toyota went out of business.
The legislation specifically carves out for things like this.
> Why do you deserve free labor from a game developer that you paid a nominal amount to 10 years ago, not to mention infrastructure costs.
The legislation doesn't add this requirement at all.
> It's the equivalent of paying $10 to enter an all-you-can-eat restaurant and complaining when they kick you out at 10pm while you say that you haven't technically had ALL you can eat yet.
No. It's paying $10 and eating until 10pm and then leaving because they are done.
Your entire comment just reads as someone who has made assumptions about what is being asked for rather than actually looked into it.
Just the opening of your first two paragraphs proves that.
That being said, I agree with the premise. Most of those cultural preservation issues wouldn't be a problem if users had control over their computing.
The problems caused by game servers going offline aren't necessarily specific to games, and the cultural preservation aspect can be applied to other programs as well. This essay explain what those problems are in a very accessible manner: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
The word deserve is interesting here.
There's a social sense (based on the just world fallacy, see also Karma), and a natural sense (by natural law, you deserve whatever you are able to get).
In the natural sense, which is the only real one, a person deserves computing freedom if they are able and willing to obtain it. If they care, and if they're willing to work for it.
It's the same way with freedom in other contexts. If you don't care, at least not enough to defend it... well, we can see the results of that.
I think Stallman is using the word deserve here in the sense that computing freedom should be some kind of human right. That's an admirable position, but I don't think I see it catching on. (Heck, regular freedom is still pretty niche, especially globally, and computing freedom is a strict subset.)
Possibly, but it doesn't appear that way to me.
> A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files. Freedom 2 ensures that the community has the legal right to share the server software
In most online games, only the developer has the "server files". You'd need access to them first to even share them. Freedom 2 should be access to server files, if anything.
and so it begins...
He explained to me that every media artifact of cultural significance would be stored there in three (I believe) copies for future generations to enjoy, or researchers, or historians.
I was given a tour by an archivist there and this became a core memory of mine.
I was always at unease growing up, wondering what would happen to video games when they no longer became popular. Would I be able to enjoy them when I got older? Would my children ever be able to play the games that shaped my teenage years?
The discussion around the matter of Stop Killing Games always devolves to one around free labour or around infringing the rights of the creator, but at some point, when a game, or a film, or a book is no longer monetised, makers of cultural works should be obliged to archive and ensure that our shared cultural heritage and identity is preserved for the future.
Film makers, authors, printers, ad agencies, music producers, and many others are already obliged to do this in many countries.
Why should video game producers be exempt?
It's just better for all of us, and our children, if these works of art are preserved, and that at an insignificant effort and cost, compared to the cost of developing it.
The worst thing, at least to me, is that the worst case scenario, as long as the devs don't go out of their way to kill a game permanently, is still not all that bad.
There's emulation, there's virtual machines, there's dicking about with config files, and there's just buying the old hardware outright. Even old, obscure and fiddly games can be played if you put in the effort. Even the old and obscure will very often be out there on the web, and even if it isn't, you can eventually get hold of a physical copy (and then make a good example and make it available yourself!).
But the moment there's a clown server dependency involved, that's it. You've lost before you've even begun. Sometimes a miracle happens, or someone dedicates their entire life to restoring that one game, and we thank them, for they are doing capital G God's work. But preservation can't depend on miracles.
Maybe we should just accept that big online games are more like cultural happenings than media objects. In the future, you simply might not be able to play Fortnite, in the same way you can never visit Woodstock again. It's just something you had to be at.
Minecraft is a great example here, because the answer it brings to the table is yes. You can play any version of Minecraft (barring some really early versions that are lost to time) natively in the launcher. Yes, even the stupid sub-versions. If Minecraft can do it just fine, I see little reason other games can't (barring licencing issues, ugh).
> What about games in which major features regularly get removed, like Fortnite?
Give the option to revert back. Provide the relevant files so someone can do it by themselves. Be a decent human being.
> Maybe we should just accept that big online games are more like cultural happenings than media objects.
Fuck off. You had to be there for WoW Classic too. Doesn't mean we can't still have it. There are WoW Classic server up right now, with people playing it. Not that that has much to do with Blizzard (they caved only after illicit Classic servers became stupid popular, and it's not like setting up those servers was an easy feat).
But then who's allowed to run servers? Can I modify the servers and mod them and republish my changes? Does killing the game also need to cancel any copyright on any server-side assets?
But then we need to get into licensing. What if Fortnite goes offline and they publish their server assets? Does that give me the right to use Naruto and Family Guy avatars on my homebrew server?
that happens at the end of nearly every paragraph here
Freedom 1 is also important for understanding the rules of the game in case it is not documented very well; changing which server it connects to is not the only issue (and a well-designed FOSS program would have an option to configure which server it connects to without needing to recompile it).
(In some cases, other people figure out the rules of the game independently and might write independent FOSS implementations (in one case, I have done this for a single-player game; other people have also done for other games). In this case, it may be less of a problem (if the FOSS implementation is actually correct and complete (and might even have less bugs than the original and/or other improvements)), and both official and unofficial implementations can continue to be used.)
Let's think about it. Free software just applies to the source code. Artwork, logos, even trademarked names are not Free. Support, services, and documentation can also be non Free. This is the Red Hat business model and they make a ton of money.
Right now several very popular games are free or almost free to install and play. The game studios make money off of in game purchases. There's no reason that couldn't continue.
Games could be Free but connecting to the server for multiplayer would of course cost money.
What about anti cheating? I think motivated software engineers working together around the world could come up with solutions to this. Or (and?), good social engineers could come up with incentives/punishments that heavily encourage fair play. I worry about this one the least. Here's one idea that my son just made me aware of this morning. Some game he was playing allowed him FPV of his teammates after he was eliminated from the round. He saw his teammate could see through walls. This angered my son and he called the teammate out. The cheating was defeated.
If the code was Free Software, how would you sell in-game purchases? Note that if it were just 3d models for your character, others could sell them too, likely cheaper without the overheads of developing the base game. Note that the article is advocating for multiplayer code to be open too.
I love free software, but I don't see how it was works in practice with games unless you're talking about open sourcing years later. Games seem different in usage and development than operating systems.
Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_game... , yes, although probably not to any helpful extent (and some of those are FOSS now, but weren't when released).
2048 had in-game ads that you could buy your way out of. You couldn't just install the ad-free version, because iOS is locked down. You could on Android, but not everyone is tech-savvy enough to actually do that.
ps. I personally played Threes first, which 2048 copied without the style and made free. I admit I was slightly disappointed for the original devs that the copy became significantly more well known. It wouldn't be my first example of the benefits of open source.
I'm not aware of anyone that has even tried to do that. That doesn't mean it's impossible.
There’s so many nuances around assets, trademarks, copyright, monetisation, cheatware(?), multi-player etc but the article ignores all of it and goes for the straight freedom angle. How do you even have in-game purchases when you can’t control client code? Do we even have a single example of FOSS and mainstream game that made money and was multiplayer?
Terrible slop and I am flagging it.
We make software a public good and fund it at the government level.
Valve could have made `steam.dll` optional for really old games but DRM is DRM and it's here to stay.
It mostly is if you digging a bit. Yes, it should work out of the box, but at least it's possible to make it work. When the battle of getting games to not permanently break is still being fought (not to mention that there's (somehow?!) significant sentiment that games permanently breaking isn't an actual problem), there's little wonder why the battle of inconvenient DRM isn't really happening.
This would suggest entitlement to be able to allow the game to function in any capacity. They aren't expecting the developer to host it, but the legal right of someone to host it and the capacity for anyone to direct their client to it.
If you decide the LLM should write your "passion blog post", it gives off immediate "soulless Linked grifter" vibes.
That's literally all anyone wants
Community run servers were killed because there's a possibility the community run servers would let you play with content you (gasp!) didn't pay for, as happened with TF2, so they can't possibly let you have that option! If they don't get $6 for a texture file, the world will end!
And don't give me bullshit about "But they would have to put extra effort into building that", as if nearly every game server application provided to players has ever been anything other than a random exe file with no documentation and critical flaws that require third party hacks to fix. Pretty much anything built on Unreal or the Source game engine had a ready to go server by default, or with a checkbox.
Hell, even nothing more than a carveout in the DMCA to allow people to legally reimplement servers after shutdown would buy a lot of goodwill. This carveout is only needed because the DMCA dramatically limited your legal rights in respect to software products just a couple decades ago.
Can't see how an independent developer would ever be able to do this. We need more independent things not less... this would be my concern.
Better legislation would be to force developers to at least allow people to run their own servers.
[1] This is still way more than the industry would want.
If the are successful we will see quite a bit more open source.
If you're a gamer whose game became unplayable from cheaters running hacked clients because the game's developer decided to share their source code online, you're entirely justified in your outrage.
The inherent injustice of developers being able to eat? The entire reason we're in this mess of a field is because of this ideological purity crusade. We could have a world where independent developers make a modest living producing good software that people pay a reasonable amouunt for, but because everyone expects everything for free, the majority of developers are forced into working for soulless corporations, who make the money that pays their salaries with the most predatory software imaginable, spamming ads, tracking, and microtransactions all over "free" software.
You also always have control over the programs that run on your own computer. Reverse engineer it if you care; the tools have always been there. The article mentions DRM, which is almost always bypassed, and private servers, which people do host -- so where's the lack of control, exactly? You just feel entitled to be given everything on a silver platter, you can't even be bothered to put effort into taking free stuff. Give me a break.
To be clear, I am fully in support of Stop Killing Games. Especially given the annoying copyright regime around hosting private servers, legislation to mandate some kind of fallback for termination is helpful. But trying to pin this cause to this horrible movement that has done 100x more harm than good? No thanks.
It’s never been about what’s possible in theory, but what’s feasible in practice. By the same kind of logic you apply here, every country in the world is as good as democratic because you can work your way to free elections eventually, even if it takes a while.
The idea of free software follows from fairly simple logic: You should be in control of your computer and any software that runs on it should be distributed under form and licence which facilitate this. It’s not about what the software wants or how much work people owe you; it’s about enabling you to own your computing when the code is literally already there. Surely you can disagree with that without making up (in my view) silly-sounding arguments for the other side?
If customers and care about open source and free software games, they will support them. There is no need to dictate the funding model people want to use for art or software products. This is an industry with an unbelievable amount of competition.
We need to get to a place where all consumer-focused apps and games include full source code, including any server necessary to play multiplayer or store cloud files.
In this I see Stop Killing Games as a half-measure that the industry supports to avoid us waking up and realizing what we should have.
>The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. >The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
It's forcing all games to be open-source. If you develop a big video game with an eight or nine figure budget and your customers are free to distribute and modify your product you will lose everything.
It wouldn't affect game developers at all, the only change would be that they have to upload the server file's code when they decide to stop supporting the game, so that players can continue it themselves.
They make you buy new or else the manufacturers fear going out of business. It's just sad that this has extended to practically everything.
Unless perhaps it means only companies selling the cheapest are surviving. Which also doesn't seem broady true.
Maybe we can say "whoever sells the cheapest acceptable units survives".
The entrance will feature the obvious candidates that normally use electricity then gradually transition into things like a manual powered citrus juicer for which the battery is only for contract enforcement and planned obsolescence
Now, with computer modelling and simulations, they can accurately design a part to be as cheap as possible to make while being just durable enough to last for the duration of the warranty. D4A did a good video on it.. https://youtu.be/SeMZGICNSMg?si=sideQIwNBr9s9QW6
Submissions on HN with interesting titles keep ending up being revealed as AI slop halfway down towards them making their point.
Authors: you don't need this. Don't disrespect your reader's time with LLM slophancement.
To elaborate, if I make a creative experience, that requires a server, and sell it to you for $70, and you play it for a year, that's your $70 of value right there. That's the moral argument.
Every single games company faced with this issue is now going to change the terms of service to note that the $70 "includes free two year subscription, paid up front!", and if the lawyers get pissy about that they'll sell two versions: one that is $0, but doesnt work until you sign up for the $70 per month subscription. That's the legal argument.
What this comes down to is "I have the right to decide what my $70 actually paid for". No you don't. What you paid for is what you paid for. Now piss off.
[1] https://tenor.com/view/oh-fuck-off-alice-kristen-bell-the-pe...
Fascinating to me that, on the one hand, so many people up in arms about AI stealing work from poor devs but then here you are demanding free use of their work because you made a one time payment ten years ago.
"Well, just make it open source, so anyone can run it". Ok, and someone sets up a server and modifies it to be "Nazi world" still using my recognizable assets. Do I have any rights there, to stop my IP from bieng used for that purpose? Is "IP" a dirty word? Isn't IP what we're up in arms about AI stealing?
You haven't thought it through.
Regarding the argument about modification of the assets - I don't see the issue. Nobody will hold the publisher responsible for what other people do. You can already do that with e.g. Counter Strike - host your own server, take an official Valve map and replace some textures with something inappropriate. No one will blame Valve for this, since they do not host those servers.
So I have thought it through. Also, AI has nothing to do with this, not sure why you bring it up...
> Every single games company faced with this issue is now going to change the terms of service to note that the $70 "includes free two year subscription, paid up front!", and if the lawyers get pissy about that they'll sell two versions: one that is $0, but doesnt work until you sign up for the $70 per month subscription.
So if you make it illegal for companies to lie and say they are selling you a game, only to then take it away, they will instead... be honest and tell you how long the game will be supported? Great!