So you could say that Paradox is sensitive when it comes to people poking around or pushing boundaries.
Open knowledge is important, especially in video game scenes where elitism is a real issue, stopping people from getting into great hobbies that I'm sure many only got into due to that one person that didn't give in to elitism and bothered to listen and to answer questions.
That's some bad advice. ToS are irrelevant only if you don't expect retaliation from ToS owner, or the costs are trivial.
> Open knowledge is important, especially in video game scenes where elitism is a real issue
Open knowledge? This is reverse engineering someone's cash cow. Kinda like claiming Win 10 code is open knowledge.
Video game scenes? Elitist? It's just a silly option in some medieval sim. There are other games that allow these kinds of things. Massive chalice for example.
By that stretch, why not complain Hearts of Iron don't allow you to create a third Furry side in WW2?
Or if you really want to be part of video game scene make your own. But I doubt you'd open source it. It takes monumental effort.
Did you see indie games? It's veritable farmers market of small games.
You can read and change your copy, regardless of what the ToS says. The owner of the game can retaliate, this is not law after all.
Moment you start open sourcing someone's game behind their back, is when they get defensive.
I have minted a few very active video game scenes with a good culture, open codebases and devs that are happy to help and introduced many people to reverse engineering that wouldn't otherwise have gotten into it, and it's really not as hard as you make it seem. Good resources are easy to write when you're passionate.
You just don't have to be so bitter all the time :)
> Kinda like claiming Win 10 code is open knowledge.
It arguably is and you can plop any Windows binary into Ghidra or IDA and learn from it. There's a huge amount of books and free information on NT internals on the internet.
It's the same with games, just that you might be more invested in your favorite game than in NT internals.
Sure. Nice of you to assume I haven't made any games, and put words in my mouth.
So to repay the kindness, I'm going to assume your games weren't on scale of Paradox games. Because those games shave man decades. That means collaborative effort on a longer timescale. That means people sacrificed their time to make this. And people need to eat.
> It arguably is...
Arguably you could open a beer bottle with your eye. That doesn't make your eye a bottle opener.
In same vein, just because you can reverse engineer something doesn't make it open source.
I'm not bitter, just realistic. Poking a sleeping lion isn't guaranteed to kill you, it's just a stupid thing to do. Especially when you are way weaker than a lion and within his claw's reach.
Not right after you were refused permission though, that's too obvious.
This is the point of contention though. In EU courts have ruled over and over and over again that you cannot be bound by terms set AFTER the purchase of any software. As a result, EULAs are pretty much worthless, because they are presentented post-purchase.
If you went to a store and bought a copy of this game then that's it, you haven't agreed to anything, and you own a copy of it and you can do almost whatever you wish with it. You cannot make further copies and sell those because that's governed by copyright law, but modifying the binaries to do what you want them to do? Absolutely fine.
It's like with cars - obviously someone put a huge amount of work into making them, they contain a huge amount of software in them, yet the idea that the manufacturer tells you what you can or cannot do with it after purchase is ridiculous(and yes, I know some companies like Tesla are already trying).
Thanks for the European perspective. Not a big fan of EULAs myself, especially ones where the cost to properly analyze by your own lawyer is likely much greater than the value of the software itself, which is the case for most consumer software.
Since this is a digital world, hacking doesn't have to lead to a loss for the creator. It can be done for your own intellectual pleasure and exploration. But making it available online to the general public is no longer exploration. So depending on the case you no longer have the moral cover of "I was just exploring".
Why not? I'd argue the opposite: that making something available online to the general public is the first step toward maximizing exploration - in particular, enabling exploration beyond the limits of your own imagination/ability.