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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

"The source also claims that there'd be no license transfer of any sort, which means that any purchases made on Stadia would effectively be nullified as the service closes down."

There clearly needs to be a law to make such things illegal. I've refused to take the discount on digital Switch games since Nintendo has clearly shown they are willing to shut down old servers and tell you to just buy your games again.

But there are some games that are digital only and I fear the next generation of games will be like Xbox. You buy a physical that does nothing more than connect to a server that downloads the game.

Perhaps legally allowing backups of games you purchased would help.

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>Perhaps legally allowing backups of games you purchased would help

as great as that would be, the corporate-run governments of the world would see that as tantamount to legalising video game piracy, one of the few (if not, the only) media that have actually succeeded in making online piracy difficult

It would be difficult from a security perspective, but if they provided their own flash drives for backing up games it could be the best for consumers and the manufacturers.

Nearly all software produced currently ships out with the assumption that updates can easily be pushed out. As a concrete example, twenty years from now I don't want to play the original Mario Kart 8 that shipped when the switch was released, I would want to play the Mario Kart 8 that has double the levels that they are currently slowly dropping over the next year. The ideal situation would be an ability to write that information back to the card.

Couple that with another law that enforces consumers ability to roll back updates to any previous version they desire and you're fully protected with the ability to play your games essentially forever

> The ideal situation would be an ability to write that information back to the card.

Be careful what you wish for. You don't want them to have a dead man's switch on your physical copy.

Combine it with legally mandated ability to roll back to a previous version perhaps?

No need for laws, all the digital game stores are going to migrate their users to game subscription services regardless. It's much more clear legally speaking that you walk away from a subscription service with nothing, and it lets platforms drop support for problematic content. Nobody wants to be responsible for your digital library.

>There clearly needs to be a law to make such things illegal. I've refused to take the discount on digital Switch games since Nintendo has clearly shown they are willing to shut down old servers and tell you to just buy your games again.

The problem is that there really isn't a way to legislate it. The content is tied to the service (either the platform service like the Switch, or the game service itself), and if the servers aren't running, you're done. No backup is going to help you. And there's piracy. I do not see any governments creating legislating to force publishers (or platform (e.g. Steam) or console manufacturers) to remove anti-piracy measures.

Mandate keeping the servers open. Or to put it another way, mandate that purchases which were advertised and sold as purchases of content (not "licenses", as the wink and nod legal fiction the industry likes to fall back on when questioned) remain fit for purpose, or the buyer is entitled to a full refund.

Then let the industry figure out the technical details. Most of these services amount to a bog standard download of encrypted files. There is absolutely nothing about this that requires any more than the most basic infrastructure anybody reading this could set up.

Alternatively, we force them to describe these time boxed, locked down, lacking basic consumer rights things we're purchasing as the rentals they actually are.

>Mandate keeping the servers open.

Awful idea. Great way to permanently move all content services to subscription based as nobody in their right mind would ever commit to keeping up servers for the rest of eternity for every game or movie they create.

You didn't read the rest of the comment. I'm not talking about things like multiplayer games, I'm talking about things like being able to download the stuff you purchased (purchased, not "licensed") in perpetuity, or at least for a reasonably long period of time, rather than just when the company gets bored.

That is not an unreasonable ask, especially considering the high degree of control society grants them over these products when they are sold. That grant should come with some responsibilities.

>I'm not talking about things like multiplayer games

What is and isn't a 'multiplayer game' isn't so clear cut. Neither is the reason why 'multiplayer games' should be exempt from this.

But let's leave that aside, the problem is that there isn't a simple, clear-cut legislation to fix this. Instead you would need to create a big regulatory and enforcement framework, along with a technical framework defined and built by the publishers .. and even then it isn't so clear-cut that this is enough. And yes, all this would raise the barrier of entry for indie developers who now would need the equivalent of 'regulatory approval' to release their games.

Given that this would take an enormous amount of effort to pass, only to satisfy a small number of video game aficionados, it's hard to see why any government would expand the effort and political capital to do it.

I believe the threat of legislation by itself may do the trick, without the need to actually get into the process. Do you remember how the ESRB was formed? There was a governmental push as a result of complaints about videogame content, with the government vowing to form a legislative solution unless the industry regulated itself.

As it turns out, they got together and came up with their own ratings system, and it was largely a success.

Again, my criteria for success is that digital content should not be arbitrarily removed from the purchaser. That's it. However we get there is an implementation detail. The hypothetical indie could shove the files on an S3 bucket and call it a day. The hypothetical multibillion-dollar mega corp could push an update to their console which redirects all download links to an absolutely basic file store of some kind that the console would work with.

I think you are missing the unintended consequences of mandating servers stay open if games are purchased. The way to avoid that permanent liability is to just get rid of purchases and force all games into a subscription.

The industry is moving in that direction anyways.

> And there's piracy. I do not see any governments creating legislating to force publishers (or platform (e.g. Steam) or console manufacturers) to remove anti-piracy measures.

Decriminalization of piracy so people can support themselves would be a good start, but I won't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

I have this pipe dream that the digital markets act forces consoles to either allow sideloading and lose basically all of the profits on their ecosystems, or remove digital markets entirely and go back to physical games only.

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