Hacker News Reader

The 'words on a page' weren't specified and the idea of 'fix' isn't an absolute notion. I can think of a simple rule change that might be an improvement without forcing any procedural changes raised earlier in the thread: Restrict use of the word 'Purchase' or 'Buy' in marketing materials for products that the user is not guaranteed to have access to the primary features of for as long as they wish. You can subscribe to a game that the creating company cant/wont support indefinitely, you can buy a game that stands alone and operates indefinitely, or you can do both and purchase a binary while subscribing to online features. The precise details of which features are 'primary' or significant enough to justify ownership could be hashed out in courts, but the problem arises when these companies advertise Sale/Purchase when the unspoken reality is, as you mention, that it's really a lease, but with unspecified terms!

> You need the binary, the assets, and the environment it can be hosted in.

Those are the requirements for making it easy to host it in an alternative location. Laws for incompatibility don't need nor usually require it to be easy, only possible.

Microsoft was able to release the network protocol for smb without releasing the binary, the assets, or the environment for their Microsoft server. They were able to release the network protocol without needing to be responsible for the development and maintenance of samba. Microsoft is not in any form responsible for security vulnerabilities in samba.

If Ubisoft released the protocol for Assassin's Creed 2 multiplayer then the only person responsible software updates would be the group implementing that protocol. A law requiring that minimum disclosure would not be expensive nor take a lot of work (unless the protocol documentation is conveniently deleted).

The biggest issue would be certificates, but if companies know before hand that protocol and authorized keys need to be published by the end of the product life, then companies will plan ahead to make those things easy for them. People who run companies can plan ahead when they are required to do so.

If I buy something, I expect to own it. The implementation details and challenge incurred to the vendor are not my problem. They took part in this transaction fully knowing this, while I had no way to know how "durable" my dlc are..

I understand how the cost-benifit analysis today favours shutting down servers and retroactively taking away recently sold products. This is probably why the previous comment suggested the need for legislation.

You do. You own the disc. Or you own a copy of the virtual equivalent on a disk that you have. You also own the equipment serving as the runtime environment.

What you don’t own are the servers running the server side features or the software not on the disc you bought.

I think that is overly reductive; just ask anyone who bought Dark Spore. The single-player campaign is entirely on the disk that they own, but the game contacts a server that tracks your progress. It then doesn't allow you to go back to any level you have already played. There's no way to start over or replay any part of it. This is simply abusive; they should have been required to state up front, in very clear terms, that the player had not actually purchased anything, and that they could only play the game once.

It is true that the players do not own the servers, but it should also be illegal for game companies to abuse their customers using that asymmetry.

This is true even though Dark Spore was apparently a pretty dull game (I never played it myself).

I don’t think that it is. I’m unfamiliar with Darkspore (spelling I found when searching conjoined it), but part of being an informed consumer is knowing what you are buying.

If you’re buying a game with a substantial single player game, LAN-based multiplayer, and online multiplayer, the part you don’t get to keep is the latter portion when the game ends. You’ve effectively bought a game and a ticket, and you should know you bought a ticket because business entities don’t have the obligation to keep existing or to continue owning their assets beyond whatever their contracts require (and there’s even ways to sell those out depending on the contract). But you still own the rest.

In the case of a MMORPG or live service game, all you own is a ticket. And even then it’s not as if you can’t be banned from accessing the servers effectively at-will but usually for cheating or harassment. You have to know the difference, because an online game is an experience in entertainment terms where as an offline game is a re-runnable piece of media. That’s not to discount the scummy things software shops can do, but check the original article; they’re shutting down the servers mostly for games 9+ years old, one that’s only a few years old but is online-only (never heard of it, must not have been too successful), and I have no idea what Ubisoft is doing with the access to DLC part in some of those titles. The article didn’t explain that part very well which is basically what I expect from game journalism, but is this DLC that is intrinsically part of the online experience? Is it offline DLC you can still keep, but not redownload? Is this a little bit of column A or a little bit of column B?

Point is, for some things that you “buy”: when the music stops, the band goes home and the stage gets taken down.

This has nothing to do with multiplayer. This was a single player game that vanished as soon as you played it; even if you liked it, still had the disk and a computer to run it in, it was gone. It was sold as an ordinary computer game, not as a concert that happens exactly once. (Even concerts are given dozens of times in a year, rather than one single time.)

I’m going to just have to take your word on that one. That frankly sounds like a case of actual fraud that I’ve been unable to verify, despite finding plenty of other controversies around the title, and basically an unproductive outlier to this discussion.

I will note the DRM server shenanigans are something I think should be illegal (on the basis that’s it’s a kind of fraud, but different than what you wrote about) though, and I’m surprised you didn’t bring that up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2pdvh4uiaM

Well I’ll be damned! That’s a terrible way to sell a game. Chalk that up to another reason not to buy from EA. That said, did people continue buying this game knowing that? Was there any backlash or controversy? Because despite the DRM activation servers going down I did see some enthusiasm around keeping this game going.

The controversy was mixed up with the overall dislike of single–player games that required you to have a constant internet connection, which had gotten started a few years earlier. SimCity, released by EA in 2013, got a lot more hate because of it than Darkspore did, but at least you could have more than one city at a time and when you finished with one you could still play it as many times as you wanted. If you could stomach it.

Darkspore just didn’t have the cachet that SimCity did, so it didn’t attract as much attention.

Oh you own Apple headphones alright too until they die a year later in forced battery death.

> the onus is on you to know what you’re buying and who you’re buying it from and what kind of commitment you can expect from them

that opinion is pretty convenient for the game publisher considering I've yet to see a single one who made it possible for a consumer to know the date they would pull the plug before purchasing the game.

How generous that it's our responsibility to do what we cannot do, but misguided to expect game publishers to do what they can do because it would be more expensive for them. Ubisoft makes billions in revenue. They can afford to not be deceptive and to make sure that players have an opportunity to access and continue to use their purchases for as long as the company has purchases on offer.

It’s an inconvenient fact for all of us that buy things in the marketplace. There’s a lot of products that are not worth buying or I think are a bad value that people will purchase anyway, and a lot of companies with mixed reputations doing dodgy things or “strategic” plays that aren’t always great for their customers. EA is an example of a company I buy zero products from precisely because their reputation is completely garbage in my household, whereas Ubisoft is an example of a company that has a borderline but still passable reputation and Nintendo is an example of a company that has a fantastic reputation in my household.

How you spend your money is up to you, but unconsidered legislating has much broader implications for society. If you think companies are not upfront enough now, or that it is not completely bleeding obvious that services with a cost component to them can be shut down at will after some length of time, then maybe that’s something to be arbitrated in court before we start flippantly talking about Acts of Congress for every paper cut we experience in life and it’s a meme at this point that like clockwork, somebody can go into some level of detail in what is involved for what people are asking for and you’ll almost immediately find someone saying “we need legislation” in nearly those exact words to the point that I don’t even think it is said in good faith; it just a reflex some people seem to have.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but the multiplayer and live services components of games are more like an experience that you buy a ticket to than an ongoing game you can always return to. When the music stops, the band goes home and the stage gets torn down.

> That’s their goddamn right

Counterpoint: No it's fucking not.

(It's not much of an argument in either case is it?)