My problem with things like this is that they mandate labor from others without compensating them.
The obvious and clearest response is simply this: If you as a publisher are so convinced that your game is obsolete... make the remote server source available under a permissive license to your existing license holders. Better yet - plan for releasing a copy of it at development time.
You don't even need to make the license permissive to everyone, or for everything (open source). You just need to make it possible for those who have purchased your product to continue to use the product, and there are MANY ways to do that which don't involve your consistent labor.
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Basically - To directly address your point: If the alternative is that the publisher does crap like completely disable single player experiences because they've shut down remote licensing servers... fuck them.
That's not a company I think should be allowed to exist. If we can't limit them this way... them I'd be fully in favor of mandating they return the full purchase price of the item to every purchaser.
That purchase price represent your customer's labor.
You are basically just saying "give up all rights to the ip you've sank a ton of money and time into"
And again - there's no reason to allow commercial use by competitors...
Code doesn't get thrown away because a game isn't being used anymore. The networking code for one game will not be completely different for the next game.
Simple, they use that tech in their next game that they hope brings more steady revenue. if you think about it as opportunity cost instead of absolute valuee the logic lines up.
Just say you'd prefer it to be legal for these corporations to defraud customers as a regular business practice rather than it be mandated that they can't do that and move on.
Scapegoating is always how these laws are justified. It's always "billionaires this or that" but the laws always include small to medium sized businesses and high income professionals that are not billionaires or mega corporations.
These laws hurt mega corporations but they are fatal to everything smaller.
Shocker but most people don't want to give all their IP away. Most others literally cannot because most tool licenses don't give you permission to distribute.
>Just say you'd prefer it to be legal for these corporations to defraud customers as a regular business practice rather than it be mandated that they can't do that and move on.
rules:
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Then maybe they shouldn't have published the game in the first place. If you can't do the bare minimum that the market demands/requires by regulation then you can't engage with it. Simple as.
The government might require that certain classes of products, like a washing machine, or laptop, work for at least a given period of time.
If it fails, it must be fixed or replaced.
This is a legal mandate for the seller or manufacturer to provide labor, the cost of which is factored into the purchase price.
That sort of warranty mandate is close to the goal of this effort, and shows that the labor costs can be handled similarly.
That doesn't mean all mandates are good, just like how implied warranties are not unlimited.
Warranty laws are not fatal for small companies. They are fatal for companies that cut corners and abuse their customers.
Digital warranties don't make much sense since popularity is generally proportional to lifetime. If it was a good game it wouldn't shut down quick enough for people to complain.
For a third example, consider right-to-repair laws which mandate that a company must provide usable manuals and parts at a reasonable cost.
The lifetime of the game depends on profitability to the company, which is only somewhat correlated with popularity. Companies even stop products which are profitable, but not profitable enough.
When does the timer start? Minecraft has been around for well over 6 years, yet it gets new players every year.
Plenty of games come out, don't do well overall and then get shutdown despite a loyal fanbase. Just because something didn't meet its sales forecast doesn't mean the people who bought it don't want to play it. A game being popular doesn't mean it's a good game, and a game being unpopular doesn't mean it's a bad game.
> If a game shuts down in 6 years (past most typical warranties), clearly you got more than enough enjoyment out of it.
First: that's not a given. Plenty of people buy games well past the launch date. If I buy a game five years, eleven months, and two weeks after launch and the auth servers are shut down two weeks later should I lose access to it?
> Digital warranties don't make much sense since popularity is generally proportional to lifetime. If it was a good game it wouldn't shut down quick enough for people to complain.
Studios close, and companies don't make decisions based on what's popular, they do it based on what makes them money. A game might have a long tail where people keep playing and buying it but substantial numbers of new customers aren't coming in anymore.
I wasn't using the example of dumping waste in rivers to illustrate an equivalence in severity with the video game issue. I was trying to show that drawing a distinction between forcing someone to stop doing something and forcing someone to do something is nonsensical in this context.
My interpretation of your argument is as follows:
"Because we already have laws to mandate people to do things, saying it's bad to mandate people to do things is nonsensical."
I disagree, I think it's bad we have to mandate people to do things ever but in certain situations we should do it because the alternative is terrible. ie like preventing people from polluting the entire environment. Also keep in mind, we are talking about video games
That's not my argument. My argument is that it's wrong to claim this law is different from any other type of law in that it requires people to do additional labor. Unless a law literally has no requirements (is that even a law?), it has to require some people to do additional work.
> I think it's bad we have to mandate people to do things ever but in certain situations we should do it because the alternative is terrible.
Many of us do think it's terrible for people to have a product they paid for become inoperable because a company decided they would take their authentication servers offline without releasing a patch first. This erodes consumer trust and can lead to a market of lemons.
> Also keep in mind, we are talking about video games
We're talking about laws, which are serious things and deserve serious discussions. The proposed legislation is likely a test balloon for other consumer protections, so reasoning through the effects is a good exercise.
If that's not desirable for a product because of the desire to make money, then allowing end user configuration should be something that comes with a fixed date (this product will require our servers for the first five years, then it's open to any servers, for example) or with an update when the company decides to stop running their servers.
Saying it "mandates labor" is inaccurate insofar as requiring that software not be used to facilitate illegal harassment, DoS, distribution of child porn, et cetera isn't considered "mandating labor". It's the cost of doing business, and suggesting that the cost is high is wildly inaccurate.
It isn't? Who doesn't consider that mandating labor? It literally is mandating labor. Also, why do you use the word facilitate? Obviously that's illegal, what you mean to say is actively preventing the use of for that purpose, which btw is not mandated, companies do it to cover their own ass when they have the resources to.
- Providing warranty service is mandated labor.
- Going through workplace safety inspections is mandated labor.
- Getting your product certified by the relevant authorities is mandated labor.
- Following cybersecurity compliance regulations is mandated labor.
- Following proper food safety guidelines in a professional kitchen is mandated labor.
- Ensuring that your premises are accessible to the disabled is mandated labor.
There's nothing special about this case of "mandated labor". You don't get compensated for being "nice enough" not to defraud your customers. That's just your half of the social contract that allows you to participate in society in the first place.
6 years later, the manufacturer decides they want to shut down the factories producing replacement parts, and won't license anyone else to make them, so they push an update out and now your car won't start anymore despite functioning just fine.
Is that reasonable?
The entirety of this debate is whether companies should be allowed to treat game sales that way. Most people don't see buying a game like an artist licensing their song to a TV show. They see it like buying a toy.
Normally this honesty would cost them money because their competitors would have better (more persuasive) marketing, but a law could force every company to be honest at the same time so that the relative ranking of each company does not change.
> Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher.
> The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.
Perhaps there is a disconnect between the policy intent and the understanding?
This is probably covered by "reasonable means to continue functioning" and the answer will be "there are no reasonable means".. but the comment parent's point somewhat stands.
Even moving a DLC check can be complicated. When you game is done, do you disable all DLC since you can't verify someone purchased it, or do you make it freely available? Who will pay for that additional data streaming (assuming it's not on something like Steam) ?
I am not disagreeing with the wish of the initiative, just providing some food for thought on the potential costs to a company.
If you sell something, it should continue to be usable after you as a business are gone. A game producer can always not make games if you find the regulation to be overly burdensome, that is a choice. It is unlikely this stops games from being made. This policy encourages the feature as part of requirements gathering and roadmap planning.
Look into World in Conflict, its a great example of what to do: https://github.com/ubisoft/massgate
Yes, I don't think they understand that running these games isn't free, modifying the games to be self hostable is not free, and giving away the code for other people to run it is ip suicide.
And none of that would be an issue if not for the fact that so many companies are creating games that become paperweights when they shut down the servers.
It used to be very commonplace to include server binaries with multiplayer games, before dedicated servers for every game was the norm. Also before that, modding games, including multiplayer games, was also highly normalized. If anything, the era of live service titles that are completely 100% locked down and only work with the developer's servers, punish modding, what have you is the aberration, not the norm. And those games once the developers want to move on, become paperweights when they do. All the achievements made, all the items unlocked, all the currency invested, instantly becomes worthless.
So like, I dunno, if you as a developer are not in this for the long haul and don't want to have to comply with this regulation at great expense at the end tail of development, then develop it like it used to be done? Include server binaries for people to use at launch? Maybe plan on making your money back on purchases of the game, and not on long-tail monetization that demands more security and locked-down-ness in the software to be viable?
Failing that, there's always hardware emulation but to be honest, unless you're for whatever odd reason trying to run your server on AMD64, I don't think there's too much to be concerned about. And, if source code is released by the developer, the community that remains could see to continuing support.
Worth noting here that the self-hosting mod for Titanfall 2, called Northstar, already did all of that with nothing but reverse-engineering involved because Respawns servers were basically unusable for years.
Also, software is not static. Do you really expect programs written today will work in 100 years?
It's 100% free if you keep this requirement in mind when making your game in the first place.
Some publishers having to spend money today because they played with fire by eroding consumer rights seems like a worthwhile price to pay.
The core problem is government granting businesses copyright, which prevents players from doing what they want with the material they buy. This is for apparently reasonable reasons, but there is some downsides to it. So it is less that we are adding another right, but more that we are specifying the right given to the business to begin with to ensure they aren't being given something that shouldn't be a right.
Ending copyright would also solve this, but with many other side effects that we probably don't want to invoke.
Publishers are playing with fire by trying to undermine that doctrine for digital goods.
So if your question is in good faith (and I very much doubt it is...) then at least this has a long history of established rights.
Again, this is the literal thing that's being debated. Companies are currently allowed to treat game sales as such and this group is arguing the law should stop them from doing so.
Right now when you play games online you don't pay for dedicated servers (which are very expensive), with this law expect that to change. Expect to also have to pay for a team of software engineers to manage the games into eternity.
I don't think you can get to a much more foundational definition of democracy than "decisions are made because a lot of people agree they should". You might disagree with the results, but it's an excellent argument for something becoming law.
> Unless stated by the law your rights are what you agreed to when signing the terms of service for the game.
Laws make contract provisions unenforceable all the time. This is not a new thing, and I have a hard time imagining the effect of laws if you couldn't invalidate agreements with them.
> Stop acting like people were duped when servers were shut off for a game that doesn't get played.
But people do feel like they got duped when that happens. That's why people get upset. You might disagree with it, but just saying "don't feel that way" isn't a good argument. Why shouldn't I feel that way? It's how games worked in the past. Games that have been shut down in the past and rendered unplayable have been made playable by fans before. Why shouldn't we expect companies the companies who made them to make an effort to do so as well?
> Right now when you play games online you don't pay for dedicated servers (which are very expensive), with this law expect that to change. Expect to also have to pay for a team of software engineers to manage the games into eternity.
I'm not entirely clear why you're taking this as a given, but I trust you'll elaborate. But humoring your (I suspect flawed) premise: personally I think it would be great if we went back to player-run dedicated servers. Some of the games I've played the most lately (Valheim, Minecraft, V Rising) are ones I've rented dedicated servers for. Hosting dedicated servers these days is extremely easy and quite cheap. Further on this tangent: I think we've lost a lot of online community because most games pour everyone into the same matchmaking buckets. This means you don't get as many small communities centered around specific servers popping up like you did back in the late 90s or early 2000s.
> Expect to also have to pay for a team of software engineers to manage the games into eternity.
Could you explain which part of the legislation requires this?
Do I really need explain why the majority thinking something is good does not make it good? Look-up tyranny of the majority.
Obviously the vast majority of people are consumers and create nothing so it's naturally good that we just leech off creators to the largest extent possible since they are a smaller group.
I am always biased in favor of people that create. They are a smaller group but vastly more important.
No, of course not, but if you look at what I wrote you'll note that I did not say that. Majority is obviously a terrible way to decide what's morally/ethically right. Within a democratic system though, it is the way we decide what rights to grant people.
> I am always biased in favor of people that create. They are a smaller group but vastly more important.
I'm glad you point out your bias. I don't know why people who "create" (this seems to have a specific meaning for you) would be more important than anyone else. How far does this bias lean? If Blizzard updates their user agreement and sneak a clause in there where I agree to give away my house if the other party asks for it, am I wrong to think that shouldn't be enforceable?
or take rights from people, which seems to be in vouge as of late.
I simply think this is a foolish direction. Preservation is important but you can't mandate entertainment to keep servers up and running. If this focused on actual single player cases there may be a point here, but I feel trying to fit in cases like WoW is just asking this bill to fail.
And to recognize my bias: I have also been in enough gamer circles to know that any talk of preservation is just wolf whistles for enabling piracy. I lot of people don't actually care about ownership (look at how they praise gamepass, a system that will actually end games ownership as we know it), they care about getting games they like for free.
Yes and that would indeed be an unrealistic thing to mandate, which is why this proposal doesn't do that. It requires companies make a "reasonable" effort to make the game continue to be playable afterward.
> And to recognize my bias: I have also been in enough gamer circles to know that any talk of preservation is just wolf whistles for enabling piracy.
We must run in very different circles. I care deeply about game preservation and haven't pirated a game in many many years.
Elsewhere in this conversation it sounded like you were implying that games which get shut down aren't worth much anymore anyway. I don't agree with this reasoning at all, but wouldn't that imply piracy wouldn't matter as much? I guess you might be giving people free alternatives at that point, but historically that hasn't had an effect on things like record sales.
> I lot of people don't actually care about ownership (look at how they praise gamepass, a system that will actually end games ownership as we know it), they care about getting games they like for free.
I'm not denying that what you're saying is true for a large number of people, but it's also false for a large number of people too. If you look at the comments on a gaming site you'll find plenty of people saying things like Game Pass are terrible because they don't give you access to games permanently.
The world will quickly go to shit if people stopped creating and building new things. Literally everything you own was built by someone's labor. Maybe stop mandating that these people do more for you?
> If Blizzard updates their user agreement and sneak a clause in there where I agree to give away my house
Where are you going with this argument? In what way does being biased mean I just agree with everything a group decides?
People don't create things in a vacuum. They exist within a society. People did not stop creating things in the US when we decided workers had to be compensated for injuries. In this (much less severe) case, the proposed legislation says that companies have to make "reasonable" efforts. I don't know how you think a reasonable effort would be enough to stop people from "creating".
> Where are you going with this argument? In what way does being biased mean I just agree with everything a group decides?
I'm genuinely trying to find out what you feel is a reasonable thing to expect someone to agree to. I assume you think people agree to have games disabled after they've paid for them because it was in an agreement they signed. Most people don't read such agreements thoroughly though. Elsewhere in this thread you said: "A lot of people thinking something isn't a good argument. Unless stated by the law your rights are what you agreed to when signing the terms of service for the game. Stop acting like people were duped when servers were shut off for a game that doesn't get played."
If you don't think the company should be allowed to take the home in the hypothetical: why? Is it the monetary amount involved? The amount of disruption to the homeowner's life? Something else?
And maybe we can also mandate that companies release detailed server specifications when they turn down a game. Everything that might be needed for someone to rewrite the server. Then someone else might step into a breach - a different company, an open source project - and continue providing the service.
Again, you're taking as a given one of the things which some people want to change. Why shouldn't the developers of the newest matchmaking-based shooter be required to release the binary for a dedicated server when they shut the game down? Obviously this won't be feasible for some games, but I can imagine plenty of games where it seems like it should be reasonable to factor it into development costs.
The worker is paid for their labor regardless.
Look at the case of Massive Entertainment and World in Conflict [1]. All reasons for not doing something similar boil down to decisions made early on in development.
Pass this law, fine. Just expect to pay $100 for a game + a monthly fee to play it online
We used to buy games and get a server.exe alongside it! In my experience, the tide started turning around 15 years ago, every big release started getting infested with in-game payments, always-online components, and most titles took away our ability to self-host servers.
With those changes, their profits skyrocketed - but greedy bastards running the show never seem to have enough, so they kill unprofitable games to get everyone to move to their new product.
Personally I don't buy AAA games anymore - partially due to these hostile practices, partially because their creators have lost any semblance of taste. Indie games and smaller studios are still pumping out real gems that don't implement any of these predatory practices at the cost of $20-50.
>We used to buy games and get a server.exe alongside it!
And you still can. If you want real change vote with your wallet instead of saying "but no, I want THIS game to be playable for free forever!". But clearly others have already voted. It's not going away.
Nothing is forever. I see a game I may want to play X years later, I don't play if if it looks like it'll shut down <X years later. I don't bother clinging to keep other games open, I just move on to what's new. Or you know, not worry because I play mostly single player games.
>Indie games and smaller studios are still pumping out real gems that don't implement any of these predatory practices at the cost of $20-50.
yup. And look what the most profitable games are. Again, wallets have voted. We are the niche, the minority. And that's okay, that's just my life as a nutshell.