Hacker News Reader

I think having expiration dates is very reasonable and I wish their FAQ would cover this. Current FAQ entries seem to suggest companies must make the games playable forever, and suggest this is somehow possible without ongoing support or divulging intellectual property. I am not sure this is always possible to satisfy in the most general sense.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

View on HN

It isn't with the status quo, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. The EU as a market has enough sway to solve every vendor insisting on restrictive licensing. And we'd only be talking about already sold copies anyway.

Yes, I suggest they divulge the intellectual property. Games are an art form similar to paintings or music, and we as a society should be able to experience previous art.

Keep the IP while you run the servers and sell the game, when you are no longer interested in running the servers, drop a tarball of code. It doesn’t need to be simple, it just needs to be possible and complete. The community can take care of it. If the IP is valuable, then you have your incentive to keep the game playable until it isn’t valuable to you.

There can be a lot of interwoven licensing with games. fmod, speedtree, SDK terms, music... you can't just open source it in most cases and call it good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com