Hacker News Reader

Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

> Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods?

Reading between the lines I think OP is suggesting backwards compatibility is retained when publishing updates.

> Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it?

I'm assuming OP's answer is something along the lines of "because it's good for society". Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company? Obviously every case is different but the principle is sound, IMO. Like copyright expiry. At the very least it's an interesting thought exercise.

View on HN

Consider books in the vein of Hardy Boys[1]. Many of these books get revised over the years by the publisher. Imagine if the book on your shelf changed and when you went to read it again, the prose differed from how you remembered. People can disagree as to the extent to which the changes are good or bad (some are clearly fixes for "whoa, that was racist even for the year it was published" others are claimed by the original authors to have stamped out the small bit of originality they were able to slip past the editors), but something is lost when you lose things the way they were originally experienced.

1: For those who don't know, this is a kids book series with a single pen-name, but with each book written for-hire. Nancy Drew and Tom Swift were created by the same publisher in a similar manner.

Nobody is coming into your house to change the bits on your hard drive.

But publishers can restrict your access to the game if you decline the latest update.

They can restrict your access to the server-side infrastructure that they run, yes.

Which in turn makes some games unable to run anything (even single-player modes).

Which is often required for the simple act of starting a game, even if the game runs offline.

It's been a while since I gamed, but auto-update on launch was a thing even a decade ago.

In a famous incident many years ago, Amazon "memory hole'd" a copy of 1984 from people's personal Kindles when they lost the license to sell it.

https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...

My pitch is that it’s generally bad and dangerous for society to make rules that retroactively apply based on how the universe reacts to your action.

If I ship a game and my obligations about updates change depending on how popular the game gets, that limits what games I’m willing to release.

Sorry, No Man’s Sky sold too many copies on day 1, so now we can’t ship any fixes that break backwards compatibility.

>make rules that retroactively apply based on how the universe reacts to your action.

I'm struggling to understand what you mean. Almost all of our rules depend on "how the universe reacts to your actions".

Can you give an example?

To pick one of my own: defamation is something that is determined based on your actions and the state at the moment they happen. If I say something potentially defamatory about you, it’s judged based on what I knew at the time, what I said, and how it would be understood by a reasonable person at that time.

You can’t rock up later and say “well looking back at this thing you said 10 years ago, we now know it was false” or that a reasonable person today would think differently about it.

By contrast, if we made a rule saying that culturally significant games are due some set of societal protections, a game dev has no way to know if their game would meet that threshold when they release the game.

I'm not the OP nor am I advocating for their point, but I believe there are some cases, e.g. with car manufacturers, where different regulations apply depending on how many you produce. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine something similar applying to how many copies of a video game you sell.

Your example seems to agree with me?

Applying different rules based on how many of a physical object a manufacturer produces is 100% something the manufacturer knows at the time they take the action.

If the regulation says "manufacturers have a higher standard for logging safety data for cars where more than 10,000 were produced", the manufacturer knows the new rule applies to them when they choose to build the 10,000th car. They can opt to do or not do that.

The equivalent here would be if we said something like: there are different regulations that apply to car manufacturers if somebody drives one of their cars for more than 10,000 miles. Because in this case, the person making the car has absolutely no clue if or when that will happen.

Yeah it's true that basing a regulation off of how much any one customer uses the product seems impractical, but I don't think that's necessarily what was being suggested.

>Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers.

I just take this to mean that exceptionally popular things should be subject to some protections and not necessarily grant the original creators unlimited control over them. One way of doing this would be to have some regulation which forces companies to make their products accessible to modders or open source projects like OpenMW after they've reached a certain level of popularity. Using copies sold as a proxy for popularity seems reasonable to me.

Again: that’s contrary to how our laws and regulations work.

Having a rule that applies to game developers after they’ve done something, entirely unrelated to anything in their control, is frankly horrifying. “Sorry, you can’t ship any more breaking changes, your game hit a popularity threshold yesterday”.

I think backwards compatibility is desirable, but really the bigger problem is the way that stores like steam essentially force auto updates.

If you could pick the time to update, after you've read the patch notes and/or waited for your favourite mods to confirm compatibility/update that would solve most problems regarding updates.

> Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company?

I agree. Look at how many times since 2011 Bethesda has put some "new" version of Skyrim up for sale. I myself probably bought the game at least 3 separate times.

At this point, Bethesda has made their money off of it and then some, what's the harm at this point in opening it up? Give it to the community under some form of no-commercial use/sale license, as an act of public good. Outside of excess profit, there's little reason to continue to hoard IP after a certain time.

Would be nice if all offline games followed something like that, although I fear if such copyright expiry was the law we'd never see fully offline games again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com