Hacker News Reader

Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

Game engines/code aren't all open source. The game developer might not have the legal rights to release the source.

Also, does this stop at games? Why not any online service ever? Why not any program at all?

Gaming might be unique in the sense that it's the only industry where 1) consumers make a one-time purchase of a product, but then 2) the manufacturer remains responsible for the online component.. forever? I can't think of any other examples in real life where this happens across an industry (maybe a few niche products).

Maybe this is the reason MS has been pushing Game Pass so hard, to get rid of the "purchase" part entirely.

> I can't think of any other examples in real life where this happens across an industry

Vehicles? Maybe not necessarily forever, but I'd expect the large car manufacturers to all still have some level of support for a 20-year-old car...

Large car manufacturers in the US are required to support their cars that they give warranties for by the the federal Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which are 10 or 12 years long by this point.

The contracts underlying the support for consumer automotive commonly run around 10 years. After that it is best effort and unofficial support by other companies if there is enough money to be made by offering it.

Cars don't really need an online component in order to continue working. Some manufacturers have tried to force some features into online components, but the cars continue to work without it once they turn it off.

Amazon just ended support for older Kindles. Not sure how that's any different.

Well I don't want the company I bought the game from to be completely in charge of the online component. If it helps them make more money then good for them but they need a winddown plan.

Any company that willfully chains a device to their cloud platform in such a way should get the same treatment, whether the cloud offering is free as in beer or paid. It's happening a lot more than you might think.

The way Kindles are being forcibly deprecated lately is another good example.

Yes, cases where the service deprecation causes physical e-waste are particularly egregious but we should also not underestimate the societal cost to breaking peoples workflow just because some company can't be arsed to responsibly sunset a service in a way that gives users options to continue it themselves.

It's more like it's the only software industry that still has a relevant amount of non-subscription based one time sales. I guess this will be the end of that.

Or maybe it will allow those developers that still provide fully offline games to more easily compete now that others with less consumer friendly business models are forced to make their deal more clear to the customer.

Am I the only one who remembers that multiplayer was just peer to peer? Like we had multiplayer before every studio decided they wanted to host their own servers, it was just what the guy with broadband in the neighborhood ran or something my ISP provided.

The issue is nobody gets that option if the ability to run a server is made unavailable to the public.

An online service requires the continual investment in the costs required to run the service and comes with the expectation that the service happening on someone else's computer could cease to exist the second you stop paying or at the end of the current contract cycle.

A game although specified as a license is treated and described as a purchase that is expected to work forever on the end users device so long as it fits the specs.

I wonder where the 'extents' of the game product/service you buy can be defined. I could foresee a game client/server/toolkit like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights being released but as a barebones legally compliant framework that lets you play. Then on the other side of the line they have an optional online service that provides a scenario to play in (running the same server the public has), if that service goes away the game still works, just as buying a load of D&D kits doesn't give you a DM to run games in perpetuity. As another example, there's a lot of servers for games like Counter-strike where the experience and how it runs the gameplay is modded server-side only.

The public responds to complexity and ambiguity by not giving you any money whereby you get to make money making french fries. Logically the most trivial thing people are going to do is make a minimalist multiplayer mode which allows users to join each others games like we did in 1995.

> The game developer might not have the legal rights to release the source.

Then the game developer/publisher should choose to use another technology or be ready to replace that piece when game reaches EOL. If no game developer can use that technology, the vendor will end up loosing a lot of sales. They can then decide if more permissive license would make sense.

It's just going to push all multiplayer games to be sold as a service. The users will get used to this because they basically already are used to it for every other piece of software.

There is basically zero chance that when given the choice between "structure billing as a service" vs "rewrite everything and open source it" that they will choose open source.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com