Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyleo | Hacker News Reader

I happen to be shutting down an online game right now.

https://www.tyleo.com/blog/sunsetting-rec-room-how-to-give-a...

The sad truth is that these things have high operating costs, especially if they need moderation. I would guess this bill just makes it more risky to make the games in the first place. It’s already brutally hard to make money on games.

I feel like the effect of this might just be that shutting an online game makes it more likely to take a whole company down if you have to issue refunds. Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards other business models like ads, free-to-play, or subscription.

View on HN

Sorry to hear about your situation. For the game you're shutting down online services for, forgive my nieve question but how much work is it to expose an environment variable called `GAME_SERVER_URL` and then document the API contract it expects on the other end?

Servers have a real cost, nobody is denying that, but I think the people who bought the game should have an option/alternative in case the servers are down.

We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded.

We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.

Anything you can add to the knowledge pool is already going to be of immense help for your community reverse engineering in the future. Be it as simple as stuff like "Our in-game chat runs over IRC" for example - that already simplifies that entire part of figuring it out of machine code out once servers are gone. ANY knowledge you can share no matter how small it is always helps when all you have is a binary file and no server to respond to your requests.

Yeah, we published some protobuf schemas on GitHub so players can decode some of our binary protocols more easily.

Is the game p2p or dedicated infra? Best thing you can do is provide the infra files that you can. Doesn't even have to be turn key. Also for the coordinator API service, anything you can provide there as well. Couple those with a configurable base url and the hackers ought to get it the rest of the way

Dedicated but our multiplayer is a P2P-like API because our original game server provider was Photon.

> We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded.

This doesn't actually answer the question about how hard it would be. What's the specific level of effort required, and some amount of why so people can learn from your experience.

> We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.

I'd rather have a working game then a refund of a gift card. Including if that means I have to stand up my own servers.

Priorities I guess

The answer is, "not trivial but easy enough that smart players can probably do it."

To each their own on what they want. We obviously can't give everyone everything. Players don't want the game to go away at all. We still talk to players every day and have confidence we are doing the right thing with our limited time.

At least part of the answer is this doesn't meet the requirement of the proposed law. You need to actually provide the functionality of the server-side, not just its API.

What are the insurmountable obstacles to releasing the server code for the community to run?

As I understand it, the obstacles are mostly legal. Our development team would love to just throw the code on GitHub.

Sounds like if it was mandatory to make a server release, legal would mostly shut up and it would be low cost. In other words, minimal change in risk.

The refund thing is just there to force action by putting a dollar value on inaction. Pretty much no company is expected to actually choose refunds.

> Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards free-to-play if in-app-purchases are excluded.

Good point, the law had better not exclude those.

This is one of the reason why that law will surely be challenged and very likely invalidated by SCOTUS. Trade secret protection is a very fundamental part and if this is forced to be broken by legally compelled speech, then it needs to have very creative interpretations over judicial precedents.

If this only applies to new sales then there is nothing that must be broken. The developers would need to choose technologies where license allows this. Those that don't wouldn't get new sales from game developers.

It's the same as GPL and similar licenses. If you don't want to publish your source that contains trade secrets then don't incorporate GPL licensed code.

There are also already various laws which compel certain types of speech. Consider things like nutrient labels or ingredient lists.

99% of the server code doesn't deserve trade secret protection, and fulfilling the goal of games continuing to work doesn't require releasing the other 1%. They can keep their matchmaking algorithm secret while releasing the code that lets people straightforwardly connect to each other. They can keep most of their code secret.

> 99% of the server code doesn't deserve trade secret protection,

Unfortunately, it is not you define whether it deserves. It's a court, ultimately SCOTUS.

As long as there is an option to give refunds then nothing is being compelled.

What a fucked situation where a company that fails who took money from people on the premise of a service existing no longer offers that service, says it's against the first amendment to enable people to continue having access to the product they paid for.

I'm curious how this would play out in the case that the company paid to license some software component that they can't open source.

Simple: that contract would be illegal. It's that simple. You can't put yourself into a position where you would be violating the law. The licensor would be on the hook for violating the law. This is "you can’t outsource compliance". Either your contract makes sure that you are compliant or a judge would make you both.

This case illustrates this point fully:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2019/08/settlemen...

That's not a worry. You can always refund.

Issues like that are part of why the law is only going to apply to new releases.

If you still choose to license something you can't release later, and it's critical to the game's operation, then that's a deliberate liability and you'll need to replace it.

That sounds like a bad incentive. Lots of games license software like Photon to run game servers. For many games, building something like that is a non-starter.

It's not like it specifically has to be open source. Photon can license their software in a way that allows for free servers that are still tied to the specific game. And then companies can buy that.

And it's not expensive for Photon to do that, so I don't see why they wouldn't add that feature for a modest price or even free. (And that's assuming the license doesn't already allow it.)

I’m not sure what you mean. Photon makes money running game servers as a service. It wouldn’t surprise me if their business wasn’t viable selling software alone.

As far as I can tell, you can have Photon run the servers or you can license them to run yourself. Though they clearly prefer the former.

Either way, there's not much revenue coming in to most games by the time the developer wants to abandon them, and Photon's not getting paid much either. There's a lot of ways to make this work out monetarily.

It’s not that simple. Many of the newer products are designed cloud-first.

I’d love to see you rise to the challenge. If you think there’s an opportunity to make money here, “lots of ways to make this work,” perhaps take it up yourself.

Cloud first is fine as long as there's a fallback. Photon has a fallback.

Can you name something that's stuck on the cloud on a technical level and also couldn't be substituted with a mild dev effort?

Right now I don't think it's a good money making opportunity. Becoming one would need Photon or some other significant service provider completely refusing to license their software in a way that's compatible with this law, and assurance that they'll continue to refuse while I build my entire product around supplementing/replacing them.

Sometimes, when a game developer shuts down, their computer equipment is liquidated with useful information still on it.

so a new law making it required would likely solve the legal issues, and gets the dev team (the only ones thinking about users or doing what's right) get what they wanted from the start?

I doubt it. I don't think another law _reduces_ legal issues. If anything it makes the situation more complicated. The plug is still getting pulled and I don't think this materially changes the outcome. If the company shuts down I'm not sure there is a legal obligation to release the code or refund. What entity would be responsible for that work?

Do you think any compagny would want to release some very sensitive / secret sauce code?

Tbh I think engineers gladly would. I think most folks want the content out. It’s the legal obligations that always get in the way.

I dunno, is it that special?

Take I’d for example. They released source code for genre defining extremely popular games and were fine.

And how often is code reused anyway? Every online game seem to either use mostly stock server code that comes with the engine or build anew every time.

Most sauce code is actually banal and boring no matter what the company executives tell themselves about their proprietary dung pile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com