The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.
The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release. Any sanitation of this binary further condemns this as a silly idea because now you are also compelling the individual or business to do additional (presumably unpaid) work so that arbitrary consumers can use their products or services indefinitely.
Games are interesting because players will sink a lot of time and sometimes money in and so it goes beyond a smart alarm clock or a fitness tracker imo.
It's entertainment. It's ok for entertainment to end, especially when it's this cheap. There aren't any situations where I haven't gotten my money's worth out of a title I've played for 1000+ hours.
> Alternatively, why not just align your incentives with the user and charge subscriptions.
Because most people balk at subscriptions. And that's kind of the answer to a lot of "why don't they just" questions in this area. They can't release the server because of proprietary libs, but they're using those because it's way, way, way cheaper than not doing that and the people who write those libs really know what they're doing. People won't buy your game at the price you'd need to set to do everything in house.
Sometimes it ends right after you bought it with no way of knowing it would, or before you bought it. Not everyone gets 1000+ hours out of a title, sometimes the day you install they announce that the servers are going down forever.
Here is one - I never got to play The Crew which got closed in 2024. But I would certainly like to do that now and some time later (10, 20 or even 50 years later). The same goes for Diablo 3 and 4, which did not shut down yet but they might. I just want to be sure that I will be able to play a game in the future. I do replay and reevaluate games, so for me it's important to keep them available all the time. Especially if I paid money for them.
We already obligate them to do other basic necessities for consumer protection such as refunding or replacing faulty products
Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing. A typical scenario would be a game developed as a fork of a proprietary codebase which was licensed from another company. Forcing the licensee to release material would infringe on the rights of the licensor.
The second that becomes a legal requirement with associated penalties, developers will stop licensing technology under those kinds of terms.
I suspect companies will just scale down the servers to 1 instance with bare minimum support. Technically the online service is still active, thereby eliminating the requirements to distribute source code, even if it can only handle a handful of active players and terrible latency.
The ideal way for a game company to keep their game alive after they have stopped supporting it is to build it with that in mind from the start. A lot of the server–side components, such as monitoring, authentication, database storage, moderation, anti–cheat, etc, etc can all be made optional. It’s a small upfront cost, but set up the build system so that you can build without all of those components, or with simpler versions of them. That includes anything you cannot legally redistribute. If your last game used a middleware component that was critical to the functionality of the game but that you cannot redistribute, then you do need to find a replacement for that specific middleware component for your future games.
Then, when the end of life date of your game approaches you simply build the server binaries one last time, this time turning off all of the optional components, and let your customers download it. You don’t have to give them the source code and you don’t have to violate any license agreements in the process. Your customers can arrange for any necessary hosting of the servers themselves, most likely by simply running the server process on their own computer.
And of course the option remains to simply write a single–player game that runs entirely on the customer’s computer, with no networked components at all. It’s a little bit old–school, but lots of game developers manage to make money that way.
> And of course the option remains to simply write a single–player game that runs entirely on the customer’s computer, with no networked components at all.
So the solution is to just stop developing multiplayer games? This is just a laughable response.
Correct. This is why I said that there would be multiple responses depending on the type of component. Many proprietary components are not critical and could easily be stripped out without harming the End–of–life version of the game, like matchmaking. But obviously that still leaves the critical ones. For those the game developer would obviously have to avoid any license agreement that would be unduly burdensome once the game was in the EOL state. Either there are already components without these onerous license terms, the existing components will be relicensed, new ones will be written and made available under less onerous licensing terms, or developers will just write their own. The market will provide.
> So the solution is to just stop developing multiplayer games?
No, not to stop developing multiplayer games but to stop putting networked components into single–player games. Remember that this all started with The Crew, which was purely a single–player game that was killed precisely because it nevertheless wouldn’t run if no server was available. If you don’t choose to make that design decision in the first place then this law has no effect on you at all. Your game is automatically safe from being killed when you stop selling it. You won’t have to do anything extra at all for players to keep playing it as long as they want to.
https://www.ea.com/news/update-on-ea-titles-hosted-on-gamesp...
[0] https://github.com/Azure/MachineLearningNotebooks/blob/maste...
For once, there is a law that actually dictates the responsibilities that a developer has to the customer, and all that responsibility states is that the developer can not revoke the use of software that a customer has already fully paid for under certain narrow circumstances; somehow this is what you find to be unreasonable?
1. Developer A writes some software.
2. Developer B licenses that software from Developer A, under the terms that (for instance) it only be used internally by Developer B and not disclosed.
3. Developer B makes modifications to that software and uses it as part of the implementation of a video game server.
4. Developer B goes bankrupt.
Under this proposed law, Developer B would be obligated to release the modified software, breaching their agreement with Developer A and potentially causing them financial harm.
If the law passed after the game was released, then it doesn’t apply.
It’s no different from mandating that the software can’t be malware that puts a ransom on your data, contain other people’s copyrighted content without permission, or just not work despite you claiming that it does when you sold it
And it’s not mandating that anything is structured in a particular way, just that the game works as the buyer would expect and how they achieve that is up to them
Laws trump contracts.
This is not unpaid work as they had already received payment at the time of purchase of the game. They should take into account the cost associated with this work at the time of sale.
This also isn't relevant to third-party code obtained under license. It is a de facto restriction on code dependencies, which may significantly increase development costs.
I agree that it's shitty that buyers can lose access to a game they bought, but I really struggle to see how this could function practically.
Nowadays, this is much less of a "can" and more of a "definitely is" :(
Based on what I see as (non-game) security consultant in terms of service complexity, what modern FOSS projects consider a normal container constellation, and on what I see from at least one indie dev whom I personally know. It has been a topic I've brought up since he put so many hours into it and the game is fun and the binary didn't even run if you don't have a compatible Google Play Services version, much less the various back-ends that it connects to for accounts, level data, level thumbnails, matchmaking, etc. until you even get to the real-time multiplayer server
In practice a lot of those components can be simplified when you don't have to support a huge number of players. A server that only supports dozens of players can just use SQLite instead of a big multi–az database cluster. The cache can just be an in–process cache instead of a connection to an external Redis instance, etc, etc.
Government forced speech includes food companies needing to add ingredient labels on packaging including allergen info, landlords needing to notify tenants before entering their homes, stores having to post accurate prices for the products they sell, and employers having to provide workers with safety data sheets for the hazardous materials they work with. These are all perfectly reasonable. Thanks to government forced speech we have more freedom/rights and better lives.
The answer to companies committing fraud is not "buyer beware".
There's even a specific term for scams where you pay money based on a specific description for an item being sold that is then changed after the time of sale known as a "bait and switch".
The government can compel speech from food and other producers to print content and nutritional labels on their products. The government can compel speech on a yearly basis when we file taxes. The can compel speech such as guidance maps and websites to be accessible to the blind (ADA). They can compel vehicle owners to provide insurance and ownership information, which is a kind of speech.
I never said it was. Yes, commercial speech has diminished protections, but it is not annulled. It is still protected to a degree, even if less than ordinary speech. You may consider selling a game to someone and then shutting it down Fraud, but I somehow doubt the supreme court would agree with you (although you might be able to convince a lower circuit court to). Compelling speech is usually something that undergoes strict scrutiny. Compelling commercial speech requires that you pass the test established in Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission (unless SCOTUS decides on one of it's random whims to overturn that ruling, which for all we know it might).
Don't get me wrong: I am in no way anti-regulation. But compelling speech is something that needs to be handled carefully.
Edit: removed the strawman thing (that was inaccurate and I apologize for the accusation).