101–110 of 294 posts
They are going to do what movie industry is already doing: create shell company for release of each game. Then they will shut down the company when they want, and there will be nobody to come for.
Yah, right!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mentioned this in a separate thread. It seems like a huge risk to release an online game if you don't do this now. A single bad game can take down a studio. Now there's even more risk because a previously successful game may come with a big bill in the future if you have to do refunds or some late architecture change when you instead want to take a product down to save money.
Perhaps they should just write games in a way where they can actually release server code when they it shuts down?
This is a weird thing to be legislating on.
They are going to do what movie industry is already doing: create shell company for release of each game. Then they will shut down the company when they want, and there will be nobody to come for.
We need to culturally accept things like "zero day law patches" for loopholes and unintended consequences. Legislators, don't just pass a law, see it incentivizing something unintended, and then throw up your hands crying "Well, we tried!" Patch the law as soon as the bad behavior starts!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So nobody to come after you for copyright violation if you run a community-patched (a.k.a. cracked) version of the game?
Well, no. Just like other purpose-built vehicles (like the ones for motion picture productions), they will transfer rights to other entities before shutting down.
This is such a terrible solution to a literal non-problem. You should be able to make software that has a limited lifespan if you want. I just think that's fine. Games should not be special.
Would you feel the same if your phone permanently bricked itself because the vendor decided it was out of date and they just don't feel like supporting it anymore?
If you sell a product for money, you don't have the right to take that product away and keep the money.
> The bill applies to digitally sold games. However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely. It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination. I believe this is the key paragraph. I wonder if this will be an incentive towards making more games qualify for tho…
So this only really applies to games you have to purchase once but are online-only? That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
Eh, it sounds unintuitive, but in practice it's extremely common. Almost every first-person shooter (well, you could really expand that to "almost every competitive multiplayer game") made by major studios is either a one-time purchase or entirely free. The ongoing revenue comes from cosmetics and other in-game goodies.
This sort of economy makes sense when you consider consoles (especially back in the day), where it's easy to get people to buy a disc but hard to get people to sign up for a subscription.
This is such a terrible solution to a literal non-problem. You should be able to make software that has a limited lifespan if you want. I just think that's fine. Games should not be special.
The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.
The backend for a game is not just an .exe file. It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services that need maintenance and that one dev who knows how to reset the cache. 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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But right now we have games that you have purchased for a one-time price, the developer revokes your ability to play it years later, and you have no recourse.
Why would you be entitled to infinite support? For a game with an online component? Why does the game's purchase price extend to infinity instead of "for as long as the developer supports the game"?
If you sell a product for money, you don't then get to later take the product away and keep the money.
This is such a terrible solution to a literal non-problem. You should be able to make software that has a limited lifespan if you want. I just think that's fine. Games should not be special.
You should be able to sell something and then take it away when you're tired of it. Would you feel the same if your phone permanently bricked itself because the vendor decided it was out of date and they just don't feel like supporting it anymore? If you sell a product for money, you don't have the right to take that product away and keep the money.
And yes, I think it should be legal for a hardware product (like Spotify's "Car Thing" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Thing) to stop working because they don't want to support the online component. It's fine to get mad at the company, but I think it should be legal to do.