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Stop Killing Games

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221–230 of 287 posts

Re: Stop Killing Games

#221

Post by skotobaza »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #196

Oh fuck off. [1] To elaborate, if I make a creative experience, that requires a server, and sell it to you for $70, and you play it for a year, that's your $70 of value right there. That's the moral argument. Every single games company faced with this issue is now going to change the terms of service to note that the $70 "includes free two year subscription, paid up front!", and if the lawyers get pissy about that th…

No, the moral argument is "I want to be able to (re)play the experience ten years from now". If the servers aren't available in any form (so I can't event self-host), then it's an issue. That is the moral part, not the financial one.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#223

Post by TylerE »

duped wrote: post #186
TylerE wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very large percentage of multiplayer games keep the backend in an MS SQL or Oracle cluster.

Sure but you don't link in Oracle/MS's database cluster orchestrators to your server, right?

THat really depends on how you define "the server",doesn't it? The intent of the bill seems to be a thing that actually play that game.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#224

Post by M95D »

I don't understand what all the fuss is about. There are so many old games on GOG to play for 10 lifetimes. On a 1GB RPi.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#225

Post by qq66 »

F3nd0 wrote: post #23
nerdjon wrote: post #8

This is basically advocating for open source games which is a completely different story than what stop killing games is trying to do. There are tons of closed source games that have zero online component to them. I don't see how you can actually argue that this is a good thing, especially when they say: > The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. A…

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > > Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that. What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between soft…

I don't see the logic in why art would be treated differently than code, and there is a lot in modern games that are not clearly one or the other (hitboxes? animations? lighting effects?)

Re: Stop Killing Games

#227

Post by avaer »

nerdjon wrote: post #8

This is basically advocating for open source games which is a completely different story than what stop killing games is trying to do. There are tons of closed source games that have zero online component to them. I don't see how you can actually argue that this is a good thing, especially when they say: > The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. A…

We need a version of "open source" that requires you to pay a reasonable ($60) price to get a copy.

That's kind of against the usual notion of "open source" but it's the only way this would work in e.g. the game industry, as currently factored.

Studios won't pay people millions of dollars to make games if the return on investment is zero other than helping all of your non-open source competitors.

I do think it's doable, but nobody's done this successfully yet.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#228

Post by Podrod »

MYEUHD wrote: post #144
dangus wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is largely how open source game engines like OpenMW or OpenTTD work: the game engine is reverse engineered, and the art is something the end user provides by downloading/owning a legitimate retail copy. And that’s really great, but this model is ultimately not realistic for most game developers. It’s not like productivity software where the code of the product isn’t the majority of the value being delivered. Git…

Games will get pirated regardless whether they're on GOG or not. > This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher. This is not always the case. For example this game will be available on…

You're wrong about Cyberpunk, it was released on both platforms on the same day. I mean it was CD Projekt's own store front.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#229

Post by flohofwoe »

nerdjon wrote: post #8

This is basically advocating for open source games which is a completely different story than what stop killing games is trying to do. There are tons of closed source games that have zero online component to them. I don't see how you can actually argue that this is a good thing, especially when they say: > The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. A…

The blog post is a bit of an incoherent mess.

The key point should be to make it legal to use and reverse-engineer abandonware (e.g. games that the developer or publisher has abandoned).

First we'll need a realistic legal definition for 'abandonware' where the abandonware's IP is automatically going into the public domain after a game has been abandondend by the publisher, and the next step must be to legalize 'pirating' and reverse-engineering abandonware.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#230

Post by JacobKfromIRC »

preommr wrote: post #200
cwillu wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are either turning off their servers …that are unnecessarily being checked by the local software before the local software will run the local offline functions.

That is irrelevant to the topic of ownership since you bought the product, you can now update the code. If you want, you can now change that behavior. Whether that's allowed by the TOS and what the consequences to that are is also a separate issue. At that point, people shouldn't buy the product if they disagree with the conditions.

> At that point, people shouldn't buy the product if they disagree with the conditions.

I think a problem with this idea is that terms of service can be difficult to understand. For example a lot of licenses or terms of service forbid "reverse engineering" entirely. In my mind, "reverse engineering" is just trying to understand something based on observing what it does, and even though a legal agreement is probably using a more strict definition, how am I supposed to know where the boundary is? "Reverse engineering" isn't usually defined in the agreement itself. And if what I want to do is considered "reverse engineering", it might not be legally enforceable anyway.

Sometimes I buy a physical object, take it home, and then open it and find conditions that I would have disagreed with if I knew about them. I've noticed this with books, but the same could happen with software. I don't know if conditions like that would be legally enforceable, but I think the complexity of understanding this makes individual decisions about what conditions to accept a poor solution to what Stop Killing Games is trying to solve.

The Steam Subscriber Agreement [1] seems to prohibit reverse engineering games (referred to as "content" in the agreement), but I guess I'm misunderstanding it because some GPL games are on Steam (e.g. SuperTux [2]).

I agree that people shouldn't buy a product if they disagree with the conditions, but I think this is too complicated for most people to do for every product. Maybe some of these conditions should be illegal to even put in a terms of service, even if they already aren't enforceable.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1572920/SuperTux/

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