Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 172 posts

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#111

Post by shigawire »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #108
teeray wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are hypocrites about this. On the one hand they say “we need to shut this down because we’re losing money on it.” On the other hand, asking them to release aspects of the game to self-host the infrastructure: “but that’s our IP and it’s valuable to us.” You shouldn’t be able to have it both ways. Sitting pretty on unprofitable IP in the hopes that it might someday make you money again is a net loss to socie…

Our society was designed from the foundations to benefit the owning class, and this is a prime, easily observed example of that. You're completely correct and it doesn't matter, because the point of IP law is to allow people who know nothing to sit on assets they own and make money for doing no work. If someone wants to argue this position, I would challenge them to explain why anything around IP law exists as it doe…

The good faith interpretation is that innovation is spurred by having some guarantees that your innovation isn't immediately ripped off. It allows for investing more into R&D.

I'm not saying the current system achieves that, but it is part of the justification.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#113

Post by ToucanLoucan »

shigawire wrote: post #111
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our society was designed from the foundations to benefit the owning class, and this is a prime, easily observed example of that. You're completely correct and it doesn't matter, because the point of IP law is to allow people who know nothing to sit on assets they own and make money for doing no work. If someone wants to argue this position, I would challenge them to explain why anything around IP law exists as it doe…

The good faith interpretation is that innovation is spurred by having some guarantees that your innovation isn't immediately ripped off. It allows for investing more into R&D. I'm not saying the current system achieves that, but it is part of the justification.

A good faith interpretation at this point is voluntarily sticking your head in the sand to feign centrism. The purpose of a system is what it does, and ours, too predictably to be mere coincidence, permits capital to endlessly extract value from those actually creating it, to the detriment of those value creators, the people they create value for, and even if they're too dead inside to perceive it, the capital holders themselves.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#114

Post by throwaway85825 »

cogman10 wrote: post #17
mysterydip wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Ah, but you didn’t buy a thing, you bought a license to temporarily use a thing in ways we deemed acceptable!” -publishers somewhere

"Here's a device we sold you, but when you first turn it on you need to sign this 30 page contract which says you actually don't own the device, if you are mad at us you have to go to our preferred arbitration, and we reserve the right to turn your device off at any time on a whim because you left a bad review somewhere. Sign it or enjoy your worthless brick which we will not refund. Oh, and now every single manufact…

Contracts without signatures should always be void. Any notable terms should need to be initialed.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#115

Post by throwaway85825 »

aurareturn wrote: post #76
tetha wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding 1 and 2, my pity is mild if this requirement forced companies to follow principles of secure software development, configuration and deployment. Injecting stuff from deployment config is not hard. 3 is valid and can be tricky, as it would depend on when in the software lifecycle the release would be mandatory. If it's in a wind-down or bankruptcy situation, it would be tricky. Though that discussion is simi…

Try open sourcing a code base that is built up over the last 15 years and most of the devs no longer work there. Thats what you’re asking for many online games. Not to mention open sourcing the code will subject the company to legal liability if there’s something weird in there like discrimination of some form.

Every employment contract requires copyright assignment. It's not so complicated.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#116

Post by throwaway85825 »

1123581321 wrote: post #94
ryandrake wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, then prevent that via regulation, too. It fatalistic to say "Well, we just can't possibly regulate companies, because they will surely find loopholes and avoid the regulation!" The answer is to write better, more thorough regulation that prevents loopholes. That shouldn't be such a tall order!

Just write a regulation that every game developer has to make a great game, not charge too much, support it for years, and give it away for free as soon as it's not popular. That way, we'll only have great games and archives of great free games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM

'Great' is neither a legal or commercial term.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#117

Post by throwaway85825 »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #58
ajuc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now it becomes way more expensive for small studios to come out with games that have online features. Good riddance. Online features suck. Make your game multiplayer or make it singleplayer. Don't add pointless online features. PS all you need to make sure it works is release the server once you stop supporting it yourself. > They rely on a huge network of interconnected cloud micro services. Give people the docker…

Any sufficiently popular multiplayer Indy game gets ruined by cheaters.

Not a problem with private servers and offline reputation management.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#118

Post by dasyatidprime »

sph wrote: post #81
knollimar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they have an indie game theyre "making" and being forced to build an EOL plan for a game that will statistically be a flop is silly to them. I feel a carveout for total says, say $200k USD or less, would be reasonable. Otherwise you're just conscripting indie time. I was working on a game, but I'm not looking forward to releasing updates everytime steam changes their relay. Considering scrapping multiplayer comple…

Indie game devs don't care about EOL plans because they're not building a game as a service. If the indie game has multiplayer, it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages. No indie is setting up a proprietary autoscaling game server infrastructure on AWS that they will have to maintain for years and have an end-of-life plan for if the SKG initiative passes. The only co…

> it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages

This is drifting some from the original specific topic toward the broader conflict, but, not for everyone involved, surely? Will the audience run your server binary, under normal circumstances? Or will they say “Wow, you couldn't even be bothered to put up some basic servers for free? Jeez, you're saying I have to set up a whole account somewhere else and pay them just so I can have a multiplayer game, or set up weird-looking technical shit on my computer that might expose me to hackers? Nobody else asks me to do this, what is this bullshit”? Of course there are intermediary options here (one of which I describe below), but those don't necessarily let you do the “we didn't want to be in the hosting business” plan straightforwardly, so you might still have to take on a lot of the fixed planning costs.

The incentive gradient among consumers tilting so hard in the direction of indefinite active support becoming table stakes seems to be a core part of the vicious cycle here. “I shouldn't have to set stuff up” implicitly cedes control; if they're not doing the coordination, then someone is, and that someone gets hidden responsibility and power without compensation or effective voice, which is an unstable combination by default. This is a similar issue to what happens with convenient, centralized, subsidized social media and chat platforms.

Minecraft is actually an interesting borderline case here: the player license authentication and name/appearance binding is all centralized, and that could suddenly go away and leave everyone in the dark, but individual world servers can be run independently and there are a number of third-party hosting businesses based on this. Microsoft later felt compelled to offer Realms as a first-party means of setup, but IIRC those do take a recurring fee so it's not in the same unstable zone. But then we have a separate issue where, as far as I can dimly tell, a lot of people started expecting “game companies do the work to keep us safe on Their Platform” as, again, table stakes, and so they implemented non-repudiable digital signatures in chat to allow people on non-centrally-hosted servers to still report each other's chat messages to central moderation, which I must assume is another ongoing cost. (In the modded world there are mods that strip this.)

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#119

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

My lateral solution: don’t let the companies use the words “purchase” or “buy”, force them to use the words “rent” or “license”.

You can only use the words “purchase” or “buy” if you can install / move the files to a device that is completely airgapped from the internet and continue to use the product indefinitely. Extend it to movies and music as well.

Use established language to enable consumers to make an informed decision.

Re: The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

#120

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

DaSHacka wrote: post #67
emptybits wrote: post #40

Tell gamers how many months, for the advertised price, they will receive a guaranteed level of service and features for. Then let gamers decide. Example: If I'm reminded, at purchase time, that this $70 game will work online for 24 months and single-player offline for 36 months, then I can make an informed decision before I buy. Studios would be forced to bring their business plan into visibility and be held to a lev…

> Tell gamers how many months, for the advertised price, they will receive a guaranteed level of service and features for. Companies would just default to saying "we reserve the right to shut off online connectivity at any time."

Force them to list an effective annual subscription fee more prominently displayed than any “purchase” price. If they can’t guarantee any level of service, the license is assumed to be valid for one day, and their game ‘costs’ thirty thousand dollars.
Post reply on HN