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

Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

dexerto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 346 posts

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#121

Post by f4c39012 »

jon-wood wrote: post #83
p0w3n3d wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say this shows how corrupted elites are. If the "democratic" entity spends all the time with lobbyists, and not the initiative which started the discussion, this speaks volumes.

[flagged]

> If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.

"buy" is doing some heavy lifting here. If I buy something, it is mine. If someone else can arbitrarily take it away or stop it working, then it was mis-sold, because what I've really done is rent for an indeterminate period of time. What should be clear up front is whether I'm buying or renting.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#122

Post by hobofan »

skotobaza wrote: post #84
hobofan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now you have shifted to goal post from "providing a simple runnable binary" (not feasible due to baked in third-party licensing) to "open sourcing the game code, so people can rewrite the game to patch the missing parts". The few examples you point out as "open source released with stubs" are also usually games that are decades old and cultural landmarks, where there was economic incentive from the right holders (…

That's just one of the options, albeit the most beneficial for gamers. > "open source released with stubs" are also usually games that are decades old and cultural landmarks Not necessarily. Edit: the goalpost is "the games should remain playable after the publisher stop supporting it". It hasn't moved an inch. So I'm not sure what you are talking about...

[flagged]

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#123

Post by krige »

hobofan wrote: post #106
acron0 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe don't fill your games with ads and release them on restrictive, exploitative platforms?

aka "don't make games that anyone has the chance of playing"

That's an boggling misrepresentation of the market.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#124

Post by Orygin »

drorco wrote: post #104
acron0 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe don't fill your games with ads and release them on restrictive, exploitative platforms?

Did you ever build a commercial project or any business yourself? The nature of your comment implies to me you haven't. I highly recommend you give it a try, it might actually change your mind!

I didn't know it was impossible to build businesses without inserting to Meta/Google/others ad SDK to spy on all my users. Maybe we should stop normalizing these behavior.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#125

Post by lofaszvanitt »

The premise was flawed from the get go. It should have been when you release a game it should be sound,

NO DAY 0 patches,

free of bugs that prevent in any way completing the game or cause serious annoyance,

a way to have a digitally bought game made offline, and play offline.

If it's an online game, then after X years, or before abandonment by the studio release a vm that holds the server code, so the addicts could host their own shit.

That's all. But it was fucked from the get go, maybe literally started by a lobbyist. Or simply Ross Scott was simply didn't know what he was doing.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#126

Post by skotobaza »

hobofan wrote: post #116
skotobaza wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question remains - how does any of this prevent small developers from releasing either the binary or the code in the modified form? Again, that has already been done with variety of games (not just popular ones as you assume), so it's not something extraordinary. The developers definitely have the resources to do so since they were getting money for the game, and the least they can do for their game and its commu…

> The developers definitely have the resources to do so since they were getting money for the game There is no guarantee that they did!!! Yes, the examples we are pointing out (typical "friendslop" games from the last years) made bank, and should be able to afford to afford and EOL path. However for every successful game that uses those technologies there are ~100 that "didn't make it", or barely broke even that are…

I get what you mean - if the developer stops supporting the game then they might run out of money to make the changes. This can even happen spontaneously in some cases. But I'm still expecting at least some effort in preserving their product, their legacy. Some people might call it naive (and it probably is), but for me personally the baseline is that games should be playable at least in some way. Maybe the experience will not be the same, maybe there will a lot of lag, maybe something will break. But it is still better than not being able to play the game at all.

I don't think anyone is downplaying the effort of making a videogame that is both easy to host for the small developers and for the community. But unfortunately developers themselves often choose to pursue financial goals disregarding everything else. So it's understandable that gamers are not happy and demanding some solution. And that the industry is trying to push back.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#127

Post by maccard »

59nadir wrote: post #113
maccard wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game developer here. If it were “just” that easy I’d love to support this. > All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this You’re making a huge assumption here both about the scope of the law, and about how straightforward this is to do. I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would b…

> [...] running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda [...] The initiative has no problem with this as far as I know; the backend being an overengineered mess doesn't make it non-compliant with what SKG wants. I've worked on game backends that would've trivially complied with just a basic executable blob + MySQL, and ones that would've required someone to run 10+ services on AWS…

> The initiative has no problem with this as far as I know; the backend being an overengineered mess doesn't make it non-compliant with what SKG wants.

SKG wants games to be "playable" and doesn't define what playable is. Is a multiplayer chess game with no AI "playable" if you can boot into the menu? Is TLOU remastered playable if the multiplayer is turned off but the SP is still playable? Is Trackmania playable without UGC sharing and leaderboards? I would say "no" to all of the above, FWIW.

> With that said I don't think anyone would really be developing things this way in a world where they actually took this type of compliance seriously, and there is no real upside to hyperfocusing like that on third-party platform solutions and so on.

I think that what will actually happen is three things. 1) Many small studios that try things will just nope out. 2) Studios will switch to the Hollywood model of spinning up an entity per game to tack all the liability onto. There's no real reason to do this now, but if there's actual liability for it, that will change overnight. 3) Larger studios will split out online development from game development into separate entities.

I don't think it's hyperfocusing to say "there's a massive hole in this idea", I think it's dismissive of SKG to ignore people who work in this spaces concerns (ironically, it appears this is one of the reasons the EU commission isn't proceeding here, because SKG haven't engaged with industry groups to come up with a way to make this work).

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#128

Post by hobofan »

krige wrote: post #123
hobofan wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aka "don't make games that anyone has the chance of playing"

That's an boggling misrepresentation of the market.

The "release them on restrictive, exploitative platforms" part of the comment excludes (depending on interpretation): any mobile platform + Steam

So that excludes ~95% of addressable playerbase.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#129

Post by skotobaza »

maccard wrote: post #119
skotobaza wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just one of the options, albeit the most beneficial for gamers. > "open source released with stubs" are also usually games that are decades old and cultural landmarks Not necessarily. Edit: the goalpost is "the games should remain playable after the publisher stop supporting it". It hasn't moved an inch. So I'm not sure what you are talking about...

You've not just edit'ed and added to your comment, you removed a point about supporting open sourcing the games as a solution. > : the goalpost is "the games should remain playable after the publisher stop supporting it". It hasn't moved an inch. So I'm not sure what you are talking about... Many people (myself included) have absolutely no problem with that in principle. It's how do you do it that we have a problem w…

> You've not just edit'ed and added to your comment, you removed a point about supporting open sourcing the games as a solution.

I did not remove anything from my comment. Just added a statement since the alleged "goalpost moving" was referenced twice in the thread, so I had to reread my posts to check if it was really there. Hence my confusion.

> Many people (myself included) have absolutely no problem with that in principle

You can propose your own solution to the problem, not just criticize what other people say.

> just have every video game use the architecture that I have in my head

I'm not proposing any specific architecture.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#130

Post by hobofan »

skotobaza wrote: post #126
hobofan wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The developers definitely have the resources to do so since they were getting money for the game There is no guarantee that they did!!! Yes, the examples we are pointing out (typical "friendslop" games from the last years) made bank, and should be able to afford to afford and EOL path. However for every successful game that uses those technologies there are ~100 that "didn't make it", or barely broke even that are…

I get what you mean - if the developer stops supporting the game then they might run out of money to make the changes. This can even happen spontaneously in some cases. But I'm still expecting at least some effort in preserving their product, their legacy. Some people might call it naive (and it probably is), but for me personally the baseline is that games should be playable at least in some way. Maybe the experienc…

> they might run out of money to make the changes

They may have never made any money to begin with, as they ran out of money during the development phase of the game because they were trying to comply with the regulation, and never got to release the game. Regulation almost always places a higher proportional burden on the smaller players, while larger players can afford it, which is why sensible regulation has carveouts for smaller players.

> maybe there will a lot of lag, maybe something will break. But it is still better than not being able to play the game at all

How is that better? A multiplayer game with awful lag isn't enjoyable anymore, and a game without joy is just a chore.

Post reply on HN