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

Stop Killing Games

jxself.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 287 posts

Re: Stop Killing Games

#121

Post by [deleted] »

F3nd0 wrote: post #110
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and then it's significantly less feasible for developers to eat, to an important degree. It just comes across as entitled - it's too much effort to reverse engineer, give everything to me for free! Never mind that it can be done, I don't want to do it, I'm entitled to 10,000 manhours of free labour because software yearns to be free!!!

I think your rhetoric is needlessly antagonistic. The idea of free software follows from fairly simple logic: You should be in control of your computer and any software that runs on it should be distributed under form and licence which facilitate this. It’s not about what the software wants or how much work people owe you; it’s about enabling you to own your computing when the code is literally already there. Surely…

[deleted]

Re: Stop Killing Games

#122

Post by b65e8bee43c2ed0 »

john_strinlai wrote: post #19
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…

this was written (or 'output') by someone (or something) that clearly has not thought of the knock-on effects of those freedoms. they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again". by all means i 100% agree that an ostensibly single player game should not be locked…

>they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".

fyi, there are tens of torrent trackers with every game/movie/album/etc under the sun. had been for two decades.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#123

Post by dijit »

tayo42 wrote: post #115
dijit wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, ok, you grasped at a few issues there that go off in different directions. The issue with "Stop Killing Games" is that the legislation doesn't currently look like anything, it's a broad appeal and the solution for studios will depend on where it finally lands. If it lands in the realm of "Games must be released FOSS after x years" then, aside from the fact that a lot of the times we don't own the copyrights to…

We used to have player run servers for years. Is it some lost skill to write software that way?

It's not a lost skill.

Spinning up a binary and replicating actors across two computers that both have a connection string to a server is.. for all intents and purposes: easy.

Where it falls down is when you start to have complex interactions with AI that's serverside, or you have a dynamic world that changes based on player behaviour, or you have cross platform requirements, integrations with companion apps and above all: matchmaking.

If you're a looter-shooter, there's a whole host of complicated interactions too.

A game like Apex Legends could probably distribute their server binary, but if you require online, as in, not just a single match, but an economy- a dynamic matchmaker and a dynamic world (meaning: when you kick a box it stays kicked) and a persistent account (you keep your loot): then that doesn't work well anymore.

The interactions are just too complex to batten down reliably, they'll be exploited, there'll be no fun, or: it just won't be possible for certain features, regardless of safety.

You can see how this looks by trying to use one of the many unofficial versions of Runescape.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#124

Post by Telaneo »

eckesicle wrote: post #116

My father was a printer his entire life. I went with him to work one day when I was around 12 years old. He loaded up a box of, what seemed to me a random selection of flyers, booklets and other printed goods in his car, and together we drove to the National Archives (in Sweden). He explained to me that every media artifact of cultural significance would be stored there in three (I believe) copies for future generati…

> I was always at unease growing up, wondering what would happen to video games when they no longer became popular. Would I be able to enjoy them when I got older? Would my children ever be able to play the games that shaped my teenage years?

The worst thing, at least to me, is that the worst case scenario, as long as the devs don't go out of their way to kill a game permanently, is still not all that bad.

There's emulation, there's virtual machines, there's dicking about with config files, and there's just buying the old hardware outright. Even old, obscure and fiddly games can be played if you put in the effort. Even the old and obscure will very often be out there on the web, and even if it isn't, you can eventually get hold of a physical copy (and then make a good example and make it available yourself!).

But the moment there's a clown server dependency involved, that's it. You've lost before you've even begun. Sometimes a miracle happens, or someone dedicates their entire life to restoring that one game, and we thank them, for they are doing capital G God's work. But preservation can't depend on miracles.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#125

Post by stale2002 »

john_strinlai wrote: post #79
fragmede wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs. > So, we'd have to work on slimming that down ...why? My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.

> My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on. if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation. the spirit of the law is that i can reasonably spin up an instance of the server for me and my friends to play.

> if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation.

This isn't the 2000s. People can rent a computer out of a data center. This isn't some hard problem here.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#126

Post by [deleted] »

stale2002 wrote: post #119
DSMan195276 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? It's a question of when, not if - you're not going to pay to keep the servers online forever. What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't? If they're bad enough then plenty of people will not be interested in taking that risk by making such games.

> What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't? How about "the government forces you to release the code"? That's seems fair. Unless you hid your source code in USB drives under your bed, the government can probably just force GitHub (or similar )to release it. I bet they've got it backed up.

[deleted]

Re: Stop Killing Games

#127

Post by adamrezich »

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

Only just that the video games industry as we've known it for the past few decades is basically already dead—at best, it's a hollowed-out husk of what it once was.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#128

Post by jmyeet »

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…

It's not really advocating for open source games despite evoking Richard Stallman and Free Software.

A lot of people get all up in their feelings when it comes to "private property", like (hypoerbolic) "if they allow redistribution of abandonware, they might take everything" and it's just not justified. It used to be, for example, that copyrights on books weren't automatically granted and they were much shorter terms. You had to apply for copyright renewals. Why? Because of orphaned works and it was viewed that if nobody held an interest that they asserted, it was in the public good to place that in the public domain.

Abandonware follows the same principles. The arguably controversial part is that "abandonware" here includes "forced obsolescence". And I 100% agree that if you, as the publisher, make a game nonfunctional (or even greatly reduced functionality) then people should have the right to make those games work.

The most egregious cases are like Simcity 5, which was made online for literally no reason (other than "because piracy"). They tried to sell online features but that wasn't the reason.

The idea that this kills the entire gaming industry is just slippery slope hyperbola.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#129

Post by andai »

Altern4tiveAcc wrote: post #95

PSA for anyone considering reading it: this article is full of LLMisms and was probably generated from a prompt. That being said, I agree with the premise. Most of those cultural preservation issues wouldn't be a problem if users had control over their computing. The problems caused by game servers going offline aren't necessarily specific to games, and the cultural preservation aspect can be applied to other program…

> If a certain activity is essentially your own, then maintaining your full control over it requires that you do it using your copies of free programs, running them on computers you control. Doing it in any other way is SaaSS because it denies you the control you deserve.

The word deserve is interesting here.

There's a social sense (based on the just world fallacy, see also Karma), and a natural sense (by natural law, you deserve whatever you are able to get).

In the natural sense, which is the only real one, a person deserves computing freedom if they are able and willing to obtain it. If they care, and if they're willing to work for it.

It's the same way with freedom in other contexts. If you don't care, at least not enough to defend it... well, we can see the results of that.

I think Stallman is using the word deserve here in the sense that computing freedom should be some kind of human right. That's an admirable position, but I don't think I see it catching on. (Heck, regular freedom is still pretty niche, especially globally, and computing freedom is a strict subset.)

Re: Stop Killing Games

#130

Post by john_strinlai »

stale2002 wrote: post #125
john_strinlai wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on. if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation. the spirit of the law is that i can reasonably spin up an instance of the server for me and my friends to play.

> if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation. This isn't the 2000s. People can rent a computer out of a data center. This isn't some hard problem here.

>People can rent a computer out of a data center.

how much does 190GiB of RAM and 38 CPUs go for, hourly?

Post reply on HN