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Stop Killing Games

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Re: Stop Killing Games

#131

Post by DSMan195276 »

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.

The government will release it with all the copyrighted code and assets that's owned by a bunch of third-parties?

Ex. if I license my artwork, music, characters, code library, etc. to a game developer and they don't create a legally releasable version of their server, then the government will forcibly break our licensing agreement and I just get screwed?

Re: Stop Killing Games

#132

Post by john_strinlai »

b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote: post #122
john_strinlai wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i was unaware torrenting copyrighted content was made legal, thanks for the update

Re: Stop Killing Games

#133

Post by john_strinlai »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #100
john_strinlai wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We have decades of real world experience which shows this is not true. People buy things they could otherwise get for free with a bit of work all the time.

you aren't getting a company to build baldurs gate 3 and hope they recoup the costs from ko-fi donations.

real world experience is that most companies do not offer their software for free, and open source developers either have to get sponsored or have to constantly solicit donations.

donations do not typically cover multi-million dollar, multi-year development cycles.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#134

Post by saghm »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #67
F3nd0 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! And there are many other re-implementation projects, like OpenMW, OpenGothic, fheroes2, and others, which allow you to play the games if you can provide the original assets. Largely for older games, but the point stands. https://openmw.org/ https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic https://ihhub.github.io/fheroes2/

Adding on to this but I'm not sure if it's 1:1 what you're talking about. PokeMMO is a online Pokemon Fangame that combines the first 5 generations of games. From what I gather, this is possible because it is up to the user to provide the ROMs, so litigious Nintendo cannot say they are re-distributing copyrighted material

Does it only use the assets from the original games, or also the scripting? If the former, then I'd say it's basically the same concept that I'm talking about, but with making a new game using the existing assets rather than reimplementing an existing one. If it uses the scripting as well and then provides some extra stuff to merge them and put it online, I'd say it's a slightly different (but still extremely cool!) thing.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#135

Post by b65e8bee43c2ed0 »

john_strinlai wrote: post #132
b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

i was unaware torrenting copyrighted content was made legal, thanks for the update

>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".

Re: Stop Killing Games

#136

Post by john_strinlai »

b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote: post #135
john_strinlai wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i was unaware torrenting copyrighted content was made legal, thanks for the update

>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".

yes, i wrote that.

right now that would be illegal to do in most jurisdictions.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#137

Post by saghm »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #87
saghm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that vein, the other day this got posted to HN: https://twilitrealm.dev/ It uses an independent reimplementation of the code of a Zelda game from the GameCube and combines them with the assets from the actual game to make native binaries for various platforms, which blows my mind a bit but demonstrates the power of this sort of split abstraction.

what power, exactly? that nintendo doesn't care about these guys for some idiosyncratic reason?

The power to have a game natively on platforms it was never implemented on before but look identical to the original. To me, that's honestly cooler and more desirable than emulation; the fact that it's also more defensible from an IP standpoint is just a nice bonus.

I also wouldn't say that "respecting the limits of IP law" is particularly idiosyncratic either; you can make the case that IP owners like Nintendo often overreach due to the inherent advantage of being a large company with a lot more resources than a smaller open source project, but I don't really see it as worthwhile to call them out for not doing that in some cases.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#138

Post by metabagel »

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…

> PSA for anyone considering reading it: this article is full of LLMisms and was probably generated from a prompt.

Possibly, but it doesn't appear that way to me.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#139

Post by dijit »

john_strinlai wrote: post #130
stale2002 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Cheapest I could find on AWS was $1.848/hr for the compute, no storage.

$1,349.04/Month

(m6g.12xlarge in us-east-1)

Re: Stop Killing Games

#140

Post by b65e8bee43c2ed0 »

john_strinlai wrote: post #136
b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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".

yes, i wrote that. right now that would be illegal to do in most jurisdictions.

despite that, people have been doing that for over two decades, but publishers continue to publish.
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