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Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

arstechnica.com

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Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#221

Post by jandrewrogers »

jcranmer wrote: post #146
parliament32 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming might be unique in the sense that it's the only industry where 1) consumers make a one-time purchase of a product, but then 2) the manufacturer remains responsible for the online component.. forever? I can't think of any other examples in real life where this happens across an industry (maybe a few niche products). Maybe this is the reason MS has been pushing Game Pass so hard, to get rid of the "purchase" par…

> I can't think of any other examples in real life where this happens across an industry Vehicles? Maybe not necessarily forever, but I'd expect the large car manufacturers to all still have some level of support for a 20-year-old car...

The contracts underlying the support for consumer automotive commonly run around 10 years. After that it is best effort and unofficial support by other companies if there is enough money to be made by offering it.

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#222

Post by JacobKfromIRC »

Nition wrote: post #165
mrandish wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> open source server code if you are going to cease support When I was a senior exec at a big public tech company, there was a product we decided to discontinue and we thought would be nice to just open source. Somehow I ended up in charge of managing that process and was shocked at how complex, time-consuming and expensive it was in a multi-billion dollar, publicly-traded corp vs some code my friends and I wrote. Le…

Nah, you just open source it in a broken state without anything that had separate licensing, so nobody is happy and the law is followed.

This would be a way better outcome than the current default. I've even seen this suggested before [1].

If game-specific logic is not public, information needed for reverse engineering could be completely missing, but if game-specific logic is available plus the names of the missing libraries, reconstruction of the game should be possible eventually.

[1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Open-sourcing-video-games/ (See "What if I don’t completely own my game?")

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#223

Post by Akronymus »

luxuryballs wrote: post #183

This makes the Minecraft model look all that much better than it already was, users pay for an account, the servers are self hosted by the community, as far as I can tell on the surface level Minecraft would already comply with this legislation.

Not quite, afaict. When the auth servers are shut down, you wouldnt be able to play it anymore, even in single player.

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#225

Post by JacobKfromIRC »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #105

I don't see any world in which these "stop killing games" laws result in anything close to what the proponents are asking for, for multiple reasons, one of the biggest being that the proponents don't have a clear, coherent, cohesive vision that takes into account all of the side-effects, and everyone you talk to in this space has a slightly different idea of what they want, and even the main proponent, Ross Scott, ha…

I agree with most of this, but "server binary with no documentation" is an extremely good outcome compared to the status quo.

People can reverse-engineer a server binary, but reverse-engineering a server that is no longer running is not guaranteed to be possible.

There are worse potential loopholes you didn't mention though.

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#226

Post by gsich »

Terr_ wrote: post #84
weberer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to be open source, you only need to provide server binaries to download. This was the standard until circa 2010. People were able to host dedicated servers themselves.

That would be an improvement over nothing, but closed-source means that the game is still going to die as soon as someone finds a security vulnerability (or even just a gameplay glitch) that can't be feasibly patched. Imagine an MMO where special text in the chat causes viewers' clients to crash, or a glitch exists to duplicate items or money, or where anybody can crash the server to run arbitrary commands.

Modern Warfare 2 and 3 have an unpatched RCE. Still available on Steam.

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#227

Post by summerlight »

georgeecollins wrote: post #40

It seems like the fair solution to this problem is to open source server code if you are going to cease support for an online game. That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to. I also really support giving 60 day notice if an online game is going to shut down. Places I have worked have had policies like that for games they are sun setting and I think the best game publishers th…

Many developers with good will actually tried that and gave up due to lots of problems. This is not just bad ROI but also a legal minefield. Engineers usually cannot argue against this kind of risks. Enforcing this will unlikely work in higher courts. Though something like open sourcing protocols for server reimplementation may have some chances.

While I see problems in the law but the spirit is reasonable. We need to push toward this direction. At least there should be difficult economical trade-off for publishers when they decide to shut down the game. Nowadays, some random executive just takes look into some excel, see some games have declining revenue and decides to "simplify the business" without much thoughts. This has to stop.

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#228

Post by gsich »

mjr00 wrote: post #57
georgeecollins wrote: post #40

It seems like the fair solution to this problem is to open source server code if you are going to cease support for an online game. That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to. I also really support giving 60 day notice if an online game is going to shut down. Places I have worked have had policies like that for games they are sun setting and I think the best game publishers th…

> It seems like the fair solution to this problem is to open source server code if you are going to cease support for an online game. That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to. It's nice in theory, but in practice many (most?) games are using middleware they don't have the rights to redistribute as open source. IIRC when the source code for Doom, the first major commercial ga…

Then don't. People will find a way to replace those.

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#229

Post by JacobKfromIRC »

Akronymus wrote: post #223
luxuryballs wrote: post #183

This makes the Minecraft model look all that much better than it already was, users pay for an account, the servers are self hosted by the community, as far as I can tell on the surface level Minecraft would already comply with this legislation.

Not quite, afaict. When the auth servers are shut down, you wouldnt be able to play it anymore, even in single player.

Does Minecraft's offline mode not work indefinitely? I'm not familiar with the official launcher but this article [1] doesn't say anything about needing to reconnect occasionally.

[1] https://www.practical-tips.com/games/play-minecraft-offline-...

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#230

Post by XorNot »

skullone wrote: post #155
pests wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I play SubSpace (a MMO spaceship game released in the 90s) to this day. It was shut down soon after release. The original server binaries were left on the original CDROM by a programmer. Then PriitK, a creator of Kazaa and then Skype and Joost!, went on to re-create the client due to cheating/hacking, naming it Continuum. Years later the server is reimplemented as A Small Subspace Server (ASSS), making it a complete…

Props for bringing up Subspace! What a fun game that deserves more players! (And a new client ui)

Yeah damn that takes me back.
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