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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

#401

Post by tyleo »

grayhatter wrote: post #361
tyleo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, the obstacles are mostly legal. Our development team would love to just throw the code on GitHub.

so a new law making it required would likely solve the legal issues, and gets the dev team (the only ones thinking about users or doing what's right) get what they wanted from the start?

I doubt it. I don't think another law _reduces_ legal issues. If anything it makes the situation more complicated. The plug is still getting pulled and I don't think this materially changes the outcome. If the company shuts down I'm not sure there is a legal obligation to release the code or refund. What entity would be responsible for that work?

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

#402

Post by tyleo »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #389
tdeck wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how this would play out in the case that the company paid to license some software component that they can't open source.

Issues like that are part of why the law is only going to apply to new releases. If you still choose to license something you can't release later, and it's critical to the game's operation, then that's a deliberate liability and you'll need to replace it.

That sounds like a bad incentive. Lots of games license software like Photon to run game servers. For many games, building something like that is a non-starter.

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

#403

Post by tyleo »

grayhatter wrote: post #359
tyleo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded. We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.

> We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded. This doesn't actually answer the question about how hard it would be. What's the specific level of effort required, and some amount of why so people can learn from your experience. > We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline…

The answer is, "not trivial but easy enough that smart players can probably do it."

To each their own on what they want. We obviously can't give everyone everything. Players don't want the game to go away at all. We still talk to players every day and have confidence we are doing the right thing with our limited time.

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

#404

Post by tyleo »

Fabricio20 wrote: post #182
tyleo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded. We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.

Anything you can add to the knowledge pool is already going to be of immense help for your community reverse engineering in the future. Be it as simple as stuff like "Our in-game chat runs over IRC" for example - that already simplifies that entire part of figuring it out of machine code out once servers are gone. ANY knowledge you can share no matter how small it is always helps when all you have is a binary file an…

Yeah, we published some protobuf schemas on GitHub so players can decode some of our binary protocols more easily.

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

#405

Post by tyleo »

LightHugger wrote: post #274
tyleo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subsidiary is what I was thinking too. Imagine you were just some indie dev freelancing and all of a sudden you have a big shutdown bill.

the idea of a "shutdown bill" is absurd and irrelevant to the law being discussed unless you are a scammer being forced to refund people.

I’m not sure what you mean. If you shut down a game and a law demands extra work to stand up a F2P server, who pays for that work? That’s the “shutdown bill” I’m talking about.

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

#406

Post by darkwizard42 »

kube-system wrote: post #106
darkwizard42 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately consumers can then make a better choice, to simply drop those subscription based games.

They could, but there is very little evidence to show that a dislike for subscription models outweighs people's desire to consume quality content. Evidence is strong that people follow the content they want, and then secondarily choose the least friction delivery model.

As others have echoed, I think a subscription model is FINE for a game IF you are upfront about that being the cost. I suspect many customers are frustrated when they purchase something and then it is simply not able to be used when the developer feels like it.

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

#407

Post by quickthrowman »

mrandish wrote: post #85

I doubt it's possible for legislation to mandate meaningful compliance regarding something as dynamic and rapidly evolving as online games. Despite good intentions, such legislation often results in unintended consequences including distorting the market, creating perverse incentives or even making the problem worse. Serious problems are already apparent. Games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription." a…

> Serious problems are already apparent. Games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription." aren't regulated, which will greatly accelerate the death of perpetual licensing. A world where no games are available for outright purchase and offline use would be disastrous for players and historical preservation.

Either it’ll go this way, or you’ll get the client for free and it’ll cost $(full game price) to create an online account. Free client means no refunds, thanks for playing!

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

#408

Post by pointlessone »

Thaxll wrote: post #167
pointlessone wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the insurmountable obstacles to releasing the server code for the community to run?

Do you think any compagny would want to release some very sensitive / secret sauce code?

I dunno, is it that special?

Take I’d for example. They released source code for genre defining extremely popular games and were fine.

And how often is code reused anyway? Every online game seem to either use mostly stock server code that comes with the engine or build anew every time.

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

#409

Post by braiamp »

knollimar wrote: post #352
braiamp wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, and why you think that would be? Because games were like this before. Small and big. There are even modern games that are like this.

What does an indie game that's starting to get a little bit of funding from sales do? You know, the way they take off and quit their jobs, deliver excellence, etc. Do they now have to throw that money into an endowment in case their game starts failing and they can't afford servers? (enough to cover the time to patch in a local update). Take all the games that started being able to make multiplayer with the steam SDK…

Dude, your entire argument is welfare for the software makers, not fair business practices. You want developers to continue externalizing the cost of architecting their game in such a way that hosting is expensive for them. Consumers do not care about that and also shouldn't. This law actually would prevent you from doing such boneheaded financial decision. The consumer shouldn't be holding the bag because you thought you needed to design a web of microservices for what is just minecraft. Nobody is stopping you from making a multiplayer game. The law is stopping you from making one that no one can afford to keep running.

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

#410

Post by acdha »

watwut wrote: post #399
acdha wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that there might be a difference between knowing which licensed libraries you used and verifying that your usage of them fully complied with the current license terms when releasing the source code. For example, licensing a library for binary distribution might not cover releasing a copy of a header file, modified copy of something you got from support before a bug fix made it into a release, some random uti…

This is a non problem. We use libraries with standard licenses and there is finite set of them - like 4. And I work on fairly large software. If your company has issue achieving this, then it was simply not complying with those licenses. You can go through all licenses just by checking their list in maven. None of that is hard or expensive.

We have considerably more than 4, some of which are custom works of companies which have been selling under their terms since the 80s. No, I don’t think it’s a huge problem but if you have a lawyer who doesn’t at least want to check, you need a better lawyer.
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