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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

#441

Post by account42 »

furyofantares wrote: post #261
fluoridation wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of games have tacked-on online features to excuse the existence of the server to enable DRM, and a lot of multiplayer games arbitrarily don't offer a way for clients to double as local servers like in the heyday of arena shooters.

Sure, but the existence of such annoying things does not mean that's the only reason to use a client-server architecture and that it would only affect those games.

It's the main reason for keeping the server part away from players though.

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

#442

Post by account42 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #234
Dylan16807 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you plan for it from the start, it's a small cost. And the simpler the game development process the cheaper it gets.

It is not. Most of the full online game stacks are not open source and most of the open source ones are poor and under featured

A lot of things are costly until they become required by law - then vendors have no choice but making that part of the price they compete on.

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

#443

Post by account42 »

varispeed wrote: post #138
brobdingnagians wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And makes it more expensive. There is the seen benefit and then the unseen cost. Every game released will have to account for the possibility of it, and will create issues for people who really didn't want those issues. After awhile people will forget there are associated issues and costs, but they will still be there.

Middle ground could be completely open API from the start, so community could build alternative server from the ground up.

Having a documented API and the game actually abiding by it would probably be way more expensive than ensuring you can dump the source code on the community on end of life. The latter is only (sometimes) costly now because the industry is not built around it.

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

#444

Post by account42 »

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 is already common with source releases for games and it is much much much better than no source release at all. A lot of the proprietary middle ware ends up being not that hard to replace after all.

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

#445

Post by account42 »

JacobKfromIRC wrote: post #222
Nition wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "Wh…

Yes, partial source is still very useful. I don't think the law should allow for it though as companies could intentionally put as much as possible into "proprietary" libraries that they conveniently only license for binary distribution from a totally unrelated company that for no reason at all is owned by the same stakeholders. Much better to just require everything to be there and then have the industry adapt.

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

#446

Post by account42 »

mrgaro wrote: post #270
umvi wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better to just publish the protocols/APIs and let the community roll their own

Often, especially on competitive games, the server is basically a full client, but just without graphics. The server will often run physics simulations etc, so that it can validate that nobody is cheating. Sure, in some cases you can roll your own server, but often it's impossible.

Impossible is too strong of a word.

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

#447

Post by account42 »

watwut wrote: post #379
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…

> Legal had to verify that there was no licensed library code used Your company did not tracked libraries licenses in the first place?

Historically, the game industry often enough wasn't even able to track the final source code of their past releases.

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

#448

Post by account42 »

acdha wrote: post #410
watwut wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is actually something that a law requiring source code releases would end up improving though as those companies would be forced to standardize their licenses or find themselves without customers.

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

#449

Post by account42 »

guelo wrote: post #144
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…

If the bill is properly worded open sourcing the code shouldn't imply that all 3rd party libraries also have to be open sourced.

It should if it wants to prevent malicious compliance by spinning out essentially the whole server into a "third party" library.

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

#450

Post by account42 »

rahkiin wrote: post #377
wsve wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what commercial software licenses are you using to write backend server architecture for a video game? There's no need for a dependency on FMOD or anything (unless you're doing something very unusual)

Big AAA games have access to Unreal or Unity code and they change the code to fit their needs. They are not able to share the Unity/Unreal code

They are not able to share that code now because licensing the code in a way that it cannot be shared is currently a viable business model for Unreal and Unity - that would change with the proposed law and the middle ware providers will be forced to adopt different terms if they want to continue existing.
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