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Stop Killing Games

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Re: Stop Killing Games

#61

Post by cogman10 »

0xy wrote: post #35
ryandrake wrote: post #22

If I subscribe to a service for $M/mo, I expect that service to work as long as I pay for it. If the maintainer of that service decides to turn it off and no longer charge me money, then so be it. I subscribed with eyes open about the lifetime that $M got me. If I buy a product for $N one-time charge, I expect that product to work basically forever, until it physically breaks or wears out. I have woodworking tools ov…

Why do you deserve free labor from a game developer that you paid a nominal amount to 10 years ago, not to mention infrastructure costs. At no point did you purchase unlimited free online service forever, by the way. The game developer did not promise that, and you hold no contract with them mandating free labor and infrastructure perpetually. It's the equivalent of paying $10 to enter an all-you-can-eat restaurant a…

I purchased a toy that I expect to be able to continue playing with long after the company that made that toy loses interest in it. I don't expect the company to run servers for my toy, I can do that if they gave that opportunity.

The way the industry currently operates is you show up to an all you can eat buffet, pay your $10, and then they give you a 30 page contract that you have to sign before you can start eating. You are further SOL if you sign that contract at 4:40 and they decide "well, today we are going to close at 5pm because there's not enough people here. This isn't profitable to us".

Once upon a time, all games operated like this. I could buy half life and run a half life server locally and all my friends could play half life together without valve ever getting in the middle. That didn't cost valve anything to support that. It was all part of the price of purchase of half life.

Heck, for games like Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2, 3rd parties like MSN hosted their own 3rd party services for matching players together. We still hosted the servers, but MSN did the match making. And when they stopped that service, it didn't matter. We can still host and play DF2. Theoretically another 3rd party could start up to match make again.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#62

Post by mrguyorama »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #40

I'm confused, does the author (or prompter, it would seem) of this article really feel entitled to game servers running indefinitely?

I can still play Quake without Id spending any of their own money running servers.

That's literally all anyone wants

Community run servers were killed because there's a possibility the community run servers would let you play with content you (gasp!) didn't pay for, as happened with TF2, so they can't possibly let you have that option! If they don't get $6 for a texture file, the world will end!

And don't give me bullshit about "But they would have to put extra effort into building that", as if nearly every game server application provided to players has ever been anything other than a random exe file with no documentation and critical flaws that require third party hacks to fix. Pretty much anything built on Unreal or the Source game engine had a ready to go server by default, or with a checkbox.

Hell, even nothing more than a carveout in the DMCA to allow people to legally reimplement servers after shutdown would buy a lot of goodwill. This carveout is only needed because the DMCA dramatically limited your legal rights in respect to software products just a couple decades ago.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#63

Post by dijit »

F3nd0 wrote: post #50
dijit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a game dev myself, agreed. I’m guessing nobody here has ever actually tried to make games, let alone multiplayer ones. It’s not “oh just make it better” we’re usually already stretching the limits of what’s possible financially and time wise to get a working (fun) product. You can add burdens all you want, but that means the games get simpler.. because they can’t be made cheaper (price sensitive customers) and tim…

As not a game dev myself, may I ask for clarification? How does ‘Stop Killing Games’ legislation kill any sort of multiplayer games specifically? Aren’t there already games which don’t have the problem the movement is trying to solve? Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? I feel like I may have misunderstood your point or am just lacking a lot of important…

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 our own assets or certain code (they're on license for a single release) the second issue is how to release it.

First: the online backend for The Division or Destiny are just... not possible to run. The backend is fused to the products via a slurry of certificate pinning and object serialisation, with some things happening only on the server.

"Un-fusing" them is, basically impossible at this point; so the question is: can you build such a system without them being fused together in the first place?

The answer is: yes, but only by slowing down development. It would become much more about defining our boundaries and working on a "slim" version of the backend, or stubbing the backend completely. Obviously this is a lot of effort. The thing is we only barely managed to get a functional system, so adding an extra year for programming isn't going to be possible, we'll have to "cut" features that are hard to make.

"So, why don't you just release the server".

Well, that's a good question, we could remove the certificate pinning we have on the client, and the entitlement checks, stub out all the code that relies on third party APIs and give you a server binary.

But 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, or building things in a totally different way: which means "seamless" darkzones and safehouses becomes impossible.

THEN you have the issue of releasing a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product, which we already had a major issue with.

So, most likely, we just make single player games.

Honestly, the industry is moving that way anyway because unless you've been doing it for a while making multiplayer games is really hard from a game design standpoint and there's an ongoing operational cost which people are a bit too price sensitive to support.

That's why Massive released The Division 1 & Division 2 but then pivoted to doing single-player games like Star Wars and Avatar which only retains the most basic multiplayer elements.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#64

Post by applfanboysbgon »

F3nd0 wrote: post #56
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The literal next sentence after your quote was addressing the feasibility, of which it is clearly feasible because people actually are reverse engineering games at scale.

The point I was trying to make is that understanding and modifying software to do your bidding is significantly more feasible if you already have the source code than if you have to reverse-engineer it yourself, to an important degree.

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!!!

Re: Stop Killing Games

#65

Post by promano »

jl6 wrote: post #46
xmprt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> redistribute copies I read this more as game sharing. For example, say I buy a game and my friend also wants to play the game. In the past, I could just give them the disk and we both enjoy it. But today, with DRM and one use keys, this isn't possible. The game industry survived 20 years ago so there's no reason it can't survive without DRM and with sharable keys.

Game budgets were a lot lower 20 years ago, so maybe modern AAA games with $100m+ budgets can only exist in a world where every possible customer can be maximally shaken down.

Maybe we need a separate campaign, "Kill Games": any games whose existence requires players being "shaken down" should not be allowed to exist.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#66

Post by saghm »

zuzululu wrote: post #60
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/

WTF! That is impressive there is OSS Gothic 2 I wonder if its legal, how is it MIT

Presumably from the same methodology they laid out in the parent comment: clean-room reimplementation of the code is fair game, and you have to bring-your-own-assets (ostensibly from a legal copy of the original game, but however you do it is your own choice, not anything the people providing the free code need to be concerned with).

Re: Stop Killing Games

#67

Post by dpoloncsak »

F3nd0 wrote: post #30
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.

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

Re: Stop Killing Games

#68

Post by figmert »

john_strinlai wrote: post #31
figmert wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article mentions, these arguments are basically all the arguments of the FSF, and everything Richard Stallman pushed for since the 80s. So yes, there has been plenty of thought, scrutiny, improvements, etc. 40 years of it in fact.

> So yes, there has been plenty of thought, scrutiny, improvements, etc. 40 years of it in fact. what percent of businesses follow the FSF freedoms and turn a profit? i would love it if i could get all my games for free, and legally give additional copies to all my students, family, and friends. but the developers pumping out those games probably want to see some sort of return more substantial than whatever trickles…

Not really my point. My point is more that you suggested no one has thought about this, but yes, they have.

To answer your question, there have been plenty of business who have created and published free software (albeit plenty have later closed them). Notable examples are Databricks, Hashicorp, Mongodb, RedHat.

Sure they've built a moat on top of their free software, but they have (or had) free software regardless.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#69

Post by fragmede »

dijit wrote: post #63
F3nd0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As not a game dev myself, may I ask for clarification? How does ‘Stop Killing Games’ legislation kill any sort of multiplayer games specifically? Aren’t there already games which don’t have the problem the movement is trying to solve? Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? I feel like I may have misunderstood your point or am just lacking a lot of important…

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…

> 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.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#70

Post by dijit »

fragmede wrote: post #69
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…

> 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.

Community backlash will be fierce if it's not actually runnable.

Ubisoft doesn't have the most stellar reputation for example (I don't work there anymore) so people look at things we do by accident as if they are intentionally malicious.

Also, the California law is one law, the EU is also looking at this and it's likely to look different - that's why "Stop Killing Games" doesn't really mean anything yet, even people within the movement have differing definitions.

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