“but black dynamite!.. i sell drugs to the community!”
I think people are overestimating what this petition is going to do. It will likely just end up in a response from the EU listing pros and cons but effectively saying “can’t really do anything about it, sorry!”. It’s still good, even MMOs have server software gaming companies could release if legislation forced them instead of causing fandoms to die. Games are culture. They may also be entertainment, but that’s culture as well. But I wouldn’t hold out hope.
Well when the choice is anti consumer, too fucking bad.
Anti-murder laws are cuttailing my choice! What if I someday would like to make a choice to murder someone?
Yes! When I read that, I immediately thought “curtailing developer choice is exactly the point.”
It needs way more people, because I guess a lot of people from all over the world used VPNs to sign the petition and will get nullified.
So if you planned to do it, don’t, you will hurt your goals more than you’re doing an good.
Copyright was invented so artists would be able to sell their art, and more art would be made.
When copyright is protected on a product that’s no longer sold, less art is made.
When a copyright holder stops selling their art, copyright protections should immediately cease, and they should be responsible for copyright obligations - releasing the source code to the public. Use it or lose it!
This is the most level headed approach to IP I’ve seen. If you’re not willing to use the property you forfeit it. It’s a common contact for licensing rights for movies that forces a studio to make a movie or lose rights. That way people can’t squat on a licence to prevent others using it.
A good book on this is: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig
Sony has to make a Spiderman movie every few years even though DVDs of the old ones are still being sold, but Ubisoft can just delete games forever and they can never be played again.
“… curtail developer choice” - This from a bunch of people for whom the term ‘executive meddling’ was created.
Sounds like they just put together a bunch of meaningful sounding words. I know what they want to say though: "Noooo! But mah freedumbs! NOOOO 😭 "
Uh, yeah, that’s the point of all regulations. To make you not pick bad things.
Developer choice, ha-ha, very funny. I am not familiar with the industry and still feel safe to bet most of them (edit: actual software developers making games) just want to get enough money for doing what they can do without too much stress/disgust and also most of them don’t have a desire to see their work die just because some manager decided it is time to make some other games instead
I bet they’re really pissed off with ubisoft right now. They basically started this whole movement by being so egregious with The Crew. Less than a month before they shut the servers down the game was still on sale for the full price that it had launched with.
Granted it was shut down because it was the most mediocre game ever made but that still isn’t an excuse.
Tbh when I read of it, being an open world driving game where you can just drive around a very large area, I kind of wanted it. Not as a game, but simply for driving around. MarioKart is too happy for that. I just want to get lost in thoughts while driving.
Forza Horizon is good for that experience
Gran Turismo has similar stuff and is just better as a driving sim game.
Whenever a large games company talks about “developer choice” you know they’re referring to one of a few things:
- Think of the shareholders!
- Think of the rich CEO who adds zero value to the company!
- The people don’t know what they want and therefore we need to tell them exactly what they want and need!
This initiative sure would make things more complicated for the game publishers, yes.
Because they’re currently not doing the bare minimum.
If they weren’t so accustomed to not doing the bare minimum, maybe they would have different opinions! Just saying.
Edit: Just signed the petition. Didn’t think this was necessary before because, as soon as I heard of it, Finland was already top of the list percentage wise. But I did sign it, just for the hell yeah of it.
It’s not just for the hell of it!
Invalid votes will be removed when it’s time for the final tally, so the initiative needs a solid buffer to still he over a million after.
There’s been a talk of some people using bots to inflate the numbers in a misguided attempt to help the initiative, so every vote is still very welcome.
Also, I kinda want to see just how high Finland can go above the threshold.
Tell your friends!
I wouldn’t be surprised if the game industry isn’t also using bots to inflate the numbers to make people procrastinating not feel the need to contribute and make the petition look less valid.
Eh, doubtful. The initiative got a shitton of extra coverage as it was nearing/reached the goal. They would have preferred if it went a lot slower.
Major game publishers aren’t known for their good ideas.
I agree wholeheartedly and I also signed late while being Finnish.
Companies would still be cutting flour with chalk if they had their way. “It’s limiting blah blah blah” that’s the point you corpos, consumer rights are about the consumer not the bottom line
Not to mention that studios like Larian have proven that it’s entirely possible to make a blockbuster game without teams of 400 heads, changing direction and leadership every few years and laying off the people who made the product in the first place. They really seethed at that one, so many salty comments lol.
Larian has six studios and over four hundreds of employees. They are not as big as Ubisoft of course, but they are still very much an AAA game studio.
But they got that big by doing what the previous poster said
So did many of the other big AAA devs, then they changed. You’re not making any point at all. And don’t get me wrong, what Larian has done is amazing, and the response from the rest of the AAA game studios is both hilarious and depressing, but sadly not surprising. Most AAA studios got big by doing good, they wouldn’t have gotten that big otherwise. But then either new people came in an fucked them up or the ones already there got greedy and lost touch with reality, it’s the same with many other things.
Larian has close to 500 employees across studios in seven different countries. They’re definitely the good guys (at least for now), but they are not an example of a small indie studio.
BG3 being DRM-free and playable indefinitely also demonstrates that you can have plenty of success and not break your own product to do so.
Totally agree but the person they’re responding to implied they were some scrappy indie production. Ex33 (there are caveats/asterisks here but still) is a much better example. I think at its peak the whole team was like 40 people with hired hands.
They did not, they said you can be successful without corpo overhead and bullshittery.
Not to mention that studios like Larian have proven that it’s entirely possible to make a blockbuster game without teams of 400 heads, changing direction and leadership every few years and laying off the people who made the product in the first place. They really seethed at that one, so many salty comments lol.
Show me on the doll where that comment said Larian is an indie developer. Saying that they lack corporate interference does not equal claiming that they’re an indie team.
There’s this neat thing between indie devs and AAA corporate studios called AA. Big enough to fund larger projects than indie devs while being small enough to usually still be private companies that aren’t beholden to investors and therefore can take larger risks than the AAA devs are allowed, letting them make the games that they would want to play. CD Projekt RED and FromSoft both fit into this category as well, though all 3 companies are getting big enough to potentially start being considered AAA studios.
History taught us that corpos would literally burn the world for a few more bucks. And by history, I mean right now.
Businesses would bring back slavery if we let them.
They don’t really need to bring it back, it’s always been there, just in other countries
Lol. We’re gamers. We know that if we encounter enemies we’re going in the right direction.
Still trying to find the right direction on animal crossing.
Towards the bees!
paying your debts. The game breaks as it cannot speculate anymore on your debt
This is just pure fabricated bullshit. They themselves started limiting options. Remember the old days where you could host your own server with basically any game? They took that away, not us. So they themselves are 100% responsible for this ‘uprising’. Besides they could just provide/open-source the backend and disable drm. Hardly any work at all.
But of course it’s not about that. They just try to hide behind this ‘limits options’ argument. But they simply don’t want you to be able to play their old games. They want you to buy their latest CoD 42.
I remember the “old days”. That was when dialup internet was still popular and running a server usually meant it was on your 10Mb LAN. When we got DSL it was better and you could serve outside your LAN. This was also the time when games had dark red code booklets, required having a physical CD inserted or weirdly formatted floppies (sometimes a combination of these). You could get around these things and many groups of people worked hard at providing these workarounds. Today, many of these games are only playable and only still exist because of the thankless work these groups did. As it was and as it is has not changed. Many groups of people are still keeping games playable despite the “war” that corporations wage on them (and by proxy on us). Ironically, now that there is such a thing as “classic games” and people are nostalgic for what brought them joy in the past, business has leapt at this as a marketing opportunity. What makes that ironic? These business are re-selling the versions of games with the circumvention patches that the community made to make their games playable so long ago. The patches that publishers had such a big problem with and sought to eradicate. This is because the original code no longer exists and the un-patched games will not run at all on modern hardware and the copy-protections will not tolerate a virtual machine. Nothing has changed.
We can even go back as far as when people first started making books or maps that had deliberate errors so that they could track when their work was redistributed. Do the people referencing these books or maps benefit from these errors?
Why do some of us feel compelled to limit knowledge even at the cost of corrupting that knowledge for those we intend it for (and for those long after who wish to learn from historical knowledge)?
Let’s be real, open sourcing it isn’t “hardly any work”. All the code has to be reviewed to make sure they can legally release it, no third-party proprietary stuff.
Oh but with the new rules they could do that before making their code work that way. The idea is not for the new laws to apply retroactively but for new games.
I think your response is coming off as kinda “oh just do it different”. But that still means an entire industry of people are going to have to change how they make things. (And still spend time and money evaluating things at the end, just to be sure nothing slipped through.) I’m in favor of this at least being looked at and honest conversations happening, (which will not happen without this.) But there will certainly be an adjustment period where people on ground level learn and develop new “best practices”. And invariably someone will screw up. The companies are obviously only worried about money. They’ll get over it, is my opinion. But I think it’s worth communicating that we all understand new government regulation is likely going to be a pain in the ass. We just think it’s worth the pain/money. And that’s open sourcing or just creating a new mode for offline play in everything.
But that still means an entire industry of people are going to have to change how they make things.
Companies do that all the time in response to government regulation. You like seat belts and backup cameras in your car? No sawdust in your food? Transparent pricing when buying internet access? Government regulation. None of those companies went out of business.
This is exactly why I said:
But I think it’s worth communicating that we all understand new government regulation is likely going to be a pain in the ass. We just think it’s worth the pain/money.
When starting a new game, don’t include that stuff. Not including proprietary stuff without meeting the licensing requirements is already a step in the process.
There is a reason it’s included though. Stuff like fmod, bink video etc. does complicated things that you otherwise need to implement yourself.
When the law passes, the owners of proprietary functionality will adapt their licensing to meet the requirrments or go out of business when everyone stops using them.
Look I get it. The planet is dying, income inequality, it seems everything is unfair and going to shit. People yearn at an opportunity to help make things better. But yelling for simple solutions is the opposite of helpful. Because there are no simple solutions.
Saying to “just open source it” does not make sense.
What do you do about:
- proprietary codecs
- proprietary software that just does not exist as open source
- the fact you need a copy of the game engine to actually build the game from sources
- assets that have been bought on asset stores. Do the people who make those for a living not have a right to continue to make a living?
Making single player games without always online DRM: yes totally doable
Running game servers of online games forever: not really doable, as soon as all the libraries etc. they depend on are unsupported they will shut down one way or another. You need staff basically forever. Not even mentioning the maintenance headache that every legacy system always turns into.
Letting people run their own dedicated servers: sometimes doable, depends on the game though. Some games do not have “a server” but a whole infrastructure of stuff, look at foxhole. Some “servers” are a house of cards barely held together by duct tape.
This initiative all comes down to the definition of “reasonable”. What is reasonable, actually? Running an infrastructure at a loss until bankruptcy? Or just keeping it online until it starts making a loss.
This has nothing to do with open source.
Nothing.
Open source has zero relevance.
None whatsoever.
Nada.
Their licensing will change so that it doesn’t restrict keeping the game alive after servers go down or their license can’t be used to kill an otherwise functional game. That’s it.
Games will be designed to include the ability to do private servers after the company servers go down. It will be a cost of development just like anything else they are required to do. If they don’t want to include that, then they can choose not to make an online game.
“That stuff” is often core to the game. Any anti-cheat library, for example. On the client site, libraries like physx, bink video, and others are all proprietary and must be replaced and tested before it can be released in a working state. Few companies would release a non-functional game and let reviewers drag them through the mud for it.
None of those things will be affected because this isn’t about making games open source. It is about making games that have a design that allows them to potentially function indefinitely instead of allowing the companies to design them with planned obsolescence like tying single player games to server verification.
So you’re telling me that this could disrupt the anti-cheat industry, which is currently responsible for a lot of the Windows platform lock in the gaming industry and is tied to a lot of potential security vulnerabilities because it goes to a much higher level of privilege than a reasonable user would expect a game to need? I already wish I was in the right geographic area to sign, you don’t need to sell me on it twice!
Anti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games. No one wants to play a game against cheaters since they typically have an unfair advantage. If you can’t combat cheating then you might as well not make the game since no one will want to play it. Fine by me since I don’t care for such games but I could imagine people who like playing them might prefer to play against as few cheaters as possible. What are the alternatives?
Battlefield and cod have cheaters running rampant in their official servers despite using anti cheats. They could employ a team to monitor cheating reported by players. But clearly they just don’t want to expend resources to combat that.
EvE Online doesn’t use root access anticheat software. I know it doesn’t because it runs on Linux just fine. That particular player base is the worst hive of scum and villainy that you’ll find outside of government. Clearly the anticheat software isn’t as essential as game studios would have you believe. The only major cheating I’m aware of in EvE was the BoB scandal, and that involved Devs cheating because they were Devs.
Can the EvE online method be applied to dissimilar games like e.g. fps games?
Anti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games
Client-side anti-cheat is useless. It’s not a necessary evil, it’s just evil. The minute the cheater/hacker has direct access to the system, you’ve already lost.
Much like every form of security measure, the intention is not to completely eliminate the possibility of an attack (which is impossible in most cases). Instead, the intention is to increase the amount of effort that’s required to make an attack.
So just don’t let them join/kick them from your server?
Before you can do that, you need to determine whether someone is cheating. This is the purpose of anti-cheat software.
This is why code should be written to be library-agnostic. Or, rather, libraries should be written to a particular open source interface standard to make library agnosticism easier.
It’s just one possible solution. They can just release a proprietary server application instead.
It will be hardly any work once a law passes, because they’ll make sure it is. Everyone knows where the proprietary code is. It doesn’t just get merged in “by accident” unless you are a really shit developer (and to be fair some are).
Besides, no one is saying they have to open source it. To be honest, the outcome from this petition that I would most like to see is simply a blanket indemnity to the community attempting to revive, continue and improve the software from that point forward. If the law says that it’s legal once a software is shut down, for the community to figure out a way to make it work again and make it their own, and puts no further responsibilities on the “rights holder” at all, I think that honestly solves the problem in 99% of cases. It would be nice if they gave the community a hand, released what they could, and tried not to be shit about it, (and I know some of them will be shit about it, but we’re pretty resourceful), as long as they’re not trying to sue every attempt into oblivion I think we’ll make a lot of progress on game preservation and make the gaming world a much better place.
Everyone knows where the proprietary code is. It doesn’t just get merged in “by accident” unless you are a really shit developer (and to be fair some are).
Heh. You are still overestimating the average developer. Random code gets copy-pasted into files without attribution all the time. One guy might know, but if he gets moved to a different team, the new guy has no idea. That can be a ticking legal time-bomb.
Again, if you know going in that is an absolute requirement, processes can be put in place to ensure things like that doesn’t happen. (at least not as often) vs what you’re thinking of trying to do it after the game is already shipped.
That’s why i also said provide, not just open source. They can release a binary.
Maybe they should have made sure their code was fully legal to use before releasing the game initially
What? There’s a big difference between “legal to sell as a compiled binary” and “legal to release as source”.
Just saying, if my highschool programming classes are any indicator, there’s a ton of released binaries out there that use copywritten and otherwise plaigarized code
And that’s one of the big reasons companies don’t even think about open-sourcing their code.
honestly with online only games i’d be “okay” (not that it’d be great but okay) with them just releasing a bunch of internal docs around the spec. you’re right that open sourcing commercial code is actually non-trivial (though perhaps if they went in knowing this would have to be the outcome then maybe they’d plan better for it), but giving the community the resources to recreate the experience i think is a valid direction
Bold of you to assume such spec or docs exist. Usually it’s all cowboyed and tightly coupled, with no planning for reuse.
Cool, so after they are legally required to then they will start creating the documentation.
The point is making them change how they do things when how they do it is shitty for consumers.
I’m speaking from ignorance but isn’t the server backend often licensed and they couldn’t release it if they wanted, even as binaries? Granted, going forward they’d have to make those considerations before they accept restrictive licenses in core parts of their game. And the market for those licenses will change accordingly. So there core of your argument is correct.
lots of licensed or bought code in development in general, but knowing that you’ll have to provide code to the public eventually, means that you’ll have to take this into consideration when starting a project.
Which is doable, but is additional time and money.
Making games online is also additional time and money.
Yes, but that’s immediately profitable, which is why so many companies do it.
codifying in law that your customers must be able to run a server for your game, when you stop running them has the consequence, that you’ll have to buy licenses that allow you to give binaries or code for those things to your customers. every middleware or library that does not allow that won’t be a viable product anymore. It’s not more dev work, it will change how licensing in game development for middleware and such will be done.
Why would coding something with less restrictions take more time and money?
Because you can buy other people’s code for cheaper than developing it yourself, as long as you use it within the restrictions of the license you paid for.
The thing is either that license model changes, or those other companies selling the code cease to exist when nobody buys something they can’t use.
It doesn’t, that’s why companies rarely open-source their code. If you want to publish it you have to make sure you have all the rights to do so, you have to code in a way that’s readable for outside users, you have to make sure people can reproduce your build process, and ideally you provide support.
On the other hand, if you’re not developing the source for publication, you can leave undocumented dirty hacks, only have to make sure it builds on your machine, and include third-party proprietary code wherever you want. That’s faster and cheaper, so naturally companies will prefer it.
There’s no requirement that the open source code released after EoL has to be pretty or maintained, just functional to meet legal requirements. Using other 3rd party code would be a hurdle to get over I suppose. It would definitely take a different approach to design, but after the initial shock of changing, it wouldn’t be more difficult to do long term.
Maybe so, but that’s a decision they make. Surely I as customer shouldn’t be taken away what i paid for because of that? And if so they should have mentioned clearly upon sale that they would take away my product after 3-4 years (though maybe that’s the case in those dense ToS?) . Everything else should be considered illegal and fraudulent if they planned/knew it from the start. Which is the case if it’s a licensing issue
Besides, I’m pretty sure after those 4 years the code is outdated and they could renegotiate the license to be more open to release a binary.
