121 分 | 作者 Brajeshwar 10小时前
15 条评论
- ryandrake 9小时前The goal is a good one, but it's too specific. It should not be allowed for a developer or device manufacturer to kill or nerf any product remotely, once it was bought and paid for. This problem is sneaking into other non-game software, and even physical devices! If you buy a thing you shouldn't need to tether that thing to the manufacturer, and it shouldn't be possible to make it useless when they decide to turn down a server.
As a developer or manufacturer, if your software or device absolutely requires a server that costs money to maintain, then your business plan should take that into account: You should be charging customers monthly to keep that service running. You shouldn't promise a one-time payment, take the customer's money and then yank the service away on a whim.
Nobody is asking for free labor to keep services running. I'm asking that you 1. only tether your product to a server if you absolutely need to, and 2. charge for that kind of product monthly so that you can leave it running while you still have customers. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
- StillBored 1小时前Part of this is simply fixed by a tweak to copyright that if the IP isn't available for sale at a reasonable price the copyright no longer applies. Games, books, movies, music, etc.
- emptybits 8小时前Tell gamers how many months, for the advertised price, they will receive a guaranteed level of service and features for.
Then let gamers decide.
Example: If I'm reminded, at purchase time, that this $70 game will work online for 24 months and single-player offline for 36 months, then I can make an informed decision before I buy. Studios would be forced to bring their business plan into visibility and be held to a level of service, and then gamers can't complain when a game is "switched off" according to plan.
This is already implied, just not explicit and quantified in advance.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a game that had early expiry of online already contemplated. And offline play should be rich and complete indefinitely. But I still live in the glorious console cartridge era in my head and in my emulators.
- DaSHacka 7小时前> Tell gamers how many months, for the advertised price, they will receive a guaranteed level of service and features for.
Companies would just default to saying "we reserve the right to shut off online connectivity at any time."
- ryandrake 5小时前Well, then prevent that via regulation, too. It fatalistic to say "Well, we just can't possibly regulate companies, because they will surely find loopholes and avoid the regulation!" The answer is to write better, more thorough regulation that prevents loopholes. That shouldn't be such a tall order!
- 1123581321 5小时前Just write a regulation that every game developer has to make a great game, not charge too much, support it for years, and give it away for free as soon as it's not popular. That way, we'll only have great games and archives of great free games.
- throwaway85825 3小时前'Great' is neither a legal or commercial term.
- protocolture 2小时前Then just regulate the term Great. You can regulate everything. Just send in the troops to force gamedevs to only make Red Alert 2, objectively the government derived best possible game. Any deviation from Red Alert 2 will be severely punished.
- ryandrake 2小时前Not sure what point this exaggeration is supposed to make. Just let companies do whatever they want and Buyer Beware?
- YurgenJurgensen 2小时前Force them to list an effective annual subscription fee more prominently displayed than any “purchase” price. If they can’t guarantee any level of service, the license is assumed to be valid for one day, and their game ‘costs’ thirty thousand dollars.
- Devasta 7小时前That's fine if "gamers" are my age, but 3 years for a 12 year old is an eternity. This isn't a thing which can be handled like the cookie consent popups.
- dylan604 6小时前Maybe the parental unit of said 12 year old should be involved in there somewhere
- datsci_est_2015 3小时前My lateral solution: don’t let the companies use the words “purchase” or “buy”, force them to use the words “rent” or “license”.
You can only use the words “purchase” or “buy” if you can install / move the files to a device that is completely airgapped from the internet and continue to use the product indefinitely. Extend it to movies and music as well.
Use established language to enable consumers to make an informed decision.
- 0x59 2小时前I like where you're going and obv industry will just have you buy a license
- datsci_est_2015 2小时前My hope would be rent / license would tend to have a lower value than purchase / buy, to compensate.
- anotherevan 2小时前I've been saying this about Amazon with ebooks, and DRM'd goods in general for years.
- CivBase 2小时前This is a good step, but it's not enough on its own. The core issue with game licenses is that they can be terminated at any time for any reason. There needs to at least be a well-defined timespan for the license. But of course that'd be seen as an "expiration date" and no publisher wants to put that on their game.
- datsci_est_2015 2小时前Well calling it a license in the first place is a strong step towards requiring an expiration as well. Licenses are rarely indefinite in scope, if I understand correctly.
- KolibriFly 8小时前Just don't design the game so that, when the business model stops working, every paid copy becomes a brick
- rolph 8小时前i remember when multiplayer games could be connected to a user operated server.
the basic function of a multiplayer server is to keep the players game state synched, large numbers of players, and very fast gameplay vs connection rate and jitter is fly in ointment.
- dpcan 9小时前I’m a devils advocate on this argument.
Yes, a big company can take it away, but I think they have to leave it online long enough to get your money’s worth.
So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.
- operatingthetan 8小时前>So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.
This example is humorously short and this is why there is backlash to game companies shutting down games. What about the people who bought it towards the end? They just get nothing? All that time and money spent just gets thrown in the trash because they don't want a cloud bill? They either need to opensource the games and servers or keep supporting them for a decade or longer.
- elondaits 9小时前Not everything is economic value. For gamers, an online game can be a community hub, part of their identity, a hobby. It’s not about whether they got their money’s worth, it’s about destroying a virtual “place” they’re emotionally and socially invested, and the specific skill they posses when they’re there.
- 0x59 8小时前I think this is the root of it and what the article describes in the first half. I suspect owning a copy of a game will soon be completely eliminated and replaced w the subscription model. Then when subscription dollars stop flowing, the company naturally winds down the service.
- RobotToaster 8小时前Counterpoint: UK law gives you six years to sue if goods are faulty or otherwise not as advertised, why should software be any different?
- knollimar 7小时前6 years seems pretty reasonable to expect servers to be up. And wouldnt bankrupt every company giving prorata refunds based on that %
- jayd16 9小时前Certainly we'll just move the fig leaf so the free online component of games are now part of a subscription.
Ideally a free subscription through packed in keys and such but we'll probably end up being nickel and dimed even further.
- vblanco 8小时前Every developer on videogames has some kind of offline mode already implemented, because its necessary to be able to playtest the game builds on the developer machines. Any argument against SKG is lobbyst nonsense. With the very specific exception of stuff like MMOs. We are seeing cases of pirates being able to play those "turned off games" through cracks and private servers, so there is absolutely 0 reason why the publisher cant already do it.
- Rohansi 48分钟前> Every developer on videogames has some kind of offline mode already implemented, because its necessary to be able to playtest the game builds on the developer machines.
Not guaranteed. Many just run a local server, either in-process or externally. Minecraft's singleplayer mode actually runs a server in-process internally. This simplifies development because singleplayer is conceptually the same as playing alone on a server.
This gets more complicated when there are infrastructure servers in the mix for things like player state, matchmaking, etc. You would bypass that in development but they are required for normal play while being external to the game server.
- danaris 9小时前So who gets to be the arbiter of how much time $70 is worth?
You?
The companies making the games?
Why should they get to destroy games—gone, forever, with no chance of retrieval or resurrection—that hundreds of people put their time and love into, and millions of people want to play, just because they think it'll make this quarter's stock price numbers look better?
Copyright was created to protect the rights of the creator for a limited time to promote the useful arts. Creations are supposed to become part of the public domain once the creator is no longer getting use out of them. Game companies want to break that bargain, scorched-earth style, and ensure that no one can ever use the things that they create to make anything new.
- 0x59 8小时前Why would you buy my new game if you're spending all your attention on the one I sold you 10 years ago?
- rolph 8小时前because you made an effort born of true craftsmanship, because you found the properties of the game that appealed to users and preserved them, instead of taking them away, or locking them into a premium paid tier version.
- danaris 7小时前Why should we let these kinds of concerns dictate what happens with our cultural heritage?
Why should profit be the first, last, and only consideration when it comes to deciding whether the art of today is even possible to view tomorrow?
- watwut 6小时前Why would you buy a new bool when old one did not burned out yet?
And you know what ... it is ok for people to buy a thing, keep having a thing and not being forced to buy entirely different thing.
- ChrisArchitect 8小时前Related on U.S. developments:
The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
- shmerl 4小时前Releasing source code for games (including server part) should help.
- amazingamazing 8小时前I imagine the end result will be another layer of online subscription.
- aogaili 4小时前Am I the only one finding the dependency on those videos games to be concerning?
- add-sub-mul-div 2小时前No. The people in the in-group you want to be a part of feel the same way.
- aogaili 42分钟前Sorry - I didn't get this comment? I mean isn't strange that people get to live in a digital reality that is dependant on a servers that could be taken down instead of being embedded in physical reality that we call life?
- sph 8小时前A lot of “yes, but…” in this comment section. Hard to tell if it’s HN playing contrarian as it usually loves to do, or just people so brainwashed they default to defending corporate interests.
Nothing makes me as hopeless for the future as reading people trying to one up the negativity about any initiative at all, and if no one did anything, they’d hit you with the snarky ‘go vote to make your voice heard instead of complaining’
It takes big balls to fight publishers and even more massive to fight the internet and the pseudo-intellectual snark of internet commenters. The entire SKG initiative has my support and perhaps it’s the only thing that might convince me that ordinary citizens actually have any say at all in directing legislation.
- Accacin 4小时前Yeah, I'm amazed that it's like that.
The "hacker" part now is completely lost on people. They just don't see the big picture, it isn't just about getting your money's worth. Some people spend their free time playing with other people they've only ever met online. Some people escape into a game after work. Relationships are built in these games, and when a game gets suddenly taken away with no recourse, it's a horrible feeling.
I can't find the best example, but this video is of a guy who plays these "dead" games and tries to find the people who are still playing, getting to know them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FEW7gxci2Q
Some of these people are just lovely, taking the time to show him around, teaching him the ropes. They're just happy that someone is playing the game. This all exists because the developers are still supporting these games. Take a look at the section about Blockland in the video I linked!
- junaru 8小时前You can't make a person see a problem if his livelihood depends on not seeing it.
In my gaming circles, people who work on SaaS solutions are against SKG even though they are avid gamers and even open source contributors. They just recoil on a thought of an EOL plan. Same on HN.
"Think of the indies" is just same old "Think of the children" astroturfing.
- knollimar 7小时前Or they have an indie game theyre "making" and being forced to build an EOL plan for a game that will statistically be a flop is silly to them.
I feel a carveout for total says, say $200k USD or less, would be reasonable. Otherwise you're just conscripting indie time.
I was working on a game, but I'm not looking forward to releasing updates everytime steam changes their relay. Considering scrapping multiplayer completely.
- sph 6小时前Indie game devs don't care about EOL plans because they're not building a game as a service.
If the indie game has multiplayer, it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages. No indie is setting up a proprietary autoscaling game server infrastructure on AWS that they will have to maintain for years and have an end-of-life plan for if the SKG initiative passes.
The only companies that SKG would inconvenience are AAA/live service studios. They have enough money to find a workable solution, or more likely, spend billions in lobbying against this initiative.
- dasyatidprime 3小时前> it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages
This is drifting some from the original specific topic toward the broader conflict, but, not for everyone involved, surely? Will the audience run your server binary, under normal circumstances? Or will they say “Wow, you couldn't even be bothered to put up some basic servers for free? Jeez, you're saying I have to set up a whole account somewhere else and pay them just so I can have a multiplayer game, or set up weird-looking technical shit on my computer that might expose me to hackers? Nobody else asks me to do this, what is this bullshit”? Of course there are intermediary options here (one of which I describe below), but those don't necessarily let you do the “we didn't want to be in the hosting business” plan straightforwardly, so you might still have to take on a lot of the fixed planning costs.
The incentive gradient among consumers tilting so hard in the direction of indefinite active support becoming table stakes seems to be a core part of the vicious cycle here. “I shouldn't have to set stuff up” implicitly cedes control; if they're not doing the coordination, then someone is, and that someone gets hidden responsibility and power without compensation or effective voice, which is an unstable combination by default. This is a similar issue to what happens with convenient, centralized, subsidized social media and chat platforms.
Minecraft is actually an interesting borderline case here: the player license authentication and name/appearance binding is all centralized, and that could suddenly go away and leave everyone in the dark, but individual world servers can be run independently and there are a number of third-party hosting businesses based on this. Microsoft later felt compelled to offer Realms as a first-party means of setup, but IIRC those do take a recurring fee so it's not in the same unstable zone. But then we have a separate issue where, as far as I can dimly tell, a lot of people started expecting “game companies do the work to keep us safe on Their Platform” as, again, table stakes, and so they implemented non-repudiable digital signatures in chat to allow people on non-centrally-hosted servers to still report each other's chat messages to central moderation, which I must assume is another ongoing cost. (In the modded world there are mods that strip this.)
- superkuh 9小时前Good cause, but society has rapidly moved passed them just switching off games after people bought them. Now the hardware production companies for gaming are winding down and not producing gaming computer parts because megacorp datacenter parts have a much higher margin. The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud; a context in which these "stop killing games" arguments will have much less leverage.
- nkrisc 9小时前Then I will simply stop purchasing games and continue to play old ones that I can run on my computer as I please, online server or just do something better with my time.
The whole thing seems absurd when you remember that no one needs video games. This doesn’t need to be legislated. Let them kill video games and then stop buying their video games if they’re just going to kill it off. Why are people still buying games that cash be killed off?
If enough people are still buying these games then clearly the game being killed off is not an important factor. If it was, they wouldn’t buy them.
What does need to be legislated is how these games and services are marketed: it must be made clear latest date the service is guaranteed to be up.
- trumpdong 9小时前This is a phase and data center parts are usable for gaming. (Yes even with all the rasterizer and texture units chopped off, we'll have a wrapper that does that work in compute shaders)
- mpyne 9小时前> The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud
That might be your future. But as long as there are computing platforms that users can run in their own home there will be games for them.
Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud, and their customers have proven willing to pay higher prices for the types of gaming experience Nintendo will deliver.
- xpct 9小时前Judging by the amount of people saying they've used and enjoyed cloud gaming I'm not as confident as you to make that claim. If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease.
I enjoy low-latency competitive games, and I'd say those are unlikely to get replaced by cloud, because many players notice latency spikes immediately. But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by people who like the feeling of owning their own hardware, or feel the need to have lower latency in games.
I'm sure if someone built a data center within two blocks of my home and I was able to stream from it, many of these issues would disappear as well.
- mpyne 6小时前> If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease.
Perhaps, but I never claimed otherwise. Simply that the personal devices that do exist will also have games for them. Computer games were here from the beginning, and they will be here in the end. And even personal devices that were chosen for non-gaming needs can play games, nothing requires games to run only on RGB-infested PCs.
> But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by
Yes, the market dynamics may certainly shift, but that's been the story for decades already. And if cloud gaming were going to be this immediately-better story, things like Stadia and Luna would have performed much better in the market.
I think people worry about the cost-efficiency of how to do gaming in a world where hardware is expensive, but the reason hardware is expensive is because it's being sucked up for AI usage, not for gaming usage. So cloud gaming will also necessarily be expensive by these terms, even if the average cost seems less for a cloud gaming subscription than owning your own PC or console.
- jayd16 9小时前Consoles already make you pay for online services. They already sunset games so I think even under the new rules they have the ability to stop that service at any time.
- superkuh 9小时前>Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud,
Consoles might as well already be cloud for all you control them. But I guess I should've specified PC gaming. I thought it was indicated from the context of "stop killing games". Also, to be clear, I'll never "cloud" game or use consoles. I'll just remain in the past with old hardware and old (and new indie) games. But the "PC gaming industry" as an economic block larger than movies is dying and that's a shame.
- KolibriFly 8小时前Hardware scarcity and cloud incentives are real, but they're also part of the same broader trend: more dependency on centralized providers, less control for the buyer
- vitalyan1234 8小时前fortunately, that's been already attempted and despite the best circumstances imaginable resulted in a much welcome failure.
>On September 29, 2022, Google announced that it would shut down Stadia, citing its lack of traction with users. The service was shut down on January 18, 2023, and Google refunded all purchases for hardware and games made through the Google and Stadia stores.
even more fortunately, further attempts will fail for the same reason - input lag.
- bpavuk 8小时前some timing-sensitive games such as Clair Obscur (parry) or I Am Your Beast (movement)? sure, they depend on low latency. that said, GeForce Now is, sadly, pretty good nowadays. enough to play a moderately fast paced game such as DEATHLOOP. Ukraine, streaming from Germany. 5 GHz is basically required, but in slower-paced games, on a phone, with 720p streaming, you can get by with 4G.
even games are not really a moat for owning hardware - next Gears with its timing-sensitive reloading mechanic can just get adapted for cloud.
if cloud gaming gets another hype wave for one reason or another, this time I am pretty sure they will lock in a much bigger user base. me personally? still committed to owning my hardware, but I can totally imagine my mother playing some RTS on a GeForce Now-connected tablet and having zero complaints.
- anankaie 7小时前Clair Obscur was perfectly playable for me through GeForce Now, for what it is worth, even when hitting parry timing. (N = 1, but a datum nonetheless)
- vitalyan1234 7小时前it is possible to adapt to input/network lag, sure. I played Doom 3 at 10-15 FPS in 640x480 and Warcraft 3 with 300ms latency, and I enjoyed it at the time, but I don't think I could endure such underwhelming experiences after many years of much better ones.
- bpavuk 6小时前honestly I'd still throw a penny for at least a day pass if I'm e.g. traveling. getting that Duollistes or Locust fix on a train looks irresistible
- tancop 9小时前we still got newer companies out of china like moore threads working on gaming gpus, they had to pause new production because of the whole ai shortage but it looks like they might restart. is it usable for any serious gaming right now? no. but its already fighting the nvidia/amd monopoly together with intel.
as long as there is a market the producers will come, even in a super capital intensive industry like this. and it looks like nvidia is partially going back on the whole data center push with rtx spark. its just one high end product but it shows they know a lot of people want local gaming and local inference.
- binkHN 3小时前I still miss Stadia.
- phyzix5761 8小时前Why California's New Save Our Games Bill Could Kill Indie Studios: https://arkvis.com/blog/2026-05-15_why-californias-new-save-...
- vblanco 8小时前Im a professional gamedev. There is pretty much no indie on earth who actually depends on cloud systems to work, because that stuff is expensive and indies dont have money. Thats a megacorp thing particularly from AAA publishers. Indies are either singleplayer (this is 0 problem) or they have local servers.
That article is paid for by the lobbysts and completely incorrect and wrong.
- Rohansi 28分钟前It's not just clouds systems. SKG might not cover it but what happens if Steam hypothetically shuts down? Many games are built on the Steamworks API for things like matchmaking and networking. Those will stop working if Steam is gone which could bring down many multiplayer titles with it, even if the games have local servers.
- cm2012 7小时前Two of my favorite games of all, Chivalry 2 and Hell Let Loose, are indie studio games and this law would make more expensive to make.
- vblanco 7小时前Im not sure for Hell Let Loose, but Chivalry 2 is a Unreal game and all unreal games come with a server.exe that works by default and works through direct IP connection. It would cost them 0 and im sure the game could just host servers with the normal client build like all unreal engine games do by default.
- zamalek 8小时前This the lobbyist's FUD, and SKG are so up-front with the reasonable constraints that it makes it pretty obvious that this is a paid piece.
Edit: oh, it's yours. Spend 5 minutes understanding exactly what SKG have said they are not asking for.
- knollimar 7小时前California AB1921 notably doesn't match those opinions.
- ajuc 8小时前> Now it becomes way more expensive for small studios to come out with games that have online features.
Good riddance. Online features suck. Make your game multiplayer or make it singleplayer. Don't add pointless online features.
PS all you need to make sure it works is release the server once you stop supporting it yourself.
> They rely on a huge network of interconnected cloud micro services.
Give people the docker file.
> A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.
That's more AAA stuff not indie.
- Rohansi 9分钟前> That's more AAA stuff not indie.
If they run it themselves, probably. Indies are more likely to use free services like Steamworks and Firebase which can be pulled out from under them for any reason.
- bethekidyouwant 7小时前Any sufficiently popular multiplayer Indy game gets ruined by cheaters.
- throwaway85825 3小时前Not a problem with private servers and offline reputation management.
- customguy 4小时前Here's an idea, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's not new: instead of forcing all game devs to ensure longevity, just make clear criteria for what constitutes that longevity, and developers that meet them (or promise to meet them when they shut down) can slap a nice bright logo onto their game. Something like the rating system, except it's a line that's only there for games that claim they are "yours forever". Steam would have a filter for it, and so on.
Then you can make the punishments/fines for breaking that promise draconian, since nobody has to opt in.
Most single-player games would have the logo out of the box, gamers would come to expect it for those, and take a good hard look at single player games that don't have it. With multiplayer games it would be more varied, but there would now be a very clear incentive to see if it might not be possible after all to do what is needed to get that label, especially if none of your competitors have it. And most importantly when planning new games, you'd double check every decision would disqualify the game for it.
- customguy 2小时前Is it just because some gamers are very irate or is this actually a bad idea? If so, how?
If someone wants to argue this position, I would challenge them to explain why anything around IP law exists as it does now if that was not the explicit goal.
I'm not saying the current system achieves that, but it is part of the justification.
I think we need to stop treating it as a dichotomy.
There's an understanding it won't last forever, when you buy a multiplayer game, ans making devs make offline versions in the cases where its trivial is going to bite indie game studios.
Gamers have repeatedly shown they dont like subs. Its hard to model "we want to charge you 40 cents per month, escalating with inflation" but thats what youre asking for
Pretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.
I'd be 100% for "if your game has an easily releasable server you have to release it on EoS" but this bill isn't it.
That should not be ok. It wasn’t sold with a disclaimer or expectation that it could be switched off.
I wish we could target this specifically.
I personally would just put like a $200k sales carveout and that would make me happy.
There's no need to "make devs make" anything. We'll do it ourselves. The corporations just need to stop getting in our way with their idiotic cease and desist letters and injunctions and legal threats.
There's no need for them to spend even one cent of their money or even one second of their time on the matter. They just need to do literally nothing. That's literally all they have to do.
This is a root problem, but you can't simply say "void copyright ownership" without crossing international lines.
It's an awkard international committee problem since you can't overwrite the centralized law.
Try stealing from 60 different corporations and see how that works out.
It's not stealing in that sense. You're enshrining "devs can't sell a 1 time payment license to an ongoing service" as a right and I simply disagree.
Your framing relies on devs not being allowed to sell this license. I don't think banning them is healthy.
If they marked the buy button "license" like California will soon mandate, would that suffice for you, or do you actually demand a perpetual experience?
Edit: also corps frequently short each other very slightly all the time. No one makes some outrage about small amounts like that.
It's also necessary to heavily punish any company that tries to leverage the legal system's expenses to financially ruin adversaries, especially individuals, by burdening them with the legal costs of defending themselves for the crime of exercising their rights.
These sorts of EULA should be flat out illegal.
And any and all EULAs or similar documents presented after a sale should be completely null and void. But any corporation attempting to that should be fined a signficant portion of their revenue. Past that, dissolution of company.
But no, we live in a shit society that someone who signs up for a demo of Disney+ and then has his wife die due to bad food, and they tried to slap indefinite arbitration on him.
https://lawreview.missouri.edu/infinite-arbitration-how-one-...
This whole country feels like one big fucking company store scam.
But I think there is an argument to be made that the EULA has no compensation. Since payment has already been made for the product, it's completely one sided.
For starters, the arbitration clause is designed to make sure that these cases never get to the supreme court. Lower courts see an arbitration clause and say "Thank god, I don't want to deal with this" and are more than happy to sweep cases that way to unload their docket. Once in arbitration, any ruling made has no precedent setting value. The arbitration process is itself designed to drive up legal costs.
But even if that arbitration clause wasn't there or a judge decides to hear the case, it's incredibly expensive to take someone to court. Hundreds if not millions of dollars in fees. The US doesn't have a "loser pay" system, instead both sides are responsible for their own legal fees. Further, the US doesn't have any sort of public civil litigators. We barely have criminal defenders.
The best case scenario is that some sort of class action is built up. But that's really hard and isn't likely to address the contract itself. Even if it does, it'll only be the one contract for the one manufacturer.
Big legal fees, limited applicability, likely burden shifting from public courts. The only way this gets addressed would be through regulation or new laws outlawing the practice.
2. It's not just a country. Sadly this is a worldwide problem, this is the global standard. And it's sickening.
And it makes these devices worse. I should be able to control my oven using a simple REST api and home assistant. The fact that in order to interact with my oven with a home assistant I first have to reach out to my manufacture servers is just insane. It's an oven. It only has so many sensors and nobs to twist.
About the only grace I give these manufacturers is the fact that google and apple both make it an annoying pain to maintain applications in their app store. A manufacturer can't simply drop "oven app" once and expect it to be available on the store forever. But that too should be solved with the same regulation that says "Ovens, refrigerators, washing machines, thermostats, and doorbells must not connect to the internet". We can teach the world about VPNs if they want remotely access their devices.
If the app doesn't use the Internet then the natural way to provision it is to have it pre-loaded on the device anyway. Why should the goal of "avoid needing to hit the manufacturer's servers" involve hitting Google's servers?
Imagine a highly complex online game that requires a few people and tens of thousands a month in cloud costs to keep it running. Now imagine that this game is 25 years old and only has 100 players total left. Are you saying that this developer must maintain the exact same quality of online play for 100 people?
IMO, the move from community servers over to matchmaking & vendor only servers being the only viable option was a huge disservice to the long-levity of games. If I find the code around here, I could still get a Tremulous server running today for a few bucks, even if I haven't played that game for 20+ years.
Solutions to this modern problem was solved during the dialup and LAN party era. None of those single player games required an online launcher.
3 is valid and can be tricky, as it would depend on when in the software lifecycle the release would be mandatory. If it's in a wind-down or bankruptcy situation, it would be tricky. Though that discussion is similar to the responsible disclosure discussion, isn't it? Exploiters usually already know them.
Not to mention open sourcing the code will subject the company to legal liability if there’s something weird in there like discrimination of some form.
Thats pretty easy actually.
All you have to do is go into the setting page on the git repo and change the settings from private to public.
I'm sure most game devs are able to figure that one out.
Everything else that resolves was that is merely consequences for which I have little pitty for.
What they're saying is (for games that would come out in the future only), is that they need to have an EoL plan for the game.
Let people host their own servers. That used to be a standard feature of multiplayer games.
This is what the post was saying:
1. No nerfing to the game/service whatsoever. This means you can't just kill online play. Ever.
2. Charge a monthly price or significantly increase the purchasing price.
Clearly neither of these are viable for most games and the game industry.
It had its server reimplemented by enthusiasts [1] with no access to this "one of a kind cloud" for decades now. Heck it even supposedly had game client ported to new engine [2].
> B-but we can't release the binaries due to licensing...
Release the source. As a developer you should be able to write code that allows to stub out all the propriety parts. The community will replace your speedtrees, matchmaking, netcode, anticheats and so on.
Change is hard we get it, but the excuses are on par with any other industry..
[1] https://www.getmangos.eu/
[2] https://turtlecraft.gg/remastered
Exactly!
If you ever want a clear demonstration of the phrase "litany of excuses", all you have to do is post online calling for a game company to provide any kind of post-sale support or user-friendly EOL plan for their game.
1. "Game companies don't make any money, so they can't provide any development support after the sale, which barely pays for initial development!"
2. "Game companies are under immense time pressure so they can't waste time on EOL plans or developing the server to be eventually severable and releasable!"
3. "Game companies cannot release the server binaries because of vague licensing reasons!"
4. "Game companies cannot release the server source code because of other vague licensing reasons and secret sauce IP!"
5. "Game companies cannot release the server source code because of cheating!"
6. "Game companies might not even have the server source code when it's time to EOL the online service! You can't expect them to save a backup!"
7. "The game company might shut down and that means they have to just suddenly pull the plug!"
8. "Servers are expensive and complicated to run, and surely the community wouldn't be able to do it!"
9. "The server source might not compile anymore, and surely the community wouldn't be able to fix it!"
You'll hear variations of these excuses and others whenever you suggest these guys lift even a finger to non-disruptively turn down their game.