I am out of the loop but it seems like a topic to once again promote my age old belief that:
The moment purchased or licensed software is no longer serviced or supported it must become open-source.
No exception. I am still waiting on the firmware to reprogram my smartish oven.
I’d go even further: developers ought to be required to submit reproducible builds to the Library of Congress in order to be eligible for copyright in the first place.
(And copyright ought to be shortened back to its original term length, by the way.)
Sadly, even if I’m moralistically in favor, there is so much insane computer science logic (and proprietary mechanisms) behind the process of compilation, especially on certain embedded systems where this issue comes up, that I doubt that could ever be pushed into law.
I understand it’s easy for a layperson to have that opinion, but I don’t think it can be hand-waved away as too difficult when people are actually doing it.
It being possible for some is quite literally you using an anecdote to try and prove a norm. I sincerely hope you have enough logic skills to understand why that is stupid, incorrect, and bad logic…
This doesn’t make sense as the compilers would also be included in this new copyright scheme and would become public property after so much time.
There are open source compilers for all major CPU architectures. In fact the open source compilers regularly outperform the closed source ones. It’s also not exactly that difficult to add on more architectures to an existing compiler these days thanks to the modular way modern compilers are built. Once you build a backend for LLVM you unlock not just one language but about a dozen.
This reminds me of warzone 2100. After its publisher (punpkin) ceased trading, some dedicated ex-employees and community members managed to liberate the source code in 2004.
Now it’s available in some of the major distros and is still updated to this day.
Boy, it was frustrating to see Thor completely misrepresent the position of the campaign. It wasn’t “vague enough to also include live service games”; it purposely includes them.
I’ve been a big fan of Thor since his first shorts boom, but this take is a massive fucking L from him that I’m very sad to see.
Honestly him calling Ross a “greasy used car salesman” really hurt to see. I didn’t take Thor as the type to insult someone like that simply for disagreeing with him.
Kind of makes me wonder if his whole nice guy thing is an act. Either way it calls into question the person I assumed he was.
I’ve heard reference to that and Thor backpedaling calling it ‘car salesman logic’ or something. Do you know where the clip is?
It was on stream, so hopefully someone recorded it and uploads it.
In this video though, at the very end, this guy shows another clip that I haven’t been able to find of Thor reacting to one of Ross’ comments and… well I can’t think of a better word than melting down tbh.
He’s showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn’t make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.
Ross wrote a response to Thor’s in the comments of this video, but it’s a bit buried. I’ll include Thor’s for context as well:
Thor:
I’m aware of the process for an initiative to be turned into legislature much farther down the road after many edits. If people want me to back it then the technical and monetary hurdles of applying the request need to be included in the conversation. As written this initiative would put a massive undue burden on developers both in AAA and Indie to the extent of killing off Live Service games. It’s entirely too vague on what the problem is and currently opens a conversation that causes more problems instead of fixing the one it wants to.
If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just “videogames” as stated in the initiative. Specifically call out the practice we want to shut down. It’s a much more correct conversation to have, defeats the actual issue, and stops all this splash damage that I can’t agree with.
Ross’s response:
@PirateSoftware I actually wasn’t planning to write to you further since you said you didn’t want to talk about it with me and I’ll still respect that if you’d like. But since you brought up what I said again I’ll at least give my side of that then leave you alone:
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I’m 100% cynical, I can’t turn it off. I wasn’t trying to appeal to legislators when I said that, I doubt they’ll even watch my videos. I was trying to appeal to people who are are kind of doomer and think this is hopeless from the get-go. I wanted to lay out the landscape as I view it that this could actually work where many initiatives have failed. Did it backfire more than it inspired people? I have no idea. I’ve said before I don’t think I’m the ideal person to lead this, stuff like this is part of why I say that; I can’t just go Polyanna on people and pretend like there aren’t huge obstacles and these are normally rough odds, so that was meant as inspirational. You clearly weren’t the target audience, but you’re in complete opposition to the movement also.
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I’m literally not a part of the initiative in any official capacity. I won’t be the one talking to officials in Brussels if this passes. The ECI could completely distance itself from me if that was necessary.
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In my eyes, what I was doing there was the equivalent of forecasting the weather. You think it’s manipulation, but I don’t control the weather. I can choose when I fly a kite based on my forecast however.
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It was also kind of half-joke on the absurdity of the system we’re in that I consider these critical factors that determine our success or not. So yes, I meant what I said, but I also acknowledge it’s kind of ludicrous that these are perhaps highly relevant factors towards getting anything done in a democracy.
Anyway, I got the impression this whole issue was kind of thrust upon you by your fans, you clearly hate the initiative, so as far as I’m concerned people should stop bothering you about it since you don’t like it.
If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just “videogames” as stated in the initiative.
Spoken like an idealist. Video games is probably the biggest thing that will gain traction. Sure, it would be great to tackle the entire issue, but the people making this initiative aren’t using other software that does that shit. Saying “care about all the people” dilutes the issue.
Hard disagree with Thor on this one.
… to the extent of killing off live service games.
I mean… Nothing of value was lost? In my opinion, so far, the only decent live service game to have ever come out is still Warframe. Everything else that cane after is either a pale imitation or straight up cow milking garbage.
We could certainly do with a lot less “live service”.
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Yeah, that’s why he says it’s stupid. It seems like he’s fine with the idea of removing DRM that makes single player games unplayable but forcing devs to make online multiplayer games playable forever is ridiculous.
Only if you think the campaign means that companies must pay for the multiplayer servers forever which Ross has said on MULTIPLE occasions is not reasonable and not what he wants.
Giving players the tools to host their own servers or adding LAN functionality, though? That’s entirely reasonable seeing as that’s how multiplayer always used to work. I mean, there are still plenty of Unreal Tournament servers active today without any involvement from the developer in decades.
Especially since, if this initiative works, developers will make games with that functionality in mind.
To clarify, your position is it’s ridiculous, or you’re stating that his position is that it’s ridiculous?
My position is it’s ridiculous. I agree with Thor. Saying all games must exist forever is too vague because I don’t think all games should be forced to exist forever.
Per the official Stop Killing Games FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq (apologies if formatting ends up looking weird)
Q: Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?
A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:
‘Gran Turismo Sport’ published by Sony ‘Knockout City’ published by Velan Studios ‘Mega Man X DiVE’ published by Capcom ‘Scrolls / Caller’s Bane’ published by Mojang AB ‘Duelyst’ published by Bandai Namco Entertainment etc.
That’s fine for single player games but modifying some massive MMO so that someone can host it on a laptop is literally impossible. This language applies to everything. EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, all of it would need to be able to run on someone’s home computer when they’re purposefully built from the ground up to work on massive servers?
The difference between a home server and a larger business server is simply the scale of how many players it can host at once.
WoW’s server binary was reverse engineered by fans, and a large ecosystem of privately run WoW servers that players can connect to exist at this very moment.
Private servers running older vanilla versions of wow became so popular, blizzard then created their own vanilla wow server to get in on the action.
I don’t think there’s any language in this petition that says it must be hosted on a laptop. The server binary, with a reasonable expectation that someone with documentation, the hardware, and the know-how to use it, would be enough.
Lol that not impossible.
It’s not impossible at all. People have done this literally for decades. Classic WoW only exists because people hosted their own seevers and Blizzard wanted in on the money. Star Wars Galaxies the same. I think Everquest 1 as well. And probably others as well.
So why does this law need to exist if everyone is doing it and has been doing it for decades?
If a big MMO closes that’d be rough, but those types of games tend to form communities anyways like Minecraft. You don’t have to pay Microsoft a monthly rate to host a Java server for you and a few friends, you just have to have a little bit of IT knowledge and maybe a helper package to get you and your friends going. It’s still a single binary, even if it doesn’t run on a laptop well for larger settings.
With a big MMO, there will form support groups and turnkey scripts to get stuff working as well as it can be, and forums online for finding existing open community servers by people who have the hardware and knowledge to host a few dozen to a few hundred of their closest friends online.
Life finds a way.
If it’s a complicated multi-node package where you need stuff to be split up better as gateway/world/area/instance, the community servers that will form may tend towards larger player groups, since the knowledge and resource to do that is more specific.
God, finally someone with common sense. The devs do not need to change the software for you to host a server in your 10 year old ThinkPad, they just need to make the software available. It’s not up to them to figure out HOW you are going to host the game’s server, they just need to make it POSSIBLE.
FFXIV has headed in the opposite direction of your claim. They’ve recently been making a lot of changes to major story dungeons so that the experience relies as little as possible on online communities. Right now, playing requires a subscription. It’s more and more believable to see that requirement removed if the game was somehow dead and that ‘had’ to happen.
This comment betrays a technical misunderstanding.
Not only is it possible, but designing games from the ground up in this way makes it easier for developers to test and make robust software.
People have been running private wow servers for a long time now apparently, so it seems possible for mmos.
Not a fair comparison. The private servers were written with the small hosting in mind. They would very likely never scale to what Blizzard has in place. For all I know, Blizzard could run their stuff on a Mainframe with specific platform optimizations against an IBM DB2.
But I also don’t think this has to be transferable to a local setup without effort either. Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
They all should still be preserved. The code can be stored without needing servers to be kept open, for example
What? I write some code and then delete it and I’m in trouble because I didn’t preserve it?? I really don’t understand this concept at all
You sold someone some code that you then rendered inoperable by actions beyond their control; that’s what you’d get in trouble for. Delete your own code all you like.
That’s a different statement than you made before. I am also against disabling something someone paid for. But what did you mean by
The code can be stored without needing servers to be kept open
I have to store code? Can’t I delete my own code?
Any company that isn’t completely incompetent has some revision control solution like GitHub. It saves the original and all the changes throughout the life of the code. It’s designed specifically to allow developers to update or even delete code while still maintaining records
An indie dev recently lost the source code to their early access game and had to remove it from Steam. If this law was in place, what punishment would they face for their incompetence? It would be rare for a massive company to not have source control, but it probably isn’t uncommon for small first time devs. So now you have a well intentioned law putting regulations in place that hurt small devs and raise the barrier to entry.
A game’s code can be submitted to a repository on release to the public to be stored for the sake of preservation. The repository can always be made access on a case by case basis, thus preventing the loss of code and culture while also protecting the IP holder’s rights
And every single game dev would be required to do this for the thousands of games released every year? Who would host this massive repository? Who would determine access on a case by case basis? It’s a nice suggestion but mandating this as a law everyone has to follow? Why? I thought this was about consumer protection
Well, it wouldn’t be retroactive. As a consumer, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to know what I’m buying. If anything, this petition is way softer than my stance. As per this petition, you could get around doing the honest thing of providing the customers the ability to host the servers themselves by just clearly informing the customer at the point of sale how long services will be up for, if you truly want to try to convince people that it’s a service and not a product that they just made worse for business reasons. But they don’t want to do that, because then they can’t sucker people into buying something that isn’t long for this world.
Many consider games to be works of art in the same way that music, books, movies, and paintings are. In the same way that historians use the creative works of yesteryear to guage how people during events like World War I, historians of tomorrow need access to games to study the events of our lifetimes.
Book burnings have occurred throughout history and they have been devastating, but many works can still be studied because other copies exist elsewhere. The problem with games is that they’re deliberately designed to self-destruct. Historians 50 years down the line can’t study Fortnite’s mechanics or its evolution because as soon as a new update releases, the servers for the previous chapter of the game are gone. Even if we wanted to preserve just the final release, we can’t because it is far easier for Epic Games to hide or throw away the server source code rather than properly archive it when they inevitably kill the game. This is a huge deal because Fortnite has genuinely had an impact on our culture, for better or worse. Even if it didn’t, it is a technical feat to get a game like that to work well, and programmers need to be able to study the game after the industry inevitably moves on.
To be clear, companies shouldn’t need to maintain their games and software forever. However, there is simply no way to play many games because there are no usable servers for them, which is entirely unacceptable. The initiative simply wants us to be in a world where someone can put in a reasonable amount of effort to play abandoned games, and I don’t think that’s a huge ask.
I’m a little surprised either of them have such a strong opinion about something EU related anyway, given it doesn’t affect them directly. Well I guess Louis is just really passionate about that stuff so it’s not all that surprising. As for Thor, maybe he’s using his online presence to kickstart a live service game himself? Obviously regulations are scary in that case. It’s a wild guess from my side but I think that would be on brand for him.
The potential legislation would be specific to the EU, but that doesn’t really matter; this market is large enough that it would directly affect other markets. Either the games are patched for all territories or others will make the EU-specific build available. One option generates positive press, the other negative, and any difference in cost would be negligible.
There’s also the argument of preserving art.
It would affect video game developers that want to publish in the EU.
It likely won’t affect Thor directly unless he makes a live-service game in the future. He just thinks it’s harmful to the industry and tends to speak out about stuff like that.
Damn, imagine if it passes and devs just don’t release in the eu anymore. I mean the best scenario we are all hoping for is it passes and is obliged by everywhere due to the Brussels effect. Doesnt mean it will though.
In the end, it may pass but publishers stop selling in the EU in an official capacity but europeans still digitally buy the games anyway…
No chance. There could be a few exceptions, but there’s no shot that would have any amount of widespread adoption.
I remember Thor saying that not tying a single player campaign to a server would be bad for developers and Louis barely covered that statement here. How? How would keeping single player and any server-based systems separate hurt the dev? Just plan for this from the beginning. 🤦♂️
Yep. And wtf happened with LAN multiplayer? Even the Beta from Diablo II Ressurected had it, but they REMOVED IT from the release version. I call BS on what this Thor guy is saying.
Blizzard swore off local multiplayer after what happened with StarCraft esports. The Korean leagues ran huge tournaments and made a ton of money off Blizzard’s IP and essentially told them to pound sand. Now everything has to go through their servers so they control the ecosystem.
Same with how Blizzard now owns every custom game you make. They learned their lesson with DOTA/LOL and feel like all that money should be theirs.
All of which seems to indicate that this is a real problem. People can play Brood War forever, but what happens when the SC2 servers go down?
Thank you based Ross.
I really don’t see why an indie dev would oppose this. If you were an artist, you wouldn’t want to watch your creation completely disappear from existence because you couldn’t keep working on it, would you?
