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The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.
by wagwang 4mo ago
The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.
- doctorpangloss 4mo agoi don't know, do game developers have a right to sell a Remastered Multiplayer Edition later? in my opinion, yes.
- kgwxd 4mo agoGovernment forced speech is never reasonable. If you don't like the arrangement, just don't buy the game. Tell them why you didn't buy the game. Hope for a better future where more of the industry is built on open source. That's all anyone can do. That's all anyone should be able to do.
- wredcoll 4mo agoThere's always someone willing to blame the victim. The answer to companies committing fraud is not "buyer beware".
- ethin 4mo agoWhat are you proposing then? The government is not allowed to compel speech for good reason.
- Y-bar 4mo agoThat’s not a Carte Blanche that forbids the government from everything. The government can compel speech from food and other producers to print content and nutritional labels on their products. The government can compel speech on a yearly basis when we file taxes. The can compel speech such as guidance maps and websites to be accessible to the blind (ADA). They can compel vehicle owners to provide insurance and ownership information, which is a kind of speech.
- ethin 4mo ago> That’s not a Carte Blanche that forbids the government from everything. I never said it was. Yes, commercial speech has diminished protections, but it is not annulled. It is still protected to a degree, even if less than ordinary speech. You may consider selling a game to someone and then shutting it down Fraud, but I somehow doubt the supreme court would agree with you (although you might be able to convince a lower circuit court to). Compelling speech is usually something that undergoes strict scrutiny. Compelling commercial speech requires that you pass the test established in Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission (unless SCOTUS decides on one of it's random whims to overturn that ruling, which for all we know it might). Don't get me wrong: I am in no way anti-regulation. But compelling speech is something that needs to be handled carefully. Edit: removed the strawman thing (that was inaccurate and I apologize for the accusation).
- ppseafield 4mo agoThis is not just free speech, it's commerce, and the government has the ability to regulate commerce. Warranties and lemon laws are not regulating speech - they're regulating sales and the legal requirements for those sales. Providing a method for playing a game a customer purchased after the company decides to abandon it is putting a legal requirement on the sale of goods.
- hgoel 4mo agoWelp, better get rid of all nutritional facts, allergy warnings, medical side effect notices and all the other signage mandated by government for your safety.
- wilg 4mo agoExcept shutting down a game is not fraud.
- toraway 4mo agoHow is selling something and then removing the ability to use what was paid for not fraud? (setting aside the EULAs companies currently get away with using to sidestep the question) There's even a specific term for scams where you pay money based on a specific description for an item being sold that is then changed after the time of sale known as a "bait and switch".
- autoexec 4mo ago> Government forced speech is never reasonable. Government forced speech includes food companies needing to add ingredient labels on packaging including allergen info, landlords needing to notify tenants before entering their homes, stores having to post accurate prices for the products they sell, and employers having to provide workers with safety data sheets for the hazardous materials they work with. These are all perfectly reasonable. Thanks to government forced speech we have more freedom/rights and better lives.
- bob1029 4mo agoI don't think forcing a person or business to divulge their intellectual property, simply because they no longer wish to provide downstream products or services, is reasonable. That said, as a consumer I really don't like when something goes away. Overwatch 1 was probably the most brutal experience for me. In the end, I don't think anyone has any kind of special entitlements here. The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release. Any sanitation of this binary further condemns this as a silly idea because now you are also compelling the individual or business to do additional (presumably unpaid) work so that arbitrary consumers can use their products or services indefinitely.
- circuit10 4mo agoIf this was about open source software I’d agree about not forcing people to do additional work, but if you’re selling something for money you should be obligated to do the bare minimum of stripping secrets out of a binary so the product you sold can actually work (and this will be barely any work if it’s designed with this in mind in the first place) We already obligate them to do other basic necessities for consumer protection such as refunding or replacing faulty products
- redsocksfan45 4mo ago[dead]
- duskwuff 4mo ago> The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release. Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing. A typical scenario would be a game developed as a fork of a proprietary codebase which was licensed from another company. Forcing the licensee to release material would infringe on the rights of the licensor.
- circuit10 4mo agoIt would at least be reasonable to expect this for future games, just treat the server binary the same way as the client in terms of what code you include (there way be some more involved if they have to migrate off a reusable codebase but I think it’s worth it)
- TylerE 4mo agoWhat if, as a very high number do, the server uses something like a proprietary SQL database?
- mschuster91 4mo agoSo what, dedicated hackers will find a way around that. There's bigger fish to fry.
- maccard 4mo agoDedicated hackers already find a way around limitations. By that logic there’s no reason to do any of this.
- Capricorn2481 4mo agoAfter years of plugging away at it, sure. We can't rely on years of free labor from the community to make the games we bought work. Even if they had to substitute some proprietary libraries, it would be a much better starting point.
- maccard 4mo agoOh I agree - I don’t think saying hackers will find a way is a good solution at all!
- db48x 4mo agoYou only need that fancy database when you have lots of users. When you release a server binary that anyone can run it doesn’t need to support quite so many. Have a compile–time flag that excludes the fancy database when set, and have it fall back to something simpler like SQLite or Postgres or whatever you want.
- nine_k 4mo agoIt would be enough to guarantee no legal threats against users who reverse-engineer the protocol and implement their own server. (A catchy name for it: "Fair Game Act".)
- kristiandupont 4mo agoThe backend for a game is not just an .exe file. It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services that need maintenance and that one dev who knows how to reset the cache. I agree that it's shitty that buyers can lose access to a game they bought, but I really struggle to see how this could function practically.
- lucb1e 4mo ago> It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services Nowadays, this is much less of a "can" and more of a "definitely is" :( Based on what I see as (non-game) security consultant in terms of service complexity, what modern FOSS projects consider a normal container constellation, and on what I see from at least one indie dev whom I personally know. It has been a topic I've brought up since he put so many hours into it and the game is fun and the binary didn't even run if you don't have a compatible Google Play Services version, much less the various back-ends that it connects to for accounts, level data, level thumbnails, matchmaking, etc. until you even get to the real-time multiplayer server
- ChoGGi 4mo agoAt the very least this hopefully stops them from suing modders that recreate the server software.
- db48x 4mo agoThere’s no reason that has to be a serious impediment. Just release all of the components, plus a terraform file that sets it all up properly. In practice a lot of those components can be simplified when you don't have to support a huge number of players. A server that only supports dozens of players can just use SQLite instead of a big multi–az database cluster. The cache can just be an in–process cache instead of a connection to an external Redis instance, etc, etc.
- Akronymus 4mo agoNo, the reasonable compromise should be that the game remains playable, how that is achieved is up to the dev. Some will release the binaries, some make the spec open to the public for people to implement their own, some will patch out the online requirement, etc...
- Manuel_D 4mo agoThe developers may not have licenses for all the components of the server-side code. Lots of proprietary middleware is in use in online games.
- maccard 4mo agoThis should be true for all software then, not just a subset of software.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]