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This is basically advocating for open source games which is a completely different story than what stop killing games is trying to do. There are tons of closed

by nerdjon 4mo ago

This is basically advocating for open source games which is a completely different story than what stop killing games is trying to do. There are tons of closed source games that have zero online component to them. I don't see how you can actually argue that this is a good thing, especially when they say: > The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.

felipellrocha 4mo ago
To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit. It just takes the idea to its logical conclusion. As a game developer, if this thing passes, I would just not build multiplayer ever anymore.
- dijit 4mo ago
  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 time is finite in that context. something has to give.
  - F3nd0 4mo ago
    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 insight.
    - dijit 4mo ago
      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.
      - fragmede 4mo ago
        > 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.
  - drnick1 4mo ago
    > I’m guessing nobody here has ever actually tried to make games, let alone multiplayer ones. One possibility is to charge for online play on the "official" server. This can be done regardless of the availability of source code. Another possibility is to release the source code when the game reaches its end of life.
    - habinero 4mo ago
      > Another possibility is to release the source code when the game reaches its end of life. You might not have permission to, if it uses a lot of third party libraries.
      - skotobaza 4mo ago
        It's not a problem, you can replace such function calls with stubs and document it. Some games that released their source code already did that.
  - throwaway85825 4mo ago
    A game that can no longer be played at all is very simple but also not very fun.
- BlitzGeology91 4mo ago
  > To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit. No, it doesn’t. It just requires that we go back to making multiplayer games the old-fashioned way (the good way). Descent 3 was released in 1999. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer to this day if you want to [1], and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop you from doing so. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer because Descent 3 allows you to host your own servers and allows you to manually enter IP addresses in order to connect to servers (this is necessary because the services that Descent 3’s in-game server browsers depend on no longer exist). Descent 3’s source code was released in 2024 [2] which certainly helps with multiplayer preservation, but I can tell you that a small number of people definitely did play multiplayer Descent 3 in 2023 when the source code was not yet available. Descent: Underground was released to Steam Early Access in 2015 [3]. Unlike the previous Descent games, Descent: Underground (or at least, that iteration of Descent: Underground) was pretty much multiplayer-only. The developers of Descent: Underground did not allow players to host their own Descent: Underground servers. (I think that they had some plan to allow for hosting your own servers in the future, but that didn’t get implemented in time). At some point, the official servers for that version of Descent: Underground were shutdown. As a result, you can no longer play Descent: Underground’s multiplayer. The fact that I can play the multiplayer for a 27-year-old game, but I can’t play the multiplayer for an 11-year-old game is unsurprising. Many older multiplayer games did not have fatal design flaws that would cause them to die after certain period of time. Many newer multiplayer games do have such fatal design flaws. The good news is that this means that we already know how to stop killing multiplayer games. We just have to go back to doing things the way that we used to do them. (In fact, some games don’t even need to “go back to doing things the way that we used to do them”. Take Counter-Strike 2, for example. Counter-Strike 2 was released in 2023 and does indeed allow players to host their own servers.) The statement “the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games” is absolutely ridiculous. [1]: <https://tsetsefly.de/ https://tsetsefly.de/> [2]: <https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/descent-3-programmer-releases-the-classic-space-shooters-source-code-including-a-surprise-patch-developed-15-years-ago-but-never-released/ https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/descent-3-programmer-relea...> [3]: <https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/18969 https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/18969>
  - 4mo ago
- hhjinks 3mo ago
  Why not? Minecraft is the second most selling game of all time and comes with a freely distributable and hostable multiplayer component. How would this legislation have stopped that from happening?
john_strinlai 4mo ago
this was written (or 'output') by someone (or something) that clearly has not thought of the knock-on effects of those freedoms. they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again". by all means i 100% agree that an ostensibly single player game should not be locked behind a login or telemetry, and that platforms like steam should not be able to lock you out of playing games you paid for. but i dont think forcing the whole free software thing would work out how the author is imagining it.
- luqtas 4mo ago
  you don't need to liberate your project to GPL or whatever OSS to let users distribute them via torrent or at least being able to backup the DRM-free installer... i bet most if not all AAA games have their crack into the pirate land in less than a week after or even before release
- figmert 4mo ago
  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.
  - john_strinlai 4mo ago
    >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 into their ko-fi account. they'll just stop developing games and go into CRM software or whatever.
    - figmert 4mo ago
      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.
F3nd0 4mo ago
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > > Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that. What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.
- saghm 4mo ago
  In that vein, the other day this got posted to HN: https://twilitrealm.dev/ 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.
  - F3nd0 4mo ago
    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://openmw.org/ https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic https://ihhub.github.io/fheroes2/ https://ihhub.github.io/fheroes2/
    - saghm 4mo ago
      OpenMW has been on my list to try out for a while now, I should have thought of that one. I hadn't heard of OpenGothic, but I also only recently started learning about that game at all with the remake coming out soon, so I might need to add that to my list as well! This makes me think, is there one of those "awesome" lists for open game reimplementations? If not, someone should make one... (edit: Thanks for the multiple great replies on this! Now I have even more stuff to go through to add to my lists, and I love having that problem)
xmprt 4mo ago
> 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.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >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. the difference being that only one person could enjoy it at a time. the math is a bit different when one person can put a copy of their game up online and let thousands of people enjoy it for free at the same time. there is a happy medium somewhere between intrusive DRM and demanding games be free.
- jl6 4mo ago
  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.
  - promano 4mo ago
    Maybe we need a separate campaign, "Kill Games": any games whose existence requires players being "shaken down" should not be allowed to exist.
    - nkrisc 4mo ago
      Or “You Don’t Need to Play Video Games”. I enjoy playing video games but I recognize them for what they are: a luxury past-time that is not necessary for life and one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow.
      - skotobaza 4mo ago
        > one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow I get what you are trying to say, but in general video games offer unique experience that no other media can provide - interactivity, e.g. exploring different worlds with different mechanics. I think this experience can invoke something in people that no other media can replicate. So I think we will lose something important if it suddenly vanishes.
cogman10 4mo ago
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that. My reading of this was it was in terms of multiplayer games and servers. It was that the server should be freely redistributable and accessible. Much like you can download and run a minecraft server without owning a minecraft license. The next sentence > A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files.
abetusk 4mo ago
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. Pretty dismissive, no? Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards. Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe [2]. Solarus has a donation page [3]. I'm sure there are many more examples that span the spectrum of payment options and cover different permutations of being online or offline. To me, the deeper question is what are you actually purchasing? The bytes? The convenience? A slice of server resources? Developers and artists time? I'm happy to give money to projects that I use, especially if it creates less friction than trying to go outside of the payment method and if the project is libre/free. I'm willing to pay for proprietary content but I have little expectation about what kind of service they're providing, especially they fold. If there's a libre/free option, I would much prefer to invest in it. If there's a proprietary option that is asking for resources, I'm much less prone to give since it's clearly a transactional relationship. [0] https://onehouronelife.com/ https://onehouronelife.com/ [1] https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/no_copyright.txt https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/no_copyri... [2] https://www.teeworlds.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=446 https://www.teeworlds.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=446 [3] https://www.solarus-games.org/about/donate/ https://www.solarus-games.org/about/donate/
- kulahan 4mo ago
  This is cool and all, but it’s been proven a million times over that surviving on donations sucks. One of the reasons a new field gets innovation in partly because it brings so many people hungry for profit in to give it a go. If your only motivation is art and “maybe someone will toss me a buck on occasion”, we’ll have as many software devs as we do street performers.
- dijit 4mo ago
  > Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards. OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. The community only got access to the servers when they had declined to 20-30 concurrent players. So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model. > Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe Teeworlds doens't pay its staff a living wage, those donations went to server infrastructure. According to developers of the most popular open-source games themselves, open-source games have not been commercially successful... it is very common for them to only cover operating costs via community donations, and many projects have a player base actively opposed to any monetisation model.[0] Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements. [0]: https://80.lv/articles/inside-the-open-source-games-in-search-of-business-opportunities https://80.lv/articles/inside-the-open-source-games-in-searc... FD: I speak from a position of being in the AAA gaming space for 11 years, so I have an economic incentive to... not lose my job due to the collapse of industry- but I'd like you all to be able to enjoy my creations after it's no longer possible for me to run it for you; I want a solution too!
m463 4mo ago
yeah. I think a more achievable model might be more like GOG, but with online. GOG games remain closed source, but are downloadable and playable offline with no DRM. But there's nothing about online/multiplayer play in the GOG equation.
singpolyma3 4mo ago
Given that I can already get a copy of any game in existence without paying, the quoted text isn't even a change from the status quo really.
adamrezich 4mo ago
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > Am I missing something serious here Only just that the video games industry as we've known it for the past few decades is basically already dead—at best, it's a hollowed-out husk of what it once was.
- skotobaza 4mo ago
  "Few decades" is a stretch I think. More like one decade.
  - adamrezich 3mo ago
    I meant that the games industry is a few decades old, and it's been dead for about a decade and a half or so now.
jmyeet 4mo ago
It's not really advocating for open source games despite evoking Richard Stallman and Free Software. A lot of people get all up in their feelings when it comes to "private property", like (hypoerbolic) "if they allow redistribution of abandonware, they might take everything" and it's just not justified. It used to be, for example, that copyrights on books weren't automatically granted and they were much shorter terms. You had to apply for copyright renewals. Why? Because of orphaned works and it was viewed that if nobody held an interest that they asserted, it was in the public good to place that in the public domain. Abandonware follows the same principles. The arguably controversial part is that "abandonware" here includes "forced obsolescence". And I 100% agree that if you, as the publisher, make a game nonfunctional (or even greatly reduced functionality) then people should have the right to make those games work. The most egregious cases are like Simcity 5, which was made online for literally no reason (other than "because piracy"). They tried to sell online features but that wasn't the reason. The idea that this kills the entire gaming industry is just slippery slope hyperbola.
trinsic2 4mo ago
>That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. The AAA industry are already destroying the gaming industry with there shit games and stupid DRM pratices. This would be returning balance to the game industry.
avaer 4mo ago
We need a version of "open source" that requires you to pay a reasonable ($60) price to get a copy. That's kind of against the usual notion of "open source" but it's the only way this would work in e.g. the game industry, as currently factored. Studios won't pay people millions of dollars to make games if the return on investment is zero other than helping all of your non-open source competitors. I do think it's doable, but nobody's done this successfully yet.
flohofwoe 3mo ago
The blog post is a bit of an incoherent mess. The key point should be to make it legal to use and reverse-engineer abandonware (e.g. games that the developer or publisher has abandoned). First we'll need a realistic legal definition for 'abandonware' where the abandonware's IP is automatically going into the public domain after a game has been abandondend by the publisher, and the next step must be to legalize 'pirating' and reverse-engineering abandonware.

by nerdjon 4mo ago

felipellrocha 4mo ago

To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit. It just takes the idea to its logical conclusion. As a game developer, if this thing passes, I would just not build multiplayer ever anymore.

dijit 4mo ago
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 time is finite in that context. something has to give.
- F3nd0 4mo ago
  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 insight.
  - dijit 4mo ago
    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.
    - fragmede 4mo ago
      > 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.
- drnick1 4mo ago
  > I’m guessing nobody here has ever actually tried to make games, let alone multiplayer ones. One possibility is to charge for online play on the "official" server. This can be done regardless of the availability of source code. Another possibility is to release the source code when the game reaches its end of life.
  - habinero 4mo ago
    > Another possibility is to release the source code when the game reaches its end of life. You might not have permission to, if it uses a lot of third party libraries.
    - skotobaza 4mo ago
      It's not a problem, you can replace such function calls with stubs and document it. Some games that released their source code already did that.
- throwaway85825 4mo ago
  A game that can no longer be played at all is very simple but also not very fun.
BlitzGeology91 4mo ago
> To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit. No, it doesn’t. It just requires that we go back to making multiplayer games the old-fashioned way (the good way). Descent 3 was released in 1999. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer to this day if you want to [1], and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop you from doing so. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer because Descent 3 allows you to host your own servers and allows you to manually enter IP addresses in order to connect to servers (this is necessary because the services that Descent 3’s in-game server browsers depend on no longer exist). Descent 3’s source code was released in 2024 [2] which certainly helps with multiplayer preservation, but I can tell you that a small number of people definitely did play multiplayer Descent 3 in 2023 when the source code was not yet available. Descent: Underground was released to Steam Early Access in 2015 [3]. Unlike the previous Descent games, Descent: Underground (or at least, that iteration of Descent: Underground) was pretty much multiplayer-only. The developers of Descent: Underground did not allow players to host their own Descent: Underground servers. (I think that they had some plan to allow for hosting your own servers in the future, but that didn’t get implemented in time). At some point, the official servers for that version of Descent: Underground were shutdown. As a result, you can no longer play Descent: Underground’s multiplayer. The fact that I can play the multiplayer for a 27-year-old game, but I can’t play the multiplayer for an 11-year-old game is unsurprising. Many older multiplayer games did not have fatal design flaws that would cause them to die after certain period of time. Many newer multiplayer games do have such fatal design flaws. The good news is that this means that we already know how to stop killing multiplayer games. We just have to go back to doing things the way that we used to do them. (In fact, some games don’t even need to “go back to doing things the way that we used to do them”. Take Counter-Strike 2, for example. Counter-Strike 2 was released in 2023 and does indeed allow players to host their own servers.) The statement “the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games” is absolutely ridiculous. [1]: <https://tsetsefly.de/ https://tsetsefly.de/> [2]: <https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/descent-3-programmer-releases-the-classic-space-shooters-source-code-including-a-surprise-patch-developed-15-years-ago-but-never-released/ https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/descent-3-programmer-relea...> [3]: <https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/18969 https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/18969>
- 4mo ago
hhjinks 3mo ago
Why not? Minecraft is the second most selling game of all time and comes with a freely distributable and hostable multiplayer component. How would this legislation have stopped that from happening?

john_strinlai 4mo ago

this was written (or 'output') by someone (or something) that clearly has not thought of the knock-on effects of those freedoms. they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again". by all means i 100% agree that an ostensibly single player game should not be locked behind a login or telemetry, and that platforms like steam should not be able to lock you out of playing games you paid for. but i dont think forcing the whole free software thing would work out how the author is imagining it.

luqtas 4mo ago
you don't need to liberate your project to GPL or whatever OSS to let users distribute them via torrent or at least being able to backup the DRM-free installer... i bet most if not all AAA games have their crack into the pirate land in less than a week after or even before release
figmert 4mo ago
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.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago
  >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 into their ko-fi account. they'll just stop developing games and go into CRM software or whatever.
  - figmert 4mo ago
    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.

F3nd0 4mo ago

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > > Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that. What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.

saghm 4mo ago
In that vein, the other day this got posted to HN: https://twilitrealm.dev/ 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.
- F3nd0 4mo ago
  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://openmw.org/ https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic https://ihhub.github.io/fheroes2/ https://ihhub.github.io/fheroes2/
  - saghm 4mo ago
    OpenMW has been on my list to try out for a while now, I should have thought of that one. I hadn't heard of OpenGothic, but I also only recently started learning about that game at all with the remake coming out soon, so I might need to add that to my list as well! This makes me think, is there one of those "awesome" lists for open game reimplementations? If not, someone should make one... (edit: Thanks for the multiple great replies on this! Now I have even more stuff to go through to add to my lists, and I love having that problem)

xmprt 4mo ago

> 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.

john_strinlai 4mo ago
>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. the difference being that only one person could enjoy it at a time. the math is a bit different when one person can put a copy of their game up online and let thousands of people enjoy it for free at the same time. there is a happy medium somewhere between intrusive DRM and demanding games be free.
jl6 4mo ago
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.
- promano 4mo ago
  Maybe we need a separate campaign, "Kill Games": any games whose existence requires players being "shaken down" should not be allowed to exist.
  - nkrisc 4mo ago
    Or “You Don’t Need to Play Video Games”. I enjoy playing video games but I recognize them for what they are: a luxury past-time that is not necessary for life and one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow.
    - skotobaza 4mo ago
      > one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow I get what you are trying to say, but in general video games offer unique experience that no other media can provide - interactivity, e.g. exploring different worlds with different mechanics. I think this experience can invoke something in people that no other media can replicate. So I think we will lose something important if it suddenly vanishes.

cogman10 4mo ago

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that. My reading of this was it was in terms of multiplayer games and servers. It was that the server should be freely redistributable and accessible. Much like you can download and run a minecraft server without owning a minecraft license. The next sentence > A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files.

abetusk 4mo ago

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. Pretty dismissive, no? Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards. Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe [2]. Solarus has a donation page [3]. I'm sure there are many more examples that span the spectrum of payment options and cover different permutations of being online or offline. To me, the deeper question is what are you actually purchasing? The bytes? The convenience? A slice of server resources? Developers and artists time? I'm happy to give money to projects that I use, especially if it creates less friction than trying to go outside of the payment method and if the project is libre/free. I'm willing to pay for proprietary content but I have little expectation about what kind of service they're providing, especially they fold. If there's a libre/free option, I would much prefer to invest in it. If there's a proprietary option that is asking for resources, I'm much less prone to give since it's clearly a transactional relationship. [0] https://onehouronelife.com/ https://onehouronelife.com/ [1] https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/no_copyright.txt https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/no_copyri... [2] https://www.teeworlds.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=446 https://www.teeworlds.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=446 [3] https://www.solarus-games.org/about/donate/ https://www.solarus-games.org/about/donate/

kulahan 4mo ago
This is cool and all, but it’s been proven a million times over that surviving on donations sucks. One of the reasons a new field gets innovation in partly because it brings so many people hungry for profit in to give it a go. If your only motivation is art and “maybe someone will toss me a buck on occasion”, we’ll have as many software devs as we do street performers.
dijit 4mo ago
> Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards. OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. The community only got access to the servers when they had declined to 20-30 concurrent players. So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model. > Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe Teeworlds doens't pay its staff a living wage, those donations went to server infrastructure. According to developers of the most popular open-source games themselves, open-source games have not been commercially successful... it is very common for them to only cover operating costs via community donations, and many projects have a player base actively opposed to any monetisation model.[0] Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements. [0]: https://80.lv/articles/inside-the-open-source-games-in-search-of-business-opportunities https://80.lv/articles/inside-the-open-source-games-in-searc... FD: I speak from a position of being in the AAA gaming space for 11 years, so I have an economic incentive to... not lose my job due to the collapse of industry- but I'd like you all to be able to enjoy my creations after it's no longer possible for me to run it for you; I want a solution too!

m463 4mo ago

yeah. I think a more achievable model might be more like GOG, but with online. GOG games remain closed source, but are downloadable and playable offline with no DRM. But there's nothing about online/multiplayer play in the GOG equation.

singpolyma3 4mo ago

Given that I can already get a copy of any game in existence without paying, the quoted text isn't even a change from the status quo really.

adamrezich 4mo ago

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > Am I missing something serious here Only just that the video games industry as we've known it for the past few decades is basically already dead—at best, it's a hollowed-out husk of what it once was.

skotobaza 4mo ago
"Few decades" is a stretch I think. More like one decade.
- adamrezich 3mo ago
  I meant that the games industry is a few decades old, and it's been dead for about a decade and a half or so now.

jmyeet 4mo ago

It's not really advocating for open source games despite evoking Richard Stallman and Free Software. A lot of people get all up in their feelings when it comes to "private property", like (hypoerbolic) "if they allow redistribution of abandonware, they might take everything" and it's just not justified. It used to be, for example, that copyrights on books weren't automatically granted and they were much shorter terms. You had to apply for copyright renewals. Why? Because of orphaned works and it was viewed that if nobody held an interest that they asserted, it was in the public good to place that in the public domain. Abandonware follows the same principles. The arguably controversial part is that "abandonware" here includes "forced obsolescence". And I 100% agree that if you, as the publisher, make a game nonfunctional (or even greatly reduced functionality) then people should have the right to make those games work. The most egregious cases are like Simcity 5, which was made online for literally no reason (other than "because piracy"). They tried to sell online features but that wasn't the reason. The idea that this kills the entire gaming industry is just slippery slope hyperbola.

trinsic2 4mo ago

>That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. The AAA industry are already destroying the gaming industry with there shit games and stupid DRM pratices. This would be returning balance to the game industry.

avaer 4mo ago

We need a version of "open source" that requires you to pay a reasonable ($60) price to get a copy. That's kind of against the usual notion of "open source" but it's the only way this would work in e.g. the game industry, as currently factored. Studios won't pay people millions of dollars to make games if the return on investment is zero other than helping all of your non-open source competitors. I do think it's doable, but nobody's done this successfully yet.

flohofwoe 3mo ago

The blog post is a bit of an incoherent mess. The key point should be to make it legal to use and reverse-engineer abandonware (e.g. games that the developer or publisher has abandoned). First we'll need a realistic legal definition for 'abandonware' where the abandonware's IP is automatically going into the public domain after a game has been abandondend by the publisher, and the next step must be to legalize 'pirating' and reverse-engineering abandonware.