They all should still be preserved. The code can be stored without needing servers to be kept open, for example
Comment on Louis Rossmann's response to harsh criticism of "Stop Killing Games" from Thor of @PirateSoftware
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 month agoMy 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.
Icalasari@fedia.io 1 month ago
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
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
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
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?
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
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
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
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.
Icalasari@fedia.io 1 month ago
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
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
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
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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. 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.
TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee 1 month ago
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.
Cowboy_Dude@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Per the official Stop Killing Games FAQ: www.stopkillinggames.com/faq (apologies if formatting ends up looking weird)
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
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 group up to work on massive servers?
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 month ago
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.
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
So why does this law need to exist if everyone is doing it and has been doing it for decades?
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
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.
echomap@fedia.io 1 month ago
People have been running private wow servers for a long time now apparently, so it seems possible for mmos.
aksdb@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Lol that not impossible.
ParetoOptimalDev@lemmy.today 1 month ago
This response 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.
Katana314@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
computergeek125@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
proton_lynx@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.