I hope the EFF gets involved if it isn't already. Particularly, it'd be rude not to, as they're getting quite a lot of donations through Humble Bundle.
The whole industry is.
The problem is- games do not age out as we are all made to believe. Well made games are fun, even twenty or thirty years after release. And while graphics are important for selling them- they are actually irrelevant for playing them once they fulfill there purpose.
Thus Southkorea still plays StarCraft, and if it weren't for backwards incompatibility slowly grinding old software to dust- a lot of people instead of buying new, dlc infested - constructions sites that might contain fun in the future- would play the old titles.
The industrys idea of revenue here is to churn the wheel of decay as fast as possible, with as much as additional sales while the customer does not buy the actual product.
The old idea of a game was to provide as much entertainment, often as long as possible (bind the customer to you)- and this means there are still shards with Ultima Online, still people playing RedAlert2 and CC:Generals. From a business point of view- this is the secret oil of the industry- there is a finite amount of people, with a finite amount of time. There are different grades of people (aka income) but that can change.
Something like MineCraft is a world destroying catastrophe in these eyes.
If you carefully look, you can see the ripples of "Long Value Release" and Studios closing due to people not buying games for years after.
So, what does the industry fear? A summer where all play some old forgotten modded title, while not even the flys circle over the loot boxes in the stores.
Thus, loosing control over the online service- has nothing to do with piracy, but everything to do with loosing control over the end-of-life of your product.
You cant patch some games balance into oblivion to sell the successor- if you do no longer control the servers.
Company like Bethesda or CDProjekt are showing that having one long running game can work too. (Bethesda is a bit strange due to their military contracts but still).
CDProjekt are even more interesting because they are behind GOG.com . Which spend time making old game playable on recent PC, but sell them for a price when they were abandonware before. Most of the time without DRM.
The interesting part is they do make money through it. Which shows that you can keep a small but longterm income from your backcatalogue.
At the same time, they are making abandonware harder to support through copyright exception since copyright holders now make money again ...
Agreed some companys- have a more longterm view. I may also point out that valve and blizzard games are well maintained and where never server-severed.
Even those impose centralized control on there software though:
> Bethesda is a bit strange due to their military contracts
I am curious to know what you are talking about. I've never heard Bethesda getting money from the DoD. And I've found nothing, since all search results are mixed with info about the military base in the city called Bethesda.
Bohemia Interactive created a division, Bohemia Interactive Simulations, to handle the military training software, which has worked with other NATO countries.
But from the Wikipedia page, the division has been bought by an equity firm, The Riverside Company, in 2013. So Bohemia Interactive doesn't deal anymore with the military, even if they might still have contact in the military, since they have developed military simulations.
The beauty of GOG is in its similarity with Steam, but without the DRM. Much like Steam, they just don't sell games, they provide added value in their (optional, and I hope it stays optional) GOG Galaxy client, their community, things like that that do appeal to people.
I always saw Abandonware as a necessary evil, flagrant copyright violation when the copyright holder has zero interest on their property, but GOG and such are a good alternative. Not only the games are sold at reasonable prices and put under rather regular sales, but avoiding DRM does make sharing significantly easier.
They should be careful. Copyright is a trade-off of rights. We grant copyright as an artificial carve-out of public rights in order to promote creation. But if those creations increasingly get walled off and locked away from a public that still wants access to them, by combinations of legal and technical means, we need to assess if the balance is right or if we need to reduce the copyright protections.
As it currently stands, support for copyright is overall quite strong - the mainstream belief is still that a fairly substantial degree of protection is justified. But the more peoples ability to continue to access things that are important parts of their memories gets locked down, the greater the chance that more people will come to see copyright as more of a hindrance than benefit.
My son, at 8, still regularly gets upset when he thinks of a fairly inane role playing game he didn't spend all that much time on, whose online servers were shut down about two years ago, and has more than once expressed anger towards the developers for doing so.
He still has not experienced a "serious" loss in this area in the sense of a game he's invested countless hours in and made friendships in. With a culture where more and more time gets spent in these virtual worlds that people invest a lot of time, energy and even money in, if it gets taken away there will be increasing levels of anger as well (if, say, Roblox was to shut down I'll never hear the end of it)
They're going to find themselves threading a fine line here, with new generations likely to be increasingly negative to actions that will be seen not in terms of just shutting down unprofitable games, but as hostile and destructive unjustified attacks on real communities.
Great comment. I would add that part of the tradeoff is that in exchange for the exclusive right to sell a certain product there is the expectation that the product will enter the public domain after a period of time.
But the copyright law in the US grants that protection for 70 years. 70 years seems like plenty of time for an art piece, a book or a piece of music to be useful to its creators and still remains useful for the public after that time. I don't think the same time frames are relevant for online multiplayer: imagine sitting down 50 years from now and trying to reverse-engineer a WOW server.
What if copyright only applied to the supported life of a game? For instance, copyright can apply to a game for up to 70 years, or whenever one of the game's core components ceases being supported plus 5 years, whichever is sooner.
I think its just from a long time ago. The idea back then was to give a specific author the ability to profit from their own work while they were alive and for another generation or so and then free that work to benefit the general public; 95/70 years was just like 'that's way longer than anybody lives'.
As usual, though, once companies could have copyrights they used some of the money to bribe politicians to extend that original idea to add time and cover all sorts of things to prevent the public from benefiting at the expense of the copyright holder, while claiming the opposite.
Its not unreasonable they would do that (longer and more expansive copyright means more value for shareholders), I just wish it wasn't the only thing anyone with the power to change it was thinking about.
It's not just that sort of thinking but that later pieces of legislation have extended the period of copyright for works that should have expired. There are a lot of corporations like Disney that don't want to see their properties ever enter public domain.
> The idea back then was to give a specific author the ability to profit from their own work while they were alive and for another generation or so and then free that work to benefit the general public; 95/70 years was just like 'that's way longer than anybody lives'.
Copyright was originally 28 years, and has been increasing linearlyish ever since: long copyrights are a recent phenomenon. Also, it's 70 years plus the author's lifetime. There are nice charts in Wikipedia.
I don't think it's just when it was that's significant here. Some works simply age slower than others. Stephen King's "It" is 30 years old. It doesn't seem insane that he should be making money off the recent cinema adaptation.
Games feel a lot more ephemeral. They're not being commercial exploited for 30 years. In some cases the franchise is, fine. In most cases, it's nowhere near 30 years.
"Not worth preserving" is basically the industry admitting this!
But we can't wait 30, 70, whatever years to preserve WoW, for example. Most of the work needs to be done while the servers are still available. Even if you wait 95 years to publish the work, the work has to be done while it's not legal. It's the only way it's possible. That disconnect seems nuts to me.
I think this is something our copyright legislation is ill-equipped for - having to admit that not all works are created equally. A book might be profitable for an entire lifetime. A game is not. Trying to pretend the same solution can solve both problems will only fracture the system.
"if, say, Roblox was to shut down I'll never hear the end of it"
I'd much rather hear about that then have to explain to grandma once again why, if she gets him a Roblox Card for his birthday/christmas/etc., her real $60 USD is potentially going to be spent on just one virtual hat (Dominus) or virtual sword (Godly).
My kid is finally starting to come around to the insanity behind that concept, but I feel horrible for the parents and other gift givers that don't yet understand.
I think it's we who don't understand. My son measures money in how many weeks allowance he needs to spend on it. And he still prefers to spend it on virtual things on sites like Roblox rather than buying physical objects, because he gets enjoyment and experiences out of it.
I find that hard to argue with when considering that e.g. the thousands I've spent on movies over the years, while e.g. I can pretend it is for the DVDs I bought rather than for access to the movie, really is about enabling experiences too - the physical objects are now largely obsolete and just takes up space. The experiences on the other hand last.
I find myself catching up slowly to his lack of attachment to holding something physical.
Sure, that means he needs to experience some degree of loss to make him internalize the risks, but even as he's coming to terms with that, but at the same time physical objects get broken or worn or lost too.
I don't worry so much about him losing virtual items he's paid for - I think most of the disappointment comes from no longer being able to be part of a community. E.g. the game he's upset about gets mentioned because he enjoyed making me play it with him - he's never mentioned the things in it he spent money on. We play other games, but that specific experience is something he misses.
And I think that is central to what copyright holders will face: They need to realize that these communities are far more important to people than their products, even when it is the product that enables the community. And antagonizing increasingly vocal communities is not a good long term strategy, because these people are going to more and more evaluate products in terms of community and trust. My son for example care far more about the group of people he follows and plays with than the specific game.
It's a shame. I still play Ninja Gaiden for the original NES--on the original NES, with the original cartridge, with the original controller.
I'm cynical I know, but in 30 years no one will remember these short-sighted fools, whereas I'd bet $100 the original Ninja Gaiden will still be around (and I hope so!).
My 3 year old plays Galaga on my Atari 7800, Super Mario on my NES, Donkey Kong Country on my SNES, and so on. They've all lasted 25 or 30 years so far, and they're sure to have good years left in them.
ESA has been around for 23 though, and produces the E3 expo. I think they'll be around for at least a chunk of that 30 years.
There should be no issues making an emulator for a server for defunct games just as there is no issues making emulators for dead consoles.
Microsoft tried really hard to push for single player online DRM too with the launch of the xbox 1. Luckily the gamers wouldn't have any of it and it became the worst PR blunder they made in gaming yet.
They are trying again with the games on windows store. They are encrypted, unmoddable and with online checks.
I hope the gaming community will stand fast on this subject in the future as well as.
The ESA (originally called IDSA) was already not worth preserving back in the golden days of abandonware, in the late nineties. Does anyone remember this? I mean when the original Home of the Underdogs website was running. The ESA mostly bullied abandonware sites into removing downloads of old games.
>Microsoft tried really hard to push for single player online DRM too with the launch of the xbox 1.
Another issue with this push is that online DRM really hurts people who live in areas where internet connections are non-existent or extremely limited. Forced updates on dial-up or satellite internet with 2GB a month caps are not compatible. This move discriminates against those who live in these areas, and while for adults it is their choice to live where they do, for children it is not.
I see this in areas of life more important than gaming as well. These days kids get sent home with homework that requires an internet connection to complete, despite these rural areas being so far from any public access that there is no way for the child to do their work. This creates a situation of helplessness for the child, which has the potential to lead them into a situation of learned helplessness with school work because the school system assumes infrastructure that doesn't exist for all.
I know it's from fantasy's series, but what I'd like to see is that as soon as a company (or rights holder) shut down official servers or make game unplayable in other ways, such act counts as the rights abandon and game goes to public domain. I'm not against companies making money from old games, but I still want to play HoMM3 released in 1999 and probably will want to play it 30 years in future (it's like chess for me), so just make it possible.
> Giving access to the proprietary server code could hypothetically lead to preservation societies building their own infrastructure and charging for access. Thus, they'd be a direct competitor to the original developers and publishers, which is something the ESA isn't exactly keen on.
This is ridiculous. Since when did "businesses not wanting to compete" justify anything? Of course they don't, but that's what our economy is supposed to be built on!
Are they actually admitting that their modern games cannot compete with older titles they shut down because they decided they were no longer profitable? Besides, nothing is stopping them from also hosting those old titles again. They've just admitted there's a market for it!
I suspect the real problem here is that older titles don't support the "live services", GaaS, and modern monetization strategies they've been pushing for the last few years. Sure, an old MMO like Everquest might be profitable to host, but it can't rake in the kind of money a lootbox scheme can.
Copyright is not inherently a bad idea, but articles like this indicate to me that our current implementation is very broken.
Preservation is central to the purpose of copyright, hence the (inadequately enforced) deposit requirement. If preservation of games isn't essential, they should not be subject to copyright at all.
> "The prevalence of reissues of older games belies any claim that game companies lack incentive to preserve older titles," the ESA writes.
Yeah. It shouldn't matter if Lord of The Rings ever goes out of print because, after all, we have several movie adaptions of it. What more could we ever want?
36 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 92.6 ms ] threadI hope the EFF gets involved if it isn't already. Particularly, it'd be rude not to, as they're getting quite a lot of donations through Humble Bundle.
Thus Southkorea still plays StarCraft, and if it weren't for backwards incompatibility slowly grinding old software to dust- a lot of people instead of buying new, dlc infested - constructions sites that might contain fun in the future- would play the old titles.
The industrys idea of revenue here is to churn the wheel of decay as fast as possible, with as much as additional sales while the customer does not buy the actual product.
The old idea of a game was to provide as much entertainment, often as long as possible (bind the customer to you)- and this means there are still shards with Ultima Online, still people playing RedAlert2 and CC:Generals. From a business point of view- this is the secret oil of the industry- there is a finite amount of people, with a finite amount of time. There are different grades of people (aka income) but that can change.
Something like MineCraft is a world destroying catastrophe in these eyes.
If you carefully look, you can see the ripples of "Long Value Release" and Studios closing due to people not buying games for years after.
So, what does the industry fear? A summer where all play some old forgotten modded title, while not even the flys circle over the loot boxes in the stores.
Thus, loosing control over the online service- has nothing to do with piracy, but everything to do with loosing control over the end-of-life of your product.
You cant patch some games balance into oblivion to sell the successor- if you do no longer control the servers.
Company like Bethesda or CDProjekt are showing that having one long running game can work too. (Bethesda is a bit strange due to their military contracts but still).
CDProjekt are even more interesting because they are behind GOG.com . Which spend time making old game playable on recent PC, but sell them for a price when they were abandonware before. Most of the time without DRM. The interesting part is they do make money through it. Which shows that you can keep a small but longterm income from your backcatalogue.
At the same time, they are making abandonware harder to support through copyright exception since copyright holders now make money again ...
Even those impose centralized control on there software though:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~owend/free/bnetd.html
I am curious to know what you are talking about. I've never heard Bethesda getting money from the DoD. And I've found nothing, since all search results are mixed with info about the military base in the city called Bethesda.
Bohemia Interactive created a division, Bohemia Interactive Simulations, to handle the military training software, which has worked with other NATO countries.
But from the Wikipedia page, the division has been bought by an equity firm, The Riverside Company, in 2013. So Bohemia Interactive doesn't deal anymore with the military, even if they might still have contact in the military, since they have developed military simulations.
I always saw Abandonware as a necessary evil, flagrant copyright violation when the copyright holder has zero interest on their property, but GOG and such are a good alternative. Not only the games are sold at reasonable prices and put under rather regular sales, but avoiding DRM does make sharing significantly easier.
I assume you mean Bohemia Interactive, who make ARMA?
I make the same mistake.
Bethesda do work well too with TES stuff too that said.
Link for the interested: https://esamarathon.com/
As it currently stands, support for copyright is overall quite strong - the mainstream belief is still that a fairly substantial degree of protection is justified. But the more peoples ability to continue to access things that are important parts of their memories gets locked down, the greater the chance that more people will come to see copyright as more of a hindrance than benefit.
My son, at 8, still regularly gets upset when he thinks of a fairly inane role playing game he didn't spend all that much time on, whose online servers were shut down about two years ago, and has more than once expressed anger towards the developers for doing so.
He still has not experienced a "serious" loss in this area in the sense of a game he's invested countless hours in and made friendships in. With a culture where more and more time gets spent in these virtual worlds that people invest a lot of time, energy and even money in, if it gets taken away there will be increasing levels of anger as well (if, say, Roblox was to shut down I'll never hear the end of it)
They're going to find themselves threading a fine line here, with new generations likely to be increasingly negative to actions that will be seen not in terms of just shutting down unprofitable games, but as hostile and destructive unjustified attacks on real communities.
But the copyright law in the US grants that protection for 70 years. 70 years seems like plenty of time for an art piece, a book or a piece of music to be useful to its creators and still remains useful for the public after that time. I don't think the same time frames are relevant for online multiplayer: imagine sitting down 50 years from now and trying to reverse-engineer a WOW server.
What if copyright only applied to the supported life of a game? For instance, copyright can apply to a game for up to 70 years, or whenever one of the game's core components ceases being supported plus 5 years, whichever is sooner.
They'd need to justify these 70 years really well. Which they have not.
As usual, though, once companies could have copyrights they used some of the money to bribe politicians to extend that original idea to add time and cover all sorts of things to prevent the public from benefiting at the expense of the copyright holder, while claiming the opposite.
Its not unreasonable they would do that (longer and more expansive copyright means more value for shareholders), I just wish it wasn't the only thing anyone with the power to change it was thinking about.
Copyright was originally 28 years, and has been increasing linearlyish ever since: long copyrights are a recent phenomenon. Also, it's 70 years plus the author's lifetime. There are nice charts in Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_...
Games feel a lot more ephemeral. They're not being commercial exploited for 30 years. In some cases the franchise is, fine. In most cases, it's nowhere near 30 years.
"Not worth preserving" is basically the industry admitting this!
But we can't wait 30, 70, whatever years to preserve WoW, for example. Most of the work needs to be done while the servers are still available. Even if you wait 95 years to publish the work, the work has to be done while it's not legal. It's the only way it's possible. That disconnect seems nuts to me.
I think this is something our copyright legislation is ill-equipped for - having to admit that not all works are created equally. A book might be profitable for an entire lifetime. A game is not. Trying to pretend the same solution can solve both problems will only fracture the system.
I'd much rather hear about that then have to explain to grandma once again why, if she gets him a Roblox Card for his birthday/christmas/etc., her real $60 USD is potentially going to be spent on just one virtual hat (Dominus) or virtual sword (Godly).
My kid is finally starting to come around to the insanity behind that concept, but I feel horrible for the parents and other gift givers that don't yet understand.
I find that hard to argue with when considering that e.g. the thousands I've spent on movies over the years, while e.g. I can pretend it is for the DVDs I bought rather than for access to the movie, really is about enabling experiences too - the physical objects are now largely obsolete and just takes up space. The experiences on the other hand last.
I find myself catching up slowly to his lack of attachment to holding something physical.
Sure, that means he needs to experience some degree of loss to make him internalize the risks, but even as he's coming to terms with that, but at the same time physical objects get broken or worn or lost too.
I don't worry so much about him losing virtual items he's paid for - I think most of the disappointment comes from no longer being able to be part of a community. E.g. the game he's upset about gets mentioned because he enjoyed making me play it with him - he's never mentioned the things in it he spent money on. We play other games, but that specific experience is something he misses.
And I think that is central to what copyright holders will face: They need to realize that these communities are far more important to people than their products, even when it is the product that enables the community. And antagonizing increasingly vocal communities is not a good long term strategy, because these people are going to more and more evaluate products in terms of community and trust. My son for example care far more about the group of people he follows and plays with than the specific game.
I'm cynical I know, but in 30 years no one will remember these short-sighted fools, whereas I'd bet $100 the original Ninja Gaiden will still be around (and I hope so!).
https://www.reddit.com/r/montreal/comments/7yauuc/to_the_gam...
From the sound of it, the gamer was young. Even newer generations seem to enjoy it.
ESA has been around for 23 though, and produces the E3 expo. I think they'll be around for at least a chunk of that 30 years.
There should be no issues making an emulator for a server for defunct games just as there is no issues making emulators for dead consoles.
Microsoft tried really hard to push for single player online DRM too with the launch of the xbox 1. Luckily the gamers wouldn't have any of it and it became the worst PR blunder they made in gaming yet. They are trying again with the games on windows store. They are encrypted, unmoddable and with online checks.
I hope the gaming community will stand fast on this subject in the future as well as.
Another issue with this push is that online DRM really hurts people who live in areas where internet connections are non-existent or extremely limited. Forced updates on dial-up or satellite internet with 2GB a month caps are not compatible. This move discriminates against those who live in these areas, and while for adults it is their choice to live where they do, for children it is not.
I see this in areas of life more important than gaming as well. These days kids get sent home with homework that requires an internet connection to complete, despite these rural areas being so far from any public access that there is no way for the child to do their work. This creates a situation of helplessness for the child, which has the potential to lead them into a situation of learned helplessness with school work because the school system assumes infrastructure that doesn't exist for all.
This is ridiculous. Since when did "businesses not wanting to compete" justify anything? Of course they don't, but that's what our economy is supposed to be built on!
Are they actually admitting that their modern games cannot compete with older titles they shut down because they decided they were no longer profitable? Besides, nothing is stopping them from also hosting those old titles again. They've just admitted there's a market for it!
I suspect the real problem here is that older titles don't support the "live services", GaaS, and modern monetization strategies they've been pushing for the last few years. Sure, an old MMO like Everquest might be profitable to host, but it can't rake in the kind of money a lootbox scheme can.
Copyright is not inherently a bad idea, but articles like this indicate to me that our current implementation is very broken.
> "The prevalence of reissues of older games belies any claim that game companies lack incentive to preserve older titles," the ESA writes.
Yeah. It shouldn't matter if Lord of The Rings ever goes out of print because, after all, we have several movie adaptions of it. What more could we ever want?