I wholeheartedly agree with this. Add an expiration date on the "box" (I dunno what you call it in modern times):
"Online-only: This game will be playable until 2028-06-30"
This forces the publisher to put their money where their mouth is. If the game is successful, like WoW, by all means extend the time it's playable for. If it 'flops', you're on the hook to support it for 3 years, since you shouldn't be putting out made-to-fail slop.
I hope this will pass. Video games are an important medium, and it's distressing to the degree they are overwritten or completely destroyed when they are no longer profitable.
I’m curious how this can be enforced. If a game requires centralized servers, and the company goes out of business, you can’t force a bankrupt entity to keep the system running. Even if they published an expiration date, if there is no money left to run the servers, there’s nothing to sue for, nobody to fine, and no money to run the server.
You could force the company to release their code upon bankruptcy, but what if another company wants to buy those assets? What if some other IP that they might use on other games is mixed in there and required for the game to work?
You could make a prohibition on live service games to begin with. You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset. The problem here is economic.
Game companies can’t go back to the old model of lumpy cash flow. You can’t have one huge pile of money come in when the game launches, and then a long miniscule tail. That doesn’t keep people employed. It’s also super risky when a game with a huge budget and long development time flops. You have to have some kind of constant revenue stream from subscriptions or micro-transactions to stay afloat. If users can run their own servers, that can never happen.
Millions of essentially rich middle upper class banding together effortlessly to petition the government to save their entertainment. Meanwhile there are people spending their whole lives to get even a tiny sliver of support for things like human rights violations.
The obvious case where this makes sense are single-player games that require internet access before they even launch, like when you need to link a Microsoft account to play Forza.
But it's less obvious to me how the legislation should work for a multiplayer-only game that goes out of business. I suppose it should require a refund at some point. But at what point?
Steam only lets you refund a game that you played for less than two hours.
And if you think that's not long enough, there's surely some time period where you can agree that you've got your money's worth. Kind of like how you lose the ability to say "I didn't like it" after you ate your whole dinner at a restaurant.
Yet in the comments here someone gives an example of three years of online support which is insane. Why is multiplayer special? Should Steam also let you refund any game until three years elapse?
I think a legal remedy here won't work. It can't magically produce money or desire to keep something runnable indefinitely. And any regulation that tries to compel work without payment seems like it will just hurt indie developers more.
I'm really glad there was an effort by streamers and influencers (shout-out to Asmongold and Penguinz0) to back Ross up and push back on PirateSoftware's incorrect take on this initiative. For a while it looked like the UK wasn't going to get 100k votes and that the EU initiative wasn't going to hit the million mark. Then about a week ago content got uploaded and this initiative got a much needed boost.
The console wars are no longer company vs company, it is company vs consumer. So much anti consumer shenanigans are going on in the video game industry a message needs to be sent.
If you care about video games, even in passing as a complete casual, please sign the petitions. I've done my dash for the UK.
This seems very silly to me. Why would it apply only to games? It specifically is trying to apply to free games also. Should any product or service you ship with a client have to allow you to self host it if you don’t want to support it forever? What if your backend is extremely complex like WoW or Fortnite? That’s months or years of work to make that self hostable. How do you broker access to what you actually purchased? Does everyone just get to be Peter Griffin?
This seems like a lot of hullabaloo over an issue that most people don’t care about, isn’t a major problem, has large technical and financial hurdles.
It seems to me if it’s important to consumers the large size and diversity of the gaming market would make this a non issue because you could just select a game without this restriction, of which many are available in every genre.
I think this initiative sounds great, it's curious to me in a legal sense why this would strictly pertain to gaming software and not one-time bought software licensing models as a whole. This issue is pretty prevalent in software in general. Software vendors should have some accountability for EoLing these things in a graceful manner.
As others have noted, the problem is often with keeping servers running. It's impossible to predict how successful a game will be in the long term, so the publisher can't make any claims to it's longevity. And, it doesn't make any sense to keep servers running if there's not enough income flow. Where this is really an issue is MMOs. Games like Forza already have some solutions: online features are eventually disabled, but you can still play the core game.
This is one of the few places where the USA has a sensible solution. In 2015, my org (Themade.org) worked with Archive.org, MIT, the EFF, and Harvard Law to obtain a DMCA 1201 exemption for legal DRM circumvention for the case of single player games where online validation servers have ceased operations.
Thanks to the hard work of these organizations, the US market, at least, allows for those who purchased these games to continue to play them with a third party patch to their client. See below:
Quite a few EU national libraries have legal desposits of cultural works extended to video games. It's not that far fetched for them to expect that their copies should be working.
For ephemeral GaaS the libraries could require a video of a reference playthrough for any new game mode, if they don't want to leave it all inconsistent and spotty twitch and letplay youtube coverage.
Requiring GaaS Server binaries to made public is a bridge too far here to me, if the game is kept running with a minimum of two years after announcing EOL and shutting down purchases in shops after that. It should be encouraged, but mandatory? Playability is not everything if the experience is not reproducable to begin with.
I am very surprised that people read this and think: "HoW CaN yOu SuppORT GaME AFter BANkRUPCY! THIS WILL KILL MMOS"
Jeez, learn to fucking read. If a company kills a game with multiplayer-online requirement, release the goddamn server or let people make and host servers. this is the only thing that is being proposed.
Lots of bad takes in this thread. The whole idea behind this is just to stop defrauding customers that buy your software and then are left holding the bag. Nobody is asking for developers to keep running server infra for eternity.
Any of the following options are enough to satisfy this proposal:
- Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.
- Have your server source code (stripped down of proprietary stuff) ready for public release at EoL.
- Allow customers to reverse engineer the binaries and communication protocol after EoL.
- Package dedicated server binaries with the game and allow customers to connect to it via a LAN or direct IP option.
That's sneering. Don't do this. If you have a specific argument that you respond to, then do it. Generically sneering at other comments is profoundly anti-intellectual, extremely boring, and directly against the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - it actively degrades the quality of HN.
How is this problematic? New law impedes on previous practices and renders them unfeasible all the time.
In the specific case of Pokemon Go, and with end-of-life plans in mind, you could probably design the game around that expectation. GDPR has had similar consequences, at the very least.
Also, this text is not law. This will be negotiated and I doubt the gaming industry would leave the initiative as-is.
There is no feasible way for Pokémon Go to remain in a reasonably playable state after the servers shut down. I outlined my points here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44449575
If you're okay with games like Pokémon Go being harder or impossible to make, that's fine, but dont pretend like it's trivial for all game developers to meet the requirements in this petition.
Look at Concord. It was turned off immediately, because there was no players interest and Sony decided to cut the losses right away. Under the proposed rules they wouldn't be able to just kill a game they had high hopes for but ended up unneeded.
The only financially viable solution for online games is to release in Europe later, after the project popularity in other markets was established.
29 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 51.3 ms ] thread"Online-only: This game will be playable until 2028-06-30"
This forces the publisher to put their money where their mouth is. If the game is successful, like WoW, by all means extend the time it's playable for. If it 'flops', you're on the hook to support it for 3 years, since you shouldn't be putting out made-to-fail slop.
You could force the company to release their code upon bankruptcy, but what if another company wants to buy those assets? What if some other IP that they might use on other games is mixed in there and required for the game to work?
You could make a prohibition on live service games to begin with. You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset. The problem here is economic.
Game companies can’t go back to the old model of lumpy cash flow. You can’t have one huge pile of money come in when the game launches, and then a long miniscule tail. That doesn’t keep people employed. It’s also super risky when a game with a huge budget and long development time flops. You have to have some kind of constant revenue stream from subscriptions or micro-transactions to stay afloat. If users can run their own servers, that can never happen.
Millions of essentially rich middle upper class banding together effortlessly to petition the government to save their entertainment. Meanwhile there are people spending their whole lives to get even a tiny sliver of support for things like human rights violations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39909538
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126782
But it's less obvious to me how the legislation should work for a multiplayer-only game that goes out of business. I suppose it should require a refund at some point. But at what point?
Steam only lets you refund a game that you played for less than two hours.
And if you think that's not long enough, there's surely some time period where you can agree that you've got your money's worth. Kind of like how you lose the ability to say "I didn't like it" after you ate your whole dinner at a restaurant.
Yet in the comments here someone gives an example of three years of online support which is insane. Why is multiplayer special? Should Steam also let you refund any game until three years elapse?
The console wars are no longer company vs company, it is company vs consumer. So much anti consumer shenanigans are going on in the video game industry a message needs to be sent.
If you care about video games, even in passing as a complete casual, please sign the petitions. I've done my dash for the UK.
This seems like a lot of hullabaloo over an issue that most people don’t care about, isn’t a major problem, has large technical and financial hurdles.
It seems to me if it’s important to consumers the large size and diversity of the gaming market would make this a non issue because you could just select a game without this restriction, of which many are available in every genre.
Thanks to the hard work of these organizations, the US market, at least, allows for those who purchased these games to continue to play them with a third party patch to their client. See below:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exempt...
so hoping that a third party patch can fix the issue. hoping it does. sounds like a very hopeless "legal" workaround
Requiring GaaS Server binaries to made public is a bridge too far here to me, if the game is kept running with a minimum of two years after announcing EOL and shutting down purchases in shops after that. It should be encouraged, but mandatory? Playability is not everything if the experience is not reproducable to begin with.
Any of the following options are enough to satisfy this proposal:
- Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.
- Have your server source code (stripped down of proprietary stuff) ready for public release at EoL.
- Allow customers to reverse engineer the binaries and communication protocol after EoL.
- Package dedicated server binaries with the game and allow customers to connect to it via a LAN or direct IP option.
That's sneering. Don't do this. If you have a specific argument that you respond to, then do it. Generically sneering at other comments is profoundly anti-intellectual, extremely boring, and directly against the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - it actively degrades the quality of HN.
In the specific case of Pokemon Go, and with end-of-life plans in mind, you could probably design the game around that expectation. GDPR has had similar consequences, at the very least.
Also, this text is not law. This will be negotiated and I doubt the gaming industry would leave the initiative as-is.
If you're okay with games like Pokémon Go being harder or impossible to make, that's fine, but dont pretend like it's trivial for all game developers to meet the requirements in this petition.
The only financially viable solution for online games is to release in Europe later, after the project popularity in other markets was established.
was at 60% less than a week ago :o
How? What games would be impossible to make with the proposed change?