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Copyright was invented so artists would be able to sell their art, and more art would be made.
When copyright is protected on a product that's no longer sold, less art is made.
When a copyright holder stops selling their art, copyright protections should immediately cease, and they should be responsible for copyright obligations - releasing the source code to the public. Use it or lose it!
This is the most level headed approach to IP I've seen. If you're not willing to use the property you forfeit it. It's a common contact for licensing rights for movies that forces a studio to make a movie or lose rights. That way people can't squat on a licence to prevent others using it.
The same thing should apply to private property, especially in cities.
Pretty sure it was so publishers (printing press owners) could have a guaranteed profit. Those two things (publisher and artist profits) were correlated at the time. Not so much anymore. Streaming/subscription mentality is like planned obsolescence for IP.
Anti-murder laws are cuttailing my choice! What if I someday would like to make a choice to murder someone?
Yes! When I read that, I immediately thought "curtailing developer choice is exactly the point."
Yup, that's correct. What about it?
I think people are overestimating what this petition is going to do. It will likely just end up in a response from the EU listing pros and cons but effectively saying "can't really do anything about it, sorry!". It's still good, even MMOs have server software gaming companies could release if legislation forced them instead of causing fandoms to die. Games are culture. They may also be entertainment, but that's culture as well. But I wouldn't hold out hope.
I think forcing MMOs to release software is a bit much.
Opted for large scaled systems. It's more than just simple software. There is a ton of infrastructure and proprietary solutioning that goes into it. That's likely used for other games as well.
It may not even be possible to release the software because it is not just software and the resources to prepare it for releasing may not be available.
However, if a game company shut down their servers, they should not be allowed to prevent other people from try to reverse engineer and make their own servers.
Single player and local games 100% though should not be allowed to be killed.
Opted for large scaled systems. It’s more than just simple software. There is a ton of infrastructure and proprietary solutioning that goes into it. That’s likely used for other games as well.
Doesn't mean it can't be released, just that it might be difficult to reproduce. It would still be much, much easier to reverse engineer that than to reverse engineer everything from the client and network communication captures.
It may not even be possible to release the software because it is not just software and the resources to prepare it for releasing may not be available.
In other words, so you don't know, and vague assumptions on a closed box because closed boxes allow you to make them.
Most MMOs usually have multiple instances running, each which need to be maintained separately. That means they have usually gone through the process of encapsulating the server functionality in a way that can be reproduced and recreated into new instances. They have to be maintained at the same time, so they need to be relatively standard. At one point those supposedly absent resources to duplicate the instance of a server have likely existed, and just need to be packaged for public release. Proprietary portions can simply be excluded - an incomplete release is preferable to an absent one. Can't release databases, they can release schemas, etc. Incomplete > absent.
You largely seem to be giving MMO companies the excuse that if their server solution could theoretically be proprietary and convoluted enough, even if it really isn't, that they not be subject to the Stop Killing Games initiative. MMOs, unlike single player games, have a far more notable sociable and persistence factor to them, a bigger cultural footprint within those communities, that makes the Stop Killing Games Initiative particularly applicable to them. There's one simply way not to be subject to its demands - don't kill the games.
Companies would still be cutting flour with chalk if they had their way. "It's limiting blah blah blah" that's the point you corpos, consumer rights are about the consumer not the bottom line
History taught us that corpos would literally burn the world for a few more bucks. And by history, I mean right now.
"but black dynamite!....... i sell drugs to the community!"
This is just pure fabricated bullshit. They themselves started limiting options. Remember the old days where you could host your own server with basically any game? They took that away, not us. So they themselves are 100% responsible for this 'uprising'. Besides they could just provide/open-source the backend and disable drm. Hardly any work at all.
But of course it's not about that. They just try to hide behind this 'limits options' argument. But they simply don't want you to be able to play their old games. They want you to buy their latest CoD 42.
Let's be real, open sourcing it isn't "hardly any work". All the code has to be reviewed to make sure they can legally release it, no third-party proprietary stuff.
Oh but with the new rules they could do that before making their code work that way. The idea is not for the new laws to apply retroactively but for new games.
I remember the "old days". That was when dialup internet was still popular and running a server usually meant it was on your 10Mb LAN. When we got DSL it was better and you could serve outside your LAN. This was also the time when games had dark red code booklets, required having a physical CD inserted or weirdly formatted floppies (sometimes a combination of these). You could get around these things and many groups of people worked hard at providing these workarounds. Today, many of these games are only playable and only still exist because of the thankless work these groups did. As it was and as it is has not changed. Many groups of people are still keeping games playable despite the "war" that corporations wage on them (and by proxy on us). Ironically, now that there is such a thing as "classic games" and people are nostalgic for what brought them joy in the past, business has leapt at this as a marketing opportunity. What makes that ironic? These business are re-selling the versions of games with the circumvention patches that the community made to make their games playable so long ago. The patches that publishers had such a big problem with and sought to eradicate. This is because the original code no longer exists and the un-patched games will not run at all on modern hardware and the copy-protections will not tolerate a virtual machine. Nothing has changed.
We can even go back as far as when people first started making books or maps that had deliberate errors so that they could track when their work was redistributed. Do the people referencing these books or maps benefit from these errors?
Why do some of us feel compelled to limit knowledge even at the cost of corrupting that knowledge for those we intend it for (and for those long after who wish to learn from historical knowledge)?
"... curtail developer choice" - This from a bunch of people for whom the term 'executive meddling' was created.
Lol. We're gamers. We know that if we encounter enemies we're going in the right direction.
Still trying to find the right direction on animal crossing.
Towards the bees!
Uh, yeah, that's the point of all regulations. To make you not pick bad things.
"curtail developer choice" is such a weak argument because you could equally apply it to literally every piece of regulation ever passed. Of course it curtails choice, that's almost the dictionary definition of an industry regulation.
Why are publishers speaking for devs about how much choice devs would have? Why not get devs to speak?
Because sometimes publishers like to be the ones cuetailing dev choices
This initiative sure would make things more complicated for the game publishers, yes.
Because they're currently not doing the bare minimum.
If they weren't so accustomed to not doing the bare minimum, maybe they would have different opinions! Just saying.
Edit: Just signed the petition. Didn't think this was necessary before because, as soon as I heard of it, Finland was already top of the list percentage wise. But I did sign it, just for the hell yeah of it.
It's not just for the hell of it!
Invalid votes will be removed when it's time for the final tally, so the initiative needs a solid buffer to still he over a million after.
There's been a talk of some people using bots to inflate the numbers in a misguided attempt to help the initiative, so every vote is still very welcome.
Also, I kinda want to see just how high Finland can go above the threshold.
Tell your friends!
Whenever a large games company talks about "developer choice" you know they're referring to one of a few things:
Developer choice, ha-ha, very funny. I am not familiar with the industry and still feel safe to bet most of them (edit: actual software developers making games) just want to get enough money for doing what they can do without too much stress/disgust and also most of them don't have a desire to see their work die just because some manager decided it is time to make some other games instead
I bet they're really pissed off with ubisoft right now. They basically started this whole movement by being so egregious with The Crew. Less than a month before they shut the servers down the game was still on sale for the full price that it had launched with.
Granted it was shut down because it was the most mediocre game ever made but that still isn't an excuse.
So does not allowing food companies to sprinkle lead and uranium in food. What's the point?
The original article completely misrepresents the initiative:
We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.
Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
...
Stop Killing Games is not trying to force companies to provide private servers or anything like that, but leave the game in a playable state after shutting off servers. This can mean:
Of course, releasing server code is an option.
The expectation is:
That didn't restrict design decisions, it just places a requirement when the game is discontinued. If companies know this going in, they can plan ahead for their exit, just like we expect for mining companies (they're expected to fill in holes and make it look nice once they're done).
I argue Stop Killing Games doesn't go far enough, and if it's pissing off the games industry as well, then that means it strikes a good balance.
And "would leave rights holders liable" is completely false, no game would have offline modes if it did
Giant corporations have proven no amount of profit is too much. There needs to be some guardrails. And some form of preservation of the games your loyal customers have enriched your company to access.
Curtailing developer choice is rather the point, no?
Yeah just the choices that fucks over paying customers. They are saying they would like to keep doing that and this laws would curtail that.
Will someone think of the poor shareholders? /s
If it means developers won’t make “live-service”/trash games anymore, we should hasten the SKG movement.
Ah, the propaganda war has started.
That's good news. Means the initiative has a shot.
It was disquieting back when they were just flat out ignoring it.
they say "developer choice" because they know those words have positive connotations but what they mean is "publisher greed"
It needs way more people, because I guess a lot of people from all over the world used VPNs to sign the petition and will get nullified.
So if you planned to do it, don't, you will hurt your goals more than you're doing an good.
Corporate jargon translation:
"It's going to limit innovation" = "We won't be able to use those new ways of ripping off our customers anymore"
"Won't somebody PLEASE think of the ~~children~~ devs!?"
The last refuge of a dying argument 😴
The devs would probably prefer if their work for several years wasn't thrown in the trash. It's the publishers and suits killing games.
"Developers" are the ones who are passionate about the games they make, and definitely don't want their games dead.
"Corporations" are the ones who only want to profit from selling the game, and then ditch it once it's no longer lucrative enough.
