And none of that would be an issue if not for the fact that so many companies are creating games that become paperweights when they shut down the servers.
It used to be very commonplace to include server binaries with multiplayer games, before dedicated servers for every game was the norm. Also before that, modding games, including multiplayer games, was also highly normalized. If anything, the era of live service titles that are completely 100% locked down and only work with the developer's servers, punish modding, what have you is the aberration, not the norm. And those games once the developers want to move on, become paperweights when they do. All the achievements made, all the items unlocked, all the currency invested, instantly becomes worthless.
So like, I dunno, if you as a developer are not in this for the long haul and don't want to have to comply with this regulation at great expense at the end tail of development, then develop it like it used to be done? Include server binaries for people to use at launch? Maybe plan on making your money back on purchases of the game, and not on long-tail monetization that demands more security and locked-down-ness in the software to be viable?
Also, software is not static. Do you really expect programs written today will work in 100 years?
Failing that, there's always hardware emulation but to be honest, unless you're for whatever odd reason trying to run your server on AMD64, I don't think there's too much to be concerned about. And, if source code is released by the developer, the community that remains could see to continuing support.
Worth noting here that the self-hosting mod for Titanfall 2, called Northstar, already did all of that with nothing but reverse-engineering involved because Respawns servers were basically unusable for years.
It's 100% free if you keep this requirement in mind when making your game in the first place.
Some publishers having to spend money today because they played with fire by eroding consumer rights seems like a worthwhile price to pay.
Publishers are playing with fire by trying to undermine that doctrine for digital goods.
So if your question is in good faith (and I very much doubt it is...) then at least this has a long history of established rights.
Again, this is the literal thing that's being debated. Companies are currently allowed to treat game sales as such and this group is arguing the law should stop them from doing so.
Right now when you play games online you don't pay for dedicated servers (which are very expensive), with this law expect that to change. Expect to also have to pay for a team of software engineers to manage the games into eternity.
I don't think you can get to a much more foundational definition of democracy than "decisions are made because a lot of people agree they should". You might disagree with the results, but it's an excellent argument for something becoming law.
> Unless stated by the law your rights are what you agreed to when signing the terms of service for the game.
Laws make contract provisions unenforceable all the time. This is not a new thing, and I have a hard time imagining the effect of laws if you couldn't invalidate agreements with them.
> Stop acting like people were duped when servers were shut off for a game that doesn't get played.
But people do feel like they got duped when that happens. That's why people get upset. You might disagree with it, but just saying "don't feel that way" isn't a good argument. Why shouldn't I feel that way? It's how games worked in the past. Games that have been shut down in the past and rendered unplayable have been made playable by fans before. Why shouldn't we expect companies the companies who made them to make an effort to do so as well?
> Right now when you play games online you don't pay for dedicated servers (which are very expensive), with this law expect that to change. Expect to also have to pay for a team of software engineers to manage the games into eternity.
I'm not entirely clear why you're taking this as a given, but I trust you'll elaborate. But humoring your (I suspect flawed) premise: personally I think it would be great if we went back to player-run dedicated servers. Some of the games I've played the most lately (Valheim, Minecraft, V Rising) are ones I've rented dedicated servers for. Hosting dedicated servers these days is extremely easy and quite cheap. Further on this tangent: I think we've lost a lot of online community because most games pour everyone into the same matchmaking buckets. This means you don't get as many small communities centered around specific servers popping up like you did back in the late 90s or early 2000s.
> Expect to also have to pay for a team of software engineers to manage the games into eternity.
Could you explain which part of the legislation requires this?
Do I really need explain why the majority thinking something is good does not make it good? Look-up tyranny of the majority.
Obviously the vast majority of people are consumers and create nothing so it's naturally good that we just leech off creators to the largest extent possible since they are a smaller group.
I am always biased in favor of people that create. They are a smaller group but vastly more important.
No, of course not, but if you look at what I wrote you'll note that I did not say that. Majority is obviously a terrible way to decide what's morally/ethically right. Within a democratic system though, it is the way we decide what rights to grant people.
> I am always biased in favor of people that create. They are a smaller group but vastly more important.
I'm glad you point out your bias. I don't know why people who "create" (this seems to have a specific meaning for you) would be more important than anyone else. How far does this bias lean? If Blizzard updates their user agreement and sneak a clause in there where I agree to give away my house if the other party asks for it, am I wrong to think that shouldn't be enforceable?
The world will quickly go to shit if people stopped creating and building new things. Literally everything you own was built by someone's labor. Maybe stop mandating that these people do more for you?
> If Blizzard updates their user agreement and sneak a clause in there where I agree to give away my house
Where are you going with this argument? In what way does being biased mean I just agree with everything a group decides?
People don't create things in a vacuum. They exist within a society. People did not stop creating things in the US when we decided workers had to be compensated for injuries. In this (much less severe) case, the proposed legislation says that companies have to make "reasonable" efforts. I don't know how you think a reasonable effort would be enough to stop people from "creating".
> Where are you going with this argument? In what way does being biased mean I just agree with everything a group decides?
I'm genuinely trying to find out what you feel is a reasonable thing to expect someone to agree to. I assume you think people agree to have games disabled after they've paid for them because it was in an agreement they signed. Most people don't read such agreements thoroughly though. Elsewhere in this thread you said: "A lot of people thinking something isn't a good argument. Unless stated by the law your rights are what you agreed to when signing the terms of service for the game. Stop acting like people were duped when servers were shut off for a game that doesn't get played."
If you don't think the company should be allowed to take the home in the hypothetical: why? Is it the monetary amount involved? The amount of disruption to the homeowner's life? Something else?
or take rights from people, which seems to be in vouge as of late.
I simply think this is a foolish direction. Preservation is important but you can't mandate entertainment to keep servers up and running. If this focused on actual single player cases there may be a point here, but I feel trying to fit in cases like WoW is just asking this bill to fail.
And to recognize my bias: I have also been in enough gamer circles to know that any talk of preservation is just wolf whistles for enabling piracy. I lot of people don't actually care about ownership (look at how they praise gamepass, a system that will actually end games ownership as we know it), they care about getting games they like for free.
Yes and that would indeed be an unrealistic thing to mandate, which is why this proposal doesn't do that. It requires companies make a "reasonable" effort to make the game continue to be playable afterward.
> And to recognize my bias: I have also been in enough gamer circles to know that any talk of preservation is just wolf whistles for enabling piracy.
We must run in very different circles. I care deeply about game preservation and haven't pirated a game in many many years.
Elsewhere in this conversation it sounded like you were implying that games which get shut down aren't worth much anymore anyway. I don't agree with this reasoning at all, but wouldn't that imply piracy wouldn't matter as much? I guess you might be giving people free alternatives at that point, but historically that hasn't had an effect on things like record sales.
> I lot of people don't actually care about ownership (look at how they praise gamepass, a system that will actually end games ownership as we know it), they care about getting games they like for free.
I'm not denying that what you're saying is true for a large number of people, but it's also false for a large number of people too. If you look at the comments on a gaming site you'll find plenty of people saying things like Game Pass are terrible because they don't give you access to games permanently.
Again, you're taking as a given one of the things which some people want to change. Why shouldn't the developers of the newest matchmaking-based shooter be required to release the binary for a dedicated server when they shut the game down? Obviously this won't be feasible for some games, but I can imagine plenty of games where it seems like it should be reasonable to factor it into development costs.
And maybe we can also mandate that companies release detailed server specifications when they turn down a game. Everything that might be needed for someone to rewrite the server. Then someone else might step into a breach - a different company, an open source project - and continue providing the service.
The core problem is government granting businesses copyright, which prevents players from doing what they want with the material they buy. This is for apparently reasonable reasons, but there is some downsides to it. So it is less that we are adding another right, but more that we are specifying the right given to the business to begin with to ensure they aren't being given something that shouldn't be a right.
Ending copyright would also solve this, but with many other side effects that we probably don't want to invoke.
Yes, I don't think they understand that running these games isn't free, modifying the games to be self hostable is not free, and giving away the code for other people to run it is ip suicide.