News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:EFF asks for the right to revive “abandoned” online games by teddyh on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @04:08PM (#8564266)
Sadly, I don’t think the game companies are going to accept this – they are probably afraid that legitimizing this will make development of replacement server code start early (in anticipation of the shutdown of the official servers) and that the existence of working code, even though it will somehow be illegal to run, will still be run by many people, loosening the company’s iron grip of the players through the official servers.
Re:EFF asks for the right to revive “abandoned” online games by 0942v8653 on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @04:37PM (#8564410)
Which is sad considering the "iron grip" is not really going to help them much; for an extreme example look at what server mods did for Minecraft.
Re:EFF asks for the right to revive “abandoned” online games by jiggy2011 on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:32PM (#8564671)
Most of the minecraft money comes from selling copies of the client, not from server subscriptions as in the case of WoW.
Re:EFF asks for the right to revive “abandoned” online games by gizmo686 on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @11:18PM (#8565771)
To clarify this point, the Minecraft server is free to download [0], even if you have not purchased the game at all.

[0] https://minecraft.net/download

Re:EFF asks for the right to revive “abandoned” online games by kruczek on Thursday November 06, 2014 @05:47AM (#8566495)
I don't think that would loosen the iron grip of game companies - as you mentioned it would be "illegal to run" such servers then, just as much as it is now. And they would "still be run by many people" regardless.
Re:EFF asks for the right to revive “abandoned” online games by teddyh on Thursday November 06, 2014 @09:43AM (#8567161)
No, my point is that the eventual legality of such services will make them be developed earlier than they would be developed had they been illegal indefinitely.