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ampersandrew ,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Boy, it was frustrating to see Thor completely misrepresent the position of the campaign. It wasn’t “vague enough to also include live service games”; it purposely includes them.

ImplyingImplications ,

Yeah, that’s why he says it’s stupid. It seems like he’s fine with the idea of removing DRM that makes single player games unplayable but forcing devs to make online multiplayer games playable forever is ridiculous.

ampersandrew ,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

To clarify, your position is it’s ridiculous, or you’re stating that his position is that it’s ridiculous?

ImplyingImplications ,

My position is it’s ridiculous. I agree with Thor. Saying all games must exist forever is too vague because I don’t think all games should be forced to exist forever.

Icalasari ,

They all should still be preserved. The code can be stored without needing servers to be kept open, for example

jay ,
@jay@mbin.zerojay.com avatar

Code is already stored, it's just not public.

ImplyingImplications ,

What? I write some code and then delete it and I’m in trouble because I didn’t preserve it?? I really don’t understand this concept at all

ampersandrew ,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

You sold someone some code that you then rendered inoperable by actions beyond their control; that’s what you’d get in trouble for. Delete your own code all you like.

ImplyingImplications ,

That’s a different statement than you made before. I am also against disabling something someone paid for. But what did you mean by

The code can be stored without needing servers to be kept open

I have to store code? Can’t I delete my own code?

ProdigalFrog OP ,

If you sell someone a game that relies on a server you own, and did not advertise clearly that you were selling a service, not a good (something you own), and then break that product for the customer without any possibility of them repairing their good, and you delete the code that could’ve fixed it, you’d be sorta commiting fraud.

If you abandon a product that was sold as a good, and it became inoperable due to forces unrelated to you, you’d be in the clear.

ImplyingImplications ,

Right, so an MMO charging a monthly fee shouldn’t need to make their game available to everyone if they stop charging people the fee and shut it down? Because that’s what I think too.

ZeroHora ,
@ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

In the ideal world they could release the code open source, there’s no money lose on that.

ProdigalFrog OP ,

Yes, legally an mmo sold as a service would not be targeted.

ImplyingImplications ,

But the FAQ on the stop killing games site specifically says this applies to MMOs. That’s why I disagree. Specifically for the part about MMOs.

ampersandrew ,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

A few things. People use MMOs as an example of a thing that cannot be run by users, and the FAQ calls out that this is demonstrably false. Second, there’s the idea of a good and a service, and games have been happy to blur this line over the past decade and change. When you pay a monthly subscription fee, there’s no question that you’re paying for a service; your service ends when that month is up. The problem comes from selling you things as though they’re goods but then revoking access to them at some unknown time in the future as though it were a service or lease that you had no idea when it would expire. So this campaign also demands that if you’re selling microtransactions like a cosmetic mount in an MMO, you need to be able to use that mount after the servers are no longer supported, and as we’ve already proven, it is definitely actually possible for ordinary people to run MMO servers, even if they’re hosting them for a few hundred or a few thousand people rather than hundreds of thousands or millions.

ProdigalFrog OP ,

The question on the FAQ is asking if it’s possible, which it is. But in his big video on this topic, he says that subscription based MMOs really don’t count (even if he’d like it to).

ImplyingImplications ,

I agree with that. That’s what I meant in my original comment that applying this to all games is ridiculous. Subscription based MMOs are a game but this initiative shouldn’t apply to them.

WHYAREWEALLCAPS ,

That is not what is being discussed and was never being discussed. You're sounding like you're being pedantic to try to pick a fight

ImplyingImplications , (edited )

I’m being specific because this is being intended as a law everyone must follow. “All games need to be available forever” is very vague. How will this vague law be applied in practice? People brought up the idea of eternal code preservation. Alright. How does that work?

I’m not picking a fight. I want supporters to explain in vivid detail their expectations because it’s clear not even all the supporters agree on how it would be implemented. Some said it doesn’t apply to MMOs. Some said it does. It needs to be one or the other. That’s not being pedantic, it’s being realistic.

ampersandrew ,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

What the petition says is what it’s asking for. What we want may be different. What European parliament drafts, if we’re so lucky, will be what’s actually the law. The concerns in the petition are quite clearly about how this applies to EU consumer protections, and many of us are interested in that plus the bonus that this will grant to preservation by proxy.

Icalasari ,

A game's code can be submitted to a repository on release to the public to be stored for the sake of preservation. The repository can always be made access on a case by case basis, thus preventing the loss of code and culture while also protecting the IP holder's rights

ImplyingImplications ,

And every single game dev would be required to do this for the thousands of games released every year? Who would host this massive repository? Who would determine access on a case by case basis? It’s a nice suggestion but mandating this as a law everyone has to follow? Why? I thought this was about consumer protection

Icalasari ,

Iunno, the Library of Congress in the states seems capable of holding every movie, book, journal, etc.

I think a way could be found for games in the EU if even the US can manage this for other media

ImplyingImplications ,

Is that repository required by law? Is every author and director required to follow it or be punished? What if an author only publishes it on their website and then takes the website down and it never makes it to the archive are they in trouble? It’s a nice thing, but mandating it as law is ridiculous.

mnemonicmonkeys ,

Any company that isn’t completely incompetent has some revision control solution like GitHub. It saves the original and all the changes throughout the life of the code. It’s designed specifically to allow developers to update or even delete code while still maintaining records

ImplyingImplications ,

An indie dev recently lost the source code to their early access game and had to remove it from Steam. If this law was in place, what punishment would they face for their incompetence? It would be rare for a massive company to not have source control, but it probably isn’t uncommon for small first time devs. So now you have a well intentioned law putting regulations in place that hurt small devs and raise the barrier to entry.

ampersandrew ,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Well, it wouldn’t be retroactive. As a consumer, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to know what I’m buying. If anything, this petition is way softer than my stance. As per this petition, you could get around doing the honest thing of providing the customers the ability to host the servers themselves by just clearly informing the customer at the point of sale how long services will be up for, if you truly want to try to convince people that it’s a service and not a product that they just made worse for business reasons. But they don’t want to do that, because then they can’t sucker people into buying something that isn’t long for this world.

Cowboy_Dude ,
@Cowboy_Dude@lemmy.ml avatar

Per the official Stop Killing Games FAQ: www.stopkillinggames.com/faq(apologies if formatting ends up looking weird)

Q: Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?

A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:

‘Gran Turismo Sport’ published by Sony ‘Knockout City’ published by Velan Studios ‘Mega Man X DiVE’ published by Capcom ‘Scrolls / Caller’s Bane’ published by Mojang AB ‘Duelyst’ published by Bandai Namco Entertainment etc.

ImplyingImplications ,

That’s fine for single player games but modifying some massive MMO so that someone can host it on a laptop is literally impossible. This language applies to everything. EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, all of it would need to be able to run on someone’s home computer when they’re purposefully built from the ground up to work on massive servers?

ProdigalFrog OP ,

The difference between a home server and a larger business server is simply the scale of how many players it can host at once.

WoW’s server binary was reverse engineered by fans, and a large ecosystem of privately run WoW servers that players can connect to exist at this very moment.

Private servers running older vanilla versions of wow became so popular, blizzard then created their own vanilla wow server to get in on the action.

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

It’s not impossible at all. People have done this literally for decades. Classic WoW only exists because people hosted their own seevers and Blizzard wanted in on the money. Star Wars Galaxies the same. I think Everquest 1 as well. And probably others as well.

ampersandrew ,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t think there’s any language in this petition that says it must be hosted on a laptop. The server binary, with a reasonable expectation that someone with documentation, the hardware, and the know-how to use it, would be enough.

ZeroHora ,
@ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

Lol that not impossible.

computergeek125 ,

If a big MMO closes that’d be rough, but those types of games tend to form communities anyways like Minecraft. You don’t have to pay Microsoft a monthly rate to host a Java server for you and a few friends, you just have to have a little bit of IT knowledge and maybe a helper package to get you and your friends going. It’s still a single binary, even if it doesn’t run on a laptop well for larger settings.

With a big MMO, there will form support groups and turnkey scripts to get stuff working as well as it can be, and forums online for finding existing open community servers by people who have the hardware and knowledge to host a few dozen to a few hundred of their closest friends online.

Life finds a way.

If it’s a complicated multi-node package where you need stuff to be split up better as gateway/world/area/instance, the community servers that will form may tend towards larger player groups, since the knowledge and resource to do that is more specific.

echomap ,

People have been running private wow servers for a long time now apparently, so it seems possible for mmos.

Katana314 ,

FFXIV has headed in the opposite direction of your claim. They’ve recently been making a lot of changes to major story dungeons so that the experience relies as little as possible on online communities. Right now, playing requires a subscription. It’s more and more believable to see that requirement removed if the game was somehow dead and that ‘had’ to happen.

ProdigalFrog OP ,

He’s showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn’t make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.

Ross wrote a response to Thor’s in the comments of this video, but it’s a bit buried. I’ll include Thor’s for context as well:

Thor:

I’m aware of the process for an initiative to be turned into legislature much farther down the road after many edits. If people want me to back it then the technical and monetary hurdles of applying the request need to be included in the conversation. As written this initiative would put a massive undue burden on developers both in AAA and Indie to the extent of killing off Live Service games. It’s entirely too vague on what the problem is and currently opens a conversation that causes more problems instead of fixing the one it wants to.

If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just “videogames” as stated in the initiative. Specifically call out the practice we want to shut down. It’s a much more correct conversation to have, defeats the actual issue, and stops all this splash damage that I can’t agree with.

Ross’s response:

@PirateSoftware I actually wasn’t planning to write to you further since you said you didn’t want to talk about it with me and I’ll still respect that if you’d like. But since you brought up what I said again I’ll at least give my side of that then leave you alone:

  • I’m 100% cynical, I can’t turn it off. I wasn’t trying to appeal to legislators when I said that, I doubt they’ll even watch my videos. I was trying to appeal to people who are are kind of doomer and think this is hopeless from the get-go. I wanted to lay out the landscape as I view it that this could actually work where many initiatives have failed. Did it backfire more than it inspired people? I have no idea. I’ve said before I don’t think I’m the ideal person to lead this, stuff like this is part of why I say that; I can’t just go Polyanna on people and pretend like there aren’t huge obstacles and these are normally rough odds, so that was meant as inspirational. You clearly weren’t the target audience, but you’re in complete opposition to the movement also.
  • I’m literally not a part of the initiative in any official capacity. I won’t be the one talking to officials in Brussels if this passes. The ECI could completely distance itself from me if that was necessary.
  • In my eyes, what I was doing there was the equivalent of forecasting the weather. You think it’s manipulation, but I don’t control the weather. I can choose when I fly a kite based on my forecast however.
  • It was also kind of half-joke on the absurdity of the system we’re in that I consider these critical factors that determine our success or not. So yes, I meant what I said, but I also acknowledge it’s kind of ludicrous that these are perhaps highly relevant factors towards getting anything done in a democracy.

Anyway, I got the impression this whole issue was kind of thrust upon you by your fans, you clearly hate the initiative, so as far as I’m concerned people should stop bothering you about it since you don’t like it.

magic_lobster_party ,

It's entirely too vague on what the problem is

How is it vague? If I buy a game, it should be playable for all eternity. Just like how I can pop in Super Mario on NES and play it just like how it was in the 80s.

Or how I can still play Half Life deathmatch more than 25 years after its release.

ZeroHora ,
@ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

He’s showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn’t make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.

I don’t think he have any soft spot for mega corp, is just online figures/influencers can’t never be wrong type of thing.

atro_city ,

If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just "videogames" as stated in the initiative.

Spoken like an idealist. Video games is probably the biggest thing that will gain traction. Sure, it would be great to tackle the entire issue, but the people making this initiative aren't using other software that does that shit. Saying "care about all the people" dilutes the issue.

Hard disagree with Thor on this one.

webghost0101 ,

I am out of the loop but it seems like a topic to once again promote my age old belief that:

The moment purchased or licensed software is no longer serviced or supported it must become open-source.

No exception. I am still waiting on the firmware to reprogram my smartish oven.

grue ,

I’d go even further: developers ought to be required to submit reproducible builds to the Library of Congress in order to be eligible for copyright in the first place.

(And copyright ought to be shortened back to its original term length, by the way.)

Katana314 ,

Sadly, even if I’m moralistically in favor, there is so much insane computer science logic (and proprietary mechanisms) behind the process of compilation, especially on certain embedded systems where this issue comes up, that I doubt that could ever be pushed into law.

grue ,

I understand it’s easy for a layperson to have that opinion, but I don’t think it can be hand-waved away as too difficult when people are actually doing it.

sanosuke001 ,

I’d even be happy with there being a choice between “either release tools needed to unlock and run services necessary to function OR release all source code to public domain so someone else is able to fix and rebuild the software as necessary”

If I pay for something they shouldn’t be able to disable it

CosmoNova ,

I’m a little surprised either of them have such a strong opinion about something EU related anyway, given it doesn’t affect them directly. Well I guess Louis is just really passionate about that stuff so it’s not all that surprising. As for Thor, maybe he’s using his online presence to kickstart a live service game himself? Obviously regulations are scary in that case. It’s a wild guess from my side but I think that would be on brand for him.

bread ,
@bread@feddit.nl avatar

The potential legislation would be specific to the EU, but that doesn’t really matter; this market is large enough that it would directly affect other markets. Either the games are patched for all territories or others will make the EU-specific build available. One option generates positive press, the other negative, and any difference in cost would be negligible.

There’s also the argument of preserving art.

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