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Software developers now have a moral obligation to make sure their code is ready to run on any future tech stack? Sounds .... not correct.

by m1gu3l 6y ago

giancarlostoro 6y ago
Space Cadet for Windows that we all miss would like to have a word....
iamacyborg 6y ago
If they sell thousands of dollars worth of digital items then yes, they should have a moral obligation to support those customers. Particularly given the murky exploitative psychological tricks employed by these games to get customers in the first place.
- m1gu3l 6y ago
  If the EULA says the value of said digital items is zero (as hinted at in some comment further up) then I can agree that we disagree.
  - jhbadger 6y ago
    It may be legal to steal digital items from users because of antiquated laws that don't recognize digital items as items worthy of protection, but it certainly isn't moral.
    - pmontra 6y ago
      Let's explore some possibilities. 1. Should Zynga buy back those items at a lower price because they are used items? 2. What happens to cars (because we love car analogies) when the manufacturer stops building spare parts? In this case they are either collected from old cars or somebody else build those parts. Maybe should Zynga at least try to sell the game infrastructure with data? That would be like relying on third party spare parts but the car keeps going. Of course if nobody buys the game, maybe even for free, that's it 3. Other ideas? By the way, this isn't the first time an online game shuts down and players lose everything, right?
      - jhbadger 6y ago
        When Microsoft closed their cloud-based ebook business in 2019, they refunded 100% of the money to the people who lost access to the books they bought. This was the correct response to shutting down servers. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a27021744/microsoft-ebook-store-shutdown/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a27021744/micros...
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        > When Microsoft closed their cloud-based ebook business in 2019, they refunded 100% of the money to the people who lost access to the books they bought. They probably had different terms of sale; buying books contingent on an external service is less attractive than buying in-game items contingent on the game. > This was the correct response to shutting down servers. Depending on the terms of sale, it may have been the minimum legally required response.
      - alisonkisk 6y ago
        Car manufacturers are legally required to provide spare parts for about 7 years after sale. That's part of why discontinued car models are destroyed instead of sold at clearance discount. And parts can be reverse-engineered/cloned too (as long as they aren't software-locked). Zynga could offer to it's user to give their users credits to use in an alternate game, if they want.
      - josephcsible 6y ago
        There's a big difference between "we're not making spare parts for your car anymore" and "we put a thermite charge in your car's engine, and we're remotely detonating it the day that we stop making spare parts for it".
sigotirandolas 6y ago
No, you don't have a moral obligation for it to run in any future tech stack. But it should be able to run in the same tech stack it was running before, or provide some way to interoperate. The game shouldn't be designed in a way that makes it possible for someone else to unilaterally shut down the game with no recourse. To illustrate, if FarmVille were an offline game that costed $1000, I could still set up a Windows XP computer, install Flash, and play it. It's not trivial, but it's very doable and legal. But instead, actual FarmVille is designed so that it needs an online infrastructure (so far so good, it's a core part of the game after all), but by design this infrastructure can only be provided by Zynga. You can't replicate it even if you want to.
- watwut 6y ago
  By this logic, making roblox games is immoral?
  - sigotirandolas 6y ago
    I'm not very familiar with Roblox, but if I understand it, it's an online platform that allows others to build games on top of it, and like Farmville the servers are exclusively provided by Roblox. In this case, I would say the moral fault lies mainly in Roblox, since they are the ones providing the platform and hence making the decision to exclusively provide the servers (and that moral fault has not yet happened, it would only happen if when they shut down they don't provide an alternative). If you are someone building on top of Roblox, I don't think you deserve the same amount of fault, but it's certainly something you have to consider. It's also a risk in that building on top of this design leaves you open to being de-platformed (like, for example with the iOS Store if Apple doesn't like your application). For what it's worth, I don't think Roblox or Zynga are immoral because of this, just that on this particular topic they are morally faulty. My bar for what should be acceptable as a recourse is also not very high. Providing any form of alternative like LAN play, closed-source server software, specifications or interoperability with other software would be enough for me. The problem I see with the current situation is the "last resort recourse" there is now in most cases, reverse engineering, is legally shaky, generally against the terms of service, terribly complicated and expensive and not guaranteed to succeed if critical parts of the application are server-side.

Software developers now have a moral obligation to make sure their code is ready to run on any future tech stack? Sounds .... not correct.

by m1gu3l 6y ago

Software developers now have a moral obligation to make sure their code is ready to run on any future tech stack? Sounds .... not correct.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

Space Cadet for Windows that we all miss would like to have a word....

iamacyborg 6y ago

If they sell thousands of dollars worth of digital items then yes, they should have a moral obligation to support those customers. Particularly given the murky exploitative psychological tricks employed by these games to get customers in the first place.

m1gu3l 6y ago
If the EULA says the value of said digital items is zero (as hinted at in some comment further up) then I can agree that we disagree.
- jhbadger 6y ago
  It may be legal to steal digital items from users because of antiquated laws that don't recognize digital items as items worthy of protection, but it certainly isn't moral.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    Let's explore some possibilities. 1. Should Zynga buy back those items at a lower price because they are used items? 2. What happens to cars (because we love car analogies) when the manufacturer stops building spare parts? In this case they are either collected from old cars or somebody else build those parts. Maybe should Zynga at least try to sell the game infrastructure with data? That would be like relying on third party spare parts but the car keeps going. Of course if nobody buys the game, maybe even for free, that's it 3. Other ideas? By the way, this isn't the first time an online game shuts down and players lose everything, right?
    - jhbadger 6y ago
      When Microsoft closed their cloud-based ebook business in 2019, they refunded 100% of the money to the people who lost access to the books they bought. This was the correct response to shutting down servers. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a27021744/microsoft-ebook-store-shutdown/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a27021744/micros...
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > When Microsoft closed their cloud-based ebook business in 2019, they refunded 100% of the money to the people who lost access to the books they bought. They probably had different terms of sale; buying books contingent on an external service is less attractive than buying in-game items contingent on the game. > This was the correct response to shutting down servers. Depending on the terms of sale, it may have been the minimum legally required response.
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      Car manufacturers are legally required to provide spare parts for about 7 years after sale. That's part of why discontinued car models are destroyed instead of sold at clearance discount. And parts can be reverse-engineered/cloned too (as long as they aren't software-locked). Zynga could offer to it's user to give their users credits to use in an alternate game, if they want.
    - josephcsible 6y ago
      There's a big difference between "we're not making spare parts for your car anymore" and "we put a thermite charge in your car's engine, and we're remotely detonating it the day that we stop making spare parts for it".

sigotirandolas 6y ago

No, you don't have a moral obligation for it to run in any future tech stack. But it should be able to run in the same tech stack it was running before, or provide some way to interoperate. The game shouldn't be designed in a way that makes it possible for someone else to unilaterally shut down the game with no recourse. To illustrate, if FarmVille were an offline game that costed $1000, I could still set up a Windows XP computer, install Flash, and play it. It's not trivial, but it's very doable and legal. But instead, actual FarmVille is designed so that it needs an online infrastructure (so far so good, it's a core part of the game after all), but by design this infrastructure can only be provided by Zynga. You can't replicate it even if you want to.

watwut 6y ago
By this logic, making roblox games is immoral?
- sigotirandolas 6y ago
  I'm not very familiar with Roblox, but if I understand it, it's an online platform that allows others to build games on top of it, and like Farmville the servers are exclusively provided by Roblox. In this case, I would say the moral fault lies mainly in Roblox, since they are the ones providing the platform and hence making the decision to exclusively provide the servers (and that moral fault has not yet happened, it would only happen if when they shut down they don't provide an alternative). If you are someone building on top of Roblox, I don't think you deserve the same amount of fault, but it's certainly something you have to consider. It's also a risk in that building on top of this design leaves you open to being de-platformed (like, for example with the iOS Store if Apple doesn't like your application). For what it's worth, I don't think Roblox or Zynga are immoral because of this, just that on this particular topic they are morally faulty. My bar for what should be acceptable as a recourse is also not very high. Providing any form of alternative like LAN play, closed-source server software, specifications or interoperability with other software would be enough for me. The problem I see with the current situation is the "last resort recourse" there is now in most cases, reverse engineering, is legally shaky, generally against the terms of service, terribly complicated and expensive and not guaranteed to succeed if critical parts of the application are server-side.