7 ms·

My problem with things like this is that they mandate labor from others without compensating them.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
> This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or related features and assets sold for videogames they operate) to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state. > Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher. > The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state. Perhaps there is a disconnect between the policy intent and the understanding?
- brigadier132 2y ago
  > Perhaps there is a disconnect between the policy intent and the understanding? 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.
  - babypuncher 2y ago
    It's not free if you weren't considering this when designing your game. 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.
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      Is everything a right now?
      - rimunroe 2y ago
        Many people (myself included) argue that this is a part of consumer rights ...hence the legislation we're discussing. You might disagree with it, but you can't pretend that a lot of people don't believe a company shouldn't be able to disable a game they already "sold" to you.
        brigadier132 2y ago
        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. 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.
        rimunroe 2y ago
        > A lot of people thinking something isn't a good argument. 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?
  - conradludgate 2y ago
    The way I'm reading it is regarding single player titles. I've seen many single player games with an online mechanic stop being playable in single player after the online servers are taken down.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    > 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. 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?
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      And when the binaries inevitably stop working 50 years after release what should be done?
      - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
        The oldest server binary I've used recently was for Freelancer, which was released in 2003. It required some elevated permissions but otherwise, both the server and the game itself ran fine on newer hardware and versions of Windows. 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.
- ldoughty 2y ago
  Who will pay devs to convert World of Warcraft into a single-player game? This is probably covered by "reasonable means to continue functioning" and the answer will be "there are no reasonable means".. but the comment parent's point somewhat stands. Even moving a DLC check can be complicated. When you game is done, do you disable all DLC since you can't verify someone purchased it, or do you make it freely available? Who will pay for that additional data streaming (assuming it's not on something like Steam) ? I am not disagreeing with the wish of the initiative, just providing some food for thought on the potential costs to a company.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Cost of business that was previously avoided, to the detriment of consumers. Who pays for required warranty reserves? It is built into the cost of good sold model (EU requires warranties of no shorter than 2 years). If you sell something, it should continue to be usable after you as a business are gone. A game producer can always not make games if you find the regulation to be overly burdensome, that is a choice. It is unlikely this stops games from being made. This policy encourages the feature as part of requirements gathering and roadmap planning.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      warranty reserves are incremental and predictable. Development is unpredictable. I'd hope people on HN would understand not comparing tech to an assembly line.
  - spookie 2y ago
    It doesn't necessarily mean to turn WoW in a simgle player game. Just being able to setup servers in a reasonable way (i.e. not reverse engineering and emulating how they work, like people have done for WoW). Look into World in Conflict, its a great example of what to do: https://github.com/ubisoft/massgate https://github.com/ubisoft/massgate
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rimunroe 2y ago
Is this not how most regulation (and law in general) works? You make a rule to stop someone from doing some undesirable thing, often without compensating them for whatever they've lost as part of doing it. These things are (ideally) done because we see the benefit outweighing the burden.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  This law is not stopping anything, it's mandating something be done. And yes, many laws are like this and that's why Europe's startup ecosystem does not exist. Laws like this are a pain for large companies but they are fatal for small ones.
  - rimunroe 2y ago
    Stopping someone from doing something necessarily requires them to change their behavior. E.g. creating a rule saying you can't dispose of waste in a river forces people who were doing that to find another method of disposal.
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      Please stop with the analogies to life saving medical devices or polluting the planet with toxic chemicals. Not all situations are equivalent. It's obviously good to mandate that other people shouldn't be poisoned. That doesn't mean all mandates are good.
      - rimunroe 2y ago
        Your response was to me and yet I hadn't made any analogies to life saving medical devices. I wasn't using the example of dumping waste in rivers to illustrate an equivalence in severity with the video game issue. I was trying to show that drawing a distinction between forcing someone to stop doing something and forcing someone to do something is nonsensical in this context.
        2y ago
Lucasoato 2y ago
I’m compensating you with my money to buy a game and you want to retain a kill switch to turn it off anytime you want? Imagine if I did that to your pacemaker.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  You probably pay a lot more for a pacemaker. Also, these kinds of analogies are not good arguments, pacemakers and video games are not in any way comparable. Pass this law, fine. Just expect to pay $100 for a game + a monthly fee to play it online
  - georgeecollins 2y ago
    I am surprised this reply gets down voted because it is pretty accurate. Video game makers/publishers (I am one!) design and distribute games based on what they can make money on. People tend to be cheap about entertainment, particularly the biggest consumers who have more time than money. So they complain about free to play but probably download 20 free to play games for every premium one they pay for. It's their right to do so. But they do tend to pick whatever is cheapest to them up front.
    - triceratops 2y ago
      It's being downvoted because there are plenty of DRM-free, no server-required games in existence today and they don't cost $100 + a monthly fee. AAA games back in the days when they were distributed by CD-ROM or disk didn't charge a monthly fee either.
    - dns_snek 2y ago
      It's being downvoted because it's baseless fearmongering. We used to buy games and get a server.exe alongside it! In my experience, the tide started turning around 15 years ago, every big release started getting infested with in-game payments, always-online components, and most titles took away our ability to self-host servers. With those changes, their profits skyrocketed - but greedy bastards running the show never seem to have enough, so they kill unprofitable games to get everyone to move to their new product. Personally I don't buy AAA games anymore - partially due to these hostile practices, partially because their creators have lost any semblance of taste. Indie games and smaller studios are still pumping out real gems that don't implement any of these predatory practices at the cost of $20-50.
wormlord 2y ago
It does not mandate labor. It mandates capital expenditure by the companies. The worker is paid for their labor regardless.
horsawlarway 2y ago
Only if the publisher has placed themselves into a position where labor is required to keep the game running... The obvious and clearest response is simply this: If you as a publisher are so convinced that your game is obsolete... make the remote server source available under a permissive license to your existing license holders. Better yet - plan for releasing a copy of it at development time. You don't even need to make the license permissive to everyone, or for everything (open source). You just need to make it possible for those who have purchased your product to continue to use the product, and there are MANY ways to do that which don't involve your consistent labor. --- Basically - To directly address your point: If the alternative is that the publisher does crap like completely disable single player experiences because they've shut down remote licensing servers... fuck them. That's not a company I think should be allowed to exist. If we can't limit them this way... them I'd be fully in favor of mandating they return the full purchase price of the item to every purchaser. That purchase price represent your customer's labor.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  Giving away the source does not protect the game creator and actively harms them since they are giving up trade secrets. You are basically just saying "give up all rights to the ip you've sank a ton of money and time into"
  - horsawlarway 2y ago
    You yourself as the publisher are stating that you don't believe that those exact same trade secrets are valuable enough to continue selling (soooooo which is it????) And again - there's no reason to allow commercial use by competitors...
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      > You yourself as the publisher are stating that you don't believe that those exact same trade secrets are valuable enough to continue selling (soooooo which is it????) Code doesn't get thrown away because a game isn't being used anymore. The networking code for one game will not be completely different for the next game.
johnklos 2y ago
No, it doesn't. Programs need to be designed to rely on specific servers, with specific DNS host names, checking valid TLS certificates. They can just as easily (and trivially, I should add) be designed to allow for configuration with other servers. If that's not desirable for a product because of the desire to make money, then allowing end user configuration should be something that comes with a fixed date (this product will require our servers for the first five years, then it's open to any servers, for example) or with an update when the company decides to stop running their servers. Saying it "mandates labor" is inaccurate insofar as requiring that software not be used to facilitate illegal harassment, DoS, distribution of child porn, et cetera isn't considered "mandating labor". It's the cost of doing business, and suggesting that the cost is high is wildly inaccurate.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  > isn't considered "mandating labor" It isn't? Who doesn't consider that mandating labor? It literally is mandating labor. Also, why do you use the word facilitate? Obviously that's illegal, what you mean to say is actively preventing the use of for that purpose, which btw is not mandated, companies do it to cover their own ass when they have the resources to.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    We "mandate labor" all the time, that's how the countless laws & regulations work. - Providing warranty service is mandated labor. - Going through workplace safety inspections is mandated labor. - Getting your product certified by the relevant authorities is mandated labor. - Following cybersecurity compliance regulations is mandated labor. - Following proper food safety guidelines in a professional kitchen is mandated labor. - Ensuring that your premises are accessible to the disabled is mandated labor. There's nothing special about this case of "mandated labor". You don't get compensated for being "nice enough" not to defraud your customers. That's just your half of the social contract that allows you to participate in society in the first place.
spookie 2y ago
This is a software architecture issue. It doesn't necessarily mean there's more work, just different goals when starting out. Look at the case of Massive Entertainment and World in Conflict [1]. All reasons for not doing something similar boil down to decisions made early on in development. [1] https://github.com/ubisoft/massgate https://github.com/ubisoft/massgate
chrisknyfe 2y ago
My problem with things like this is that companies expect to sell a product to me and then steal it back from me without compensating me.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  you were compensated with months or years of usage. You bought a license not the IP.
  - rimunroe 2y ago
    > You bought a license not the IP. The entirety of this debate is whether companies should be allowed to treat game sales that way. Most people don't see buying a game like an artist licensing their song to a TV show. They see it like buying a toy.
  - wtetzner 2y ago
    That's a rental, not a purchase. If nothing else, companies should be forced to use correct terminology.
  - techjamie 2y ago
    Imagine going to a car dealer, the entire transaction, the word "rent" or "lease" are never used. And you have to sign a 30 page agreement where hidden on page 18 there's a clause saying you're purchasing a license to use the car and it can be revoked at any time. 6 years later, the manufacturer decides they want to shut down the factories producing replacement parts, and won't license anyone else to make them, so they push an update out and now your car won't start anymore despite functioning just fine. Is that reasonable?
saint_fiasco 2y ago
They should probably allow companies to keep doing what they are doing now as long as they call it "rent" instead of "buy" in their marketing materials. Normally this honesty would cost them money because their competitors would have better (more persuasive) marketing, but a law could force every company to be honest at the same time so that the relative ranking of each company does not change.
bialpio 2y ago
Do you have the same problem with mandating labor if the mandated labor is related to obtaining some kind of certifications? Why or why not?
beretguy 2y ago
Except that they don’t.

> This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or related features and assets sold for videogames they operate) to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state. > Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher. > The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state. Perhaps there is a disconnect between the policy intent and the understanding?

brigadier132 2y ago
> Perhaps there is a disconnect between the policy intent and the understanding? 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.
- babypuncher 2y ago
  It's not free if you weren't considering this when designing your game. 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.
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    Is everything a right now?
    - rimunroe 2y ago
      Many people (myself included) argue that this is a part of consumer rights ...hence the legislation we're discussing. You might disagree with it, but you can't pretend that a lot of people don't believe a company shouldn't be able to disable a game they already "sold" to you.
      - brigadier132 2y ago
        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. 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.
        rimunroe 2y ago
        > A lot of people thinking something isn't a good argument. 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?
- conradludgate 2y ago
  The way I'm reading it is regarding single player titles. I've seen many single player games with an online mechanic stop being playable in single player after the online servers are taken down.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > 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. 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?
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    And when the binaries inevitably stop working 50 years after release what should be done?
    - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      The oldest server binary I've used recently was for Freelancer, which was released in 2003. It required some elevated permissions but otherwise, both the server and the game itself ran fine on newer hardware and versions of Windows. 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.
ldoughty 2y ago
Who will pay devs to convert World of Warcraft into a single-player game? This is probably covered by "reasonable means to continue functioning" and the answer will be "there are no reasonable means".. but the comment parent's point somewhat stands. Even moving a DLC check can be complicated. When you game is done, do you disable all DLC since you can't verify someone purchased it, or do you make it freely available? Who will pay for that additional data streaming (assuming it's not on something like Steam) ? I am not disagreeing with the wish of the initiative, just providing some food for thought on the potential costs to a company.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Cost of business that was previously avoided, to the detriment of consumers. Who pays for required warranty reserves? It is built into the cost of good sold model (EU requires warranties of no shorter than 2 years). If you sell something, it should continue to be usable after you as a business are gone. A game producer can always not make games if you find the regulation to be overly burdensome, that is a choice. It is unlikely this stops games from being made. This policy encourages the feature as part of requirements gathering and roadmap planning.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    warranty reserves are incremental and predictable. Development is unpredictable. I'd hope people on HN would understand not comparing tech to an assembly line.
- spookie 2y ago
  It doesn't necessarily mean to turn WoW in a simgle player game. Just being able to setup servers in a reasonable way (i.e. not reverse engineering and emulating how they work, like people have done for WoW). Look into World in Conflict, its a great example of what to do: https://github.com/ubisoft/massgate https://github.com/ubisoft/massgate

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rimunroe 2y ago

Is this not how most regulation (and law in general) works? You make a rule to stop someone from doing some undesirable thing, often without compensating them for whatever they've lost as part of doing it. These things are (ideally) done because we see the benefit outweighing the burden.

brigadier132 2y ago
This law is not stopping anything, it's mandating something be done. And yes, many laws are like this and that's why Europe's startup ecosystem does not exist. Laws like this are a pain for large companies but they are fatal for small ones.
- rimunroe 2y ago
  Stopping someone from doing something necessarily requires them to change their behavior. E.g. creating a rule saying you can't dispose of waste in a river forces people who were doing that to find another method of disposal.
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    Please stop with the analogies to life saving medical devices or polluting the planet with toxic chemicals. Not all situations are equivalent. It's obviously good to mandate that other people shouldn't be poisoned. That doesn't mean all mandates are good.
    - rimunroe 2y ago
      Your response was to me and yet I hadn't made any analogies to life saving medical devices. I wasn't using the example of dumping waste in rivers to illustrate an equivalence in severity with the video game issue. I was trying to show that drawing a distinction between forcing someone to stop doing something and forcing someone to do something is nonsensical in this context.
      - 2y ago

Lucasoato 2y ago

I’m compensating you with my money to buy a game and you want to retain a kill switch to turn it off anytime you want? Imagine if I did that to your pacemaker.

brigadier132 2y ago
You probably pay a lot more for a pacemaker. Also, these kinds of analogies are not good arguments, pacemakers and video games are not in any way comparable. Pass this law, fine. Just expect to pay $100 for a game + a monthly fee to play it online
- georgeecollins 2y ago
  I am surprised this reply gets down voted because it is pretty accurate. Video game makers/publishers (I am one!) design and distribute games based on what they can make money on. People tend to be cheap about entertainment, particularly the biggest consumers who have more time than money. So they complain about free to play but probably download 20 free to play games for every premium one they pay for. It's their right to do so. But they do tend to pick whatever is cheapest to them up front.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    It's being downvoted because there are plenty of DRM-free, no server-required games in existence today and they don't cost $100 + a monthly fee. AAA games back in the days when they were distributed by CD-ROM or disk didn't charge a monthly fee either.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    It's being downvoted because it's baseless fearmongering. We used to buy games and get a server.exe alongside it! In my experience, the tide started turning around 15 years ago, every big release started getting infested with in-game payments, always-online components, and most titles took away our ability to self-host servers. With those changes, their profits skyrocketed - but greedy bastards running the show never seem to have enough, so they kill unprofitable games to get everyone to move to their new product. Personally I don't buy AAA games anymore - partially due to these hostile practices, partially because their creators have lost any semblance of taste. Indie games and smaller studios are still pumping out real gems that don't implement any of these predatory practices at the cost of $20-50.

wormlord 2y ago

It does not mandate labor. It mandates capital expenditure by the companies. The worker is paid for their labor regardless.

horsawlarway 2y ago

Only if the publisher has placed themselves into a position where labor is required to keep the game running... The obvious and clearest response is simply this: If you as a publisher are so convinced that your game is obsolete... make the remote server source available under a permissive license to your existing license holders. Better yet - plan for releasing a copy of it at development time. You don't even need to make the license permissive to everyone, or for everything (open source). You just need to make it possible for those who have purchased your product to continue to use the product, and there are MANY ways to do that which don't involve your consistent labor. --- Basically - To directly address your point: If the alternative is that the publisher does crap like completely disable single player experiences because they've shut down remote licensing servers... fuck them. That's not a company I think should be allowed to exist. If we can't limit them this way... them I'd be fully in favor of mandating they return the full purchase price of the item to every purchaser. That purchase price represent your customer's labor.

brigadier132 2y ago
Giving away the source does not protect the game creator and actively harms them since they are giving up trade secrets. You are basically just saying "give up all rights to the ip you've sank a ton of money and time into"
- horsawlarway 2y ago
  You yourself as the publisher are stating that you don't believe that those exact same trade secrets are valuable enough to continue selling (soooooo which is it????) And again - there's no reason to allow commercial use by competitors...
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    > You yourself as the publisher are stating that you don't believe that those exact same trade secrets are valuable enough to continue selling (soooooo which is it????) Code doesn't get thrown away because a game isn't being used anymore. The networking code for one game will not be completely different for the next game.

johnklos 2y ago

No, it doesn't. Programs need to be designed to rely on specific servers, with specific DNS host names, checking valid TLS certificates. They can just as easily (and trivially, I should add) be designed to allow for configuration with other servers. If that's not desirable for a product because of the desire to make money, then allowing end user configuration should be something that comes with a fixed date (this product will require our servers for the first five years, then it's open to any servers, for example) or with an update when the company decides to stop running their servers. Saying it "mandates labor" is inaccurate insofar as requiring that software not be used to facilitate illegal harassment, DoS, distribution of child porn, et cetera isn't considered "mandating labor". It's the cost of doing business, and suggesting that the cost is high is wildly inaccurate.

brigadier132 2y ago
> isn't considered "mandating labor" It isn't? Who doesn't consider that mandating labor? It literally is mandating labor. Also, why do you use the word facilitate? Obviously that's illegal, what you mean to say is actively preventing the use of for that purpose, which btw is not mandated, companies do it to cover their own ass when they have the resources to.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  We "mandate labor" all the time, that's how the countless laws & regulations work. - Providing warranty service is mandated labor. - Going through workplace safety inspections is mandated labor. - Getting your product certified by the relevant authorities is mandated labor. - Following cybersecurity compliance regulations is mandated labor. - Following proper food safety guidelines in a professional kitchen is mandated labor. - Ensuring that your premises are accessible to the disabled is mandated labor. There's nothing special about this case of "mandated labor". You don't get compensated for being "nice enough" not to defraud your customers. That's just your half of the social contract that allows you to participate in society in the first place.

spookie 2y ago

This is a software architecture issue. It doesn't necessarily mean there's more work, just different goals when starting out. Look at the case of Massive Entertainment and World in Conflict [1]. All reasons for not doing something similar boil down to decisions made early on in development. [1] https://github.com/ubisoft/massgate https://github.com/ubisoft/massgate

chrisknyfe 2y ago

My problem with things like this is that companies expect to sell a product to me and then steal it back from me without compensating me.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
you were compensated with months or years of usage. You bought a license not the IP.
- rimunroe 2y ago
  > You bought a license not the IP. The entirety of this debate is whether companies should be allowed to treat game sales that way. Most people don't see buying a game like an artist licensing their song to a TV show. They see it like buying a toy.
- wtetzner 2y ago
  That's a rental, not a purchase. If nothing else, companies should be forced to use correct terminology.
- techjamie 2y ago
  Imagine going to a car dealer, the entire transaction, the word "rent" or "lease" are never used. And you have to sign a 30 page agreement where hidden on page 18 there's a clause saying you're purchasing a license to use the car and it can be revoked at any time. 6 years later, the manufacturer decides they want to shut down the factories producing replacement parts, and won't license anyone else to make them, so they push an update out and now your car won't start anymore despite functioning just fine. Is that reasonable?

saint_fiasco 2y ago

They should probably allow companies to keep doing what they are doing now as long as they call it "rent" instead of "buy" in their marketing materials. Normally this honesty would cost them money because their competitors would have better (more persuasive) marketing, but a law could force every company to be honest at the same time so that the relative ranking of each company does not change.

bialpio 2y ago

Do you have the same problem with mandating labor if the mandated labor is related to obtaining some kind of certifications? Why or why not?

beretguy 2y ago

Except that they don’t.