6 ms·

Someone please define "reasonable playable state". Because, for something like an MMORPG, "playable" means being able to run a server. So, what does "playable"

• beltsazar 2y ago
  I think it aims mainly at games that use an online connection as a DRM mechanism, such as Hitman 3 and Gran Turismo 7. Both games are single player games that shouldn't necessitate online connection in the first place.
• armarr 2y ago
  Legislation is always intentionally vague so that edge cases can prove themselves in court. I think they made the right choice by adapting the demands and wording to something that appeals to legislators.
• whstl 2y ago
  The FAQ mentions does "server emulators" made by fans, so "reasonably playable" could possibly mean just removing restrictions to using those. Basically removing the phone-home restrictions. Keeping the game working but offline-only also seems to be a suggestion, the list of "real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way" include some games that are playable offline-only. But your point stands, this should be discussed with more clarity before turning into law. https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
  • ffsm8 2y ago
    This isn't a draft for a law though, this is a petition to create such a draft. These kinds of critique are kinda premature - even if they're done by Internet famous people like pirate software
    • whstl 2y ago
      Yes, I totally agree.
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      If it causes enough in-fighting to turn people off, then I'd say the critiques are needed. There's already so much going against the law without the people themselves wondering if this would force their favorite MMO to shut down.
    • CRConrad 2y ago
      What does this: > These kinds of critique are kinda premature - even if they're done by Internet famous people like pirate software mean? “Internet famous people like pirate software” — is “pirate software” a person on the Internet, or what?
      • ffsm8 2y ago
        He's a twitch streamer that usually gets around 15-30 thousand concurrent viewers while he develops and plays indie games live, on-stream This was his video after he ranted for a while live. https://youtu.be/ioqSvLqB46Y?si=Iggw95x1fnZvBJ3O https://youtu.be/ioqSvLqB46Y?si=Iggw95x1fnZvBJ3O His issues boil down to 1. it's too broad/non-specific, that makes it bad for developers and will harm the industry 2. The announcement/marketing video for this initiative had several questionable points in it which make the industry look bad
        • CRConrad 2y ago
          Yeah yeah, but that doesn't explain the grammar of the sentence fragment I quoted and italicized. I still don't understand what that bit is supposed to mean. Can you explain it?
• andybak 2y ago
  I think massively online games are the tricky part. I'd be happy if this stopped publishers killing games were small teams on a private server were viable. Hell - I've had games I bought killed where there was a viable single player mode. There's no justification for that.
  • helloiamsomeone 2y ago
    What exactly is tricky about MMOs? World of Warcraft private servers are a thing and there are many more MMOs with private servers. The tricky part for private servers right now is someone having to apply elbow grease, reverse engineer things, while the publisher has the legal power to shut it down and punish people for trying to bring back a dead game they don't even support anymore.
• worble 2y ago
  >but there should be a VERY CLEAR definition of what counts as "reasonable playable state". There's a weird idea online that laws are super specific and technical and that if you don't nail things down exactly people can side-step and go "wahaha I didn't break any rules!" when that's simply not the case. Laws are more general and very much about the spirit of actions, and then the specificities get proven in court down the line. Those cases then get referenced in further court actions and end up informing the law overall, without having to have hyper specific wording for all edge-cases enshrined forever. This also provides fluidity for a changing and evolving legal and social system as a judge can take the specifics of that case into account. Every games definition of playable is going to be different, you can't codify something like that.
  • jcranmer 2y ago
    Europe is a civil law system, which places much higher prominence on proper codification of law than the common law systems common in the Anglosphere, which is generally closer to the procedure you're talking about.
    • sighinggoldfish 2y ago
      Yes, this is correct. But an ECI just requires that something happen from the Commission. In fact, revisions are basically expected if the Commission decides legislation is the path forward as past successful ECIs have demonstrated.
    • NoboruWataya 2y ago
      If you look at EU laws you'll still find plenty of examples of primary legislation setting out general, high-level concepts, which are then given more specificity in delegated regulations, regulatory guidance or court decisions.
    • galdosdi 2y ago
      It may not be a total coincidence that the common law based UK and US became so much more dominant in commerce. Obviously their imperial holdings had a lot to do with other factors too, like the UK's early lead in the industrial revolution, and the US's massive natural resources, but it's hard to ignore the advantage of a more nimble, flexible, yet predictable legal system for commerce in a time of rapidly changing technology.
• sighinggoldfish 2y ago
  Online games that aren't sold as services (like WoW with a subscription) wouldn't need to work online or with servers. The bare minimum this asks for is some state of playable which could include just the ability to run around on the map on a local machine... Ross Scott has talked about this a lot. We would love more, but we are asking for bare minimum. I'm really skeptical of modern online infra. I've worked on two MMOs as a Tech Artist and the way artists, designers, etc worked on the game was with a local only build! One of these companies actually barred WAN access from our dev machines so LAN only also worked for internal playtests! Trends to make dev builds online only are quite awful for developers in the trenches and are more about exec control than any usefulness added by such requirements. Complex server infrastructure that you mention is also not needed if you ask me, at least not to the point to make it too hard to widely ship. I'd be fine if someone still had to stand up a centralized matchmaking server still, just allow any player to do it. As an example, compare Helldivers 2 and WoW. WoW is vastly more complex but Helldivers 2 uses more modern cloud "tech" that didn't exist 20 years ago. Both had issues keeping up with player demand on launch. So what's the point of this newfangled tech? Well, it's devs convincing players they're getting a better service or good (don't know which!) and that this complexity based lock in is worth it. And it's also cloud providers like AWS and Azure convincing devs to create architectures like this which lock devs into these platform holders. I'm not convinced were seeing real improvements on the dev or player side... Scamming turtles all the way down if you ask me. It also turns out a lot of this stuff is able to reverse engineered. I'm right now playing original Demons Souls with full multiplayer connectivity (including matchmaking from a central private server) which required PSN support of the PS3 days. WoW private servers also required a great deal of reverse engineering. If online randos can do it... Plus WoW private servers literally revealed a new revenue stream to Blizzard in the form of WoW classic: "After a month or so of large scale protests, Blizzard invited the Nostalrius team to the Blizzard HQ to present the case for Vanilla. An eighty-page "post-mortem" document describing the development of Nostalrius, the problems that happened and some marketing strategies was presented to Blizzard, and after some time, released on the Nostalrius forums" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft_Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft_Classic Others have also mentioned middleware licenses as a problem. Those licenses would adapt just fine. A single game will ship with multiple binaries of RAD Tools, Havok, SpeedTree, etc. So now a player has potentially hundreds of copies of different versions of all these binaries and libraries. This is a completely solvable problem that won't stifle development or even require leaking of trade "secrets". Also, this is relatively new problem in the industry. The market grew just fine allowing for players to use their goods more freely. That any such regulation would hurt the industry is dubious at best, corporate speak at worst. In fact, I'd argue that enabling player freedom an creativity over their purchased goods has helped the industry grow to where it is today! Counter Strike was a mod, TF2 was a mod, PUBG was a mod (Fortnite wouldn't exist with out it), DOTA was a mod! Minecraft in part exploded cause of mods. A healthy and innovative free market demands player and user freedom!
• jcranmer 2y ago
  I agree. This is a heavily vibes-based petition, seemingly designed to be emotive at the expense of clarity. Is it about DRM stopping games from working? MMOs being shut down? Live services dying? In the best case scenario, this would be relatively narrowly targeted at something like DRM servers, requiring a final patch to strip DRM. What I fear is more likely to happen is that you end up with something with loopholes that causes many more games to go down the SimCity (the shitty version) route of faux online features to get them to fall into some sort of online-required carve-out. Or you end up with the GDPR route, where the big names will violate it anyways and just don't care about the penalties for doing so.
  • jwueller 2y ago
    "No planned obsolescence" seems like a pretty clear goal to me. No carve-out for online games required. They don't care about GDPR penalties? I'm going to need a source for this one.
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Funny thing is server shutdowns are rarely as "planned" out as you'd imagine. Look at GameInformer as we speak. In less than 1 business day the staff was kicked out with no warning, its 20+ year old website taken down, and its twitter handle deleted, hours after making a goodbye statement. This was clearly not planned more than a month in advance by Gamestop. Planned Obscolecense implies (if not, is outright defined) as designing a product to fail in a specific amount of time. No game service worth its salt is designed to shut down in 6 months (you can probably find some chinese asset mills to prove me wrong. so take a charitable interpretation of "worth its salt")
      • account42 2y ago
        There may be premature shutdown but no buiness plans to run servers for free forever. Ongoing server costs will be part of the business plan from the start.
  • CRConrad 2y ago
• A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  I am honestly not sure where I stand on this ( MMORPGs especially, because those were designed for being played on the internet -- unlike offline games that merely have internet connection requirement ), but FFXI darkstar project was likely a good example of what could be done. << Bear in mind these systems are usually not made to be modular, they are custom-built to work in a given environment. Lets say that somehow this requirement ( 'reasonable playable state' ) was mandated. It would likely result in more modular architecture. I call that a win.
  • usrbinbash 2y ago
    > Lets say that somehow this requirement ( 'reasonable playable state' ) was mandated. It would likely result in more modular architecture. I call that a win. It would also raise the cost of development, and raise the barrier of entry into markets. Again, I am not against this proposal quite the opposite. But it should be made clear very early on what "reasonable playable state" means, and ideally in a way that would not constitute a huge competitive disadvantage for smaller developers.
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >It would likely result in more modular architecture. I just see more workarounds rather than better tech. These laws almost never give better tech practices in the short run. I imagine many games will switch to a f2p model (which seems to be an exception here) and hike up BP costs to make up for the lack of consistent $30-60 before we get a better modular architecture.
• slightwinder 2y ago
  > Someone please define "reasonable playable state". Wouldn't this be the job of the lawmakers? > Source and internal sysops documentation? Maybe, why not. MMORPGs are the exception here, so most games will not necessarily be forced to deliver them. > You will likely need a separate server architecture that works independently of the userlist and matchmaking system. Bear in mind these systems are usually not made to be modular, they are custom-built to work in a given environment. Just open the APIs and let the community build their own. Maybe, the gaming-industry could even move to open standards, have open source-projects for most of those stuff, which would be beneficial for everyone. > but there should be a VERY CLEAR definition of what counts as "reasonable playable state". Why? In worst case, it has to be decided game by game. And for most games this is probably not a big deal, as they are not that hard entangled with online-features. I think any law should also giver the industry some leeway to establish a useful ground on their own. I mean, a solution here could go from removing licensing and allowing people debugging, so they can build their own backends. Or forcing companies to deliver the whole backend, including documentation and whatever. This is a pretty big range of options.
• jwueller 2y ago
  See Directive 2019/770 for the definition of "functional" in this context. It's already a codified term: The digital content or service must be able to perform its intended functions reliably, meet the quality and performance expectations set forth in the contract, and be compatible with other systems as expected by the consumer.