6 ms·

These are weak arguments but there are valid ones why I would not think this has a footing, even if I support the attitude. What about games where the world is

These are weak arguments but there are valid ones why I would not think this has a footing, even if I support the attitude. What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine? You can't just rip/disable licensed items out, they may form a significant part of business code. Code and APIs would be needed to be documented. Why just games? What about abandoned Saas offerings? These restrictions might creep over. I hate live service games like the next guy but legal advisors can bend these to form powerful counter-arguments.

mavamaarten 1y ago
I also think many comments are a bit too eager in claiming "oh just publish the code" and "oh just let users host X". It's obviously not that simple. The biggest one for me is that single player games should still be playable offline after servers have been sunset. I'm sure that with current games, licenses were indeed acquired for a certain limited time. But if you start development and you know you'll have to sunset it according to the rules one day, I'm sure you'll come up with other licenses or just a way to strip out content like that.
- dgfl 1y ago
  What’s the problem with releasing a server executable? As far as I can tell that would be enough to get around this legislation. And I can’t imagine that to be prohibitively expensive.
  - meheleventyone 1y ago
    What is a server executable? With a lot of modern games it could be a whole stacks worth of systems that neither the game client or server side game runtime will work without.
    - Mindwipe 1y ago
      And which are not owned by the developer or available to be perpetually licensed.
      - Ukv 1y ago
        To my understanding the idea is that if a company licenses some 3rd-party component for their game, the component would either need to be severable from the game while still leaving it reasonably playable, or the license would need to permit people who have purchased the game to use that component. This is going foward, not applying retroactively to existing games. I think that's still fairly favorable to game publishers compared to most other purchased goods. If you manufacture an office chair and license a patented swivel mechanism, the license you acquire cannot require you to break purchasers' chairs after the license expires, nor even to go around their homes swapping out the mechanism (which analogously may still be permitted for games). Moreover if the rightsholder for that patent had been licensing only under the terms that the purchased chair is destroyed after 5 years but then a change in consumer protection law prevents that practice, they'd need to license it out under more reasonable terms (like you can only sell the chairs with the mechanism for 5 years, but there's no limit on how long people can use the mechanism in their purchased chairs) - otherwise they'd get no business.
        maccard 1y ago
        > If you manufacture an office chair and license a patented swivel mechanism, the license you acquire cannot require you to break purchasers' chairs after the license expires, nor even to go around their homes swapping out the mechanism (which analogously may still be permitted for games). The big difference here is that you’re applying B2C terms on B2B licenses. This would essentially ban enterprise B2B licenses for video game software which is insanity
        Ukv 1y ago
        > The big difference here is that you’re applying B2C terms on B2B licenses. Both are cases of B2B licensing with the latter business then selling a product on to consumers. > This would essentially ban enterprise B2B licenses for video game software which is insanity I don't see how. If for instance some company develops an audio processing library, they can still license it out to a game development company for a limited time - just that the license would be "the company can no longer sell games with this technology after the license expires", opposed to anything that would prevent functioning of the already-sold games. Or rather, they could stipulate the latter in their license, but then their market would be limited to game development companies willing to patch it out after the license expires.
pointlessone 1y ago
Saas offerings are safe as they don’t let you Buy a thing. They’re very transparently a service. Same with timed licenses. It’s clear what you’re paying for. Most of the time. With games it’s often not the case. You buy them and then at unspecified moment you might lose a significant portion of functionality or the whole game. At the time you buy a game you don’t know if it’s for a time, what time, or what will stop working.
- dgellow 1y ago
  When I bought WoW it was very clear to me I was buying a service. If blizzard decided after 2 years it wasn’t sustainable and to shut down the game at no point would I be entitled to own it. It was clearly a license to access their service, as long as it exists. Same for any other MMORPG
  - anton-c 1y ago
    You can host offline servers of older mmos easily. I had my own lineage 2 private server in middle school. Private online servers too. Wow classic became a thing because private vanilla servers were incredibly popular. You should be able to do this for any game. I understand them fighting it during the games lifetime.
  - danaris 1y ago
    And what about a single-player game that relies on the company's server being online in order to allow you to play it?
    - pointlessone 1y ago
      The dev, having access to source code, issues the final patch that disables that feature. Better yet, the dev, having access to source code, never implements this feature in the first place as it doesn’t improve the player experience in any shape or form.
      - whaleofatw2022 1y ago
4hg4ufxhy 1y ago
Why not apply it to Saas? If you sold lifetime licenses and you don't want to run it anymore, just let your customers self host it. Even better if you can open source it.
mrob 1y ago
If it's really impossible for you to allow a game to remain playable after you abandon it, the only reasonable option is to not sell it at all. Instead you can rent it, with the length of the rental clearly stated up front. Advertising a rental as a sale should be illegal.
- maccard 1y ago
  Who defined playable? Take Diablo 3 and 4. They are shared world games, are they playable without them? Maybe to you’d but to me they’re not. world of Warcraft has a rich questing experience which doesn’t require playing with other people - is it ok if they just switch off multiplayer content? That’s a different game, IMO.
viraptor 1y ago
> What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine? It's ok, the engine will adjust it if big studios can't use it otherwise. It's just people having to talk to each other. > Code and APIs would be needed to be documented. Why? Nobody is talking about forced opensourcing.

mavamaarten 1y ago

I also think many comments are a bit too eager in claiming "oh just publish the code" and "oh just let users host X". It's obviously not that simple. The biggest one for me is that single player games should still be playable offline after servers have been sunset. I'm sure that with current games, licenses were indeed acquired for a certain limited time. But if you start development and you know you'll have to sunset it according to the rules one day, I'm sure you'll come up with other licenses or just a way to strip out content like that.

dgfl 1y ago
What’s the problem with releasing a server executable? As far as I can tell that would be enough to get around this legislation. And I can’t imagine that to be prohibitively expensive.
- meheleventyone 1y ago
  What is a server executable? With a lot of modern games it could be a whole stacks worth of systems that neither the game client or server side game runtime will work without.
  - Mindwipe 1y ago
    And which are not owned by the developer or available to be perpetually licensed.
    - Ukv 1y ago
      To my understanding the idea is that if a company licenses some 3rd-party component for their game, the component would either need to be severable from the game while still leaving it reasonably playable, or the license would need to permit people who have purchased the game to use that component. This is going foward, not applying retroactively to existing games. I think that's still fairly favorable to game publishers compared to most other purchased goods. If you manufacture an office chair and license a patented swivel mechanism, the license you acquire cannot require you to break purchasers' chairs after the license expires, nor even to go around their homes swapping out the mechanism (which analogously may still be permitted for games). Moreover if the rightsholder for that patent had been licensing only under the terms that the purchased chair is destroyed after 5 years but then a change in consumer protection law prevents that practice, they'd need to license it out under more reasonable terms (like you can only sell the chairs with the mechanism for 5 years, but there's no limit on how long people can use the mechanism in their purchased chairs) - otherwise they'd get no business.
      - maccard 1y ago
        > If you manufacture an office chair and license a patented swivel mechanism, the license you acquire cannot require you to break purchasers' chairs after the license expires, nor even to go around their homes swapping out the mechanism (which analogously may still be permitted for games). The big difference here is that you’re applying B2C terms on B2B licenses. This would essentially ban enterprise B2B licenses for video game software which is insanity
        Ukv 1y ago
        > The big difference here is that you’re applying B2C terms on B2B licenses. Both are cases of B2B licensing with the latter business then selling a product on to consumers. > This would essentially ban enterprise B2B licenses for video game software which is insanity I don't see how. If for instance some company develops an audio processing library, they can still license it out to a game development company for a limited time - just that the license would be "the company can no longer sell games with this technology after the license expires", opposed to anything that would prevent functioning of the already-sold games. Or rather, they could stipulate the latter in their license, but then their market would be limited to game development companies willing to patch it out after the license expires.

pointlessone 1y ago

Saas offerings are safe as they don’t let you Buy a thing. They’re very transparently a service. Same with timed licenses. It’s clear what you’re paying for. Most of the time. With games it’s often not the case. You buy them and then at unspecified moment you might lose a significant portion of functionality or the whole game. At the time you buy a game you don’t know if it’s for a time, what time, or what will stop working.

dgellow 1y ago
When I bought WoW it was very clear to me I was buying a service. If blizzard decided after 2 years it wasn’t sustainable and to shut down the game at no point would I be entitled to own it. It was clearly a license to access their service, as long as it exists. Same for any other MMORPG
- anton-c 1y ago
  You can host offline servers of older mmos easily. I had my own lineage 2 private server in middle school. Private online servers too. Wow classic became a thing because private vanilla servers were incredibly popular. You should be able to do this for any game. I understand them fighting it during the games lifetime.
- danaris 1y ago
  And what about a single-player game that relies on the company's server being online in order to allow you to play it?
  - pointlessone 1y ago
    The dev, having access to source code, issues the final patch that disables that feature. Better yet, the dev, having access to source code, never implements this feature in the first place as it doesn’t improve the player experience in any shape or form.
    - whaleofatw2022 1y ago

4hg4ufxhy 1y ago

Why not apply it to Saas? If you sold lifetime licenses and you don't want to run it anymore, just let your customers self host it. Even better if you can open source it.

mrob 1y ago

If it's really impossible for you to allow a game to remain playable after you abandon it, the only reasonable option is to not sell it at all. Instead you can rent it, with the length of the rental clearly stated up front. Advertising a rental as a sale should be illegal.

maccard 1y ago
Who defined playable? Take Diablo 3 and 4. They are shared world games, are they playable without them? Maybe to you’d but to me they’re not. world of Warcraft has a rich questing experience which doesn’t require playing with other people - is it ok if they just switch off multiplayer content? That’s a different game, IMO.

viraptor 1y ago

> What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine? It's ok, the engine will adjust it if big studios can't use it otherwise. It's just people having to talk to each other. > Code and APIs would be needed to be documented. Why? Nobody is talking about forced opensourcing.