4 ms·

> Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers. It's not clear to me what

by akerl_ 1y ago

> Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers. It's not clear to me what you're suggesting here? 1. Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods? 2. Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it?

afavour 1y ago
> Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods? Reading between the lines I think OP is suggesting backwards compatibility is retained when publishing updates. > Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it? I'm assuming OP's answer is something along the lines of "because it's good for society". Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company? Obviously every case is different but the principle is sound, IMO. Like copyright expiry. At the very least it's an interesting thought exercise.
- aidenn0 1y ago
  Consider books in the vein of Hardy Boys[1]. Many of these books get revised over the years by the publisher. Imagine if the book on your shelf changed and when you went to read it again, the prose differed from how you remembered. People can disagree as to the extent to which the changes are good or bad (some are clearly fixes for "whoa, that was racist even for the year it was published" others are claimed by the original authors to have stamped out the small bit of originality they were able to slip past the editors), but something is lost when you lose things the way they were originally experienced. 1: For those who don't know, this is a kids book series with a single pen-name, but with each book written for-hire. Nancy Drew and Tom Swift were created by the same publisher in a similar manner.
  - akerl_ 1y ago
    Nobody is coming into your house to change the bits on your hard drive.
    - skotobaza 1y ago
      But publishers can restrict your access to the game if you decline the latest update.
      - akerl_ 1y ago
        They can restrict your access to the server-side infrastructure that they run, yes.
        afavour 1y ago
        Which is often required for the simple act of starting a game, even if the game runs offline.
        skotobaza 1y ago
        Which in turn makes some games unable to run anything (even single-player modes).
    - aidenn0 1y ago
      It's been a while since I gamed, but auto-update on launch was a thing even a decade ago.
    - jasonjayr 1y ago
      In a famous incident many years ago, Amazon "memory hole'd" a copy of 1984 from people's personal Kindles when they lost the license to sell it. https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deletion-from-kindle-examined https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...
- akerl_ 1y ago
  My pitch is that it’s generally bad and dangerous for society to make rules that retroactively apply based on how the universe reacts to your action. If I ship a game and my obligations about updates change depending on how popular the game gets, that limits what games I’m willing to release. Sorry, No Man’s Sky sold too many copies on day 1, so now we can’t ship any fixes that break backwards compatibility.
  - suddenlybananas 1y ago
    >make rules that retroactively apply based on how the universe reacts to your action. I'm struggling to understand what you mean. Almost all of our rules depend on "how the universe reacts to your actions".
    - akerl_ 1y ago
      Can you give an example? To pick one of my own: defamation is something that is determined based on your actions and the state at the moment they happen. If I say something potentially defamatory about you, it’s judged based on what I knew at the time, what I said, and how it would be understood by a reasonable person at that time. You can’t rock up later and say “well looking back at this thing you said 10 years ago, we now know it was false” or that a reasonable person today would think differently about it. By contrast, if we made a rule saying that culturally significant games are due some set of societal protections, a game dev has no way to know if their game would meet that threshold when they release the game.
      - why_at 1y ago
        I'm not the OP nor am I advocating for their point, but I believe there are some cases, e.g. with car manufacturers, where different regulations apply depending on how many you produce. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine something similar applying to how many copies of a video game you sell.
        akerl_ 1y ago
- mnahkies 1y ago
  I think backwards compatibility is desirable, but really the bigger problem is the way that stores like steam essentially force auto updates. If you could pick the time to update, after you've read the patch notes and/or waited for your favourite mods to confirm compatibility/update that would solve most problems regarding updates.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company? I agree. Look at how many times since 2011 Bethesda has put some "new" version of Skyrim up for sale. I myself probably bought the game at least 3 separate times. At this point, Bethesda has made their money off of it and then some, what's the harm at this point in opening it up? Give it to the community under some form of no-commercial use/sale license, as an act of public good. Outside of excess profit, there's little reason to continue to hoard IP after a certain time. Would be nice if all offline games followed something like that, although I fear if such copyright expiry was the law we'd never see fully offline games again.
pfix 1y ago
Ohh, these are excellent questions! I understand OPs sentiment fully - and the response is probably "it depends" :D Culture and Art is a volatile thing and let's assume a game and it's mods are a piece of culture and art. Then an update of the original that interrupts the original aspects is basically the destruction of art. In olden times, in those 90s, when games were offline, you could mod to your hearts desire and nobody could take it away. And by now it's recognized as cultural heritage - even though those old games become less and less appealing to the audience that is used to better game ux (This is a bold statement by me. My generation grew up with those graphics and love them - our grandchildren will ask us why we did that like they will never understand why people used those loud noisy typewriters when you can tell your phone to write the text up) Still - typewriters are still usable. But copyright law and online only games and forced updates really destroy that game you played 10 years ago as you cannot (legally) access it anymore. Mods can be updated but that requires recreating that art - if still possible with changed APIs. But then game developers need to life off something and updating and improving games should always be in their right, see no mans sky and how it changed over the years to be a completely different game in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. IMHO it would be simple to keep significant old versions available for the general public like WoW did with their Classic rollback (not sure if this is the best example) - or like system shock, there's the rewrite and there's the original and everyone can use that version they prefer without preventing the original developer from publishing and improving.
- akerl_ 1y ago
  WoW classic is a really odd example, because the developer chose to ship it and made many changes to the underlying game when they did so.
flohofwoe 1y ago
> 2. Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it? IMHO this should mostly kick in after the original developer has stopped supporting the game. E.g. what's commonly known as abandonware, such abandoned games should automatically go into the public domain, so that copyright or IP disputes can't hinder fans who want to preserve the game. The abandonware deadline needs to be much shorter than copyright deadlines. Something like 5 years after the publisher stopped 'exploiting' the IP would make sense. Of course especially Bethesda is infamous for milking their IPs until the sun goes supernova.
prmoustache 1y ago
My opinion is that while assets could be licensed differently, proprietary licenses for code should be illegal and only code released under an osi approved open source license should be published, commercially or not. This should apply to all softwares not only games. That would make portability accross operating systems easier, and allow consumers to enjoy and maintain the products they buy forever, even if the original developers do not want to support and provide updates anymore.
- akerl_ 1y ago
  Oh. Well that’s certainly an opinion.

by akerl_ 1y ago

afavour 1y ago

> Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods? Reading between the lines I think OP is suggesting backwards compatibility is retained when publishing updates. > Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it? I'm assuming OP's answer is something along the lines of "because it's good for society". Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company? Obviously every case is different but the principle is sound, IMO. Like copyright expiry. At the very least it's an interesting thought exercise.

aidenn0 1y ago
Consider books in the vein of Hardy Boys[1]. Many of these books get revised over the years by the publisher. Imagine if the book on your shelf changed and when you went to read it again, the prose differed from how you remembered. People can disagree as to the extent to which the changes are good or bad (some are clearly fixes for "whoa, that was racist even for the year it was published" others are claimed by the original authors to have stamped out the small bit of originality they were able to slip past the editors), but something is lost when you lose things the way they were originally experienced. 1: For those who don't know, this is a kids book series with a single pen-name, but with each book written for-hire. Nancy Drew and Tom Swift were created by the same publisher in a similar manner.
- akerl_ 1y ago
  Nobody is coming into your house to change the bits on your hard drive.
  - skotobaza 1y ago
    But publishers can restrict your access to the game if you decline the latest update.
    - akerl_ 1y ago
      They can restrict your access to the server-side infrastructure that they run, yes.
      - afavour 1y ago
        Which is often required for the simple act of starting a game, even if the game runs offline.
      - skotobaza 1y ago
        Which in turn makes some games unable to run anything (even single-player modes).
  - aidenn0 1y ago
    It's been a while since I gamed, but auto-update on launch was a thing even a decade ago.
  - jasonjayr 1y ago
    In a famous incident many years ago, Amazon "memory hole'd" a copy of 1984 from people's personal Kindles when they lost the license to sell it. https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deletion-from-kindle-examined https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...
akerl_ 1y ago
My pitch is that it’s generally bad and dangerous for society to make rules that retroactively apply based on how the universe reacts to your action. If I ship a game and my obligations about updates change depending on how popular the game gets, that limits what games I’m willing to release. Sorry, No Man’s Sky sold too many copies on day 1, so now we can’t ship any fixes that break backwards compatibility.
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  >make rules that retroactively apply based on how the universe reacts to your action. I'm struggling to understand what you mean. Almost all of our rules depend on "how the universe reacts to your actions".
  - akerl_ 1y ago
    Can you give an example? To pick one of my own: defamation is something that is determined based on your actions and the state at the moment they happen. If I say something potentially defamatory about you, it’s judged based on what I knew at the time, what I said, and how it would be understood by a reasonable person at that time. You can’t rock up later and say “well looking back at this thing you said 10 years ago, we now know it was false” or that a reasonable person today would think differently about it. By contrast, if we made a rule saying that culturally significant games are due some set of societal protections, a game dev has no way to know if their game would meet that threshold when they release the game.
    - why_at 1y ago
      I'm not the OP nor am I advocating for their point, but I believe there are some cases, e.g. with car manufacturers, where different regulations apply depending on how many you produce. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine something similar applying to how many copies of a video game you sell.
      - akerl_ 1y ago
mnahkies 1y ago
I think backwards compatibility is desirable, but really the bigger problem is the way that stores like steam essentially force auto updates. If you could pick the time to update, after you've read the patch notes and/or waited for your favourite mods to confirm compatibility/update that would solve most problems regarding updates.
thewebguyd 1y ago
> Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company? I agree. Look at how many times since 2011 Bethesda has put some "new" version of Skyrim up for sale. I myself probably bought the game at least 3 separate times. At this point, Bethesda has made their money off of it and then some, what's the harm at this point in opening it up? Give it to the community under some form of no-commercial use/sale license, as an act of public good. Outside of excess profit, there's little reason to continue to hoard IP after a certain time. Would be nice if all offline games followed something like that, although I fear if such copyright expiry was the law we'd never see fully offline games again.

pfix 1y ago

Ohh, these are excellent questions! I understand OPs sentiment fully - and the response is probably "it depends" :D Culture and Art is a volatile thing and let's assume a game and it's mods are a piece of culture and art. Then an update of the original that interrupts the original aspects is basically the destruction of art. In olden times, in those 90s, when games were offline, you could mod to your hearts desire and nobody could take it away. And by now it's recognized as cultural heritage - even though those old games become less and less appealing to the audience that is used to better game ux (This is a bold statement by me. My generation grew up with those graphics and love them - our grandchildren will ask us why we did that like they will never understand why people used those loud noisy typewriters when you can tell your phone to write the text up) Still - typewriters are still usable. But copyright law and online only games and forced updates really destroy that game you played 10 years ago as you cannot (legally) access it anymore. Mods can be updated but that requires recreating that art - if still possible with changed APIs. But then game developers need to life off something and updating and improving games should always be in their right, see no mans sky and how it changed over the years to be a completely different game in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. IMHO it would be simple to keep significant old versions available for the general public like WoW did with their Classic rollback (not sure if this is the best example) - or like system shock, there's the rewrite and there's the original and everyone can use that version they prefer without preventing the original developer from publishing and improving.

akerl_ 1y ago
WoW classic is a really odd example, because the developer chose to ship it and made many changes to the underlying game when they did so.

flohofwoe 1y ago

> 2. Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it? IMHO this should mostly kick in after the original developer has stopped supporting the game. E.g. what's commonly known as abandonware, such abandoned games should automatically go into the public domain, so that copyright or IP disputes can't hinder fans who want to preserve the game. The abandonware deadline needs to be much shorter than copyright deadlines. Something like 5 years after the publisher stopped 'exploiting' the IP would make sense. Of course especially Bethesda is infamous for milking their IPs until the sun goes supernova.

prmoustache 1y ago

My opinion is that while assets could be licensed differently, proprietary licenses for code should be illegal and only code released under an osi approved open source license should be published, commercially or not. This should apply to all softwares not only games. That would make portability accross operating systems easier, and allow consumers to enjoy and maintain the products they buy forever, even if the original developers do not want to support and provide updates anymore.

akerl_ 1y ago
Oh. Well that’s certainly an opinion.