[horsawlarway]

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The obvious and clearest response is simply this: If you as a publisher are so convinced that your game is obsolete...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]

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]

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]

> 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.

[johnnyanmac]

> (soooooo which is it????)

Simple, they use that tech in their next game that they hope brings more steady revenue. if you think about it as opportunity cost instead of absolute valuee the logic lines up.

[phone[phone]]

Except how often does that _really_ happen?

[nullsmack]

Get real. ID Software showed the way to do this in the 90s and early 00s when they released the source code to their early Doom and Quake games, sometimes only 3-5 years after they came out. They didn't give up rights to ip and they didn't give up trade secrets either. Not only have those games enjoyed a high level of support ever since, but it's also enabled new creative works to be created even to present day. (ie Selaco)

Just say you'd prefer it to be legal for these corporations to defraud customers as a regular business practice rather than it be mandated that they can't do that and move on.

[brigadier132]

> corporations

Scapegoating is always how these laws are justified. It's always "billionaires this or that" but the laws always include small to medium sized businesses and high income professionals that are not billionaires or mega corporations.

These laws hurt mega corporations but they are fatal to everything smaller.

[johnnyanmac]

we're in 2024, not 1994. ID Soft made almost all the tech themselves. That doesn't really happen today with all the servies and 3rd party tools needed to keep up with consumer demand. If people were fine with Doom 1994 graphics, we'd still be playing Doom.

Shocker but most people don't want to give all their IP away. Most others literally cannot because most tool licenses don't give you permission to distribute.

>Just say you'd prefer it to be legal for these corporations to defraud customers as a regular business practice rather than it be mandated that they can't do that and move on.

rules:

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

[beretguy]

This initiative is not asking for source code. It’s asking to leave games in a playable state by any means possible. Company can release closed source binary and that would perfectly suffice.

[phone[phone]]

> Giving away the source does not protect the game creator and actively harms them since they are giving up trade secrets.

Then maybe they shouldn't have published the game in the first place. If you can't do the bare minimum that the market demands/requires by regulation then you can't engage with it. Simple as.