[Yeul]

As I understand it copyright on a videogame is 50 years but the vast majority of games- or all entertainment really- stops making money after a few years. It gets worse if your game has licensed music in it!

I think piracy is the best method of preservation because it's removed from a financial incentive. Publishers just aren't going to spend a dime if it doesn't make a buck.

[worble]

> I think piracy is the best method of preservation because it's removed from a financial incentive.

The problem is that piracy doesn't help for always online "games as a service" games where the game is killed after the server has shut down. You can't pirate the server because it was never available, and outside of being lucky enough that a few hackers dedicate a lot of spare time to reverse engineering it, that game is gone forever.

The point of this initiative is to ensure that game companies have a legal obligation that at the point of shutting down game servers they must either release the server software, patch the game to work offline, or do whatever else to ensure that the game continues to function.

It's worth noting that this would only count for games sold as goods i.e you paid a fixed fee at the time of sale with the expectation of owning a product indefinitely. Games with explicit subscriptions such as MMO's would not be subject to this since there was never an expectation of access to the product continuing after the subscription expired.

[Sakos]

There is a historical and cultural loss involved when online only games are shutdown. This isn't simply a problem of "oh there was never an expectation of eternal access". It's a problem of us losing historical artifacts because of financial incentives.

[mapcars]

> oh there was never an expectation of eternal access

I would argue there kind of is such an expectation. Unless obviously stated in the game description before payment I would expect it to function similar to other games I purchased. And I can still play the offline games from early 2000s without any issues.

I'm saying that because if an online game would be sold with a banner like "we plan to support this game for next 3 years but it might shutdown any time after that" this would absolutely affect my decision to purchase it or to purchase microtransactions inside the game.

[johnnyanmac]

>It's a problem of us losing historical artifacts because of financial incentives.

If I may be frank, most history isn't worth remembering. There will always be a dozen fans of some niche MMO that lasted a year in the 00's, but people just move on eventually. It's entertainment at the end of the day.

[coretx]

Not only that, it's capital destruction too. It shrinks your economy. Not to be confused with creative destruction.

[Moru]

If you look on the thing you sign when getting a steam account, you don't actually own any of the games. Just like the MMO's, you cant play them when steam or producer decides to shut them down.

[Qwertious]

>If you look on the thing you sign

ToSes aren't legally binding when they require you to waive your rights. This has been tested in courts repeatedly.

[diggan]

> you cant play them when steam or producer decides to shut them down.

Doesn't Steam actually let people keep a game in their Steam library even if the publisher takes down the store page for the game?

[tadzik_]

That only gives you the client component though, which isn't very useful when the game servers shut down.

Most games these days don't have a self-hostable dedicated server.

In case of Steam/Valve specifically it happened a while ago with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Valve replaced it with Counter-Strike 2, and while GO's client is still usable, some of its online components are not.

[throwaway48476]

I believe csgo on the Xbox still works online.

[SXX]

It's only works because Valve probably have contractual obligations to not break online services for the game until console EOL. This can very well be the case if it was ever possible to actually buy it on Xbox.

[leftyspook]

It does. Not sure if publisher can opt-out though.

Another point is that Steam DRM is a) optional b) unlike always online GaaS trivial to circumvent

[account42]

That's how publishers want thingns to work. But if the store interface gives one impression and the smallprint annother thne it's not clear that the contract is what courts will uphold.

It is worth noticing though that Steam has stopped using the word "Buy" and instead use terms "Add to Cart" and "Continue to payment" which are perhaps more ambiguous but still not much so IMO. They did however use "Buy" in the past and changing the store interface now should not excempt them from fulfilling the expectations they have set in the past.

[keybored]

50 year copyright on video games is insane. A really good ten year old game could be considered a “classic”, certainly a twenty year old one. SNES games are like 28–33 years or something.

Now consider how many of the modern classic PC games are kept playable/relevant (a problem with some older games are things like terrible playing mechanics; graphics less so) by an enthusiast modding community.

[sofixa]

> but the vast majority of games- or all entertainment really- stops making money after a few years

I don't think that's universally true. Paradox Interactive are a studio with grand strategy games, and even decades-old games still get new sales of the base game and the DLCs, with a strong user base.

[Qwertious]

Which decades-old games are Paradox getting lots of money from? HoI4 released in 2016, are people really buying the original HoI (from 2002)?

[sofixa]

Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV are still seeing high amounts of players, with EUIV in particular getting recent DLCs that sell well. Released in 2013, it's a decade+, and it will be at least a year or two before EUV comes out.

[johnnyanmac]

it becomes less true by the year. almost half the playtime of 2023 came from games 6+ years old: https://www.ign.com/articles/gamers-mostly-played-older-game...

this is not just a GaaS thing (though GaaS is the biggest in the list), even evergreen indie titles can choose to just add more content to a single player game for years instead of making a new title. titles like Terraria and Binding of Isaac more than passed a decade at this point.

[account42]

Paradox already often sell the base game for peanuts though and mostly make money through new DLCs.

[cchi_co]

Piracy undermines the creators' rights still. And I think that a legal framework should do its job

[throwaway48476]

Creators were never supposed to have indefinite rights. Copyright has an expiration date to balance fhe rights of the public and author.

[account42]

In the US the author's rights don't even come into the motivation. They don't exist a priori as free speech would let you share any "IP" you want. The temporary monopoly is ONLY granted to encourage more creation, not as a recognition of author rights.

In the EU it's a bit more complicated but I still don't see authors rights as a primary motivator for copyright specifically.

[johnnyanmac]

sure, and we can adjust that without abolishing copyright, nor justifying what is basically theft to go around it. I don't know why every-time this conversation comes up peopel instantly go to "abolish copyright". Is no one else here a creator of some kind?