To all the comments who expressed doubts on how this would work in practice: please read the FAQ, it answers a lot of questions and gives concrete examples.
Looking at the most relevant questions of online games, I notice few answers and no concrete examples - it’s just “not at all” followed by what sounds like a teenager student trying to bluff their way through an assignment they didn’t read. The online gaming and licensing “answers” conspicuously read like they did not involve anyone with experience actually building or operating software applications.
The critical flaw in this proposal is the attempt not to “interfere with any business practices while a game is still being supported”. I have some professional involvement in software preservation and would love to see more things preserved, but that’s going to require changes to how games are developed and sunsetted. As a simple example, the incorrect “not at all” assertion at the beginning of the multiplayer answer is directly contradicted by the acknowledgement buried in the middle admitting that this would require the game to be designed for preservation from the beginning. That’s actually correct because it’s rare for someone to develop a game from scratch, which involves reusing tools and content which are not licensed under the same terms as the original game. You could, and arguably should, require games to be developed in a more sustainable manner avoiding dependencies which can’t be easily removed or replaced at end of life but that absolutely is a change in business practice. Similarly, game developers license engines, content, etc. under terms which have limits or activation fees and that would need some sort of interference in existing business practice to change – again, arguably a good thing to do but it needs to be upfront about it similar to how we can’t just say people should stop using single-use plastic packaging without doing something about the economic factors which make it widespread.
This is especially important when you remember that preservation is most useful when it’s easily accessible: if your game is preserved but that requires running a couple of nested emulators and some patches downloaded from one dude in Moldova, very few people are actually going to do so. What you really want is to keep the game buildable so it can run on normal operating systems and bugs & quality of life improvements can be made. For example, many multiplayer games in the past only supported IPv4 but there are a growing number of people in the world who only have IPv6 so it’d be good for long-term preservation to be able to add support but maintaining a build tool chain would really hammer the licensing issues.
I’d like a proposal which simply starts by saying that they have to use terms like “rent” or “subscribe” for anything which uses DRM or company servers, and expand from there since it definitely gets thorny fast on both fronts. (What do you do with a Facebook game when they break an API a decade later?)
For things like Warcraft, I think that absolutely should be preserved for historians and other researchers if nothing else but it’s hard to imagine that being possible without some kind of active cooperation. I wonder whether there’d be an angle where you could get some kind of tax credit by depositing playable offline copies with a national library but simply the storage costs would be a burden there.
> I wonder whether there’d be an angle where you could get some kind of tax credit by depositing playable offline copies with a national library but simply the storage costs would be a burden there.
It should simply be a requirement for copyright protection in the first place - if it doesn't actually end up in the commons after the copyright term the deal makes no sense for society overall.
> 1. World of Warcraft in 2004 is very different from World of Warcraft in 2024. Do future versions "destroy" previous ones? How do you deal with this?
I think it's more about the right of the consumer to be able to play what they paid for than keep the original version intact.
> World of Warcraft in 2004 is very different from World of Warcraft in 2024. Do future versions "destroy" previous ones? How do you deal with this?
Well one of the links that was provided to me in the last discussion list the original version of FF14 (before reborn) as "dead" even though FF14 is still a thing (yes I know it was majorly changed given the original issues). So I am guessing there are at least some people that are going to try to make the argument that every version needs to be preserved.
I think that is taking things too far, but given it is listed on that page, some do think that.
It's OK to ask for a minimum level of preservation even if so much more could be done. Emulators and e.g. IPv4 and other such technological problems are really not that important. People have been making all kinds of crazy binary patches and wrappers to keep old software working in modern environments. Emulators are also not a problem even for novice users if they are packaged appropriately. What is needed is to ensure that this is a) allowed and b) people have access to all parts of the game, including server components.
This has now been posted multiple times and what you said is my biggest issue with this, its super vague and its mixing up multiple issues.
On the link for this post, if you click through to the actual initiative it is primarily talking about phoning home and yet apparently it also applies to actual online games.
In no way shape or form is World of Warcraft just "phoning home".
In the last time this was posted I was trying to discuss this with someone and they were trying to make the argument that apparently WoW gets an exception because it has a subscription but Guild Wars 2 doesn't because... it doesn't have a subscription? They are both MMO's. That makes zero sense from a technical explanation for why doing this may not be a reasonable expectation. Even if somehow that is an exception that we are going to give, where is that at all concretely explained?
Looking at the website. Lets look at this quote:
> So, if a server could originally support 5000 people, but the end user version can only support 500, that's still a massive improvement from no one being able to play the game ever again.
That is such a simplification of what a "sever" is that I am convinced no one technical was involved in writing this. There can be multiple components that may need to be scaled differently, external resources, etc etc. Maybe some are but it isn't like a "server" is just a single, launch this app with this amount of resources and your good to go. That is before getting into the complication of if a system was built to create on demand resources, maybe it spins up a server, container, etc when an online game starts, someone goes into an instance, etc etc.
To me this should be 2 things. First, no just phoning home for single player games. Thats easy and I doubt anyone is going to argue they are a good thing. Second, once a game does shut down attempts by the community to bring it back can't be challenged legally.
Anything beyond that, is not going to have issues from a technological standpoint. Like you mentioned, re-using systems, code, etc. It is not reasonable to expect that all of that will just be put out for anyone to use. I would not be surprised if there are major parts of FF11 that were used in FF14. So if FF11 shuts down, why do we expect parts of 14 to basically be put out?
I am all for not killing games but lets be realistic about what an online game actually is and the reality of the company putting out all of the resources for it to be playable after shutting down the servers. Particularly assuming could they even legally depending on what components they license.
World of Warcraft is probably the murkiest example since you had to buy a copy of WoW to play the game, but the packaging clearly said how the box only includes a month of gameplay and you need to pay for any additional time after that. So it was never really advertised as a full and complete game, even though you had to buy it.
If World of Warcraft was just a subscription without having to buy the game, then I think it'd be a lot clearer. You pay $12 for a month of WoW and you get a month of WoW, nothing more, nothing less.
It's quite a lot different from a game like The Crew, which is sold as a complete game, even though it stopped working when Ubisoft axed the servers and was even retroactively removed from players' game libraries.
Thats why I started to feel like that no one had a good explanation of what exactly they are going for here. The person I was discussing with seemed to imply the information they were presenting was from youtube videos.
My impression was that they were somehow trying to argue that there being a subscription is the only way that a consumer can understand it is an online only game. But, yeah you still have to buy the expansions and the base game (sometimes). Same with FF14 and other MMO's.
This just felt like a arbitrary designed exception that has no basis on technology. The difference between WoW and FF14 and games like GW2, Destiny, and other similar games is minimal at best from that side of things. Obviously not he same code and not designed the same way, but still systems meant to handle similar large scale things.
I just don't understand how you can argue that a consumer understands that with a subscription but if they pick up an online only game like GW2 or Destiny that they somehow don't understand that?
Regarding The Crew. I honestly still don't understand what the situation with that game was since I never played it. Was it a truly online game that required interactions with a server (not phoning home) to fundamentally work and interactions with other players to fundamentally work. Or is it like Forza where the online component was a layer on top of a single player game.
That distinction is important and are very different discussions about the impact and realities of something like this.
> The costs associated with implementing this requirement can be very small, if not trivial.
This is too naive. While it may be the case for single player games that use online connection only as a DRM mechanism (Hitman 3, Gran Turismo 7), for some games it's not trivial at all.
For example, The Division 2 servers do not only act as a "coordinator" between players like CS:GO servers, but also run logics for NPCs and environments. The server and the client are too tightly coupled.
I'd rather see some sort of provision where if the company disables the product they sold us, they're required to subsequently license the source code to us for personal use.
First off, hobbyists have an amazing track record reverse engineering many online games and creating third party servers and mods for them, so not only does this solve the problem but the amount of creativity that would be unlocked would be incredible.
Second, you better believe many many publishers will flip the fuck out if they're staring this possibility in the face, and as a result they will work way harder to support their games in the future.
It's irrelevant whether the costs are trivial. Once developers and publishers release the server binaries or API-spec, fans can invest as much time and money as they want to replicate it. They don't need to reverse-engineer it.
What happens if the game developer has licensed 3rd party tools and libraries which the server software depends on and they don’t have the right to include these?
Those shouldn't be included, of course. If the server has them too tied up to be decoupled, then I guess someone needs to unscramble the spaghetti before serving it
Right, but how hard would it be to make the server self-hostable? I feel like as long as the server address wasn't hardcoded into the game, it wouldn't be too hard
That depends entirely on the infrastructure necessary for hosting the multiplayer servers. Such as, does it require a database server for persistent storage of player information? It might be built for a k8s based environment. Split into many smaller services that all interact using a service mesh or message queue.
You cant just take these things, press a button, and voila, a small bundled server platform anyone can run at home. The modern day software development experience is a massive and complex beast.
They explicitly mention server hosting as an acceptable thing. They are not saying every consumer has to be able to run the infrastructure, but the community has to be able to. A few services on a k8s cluster would absolutely suffice for this.
That page is hard to understand. It is presented in my own language, but gives the impression of being translated by a drunk person with a dictionary, with plenty pages torn out.
While I can get a general understanding of the points being raised by translating key words back to English and think about the context it is being used in, I'm not sure it's worth the bother.
Here's another petition: If you want to be taken seriously, do not use translation tools.
edit: Found the language dropdown in the top right corner. It was obscured by my web browser. If you have trouble understanding the text, select English there. It is a coherent text and therefore likely the intended language. ("Take action", I could never have guessed that one, no one was supposed to steal anything.)
Agreed. Moreover, this appears to focus entirely on a consumerist perspective ie. the problem of online-activated games that get switched off after a couple years of sales which seems relevant to single-player games that don't need servers, but not MMORPGs/MMOx I guess, but the papmphlet wouldn't say. What's with web games? What about the inherent conflict of interest of selling vs preservation/piracy? What about the monopolistic tendencies of platforms such as Steam/consoles and their influence on game sujets (prude no-gore PC all-ages HD remakes) and that of payment providers?
It's very wordy. I get the feeling ChatGPT wrote it. AI has the tendency to maximize word usage, like it's a highschooler trying to hit the 'word count minimum' in their paper.
Does it matter? It's the same with every language, expect for the three or four major languages it handles best. Automated translation is derogatory to the audience.
It's an anti-feature. Just remove it. The target users will read the web page just like they read any other web page, in the language it is written.
Should they find their own language skills lacking, they will click the translate button in their web browser. Just like they do on any other web page.
Echoing what the others said, these arguments don't hold water. It ignores all of the practicalities of what would actually be involved in doing this, the impacts on licensing, business models, security (and saying "there's no security risk" doesn't mean there's no security risk - there's a reason we don't distribute game server binaries for many games), and lastly the sheer development effort involved.
The critical flaw in this proposal is the attempt not to “interfere with any business practices while a game is still being supported”. I have some professional involvement in software preservation and would love to see more things preserved, but that’s going to require changes to how games are developed and sunsetted. As a simple example, the incorrect “not at all” assertion at the beginning of the multiplayer answer is directly contradicted by the acknowledgement buried in the middle admitting that this would require the game to be designed for preservation from the beginning. That’s actually correct because it’s rare for someone to develop a game from scratch, which involves reusing tools and content which are not licensed under the same terms as the original game. You could, and arguably should, require games to be developed in a more sustainable manner avoiding dependencies which can’t be easily removed or replaced at end of life but that absolutely is a change in business practice. Similarly, game developers license engines, content, etc. under terms which have limits or activation fees and that would need some sort of interference in existing business practice to change – again, arguably a good thing to do but it needs to be upfront about it similar to how we can’t just say people should stop using single-use plastic packaging without doing something about the economic factors which make it widespread.
This is especially important when you remember that preservation is most useful when it’s easily accessible: if your game is preserved but that requires running a couple of nested emulators and some patches downloaded from one dude in Moldova, very few people are actually going to do so. What you really want is to keep the game buildable so it can run on normal operating systems and bugs & quality of life improvements can be made. For example, many multiplayer games in the past only supported IPv4 but there are a growing number of people in the world who only have IPv6 so it’d be good for long-term preservation to be able to add support but maintaining a build tool chain would really hammer the licensing issues.