[acdha]

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.

[chias]

Not to mention:

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?

2. What even is the definition of a "video game"? Is Neopets a video game? Is Twitter?

[acdha]

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.

[account42]

> 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.

[henriquecm8]

> 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.

[thaumasiotes]

The right to play World of Warcraft by yourself is worthless. The content available to a single player isn't even supposed to be fun.

You'd need the right to run a full server that your friends can also connect to.

[nerdjon]

> 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.

[account42]

> I think that is taking things too far

Why?

[account42]

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.

[nerdjon]

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.

[Hamuko]

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.

[nerdjon]

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.