[nerdjon]

This is basically advocating for open source games which is a completely different story than what stop killing games is trying to do.

There are tons of closed source games that have zero online component to them.

I don't see how you can actually argue that this is a good thing, especially when they say:

> The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.

That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.

Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.

[F3nd0]

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > > Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.

What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.

[saghm]

In that vein, the other day this got posted to HN: https://twilitrealm.dev/

It uses an independent reimplementation of the code of a Zelda game from the GameCube and combines them with the assets from the actual game to make native binaries for various platforms, which blows my mind a bit but demonstrates the power of this sort of split abstraction.

[F3nd0]

Yes! And there are many other re-implementation projects, like OpenMW, OpenGothic, fheroes2, and others, which allow you to play the games if you can provide the original assets. Largely for older games, but the point stands.

https://openmw.org/

https://github.com/Try/OpenGothic

https://ihhub.github.io/fheroes2/

[dpoloncsak]

Adding on to this but I'm not sure if it's 1:1 what you're talking about.

PokeMMO is a online Pokemon Fangame that combines the first 5 generations of games. From what I gather, this is possible because it is up to the user to provide the ROMs, so litigious Nintendo cannot say they are re-distributing copyrighted material

[saghm]

Does it only use the assets from the original games, or also the scripting? If the former, then I'd say it's basically the same concept that I'm talking about, but with making a new game using the existing assets rather than reimplementing an existing one. If it uses the scripting as well and then provides some extra stuff to merge them and put it online, I'd say it's a slightly different (but still extremely cool!) thing.

[dpoloncsak]

I'm not entirely sure...I know the battle AI is custom, and a few moves are still not implemented. This makes me lean towards "they're scripting it themselves" but it could be a hybrid of the two for all I know

[saghm]

OpenMW has been on my list to try out for a while now, I should have thought of that one. I hadn't heard of OpenGothic, but I also only recently started learning about that game at all with the remake coming out soon, so I might need to add that to my list as well!

This makes me think, is there one of those "awesome" lists for open game reimplementations? If not, someone should make one...

(edit: Thanks for the multiple great replies on this! Now I have even more stuff to go through to add to my lists, and I love having that problem)

[F3nd0]

Yes, there is <https://osgameclones.com/>. Note that not all of the listed games are free software, but many are.

[worble]

Luxtorpeda maintains a pretty comprehensive list of game reimplementations

https://luxtorpeda.org/packages

[t917910]

Unfortunately, open source projects traditionally have a poor AI record. And when (sometimes, contrary to tradition) they make a fully-fledged AI, it plays at a super-expert level and ruins the fun of both campaigns and single-player, turning a simple walk into Saving Private Ryan. I'd call it "made by maniacs for maniacs."

[zuzululu]

WTF!

That is impressive there is OSS Gothic 2

I wonder if its legal, how is it MIT

[saghm]

Presumably from the same methodology they laid out in the parent comment: clean-room reimplementation of the code is fair game, and you have to bring-your-own-assets (ostensibly from a legal copy of the original game, but however you do it is your own choice, not anything the people providing the free code need to be concerned with).

[doctorpangloss]

what power, exactly? that nintendo doesn't care about these guys for some idiosyncratic reason?

[saghm]

The power to have a game natively on platforms it was never implemented on before but look identical to the original. To me, that's honestly cooler and more desirable than emulation; the fact that it's also more defensible from an IP standpoint is just a nice bonus.

I also wouldn't say that "respecting the limits of IP law" is particularly idiosyncratic either; you can make the case that IP owners like Nintendo often overreach due to the inherent advantage of being a large company with a lot more resources than a smaller open source project, but I don't really see it as worthwhile to call them out for not doing that in some cases.

[doctorpangloss]

IP law is peak law nerd, regular lawyers can't make any definitive statements about IP situations, what makes you think that you could?

[saghm]

Do you honestly think that most lawyers couldn't tell you that downloading the Linux source code for personal use is legal under IP law, or that dumping games from a Nintendo Switch and serving them on a website for public download is a violation?

If you think that neither of those definitive statements are something regular lawyers could tell you, I think we just have mutually incompatible perceptions of reality. Otherwise, you're claiming that the boundary between what's transparently a legal or a violation and what's murky is itself obvious, which doesn't really make sense if you don't think that regular lawyers even understand IP law.

It honestly just seems like you're trying to pick a fight for reasons that are not really clear to me. You initially responded derisively to my use of the word "power" to describe a form of abstraction, and when I responded to clarify it, you ignored that part of my response in favor of focusing on a different part and starting a new argument about that.

[joegibbs]

But why? Both the programmer and the artist have to eat, they both take pride in their work. What is the rationale for treating one side differently to the other?

[dangus]

This is largely how open source game engines like OpenMW or OpenTTD work: the game engine is reverse engineered, and the art is something the end user provides by downloading/owning a legitimate retail copy.

And that’s really great, but this model is ultimately not realistic for most game developers.

It’s not like productivity software where the code of the product isn’t the majority of the value being delivered. Gitlab is happy to give away their source code because a bunch of enterprise integrations, support, cloud hosting, and features are paywalled.

Game developers really just can’t do this model. If the game is open source it’s going to be far too easy to pirate the game. The economics of single player games largely revolve around the strength of sales in the first month or two.

This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.

For a AAA game where it needs to sell millions of copies at a high price to break even on its huge production budget, game companies can’t risk a high piracy rate. Just look at GTA 6, a game with a production budget of multiple Avatar films.

[MYEUHD]

Games will get pirated regardless whether they're on GOG or not.

> This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.

This is not always the case. For example this game will be available on GOG on day 1. In fact you can pre-order it now: https://www.gog.com/en/game/gothic_1_remake

As another example, this game was released on GOG 5 months after the Steam release: https://www.gog.com/en/game/clair_obscur_expedition_33

Likewise, Cyberpunk 2077 was released on GOG 4 months after the Steam release. And IIRC the game's revenue didn't cover its costs until ~2 years later.

All three of the examples I gave are $50 or more.

[Podrod]

You're wrong about Cyberpunk, it was released on both platforms on the same day. I mean it was CD Projekt's own store front.

[MYEUHD]

You're right. My bad. I was looking at the price changes in gogdb, and price tracking started a few months after launch. But the details page shows the Global release date and the GOG release date.

https://www.gogdb.org/product/2093619782#details

[dangus]

I think you are at least partially reinforcing my point here. Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.

Two of the three examples are solidly in the realm of indie titles.

Yes, there are big release games on the platform. I see, for example, that Silent Hill f is on GOG.

I will generally agree that piracy eventually happens, but a lot of DRM has made piracy impractical for critical early weeks of a game's release.

I think different video game publishers have different opinions on the matter and both sides have a lot of validity. I also think that different types of games have different rates of piracy, as it can be a crime of convenience or not.

If your game's demographics skews more educated, affluent, and/or older, I would imagine that piracy rates will be lower. Perhaps your game is more popular in some countries over others that have different laws and/or cultural norms surrounding piracy.

[MYEUHD]

> Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.

It turns out I was wrong about Cyberpunk. It was released on GOG on day 1. https://www.gogdb.org/product/2093619782#details

The price chart on gogdb mislead me.

[dangus]

Ah I see. Yeah I actually thought that would be pretty strange since it was CD Projekt Red’s store.

[trinsic2]

I'd argue that games being open source and being pirated does mean you can't make money. I think you are looking at this backwards, like the rest of the industry. You don't need to force people to buy your stuff by making it closed and preventing people from getting at your stuff for free.

THe people that matter will compensate you if you make something that matters to them.

The whole idea that you need to force people to by your stuff through restrictions is a perverse way of looking at the world.

[dangus]

I think the piracy rate probably varies a lot by demographic and overall target audience, and that for some types of games and publishers a lot of the draconian DRM makes a lot of sense from a pure dollars and sense standpoint.

A certain type of player just checks for cracked versions first even though they have the money to buy the game and for that person Denuvo buying the publisher a few weeks/months of a crack not being available is worth the investment.

I suspect that a lot of the most famous examples of big budget games with no DRM at all have an older, more educated, and more affluent demographic.

[JacobKfromIRC]

There's also the free culture movement, which generally believes all creative works should be free, not just software.

There are many people who would advocate for free software and not free culture, but jxself has also written in support of free culture: https://jxself.org/drm_and_free_culture.shtml

That post is from 15 years ago, so of course he could have changed his views since then (but I don't see any evidence of that in this case).

[fasterik]

Why is there a distinction between software and art? Can't you make the same argument on both sides, either that artists should make their work freely available, or that programmers should retain the rights to their work?

[qq66]

I don't see the logic in why art would be treated differently than code, and there is a lot in modern games that are not clearly one or the other (hitboxes? animations? lighting effects?)

[BlitzGeology91]

> The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.

Personally, I’m a big fan of this idea. I really like the way that games like Doom do things: the engine itself is FOSS, but in order to play Doom, you need DOOM.WAD which is proprietary and must be purchased. DOOM.WAD doesn’t contain any code (it only contains graphics, sounds, level geometry, etc.) so you don’t have to run any unfree software in order to play Doom.

However, there are some people in the free software movement that disagree with me. The Free Software Foundation maintains a wiki called the Free Software Directory. Here’s a quote from the Free Software Directory’s rules for what can and cannot be included in the Free Software Directory [1]:

> Edge Cases

> This is not static information. Policies about adding non-free code obviously don't change, however the way projects are licensed or the way they interact each other is definitely subject to change.

> […]

> • If software is freely licensed but is bundled with artwork that is not, do we consider the program to be free? From RMS "Images and sounds need to be free if they are essential parts of the software. But if they are just decoration, and easily replaced, then they do not have to be free." Sound and artwork fall into the category of essential for interactive games. Logos on otherwise utilitarian projects do not.

That being said, that same set of rules also says [2]:

> Free programs

> Software needs to meet the free software definition to be listed at the Free Software Directory as well as follow these guidelines and requirements for entries.

> […]

> • The software program itself should not package any program-data, art assets loaded by the program, or software which is under a nonfree license. If art or data is available for the game under a nonfree license but not packaged directly with it, that is a different matter and one we should be more flexible about.

Those two quotes seem like they were written by two different people who have opposite opinions on this topic, but IDK.

Anyway, my point is: I really like it when games do that, but it seems that at least some people in the free software movement disagree.

[1]: <https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:Requi...>

[2]: <https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:Requi...>

[ZeWaka]

Dwarf Fortress is a modern example of that paradigm.

[wtetzner]

As far as I know Dwarf Fortress is entirely closed source.

[ZeWaka]

I was speaking in the sense that the base game is free and you can buy it with non-ascii graphics for a price.

However,

The "raws" that drive the game are completely configurable and accessible by a user.

It's more like the engine being closed source and the gamedata being source-available. Modding isn't quite the right word - that implies it being less open.

You can delete stuff from being present in your game, add new plants or objects, new diseases, etc.

Also related, the game has been opened up with Lua scripting thanks to Putnam's efforts, for even more powerful procedural addons.

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Raw_file

[TylerE]

In what way? I'm not seeing any.

[jmyeet]

It's not really advocating for open source games despite evoking Richard Stallman and Free Software.

A lot of people get all up in their feelings when it comes to "private property", like (hypoerbolic) "if they allow redistribution of abandonware, they might take everything" and it's just not justified. It used to be, for example, that copyrights on books weren't automatically granted and they were much shorter terms. You had to apply for copyright renewals. Why? Because of orphaned works and it was viewed that if nobody held an interest that they asserted, it was in the public good to place that in the public domain.

Abandonware follows the same principles. The arguably controversial part is that "abandonware" here includes "forced obsolescence". And I 100% agree that if you, as the publisher, make a game nonfunctional (or even greatly reduced functionality) then people should have the right to make those games work.

The most egregious cases are like Simcity 5, which was made online for literally no reason (other than "because piracy"). They tried to sell online features but that wasn't the reason.

The idea that this kills the entire gaming industry is just slippery slope hyperbola.

[felipellrocha]

To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit. It just takes the idea to its logical conclusion. As a game developer, if this thing passes, I would just not build multiplayer ever anymore.

[hhjinks]

Why not? Minecraft is the second most selling game of all time and comes with a freely distributable and hostable multiplayer component. How would this legislation have stopped that from happening?

[dijit]

as a game dev myself, agreed.

I’m guessing nobody here has ever actually tried to make games, let alone multiplayer ones. It’s not “oh just make it better” we’re usually already stretching the limits of what’s possible financially and time wise to get a working (fun) product.

You can add burdens all you want, but that means the games get simpler.. because they can’t be made cheaper (price sensitive customers) and time is finite in that context. something has to give.

[F3nd0]

As not a game dev myself, may I ask for clarification? How does ‘Stop Killing Games’ legislation kill any sort of multiplayer games specifically? Aren’t there already games which don’t have the problem the movement is trying to solve? Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? I feel like I may have misunderstood your point or am just lacking a lot of important insight.

[DSMan195276]

> Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place?

It's a question of when, not if - you're not going to pay to keep the servers online forever. What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't? If they're bad enough then plenty of people will not be interested in taking that risk by making such games.

[stale2002]

> What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't?

How about "the government forces you to release the code"? That's seems fair.

Unless you hid your source code in USB drives under your bed, the government can probably just force GitHub (or similar )to release it. I bet they've got it backed up.

[DSMan195276]

The government will release it with all the copyrighted code and assets that's owned by a bunch of third-parties?

Ex. if I license my artwork, music, characters, code library, etc. to a game developer and they don't create a legally releasable version of their server, then the government will forcibly break our licensing agreement and I just get screwed?

[knollimar]

Ab1921 in california doesn't propose this. Its either an offline copy, a copy that works without servers, or 100% refund. Basically patch or refund.

I can't wait to see "you haven't met your patch obligations" on a balance sheet and a full indie game being underwater

[runevault]

So you're assuming game devs write every line of code in their server infrastructure. First, could be using a third party library you have license to use on a limited number of machines that make up your backend servers. Second you could be paying for third party API access to something like snowflake.

You either have to rip out the code (which may or may not break the server, but still requires developer time to do) or write replacement code which likely takes even more dev time to do or you would have done it instead of paying for the library/access to the service.

[TylerE]

And how do they force release of all the proprietary dependencies? Overriding contract law is a hell of a lift, and a terrible precedent.

The whole "Stop Killing Games" movement is deeply misguided, and most of the people supporting it have absolutely no clue about how software or anything computer related actually works.

[mvdtnz]

And you're... in favour of this kind of doctrine...?

[dijit]

Well, ok, you grasped at a few issues there that go off in different directions.

The issue with "Stop Killing Games" is that the legislation doesn't currently look like anything, it's a broad appeal and the solution for studios will depend on where it finally lands.

If it lands in the realm of "Games must be released FOSS after x years" then, aside from the fact that a lot of the times we don't own the copyrights to our own assets or certain code (they're on license for a single release) the second issue is how to release it.

First: the online backend for The Division or Destiny are just... not possible to run. The backend is fused to the products via a slurry of certificate pinning and object serialisation, with some things happening only on the server.

"Un-fusing" them is, basically impossible at this point; so the question is: can you build such a system without them being fused together in the first place?

The answer is: yes, but only by slowing down development. It would become much more about defining our boundaries and working on a "slim" version of the backend, or stubbing the backend completely. Obviously this is a lot of effort. The thing is we only barely managed to get a functional system, so adding an extra year for programming isn't going to be possible, we'll have to "cut" features that are hard to make.

"So, why don't you just release the server".

Well, that's a good question, we could remove the certificate pinning we have on the client, and the entitlement checks, stub out all the code that relies on third party APIs and give you a server binary.

But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.

So, we'd have to work on slimming that down, or building things in a totally different way: which means "seamless" darkzones and safehouses becomes impossible.

THEN you have the issue of releasing a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product, which we already had a major issue with.

So, most likely, we just make single player games.

Honestly, the industry is moving that way anyway because unless you've been doing it for a while making multiplayer games is really hard from a game design standpoint and there's an ongoing operational cost which people are a bit too price sensitive to support.

That's why Massive released The Division 1 & Division 2 but then pivoted to doing single-player games like Star Wars and Avatar which only retains the most basic multiplayer elements.

[ashdnazg]

> But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.

As far as I understand that situation is accepted by the initiative. The requirement is not that it works on any specific hardware or software stack, just that it can theoretically work.

> a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product

Anti-cheat solutions aren't required to be released, and if there are bugs in the server, they might even be found and patched by the community.

[dijit]

What you're saying is true for the californian legislation, but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction) - nor the direction of the authors article, and like I replied in a sibling response: it's not like people would be pleased to get our binaries.

Second: anti-cheat itself is a fucking joke. A crutch, a last ditch hail-mary because we ran out of time to batten down the hatches or things were changed so often from the start of the project to the end that we couldn't add safety into the protocol design properly.

Exposing how our systems think about how you move, how you shoot, when AI ticks, when loot ticks, behaviour trees and how phase transitions are computed: gives an attacker a hell of a lot of leverage.

To put this into broader easier to understand terms: ask yourself why it's so easy to cheat in Unreal Engine games vs Battlefield.

It's not the anti-cheat. It's the complexity of digging through the engine and knowing what the memory is doing and what the server is doing.

[tayo42]

We used to have player run servers for years. Is it some lost skill to write software that way?

[dijit]

It's not a lost skill.

Spinning up a binary and replicating actors across two computers that both have a connection string to a server is.. for all intents and purposes: easy.

Where it falls down is when you start to have complex interactions with AI that's serverside, or you have a dynamic world that changes based on player behaviour, or you have cross platform requirements, integrations with companion apps and above all: matchmaking.

If you're a looter-shooter, there's a whole host of complicated interactions too.

A game like Apex Legends could probably distribute their server binary, but if you require online, as in, not just a single match, but an economy- a dynamic matchmaker and a dynamic world (meaning: when you kick a box it stays kicked) and a persistent account (you keep your loot): then that doesn't work well anymore.

The interactions are just too complex to batten down reliably, they'll be exploited, there'll be no fun, or: it just won't be possible for certain features, regardless of safety.

You can see how this looks by trying to use one of the many unofficial versions of Runescape.

[singpolyma3]

> But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.

This doesn't seem like much of an obstacle? Can buy or rent such without too much trouble.

[john_strinlai]

>Can buy or rent such without too much trouble.

for... thousands of dollars a month.

the goal of the regulation is that regular people can keep playing their games. not just rich people.

[fragmede]

> the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.

> So, we'd have to work on slimming that down

...why? My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.

[dijit]

Community backlash will be fierce if it's not actually runnable.

Ubisoft doesn't have the most stellar reputation for example (I don't work there anymore) so people look at things we do by accident as if they are intentionally malicious.

Also, the California law is one law, the EU is also looking at this and it's likely to look different - that's why "Stop Killing Games" doesn't really mean anything yet, even people within the movement have differing definitions.

[john_strinlai]

>My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.

if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation.

the spirit of the law is that i can reasonably spin up an instance of the server for me and my friends to play.

[F3nd0]

Wow, thank you for the detailed answer! I understand your point much better now.

I still think ‘kills any sort of multiplayer games’ (what the other dev said) is a gross exaggeration, since you list some ways this could be made to work, but it sounds like some things would cost significantly more resources and need to be done differently. But hey, maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Plus, there are multiplayer games which aren’t quite as resource-intensive on the server side.)

[dijit]

I think what I'm trying to explain is that we barely make it work by the skin of our teeth, and adding more requirements means fewer features.

The extra point I made was that it's actually kind of costly to run these systems, and I promise you publishers would love to push that cost onto the community with community run servers (think: CS1.6) but the reason they don't is because developing systems that way takes much longer and cannot be properly secured (mostly due to cheating but also from an entitlement standpoint).

So, I think either multiplayer games will get much more basic, with simple gameservers. No more large multiplayer RPGs.

Or, there will be fewer multiplayer games, because it's even more risk in an already risky business.

[apnorton]

I'm not a gamedev, but there's a more insidious issue with the CA "Stop Killing Games" legislation that was just passed --- namely, a Ship of Theseus problem.

Pick your favorite game today that you purchase once, then have long-term free multiplayer support. Something like, idk, Fortnite before it was made F2P in 2017. Games like these evolve their content over time: sometimes minor changes, like rebalancing guns or matchmaking, but sometimes these are major changes, like completely redoing the map or altering fundamental mechanics. There can also be seasonal events that are designed to be available for a limited time.

The obvious question, then, is: is it "OK" that significant parts of the multiplayer experience changed after you purchased the game? In the spirit of people who prioritize game preservation, the answer should be "no, that's destroying part of the game and losing it to history." If we accept that interpretation, then we end up killing live service games. On the other hand, if we allow significant parts of the multiplayer experience to change, then we've neutered the legislation, because the easy workaround is to slowly patch out all online features until you're left with a husk of what was originally sold.

California's legislation [1] attempts to dodge this by phrasing things in terms of "ordinary use" of the game, but the definition of "ordinary use" is quite vague and will absolutely be the subject of some court case at some point.

---

Of course, there's a bunch of other side effects to the "general" notion of "make games usable past end-of-life," too:

- You might be able to use certain open source libraries on the server side because you are not distributing them to the user, and thereby don't have to open source your server. However, if you were required to distribute a binary, that could pose issues.

- You could have a dependency on an expensive piece of software (e.g. an enterprise Oracle DB license), and be unable to package that with the download.

- You could have a dependency on another online service (e.g. AWS Game Development Services [2]) that discontinues an API you depended on, and would require massive rework to be able to release a functional binary at end of life.

- You could have a dependency on an internal system at your company that you aren't willing to release the IP for yet, due to its use in another game

[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

[2]: https://aws.amazon.com/gametech/

[skotobaza]

> Games like these evolve their content over time

This is true, but the issue is not with the content, it's with the ability (or rather inability) to access any of the content past some point. Even if only the latest content is left accessible after EOL, it will still be better than having nothing at all. The older content can be added back, no matter how finicky it can sometimes be.

Regarding the dependencies, no one is forcing the developers to release closed ones, you can replace them with stubs. But it will be beneficial from a developer to think about it beforehand - how they will implement online systems with additional requirement of EOL etc. It's not an implementation problem, but rather an architectural one.

[drnick1]

> I’m guessing nobody here has ever actually tried to make games, let alone multiplayer ones.

One possibility is to charge for online play on the "official" server. This can be done regardless of the availability of source code.

Another possibility is to release the source code when the game reaches its end of life.

[habinero]

> Another possibility is to release the source code when the game reaches its end of life.

You might not have permission to, if it uses a lot of third party libraries.

[skotobaza]

It's not a problem, you can replace such function calls with stubs and document it. Some games that released their source code already did that.

[throwaway85825]

A game that can no longer be played at all is very simple but also not very fun.

[BlitzGeology91]

> To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit.

No, it doesn’t. It just requires that we go back to making multiplayer games the old-fashioned way (the good way). Descent 3 was released in 1999. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer to this day if you want to [1], and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop you from doing so. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer because Descent 3 allows you to host your own servers and allows you to manually enter IP addresses in order to connect to servers (this is necessary because the services that Descent 3’s in-game server browsers depend on no longer exist). Descent 3’s source code was released in 2024 [2] which certainly helps with multiplayer preservation, but I can tell you that a small number of people definitely did play multiplayer Descent 3 in 2023 when the source code was not yet available.

Descent: Underground was released to Steam Early Access in 2015 [3]. Unlike the previous Descent games, Descent: Underground (or at least, that iteration of Descent: Underground) was pretty much multiplayer-only. The developers of Descent: Underground did not allow players to host their own Descent: Underground servers. (I think that they had some plan to allow for hosting your own servers in the future, but that didn’t get implemented in time). At some point, the official servers for that version of Descent: Underground were shutdown. As a result, you can no longer play Descent: Underground’s multiplayer.

The fact that I can play the multiplayer for a 27-year-old game, but I can’t play the multiplayer for an 11-year-old game is unsurprising. Many older multiplayer games did not have fatal design flaws that would cause them to die after certain period of time. Many newer multiplayer games do have such fatal design flaws. The good news is that this means that we already know how to stop killing multiplayer games. We just have to go back to doing things the way that we used to do them.

(In fact, some games don’t even need to “go back to doing things the way that we used to do them”. Take Counter-Strike 2, for example. Counter-Strike 2 was released in 2023 and does indeed allow players to host their own servers.)

The statement “the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games” is absolutely ridiculous.

[1]: <https://tsetsefly.de/>

[2]: <https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/descent-3-programmer-relea...>

[3]: <https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/18969>

[bigstrat2003]

Hard agree. I think it would be a genuine service to the world if it was no longer feasible to make the modern style of multiplayer game. The older games were not only not beholden to a company continuing to run servers, they were more fun.

[john_strinlai]

this was written (or 'output') by someone (or something) that clearly has not thought of the knock-on effects of those freedoms.

they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".

by all means i 100% agree that an ostensibly single player game should not be locked behind a login or telemetry, and that platforms like steam should not be able to lock you out of playing games you paid for. but i dont think forcing the whole free software thing would work out how the author is imagining it.

[singpolyma3]

We have decades of real world experience which shows this is not true. People buy things they could otherwise get for free with a bit of work all the time.

[john_strinlai]

you aren't getting a company to build baldurs gate 3 and hope they recoup the costs from ko-fi donations.

real world experience is that most companies do not offer their software for free, and open source developers either have to get sponsored or have to constantly solicit donations.

donations do not typically cover multi-million dollar, multi-year development cycles.

[ben-schaaf]

BG3 is actually a perfect counterexample here. It doesn't have DRM, doesn't require an online account to play and uses direct connections for multiplayer. Nothing needs to be done to preserve it.

[john_strinlai]

right, but if BG3 had to be free as in FSF free, it would not have been made.

[singpolyma3]

This is almost certainly untrue. it would have cost the same amount and all the same people would have bought it for all the same reasons.

[trinsic2]

Everything you are talking about appears to me as AAA. There will be many game companies that dont think it's worth the time to do this for the reasons you describe, but IMHO they shouldn't exist in the first place. The way online only games are made right now is destroying the game industry so im glad to see them go. We will see better iterations of games once the bloat is removed.

[singpolyma3]

Obviously not. No one is talking about donations

[john_strinlai]

if the games are free, and we aren't talking about donations, how are the studios being paid?

[singpolyma3]

Same way as now. Selling the game.

Free as in freedom not as in price

[luqtas]

you don't need to liberate your project to GPL or whatever OSS to let users distribute them via torrent or at least being able to backup the DRM-free installer... i bet most if not all AAA games have their crack into the pirate land in less than a week after or even before release

[F3nd0]

> […] in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".

This is exactly what has been happening for years, only illegally. If it became legal, I imagine far less people would end up buying the game, though probably still more than just one.

But again, games are more than just software, so the four freedoms do not enable this.

[figmert]

As the article mentions, these arguments are basically all the arguments of the FSF, and everything Richard Stallman pushed for since the 80s. So yes, there has been plenty of thought, scrutiny, improvements, etc. 40 years of it in fact.

[john_strinlai]

>So yes, there has been plenty of thought, scrutiny, improvements, etc. 40 years of it in fact.

what percent of businesses follow the FSF freedoms and turn a profit?

i would love it if i could get all my games for free, and legally give additional copies to all my students, family, and friends. but the developers pumping out those games probably want to see some sort of return more substantial than whatever trickles into their ko-fi account. they'll just stop developing games and go into CRM software or whatever.

[singpolyma3]

I don't see how "what percent" is the right metric. There are hundreds of such companies (I work for one) but it's a small percentage due to other factors (mainly it not being the default way most founders think about these things)

[figmert]

Not really my point. My point is more that you suggested no one has thought about this, but yes, they have.

To answer your question, there have been plenty of business who have created and published free software (albeit plenty have later closed them). Notable examples are Databricks, Hashicorp, Mongodb, RedHat.

Sure they've built a moat on top of their free software, but they have (or had) free software regardless.

[john_strinlai]

>My point is more that you suggested no one has thought about this, but yes, they have.

i didnt say no one has thought about free software.

i said that this specific llm that output this article did not think about how the freedoms would work in todays gaming industry.

there are dozens of issues that immediately pop into my head, mostly specific to gaming, which are not mentioned or addressed at all.

[singpolyma3]

lol. The article is obviously not written by an LLM.

[throwaway85825]

If the game is being sold it has to be supported, and if it's supported no legislative requirement applies.

[john_strinlai]

my comment is in response to the demand that games be free, not the legislation

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

>they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".

fyi, there are tens of torrent trackers with every game/movie/album/etc under the sun. had been for two decades.

[john_strinlai]

i was unaware torrenting copyrighted content was made legal, thanks for the update

[sapphicsnail]

I think their point was that lots of media is easily piratable but still makes money and companies continue to produce more of it.

[trinsic2]

Yep another lost soul at the parent that thinks piracy equals death.

[john_strinlai]

that is not what i think.

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

>they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".

[john_strinlai]

yes, i wrote that.

right now that would be illegal to do in most jurisdictions.

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

despite that, people have been doing that for over two decades, but publishers continue to publish.

[cogman10]

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.

> Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.

My reading of this was it was in terms of multiplayer games and servers. It was that the server should be freely redistributable and accessible. Much like you can download and run a minecraft server without owning a minecraft license.

The next sentence

> A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files.

[avaer]

We need a version of "open source" that requires you to pay a reasonable ($60) price to get a copy.

That's kind of against the usual notion of "open source" but it's the only way this would work in e.g. the game industry, as currently factored.

Studios won't pay people millions of dollars to make games if the return on investment is zero other than helping all of your non-open source competitors.

I do think it's doable, but nobody's done this successfully yet.

[xmprt]

> redistribute copies

I read this more as game sharing. For example, say I buy a game and my friend also wants to play the game. In the past, I could just give them the disk and we both enjoy it. But today, with DRM and one use keys, this isn't possible. The game industry survived 20 years ago so there's no reason it can't survive without DRM and with sharable keys.

[john_strinlai]

>For example, say I buy a game and my friend also wants to play the game. In the past, I could just give them the disk and we both enjoy it.

the difference being that only one person could enjoy it at a time. the math is a bit different when one person can put a copy of their game up online and let thousands of people enjoy it for free at the same time.

there is a happy medium somewhere between intrusive DRM and demanding games be free.

[jl6]

Game budgets were a lot lower 20 years ago, so maybe modern AAA games with $100m+ budgets can only exist in a world where every possible customer can be maximally shaken down.

[promano]

Maybe we need a separate campaign, "Kill Games": any games whose existence requires players being "shaken down" should not be allowed to exist.

[nkrisc]

Or “You Don’t Need to Play Video Games”.

I enjoy playing video games but I recognize them for what they are: a luxury past-time that is not necessary for life and one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow.

[skotobaza]

> one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow

I get what you are trying to say, but in general video games offer unique experience that no other media can provide - interactivity, e.g. exploring different worlds with different mechanics. I think this experience can invoke something in people that no other media can replicate. So I think we will lose something important if it suddenly vanishes.

[abetusk]

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.

Pretty dismissive, no?

Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.

Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe [2]. Solarus has a donation page [3].

I'm sure there are many more examples that span the spectrum of payment options and cover different permutations of being online or offline.

To me, the deeper question is what are you actually purchasing? The bytes? The convenience? A slice of server resources? Developers and artists time?

I'm happy to give money to projects that I use, especially if it creates less friction than trying to go outside of the payment method and if the project is libre/free. I'm willing to pay for proprietary content but I have little expectation about what kind of service they're providing, especially they fold.

If there's a libre/free option, I would much prefer to invest in it. If there's a proprietary option that is asking for resources, I'm much less prone to give since it's clearly a transactional relationship.

[0] https://onehouronelife.com/

[1] https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/no_copyri...

[2] https://www.teeworlds.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=446

[3] https://www.solarus-games.org/about/donate/

[dijit]

> Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.

OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. The community only got access to the servers when they had declined to 20-30 concurrent players. So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.

> Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe

Teeworlds doens't pay its staff a living wage, those donations went to server infrastructure.

According to developers of the most popular open-source games themselves, open-source games have not been commercially successful... it is very common for them to only cover operating costs via community donations, and many projects have a player base actively opposed to any monetisation model.[0]

Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.

[0]: https://80.lv/articles/inside-the-open-source-games-in-searc...

FD: I speak from a position of being in the AAA gaming space for 11 years, so I have an economic incentive to... not lose my job due to the collapse of industry- but I'd like you all to be able to enjoy my creations after it's no longer possible for me to run it for you; I want a solution too!

[abetusk]

> OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period.

Reference? The source was dedicated to the public domain in early 2018, which coincides with the release of the game [0].

> So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.

This is a complete fabrication.

> Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.

Making a living from open source software is hard, game or no. Making a living as a game developer is hard to begin with and many proprietary games are not commercially successful or viable.

My point was that the ecosystem is a lot more complex than your reductive analysis.

[0] https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/commits/master/no_cop...

[kulahan]

This is cool and all, but it’s been proven a million times over that surviving on donations sucks. One of the reasons a new field gets innovation in partly because it brings so many people hungry for profit in to give it a go. If your only motivation is art and “maybe someone will toss me a buck on occasion”, we’ll have as many software devs as we do street performers.

[adamrezich]

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.

> Am I missing something serious here

Only just that the video games industry as we've known it for the past few decades is basically already dead—at best, it's a hollowed-out husk of what it once was.

[skotobaza]

"Few decades" is a stretch I think. More like one decade.

[adamrezich]

I meant that the games industry is a few decades old, and it's been dead for about a decade and a half or so now.

[flohofwoe]

The blog post is a bit of an incoherent mess.

The key point should be to make it legal to use and reverse-engineer abandonware (e.g. games that the developer or publisher has abandoned).

First we'll need a realistic legal definition for 'abandonware' where the abandonware's IP is automatically going into the public domain after a game has been abandondend by the publisher, and the next step must be to legalize 'pirating' and reverse-engineering abandonware.

[singpolyma3]

Given that I can already get a copy of any game in existence without paying, the quoted text isn't even a change from the status quo really.

[m463]

yeah.

I think a more achievable model might be more like GOG, but with online.

GOG games remain closed source, but are downloadable and playable offline with no DRM.

But there's nothing about online/multiplayer play in the GOG equation.

[trinsic2]

>That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.

The AAA industry are already destroying the gaming industry with there shit games and stupid DRM pratices. This would be returning balance to the game industry.