[hodgehog11]

Not sure if you know this, but this is literally the Stop Killing Games movement. Despite the recent apparent setback as reported in the news, the organisers are in talks with EU MPs that are writing sweeping legislation to address this sort of thing across all digital mediums.

You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.

[Buttons840]

The GP comment mentioned Minecraft servers. The full story is that California politicians were discussing Stop Killing Games and and that gamers were willing and capable of running their own servers, and ESA argued against that by saying private servers are illegal, basically.

Politicians are taking about it. Anyone who purchases media cares about it. Support for copyright reform is only going to grow, so hopefully we'll see some.

[throwaway287391]

> You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.

Could you explain this? I understand that for things like emissions regulations on cars, where it’s very expensive to invest R&D and production capacity into different SKUs for different markets. I can’t see why it would help in other markets in this case though (beyond potentially inspiring similar regulations elsewhere).

[roganartu]

The most relevant example of this for the games industry is probably Steam’s refund policy. They allow you to refund a game if you bought it less than 2 weeks ago and have less than 2 hours playtime recorded.

This is their policy for all users, but was a direct result of an Australian consumer watchdog lawsuit [0].

[0] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million...

[simjnd]

Counter-example to this would be 3rd-party app stores on iOS, which are only enabled in the EU, Japan and more recently in Brazil (maybe I'm missing some).

Legislation in one market didn't impact the state of things in the others, and some countries get screwed over.

[pipes]

I think this is going to have unintended consequences if it goes through: funding game development is a very very high risk investment. Adding this type of regulation adds further cost and complication, which makes it an even less attractive investment. Which will result in less monetary and creative risk taken.

Even just open sourcing part of project is expensive. Legal and technical.

[ryandrake]

This argument is always pretty weak. All regulation adds cost and complication for companies. If that alone was a good reason to not add regulation, then taken to the logical conclusion, there should be no regulation on companies.

Regulation needs to be seen as a trade-off, for example: We get better behaving companies, and the cost is less risk taken. Then the question becomes "is the benefit worth the cost?"

[Ferret7446]

The argument should be stronger since the vast majority of regulation is as you say, the cost is not worth the benefit.

All regulation by default is anticompetitive and also comes with the risk of intended consequences, and thus must prove that they provide sufficient benefit. They are "guilty until proven innocent".

e.g., rather than trying to "just do something" about games, maybe we should revisit copyright law as a whole, instead of slapping a bandaid on a festering wound caused by the first bandaid

[benj111]

How is all regulation anti competitive?

Is it anti competitive that your product does what you say it does and is safe? Isn't that just levelling the playing field by allowing consumers to make rational choices?

What about regulation designed to make sure there is competition? Is that anticompetitive???

[Schiendelman]

I thought this was more "let people run the code themselves if they can figure it out" not "open sourcing". There's no appetite to force a company that reuses and improves their game engine on every new title to open source it, even an older version.

[Volundr]

That alone would be an improvement from the status quo, but the SKG movement does go one stop further in wanting publishers to be required to leave the game in a working (local) state of they design it to be dependent on central services they then shut down.

This could be as easy as releasing the tools they used for development when developing the game.

[Schiendelman]

That's really tough. Marathon, by Bungie, is a good example of why this is tough - it's basically all the Destiny engine, network, and tooling code. When they shut down Destiny, it's not like they have a snapshot of their tooling. They've been continuously updating that tooling for ten years, and now they're using that investment for a new project.

Most game studios are similar, in reusing and improving a whole development architecture and systems across many titles. I would not agree with making them release that, even an older version. That's a big competitive moat for some studios.

I think if a community group wants to PAY to operate a server, that's quite reasonable. And then you still end up with a fight about how much to charge. But I don't think handing over server code is the right move.

[ytoawwhra92]

Fortunately, Stop Killing Games isn't looking to mandate any one solution to this problem.

There are many possible ways to enable game preservation and SKG is pushing for game studios to pick one and implement it, instead of not doing anything and letting games die when they become unprofitable.

[Schiendelman]

Practically speaking, I think the best way to do something like this is to enforce an auction when a studio shuts down an online game. That way the people that care get to vote with their dollars, rather than costing the studio.

[Volundr]

> That's really tough. Marathon, by Bungie, is a good example of why this is tough - it's basically all the Destiny engine, network, and tooling code. When they shut down Destiny, it's not like they have a snapshot of their tooling. They've been continuously updating that tooling for ten years, and now they're using that investment for a new project.

I don't get why you think that makes it harder? Right up until the final version of the game their developers were somehow making changes and testing their changes. It's not like the game grew on its own. What were they using to test those changes? Release that. Job done.

[hodgehog11]

I don't think that's what working state means here. It's not a full snapshot or even necessarily multiplayer support. It means minimum functional, which to me is just barely enough to see the assets used in the game. Not necessarily networking, matchmaking, online services, or the relevant tooling. Developers have already proposed making helpers that would introduce an effective switch to do this.

Also what you said about releasing the code and letting the community figure it out was explicitly an example SKG said was okay, from memory.

[Schiendelman]

I think you're right from what I remember reading about them. But I think in practice it costs significant engineering time to package up what they are asking for. For a small game studio it may be incredibly prohibitive.