Comment by poisonborz
6 days ago
These are weak arguments but there are valid ones why I would not think this has a footing, even if I support the attitude. What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine? You can't just rip/disable licensed items out, they may form a significant part of business code. Code and APIs would be needed to be documented. Why just games? What about abandoned Saas offerings? These restrictions might creep over.
I hate live service games like the next guy but legal advisors can bend these to form powerful counter-arguments.
Saas offerings are safe as they don’t let you Buy a thing. They’re very transparently a service. Same with timed licenses. It’s clear what you’re paying for. Most of the time.
With games it’s often not the case. You buy them and then at unspecified moment you might lose a significant portion of functionality or the whole game. At the time you buy a game you don’t know if it’s for a time, what time, or what will stop working.
When I bought WoW it was very clear to me I was buying a service. If blizzard decided after 2 years it wasn’t sustainable and to shut down the game at no point would I be entitled to own it. It was clearly a license to access their service, as long as it exists. Same for any other MMORPG
You can host offline servers of older mmos easily. I had my own lineage 2 private server in middle school. Private online servers too. Wow classic became a thing because private vanilla servers were incredibly popular.
You should be able to do this for any game. I understand them fighting it during the games lifetime.
And what about a single-player game that relies on the company's server being online in order to allow you to play it?
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Yea I think the problem is that people don't realize how expensive the upkeep of live games are.
Most new releases rely on Multiplayer, the publishers have to come up with creative ways to monetize it.. so they introduce cosmetics, stores, etc in order to fund the ongoing development and cost.
This causes a backlash and eventually the game gets dropped because people don't want to pay a subscription.
I also think many comments are a bit too eager in claiming "oh just publish the code" and "oh just let users host X". It's obviously not that simple. The biggest one for me is that single player games should still be playable offline after servers have been sunset.
I'm sure that with current games, licenses were indeed acquired for a certain limited time. But if you start development and you know you'll have to sunset it according to the rules one day, I'm sure you'll come up with other licenses or just a way to strip out content like that.
What’s the problem with releasing a server executable? As far as I can tell that would be enough to get around this legislation. And I can’t imagine that to be prohibitively expensive.
What is a server executable? With a lot of modern games it could be a whole stacks worth of systems that neither the game client or server side game runtime will work without.
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If it's really impossible for you to allow a game to remain playable after you abandon it, the only reasonable option is to not sell it at all. Instead you can rent it, with the length of the rental clearly stated up front. Advertising a rental as a sale should be illegal.
Who defined playable? Take Diablo 3 and 4. They are shared world games, are they playable without them? Maybe to you’d but to me they’re not. world of Warcraft has a rich questing experience which doesn’t require playing with other people - is it ok if they just switch off multiplayer content? That’s a different game, IMO.
> What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine?
It's ok, the engine will adjust it if big studios can't use it otherwise. It's just people having to talk to each other.
> Code and APIs would be needed to be documented.
Why? Nobody is talking about forced opensourcing.
Why not apply it to Saas? If you sold lifetime licenses and you don't want to run it anymore, just let your customers self host it. Even better if you can open source it.