> Games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down.
For some games, like MMORPGs, an offline mode doesn't make sense.
In lieu of that, they need to make the server binaries available, along with client functionality to let you choose a server. They shouldn't be required to offer support, but the nerd community is great at figuring things out. They'll get it working and produce guides.
They should release either the server component or documentation for how it works and a way to unlock any protections around it. I’ve seen people argue before that releasing the whole backend stack would be an issue and I agree, but documentation shouldn’t be an issue.
I would prefer that this become the standard for software, as a whole, to be open source after a while. Because there is a sustainability aspect, just like the rest of the tools in our world.
For example, a manual drill has no real draw backs it will always run. An electric drill with a cord, will likely always run and electrical components can be traced and sourced rather easily. A drill that was designed to use with a battery, will not always run, and has software/firmware with some other limitations likely buried in the software.
The moment support is dropped, it should be released to open source to allow others interested to maintain it. Such as with the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 Ti... no longer supported with driver updates (outside of "security updates"). The firmware should be supported by the people if the company doesn't want to support it, it still is an excellent card even 10 years later...
MMO or not, source code should just be released. Patents are not forever, source code shouldn't be either. Though patent might be too long as well. 15/20 years worked when things developed slowly, but now days its outdated within years and could benefit other advancements.
But that’s not the same thing as supporting offline mode, at all.
> but documentation shouldn’t be an issue
Oh boy. I would bet that at any medium sized games company the number of people who can run the full stack of a game from client to backend locally is single digits, and that it is absolutely not documented.
I dunno, there’s plenty of projects that turn MMORPGs into self-contained single player RPGs and/or simulate other players with bots, so I don’t really see any reason why they should be excluded.
That's never going to happen. Game companies are not going to give you their source code. Usually the source of any game that gets shut down is shared with games that are still live. Example: if Fallout 76 is shut down, Bethesda giving you their source would essentially be giving you the source to Skyrim also. I'm not saying that I have the solution or that your idea isn't good on some level, but we have to be realistic.
Counterpoint: maybe we could make proprietary software illegal, and make everything GPL so we can just request the source code to anything we want. With enough eyes all bugs are shallow, so why wouldn't banks and nuclear reactors want their source to be audited by the public? lol
(Software might become de facto open source with AI decomp anyway)
Funcom released a single player update for Dune: Awakening (not quite MMO but close) just a few weeks ago. They have simulated player economy and end game systems and flexible rules+progression for the game itself ... it's been great.
For many online games the same could be done. Simulate the systems, give players the ability to tweak the rules and just have fun.
This bill seems to be aimed at the situation where your purchase a copy of some game, and then the game becomes unplayable because some online service it depends on goes away.
For most MMORPGs nowadays the game client is a free download. You only pay for the online service. I seriously doubt they will draft this in a way that would cover that.
I would argue that server binaries are less important now in the age of AI. The ability to reverse engineer them is so accessible now.
I think more importantly / more digestible is that you can't pursue legislation against people running their own game servers if you no longer offer the game yourself.
This is definitely the most defensible position. I'm sure others want stronger protections, but taking lawsuits off the table for any item no longer for sale (be it a game, other software, hardware, media, etc) would make a ton of sense.
No one can reasonably claim to be harmed in such a scenario. Enshrine abandonware into law.
It's currently accessible, but I'm sure they will start adding whatever roadblocks they can. e.g. Requiring attestation before running game, keeping some logic in server side which will be sent only to clients which pass the attestation, requiring platforms which grant more protections etc.
Hundreds of years ago, nothing was easy to copy, until the printing press. Early copyright surrounding that wasn’t about “IP protection” but rather who had the right to operate a printing press at all
You're dreaming. Prepare for DMCA2, where it will be illegal to run an LLM on a compiled binary for the purposes of decompiling under penalty of jail time.
As long as it is legal in at least one country, the code will be out there and models will train on it. The ship on IP has already sailed. The moat is gone.
How is that working out for the mp3 algorithm or bluray decryption?
The OSS community just laughs at algo patents. There was never any ability to enforce them at the pre-AI scale. Post-AI the corpos have no chance. They lost.
If I could run SoTA models on my desktop, you would be onto something. While it's a subscription, the big guys who own the data centers will do whatever the guys in government tell them to. TLDR: you'll start getting the "I can't assist you with this task" reply to all your prompts.
I already have built multiple confidential compute operating systems from 386 bytes of machine code all the way up with many novel and world-first features using exclusively consumer hardware I personally own, without any internet reliance, on my own property. Low level kernel and compiler debugging all with models that will run on old GPUs you can buy on ebay right now for under $500.
The way most people use AI, lighting money on fire, is a skill issue. You can build anything cheaply now if you generally know how computers work at a low level and can tell models exactly what to do.
I’d want a revenue floor before this took effect. An indie developer should not have to worry about getting sued because they didn’t properly turn off a hobby project.
Indie developers can probably avoid killing games the most easily, they're unlikely to have 3rd party tech or IP that's only temporarily licensed, or elaborate DRM, mandatory connectivity/accounts etc, and may even have complete autonomy/power to do what they want.
> Indie developers can probably avoid killing games the most easily
They can and they should. I wouldn't want someone to lose their livelihood because they didn't rigorously test a product they made and released for fun.
Anyone using AWS managed services has 3rd party tech that is temporarily licensed. Any dependence on steam, EOS, google, apple, is a third party dependency.
Please Jesus. Making a ton of online games as an indie would be suicide. Not to mention the obligations going on a balance sheet when they need funding.
Like functionally should probably be like that 200k revenue or more since it’s potentially a few weeks of labor obligation
This wouldn't have helped with my latest run in with artificial Product Existence failure*, but I'm glad to see it anyhow.
*Hey, remember how Neal Stephenson's last project was writing for a nascent shared sci-fi universe? Did you get a chance to play the visual novel that was its first entry, which was hosted on a crypto project's website? Well, I sure hope you did, because the crypto project rugpulled and took the VN down with it, effectively turning a Neal Stephenson novella into lost media less than a year after its initial release.
I am a gamer who has played around with private servers and emulators to revisit my gaming past - one thing I wonder about is how laws would handle game-changing updates? World of Warcraft famously does major renovations to game mechanics each expansion and minor changes each patch. What is to prevent a company from releasing an “update patch” that essentially cripples the game, then shutting down the game at that point and releasing the crippled code as the only available version?
:) You can argue almost all software is a video game in some way, just gotta argue yourself a way that the definition of "video game" would include your software in some way: https://excel-esports.com/
Congress.gov says Rep. Ritchie Torres has sponsored 171 bills since 2021 and only one became a law, five passed the House and most of those were under Democrat majority. [1]
I would say that it can be pretty simple to solve these problems. If a software company is going to implement a license server or a time limited certificate into a piece of software that will prevent the software from working, then they should be mandated to keep all customer payments in escrow and within 5 minutes of the software becoming unusable by the users, the money has to be returned, with interest and adjusted for inflation.
So every week when World of Warcraft goes down for maintenance for a couple of hours. Blizzard should have to forfeit all of the subscribers money, since it is unusable for more than 5 minutes?
If a server runs for 30 years, and then shuts down. It should have to return 30 years of revenue, plus interest?
> So every week when World of Warcraft goes down for maintenance for a couple of hours. Blizzard should have to forfeit all of the subscribers money, since it is unusable for more than 5 minutes?
You sound dismissive, but gamers as a whole is a demographic that is hard to be ignored and happens to span groups otherwise counter to one another. Any politician who would not take advantage does it to their own detriment.
You know how some engineering teams have a really difficult time prioritizing? Maybe in planning there's a big long list of project ideas some of which really need more discovery to define scope. There can be stuff that seems really important to a long-term vision but is also hard to estimate and higher risk of scope creep etc. And there's stuff that's cheap/fast/low-risk but doesn't solve the larger important problems? And even in the context of a company that is still burning through investor money, you fix _some_ of the smaller things even while you're still figuring out the bigger things, b/c otherwise you'd likely _never_ do the smaller things?
I'm not saying legislators are doing their best in a good faith effort to serve their constituents. But even if they were, you would sometimes see things like this, right?
Yeah, I'm certainly not opposed to this law, but it seems like a strange thing to focus on as our democracy and the rule of law is crumbling in real-time.
I sincerely don't understand this mentality. Legislators consider more than one bill per legislative session. We can (and must!) push along multiple axes, otherwise we will always be behind right?
> but it seems like a strange thing to focus on as our democracy and the rule of law
Society is improved one issue at a time, and if you sit around waiting for the revolution to come, you will end up like the socialists who never win any elections and achieve nothing for decades.
No, we do not need to overthrow all of capitalism overnight, or solve "democracy", or whatever it is that you are advocating for, before we take any action to improve society.
That is code for "just don't do anything except LARP and complain, and attack anyone who actually is accomplishing things". Its a useless philosophy.
> Games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down.
For some games, like MMORPGs, an offline mode doesn't make sense.
In lieu of that, they need to make the server binaries available, along with client functionality to let you choose a server. They shouldn't be required to offer support, but the nerd community is great at figuring things out. They'll get it working and produce guides.
They should release either the server component or documentation for how it works and a way to unlock any protections around it. I’ve seen people argue before that releasing the whole backend stack would be an issue and I agree, but documentation shouldn’t be an issue.
I would prefer that this become the standard for software, as a whole, to be open source after a while. Because there is a sustainability aspect, just like the rest of the tools in our world.
For example, a manual drill has no real draw backs it will always run. An electric drill with a cord, will likely always run and electrical components can be traced and sourced rather easily. A drill that was designed to use with a battery, will not always run, and has software/firmware with some other limitations likely buried in the software.
The moment support is dropped, it should be released to open source to allow others interested to maintain it. Such as with the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 Ti... no longer supported with driver updates (outside of "security updates"). The firmware should be supported by the people if the company doesn't want to support it, it still is an excellent card even 10 years later...
MMO or not, source code should just be released. Patents are not forever, source code shouldn't be either. Though patent might be too long as well. 15/20 years worked when things developed slowly, but now days its outdated within years and could benefit other advancements.
3 replies →
But that’s not the same thing as supporting offline mode, at all.
> but documentation shouldn’t be an issue
Oh boy. I would bet that at any medium sized games company the number of people who can run the full stack of a game from client to backend locally is single digits, and that it is absolutely not documented.
Documentation? In the video game industry? Surely you jest.
4 replies →
I dunno, there’s plenty of projects that turn MMORPGs into self-contained single player RPGs and/or simulate other players with bots, so I don’t really see any reason why they should be excluded.
I don't think they're saying exclude them, but expand the legislation to include a common scenario.
Releasing server binaries might be a stretch, but what about API specs?
Then any 3rd party could stand up a new server and at least have an inkling of where to go on.
That's never going to happen. Game companies are not going to give you their source code. Usually the source of any game that gets shut down is shared with games that are still live. Example: if Fallout 76 is shut down, Bethesda giving you their source would essentially be giving you the source to Skyrim also. I'm not saying that I have the solution or that your idea isn't good on some level, but we have to be realistic.
Counterpoint: maybe we could make proprietary software illegal, and make everything GPL so we can just request the source code to anything we want. With enough eyes all bugs are shallow, so why wouldn't banks and nuclear reactors want their source to be audited by the public? lol
(Software might become de facto open source with AI decomp anyway)
>> They need to make the server binaries available, along with client functionality to let you choose a server.
> Game companies are not going to give you their source code.
Okay but what about the thing they actually proposed?
20 replies →
> That's never going to happen. Game companies are not going to give you their source code.
We don't need them to; AI can reverse engineer most shit now.
Even if US lobbying tries to hamper that, China will accelerate it.
> Game companies are not going to give you their source code.
I don't know if you misinterpreted my comment or if you're strawmanning, because I didn't say anything about source code.
Well then they can simply not shut down the old games.
> Software might become de facto open source with AI decomp anyway
Agreed.
> Example: if Fallout 76 is shut down, Bethesda giving you their source would essentially be giving you the source to Skyrim also.
That’s kinda bullshit to different degrees with different games.
> That's never going to happen. Game companies are not going to give you their source code.
Sure they will. They can be forced to by the government which is society's monopoly on violence.
> but we have to be realistic.
No we don't. We can just force companies to do it, using the threat of the law.
Funcom released a single player update for Dune: Awakening (not quite MMO but close) just a few weeks ago. They have simulated player economy and end game systems and flexible rules+progression for the game itself ... it's been great.
For many online games the same could be done. Simulate the systems, give players the ability to tweak the rules and just have fun.
This bill seems to be aimed at the situation where your purchase a copy of some game, and then the game becomes unplayable because some online service it depends on goes away.
For most MMORPGs nowadays the game client is a free download. You only pay for the online service. I seriously doubt they will draft this in a way that would cover that.
I would argue that server binaries are less important now in the age of AI. The ability to reverse engineer them is so accessible now.
I think more importantly / more digestible is that you can't pursue legislation against people running their own game servers if you no longer offer the game yourself.
This is definitely the most defensible position. I'm sure others want stronger protections, but taking lawsuits off the table for any item no longer for sale (be it a game, other software, hardware, media, etc) would make a ton of sense.
No one can reasonably claim to be harmed in such a scenario. Enshrine abandonware into law.
2 replies →
It's currently accessible, but I'm sure they will start adding whatever roadblocks they can. e.g. Requiring attestation before running game, keeping some logic in server side which will be sent only to clients which pass the attestation, requiring platforms which grant more protections etc.
I can’t help but think that would end up violating some licensing agreements.
Ironically the various versions of WoW im self hosting have really good singleplayer support.
MMOs should have offline modes for LAN parties.
No reason a remote community can't host their own instance, and save bandwidth.
By the time something like this passes, everyone will have the ability to convert any game to unlicensed source code in a matter of hours.
Intellectual property is not going to be a thing anymore.
IP primarily existed for hundreds of years on things that are easy to copy. Technical difficulty is not relevant.
Hundreds of years ago, nothing was easy to copy, until the printing press. Early copyright surrounding that wasn’t about “IP protection” but rather who had the right to operate a printing press at all
And yet the clean room reverse engineering loophole remains in effect in the US.
It just used to take a lot of human labor, but LLMs are closing that gap. Fast.
4 replies →
You're dreaming. Prepare for DMCA2, where it will be illegal to run an LLM on a compiled binary for the purposes of decompiling under penalty of jail time.
As long as it is legal in at least one country, the code will be out there and models will train on it. The ship on IP has already sailed. The moat is gone.
2 replies →
With one giant exception, the advent of the algorithm all over again but with new proprietary and novel algorithms sets.
How is that working out for the mp3 algorithm or bluray decryption?
The OSS community just laughs at algo patents. There was never any ability to enforce them at the pre-AI scale. Post-AI the corpos have no chance. They lost.
3 replies →
If I could run SoTA models on my desktop, you would be onto something. While it's a subscription, the big guys who own the data centers will do whatever the guys in government tell them to. TLDR: you'll start getting the "I can't assist you with this task" reply to all your prompts.
> everyone
Assuming everyone is provided unlimited compute in the future is very naive
I already have built multiple confidential compute operating systems from 386 bytes of machine code all the way up with many novel and world-first features using exclusively consumer hardware I personally own, without any internet reliance, on my own property. Low level kernel and compiler debugging all with models that will run on old GPUs you can buy on ebay right now for under $500.
The way most people use AI, lighting money on fire, is a skill issue. You can build anything cheaply now if you generally know how computers work at a low level and can tell models exactly what to do.
[dead]
That's why they're pricing out desktop builders and trying to lock everyone into hosted model consumption from a cheap mobile.
And if you can afford it a VR headset or AR glasses to simulate an 80" display
"Will introduce?" Not even in the hopper yet? If it's not in the hopper and doesn't have a few co-sponsors, it's just a PR stunt.
Election coming. Gotta gin up support. And if you forget later or it mysteriously falls to the bottom of your priority list so be it.
Also announcements of future announcements is trendy. Companies do it all the time.
> "Will introduce?" Not even in the hopper yet?
There isn't even a fucking bill draft. This could have been a single staffer with AI and like a small number of industry contact's work for a week.
Mike Johnson sent the House home early again. Has to wait until the next session before it’s introduced on the floor.
Not introduced yet:
https://www.congress.gov/member/ritchie-torres/T000486?hl=to...
…why wouldn’t he release the bill text?
I’d want a revenue floor before this took effect. An indie developer should not have to worry about getting sued because they didn’t properly turn off a hobby project.
He has not introduced that bill yet. You'd see it here if it had been:
https://www.congress.gov/member/ritchie-torres/T000486?hl=to...
Indie developers can probably avoid killing games the most easily, they're unlikely to have 3rd party tech or IP that's only temporarily licensed, or elaborate DRM, mandatory connectivity/accounts etc, and may even have complete autonomy/power to do what they want.
> Indie developers can probably avoid killing games the most easily
They can and they should. I wouldn't want someone to lose their livelihood because they didn't rigorously test a product they made and released for fun.
Anyone using AWS managed services has 3rd party tech that is temporarily licensed. Any dependence on steam, EOS, google, apple, is a third party dependency.
What about steam relay? Any APIs at all? I think a revenue floor is simpler and more future proof.
Please Jesus. Making a ton of online games as an indie would be suicide. Not to mention the obligations going on a balance sheet when they need funding.
Like functionally should probably be like that 200k revenue or more since it’s potentially a few weeks of labor obligation
This wouldn't have helped with my latest run in with artificial Product Existence failure*, but I'm glad to see it anyhow.
*Hey, remember how Neal Stephenson's last project was writing for a nascent shared sci-fi universe? Did you get a chance to play the visual novel that was its first entry, which was hosted on a crypto project's website? Well, I sure hope you did, because the crypto project rugpulled and took the VN down with it, effectively turning a Neal Stephenson novella into lost media less than a year after its initial release.
I am a gamer who has played around with private servers and emulators to revisit my gaming past - one thing I wonder about is how laws would handle game-changing updates? World of Warcraft famously does major renovations to game mechanics each expansion and minor changes each patch. What is to prevent a company from releasing an “update patch” that essentially cripples the game, then shutting down the game at that point and releasing the crippled code as the only available version?
Careful, you might accidentally improve the user experience of SaaS products.
I like this but why stop at Video Games?
it's easier to formulate and pass something with a smaller scope, like this, and then expand/iterate on it to apply more broadly.
Maybe in one aspect but it also raises the question, "Why is Congress concerned with details like this?"
Just trying to point out what could be the opposition for this, not that it's a bad thing to pass.
4 replies →
I agree. I think this is why lobbyists will be flooding this guy very soon. They don't want the door cracked.
:) You can argue almost all software is a video game in some way, just gotta argue yourself a way that the definition of "video game" would include your software in some way: https://excel-esports.com/
It's easier to pass a bill for video games than try to cram movies and music in the same bill.
I doubt it will become law either way.
Congress.gov says Rep. Ritchie Torres has sponsored 171 bills since 2021 and only one became a law, five passed the House and most of those were under Democrat majority. [1]
[1] https://www.congress.gov/quick-search/legislation?congressGr...
1 reply →
I would say that it can be pretty simple to solve these problems. If a software company is going to implement a license server or a time limited certificate into a piece of software that will prevent the software from working, then they should be mandated to keep all customer payments in escrow and within 5 minutes of the software becoming unusable by the users, the money has to be returned, with interest and adjusted for inflation.
So every week when World of Warcraft goes down for maintenance for a couple of hours. Blizzard should have to forfeit all of the subscribers money, since it is unusable for more than 5 minutes?
If a server runs for 30 years, and then shuts down. It should have to return 30 years of revenue, plus interest?
> So every week when World of Warcraft goes down for maintenance for a couple of hours. Blizzard should have to forfeit all of the subscribers money, since it is unusable for more than 5 minutes?
Yes. That's exactly what I wrote.
Yeah so simple, every gaming company basically has to operate without money.
The online component is a tough sell, but for anything with single player it should be as simple as allow the binary to still run / download?
Or they can sell a product that doesn't have artificial and arbitrary self destruct dates.
Good, now make games transferable on death. My kid should be able to inherit my Steam library.
If a physical copy can be, then a digital copy should also be.
If you own it then it becomes inheritable.
It’s software, so if you own it, you can sell or give away as many copies as you want.
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I'm glad they're spending time and effort on issues important to everyday Americans' problems.
You sound dismissive, but gamers as a whole is a demographic that is hard to be ignored and happens to span groups otherwise counter to one another. Any politician who would not take advantage does it to their own detriment.
He represents a poverty-stricken district. Nobody should give a fuck about gamers until their basic needs are sorted.
9 replies →
You know how some engineering teams have a really difficult time prioritizing? Maybe in planning there's a big long list of project ideas some of which really need more discovery to define scope. There can be stuff that seems really important to a long-term vision but is also hard to estimate and higher risk of scope creep etc. And there's stuff that's cheap/fast/low-risk but doesn't solve the larger important problems? And even in the context of a company that is still burning through investor money, you fix _some_ of the smaller things even while you're still figuring out the bigger things, b/c otherwise you'd likely _never_ do the smaller things?
I'm not saying legislators are doing their best in a good faith effort to serve their constituents. But even if they were, you would sometimes see things like this, right?
I know some teams don't let work out-prioritize the party planning committee.
Video games is about as big an industry as TV and movies.
Bigger
I'm glad you can handle the concept of handling more than 1 thing at a time.
Yeah, I'm certainly not opposed to this law, but it seems like a strange thing to focus on as our democracy and the rule of law is crumbling in real-time.
I sincerely don't understand this mentality. Legislators consider more than one bill per legislative session. We can (and must!) push along multiple axes, otherwise we will always be behind right?
3 replies →
If we never passed normal somewhat mundane legislation in "unprecedented times," we wouldn't have passed anything new since September 2001.
> the rule of law is crumbling in real-time.
Why would the people in charge focus on this? They consider it a feature, not a bug.
> but it seems like a strange thing to focus on as our democracy and the rule of law
Society is improved one issue at a time, and if you sit around waiting for the revolution to come, you will end up like the socialists who never win any elections and achieve nothing for decades.
No, we do not need to overthrow all of capitalism overnight, or solve "democracy", or whatever it is that you are advocating for, before we take any action to improve society.
That is code for "just don't do anything except LARP and complain, and attack anyone who actually is accomplishing things". Its a useless philosophy.