Comment by saghm
3 days ago
How about "you need to release the binaries for the servers if you turn them off"? The intent of this sort of regulation is to prevent bait-and-switches were games become unplayable after players have invested their time and money.
Binaries are slightly less contentious, but still problematic for MMOs and other titles where they're just not designed to run on consumer gear, might have credentials baked in or might reveal trade secrets to competitors.
Fundamentally, entertainment and technology both are time limited experiences and can't reasonably be expected to last forever. Usually games get shut off when the playerbase has already moved on -- even if the binaries are available, you'd likely be playing in a ghost town.
> Binaries are slightly less contentious, but still problematic for MMOs and other titles where they're just not designed to run on consumer gear, might have credentials baked in or might reveal trade secrets to competitors
They are expected to run for at least a certain amount of time though, so maybe the solution is a requirement to post how many years it's guaranteed to be around, and if it isn't kept around that long, the server needs to be made available.
I don't think it's particularly relevant what hardware it's supposed to run on. Trade secrets are a legal privilege, so it's totally fair for society to say that certain other factors are more important in this extraordinarily limited set of circumstances, and if you're baking credentials into your server code directly, that's kind of your own fault, and I don't see "intentionally doing things in a riskier way" as something valuable to preserve.
The intent of the EU privacy directive was to clarify when websites were storing your data, instead every website has a click through banner that says they use cookies.
The actual implementation is very important.
I don't see the parallel here. You're saying you think that if companies are required to make the server binaries available after shutting down a live service game, people are going to be spammed by banners? Or is there some other emergent effect you're concerned about that you expect me to be able to infer?
I don't think this comment is made in good faith.
> Or is there some other emergent effect you're concerned about that you expect me to be able to infer?
Removing the unneeded snark, yes. A well intended, but poorly implemented law will not have the desired effect. If the law states that F2P games are exempt, for example (as Stop Killing Games has suggested), you'll find a massive swing towards free games with $60/80/100 in-game purchases to access the actual content.
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One general difficulty with implementing this is dealing with the case of a company going under. It's hard to compel performance out of a bankrupt organisation, so in a lot of cases it might still fall through. (And if this becomes a thing, you might see video game studios setting up companies to operate each game to exploit this).
I think it’s pretty much guaranteed that this would lead to a rush to the Hollywood model of a studio per project with contractors jumping between them. It work(s/ed) for movies because it was all in Hollywood but there isn’t really an equivalent for game developers.