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.
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.
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.
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)
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
That is impressive there is OSS Gothic 2
I wonder if its legal, how is it MIT
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.
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).
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...>
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I can't wait to see "you haven't met your patch obligations" on a balance sheet and a full indie game being underwater
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.
Physics subsystems (havok, ISI).
Procedural systems (Gaea, Houdini)
Vegetation (Speedtree)
VFX subsystems (Nvidia Gameworks)
First party SDKs (Sony Playstation, Microsoft NDK, Horizon/Quest).
Pathfinding (Kytheria, Mercuna)
Cutscenes/Videos (Bink)
UI (Rive, Neosis)
Networking (Photon, Coherence)
Theres… thousands more, if you’d like me to continue.
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.
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.
This doesn't seem like much of an obstacle? 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.
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.
The response of "but that isn't any fun!" is totally irrelevant; you can't preserve the initial experience, but you can preserve the basic software itself so that players still have something to mess with.
Programming-wise, this requires a little more emphasis on a modular implementation that needs to be considered from the start. Otherwise, it seems pretty straightforward. Or am I missing something?
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.
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.
Where can we find information about the direction the EU is going on this? AFAICT there has just been one meeting on the topic?
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/news/14th-valid-initia...
https://commission.europa.eu/european-citizens-initiative/me...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/stop-destroying...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXdmoeaYZ9Y
https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/news-media/news/eesc-debates-e...
First link is announcing the initiative was submitted, second is a private meeting where the initiative was presented to the comission by the organizers.
Then there was a public meeting on 16 April 2026 and a public meeting on 20 May 2026.
Is there a specific part of one of those meetings that indicates they want to go a different direction than the California bill?
From the last link:
> If designed responsibly, most games that connect to the internet can operate indefinitely without publisher support. This has been a customer expectation for over 50 years. We are open to any solution that solves the problem. We are flexible on specifics and implementation by publishers. We understand that not all game features may be operable in a discontinued game. We are not seeking ongoing support from publishers after a game has been discontinued
This sounds like the California bill would address these issues.
edit: Particularly, I'm wondering if there is any serious push for release of binaries / source code prior to the end-of-life of a game, which seems to be of particular concern.
The fact here is pretty simple: they have not indicated any support for the californian style legislation and they aren’t done yet either. The californian model is also very direct and instructive and EU laws tend to be broad frameworks, so they’ll definitely be different in some way, but unsure if they’ll encompass each other.
I can’t say what way they will definitely go, but it seems naïve to presume the californian stance given how disparate the solutions are from with in the SKG movement itself.
I’m watching it closely, obviously, but nobody knows where it will go. But this is like a 500-sided dice, the odds are low that a solution cleanly overlaps.
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.)
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.
As for community run servers being longer to develop... wait, what? How is that the case, when that used to be the standard way multiplayer got built prior to everyone trying to chase World of Warcraft? I can understand the anti-cheat argument, and I will begrudgingly acknowledge that you can't exactly force third-party servers to run your anti-piracy checks. But none of that is a technical argument. That's an argument about business risks, and publishers all jumped on the live service bandwagon because they consider their customers' control over their own games to be a business risk.
> 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.
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.
Of course there'll be idiots, but I doubt you'll see a stronger backlash than to a company shutting down the servers without any solution, like they can do now.
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.
If the company puts an artificial proof of work demanding a rack of the latest data center GPUs, that should be illegal.
If the binary has the same hardware requirements that the company used when the service was up, I see it as totally fair.
ubisoft would surely be willing to spend an extra $500k on server hardware while developing a $25MM game, and subtlety bloat their server-side code so that they can say "this is the hardware we had to use to run it".
there are a million ways to slow down code/increase hardware requirements that look plausible.
Fans have reverse-engineered and stood up servers for tons of games with no access to the server binaries. The idea that they wouldn't figure it out when given much better resources (server binaries or source code) is crazy.
i wasnt implying they couldnt figure it out.
i was implying that you would have to be an incredibly rich turbonerd to stand up a massive cloud instance for some of these games. which sort of defeats the entire goal of the regulation.
To me this is about both preserving the access to what consumers purchased, but also future preservation of art.
Copyright is not a natural right. It is a monopoly granted by the government to creators, specifically with the goal of the progress of art and science.
Games that completely die because their servers are shut off, in my opinion should just lose copyright outright. Why should the people via the government provide you with a monopoly on publishing something that you have stopped publishing?
This isn't the 2000s. People can rent a computer out of a data center. This isn't some hard problem here.
how much does 190GiB of RAM and 38 CPUs go for, hourly?
$1,349.04/Month
(m6g.12xlarge in us-east-1)
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...
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.
You might not have permission to, if it uses a lot of third party libraries.
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...>
> 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.
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.
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.
fyi, there are tens of torrent trackers with every game/movie/album/etc under the sun. had been for two decades.
right now that would be illegal to do in most jurisdictions.
publishers also have legal recourse. remove that and the publisher's math changes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That being said, I agree with the premise. Most of those cultural preservation issues wouldn't be a problem if users had control over their computing.
The problems caused by game servers going offline aren't necessarily specific to games, and the cultural preservation aspect can be applied to other programs as well. This essay explain what those problems are in a very accessible manner: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
The word deserve is interesting here.
There's a social sense (based on the just world fallacy, see also Karma), and a natural sense (by natural law, you deserve whatever you are able to get).
In the natural sense, which is the only real one, a person deserves computing freedom if they are able and willing to obtain it. If they care, and if they're willing to work for it.
It's the same way with freedom in other contexts. If you don't care, at least not enough to defend it... well, we can see the results of that.
I think Stallman is using the word deserve here in the sense that computing freedom should be some kind of human right. That's an admirable position, but I don't think I see it catching on. (Heck, regular freedom is still pretty niche, especially globally, and computing freedom is a strict subset.)
Possibly, but it doesn't appear that way to me.
> A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files. Freedom 2 ensures that the community has the legal right to share the server software
In most online games, only the developer has the "server files". You'd need access to them first to even share them. Freedom 2 should be access to server files, if anything.
and so it begins...
If I buy a product for $N one-time charge, I expect that product to work basically forever, until it physically breaks or wears out. I have woodworking tools over 50 years old. I would never expect Craftsman to sneak into my garage one day and destroy them because "they're old and unsupported and I should just buy new ones." I don't expect Toyota to repossess my car because it's hard to supply parts for old cars and they really just need me to buy another one.
So why is it OK for a software developer to just arbitrarily decide to flip a switch and remove my ability to use a product I paid for?
EDIT: I realize I am arguing for subscription pricing for software, which I am generally against. But for a game that requires a server operating in order to function, perhaps subscription pricing is more appropriate at least for that kind of game. It's still not appropriate for games or tools that run natively and don't have a significant reason for their logic to reside in a server.
See also 'Juicero'.
Only one gets away with it: World of Warcraft.
There are carve-outs in the legislation for this. It's a moot point.
I see this argument repeated, and it's made exactly like this where it sets up a strawman and then brings up software.
No one is coming into your computer to repossess your software.
They are either turning off their servers, OR they are ending a subscription.
If you have a bus pass, you can do anything you want with the card. Your chisels being 50 years old, has nothing to do with you being able to ride the bus forever just because you bought a one-month pass.
…that are unnecessarily being checked by the local software before the local software will run the local offline functions.
If you want, you can now change that behavior.
Whether that's allowed by the TOS and what the consequences to that are is also a separate issue. At that point, people shouldn't buy the product if they disagree with the conditions.
At no point did you purchase unlimited free online service forever, by the way. The game developer did not promise that, and you hold no contract with them mandating free labor and infrastructure perpetually.
It's the equivalent of paying $10 to enter an all-you-can-eat restaurant and complaining when they kick you out at 10pm while you say that you haven't technically had ALL you can eat yet.
The way the industry currently operates is you show up to an all you can eat buffet, pay your $10, and then they give you a 30 page contract that you have to sign before you can start eating. You are further SOL if you sign that contract at 4:40 and they decide "well, today we are going to close at 5pm because there's not enough people here. This isn't profitable to us".
Once upon a time, all games operated like this. I could buy half life and run a half life server locally and all my friends could play half life together without valve ever getting in the middle. That didn't cost valve anything to support that. It was all part of the price of purchase of half life.
Heck, for games like Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2, 3rd parties like MSN hosted their own 3rd party services for matching players together. We still hosted the servers, but MSN did the match making. And when they stopped that service, it didn't matter. We can still host and play DF2. Theoretically another 3rd party could start up to match make again.
I also completely disagree that "it doesn't cost Valve anything to run Half Life". Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone. Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all. Newsflash, Steam games have CEG DRM and will not function for long periods of time without Steam.
Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.
I expect perpetual access to my game the same way I expect access to my books. Most of my multiplayer games can still be played without involving a clown server somewhere (either by hosting one myself, or by playing over LAN). This is somewhat skewed by me not having bought many of the offending games, but it's clearly not an impossible feat. It's not even a big ask. And yet it's still not done.
> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.
The mere existence of that workaround means I still get to play my game. There aren't any workarounds for most of the games Stop Killing Games care about, since developing them requires enormous amounts of man-hours reverse engineering, while the devs could do the same in a fraction of the time (or at the very least give people a head start!).
Are you going pay the extra money to the developers to keep the servers running? What will people choose, the 5 year support for game that might never play again, or the forever support? Game companies will raise prices, by a lot, if forced to maintain or release games.
Beyond that, I think the authors of your books are idiots for not making whatever content they have online not just a bundled part of the book (throw in a CD or thumb drive or whatever, not my problem. Solve it however you want. Just™ actually solve it). I've had the same happen with a quiz book I found, which had the answers online, with just a QR code in the book, which then lead to a 404 page. They could have just printed a few extra pages of answers in the back, but they didn't, and I mock them for it. They're fucking morons. Thankfully quiz questions tend to be easily googleable.
> Are you going pay the extra money to the developers to keep the servers running?
No, because you don't need to do that to have a playable game.
> Game companies will raise prices, by a lot, if forced to maintain or release games.
Good thing they don't need to do that then.
That's funny, because most of my steam games will happily run with the network cable unplugged
Explicitly through a contract you HAVE to sign AFTER the purchase. That's a big problem I have with this model. It's not made explicit until after the purchase.
And, it is reasonable to expect because, as I said and other old game players can attest to, this was the status quo for games ~15 years ago. This was a change in living memory.
> Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone.
How about Quake 1/2/3? I pulled half life just as an example. Valve is making those updates because they want to, not because they have to.
> Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all.
Ok, Again Quake or Dark forces 2. But also, it's only technically incorrect today. It wasn't when HL was originally released. Valve had to backport in it's integration to the valve servers. That is, they technically had to put in effort to make the game tie to their servers.
But also, I can still dust off my old HL cds, install it, and play it without the steam integration. I can even patch it to a pre-steam version and game with people that aren't using the pre steam version.
> Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.
That's really only because steam has gone out of it's way to install DRM on top of the games. They have purposely broken my games to be dependent on their services.
None of this makes your argument better, in fact it's a highlight of the broken nature of the games industry.
I fear an entire generation is growing up thinking that it is normal and acceptable that products you buy can be remotely disabled by the developer, manufacturer or vendor when it suits them, with no recourse to the person who bought the product.
This is one of those tech nerd debate hills I'm willing to die on: It should be totally unacceptable/illegal for someone else to remotely nerf or destroy a product you bought and paid for.
If Steam goes offline, billions and billions of dollars of games go with it. The online ones, the offline ones, all of it. Gone forever. Some will not function at all without Steam servers.
Steam pioneered remote DRM attestations for PC gaming, remote product key validation, always-online dependencies on Steamworks and more.
Not true. Some games distributed via Steam will continue to work because they do not use (or require) Steamworks.
You wouldn't be able to afford it. It's well known at the time of purchase that online games will eventually become obsolete. Comparing that to tools is comparing apples to oranges.
Now, I do think that game companies should be compelled to make their servers available for others to host and maintain if they decide to stop hosting and maintaining them themselves. Some do, but all should be required to.
I've seen discussions about this exact topic in Europe, but it's a hard topic to tackle, since the relevant services will usually shut down bell beyond five years, and by that time, the statute of limitations will have run out, so even if the product could in theory have lasted for 20+ years longer if you could just have it talk to the computer in your closet, or just flipped a switch to turn it into a dumb-mode where is still does the basics you don't need a clown for, you're out of luck.
If this were normal, my car would suddenly stop working if Toyota went out of business.
The legislation specifically carves out for things like this.
> Why do you deserve free labor from a game developer that you paid a nominal amount to 10 years ago, not to mention infrastructure costs.
The legislation doesn't add this requirement at all.
> It's the equivalent of paying $10 to enter an all-you-can-eat restaurant and complaining when they kick you out at 10pm while you say that you haven't technically had ALL you can eat yet.
No. It's paying $10 and eating until 10pm and then leaving because they are done.
Your entire comment just reads as someone who has made assumptions about what is being asked for rather than actually looked into it.
Just the opening of your first two paragraphs proves that.
He explained to me that every media artifact of cultural significance would be stored there in three (I believe) copies for future generations to enjoy, or researchers, or historians.
I was given a tour by an archivist there and this became a core memory of mine.
I was always at unease growing up, wondering what would happen to video games when they no longer became popular. Would I be able to enjoy them when I got older? Would my children ever be able to play the games that shaped my teenage years?
The discussion around the matter of Stop Killing Games always devolves to one around free labour or around infringing the rights of the creator, but at some point, when a game, or a film, or a book is no longer monetised, makers of cultural works should be obliged to archive and ensure that our shared cultural heritage and identity is preserved for the future.
Film makers, authors, printers, ad agencies, music producers, and many others are already obliged to do this in many countries.
Why should video game producers be exempt?
It's just better for all of us, and our children, if these works of art are preserved, and that at an insignificant effort and cost, compared to the cost of developing it.
The worst thing, at least to me, is that the worst case scenario, as long as the devs don't go out of their way to kill a game permanently, is still not all that bad.
There's emulation, there's virtual machines, there's dicking about with config files, and there's just buying the old hardware outright. Even old, obscure and fiddly games can be played if you put in the effort. Even the old and obscure will very often be out there on the web, and even if it isn't, you can eventually get hold of a physical copy (and then make a good example and make it available yourself!).
But the moment there's a clown server dependency involved, that's it. You've lost before you've even begun. Sometimes a miracle happens, or someone dedicates their entire life to restoring that one game, and we thank them, for they are doing capital G God's work. But preservation can't depend on miracles.
Freedom 1 is also important for understanding the rules of the game in case it is not documented very well; changing which server it connects to is not the only issue (and a well-designed FOSS program would have an option to configure which server it connects to without needing to recompile it).
(In some cases, other people figure out the rules of the game independently and might write independent FOSS implementations (in one case, I have done this for a single-player game; other people have also done for other games). In this case, it may be less of a problem (if the FOSS implementation is actually correct and complete (and might even have less bugs than the original and/or other improvements)), and both official and unofficial implementations can continue to be used.)
But then who's allowed to run servers? Can I modify the servers and mod them and republish my changes? Does killing the game also need to cancel any copyright on any server-side assets?
But then we need to get into licensing. What if Fortnite goes offline and they publish their server assets? Does that give me the right to use Naruto and Family Guy avatars on my homebrew server?
that happens at the end of nearly every paragraph here
The inherent injustice of developers being able to eat? The entire reason we're in this mess of a field is because of this ideological purity crusade. We could have a world where independent developers make a modest living producing good software that people pay a reasonable amouunt for, but because everyone expects everything for free, the majority of developers are forced into working for soulless corporations, who make the money that pays their salaries with the most predatory software imaginable, spamming ads, tracking, and microtransactions all over "free" software.
You also always have control over the programs that run on your own computer. Reverse engineer it if you care; the tools have always been there. The article mentions DRM, which is almost always bypassed, and private servers, which people do host -- so where's the lack of control, exactly? You just feel entitled to be given everything on a silver platter, you can't even be bothered to put effort into taking free stuff. Give me a break.
To be clear, I am fully in support of Stop Killing Games. Especially given the annoying copyright regime around hosting private servers, legislation to mandate some kind of fallback for termination is helpful. But trying to pin this cause to this horrible movement that has done 100x more harm than good? No thanks.
It’s never been about what’s possible in theory, but what’s feasible in practice. By the same kind of logic you apply here, every country in the world is as good as democratic because you can work your way to free elections eventually, even if it takes a while.
The idea of free software follows from fairly simple logic: You should be in control of your computer and any software that runs on it should be distributed under form and licence which facilitate this. It’s not about what the software wants or how much work people owe you; it’s about enabling you to own your computing when the code is literally already there. Surely you can disagree with that without making up (in my view) silly-sounding arguments for the other side?
Valve could have made `steam.dll` optional for really old games but DRM is DRM and it's here to stay.
It mostly is if you digging a bit. Yes, it should work out of the box, but at least it's possible to make it work. When the battle of getting games to not permanently break is still being fought (not to mention that there's (somehow?!) significant sentiment that games permanently breaking isn't an actual problem), there's little wonder why the battle of inconvenient DRM isn't really happening.
Can't see how an independent developer would ever be able to do this. We need more independent things not less... this would be my concern.
Better legislation would be to force developers to at least allow people to run their own servers.
Let's think about it. Free software just applies to the source code. Artwork, logos, even trademarked names are not Free. Support, services, and documentation can also be non Free. This is the Red Hat business model and they make a ton of money.
Right now several very popular games are free or almost free to install and play. The game studios make money off of in game purchases. There's no reason that couldn't continue.
Games could be Free but connecting to the server for multiplayer would of course cost money.
What about anti cheating? I think motivated software engineers working together around the world could come up with solutions to this. Or (and?), good social engineers could come up with incentives/punishments that heavily encourage fair play. I worry about this one the least. Here's one idea that my son just made me aware of this morning. Some game he was playing allowed him FPV of his teammates after he was eliminated from the round. He saw his teammate could see through walls. This angered my son and he called the teammate out. The cheating was defeated.
If the code was Free Software, how would you sell in-game purchases? Note that if it were just 3d models for your character, others could sell them too, likely cheaper without the overheads of developing the base game. Note that the article is advocating for multiplayer code to be open too.
I love free software, but I don't see how it was works in practice with games unless you're talking about open sourcing years later. Games seem different in usage and development than operating systems.
Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_game... , yes, although probably not to any helpful extent (and some of those are FOSS now, but weren't when released).
2048 had in-game ads that you could buy your way out of. You couldn't just install the ad-free version, because iOS is locked down. You could on Android, but not everyone is tech-savvy enough to actually do that.
ps. I personally played Threes first, which 2048 copied without the style and made free. I admit I was slightly disappointed for the original devs that the copy became significantly more well known. It wouldn't be my first example of the benefits of open source.
There’s so many nuances around assets, trademarks, copyright, monetisation, cheatware(?), multi-player etc but the article ignores all of it and goes for the straight freedom angle. How do you even have in-game purchases when you can’t control client code? Do we even have a single example of FOSS and mainstream game that made money and was multiplayer?
Terrible slop and I am flagging it.
We make software a public good and fund it at the government level.
[1] This is still way more than the industry would want.
If the are successful we will see quite a bit more open source.
This would suggest entitlement to be able to allow the game to function in any capacity. They aren't expecting the developer to host it, but the legal right of someone to host it and the capacity for anyone to direct their client to it.
If you decide the LLM should write your "passion blog post", it gives off immediate "soulless Linked grifter" vibes.
That's literally all anyone wants
Community run servers were killed because there's a possibility the community run servers would let you play with content you (gasp!) didn't pay for, as happened with TF2, so they can't possibly let you have that option! If they don't get $6 for a texture file, the world will end!
And don't give me bullshit about "But they would have to put extra effort into building that", as if nearly every game server application provided to players has ever been anything other than a random exe file with no documentation and critical flaws that require third party hacks to fix. Pretty much anything built on Unreal or the Source game engine had a ready to go server by default, or with a checkbox.
Hell, even nothing more than a carveout in the DMCA to allow people to legally reimplement servers after shutdown would buy a lot of goodwill. This carveout is only needed because the DMCA dramatically limited your legal rights in respect to software products just a couple decades ago.
We need to get to a place where all consumer-focused apps and games include full source code, including any server necessary to play multiplayer or store cloud files.
In this I see Stop Killing Games as a half-measure that the industry supports to avoid us waking up and realizing what we should have.
If you're a gamer whose game became unplayable from cheaters running hacked clients because the game's developer decided to share their source code online, you're entirely justified in your outrage.
If customers and care about open source and free software games, they will support them. There is no need to dictate the funding model people want to use for art or software products. This is an industry with an unbelievable amount of competition.
Submissions on HN with interesting titles keep ending up being revealed as AI slop halfway down towards them making their point.
Authors: you don't need this. Don't disrespect your reader's time with LLM slophancement.
To elaborate, if I make a creative experience, that requires a server, and sell it to you for $70, and you play it for a year, that's your $70 of value right there. That's the moral argument.
Every single games company faced with this issue is now going to change the terms of service to note that the $70 "includes free two year subscription, paid up front!", and if the lawyers get pissy about that they'll sell two versions: one that is $0, but doesnt work until you sign up for the $70 per month subscription. That's the legal argument.
What this comes down to is "I have the right to decide what my $70 actually paid for". No you don't. What you paid for is what you paid for. Now piss off.
[1] https://tenor.com/view/oh-fuck-off-alice-kristen-bell-the-pe...
They make you buy new or else the manufacturers fear going out of business. It's just sad that this has extended to practically everything.
Unless perhaps it means only companies selling the cheapest are surviving. Which also doesn't seem broady true.
Maybe we can say "whoever sells the cheapest acceptable units survives".
The entrance will feature the obvious candidates that normally use electricity then gradually transition into things like a manual powered citrus juicer for which the battery is only for contract enforcement and planned obsolescence
Now, with computer modelling and simulations, they can accurately design a part to be as cheap as possible to make while being just durable enough to last for the duration of the warranty. D4A did a good video on it.. https://youtu.be/SeMZGICNSMg?si=sideQIwNBr9s9QW6