> I bought a Bosch 500 series because our old one broke, and we needed one quick.
Slightly OT (or maybe not) older dishwashers are usually not very hard to fix (depending on the problem). My dishwasher is over ten years old. The pump broke: I replaced it. It was easy and cheap (EUR 60).
It wasn't even the pump that was broken, just the heating resistance attached to it that had fried. You can replace only the resistor if you're skilled enough to reattach a new one. I couldn't: removing the old one was easy, but I couldn't put it back in place so I bought a whole pump instead.
Likewise, my laundry machine is over 15 years old. I just replaced the carbon brushes: they last for something like 10 years and cost less than EUR 10 a pair.
I don't think I will buy a new machine any time soon, or if I have to, it will be a used one.
The funny thing is that YouTube has ushered in arguably the golden age of DIY. If your appliance fails you can very often fix it fairly easily. Plus, you get the satisfaction of fixing it yourself and you get to strut proudly as you tell your wife that the dishwasher is working again.
Some of them even lasted in the 1990s (in the US). I had a CRT monitor blow a capacitor in the mid 1990s and took it to a repair shop. It cost me something like $100 to have it fixed, but that was still way cheaper than buying a new monitor. But yeah, after that everything became throw-away because 1) the cost of someone spending a half hour or so figuring out what the problem was and then repairing it would be more than the item cost to replace 2) greater and greater miniaturization meant that discrete components that could be repaired were few and instead it was just a "black box".
That's a bit of a myth. Lots of electronics can still be repaired just fine. Check out some electronics repair channels on youtube. I've repaired plenty of electronics myself.
Replacing instead of repairing really is mostly a cultural thing.
Appliances got so cheap there was no more value to extract by repair shops so they shut down. Government could step in with 200% tax on new appliances and the repair ecosystem would regrow, but pretty much no one wants that.
Same thing, thankfully to a lesser extent so far, for cars. Everybody's applauding the move to lots of tech and EV batteries for car but meanwhile my german car from 1988 is still running strong.
People shall complain that it's a gas guzzler but 38 years old is easily twice the lifetime any EV shall ever see. I don't see that taken into account much when talking about the lifetime CO2 of cars.
I have nothing against EVs: tried a Porsche Taycan and loved it and someone I know has a little BYD (chinese) SUV and it's very fine car for its price.
But sadly EVs seems to rhyme with "we can (and shall) remotely modify your car's software" and that's very close from "we'll remotely disable your car for good at some point in the future, when we consider it's time to upgrade to a new model".
As for car mechanics: those at official dealerships seems mostly clueless. They read the diagnostic and the diagnostic says: "Replace the entire braking system for the front right wheel". While if you go to a proper, old-school, mechanic, the dude shall happily find what's wrong and replace only what's necessary.
Gearbox noisy? Under warranty? Leave us the car for a few days and we'll replace the entire gearbox. Been there with my daily.
They're not really car mechanics anymore: they just swap complete parts, following procedures written by the car engineers.
Meanwhile you go into a shop taking car of oldtimers and youngtimers and you still get to see the actual proper mechanics, who can troubleshoot and fix only what's necessary.
That post about the dishwasher hits home because I bought that same dishwasher recently and have had the same reaction.
After reading it, I was parsing why I don't return it, and remembered that the other options in our area had their own problems. But now I'm wanting to reconsider.
This is not a new phenomenon. Back in the late 90s, Virgin Interactive released my all time favourite game: Subspace. I bought the boxed edition. Not long after, they shut down their servers leaving a lot of people disappointed.
The community stepped up and started running their own servers. Eventually the game client proper was also rewritten (by one of the guys who would go on to create Kazaa and Skype).
I don't think anyone expects companies to keep servers running for free forever. But if a community steps up, the IP holders should let it.
The community can't help every game unfortunately. Having a proper end-of-life plan from the start would solve that particular issue (Either by having documentation to keep the game alive, or a clearly stated expiration date, depending on games being sold as goods or services.)
i bought GTAV and some assassin's creed. I dont want to play, i just like to roam around the virtual world to relax. But i can't relax anymore because every time they launch they need to download 1 full day of updates that i dont need.
It's actually relaxing to just drive around with different cars into the sunset, turn the radio on and occasionally overrun some pedestrians.
I knew I can't be the only one finding it relaxing, yet the anxiety before starting the game if I can play it or not because of yet another update is really a downturn.
I have lots of games on steam (epic and Gog) too. I fear death of these platforms or removal or games that I 'own' already. I only recently started buying games, even bought the games out of guilt that I previously played pirated.
I think best is to buy a game from these platforms, and as a permanent backup, download a pirated copy of that game.
I worry about the future of Steam if Gabe Newell retires. He seems to be one of the few people that understands how and why piracy exists, and how to build a platform that consumers trust. Everywhere else you look in the gaming industry, companies abuse the trust they're granted and run over their consumers.
I'm sure Gabe and Valve as a whole have been pressured countless times to provide stronger DRM and guarantees to game publishers, and it's legitimately incredible they haven't bent. But I fear Valve is one leadership change away from devolving into what we see all over the industry - another shitty company treating their own customers like adversaries.
Don’t many of them still phone home to fetch your player data when you log in etc. often when the servers go down even if you they’re not core to the experience no one thought to make a “offline” mode work
I run my GOG games in a networkless namespace (only loopback available) for pretty much that reason, and I've yet to encounter the first game that has in-game issues about it. The worst result I've seen is that changelogs or devlogs don't render.
Phoning home isn’t wrong. Ideally in the case of the crew, if the management had an ounce of brains they would have got a couple of devs to patch that code such that it wouldn’t make the game inoperable even though the servers don’t respond. But then some idiot executive might have opposed that patch saying we cannot remove “DRM Protection” from our properties. The problem here is that company executives and leadership, especially in outfits like Ubisoft, have no vision no skill. They are just MBA grifters who are milking brands and pretending they are looking out for the shareholders. These parasites would simply move from company to company, spreading their poison everywhere. And now there is crazy talk of forcing code to be open source. Absolute madness.
Gog library is very limited. Lots of games are steam only. Pirated copies are a blessing. I haven't used those in very long time but I will though whenever I felt I am about to loose my bought copies.
Steam has had a long life and will probably be here for very long from now but only for a limited time.
What people keep failing to understand about Stop Killing Games is that the proposal is intentionally vague and doesn't fully specify its demands. The intent is to open a conversation, not think through every corner case.
Of course, the logical minds here will want to tear it apart and analyze it from every direction, but don't forget that it still needs to be "transformed" into an actual non-vague version.
Part of me worries it'll get transformed into some onerous GDPR-style law that just adds a new annoying banner when you install a game that warns you that you accept whatever end of life plan the game has, which no one will read...
Contrary to popular belief, the EU organs are able to learn. About half a year ago, I read statements of members which, if one would translate the political jargon, would amount to: “We haven’t foreseen such a blatant misuse of the law. These banners should never have happened and we would not have dreamed that corporations would shift the burden to the user. We are, in fact, quite furious about the whole thing.”
Are you saying that if some person is making a mistake, is angry about making the mistake at all, that this person will just happily do the mistake again because being angry about one’s own mistake is such a beautiful state of mind?
I am unsure of how your mental model of ‘error correction’ is working without starting at the point of recognising an error in the first place - just deliberately ignoring for a moment whatever you emotionally might attach to it.
I would say the just checked the fist step with bravery by openly admitting the mistake.
Fair enough, getting mad is maybe the first step. Whenever person A tries to influence person B to act a certain way, and it backfires spectacularly, person A may be initially angry before realizing the blame is their own.
Stop killings games is reasonable, but why can’t “you” stop demanding free labour? This whole thing is categorisation and labelling issue. The terms of transaction must be made clear with as big and bold letters as possible. Game devs should be free to create and sell games as they wish provided the terms of transaction are clear. If they don’t want to sell server binaries or open source code, then it is crazy to force them to do so.
Platforms can encourage games which have a clear sunset plan over those that don’t. Eventually the market should come up with viable solutions rather than a law made by untrained people over what and how software should be created.
From what I’ve been seeing lately: “If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing.”
I holeheartedly agree with it. I used to have a Netflix subscription until about 3 years ago. Then, the quantity and quality of content got so bad, I’ve reverted back to a trusty radarr + sonarr + BitTorrent solution.
Not only it’s faster to have it all hosted locally, but I also don’t go through mindless binge watching as the only content available is that I’ve previously willingly tag it for download.
Now, the only content I pay is when I go to the cinema sometimes when a movie really seems worth it.
Yet, when buying WAS owning (when physical copies of games were prevalent), it didn't stop pirating. Quite the opposite.
You can have your own moral compass. But most people who pirated games didn't do that out of spite. They didn't do that to protest against game-as-a-service or microtransaction or whatever "unethical" practices that the industry adopted.
I mostly play solo games. I "obtain" a DRM-free copy of every game I own and put them in a private S3 for posterity. Just like I inherited a massive collection of SciFi books from my dad, I hope to pass everything I enjoyed to my kids, if I ever have some.
Out of the frying pan (DRM-free), into the fire (S3)? Would your dad’s book collection have passed as easily to you if its existence was dependent on paying a monthly bill to a bookstore that can’t be completely trusted?
S3 is my go-to hoarder system now too. I trust that AWS can provide more resilient storage than I can. How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
One thing I would suggest is using local encryption of anything you store in AWS. Plausible deniability is useful for all parties involved.
> How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
Excluding power outages that are out of my control, during which I couldn't do any work anyway, I've had practically zero downtime of my homelab services in the many years I've been running them. Even the dozen hard drives in my NAS with several years of power on time have given me zero issues. I know that I've been lucky, and according to SnapRAID the probability of one failing in the next year is 82%, but so far I haven't had a failure yet. Even when it does happen, I'm fairly confident that the interruption will be minimal and my data will be safe.
All this is to say that running and managing services yourself doesn't require much effort at all, assuming that you're technically inclined and enjoy tinkering. The idea that cloud services are inherently more robust is a myth.
Most service interruptions happen because of two reasons: large scale distributed systems are very difficult to run and maintain, and the constant churn of large engineering teams introduces many operational risks. Essentially, it's all due to complexities of scale. These are not problems that a machine in a closet serving a few users will ever have, especially if you're smart about choosing simple and robust technology.
Anything you don't own can go black any time regardless of how many 9s they write in the contract. You don't own it, you have a revokeable right of access.
False dichotomy. The only reason your own can go black is some hw/sw failure, a risk which anyone can minimise easily by having copies. Your access of a remote corporate server can go away for 1000 reasons, making you more vulnerable.
Of course it's more complex, like how often that data changes and costs of backups vs subscription price. But I find any argument for cloud products etching towards a "you'll own nothing and be happy" economy.
In the given scenario, it’s not the 9s you need to worry about, it’s the monthly bill. Unless you’ve trained your kids to be sysadmins and they have credentials and a handover plan in place, their dad’s S3 account is going to be the last thing on their mind when dealing with bereavement and estate windup. It would be very easy for the credit card to be frozen, nonpayment alert emails to go unread, and then to miss the 90 day window before AWS deletes everything.
You act like handing them a NAS is any easier. If we're really talking about this far into the future, they'll have to replace the failing hardware themselves, update the software or find replacements, etc.
Also, I hope to still be alive when I hand them the keys to my (non AWS) S3 account. I doubt they'd enjoy those games more at 60 than at, like, 15.
> How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
Nobody cares about the 9s. If Amazon wants to they can render the service inoperable legally, over time. Fortunately, S3 is semi-standardized so it’s ”migratable” in a real sense.
The real issue is getting locked out of your account for any arbitrary reason. This happens a lot with big tech and it can be impossible to get help by a human. That’s what scares me the most but more so with Google than Amazon (at the moment).
S3 is a generic term for a cloud storage everywhere. Idk about proper terms, I always called Google Cloud Storage or Backblaze or any other products using S3 protocol as "S3". It all works the same
I don't know. Me and my colleagues call "S3" every storage service that provides an AWS S3 API. I think the official name for the product I buy from my cloud provider (Scaleway) is "Object Storage".
I know it's fashionable in America to not enjoy any good side of modern life and instead do everything yourself out of sheer paranoia, but this is getting ridiculous.
Also, you would probably gain by (re)reading the guidelines of this website. You could have kept your "laughs" to yourself.
Thinking what you would have any time if something goes wrong eg company bankruptcy, accounting error, being locked out or outright deleted because some anti-fraud triggered something - is what is really ridiculous. No amount of fancy, different laws would help if your data gone the way of Dodo.
> you would probably gain by (re)reading the guidelines of this website
Do you understand what this exactly what you should do yourself?
I do the same. Today I found out that humble bundle also has DRM-free games. There was a post about baba is you today. That game is not available on GOG but it is available on humble bundle.
If you didn’t know about itch.io the creator of Baba is You publishes all their games there (ones not even on Steam too), you can get DRM free copies there.
there are alot of drm free games released on steam. you can check this in advance by looking up the depots on steamdb and if the steamworks api files are included.
Not OP, but since Diablo3 and its server issues that often locked my out of what's supposed to be a single-player game, I absolutely refuse to buy online-only-single player games. And anything from Blizzard.
If I can't obtain a DRM-free copy of a game I already paid for, I'll seek "alternative ways". I mostly play indie games though, and I haven't had much trouble with my archiving endeavors.
At least in Germany this seems to be based on a combination of market incentives, case law and “I’ll know it when I see it”. I believe theoretically, a govermnent agency could just decide to argue that e.g. Microsoft Word qualifies as a game. This would mean that it couldn’t be advertised or sold over-the-counter anymore, until Microsoft gets an age rating for it. There doesn’t seem to be an explicit legal definition, but the usual criteria are something like
– it’s intended for entertainment
– it isn’t intended for productive use.
In practise, publishers must get an age rating or stores can’t have the game on the floor and may only sell it to adults, so it’s kind of up to the publisher. You could probably just tie a preservation responsibility to that.
But really, all software should be preserved, so the distinction is kind of pointless anyway.
Also, what should be the regulation on “service portal” softwares? Where the functionality is inherently the server side service rendered and the software is just a remote control, some might argue their games qualify under that category to shirk responsibility, e.g. Roblox
It doesn't have to be only about video games. I'm hoping it's gonna be about all software and all software vendors will be obligated to leave their software in working condition after they sunset it. The best take on this I read is that companies must prepare a way to transfer the product to the community after they no longer find it profitable. And that would be wonderful for all products. Not just software.
I don't understand the idea that imposing some sort of infinite future obligation on an organization that can be easily made to not exist can possibly be viable.
Frankly I think this whole "movement" is kinda dumb and deeply misguided.
It’s not that hard to just publish your stuff when you’re done with it. I guess you could put it in escrow for, say, 10 years, in case you decide to do something with it later.
Almost all games include large amounts of licensed code. Without the source to that what good does having the source for the game matter? Or the server?
The licensing agreements just need to change accordingly such that dependencies will be available for preservation efforts. Laws can just make things happen. If you don’t want to participate in the market under these conditions, tough luck. Someone else will. There’s still plenty of room to make money from software.
It's not infinite. It's just obligation for the end of life. It's not that far from obligations for the real-world businesses to clean up after themselves when they finish operation.
What's dumb is that now businesses can infinitely sit on a piece of real estate they no longer use, at no cost to them. If that was real estate not IP they would at least have to pay property tax on it.
It's kind of curious that businesses don't pay property taxes on IP, like at all. That might have really improved the ecosystem.
I wonder if the author sees the dichotomy of the title, while preserving games for a platform that can choose to lock you out at their discretion.
That aside it's surprising to hear about the features-behind-an-app behaviour from Bosch, they've normally been a trusted name in appliances for a long time and it seems even that is no longer going to be true.
They seem to be old Mac games. Old Macs are already being emulated and out of Apple's reach of you own an old copy of the OS. You can play these games forever even if Apple or the game makers go out of business.
A company runs an online game. The actual online infrastructure is a bunch of different services that are held together with string. They have licenced some propriatry database. The studio runs out of money and lays off all the staff.
The Stop Killing Games website's FAQ does specifically mention this scenario:
>For existing video games, it's possible that some being sold cannot have an "end of life" plan as they were created with necessary software that the publisher doesn't have permission to redistribute. Games like these would need to be either retired or grandfathered in before new law went into effect. For the European Citizens' Initiative in particular, even if passed, its effects would not be retroactive. So while it may not be possible to prevent some existing games from being destroyed, if the law were to change, future games could be designed with "end of life" plans and stop this trend.
That is just not going to happen. Sweeping regulations that govern how games will be designed and created will just mean no game is made or sold in that market. Or this whole thing will be circumvented using malicious compliance. So end of life plan just means your client works but it stops being a playable game.
Categorisation, maybe like even how cigarettes are sold, with big warnings and steam made to add a filter that doesn’t show games with no eol support will go a long way in the market coming up with solutions than just legislation forcing creators to make games in one way.
So does that mean that games are not allowed to use proprietary technologies in their backends anymore? That seems like a strange restriction to apply only to games.
Sure they can use proprietary technology in their backend. They just need permission to redistribute it, like is currently the case with any proprietary technology used by the client.
Alternatively they can use proprietary technology in the backend without permission to redistribute, so long as it is replaced before support is ended.
They are allowed to use that. There just needs to be a way for that proprietary technology to be bought and used on a backend by a user if the company deems providing the backend to be costly to continue. That's my understanding
> neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.
The game should remain playable, even if via LAN only. How that is accomplished is the responsibility of the studio, not the player - maybe they should think twice before licensing proprietary components that players cannot run themselves.
If the company fails to do this, they are effectively committing theft, and should be punished accordingly by the law. If studio execs think this it's an unreasonable thing to do, then they're free to not release their games to the public and keep their proprietary services to themselves.
It's these extreme implications why I, as a gamer and software dev, haven't signed the initiative. A lot of these things are just not feasible. And it'll be so much harder on the indie devs than on the Bungie/Blizzards.
I'm afraid if this is pushed through, the studios will just switch all online experiences to be fully subscription based. No more purchasing the game, you just pay for a month of the experience.
As a software developer do you genuinely believe that it is harder for indie game developers to build online infrastructure and pay for its hosting costs rather than build some LAN feature into the game, or to package local server binaries into the game as it was done just a few decades ago?
Most indie games I've play don't even run their own online infrastructure because of costs. Why bother, when you can just use a storefront's matchmaking for free? And storefronts provide it as a means of soft lock-in. For example one of my favorites, Deep Rock Galatic, doesn't have crossplay between the Steam PC version and the Xbox PC store version of the game.
And there's already software to emulate Steam's matchmaking because it's so common.
Similarly to car manufacturers - even if you're going out of business you can't just say "not more parts" - you have to supply them for 10-15 years. In most countries if you're not willing to continue producing parts you have to transfer IP and tooling to someone who will.
2 If you sell a online game you need to release the a server, not the source code but binarties, yes I know it is more work, but also lazy people were complaining that adding the mandatory "Unsubscribe" button in email is too much work or even impossible but they eventually do it and nobody dares today to defend that this rule was bad
3 make your game/software work offline, this entire thing was started because a greedy company killed a game that also had a single player mode. So if I bought Minecraft to play mostly single player I will be super pissed if Microsoft kills it because they were really special bastards that decided to force the Microsoft login to let me play the game. When they will abandon the game they need to make a final update and disable the online requirement.
4 The game will not be sold but will be "rended for N years", the customer knows what to expect and the developer is forced to keep the game working for N years from last purchase or refund the users. So if you launch soem AAA battle royale shit and it fails you refund your customers if you don't wana keep the servers running.
5 if all above is too much work then do not sell in EU or whatever USA state is demanding that you will not brick your sold software or hardware when you stop your servers because reasons.
I am much more sympathetic to the concerns about classic appliances becoming IOT slop, GNU, and stuff like right-to-repair, as these concern expensive, nearly non-negotiable, things you have to interact with.
But I honestly just don't care about video games. If a game company pisses me off, I'm just gonna not play it, and opt for one of the thousands of other games that came out this year. This is needless regulation, and will probably be counterproductive to your interests in the long run.
Not only that, this is such a small problem in the grand scale of things, that I don't know why we're giving it breath. Law makers have far more important things to concern themselves with. This feels like a South Park parody of hand-wringing nerds crying about video games because they have nothing else worthwhile in their life.
I think the bulk of this is kind of a silly semantic argument
"After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'"
With all the Terms of Service, you rarely actually "own" a piece of software. If all the "Buy" buttons were replaced with "Lease License" buttons - would that really change everything..? everyone would suddenly stop complaining？ I doubt it
B/c the core issue is people/consumers feel entitled to relive childhood experiences. But just like you don't have some inaliable right to go see Terminator in theaters because you did it once as a kid. I don't see why you have a right to emulate and replay a game. You don't own a right to enjoy other people's work. If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right. They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.
I think it's easier to think of the mortality when it's not a big mega corporation and think of it as a singular person's creation and you as a passive consumer asserting your rights to what they made and how they should share it
The secondary issue of "owned" and "leased" being not clearly labeled.. I think is an issue. You should know a priori what you're getting in to - and at the moment it's really unclear at times (ex the washing machine example)
I think movies are a great example why stopkillinggames matters so much: If you bought a copy of Terminator on VHS or DVD or Blu-ray, you can still watch that movie today, tomorrow, or whenever you want. And of course you can rent a movie theater to watch that movie if you like. Even if everyone who ever worked on the movie is gone and the distribution company goes bankrupt or the director decides that making this film was a mistake and burns all the original film material, you can still watch the copy you bought, because you own that copy.
Now if however you bought a physical copy of "The Crew", which is a racing game with a nice single player mode, you can't play that game anymore today. Just because the publisher decided it's time to pull the plug, and no one who bought a copy of this game gets to enjoy it any longer in any form whatsoever. This piece of art is destroyed now, please move along, and don't forget to "buy" one of our other games that will probably be available for a couple more years until we pull the plug again thank you very much.
Game publishers are destroying works of art, stopkillinggames wants to preserve these works of art, and personally I'm on the side of people who want to preserve art.
> And of course you can rent a movie theater to watch that movie if you like.
In the UK at least, not that exact one on that disc, because you may own the disc but not the rights (a loicence if you will!) for public display of the content.
Whether a movie theater with only you sitting in it counts as "public" sounds like an open question (in the government's own words "What amounts to a public space is a question of fact and only a court can make definitive pronouncements about this"), but I suspect the theatre wouldn't be keen on chancing it.
Words mean something and the meaning matters. If you buy a lawnmower from me and I come around later claiming you were only renting it, you would justifiably tell me to piss off. That this was ever allowed to pass in the digital world is a shame.
It would be more honest, although giving users a notification that you're about to screw them is obviously not very good - mainly because in practice, what will happen is they'll say "don't worry, we only put in that warning for legal reasons. We won't actually screw you" for the few years before they screw you.
Also known as "please pay attention when kickstarter says this is a crowdfunding system and not a preorder system".
I agree with you that it's a silly semantic argument. I would not be satisfied by replacing all the "buy" button by "rent". But I vehemently disagree with everything else you say:
> the core issue is people/consumers feel entitled to relive childhood experiences
> You don't own a right to enjoy other people's work
> If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right
I do, absolutely, think I am entitled to this. Why not? Do you really think it is a good thing that people can make something valuable, share it with people in a way they find moving, and then destroy it? Do you think it's a good thing when people burn books?
I feel like you are appealing to the way things are ("it's their right") and not thinking at all about how things should be. Why should it be their right? What if we changed the laws so that they didn't have that right? That doesn't mean obliterating intellectual property, it just means that for this fake pseudo-property we change the already-artificial rules very slightly to make society better. Why not?
There are countless cases of historical figures burning their unfinished works before their death. It's absolutely their right. I find it grotesque to feel you have a right to other people's work. You have don't nothing for them. They owe you nothing. You're just a faceless/nameless consumer that they don't know - who only cares about your own pleasure and not giving anything
> What if we changed the laws so that they didn't have that right?
I think it doesn't solve anything ultimately. It just makes things worse and more inconvenient. For instance piracy just made everything a SaaS where the code isn't even accessible and is on a server behind an API. If everyone can own and copy games, then business models will just shift to where nobody ever sells games and everyone just has to stream through some online service. Everyone will lose out
Unfinished works are a slightly different matter. I still disagree by and large with destroying them, but I can see the argument for it, especially when it is the explicit wish of the author.
Published works are different: you released it, why? People publish art precisely so that it can be enjoyed by others. Your argument as stated seems to naively imply that if I write a book and decide later I'm embarrassed by it, I should be able to remotely destroy all the copies. That's probably an unfair reading and not what you meant, but there is nothing in your argument that rules it out.
Sharing a creative work is a reciprocal act. The consumer (who usually pays for it, by the way) gets pleasure in enjoying the work, and the creator gets pleasure from their reputation and from feeling like they made something important. It is normal and healthy for both sides of that interaction to feel like they are a holistic part of the work. Why do you think so many people form communities around the kind of art they like? Bands are nothing if they have no fans, artists are nothing if they have no following.
To just dismiss this as a nameless/faceless consumer is honestly not even offensive, I just don't believe you.
it's a nice argument. I mean it sincerely and it has changed my mind some
But
"It is normal and healthy for both sides of that interaction to feel like they are a holistic part of the work."
This is just a bit ridiculous ... You person is creating and investing effort in to it and one is not. And the creator should dictate the terms under which he wishes to share his work.
To follow your musical example. If a musican wants to do a performance once and not leave a record, why should he not?
The audience isn't "part of the work" and thereby granted rights to a copy or to listen to it later
> historical figures burning their unfinished works before their death
> unfinished
Do you not see the difference between this and what is being discussed?
No one is saying that game studios have to release everything they are working on as open source from the moment they start writing code. They are saying that once a game is published and sold on the market, it needs to remain usable for as long as the actual hardware to run it is usable.
> I think the bulk of this is kind of a silly semantic argument
> "After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'"
> With all the Terms of Service, you rarely actually "own" a piece of software. If all the "Buy" buttons were replaced with "Lease License" buttons - would everyone suddenly stop complain？ I doubt it
That's not what the campaign is pushing for, the campaign is pushing for not allowing such things in the terms of service in the first place, within reason. The simplest way we can explain it is if you're paying for a subscription (i.e. MMOs) then the current behavior is fine. If you're paying a one-time fee for a game that depends on server somewhere to even play the game, then the publishers would be required to make end-of-life plans so the server isn't required to continue playing, even if in a limited state. I.e. all the single player games that require online connections because publishers are pushing for single-player microtransactions now.
The campaign aims to stop publishers from adding unnecessary dependencies that can shut down the games. This would stop for example publishers from killing a game when releasing a sequel to the same game, forcing users to repurchase what is essentially the same game. The Crew is a good example of this (and what started the campaign in the first place), other examples are sports games and other games like CoD that get yearly releases and services for older versions get killed arbitrarily.
> They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.
The law and society decides that, game publishers want to of course control things end-to-end and rent-seek instead of sell, because having an eternal source of revenue is much more profitable for them, those have been established by the rest of society to be predatory. No consumer should be happy that adobe does subscriptions only, no consumer should be happy that apple controls their ecosystem end-to-end to the point that they get a cut of all monetary transactions in their system. Gamers already see similar behavior with Sony and Nintendo on the hardware side, and EA, Warner, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. are pushing things further on the software side. This campaign is meant to be a push-back from such behavior. There used to be a time where charging money for horse armor was a scandal, we'll never go back to those times, but most gamers agree that gaming has gone too far in nickel-and-diming the consumer, so this a pushback to at least not have publishers kill games because of their greed.
The law already restricts software sales in many ways, there's many cases of mass-refunds because software is sold with deceptive practices, or when they do anti-competitive shit like forced bundling or market dominance abuse.
> If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right. They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.
This is the thing people should learn to accept - and take on the responsibility to refuse to engage with cultural performances that are artificially gatekept.
I did buy a number of films/series on Amazon, but the moment Jeff decides to pull the rug, I will absolutely pirate them without the slightest feeling of guilt. I don't play video games, so thankfully I'm not at the mercy of those particular sharks. But when it comes to buying ebooks on Amazon, I removed the DRM on every single one of them when I bought them. Since Amazon has moved to stop download via USB, I've simply stopped buying any drm-infested ebooks from them. I'll buy them off kobo or I'll simply not have them at all.
Seriously: why? If you think this practice is wrong, and you wouldn't participate in it, and you think voting with your wallet isn't utterly futile (i.e. it would cause some companies to change their behaviour) then why is individual, atomised action the only legitimate one? Why is it not legitimate to make a change in the law, as a collective?
In the first paragraph I thought you were on to something. You don't like their terms, don't engage
But you're still engaging by pirating and going against their terms. Jeff spent a ton of money making the TV show. He chooses who gets to see it and in what way. I'm not going to shed a tear for Jeff, but I find this sort of weaksauce to then pirate it..
How about if the license is fine, but you don't like their price? Is it okay then too?
Wallet voting tends to vote for total crap. Statutory warranty exists for that exact purpose, and you can't sell a car if you're not supplying spare parts.
> But just like you don't have some inaliable right to go see Terminator in theaters because you did it once as a kid. I don't see why you have a right to emulate and replay a game.
What? You do have the right to set up a theater and watch Terminator in it. And you can even use the old DVD and an old DVD player to do it. There's no law against that.
There shouldn't be a law against letting you play a game on whatever hardware can play it, provided you have the physical game available to you
So in your ideal world the only way software can be distributed is in a way where it can be reused anywhere - in ways that maybe don't even exist at the moment
This doesn't really solve anything . It just ends up promoting SaaS. Where you never own the game at all and don't have access to any part of it. You only rent access to a server where the software resides and runs (ex Google's failed game streaming service)
> I bought a Bosch 500 series because our old one broke, and we needed one quick.
Slightly OT (or maybe not) older dishwashers are usually not very hard to fix (depending on the problem). My dishwasher is over ten years old. The pump broke: I replaced it. It was easy and cheap (EUR 60).
It wasn't even the pump that was broken, just the heating resistance attached to it that had fried. You can replace only the resistor if you're skilled enough to reattach a new one. I couldn't: removing the old one was easy, but I couldn't put it back in place so I bought a whole pump instead.
Likewise, my laundry machine is over 15 years old. I just replaced the carbon brushes: they last for something like 10 years and cost less than EUR 10 a pair.
I don't think I will buy a new machine any time soon, or if I have to, it will be a used one.
When I was a 70's kid growing up into the 1980's, repair shops were all over the place, for any kind of electronics.
Then suddenly we got into this throw away garbage culture at the slightest sign something stops working.
The only way back is rebooting the system, or having governments step in.
The funny thing is that YouTube has ushered in arguably the golden age of DIY. If your appliance fails you can very often fix it fairly easily. Plus, you get the satisfaction of fixing it yourself and you get to strut proudly as you tell your wife that the dishwasher is working again.
Some of them even lasted in the 1990s (in the US). I had a CRT monitor blow a capacitor in the mid 1990s and took it to a repair shop. It cost me something like $100 to have it fixed, but that was still way cheaper than buying a new monitor. But yeah, after that everything became throw-away because 1) the cost of someone spending a half hour or so figuring out what the problem was and then repairing it would be more than the item cost to replace 2) greater and greater miniaturization meant that discrete components that could be repaired were few and instead it was just a "black box".
That's a bit of a myth. Lots of electronics can still be repaired just fine. Check out some electronics repair channels on youtube. I've repaired plenty of electronics myself.
Replacing instead of repairing really is mostly a cultural thing.
Appliances got so cheap there was no more value to extract by repair shops so they shut down. Government could step in with 200% tax on new appliances and the repair ecosystem would regrow, but pretty much no one wants that.
Same thing, thankfully to a lesser extent so far, for cars. Everybody's applauding the move to lots of tech and EV batteries for car but meanwhile my german car from 1988 is still running strong.
People shall complain that it's a gas guzzler but 38 years old is easily twice the lifetime any EV shall ever see. I don't see that taken into account much when talking about the lifetime CO2 of cars.
I have nothing against EVs: tried a Porsche Taycan and loved it and someone I know has a little BYD (chinese) SUV and it's very fine car for its price.
But sadly EVs seems to rhyme with "we can (and shall) remotely modify your car's software" and that's very close from "we'll remotely disable your car for good at some point in the future, when we consider it's time to upgrade to a new model".
As for car mechanics: those at official dealerships seems mostly clueless. They read the diagnostic and the diagnostic says: "Replace the entire braking system for the front right wheel". While if you go to a proper, old-school, mechanic, the dude shall happily find what's wrong and replace only what's necessary.
Gearbox noisy? Under warranty? Leave us the car for a few days and we'll replace the entire gearbox. Been there with my daily.
They're not really car mechanics anymore: they just swap complete parts, following procedures written by the car engineers.
Meanwhile you go into a shop taking car of oldtimers and youngtimers and you still get to see the actual proper mechanics, who can troubleshoot and fix only what's necessary.
What reason is there to believe an EV couldn’t last 40 or more years? There’s nothing inherent in the technology that makes that certain.
EVs don't need to be spyware on wheels, just take an ancient ICE car and convert it to an EV, with spare EV parts and some open source electronics.
https://openinverter.org/wiki/ZombieVerter_VCU https://youtube.com/@evbmw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43898280
Same with ovens. Stopped heating? Check the heating coil either at the back, top, or bottom of the oven.
You won't even need to pull the oven out, chances are you can unscrew it right there from within.
£20 replacement coil for 10 minutes of work, or pay for a whole new oven?
(The retailer assured us over the phone that they could not repair it, but had great discounts on new ovens...)
That post about the dishwasher hits home because I bought that same dishwasher recently and have had the same reaction.
After reading it, I was parsing why I don't return it, and remembered that the other options in our area had their own problems. But now I'm wanting to reconsider.
shhhhush, corporates hate this trick :P
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This is not a new phenomenon. Back in the late 90s, Virgin Interactive released my all time favourite game: Subspace. I bought the boxed edition. Not long after, they shut down their servers leaving a lot of people disappointed.
The community stepped up and started running their own servers. Eventually the game client proper was also rewritten (by one of the guys who would go on to create Kazaa and Skype).
I don't think anyone expects companies to keep servers running for free forever. But if a community steps up, the IP holders should let it.
The community can't help every game unfortunately. Having a proper end-of-life plan from the start would solve that particular issue (Either by having documentation to keep the game alive, or a clearly stated expiration date, depending on games being sold as goods or services.)
i bought GTAV and some assassin's creed. I dont want to play, i just like to roam around the virtual world to relax. But i can't relax anymore because every time they launch they need to download 1 full day of updates that i dont need.
The only way to play these games are through the tireless work of the Amelie-clad repackers.
I own these games, but I still use the repacked games instead just because they allow me to actually play it fully offline
You don't have to wait if you pirate it. A little ironically, Gabe Newell's quote fits there nicely:
> Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
same here.
It's actually relaxing to just drive around with different cars into the sunset, turn the radio on and occasionally overrun some pedestrians.
I knew I can't be the only one finding it relaxing, yet the anxiety before starting the game if I can play it or not because of yet another update is really a downturn.
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I have lots of games on steam (epic and Gog) too. I fear death of these platforms or removal or games that I 'own' already. I only recently started buying games, even bought the games out of guilt that I previously played pirated.
I think best is to buy a game from these platforms, and as a permanent backup, download a pirated copy of that game.
I worry about the future of Steam if Gabe Newell retires. He seems to be one of the few people that understands how and why piracy exists, and how to build a platform that consumers trust. Everywhere else you look in the gaming industry, companies abuse the trust they're granted and run over their consumers.
I'm sure Gabe and Valve as a whole have been pressured countless times to provide stronger DRM and guarantees to game publishers, and it's legitimately incredible they haven't bent. But I fear Valve is one leadership change away from devolving into what we see all over the industry - another shitty company treating their own customers like adversaries.
On GOG, you can just download the standalone installers, they are all DRM-free. That's why I prefer buying there.
Don’t many of them still phone home to fetch your player data when you log in etc. often when the servers go down even if you they’re not core to the experience no one thought to make a “offline” mode work
I run my GOG games in a networkless namespace (only loopback available) for pretty much that reason, and I've yet to encounter the first game that has in-game issues about it. The worst result I've seen is that changelogs or devlogs don't render.
Phoning home isn’t wrong. Ideally in the case of the crew, if the management had an ounce of brains they would have got a couple of devs to patch that code such that it wouldn’t make the game inoperable even though the servers don’t respond. But then some idiot executive might have opposed that patch saying we cannot remove “DRM Protection” from our properties. The problem here is that company executives and leadership, especially in outfits like Ubisoft, have no vision no skill. They are just MBA grifters who are milking brands and pretending they are looking out for the shareholders. These parasites would simply move from company to company, spreading their poison everywhere. And now there is crazy talk of forcing code to be open source. Absolute madness.
Most games are still single player.
It's the big predatory names that tend to go multiplayer first, or require players being online even for single player.
Fuck you rockstar btw, for lying on the steam page that a rockstar club account isn't required for max payne 3 single player.
Gog library is very limited. Lots of games are steam only. Pirated copies are a blessing. I haven't used those in very long time but I will though whenever I felt I am about to loose my bought copies.
Steam has had a long life and will probably be here for very long from now but only for a limited time.
They can’t release source code because 70% of it is stolen from previous employers or open source
Or because open source is not an obligation.
Or licensed by a third party and they does not want their code to become public knowledge.
...or just, y'know, embarrassing.
What people keep failing to understand about Stop Killing Games is that the proposal is intentionally vague and doesn't fully specify its demands. The intent is to open a conversation, not think through every corner case.
Of course, the logical minds here will want to tear it apart and analyze it from every direction, but don't forget that it still needs to be "transformed" into an actual non-vague version.
Part of me worries it'll get transformed into some onerous GDPR-style law that just adds a new annoying banner when you install a game that warns you that you accept whatever end of life plan the game has, which no one will read...
I think we won’t have to endure that again.
Contrary to popular belief, the EU organs are able to learn. About half a year ago, I read statements of members which, if one would translate the political jargon, would amount to: “We haven’t foreseen such a blatant misuse of the law. These banners should never have happened and we would not have dreamed that corporations would shift the burden to the user. We are, in fact, quite furious about the whole thing.”
Interesting. But I don't think they have learned much if they think being really angry about it will help.
Are you saying that if some person is making a mistake, is angry about making the mistake at all, that this person will just happily do the mistake again because being angry about one’s own mistake is such a beautiful state of mind?
I am unsure of how your mental model of ‘error correction’ is working without starting at the point of recognising an error in the first place - just deliberately ignoring for a moment whatever you emotionally might attach to it.
I would say the just checked the fist step with bravery by openly admitting the mistake.
Fair enough, getting mad is maybe the first step. Whenever person A tries to influence person B to act a certain way, and it backfires spectacularly, person A may be initially angry before realizing the blame is their own.
Stop killings games is reasonable, but why can’t “you” stop demanding free labour? This whole thing is categorisation and labelling issue. The terms of transaction must be made clear with as big and bold letters as possible. Game devs should be free to create and sell games as they wish provided the terms of transaction are clear. If they don’t want to sell server binaries or open source code, then it is crazy to force them to do so.
Platforms can encourage games which have a clear sunset plan over those that don’t. Eventually the market should come up with viable solutions rather than a law made by untrained people over what and how software should be created.
From what I’ve been seeing lately: “If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing.”
I holeheartedly agree with it. I used to have a Netflix subscription until about 3 years ago. Then, the quantity and quality of content got so bad, I’ve reverted back to a trusty radarr + sonarr + BitTorrent solution.
Not only it’s faster to have it all hosted locally, but I also don’t go through mindless binge watching as the only content available is that I’ve previously willingly tag it for download.
Now, the only content I pay is when I go to the cinema sometimes when a movie really seems worth it.
Yet, when buying WAS owning (when physical copies of games were prevalent), it didn't stop pirating. Quite the opposite.
You can have your own moral compass. But most people who pirated games didn't do that out of spite. They didn't do that to protest against game-as-a-service or microtransaction or whatever "unethical" practices that the industry adopted.
I mostly play solo games. I "obtain" a DRM-free copy of every game I own and put them in a private S3 for posterity. Just like I inherited a massive collection of SciFi books from my dad, I hope to pass everything I enjoyed to my kids, if I ever have some.
Out of the frying pan (DRM-free), into the fire (S3)? Would your dad’s book collection have passed as easily to you if its existence was dependent on paying a monthly bill to a bookstore that can’t be completely trusted?
S3 is my go-to hoarder system now too. I trust that AWS can provide more resilient storage than I can. How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
One thing I would suggest is using local encryption of anything you store in AWS. Plausible deniability is useful for all parties involved.
> How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
Excluding power outages that are out of my control, during which I couldn't do any work anyway, I've had practically zero downtime of my homelab services in the many years I've been running them. Even the dozen hard drives in my NAS with several years of power on time have given me zero issues. I know that I've been lucky, and according to SnapRAID the probability of one failing in the next year is 82%, but so far I haven't had a failure yet. Even when it does happen, I'm fairly confident that the interruption will be minimal and my data will be safe.
All this is to say that running and managing services yourself doesn't require much effort at all, assuming that you're technically inclined and enjoy tinkering. The idea that cloud services are inherently more robust is a myth.
Most service interruptions happen because of two reasons: large scale distributed systems are very difficult to run and maintain, and the constant churn of large engineering teams introduces many operational risks. Essentially, it's all due to complexities of scale. These are not problems that a machine in a closet serving a few users will ever have, especially if you're smart about choosing simple and robust technology.
Anything you don't own can go black any time regardless of how many 9s they write in the contract. You don't own it, you have a revokeable right of access.
Anything you own can go black at any time too. The question is how likely is it.
False dichotomy. The only reason your own can go black is some hw/sw failure, a risk which anyone can minimise easily by having copies. Your access of a remote corporate server can go away for 1000 reasons, making you more vulnerable.
Of course it's more complex, like how often that data changes and costs of backups vs subscription price. But I find any argument for cloud products etching towards a "you'll own nothing and be happy" economy.
> How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
Far, far better than my residential internet connection, that's for sure.
Of course, I have offsite backup of important stuff in case of fire.
That said, ease of use is likely a lot better with S3 for those who don't like to tinker or have a box sit and hum.
Is this not wildly expensive? Even on s3 glacier the cost per TB month is quite high.
Glacier deep archive costs $0.00099 per gigabyte-month.
Scaleway Glacier Object Storage is at 0.002€/GB/Month, so 2€/TB/Month. You can hardly find cheaper.
In the given scenario, it’s not the 9s you need to worry about, it’s the monthly bill. Unless you’ve trained your kids to be sysadmins and they have credentials and a handover plan in place, their dad’s S3 account is going to be the last thing on their mind when dealing with bereavement and estate windup. It would be very easy for the credit card to be frozen, nonpayment alert emails to go unread, and then to miss the 90 day window before AWS deletes everything.
You act like handing them a NAS is any easier. If we're really talking about this far into the future, they'll have to replace the failing hardware themselves, update the software or find replacements, etc.
Also, I hope to still be alive when I hand them the keys to my (non AWS) S3 account. I doubt they'd enjoy those games more at 60 than at, like, 15.
> How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
Nobody cares about the 9s. If Amazon wants to they can render the service inoperable legally, over time. Fortunately, S3 is semi-standardized so it’s ”migratable” in a real sense.
The real issue is getting locked out of your account for any arbitrary reason. This happens a lot with big tech and it can be impossible to get help by a human. That’s what scares me the most but more so with Google than Amazon (at the moment).
Few things:
1. I'm not going with Amazon, I live in France so I chose a french cloud provider. Laws are a bit different here.
2. I believe whatever could happen to my data, I'll see it coming and have time to move it all.
3. It's dirt cheap, and doesn't require me to manage my own storage.
Is s3 a generic term for cloud storage in France?
S3 is a generic term for a cloud storage everywhere. Idk about proper terms, I always called Google Cloud Storage or Backblaze or any other products using S3 protocol as "S3". It all works the same
I don't know. Me and my colleagues call "S3" every storage service that provides an AWS S3 API. I think the official name for the product I buy from my cloud provider (Scaleway) is "Object Storage".
> I'll see it coming and have time to move it all.
Thanks for the laughs.
I know it's fashionable in America to not enjoy any good side of modern life and instead do everything yourself out of sheer paranoia, but this is getting ridiculous.
Also, you would probably gain by (re)reading the guidelines of this website. You could have kept your "laughs" to yourself.
> fashionable in America
Missed.
> but this is getting ridiculous
Thinking what you would have any time if something goes wrong eg company bankruptcy, accounting error, being locked out or outright deleted because some anti-fraud triggered something - is what is really ridiculous. No amount of fancy, different laws would help if your data gone the way of Dodo.
> you would probably gain by (re)reading the guidelines of this website
Do you understand what this exactly what you should do yourself?
Whenever a game is available on Steam and GOG, I buy the GOG version for that reason. Everything guaranteed to be DRM-free.
I do the same. Today I found out that humble bundle also has DRM-free games. There was a post about baba is you today. That game is not available on GOG but it is available on humble bundle.
If you didn’t know about itch.io the creator of Baba is You publishes all their games there (ones not even on Steam too), you can get DRM free copies there.
there are alot of drm free games released on steam. you can check this in advance by looking up the depots on steamdb and if the steamworks api files are included.
>I "obtain" a DRM-free copy of every game I own and put them in a private S3 for posterity
What do you do for games that don't have "DRM-free copies", such as Denuvo games, or the increasingly large number of online-only singleplayer games?
Not OP, but since Diablo3 and its server issues that often locked my out of what's supposed to be a single-player game, I absolutely refuse to buy online-only-single player games. And anything from Blizzard.
If I can't obtain a DRM-free copy of a game I already paid for, I'll seek "alternative ways". I mostly play indie games though, and I haven't had much trouble with my archiving endeavors.
amazon account ban incoming
Not hosted on Amazon.
Does “videogame” have a specific, legal definition in the EU?
When does software become a videogame?
At least in Germany this seems to be based on a combination of market incentives, case law and “I’ll know it when I see it”. I believe theoretically, a govermnent agency could just decide to argue that e.g. Microsoft Word qualifies as a game. This would mean that it couldn’t be advertised or sold over-the-counter anymore, until Microsoft gets an age rating for it. There doesn’t seem to be an explicit legal definition, but the usual criteria are something like
– it’s intended for entertainment
– it isn’t intended for productive use.
In practise, publishers must get an age rating or stores can’t have the game on the floor and may only sell it to adults, so it’s kind of up to the publisher. You could probably just tie a preservation responsibility to that.
But really, all software should be preserved, so the distinction is kind of pointless anyway.
Also, what should be the regulation on “service portal” softwares? Where the functionality is inherently the server side service rendered and the software is just a remote control, some might argue their games qualify under that category to shirk responsibility, e.g. Roblox
It doesn't have to be only about video games. I'm hoping it's gonna be about all software and all software vendors will be obligated to leave their software in working condition after they sunset it. The best take on this I read is that companies must prepare a way to transfer the product to the community after they no longer find it profitable. And that would be wonderful for all products. Not just software.
I don't understand the idea that imposing some sort of infinite future obligation on an organization that can be easily made to not exist can possibly be viable.
Frankly I think this whole "movement" is kinda dumb and deeply misguided.
It’s not that hard to just publish your stuff when you’re done with it. I guess you could put it in escrow for, say, 10 years, in case you decide to do something with it later.
Almost all games include large amounts of licensed code. Without the source to that what good does having the source for the game matter? Or the server?
The licensing agreements just need to change accordingly such that dependencies will be available for preservation efforts. Laws can just make things happen. If you don’t want to participate in the market under these conditions, tough luck. Someone else will. There’s still plenty of room to make money from software.
It's not infinite. It's just obligation for the end of life. It's not that far from obligations for the real-world businesses to clean up after themselves when they finish operation.
What's dumb is that now businesses can infinitely sit on a piece of real estate they no longer use, at no cost to them. If that was real estate not IP they would at least have to pay property tax on it.
It's kind of curious that businesses don't pay property taxes on IP, like at all. That might have really improved the ecosystem.
I wonder if the author sees the dichotomy of the title, while preserving games for a platform that can choose to lock you out at their discretion.
That aside it's surprising to hear about the features-behind-an-app behaviour from Bosch, they've normally been a trusted name in appliances for a long time and it seems even that is no longer going to be true.
They seem to be old Mac games. Old Macs are already being emulated and out of Apple's reach of you own an old copy of the OS. You can play these games forever even if Apple or the game makers go out of business.
Lots more discussion from 3 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445880
A company runs an online game. The actual online infrastructure is a bunch of different services that are held together with string. They have licenced some propriatry database. The studio runs out of money and lays off all the staff.
What happens?
The Stop Killing Games website's FAQ does specifically mention this scenario:
>For existing video games, it's possible that some being sold cannot have an "end of life" plan as they were created with necessary software that the publisher doesn't have permission to redistribute. Games like these would need to be either retired or grandfathered in before new law went into effect. For the European Citizens' Initiative in particular, even if passed, its effects would not be retroactive. So while it may not be possible to prevent some existing games from being destroyed, if the law were to change, future games could be designed with "end of life" plans and stop this trend.
That is just not going to happen. Sweeping regulations that govern how games will be designed and created will just mean no game is made or sold in that market. Or this whole thing will be circumvented using malicious compliance. So end of life plan just means your client works but it stops being a playable game.
Categorisation, maybe like even how cigarettes are sold, with big warnings and steam made to add a filter that doesn’t show games with no eol support will go a long way in the market coming up with solutions than just legislation forcing creators to make games in one way.
So does that mean that games are not allowed to use proprietary technologies in their backends anymore? That seems like a strange restriction to apply only to games.
Sure they can use proprietary technology in their backend. They just need permission to redistribute it, like is currently the case with any proprietary technology used by the client.
Alternatively they can use proprietary technology in the backend without permission to redistribute, so long as it is replaced before support is ended.
They are allowed to use that. There just needs to be a way for that proprietary technology to be bought and used on a backend by a user if the company deems providing the backend to be costly to continue. That's my understanding
If only the article covered that...
> And some games have online components. Do I expect, for example, Bungie's multiplayer servers to stay up until the end of time? No.
The stop killing games initiative does specifically want to apply to online only games.
No?
> neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
Why do you think that?
It is incredibly clear looking at this FAQ that this intends to apply to online only games. https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
Multiple questions are about online-only games.
You build the EOL plan in advance.
The game should remain playable, even if via LAN only. How that is accomplished is the responsibility of the studio, not the player - maybe they should think twice before licensing proprietary components that players cannot run themselves.
If the company fails to do this, they are effectively committing theft, and should be punished accordingly by the law. If studio execs think this it's an unreasonable thing to do, then they're free to not release their games to the public and keep their proprietary services to themselves.
If the company is bankrupt, who would be charged? Or are you saying that the directors of the company would be criminally liable in this situation?
The game would only be legal to sell if they have the plan ahead of time before the game is on the market.
> Or are you saying that the directors of the company would be criminally liable in this situation?
Well, yes. As in any case of any decisions that result in violation of the law by companies.
It's these extreme implications why I, as a gamer and software dev, haven't signed the initiative. A lot of these things are just not feasible. And it'll be so much harder on the indie devs than on the Bungie/Blizzards.
I'm afraid if this is pushed through, the studios will just switch all online experiences to be fully subscription based. No more purchasing the game, you just pay for a month of the experience.
As a software developer do you genuinely believe that it is harder for indie game developers to build online infrastructure and pay for its hosting costs rather than build some LAN feature into the game, or to package local server binaries into the game as it was done just a few decades ago?
Most indie games I've play don't even run their own online infrastructure because of costs. Why bother, when you can just use a storefront's matchmaking for free? And storefronts provide it as a means of soft lock-in. For example one of my favorites, Deep Rock Galatic, doesn't have crossplay between the Steam PC version and the Xbox PC store version of the game.
And there's already software to emulate Steam's matchmaking because it's so common.
Put everything on github or torrent. Law that forces you to do that trumps any licensing agreements between companies.
Similarly to car manufacturers - even if you're going out of business you can't just say "not more parts" - you have to supply them for 10-15 years. In most countries if you're not willing to continue producing parts you have to transfer IP and tooling to someone who will.
IMHO some ideas
1 do not sell such a game, use a subscription
2 If you sell a online game you need to release the a server, not the source code but binarties, yes I know it is more work, but also lazy people were complaining that adding the mandatory "Unsubscribe" button in email is too much work or even impossible but they eventually do it and nobody dares today to defend that this rule was bad
3 make your game/software work offline, this entire thing was started because a greedy company killed a game that also had a single player mode. So if I bought Minecraft to play mostly single player I will be super pissed if Microsoft kills it because they were really special bastards that decided to force the Microsoft login to let me play the game. When they will abandon the game they need to make a final update and disable the online requirement.
4 The game will not be sold but will be "rended for N years", the customer knows what to expect and the developer is forced to keep the game working for N years from last purchase or refund the users. So if you launch soem AAA battle royale shit and it fails you refund your customers if you don't wana keep the servers running.
5 if all above is too much work then do not sell in EU or whatever USA state is demanding that you will not brick your sold software or hardware when you stop your servers because reasons.
They don't release it unless it also has LAN play option (like they used to before MBA takeover). Otherwise bye bye to jail :)
UK Government already denied the UK petition :(
The original petition died because Parliament dissolved. This is the new one that the UK Parliament has to consider for a debate as of right now.
If you scroll to the bottom of the petition it's already been considered, the consideration was "no".
The current state is at the top. It says "Waiting for 3 days for a debate date".
LibreELEC looks extremely polished
https://archive.org/details/libreelec-raspberry-pi-5
I am much more sympathetic to the concerns about classic appliances becoming IOT slop, GNU, and stuff like right-to-repair, as these concern expensive, nearly non-negotiable, things you have to interact with.
But I honestly just don't care about video games. If a game company pisses me off, I'm just gonna not play it, and opt for one of the thousands of other games that came out this year. This is needless regulation, and will probably be counterproductive to your interests in the long run.
Not only that, this is such a small problem in the grand scale of things, that I don't know why we're giving it breath. Law makers have far more important things to concern themselves with. This feels like a South Park parody of hand-wringing nerds crying about video games because they have nothing else worthwhile in their life.
[dead]
As much as a I like older games for the nostalgia sake, are there any other industries where this is an issue?
I don’t think passing laws is the right thing to do
I think the bulk of this is kind of a silly semantic argument
"After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'"
With all the Terms of Service, you rarely actually "own" a piece of software. If all the "Buy" buttons were replaced with "Lease License" buttons - would that really change everything..? everyone would suddenly stop complaining？ I doubt it
B/c the core issue is people/consumers feel entitled to relive childhood experiences. But just like you don't have some inaliable right to go see Terminator in theaters because you did it once as a kid. I don't see why you have a right to emulate and replay a game. You don't own a right to enjoy other people's work. If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right. They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.
I think it's easier to think of the mortality when it's not a big mega corporation and think of it as a singular person's creation and you as a passive consumer asserting your rights to what they made and how they should share it
The secondary issue of "owned" and "leased" being not clearly labeled.. I think is an issue. You should know a priori what you're getting in to - and at the moment it's really unclear at times (ex the washing machine example)
I think movies are a great example why stopkillinggames matters so much: If you bought a copy of Terminator on VHS or DVD or Blu-ray, you can still watch that movie today, tomorrow, or whenever you want. And of course you can rent a movie theater to watch that movie if you like. Even if everyone who ever worked on the movie is gone and the distribution company goes bankrupt or the director decides that making this film was a mistake and burns all the original film material, you can still watch the copy you bought, because you own that copy.
Now if however you bought a physical copy of "The Crew", which is a racing game with a nice single player mode, you can't play that game anymore today. Just because the publisher decided it's time to pull the plug, and no one who bought a copy of this game gets to enjoy it any longer in any form whatsoever. This piece of art is destroyed now, please move along, and don't forget to "buy" one of our other games that will probably be available for a couple more years until we pull the plug again thank you very much.
Game publishers are destroying works of art, stopkillinggames wants to preserve these works of art, and personally I'm on the side of people who want to preserve art.
> And of course you can rent a movie theater to watch that movie if you like.
In the UK at least, not that exact one on that disc, because you may own the disc but not the rights (a loicence if you will!) for public display of the content.
They even changed the law in 2016 to make it apply to venues that don't charge admission (e.g. staff rooms): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-sectio...
Whether a movie theater with only you sitting in it counts as "public" sounds like an open question (in the government's own words "What amounts to a public space is a question of fact and only a court can make definitive pronouncements about this"), but I suspect the theatre wouldn't be keen on chancing it.
Words mean something and the meaning matters. If you buy a lawnmower from me and I come around later claiming you were only renting it, you would justifiably tell me to piss off. That this was ever allowed to pass in the digital world is a shame.
So you think changing the Buy buttons to Lease License buttons would genuinely solve the author's problems?
It would be more honest, although giving users a notification that you're about to screw them is obviously not very good - mainly because in practice, what will happen is they'll say "don't worry, we only put in that warning for legal reasons. We won't actually screw you" for the few years before they screw you.
Also known as "please pay attention when kickstarter says this is a crowdfunding system and not a preorder system".
Identifying a problem is the first step to solving it.
Changing these buttons to "Rent" would force people to acknowledge what they're getting for their $60 bucks -- effectively a rental.
Once the problem is identified en masse, capitalism can do its work more efficiently.
Maybe they should make the buttons say "Lease" and see how it goes.
Just because something is permitted by legal gymnastics doesn't mean it's not perverse.
I agree with you that it's a silly semantic argument. I would not be satisfied by replacing all the "buy" button by "rent". But I vehemently disagree with everything else you say:
> the core issue is people/consumers feel entitled to relive childhood experiences
> You don't own a right to enjoy other people's work
> If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right
I do, absolutely, think I am entitled to this. Why not? Do you really think it is a good thing that people can make something valuable, share it with people in a way they find moving, and then destroy it? Do you think it's a good thing when people burn books?
I feel like you are appealing to the way things are ("it's their right") and not thinking at all about how things should be. Why should it be their right? What if we changed the laws so that they didn't have that right? That doesn't mean obliterating intellectual property, it just means that for this fake pseudo-property we change the already-artificial rules very slightly to make society better. Why not?
There are countless cases of historical figures burning their unfinished works before their death. It's absolutely their right. I find it grotesque to feel you have a right to other people's work. You have don't nothing for them. They owe you nothing. You're just a faceless/nameless consumer that they don't know - who only cares about your own pleasure and not giving anything
> What if we changed the laws so that they didn't have that right?
I think it doesn't solve anything ultimately. It just makes things worse and more inconvenient. For instance piracy just made everything a SaaS where the code isn't even accessible and is on a server behind an API. If everyone can own and copy games, then business models will just shift to where nobody ever sells games and everyone just has to stream through some online service. Everyone will lose out
Unfinished works are a slightly different matter. I still disagree by and large with destroying them, but I can see the argument for it, especially when it is the explicit wish of the author.
Published works are different: you released it, why? People publish art precisely so that it can be enjoyed by others. Your argument as stated seems to naively imply that if I write a book and decide later I'm embarrassed by it, I should be able to remotely destroy all the copies. That's probably an unfair reading and not what you meant, but there is nothing in your argument that rules it out.
Sharing a creative work is a reciprocal act. The consumer (who usually pays for it, by the way) gets pleasure in enjoying the work, and the creator gets pleasure from their reputation and from feeling like they made something important. It is normal and healthy for both sides of that interaction to feel like they are a holistic part of the work. Why do you think so many people form communities around the kind of art they like? Bands are nothing if they have no fans, artists are nothing if they have no following.
To just dismiss this as a nameless/faceless consumer is honestly not even offensive, I just don't believe you.
it's a nice argument. I mean it sincerely and it has changed my mind some
But
"It is normal and healthy for both sides of that interaction to feel like they are a holistic part of the work."
This is just a bit ridiculous ... You person is creating and investing effort in to it and one is not. And the creator should dictate the terms under which he wishes to share his work.
To follow your musical example. If a musican wants to do a performance once and not leave a record, why should he not?
The audience isn't "part of the work" and thereby granted rights to a copy or to listen to it later
> historical figures burning their unfinished works before their death
> unfinished
Do you not see the difference between this and what is being discussed?
No one is saying that game studios have to release everything they are working on as open source from the moment they start writing code. They are saying that once a game is published and sold on the market, it needs to remain usable for as long as the actual hardware to run it is usable.
I'll take the bait.
> I think the bulk of this is kind of a silly semantic argument
> "After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'"
> With all the Terms of Service, you rarely actually "own" a piece of software. If all the "Buy" buttons were replaced with "Lease License" buttons - would everyone suddenly stop complain？ I doubt it
That's not what the campaign is pushing for, the campaign is pushing for not allowing such things in the terms of service in the first place, within reason. The simplest way we can explain it is if you're paying for a subscription (i.e. MMOs) then the current behavior is fine. If you're paying a one-time fee for a game that depends on server somewhere to even play the game, then the publishers would be required to make end-of-life plans so the server isn't required to continue playing, even if in a limited state. I.e. all the single player games that require online connections because publishers are pushing for single-player microtransactions now.
The campaign aims to stop publishers from adding unnecessary dependencies that can shut down the games. This would stop for example publishers from killing a game when releasing a sequel to the same game, forcing users to repurchase what is essentially the same game. The Crew is a good example of this (and what started the campaign in the first place), other examples are sports games and other games like CoD that get yearly releases and services for older versions get killed arbitrarily.
> They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.
The law and society decides that, game publishers want to of course control things end-to-end and rent-seek instead of sell, because having an eternal source of revenue is much more profitable for them, those have been established by the rest of society to be predatory. No consumer should be happy that adobe does subscriptions only, no consumer should be happy that apple controls their ecosystem end-to-end to the point that they get a cut of all monetary transactions in their system. Gamers already see similar behavior with Sony and Nintendo on the hardware side, and EA, Warner, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. are pushing things further on the software side. This campaign is meant to be a push-back from such behavior. There used to be a time where charging money for horse armor was a scandal, we'll never go back to those times, but most gamers agree that gaming has gone too far in nickel-and-diming the consumer, so this a pushback to at least not have publishers kill games because of their greed.
The law already restricts software sales in many ways, there's many cases of mass-refunds because software is sold with deceptive practices, or when they do anti-competitive shit like forced bundling or market dominance abuse.
> If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right. They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.
This is the thing people should learn to accept - and take on the responsibility to refuse to engage with cultural performances that are artificially gatekept.
I did buy a number of films/series on Amazon, but the moment Jeff decides to pull the rug, I will absolutely pirate them without the slightest feeling of guilt. I don't play video games, so thankfully I'm not at the mercy of those particular sharks. But when it comes to buying ebooks on Amazon, I removed the DRM on every single one of them when I bought them. Since Amazon has moved to stop download via USB, I've simply stopped buying any drm-infested ebooks from them. I'll buy them off kobo or I'll simply not have them at all.
People need to vote with their wallet.
> This is the thing people should learn to accept
> People need to vote with their wallet.
Seriously: why? If you think this practice is wrong, and you wouldn't participate in it, and you think voting with your wallet isn't utterly futile (i.e. it would cause some companies to change their behaviour) then why is individual, atomised action the only legitimate one? Why is it not legitimate to make a change in the law, as a collective?
In the first paragraph I thought you were on to something. You don't like their terms, don't engage
But you're still engaging by pirating and going against their terms. Jeff spent a ton of money making the TV show. He chooses who gets to see it and in what way. I'm not going to shed a tear for Jeff, but I find this sort of weaksauce to then pirate it..
How about if the license is fine, but you don't like their price? Is it okay then too?
You don't get to sell me something and then take it away. In any other sphere of life it would be considered theft.
Wallet voting tends to vote for total crap. Statutory warranty exists for that exact purpose, and you can't sell a car if you're not supplying spare parts.
> But just like you don't have some inaliable right to go see Terminator in theaters because you did it once as a kid. I don't see why you have a right to emulate and replay a game.
What? You do have the right to set up a theater and watch Terminator in it. And you can even use the old DVD and an old DVD player to do it. There's no law against that.
There shouldn't be a law against letting you play a game on whatever hardware can play it, provided you have the physical game available to you
So in your ideal world the only way software can be distributed is in a way where it can be reused anywhere - in ways that maybe don't even exist at the moment
This doesn't really solve anything . It just ends up promoting SaaS. Where you never own the game at all and don't have access to any part of it. You only rent access to a server where the software resides and runs (ex Google's failed game streaming service)
> in ways that maybe don't even exist at the moment
<cough> emulators.