Activision Shuts Down Popular Fan Servers for Legacy Call of Duty Games (arstechnica.com) 33
Activision has sent cease-and-desist letters to two makers of popular fan clients for legacy Call of Duty titles in recent weeks. From a report: The move cuts off access to the many gameplay and quality-of-life improvements brought by these clients and stops what fans say is the only safe way to play these older games without the threat of damaging hacking by opponents. The first victim of Activision's recent efforts was SM2, a major Modern Warfare 2 modding project whose development started over two years ago.
Since then, the modding group has been working on updating that seminal 2009 release with new weapons, in-game perks, a redesigned UI, new streak and progression systems, and even a recent move to a more modern game engine. Those efforts stopped last week, though, before the mod could even release its first version. The SM2 Twitter account reported that "a team member received a Cease & Desist letter on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the SM2 project. We are complying with this order and shutting down all operations permanently."
Since then, the modding group has been working on updating that seminal 2009 release with new weapons, in-game perks, a redesigned UI, new streak and progression systems, and even a recent move to a more modern game engine. Those efforts stopped last week, though, before the mod could even release its first version. The SM2 Twitter account reported that "a team member received a Cease & Desist letter on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the SM2 project. We are complying with this order and shutting down all operations permanently."
duh - old games cut into new-game profit (Score:2)
This is an obvious money grab, and a lazy one at that.
They made huge bank on the first iteration of WoW Classic, and have recaptured some lost players that were previously playing on private servers. This crackdown is hoping that CoD players will be easier to discourage and will opt to play the new games. The alternative is they need to reboot old CoD titles, which isn't as profitable as the subscription model of WoW.
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Well, rebooting old CoD titles and selling the same game once more is pretty much only possible if they first of all kill off the competition from the old games.
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This is an obvious money grab, and a lazy one at that. They made huge bank on the first iteration of WoW Classic, and have recaptured some lost players that were previously playing on private servers. This crackdown is hoping that CoD players will be easier to discourage and will opt to play the new games. The alternative is they need to reboot old CoD titles, which isn't as profitable as the subscription model of WoW.
People who bought the game have a fundamental legal right to use the IP, because they bought the game. So in terms of morality and ethics, Activision has absolutely no legitimate right to do what they are doing.
Unfortunately, from a copyright law perspective, nobody other than (maybe) Activision has a legal right to redistribute that IP to make it possible for them to do so. This defect in copyright law means that any software involving servers is inherently a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off when
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But are we sure they bought the game? Recall the Blizzard vs BnetD case, where Blizzard surprised all their retroactively-not-customers by claiming they did not sell them a copy of the game. Blizzard said they licensed it. As stupid and fraudulent as that sounds, the judge agreed with them.
Yes, and the biggest problem with that ruling was that the government did not then begin a false advertising suit against Blizzard for deceiving consumers en masse, but that was during the Bush administration, so expecting any sort of pro-consumer action would have been borderline delusional.
When judges agree with this nonsense, then everything you know about copyright and first sale doctrine becomes irrelevant, because the terms that the "customer" "agreed to" are all that matter.
Again, the problem is that there was only a copyright case, but no subsequent false advertising case, even though consumers were clearly deceived. A whole lot of this nonsense would go away if companies were put on tri
Just pull a their fightin herds (Score:2)
And remove all the activision specific stuff from the game
Missed opportunity? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a gamer so I could be out to lunch here, but it seems to me that Activision could have worked with the folks they shut down. It would have done their brand a lot of good, and probably earned them more revenue, to bring the people keeping the legacy games going into the fold. Offer them resources and access to servers, let them manage things as they already were, and strike a deal to take a cut as well as part ownership of what is essentially new IP based on games that have already paid for themselves many times over.
It's a shame when corporations' first impulse is to raise their leg and piss on their "territory" instead of exploring cooperative ways to benefit themselves as well as others.
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Yeah well if you allow the players to continue playing the game which they purchased several years ago; they have no incentive to purchase the new version with whatever minor incremental tweaks your dev team shat out (maybe a new weapon, perhaps a map or two, oh and new skins in the cash shop?)
That's several quarters worth of STOLEN REVENUE. Oh the humanity, all that money left on the table. The Grand Nagus would be most displeased... as such an arrangement directly violates at least 20 of the Rules of Acq
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This is why I stopped purchasing games year ago. You no longer have the right to keep using them. Screw Activision for this. Hoist the anchor and rig the sails men!
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I still purchase games. I just don't buy/play games from known shitty developers/publishers - ActivisionBlizzard, EA, and Ubisoft are the 3 that come to mind. I don't touch any of their products anymore. They're all bad. None of them have a worthwhile game that has come out in the last ten years, and none of them have anything coming that might be decent.
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my biggest beef with those companies is that they all include their own launcher/storefront -- even when purchasing their game on steam (rockstar and cdpr also do this garbage)
it's pants on head retarded and immensely irritating.
>buy game on steam
>launch game on steam
>oh wait, here's ANOTHER launcher that you need to click through to launch the game you just tried launching through steam (your actual launcher)
it's particularly bad when the game is advertised as having full controller support -- the
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I don't mind if they include their own launchers (like Rockstar, Paradox, & CDPR's), as long as I'm not required to create some sort of new account to use it, and it doesn't want to run in the background. However, those launchers are also easily bypassed. You just point Steam (or regular shortcut) at the actual game executable instead of the default launcher.
But yeah, I won't touch Uplay, or Epic, or any of these separate installs that are trying to act like Steam.
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It's a little more complicated than that. If they don't actively pursue and project their IP, they lose it. Yeah, you can have an IP, but if people start using it, and you don't go after them, you can be stripped of your IP protections for that IP, and then anyone can do anything they want with it.
In addition with human behavior, people using private servers often have to use copies of the game that aren't protected by DRM, regardless if they ever purchased the game or not. So a lot of people are playing th
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It's a little more complicated than that. If they don't actively pursue and project their IP, they lose it.
Nope. Notwithstanding the doctrine of laches and its impact on damage claims, the only form of IP for which failing to protect the IP causes it to be "lost" is trademarks. And even that applies only in fairly specific situations, where a trademark is being used generically to describe competitors' products, not in situations where someone is modifying an existing product that legitimately is covered by that trademark.
They absolutely did not have any obligation to do this, except perhaps from an MBA-derang
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If you mean that third-party servers don't check the DRM or otherwise verify that the software was legitimately purchased, that's a separate issue, and is something that would almost certainly have to be changed if the third-party servers want to have a prayer of being legitimate, IMO.
Quick! Point to a publicly accessible online database that contains a record of every game purchase ever. ... ... No bites?
Even if they wanted to do that, they'd have a hard time doing so. Not to mention that any such database would obviously exclude secondhand sales. There's no way to track chain of custody. The best you can hope for is verification of physical media presence. Which IMO, some Wii ISO launchers used to do.
As for "being legitimate", verifying that and holding others accountable is the j
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If you mean that third-party servers don't check the DRM or otherwise verify that the software was legitimately purchased, that's a separate issue, and is something that would almost certainly have to be changed if the third-party servers want to have a prayer of being legitimate, IMO.
Quick! Point to a publicly accessible online database that contains a record of every game purchase ever. ... ... No bites?
Presumably the software sends some token that is used for verifying that the DRM is valid. For a lightweight verification mechanism, tying that identifier to a specific user identity and requiring the user to upload some proof of purchase would probably be "good enough". If they want something better, it should be the manufacturer's responsibility to provide that better solution as a publicly available server until such time as their IP ceases to be protected.
As for "being legitimate", verifying that and holding others accountable is the job of the IP's rightsholder. It's not the public's job to enforce a private individual's / group's IP rights on their behalf. Never mind that doing such things in the US is just begging the actual rightsholder to sue you for false representation or, more likely, "inadequate protection." I.e. willful copyright infringement. Because you didn't do it to their self-determined standard. (Which was to not do anything at all with their IP. Regardless of any legitimacy checking.)
Morally, yes, but legally, if the server is a
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Presumably the software sends some token that is used for verifying that the DRM is valid. For a lightweight verification mechanism, tying that identifier to a specific user identity and requiring the user to upload some proof of purchase would probably be "good enough". If they want something better, it should be the manufacturer's responsibility to provide that better solution as a publicly available server until such time as their IP ceases to be protected.
That's the entire point of modern DRM systems (I.e. Denuvo.) Except they don't have the client generate anything. Instead the game requests a token from the storefront that purchased the game. (I.e. Steam.) The storefront generates a response indicating whether or not the logged in account has purchased the game and encrypts / signs it using standard public key crypto. The next bit is different depending on a few things, but either the storefront sends the response directly to the publisher for verificatio
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Re:Missed opportunity? (Score:4, Interesting)
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It would have done their brand a lot of good
Activision doesn't have a brand, their name does not attract any customers. No one says "hey, have you played that latest Activision game yet?" They have IP and sales, and people playing their old games are people not buying loot boxes in their new ones.
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Scared (Score:2)
They should have ignored it. Nothing bad would have happened. Activision wouldn't have an actual defense to use in court.
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They should have ignored it. Nothing bad would have happened. Activision wouldn't have an actual defense to use in court.
Ending up being "in court" is already the bad thing that would have happened, regardless of whether any defense might have been good or bad.
All modern courts have a significant, inherent bias toward the party with the most available cash. The court system guarantees your inalienable right to all the Justice and Due Process you can afford to buy.
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And I'm saying it wouldn't have wound up in court in the first place. Nothing they are doing is actually illegal, unless I'm missing a detail that they were selling stuff that doesn't belong to them. Even if they accepted money to keep the private servers online and modders working, that's not illegal either. If they gave out fully pirated copies of CoD along with everything else, I could also see that as an issue, but as far as I know that wasn't the case.
The C&D letter is literally just an intimidatio
Remember bnetd? (Score:2)
Activision [bought a company that] previously won a case like this. See bnetd [wikipedia.org].
The only way to win (Score:1)
The only way to enjoy proprietary games is to not play them. Why would I want to play a game where it's against the law to maintain it? Fuck that.
Think about how amazingly stupid and bad-faith it is, that it even can be illegal to maintain the software that you use.
Every time a software company does this, they are advocating for repealing copyright. I say we finally give into them. The more someone says they don't want my money, the more I believe them.
awwww.... (Score:2)
Abandonware (Score:4, Insightful)
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I really wish that US copyright law had a strict clause for abandonware. If you're going out of your way to make it unavailable, then fine, but you shouldn't be able to prevent others from offering and supporting abandoned works.
They aren't did you read the DMCA? The entire american government is corrupt and you all keep electing corproate cronies into office. Like you all need to get a clue down there in america. The history of copyright law itself should show you it has never once NOT been expanded. Both democrats and republicans have been given corporations carte blanche to steal your kids history and destroy it.
AKA they've been winning for 200 years, why would the american upper class and dynasties of the business community
No sale (Score:2)
I can host my own server, I will buy your game. I don't mind if there are "official" servers that the maker of the game hosts for those that don't want to host their own, or for those that want to play "competitively" and ensure that no hoster and admin wants to make a dime by selling "premium" accounts that play with aimbots and whatnot, but I want to be able to host my own server, too.
If I cannot host a server myself, I am 100% dependent on the maker of the game for the privilege to play a game I paid for
Renegade (Score:4, Insightful)
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EA is a lot more friendly to people who do this kind of stuff than Activision Blizzard is (which is why Activision Blizzard is on my personal blacklist at this point and EA isn't).
As for Renegade, these days the anti-cheat is much better than that RenGuard crap (I should know, I wrote a chunk of the new anti-cheat) and we have awesome features like an automatic map downloading system.