Initiative Aims To Require EU Game Publishers To Make Retired Games Playable (pcgamer.com) 91
A proposed European Union law seeks to ensure that video games sold or licensed in the EU remain playable even if servers are shut down or studios close. The law would require publishers of sold and free-to-play games with microtransactions to provide resources to keep games functional, such as allowing players to host their own servers. Through a process called the "European Citizens Initiative," the petition needs one million signatures just to have a chance at becoming law. PC Gamer reports: "An increasing number of publishers are selling videogames that are required to connect through the internet to the game publisher, or 'phone home' to function," the petition reads. "While this is not a problem in itself, when support ends for these types of games, very often publishers simply sever the connection necessary for the game to function, proceed to destroy all working copies of the game, and implement extensive measures to prevent the customer from repairing the game in any way."
Understanding that developers and publishers can't support games forever, the initiative would expect "the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state." That means giving players the tools to host the game on their own servers, for example, and removing the requirement for games to connect to the publisher's (defunct) servers in order to be played. This is what the developer behind Knockout City did when it pulled the plug on the game's official servers.
Not only does this initiative apply to games that are sold, but includes free to play games that have microtransactions for assets (like skins) or other paid-for features. The thought is, if you purchase an item in a free game, you should have the right to continue to use it indefinitely -- which means keeping that free game playable in some form. It's important to note that even a million signatures doesn't mean an automatic win, just that it'll go forward to the European Union as a proposal to become a law.
Understanding that developers and publishers can't support games forever, the initiative would expect "the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state." That means giving players the tools to host the game on their own servers, for example, and removing the requirement for games to connect to the publisher's (defunct) servers in order to be played. This is what the developer behind Knockout City did when it pulled the plug on the game's official servers.
Not only does this initiative apply to games that are sold, but includes free to play games that have microtransactions for assets (like skins) or other paid-for features. The thought is, if you purchase an item in a free game, you should have the right to continue to use it indefinitely -- which means keeping that free game playable in some form. It's important to note that even a million signatures doesn't mean an automatic win, just that it'll go forward to the European Union as a proposal to become a law.
Never liked online requirements even single play (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Never liked online requirements even single pla (Score:4, Insightful)
Apart from the reason that I like the older games better, this is why I never bought a game that had any kind of online requirement. I prefer not to worry about unwanted updates or retractions or complete removals when I occasionally feel like playing a game.
Running an airgapped Windows 7 laptop and each game in a Sandboxie box also helps.
If I'm interested enough to buy a Steam or other distributed game, I'll see if there's a repack version first which avoids all the crap.
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Apart from the reason that I like the older games better, this is why I never bought a game that had any kind of online requirement. I prefer not to worry about unwanted updates or retractions or complete removals when I occasionally feel like playing a game.
Running an airgapped Windows 7 laptop and each game in a Sandboxie box also helps.
If I'm interested enough to buy a Steam or other distributed game, I'll see if there's a repack version first which avoids all the crap.
That's one thing Steam is good for, it will clearly tell you "This game requires a 3rd party account" and at that point it's a big fat nothankyou.jpg from me. If I really want to play the game, I can usually acquire it via the usual sources. Either that or I'll play something else.
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The biggest problem with making a game that doesn't phone home is that piracy eats the game developer's lunch. By making it phone home, it's a much easier way to ensure people have paid for the game than the many copy protection systems and things like codes in printed manuals etc that have been used previously.
However, once a company is no longer willing to support the servers that make the game playable, they should definitely be required to release a patch that makes the game playable without phoning hom
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By making it phone home, it's a much easier way to ensure people have paid [...] However, once a company is no longer willing to support the servers that make the game playable, they should definitely be required to release a patch that makes the game playable without phoning home.
But then I have to trust that will happen, which I don't.
Hence I don't buy SP games with online requirements.
If the developers want my money, they will make the game playable without asking them for permission on launch.
Re:Never liked online requirements even single pla (Score:5, Insightful)
They should be required to provide the patch on release day, to an escrow service. Then it gets automatically released once the servers go down.
Relying on them doing it at EOL means they will probably just go bankrupt or come up with some excuse like "we lost the source code".
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Don't forget that they have to update the patch in escrow as and when they make changes to the actual game / official backend / protocol, etc.
Might be easier to do a source code dump, but that may include other IP.
Re:Never liked online requirements even single pla (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pirates really aren't slowed down much, it is only the valid owners who are screwed over by the extra hassles.
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By making it phone home, it's a much easier way to ensure people have paid for the game than the many copy protection systems and things like codes in printed manuals etc that have been used previously.
The pirates you are trying to stop have the perfect answer for your shenanigans: JMP 0x{address of next instruction for valid purchases}. Only the legitimate buyers have to put up with the phone home attempts, and the broken games when the server fails / gets retired.
TL;DR: Legitimate buyers pay full price and get an inferior version of the product than the Pirates who pay nothing and get the best version of the product.
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But.. but... think of the profits!
No, I agree, it is seriously stupid for a single player only game to require an internet connection except for initial installation or authentication. I have hit this problem quite a fiew times. Such as buying a game on Steam that REQUIRES an additional login account on Origin or some other lame service.
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To be fair to Steam, there's a honking brown badge that says "This game requires a 3rd-party account..." in the store's sidebar; nevermind the warning that is "Published by: EA | Ubisoft | Epic | ..."
Amen. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, make old (and new) devices communicable, as in force the release of proprietary protocols like those of a garmin watch or an omron blood pressure monitor, so that I can access MY device without a bloated, region-restricted pieces of spyware that insist on knowing who my contacts are before they send whatever data they collect to a server somewhere where I can't control it at all.
Re: Amen. (Score:5, Informative)
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Signed.
Re:Amen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, make old (and new) devices communicable, as in force the release of proprietary protocols like those of a garmin watch or an omron blood pressure monitor, so that I can access MY device without a bloated, region-restricted pieces of spyware that insist on knowing who my contacts are before they send whatever data they collect to a server somewhere where I can't control it at all.
I agree entirely. Sadly, this is one of those cases where we get the policies and the market that our neighbours deserve. As long as most people keep falling for and buying into this cloud-based "all your stuff are belong to us" bullshit - and there's no sign that they're ever going to get a clue about it even when you shout it into their ears - we're gonna be stuck with this shell game.
Generally speaking, human beings are slaves to convenience, and are like magpies when it comes to shiny things.
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Exactly. Same thing for subscription-only fishhooking like Photoshop, Lightroom, etc.
That said, what the EU is aiming at here is very much the right way to go.
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what the EU is aiming at here is
It is not "the EU" that is aiming at that. It is a citizen petition https://citizens-initiative.eu... [europa.eu] Several are on-going, and the chances of any to pass the 1 million signatures threshold is very low.
Currently the most two signed you still can sign are "safe and accessible abortion" with 556,737 signatures and "Tax the rich" with 260,056.
Out of 10 previously successful initiatives, most were Animal Rights: "Fur-free Europe", "cruelty-free cosmetics", "stop finning", "save the bees", "end the cage age", "s
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Oh man, definately this. I have an Apple watch specifically for its features around health monitoring. I'm middle age, slightly overweight and half my friend circle are docs and nurses and they *all* have them (or the Samsung versions) because they've seen those things save their patients lives , and it just makes sense. If my heart does something stupid, I want that extra chance that the watch will call me an ambulance and get me to safety during that critical golden hour.
BUT. I'd also prefer that I have a
Let us speedrun this (Score:5, Interesting)
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Already signed up when I read about this before slashdot.
Please all who read this and live in Europe, sign up too if you can, this is a part of showing the industry that we will not accept them taking our rights to freedom away from us.
A great first step (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never been into gaming, so it had never occurred to me before now that it's part of our cultural heritage. Totally aside from the "I paid for it so I should be able to continue playing" issue, letting games lapse is the equivalent of burying or burning books when their copyright period expires.
Any creative endeavour should continue to be available for as long as it's of even historical interest. When a company decides to no longer support a game, it should be legally obligated to release all of the source code, protocols, artwork, etc to the public domain.
Re:A great first step (Score:4, Insightful)
when you purchase a game you actually purchase a license to use it, not the ownership of its ip. as much as i loathe that notion of ip and advocate opensource, you can't have your cake and eat it.
the comparision to books is also flawed. a book can be sold long after the author died and rights holders (descendants or hoarders) continue to control the distribution and reap the benefits for many years, even generations. this is about games whose ip is still owned, but product's life and support stops. what's proposed here is merely that the product can be usable beyond that point, it makes no claim about the ip, but even the mere use has its problems.
it might be impractical as to be virtually impossible. there is a growing class of games that are evolving in nature, and while developers might archive older versions, those are lost to the world forever just right after every update, even long before the game reaches end of life. there are dramatic examples of this (i cite it because you say you're not privy to games): "overwatch" was released in 2016 for a full aaa title price. after several updates over the years it was replaced in 2023 by the sequel "overwatch 2" which is a free-to-play game, and at that point (the paid for) "overwatch" just ceased to exist altogether. the catch here is that both games are actually very different even if they share many common traits.
there are also technical limitations. many games these days, specially those "massively online", require complex server architectures and networks to work. these are not only expensive but rely on components that over the years become obsolete themselves, which means that once the developer ceases to keep up with technology (through software maintenance that tends to become more costly and expensive with time) these games become increasingly harder to "spin up" again, even with access to the source code. one dramatic example of this is "elite dangerous", an iconic 2014 game with a great deal of backstory in pioneering computer games history that goes back to 1995, about which the director mentioned the possibility to release it to the public after end of life. even if he kept that promise (for a change) that would be just moot, since the server architecture and implementation is suspect to be such a mess of spaghetti code relying on a tangle of ad-hoc services that the developers themselves have had a hard time rolling out every single update since release, with problems increasing with time, and it is not realistic at all to expect that anyone could replicate such an environment in the future without a massive rewrite, let alone as a hobby project.
so, deep down and in principle i actually agree with you (and i have signed the proposal), but i have trouble seeing how this could be achieved in any practical way, and intelectual property fundamentalism isn't even the worst problem in this case. this is just one aspect of an issue that affects not only games but all information in the digital era.
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Thanks for an insightful and informative comment. It's always good to learn about complexities that I either never knew about or never considered.
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The same sort of stuff is happening with e-books. The are advertised as "buy the book", then they claim "haha sucker you only purchased a license", and try to control what you can do with it. With a physical book or game CD they couldn't do that unless they made you sign an agreement at the register.
Also of note, "intellectual property" doesn't exist in nature, humans invented it for a purpose and can change it if it isn't working as desired.
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there are also technical limitations. many games these days, specially those "massively online", require complex server architectures and networks to work.
Sure, but if a homebrew run-at-home server supports 100 users and the original supported 10000 users, it's still better than not having a game at all.
And "complex server architecture" of today is a "couple of containers I run at the corner of my spare box" tomorrow.
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And "complex server architecture" of today is a "couple of containers I run at the corner of my spare box" tomorrow.
if you even get those containers packed with the correct version of abandonware at that point and manage to configure, tunnel and wire them together correctly, then sure, why not. i mean, people have been able to run quake on a graphic calculator, but that's not the norm. i agree though that watching the eu trying to pass a law to force developers to make that scenario possible would be fun.
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Lastly, Multiplayer and matchmaking may be huge
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The only reason it's not legally like a books is because we haven't passed laws making it legally like a book.
Pass the laws, make it a legal requirement that the software functions once the official servers are gone that's tested and verified with some escrow funds to back it up.
But constituents have to demand this or else the gaming industry just lobbies, backs, and outright bribes politiicians to pass laws that favor them. I still play total annihilation occasionally-- Cavedog hasn't existed for decades
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The only reason it's not legally like a books is because we haven't passed laws making it legally like a book.
because ... it isn't a book. as i tried to explain, that's not that simple in many cases. it might work for total annihilation, but not for games that depend on additional infrastructure. the basic difference between a book and these sort of games is that while anybody with access to the text can publish the book over and over, these games are a service that costs money to run and work to maintain and keep updated.
how long has this to run? just the next 10 generations of devices? until the last customer die
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No-one said that the games had to be kept up to date by the developers without compensation.
No-one said that the game's servers had to be kept running by the publishers without compensation.
No-one said that the IP rights to the games must be revoked / forfeit.
That's the narrative the industry pushes because they want control. The issue isn't whether or not the games will run, but whether or not the game's developers / publishers will allow those
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Stop conflating "ability to use" with "ability to run".
sorry what?
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Just because you can run the executable doesn't mean you are authorized to do so.
The latter is what TFS is demanding from publishers and developers. That the authorization to run the executable be implicit by virtue of having possession of the executable once the publishers / developers abandon support. Instead of explicit by checking an online server that's no longer available. No-one said anything about demanding that the e
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If a franchise can't survive without the previous games being forcibly taken away, the franchise shouldn't survive.
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As the other person said, I'm not mandating that it will run on unknown operating systems and hardware.
And, I think you *know that* and are misdirecting here.
A reasonable legal solution can be written and passed that require the game doesn't disable it self from running on the same hardware and OS or emulations of the same hardware and OS when the validation servers go down.
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As the other person said, I'm not mandating that it will run on unknown operating systems and hardware.
nobody said it would have to run on unknown hardware. get this: a game might be designed and written to work with, e.g., specific amazon server instances. after the game hits end of life, those instances might not even be available anymore, or might have evolved enough to become incompatible with the original design. your game client just won't work, no matter what you feel like "mandating", unless someone provides an alternative implementation and service, pays to have it running, and specifically updates
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when you purchase a game you actually purchase a license to use it, not the ownership of its ip.
You are correct that we are not purchasing the IP, I have no idea why anyone would think anything differently; however, you are purchasing the code and your possession of the code is, theoretically, inviolable. It is yours to do with as you please other than redistributing it. Edit it, change it, hell, you can even delete it if you want. It is yours to do with as you will. You can even gift your ownership of the code to someone else.
I am uncertain why you think you are only purchasing the 'right' to 'use' i
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different things. ofc you own the program, let's say the code, to do as you see fit (* sometimes with limitations, see below). my point was about the scenario (which is quite common) where owning that code is not enough to actually play the game (i.e. *use* the sw), because it needs a lot of extra code and working infrastructure to function that you're not buying, that may even rely on third party providers, and is offered basically as a service. services aren't owned and aren't forever, they come and go, t
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... i think this was aimed at people breaking copy protections but, being spaniards, they did overshoot ...
on second thought ... maybe they didn't even realize the dimension that sw has as cultural heritage, just like any other media. they only contemplated the utilitary, comercial side of it.
might be pragmatic problems (Score:1)
If I publish an indie game and then die, who's responsible for keeping it running?
What if the platform a game runs on dies?
Not really (Score:3)
Why, then you'd have made sure that it doesn't require an online, subscription, or other fishhook element to continue operating, because you're a responsible developer who cares about their customers/users. Right?. Right?
The next step, assuming they get this one done, is to require operating systems to continue to provide the resources in version x+1 required to support applications built for versions x and x-n. Microsoft did
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> to require operating systems to continue to provide the resources in version x+1 required to support applications built for versions x and x-n.
Which means the longer your company exists, the larger the backwards compatibility burden.
I think a better option might be to make emulation of an OS legal once there is no longer an available backwards compatible OS from the original publisher. Probably with the condition that the emulator not be forward compatible... it shouldn't be able to do anything the ol
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I suppose the language needs to be tightened up... But I meant more like making a Win98 emulator and extending it until it it functionally WinXP.
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"I think a better option might be to make emulation of an OS legal"
It already is. Its called "Virtual Machines" - and we've been using them for decades already.
There are also already full PC emulators for example, like DosBox, which is exactly what gaming platforms like GoG uses to release legacy DOS games through.
On the PC side of things, these have been long-solved problems.
And even without these, games built for Windows 95 often still run on Windows 11. But if they don't, the compatibility tools like I j
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I bought Windows95, why should I need to buy Windows11? Besides which, they've changed the EULA in ways that I find unacceptable, so I don't WANT to run Windows11.
If they'd made it easy to run under emulation, I'd still have a copy of Windows95 hanging around for when I wanted to play Bard's Quest or something. It wasn't worth fighting through the mess, so I just gave up and switched to something else. (First Apple, and then when they tried to sneak an unacceptable EULA change into an update, to Linux.)
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I'm not sure what you're getting at here?
Windows 95 still works perfectly fine in a Virtual Machine, and there are plenty of PC emulators that also run it now too.
You DONT need to buy Windows 11 to run a Win95 VM, that was just one example. VMs can run on just about any hypervisor from any vendor (even F/OSS ones), or, again, there are PC emulators too. This is a thing. It has been a thing since almost as long as PCs have existed.
Hell, Bard's Quest specifically can be played in your BROWSER! https://archive [archive.org]
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I probably *could* have run it under emulation, but it took too much effort. As a result I no longer have ANY MS software that I use. This probably isn't what they wanted, but it's the way their actions drove me.
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Good points, but not quite right. DRM software shouldn't have copyrights, but should have marketing rights, as in "nobody else can sell this". And I'm not sure licensing should even be allowed for anything that isn't totally open source. (N.B.: Open Source is a superset of Free Software, and I'm pointing at the Open Source aspect.)
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Well, I guess they can sue your corpse then!
i buy games to support the programmers (Score:3)
But i play using downloaded b00tl3g repacks that have had the online stuff and DRM patched and disabled.
Count me in ... (Score:1)
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https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/p... [europa.eu] On the right side, select your nationality.
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... If you live in the EU
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If you are a national of a EU country and of voting age. The place of residence is not a criterion.
Great idea! Same required for smart devices (Score:2)
They want copyright (Score:1)
The government should be imposing large fines on these publishers. The government is protecting their publications so it enters public domain: Wilful destruction is more than destroying history, it is stealing from the government. Or simply, if they want copyright protection, they must ensure their publication enters the public domain. A CEO, and probably the publisher, won't be around in 140 (or more) years, so when a corporation is dissolved or de-registered, all publications enter the public domain.
no, absolutely not. (Score:2)
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Not necessarily. It doesn't need to be supported forever. It's more like one last update to release a user available server component (if needed, like for multiplayer games), the ability for users to select the server they want to join, and the always-on DRM removed. It's not like a game originally released for Windows XP needs to be constantly up to date with current DirectX, Windows 10/11 support, etc into the future. As long as that Windows XP version works as above, isn't that enough?
We're not asking fo
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The developer would be required to release the source code for their own developed backend code and tools, but they couldn't be required to do more than that, not even for 3rd party proprietary tools. Making it work afterward would be the task of whoever takes it into their hands as a hobby.
This initiative might be extended to those 3rd party tools, OSes and whatnot in some way, but then it'd be on those developers, not the gaming company.
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The developer would be required to release the source code for their own developed backend code and tools, but they couldn't be required to do more than that, not even for 3rd party proprietary tools. Making it work afterward would be the task of whoever takes it into their hands as a hobby.
This initiative might be extended to those 3rd party tools, OSes and whatnot in some way, but then it'd be on those developers, not the gaming company.
I would go further and say that the source code for both the app and the backend server must be made public when a product is discontinued.
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Avoid flavor of the month crap in software development. I have code from the '90s that will compile and run just fine. A lot of large businesses are still running software written in COBOL in the '70s.
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I know reading is hard, but at least make an effort to actually look at the thing you're commenting on:
Nobody's suggesting that a company is forced to continue supplying re
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What about Adobe (Score:4, Insightful)
Cut the BS already (Score:3)
It is no such thing. Calling it a 'proposed EU law' gives this the unwarranted appearance of having been proposed in the course of an official EU legislative process, i.e. by the EU commission. That is not the case. It is merely a citizen's petition at this point.
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Sounds a little stronger than a petition. The EU Commision has to directly respond to any laws proposed via this mechanism and make a case against implementing it (covered by existing laws or upcoming legislation; contradicts existing
Raising the cost of games (Score:1)
AAA games are already to expensive and smaller studios struggle for relevance. Requiring companies to provide any kind of support beyond the end of life of the game, or any software, is ridiculous. I do 100% agree that âoephone homeâ to play sucks. I travel a lot and hate when a steam game wonâ(TM)t let me play locally saved games because it canâ(TM)t check the server. But I would prefer aligning market incentives with game publishers.
Publishers need to make money, if only to pay for dev
Re:Raising the cost of games (Score:4, Insightful)
Make who allow offline play ... (Score:2)
The team who wrote it who were fired shortly after the game was published .. who went bust .... ?
The Publisher
The copyright holder, who bought the company, who bought the company who owned the publisher, who still own the game
How exactly are they going to attempt to enforce this ?
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Not just online games (Score:2)
My physical copy of Benoît Sokal's Paradise can't install anymore on recent Windows because of DRM, and was never sold as digital copy.
This will increase cost and reduce availability. (Score:2)
Er ... (Score:2)
... isn't this a little like mandating that Broadway keep putting on Annie, indefinitely?
(I mean, not that you need to mandate that, it happens anyway, but still ...)
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No, that is a poor analogy.
A [Broadway] play is a one-time service, a game is not. Games used to be sold with the understanding that you paid so you can enjoy it till the end of time. Online games have hijacked that assumption.
A slightly better (but still poor) analogy would be paying a one-time fee for premium access to content and then the content is pulled years later.
Bungie pulled some shenanigans with Destiny 2 when they removed DLC. People paid to access content and expected it to be there.
ID Software did this for YEARS already (Score:2)
ID Software has released source code for all their games as long as John Carmack worked there. Doom (1995)'s source code was released in 1997, only 2 years later. They also made Linux ports available of many games. I ran Quake 2 on my Linux 2.4 machine back in 2002 thanks to Timothee "ZeroWing" Besset's third-party binary releases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Reading and understanding this code is part of why I am employed as a programmer today. Thank you, John!
The Swedish developer Frictional Games re
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If you have original, working install media, you can extract the assets. There's no DRM blocking you from copying them forward and have it continue to work to this day even if you don't have a floppy drive any more. So Doom (2) is already in the green here. There is no requirement that the original author/publisher just give the game away after the fact, only that they not sabotage it for fair customers.
id Software might be a bad example here. Source code is nice, and solves most problems by offloading them
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