cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/34790413
If you want to make this a law, how would anyone handle this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3jMKeg9S-s&t=73
This argument holds true for developers of all sizes and is somehow totally ignored by most here.
I prepared for this argument very long time ago.
He omits a number of unrealistic assumptions:
- Bots buying game somehow is not infinite money glitch for developers. Assumption of complete lack of mental capacity of dev.
- Nobody except ‘Bad Guy’ can run server. Or if there is, none of them will run server just to play game instesd of profiting. Assumption of complete lack of mental capacity of players.
- ‘Bad Guy’ somehow makes more money from servers than spends on botting.
And now I will add new assumption I missed:
- ‘Bad Guy’ spends less on botting, than it costs to reverse engieneer protocol or make new game.
EDIT: forgot most important assumption, that was in another message:
- Game should not loose players, or there will be nobody to profit off.
You dont need bots to ruin a game, ddos is sufficient and cheap enough to come by, probably even easier in the future. Argument 2 already covered in other comment below
Your reply basically was “even if they will not profit from it, they still can abuse company by doing it”. It does not address critique of implicit assumptions such takes.
Such position is fundamentally anti-social and similar to making shopping center contaminate enviroment with radiation when company, that owns it, goes bankrupt, because “it would open ways for abuse”. Except it’s even more nonsensical(see 2, 3 and 4).
If anything, this is not an argument against SKG, this is argument against capitalism as a whole.
Because it would almost certainly not happen in reality. The server being released means everyone could spin up one for free. You wouldn’t be able to monetize it to any significant degree.
If you want to be generous toward Thor, he is a security expert trained to focus on any hypothetical risks, however unlikely. If you don’t, he is a game developer with monetary interest in this not passing and vast experience conning people.
It may be true that it may not actually happen. However:
- I have elaborated on monetization in another long comment.
- it cannot be wrong to have monetary interest in your product.
- A law (which is the goal afaik) needs to account for unlikely scenarios, thats why its usually so hard to make new ones
I am not against leaving games playable, but the fact that people like the game means that the devs did a good job and their fate needs to be accounted for. Devs who make good games are not an enemy
idk https://pretendo.network/ seems to be doing pretty good. It would be nice to just host my own small server after the game is done for just me and some of my friends.
I am talking about the video hypothetical. Trying to destroy a game only to profit off the released server.
If a game has reached EoL then they’re just being straight greedy worrying about someone else making a little money off it. Running a public server costs money too.
And again, nobody said they have to release a ready to go and fully functioning standalone binaries. Just the documentation on how it works as a bare minimum would go EXTREMELY far for the open source community and then the whole “ThEY DiDnt MaKE anY ConTrIBuTIOns” goes up in smoke
Stop killing games said that games need to be kept in a functioning state afaik. That means exactly that. I am very for modding games but modding a game does not entitle me to the original creators intellectual property, but merely the part j have added.
Also what documentation? :)
One thing that would go against monetization of servers after hostility to get the original to go down would be that anyone could spin up a free one in competition. Once the server binaries are available to everyone, anyone can run a server. Why would someone pay for something they can get for free?
This still doesn’t cover for the abuse of studios which is the main concern here, after all making games harder to kill off shouldn’t come with making the production or maintenance more risky or significantly mor expensive. A malicious party trying to kill a game because they dont like it or part of the community is still a valid motive.
Regarding your Question, minecraft servers are a good example of this: there are many servers out there which monetise in game resources or grind shorteners for real world money. I dont think that it is a stretch to say that a non sandbox game could be adjusted to work in such fashion. Also the point is not that there are other options, but that someone may easily make money with stuff the dont own and have never contributed to in its making.
At the end of the day all of us still want new games to be made. Therefore we need to accept that the people making them need to be able to have a steady income doing their job. Monetising ones own creation is, and should be, well within your rights. Even if some of us dont like it providing a platform in form of a game, as a service / with ever fresh content can be a valid value proposition and there are many studios out there doing this successfully while being well respected, think of Deep rock galactic or path of exile.
You can abuse studios right now. This would not change that. It would not make maintenance risky or more expensive.
It provides an extremely theoretical motive for people to do the abuse, that is unlikely to materialize in reality.
And if you want to be theoretical, it removes ideological reasons for abuse. Right now, if you dislike an online game, and got the studio shut down, the game would be gone. With this initiative, it would survive removing the motivation to try in the first place.
ITT: Time travelers from 2009, thinking my_game_dedicated_server.exe is still how all online games work.
I’m sorry to inform you that this is 2024, AWS has invaded every cubic centimeter of computing, and most companies couldn’t extract a business-critical system from the rest of their infrastructure in a way that another company could run it even if they had 3 years and 100 million dollars to get it done.
Found the executive. You’re the crow in this meme.
No. They can release source code or documentation for others to work off of, no one is asking them to deliver a fully functioning standalone version.
I feel like wayyy too many engineer minds lean back on “too vague” without understanding how many judgment calls judges make in cases every day. It’s not uncommon for them to have to decide what someone’s intent or knowledge was when taking a certain action.
That’s someone who shouldn’t be a judge, that’s what a jury or maybe even mediators would be for. A judge is black and white, and shouldn’t judge on anything they aren’t 100% educated on.
Just because the USA broken system is that way doesn’t mean it’s the norm, nor should it be how it’s actually done.
How can you be an impartial judge on something you don’t know anything about? They need to know the law, the relevant materials, and comprehend it.
So yea, they NEED to be knowledgeable, and if they are using “personal interpretations” instead of established, they aren’t fit to be a judge.
Just because this is allowed by your corrupt system doesn’t make it okay to allow dude.
It’s literally in the word “impartial” means. OP is saying they want biased judges who judge with their emotions instead of objectively.
Software engineer here. I find the petition to be very specific, and totally feasible.
Anyway, this isn’t a true referendum where its text would become immediate law as soon as it passes. It’s a petition that would be presented to legislators who would write the actual law. The petition doesn’t need to be written in legalese.
(Also: if the customer paid them even one cent, then they DO owe the customer something. Also: They should be forced to release the server software when they shut down the servers.)
Switch this meme with “people want video games they own” and it’s this thread. There are still plenty of games you can self host: Palworld, Minecraft, Satisfactory, Factorio, Terraria, Space Engineers, Counter Strike 2, The Forest, ARMA III, 7 Days to Die, Rust, Valheim. The average person obviously doesn’t care about self hosting their own game server.
Or just release an offline patch so the game can be still playable?
While this could technically work to keep games playable, for a lot of games where the point was to play it online (not games that were forced to be online for arbitrary reasons like Sim City) then it doesn’t make much sense to do. If I had an offline version of Overwatch 1 then yeah I could still look at the characters, skins, and do practice, but that’s not really the point of the game. Games like OW1 are part of the reason people are calling for being able to set up their own community servers so the game could still be playable by dedicated fans without requiring the developers to support it forever.
