cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/34790413
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.
Maybe its my lack of trust in the government from being in the US, but you guys seem to have a ton of faith that your legislators will take this and not make it a shit show and worse than the status quo.
How? I’m not native English speaker, but I rarely do this type of mistakes. Yet I often see them in others’ texts.
To all the people saying they should release server source code: You don’t even need to do that (as nice as it would be). At the very basic level all that is needed is:
- remove DRM (which probably cost more effort to add in the first place)
- a description of the API for any online components (which any decent dev team will already have internally documented)
- remove DRM (which probably cost more effort to add in the first place)
Denuvo charges monthly. And, looking at history of games, takes no effort by developers. Heck, they even can take their own pirated game with DRM removed. And even if removing DRM costs money, they have nobodu, but themselves to blame.
“Stop Killing Games” is literally a way to force companies to let you host your own servers. That’s the intention. The company loses nothing, they can wash their hands and move on.
In fact, they can even continue to sell games without servers.
They cant run servers forever. Which is why they should release the server code when they decide to shut down.
Yeah that would be awesome but it’s easier said than done (to no surprise, I’m sure).
One of the big issues I see from a developer standpoint is the potential for leaking proprietary code that they may not want to publicize like things related to authorization, server side anti cheat implementations, etc.
Why would they care? The product is done right? Well every project is not written from scratch and so to publish this stuff it could incur risk to the org’s other current/future projects in addition to helping outside sources get a leg up on said other current/future projects.
This could be dealt with potentially as well but that means extra dev resources and time and potentially inter-org collaboration to develop common OS standards but again that’s work that does not generate $$$
I’m not defending these assholes mind you, I just understand the blockers in the way. The greedy fucks could indeed do this but they never will because of said $$$
One of the big issues I see from a developer standpoint is the potential for leaking proprietary code
It is no longer proprietary then.
that they may not want to publicize like things related to authorization,
If it has any impact, then it means they were insecure all along. Or in other words, they had CWE-656 vulnreability.
server side anti cheat implementations, etc.
There are lots of effective opensource anticheats. Server-side, obviously. See minecraft anticheats.
and potentially inter-org collaboration to develop common OS standards
So, POSIX?
it could incur risk to the org’s other current/future projects in addition to helping outside sources get a leg up on said other current/future projects.
It’s called anti-social behaviour. “Why help someone else?”
Oh, well, if it’s not proprietary anymore, no problem!!! Did you not read the context regarding the impact to other existing and in-progress projects?
Also I like how you threw out POSIX as if that somehow makes this concept not only feasible but also fits into profit margins to be able to secure the additional funding. Who will sign up to contribute time and resources and stick to those same standard long term? EA? Ubisoft? I didn’t say it couldn’t be done I said it’s not something corporate would ever go for.
Go ahead and tell those big corpos to stop being anti social, I’m sure that’ll secure the funding and commitments necessary industry-wide
