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[ANSWERED] What's going on with some person seemingly called "PirateSoftware" and the stop killing games campaign?
(lemmy.abnormalbeings.space)
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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The EU already mandates minimal service life for things like security updates. I don't see why it won't make it past courts. Hell, under EU laws regarding warranty, games publishers are probably already forced to either run game servers for a minimum of two years (or offer alternatives such as full refunds). This concept is just extending the mandated warranty in a sense. As for the software itself, manufacturers are under tons of regulation when it comes to support and availability of replacement parts in various industries. Entitlement does play a role, but that may very well be in the fact that consumers are simply entitled to access to the goods and services they purchased.
Also, there's nothing stopping companies from releasing alternative servers when their main servers turn off. Games used to come with dedicated servers for free. Companies just decided not to do it anymore because they can make more money with their current strategy. While the games are being sold, these companies make hundreds of millions or even billions of profit. The cost of their servers remaining available is just part of their profit forecast.
None of this will fail because it would be impossible to make happen. The real question is probably if consumers have more power than the video games lobby. I doubt they do. The proposal goes against the financial incentives of video game publishers, so they'll try to convince lawmakers not to bother. If their attempts fail, there's a chance certain games won't make it into the EU if such a law passes, or that certain content won't be available, but it's not like nobody will make games anymore.
A more realistic scenario of a law like this will have game publishers state an expiration date on their software. They already have to when it comes to security updates, but they'll probably have to put a sticker on it like "this game/DLC will stop working after 2026" and let consumers decide whether to buy the product or not.
Aside from the fact it's proprietary stuff they own... you can't just mandate that a company must release stuff they own to the public. They own it, they can do whatever they want with it.
This is the far better parallel to draw imo, and has the best chance of meaning anything.
Except for the fact for most games the online play is an extra feature and not the core game. And thus all game devs have to do is argue that "the game still works in offline play" and this won't apply to those games anyways.
Oh god no, it's way more complicated than that.
Modern game servers for major games are simply just not designed to be run locally bare metal. They're often in the form of complex stacks of multiple moving parts, shit like entire k8s deployment stacks with like 12 distinct resources, many of which might be tightly coupled to implementation details.
Such that even if they release that part public, it still wouldn't work because it depends on other pieces that literally don't exist anymore.
A great example of this is simply any login process.
It's super likely they have an auth server they run that you login to.
They use that auth server for multiple things, not just this 1 game.
They release, say, v2.4 of their game server program in 2025, it's tightly coupled to the auth server v1.7 api.
It works for about 4 months before they update to fix some stuff on their auth server, now their auth server is v1.8 annnnnd...
Now that v2.4 copy of your game server stops working cuz it's not compatible with v1.8 of their auth system, so it's now just dead.
You can't mandate they keep updating their old code on a game they don't support anymore.
So... you're fucked anyways.
You can't mandate they release their auth server cuz it's still in active use and you really don't want to expose the inner workings of the auth system to hackers for them to inspect.
So yeah, it's just not happening, sorry.
Designing a server to be self hosted is a critical choice you make very very early on in development. If it wasn't designed that way from the start, its useless to ask for a copy of it for self hosting, it will stop working eventually when external upstream apis stop being compatible.
Wrong. Copyright, patent, trademark, etc law is time restricted. Biggest recent example is that even after decades of (successful) lobbying and corruption, Disney had to release Steamboat Willy into public domain.
Not even remotely comparable.
Code isnt something publicly accessible in the first place. You cant force a company to make a private thing become public, and I mean that in the literal sense of "this wasn't something outside people could even see"
Because, to do so, you'd have to first force the company to keep their internal copy of it archived, which you also can't force them to do.
If a few years later you go "You have to publish this source code now" and the company goes "We don't even have that around anymore, it doesnt exist" wtf are you gonna do about it? It's been deleted, and it was never publicly accessible in the first place, so you have no idea what it even was or looked like.
As a result, you can't force anything about it, it literally doesnt even exist anymore, so you can't travel back in time and make the company undo that.
Of course you can. See documentation of business transactions for tax audits.
Also, it's not like companies lose their code binaries while the game servers are still up and running. And it's not like the code gets thrown out the window as soon as the servers go down or something.
Bro, you are both strawmanning the shit out of this and have no idea on what the fuck you're talking about. You should stop eating corporate propaganda and be happy that there are people trying to work against corporate greed.
Yeah... no.
You can't compare taxes which involve transactions with the outside world, and are arguably the most important thing the government cares about, to the source code of some shitty mobile game that got made 5 years ago or whatever.
If you genuinely tried to make a law in your country that tech companies are legally required to preserve all their source code for games forever, do you know what would actually happen?
Your country's entire game industry would quickly dry up because that's an incredibly stupid thing to try and ask.
Companies aren't gonna sit and audit their developers git history commits for some mobile game or random steam release.
And, if you have any concept of how git or other forms of source control for games works, you'd also know that basic day to day operations would, potentially violate such a law, depending on interpretation.
And no company will wanna incur that risk so they will just avoid your country cuz it's law was written by someone with clearly zero understanding of how source control works.
Classic example of gamers demanding stupid stuff with zero clue about the actual implementation details of what they are asking for.
Lmao. Just lmao.