Was it too much to add some line about the customers who have already paid for the game being locked out? My guess is that the Comission won't even know what the actual problem is.
At least it's a first step in the right direction.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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I don't think there's any chance the outcome of this will be allowing the communities of orphaned games to maintain them.
However, I think a good middle ground would be requiring publishers to state ahead of time (and inform customers clearly before they make a purchase) how long they will support their game. They should then be able to extend this period, but also be required to refund customers if they drop support before the initial support period they announced ends. Also, there should be a mandatory minimal length to the support period (like some countries have a mandatory warranty period for some products).
What’s stopping the foss community from making servers where the games can communicate? There’s already a project in the works for wiiU and 3ds after those console servers shut down.
I might not be able to work on this myself due to my own ineptitude but I know there are people out there smarter than me and more passionate than me who could possibly do it
Nothing is stopping them.
I'm just saying his proposal to allow the community to maintain and develop the games further (which to me sounds like giving them the source code) probably won't be put into law anytime soon.
That’s a good point. I didn’t even think of needing the source code.
Honestly, this should be a bigger discussion, and not limited to just games. If a software company sells a software license for perpetual use to someone, they should not be allowed to use copy protection mechanisms that prevent the licensee from using it in perpetuity.
If there's some other technical reason why the software won't run any more after ten or twenty years, that's another story. But if they just can't be bothered to keep running the licensing servers, then they need to bloody well remove the stinking copy protection.
The promise copyright holders were supposed to uphold was that the public received it as public domain when the copyright ended. How the fuck can you receive anything as public domain when the media is completely lost after only 10% of the duration of the copyright?
This is just another obvious sign that the whole copyright system is completely broken. If copyright holders won't retain the media long enough for the copyright to expire, and hold up their end of the bargain, then we have no obligation to uphold their copyright.
I don’t see why developers can’t just make a game that works with or without the internet. There’s no reason a game can’t just connect to another copy of the game and communicate console to console. If there’s a reason beyond greed that this can’t happen please enlighten me.
Peer2peer connections are very difficult. Mainly because clients are behind a NAT which allows only connections from inside to outside. So when a client wants to connect to another client one connection comes from outside and is blocked. There is a "bug" called NAT holepunching to still connect but that's not a trivial task and doesn't work on all setups. I recently tried out webRTC for a multiplayer game but I still don't know what to do with people where that connection can't be established. SteamAPI has a P2P feature as well, and when they can't establish a p2p connection they just silently route the packets over their servers.