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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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How is it vague? If I buy a game, it should be playable for all eternity. Just like how I can pop in Super Mario on NES and play it just like how it was in the 80s.
Or how I can still play Half Life deathmatch more than 25 years after its release.
I agree. Louis brought a good point when he talked about Gran Turismo licensed content (like Ferrari cars and etc), that some companies have licenses that will expire for content in the game. But you know what? THAT'S NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM. You buy a game, you should be able to run it until the end of time.
It's vague in all the legal ways:
First of all which kinds of games it applies to. It obviously can't work for games that have a technical server requirement, ... world of warcraft, but actually EVE online. The guys who run that game, get experimental hardware that's usually military only (or at least they did in the past). The server is not something, you could run even if you wanted to. Drawing the legal boundary between what "could be" single player offline (e.g. the crew, far cry, hitman), wasn't done.
It's not clear how it should apply to in terms of company scale. The new messenger legislation that was passed, made space for the EU parliament / system to declare and name, individually, who counts as a company that is is big enough, so that they have to open their messenger system to others for interoperability. It's not clear if the law has to apply to everyone, and every game, or just e.g. companies above 20 million revenue or something.
It's not clear what happens if a company goes bankrupt, and the system isn't immediately ready to keep working.
And a few more.
That being said, I think Thor's stance on this is silly. All of that is part of the discussion that is now starting. He could raise good points and get them included, but I guess that's not happening.
Are you saying in 80 years when Blizzard is no more they should release all the code to run your own WoW MMO servers?
There are private servers in WoW already.
Maybe not give out all hosting software, but give the possibility to connect to community hosted servers.
I'm aware that exists. But the experience of an MMO on a community server must be pretty different (but I don't know).
If the desire is to not lose the experience after the company shutters the project, I'm not really sure that's possible. Maybe it is for WoW. But I can certainly imagine a game like Pokemon Go or something being developed by an indie dev that works by orchestrating live real-time events depending on players locations. Would this game even be allowed in the EU following this law? They can't allow users personal locations to be released, they can't create a game they can't eventually fully release to the public. Even if they found a way to strip out users locations, the experience would be completely broken. So what's the answer? Just don't innovate in that space?
I don’t think the intent is to maintain the exact original experience forever and after. It’s to ensure it’s possible to play the game at all even if the developer shuts down their servers.
It’s becoming more and more common that games stop functioning completely when the developers no longer want to support the game anymore - even games that are perfectly playable single player.
Yeah I agree with the single player bit. And even multiplayer if it's as simple as releasing the server app. But I think Thor's point and what's being debated here is that live service games often aren't like that. So why is this law seemingly including them?
If you don't like live service games and don't feel like they should exist, then don't buy them. I can see some legislation around clear marketing. But if people want to pay for an ephemeral service, that's up to the consumer.
The answer is to allow people to host it themselves. If you've got a Discord server and people who want to experience a game with you, you could get 40 people together to do a WoW raid long after it stopped being profitable for Blizzard. In a case like Pokemon Go, either that stuff is determined algorithmically or there's a game master with their finger on the button to trigger the event; users could run that too.