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Are we really going to discuss what "reasonable" means when it says "providing reasonable means"?
Because my autism levels are not on that 4chan level, yet.
General Gaming News and Discussion
- Thread starter Wintermute
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Because my autism levels are not on that 4chan level, yet.
Control
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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Well, it's certainly true that we can't always trust corporations to do what's in the best interests of their customers. Of course, the suggested alternative is that we can trust the government to do what's in the best interests of everyone.
Even in the most innocuous of cases, how many collective human lifetimes have been wasted figuring out how to get rid of the cookie prompts on basically every website now? Thanks EU!
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Control
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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I'm not quibbling over "reasonable". You said it targets single player games. I do not see anything in the petition or in your quoted text that says that.
Penance
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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True. Life is a balancing act in which you have to constantly stay vigilant. We evolved past the point of having to look out for predators and our reward is that we have to govern ourselves constantly and make sure one entity, private or government doesn't get too powerful (read: the new predators)
Too bad we've done a piss poor job at doing either. But that's another discussion entirely. I think in regards to this the most the EU might do is better labels and terms, which I'm OK with.
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OU Ariakas
Diet Dr. Pepper Enjoyer
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If a game has been out for 10 years and the company decides to end support for it, why do we get to demand that it persists forever? Did anyone demand that Mattel had to release the IP for the Intellivison and all of the games to the public once the console stopped production and support ended? Why are PC video games a different story?
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Thinking about it more if the eu passed any bill like this it would immediately end all gaming in the eu.
1: we know you built in an online check deep into the game code to act as an antipiracy DRM measure but now you have to build a backdoor in that can be activated with a flip of a switch making it trivial to pirate your game
2: we know you built in always online games as a service and to improve multi-player competitiveness you moved lots of computational checks to server side to cut down on aim bots and other cheats but now everything has to be client side and hackable
3: we know this is an mmo which literally cannot function as a stand alone and requires maintaining an account with us and connecting to our servers but you need to Baloon your budget 200% giving your game the kingdom of amalur treatment and converting it to offline single player and go bankrupt before you can even launch online mode despite selling over 1.25 million copies in the first 90 days
1: we know you built in an online check deep into the game code to act as an antipiracy DRM measure but now you have to build a backdoor in that can be activated with a flip of a switch making it trivial to pirate your game
2: we know you built in always online games as a service and to improve multi-player competitiveness you moved lots of computational checks to server side to cut down on aim bots and other cheats but now everything has to be client side and hackable
3: we know this is an mmo which literally cannot function as a stand alone and requires maintaining an account with us and connecting to our servers but you need to Baloon your budget 200% giving your game the kingdom of amalur treatment and converting it to offline single player and go bankrupt before you can even launch online mode despite selling over 1.25 million copies in the first 90 days
Tmac
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This is a pretty retarded take. You owned the CD and also owned the way to play it in perpetuity; both were up to you to maintain. You owned the NES game and the NES to play it; they were up to you to maintain.
Just like if you buy a fucking weed-eater or leaf blower, you own them and it's up to you to maintain. They don't just disappear when a publisher decides to start a new lawn care season. So, your analogies are all FUCKING RETARDED.
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Penance
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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No I don't think that's reasonable either. I think it'll be up to the lobbyist and lawyers to write the law. Like I said, I think the most we can hope for is better verbiage and communications to the intent and lifecycle of a game. Kind of like what they did with loot boxes and displaying odds.
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Tmac
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Open sourcing their product to paying customers after they decide to stop supporting it would be a reasonable requirement.
OU Ariakas
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You said above that my arguments were fucking retarded because in the this single specific format, Personal Computers, the game is not a physical thing that you own anymore. I think it highlights just how unreasonable the request is simply because the only change is that we accidentally developed a technology that was almost infinitely upgradeable and bypassed forced obsolescence. There has to be a reasonable assumption that a customer has a time period where they can be expected to use a digital product before the "contract" is considered complete. Should a game you bought last year be forced to keep servers on for at least 4 years to give you a reasonable time to enjoy the product? Yes. Should a game that has been running for a decade have to release the source code just because you feel like you want to play it more? No. I don't mind if you disagree, but calling the argument retarded is disingenuous to the reality of what is being asked.
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Control
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That might seem reasonable to most consumers, but if you'd spent years of your life coding something (or millions of your own dollars paying someone to code it), you might not want to just give it away.
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Tmac
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Definitely a reasonable perspective. But, if you're selling cosmetics to your customers, and they've invested hundreds or thousands of dollars into your game, it's unreasonable to shut it down and thereby remove their access to their purchases/property within the game.
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Control
Bronze Baronet of the Realm
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I feel like that's an "it depends" situation. If it's a game that can easily function as single-player, then sure, definitely reasonable. If it's an mmo, that sounds a lot less reasonable. A lot of other game fall somewhere in the middle.
Penance
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I think there might be a just philosophical debate in that if you choose to stop support to your product, it should be fair game for hackers to reverse engineer it and "fork" the IP at their leisure. Maybe not for their own profit, but maybe within reason? This gets heavy into copy right law and a lot of game IPs will eventually become public domain anyway. I know this is US copyright law and we're talking EU obviously but it's just a thought.
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Well obviously the big issue is copyright and why companies don't bother doing anything to help with that. It would cost pretty much nothing to release the source code of their servers and let fat nerds make their own servers out of that. A lot of time the fat nerds already do that out of leaked super outdated builds(like from beta or whatever) and a mix of reverse engineering to cobble together sticks and leaves into a game that's pretty close to the original. The issue is these companies don't want that because what if 5-10years from now they decide "oh let's reheat that corpse and make a new game with that IP, or even lazier just make a remastered version of out failed game to dig into that nostalgia money", then they don't want to have to compete with a free version that might be even better than what they put out.
I think part of the issue is should copyright laws be enforceable on a product that for all intents and purposes does not exist anymore. If the game can't be bought or played, should copyright laws apply to it? I don't mean the whole of them, I think art/IP stuff should still be protected, it's not like you can decide to make a new game out of the Warhammer IP for free because the Warhammer mmo is dead kind of thing, but I think the copyright specifically pertaining to Warhammer Online as a game should be un-enforceable if the game just doesn't exist currently, provided you don't actually sell the game(again you don't get to remake the game then sell it on Steam because it's dead now). If the company does decide to re-release it, then they'd get their copyrights back and would be able to send C&D letters to private servers and such, but otherwise I don't think it's very fair to be able to threaten lawsuits for a game that doesn't even exist anymore.
For singleplayer games it's even less excuseable. Doesn't matter if it has always online DRM or cosmetics that use an online shop or whatever, all that shit should simply be taken offline if you shut down the game. It would "cost money", but only because the game weren't designed from the start with the possibility in mind. If you just decided to make them like this from the ground up, then it would cost nothing to just switch. Obviously they don't design them that way because there's no laws that force them to do that.
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Captain Suave
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
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Copyright in general has been perverted from its original purpose, which was to be a temporary restraint to allow creatives to profit from their work for a modest time. Copyrights were supposed to last 14 years with an option to renew to 28, then everything reverted to public domain since the concept of owning ideas in perpetuity throttles the progress of knowledge. Thanks to Disney we're now trending towards a world where people think riffing off the thoughts, never mind work, of others is a bad thing and immortal corporations or the great-grandchildren of creators are entitled to something.
I'm all for revoking copyright on abandonware; I just question how much much good it will do for to consumers due of the nature of modern software architecture.