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Stop Killing Games

(www.stopkillinggames.com)
253 points MYEUHD | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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Apreche ◴[] No.44446392[source]
I’m curious how this can be enforced. If a game requires centralized servers, and the company goes out of business, you can’t force a bankrupt entity to keep the system running. Even if they published an expiration date, if there is no money left to run the servers, there’s nothing to sue for, nobody to fine, and no money to run the server.

You could force the company to release their code upon bankruptcy, but what if another company wants to buy those assets? What if some other IP that they might use on other games is mixed in there and required for the game to work?

You could make a prohibition on live service games to begin with. You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset. The problem here is economic.

Game companies can’t go back to the old model of lumpy cash flow. You can’t have one huge pile of money come in when the game launches, and then a long miniscule tail. That doesn’t keep people employed. It’s also super risky when a game with a huge budget and long development time flops. You have to have some kind of constant revenue stream from subscriptions or micro-transactions to stay afloat. If users can run their own servers, that can never happen.

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1. maplant ◴[] No.44446436[source]
This requires companies to have an end-of-life plan for their games should the company wish to take down their servers. It does not require source code for the centralized servers, only the binaries. In the case of bankruptcy, the end-of-life plan would be part of the assets sold with the game.
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2. wilg ◴[] No.44446767[source]
Do the binaries have to be usable forever? Or for how long? What if some system update breaks them?
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3. maplant ◴[] No.44446928[source]
They don't, they just need to be usable at end of life. The proposal is purposefully very lenient
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4. Volundr ◴[] No.44447267[source]
Nope! Do I need a fleet of servers to run it? No problem! Do I need a specific release.minor.patch of FreeBSD? No problem! Do I need your proprietary kernel patches? Yeah you need to release those.

Or do you have tooling that allows your devs to run it on their machines without the server components (most online games do)? Releasing that instead is also an option.

5. wilg ◴[] No.44450015{3}[source]
Can they include a dead man's switch so they become unusable one day later?
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6. maplant ◴[] No.44455003{4}[source]
I think so, as long as it's not reliant on a central server!