> Games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down.
For some games, like MMORPGs, an offline mode doesn't make sense.
In lieu of that, they need to make the server binaries available, along with client functionality to let you choose a server. They shouldn't be required to offer support, but the nerd community is great at figuring things out. They'll get it working and produce guides.
They should release either the server component or documentation for how it works and a way to unlock any protections around it. I’ve seen people argue before that releasing the whole backend stack would be an issue and I agree, but documentation shouldn’t be an issue.
I would prefer that this become the standard for software, as a whole, to be open source after a while. Because there is a sustainability aspect, just like the rest of the tools in our world.
For example, a manual drill has no real draw backs it will always run. An electric drill with a cord, will likely always run and electrical components can be traced and sourced rather easily. A drill that was designed to use with a battery, will not always run, and has software/firmware with some other limitations likely buried in the software.
The moment support is dropped, it should be released to open source to allow others interested to maintain it. Such as with the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 Ti... no longer supported with driver updates (outside of "security updates"). The firmware should be supported by the people if the company doesn't want to support it, it still is an excellent card even 10 years later...
MMO or not, source code should just be released. Patents are not forever, source code shouldn't be either. Though patent might be too long as well. 15/20 years worked when things developed slowly, but now days its outdated within years and could benefit other advancements.
If a company is willing to continue maintaining a piece of code their monopoly should continue. If they choose to stop (because they can't come up with a sustainable business model, can't find somebody to sell the monopoly to who will, etc) it should become, at minimum, source available (if not out right Open Source).
This should be the case, especially, for software that drives long-lived hardware devices in infrastructure roles (public works, manufacturing, etc).
I dunno, there’s plenty of projects that turn MMORPGs into self-contained single player RPGs and/or simulate other players with bots, so I don’t really see any reason why they should be excluded.
I would argue that server binaries are less important now in the age of AI. The ability to reverse engineer them is so accessible now.
I think more importantly / more digestible is that you can't pursue legislation against people running their own game servers if you no longer offer the game yourself.
This is definitely the most defensible position. I'm sure others want stronger protections, but taking lawsuits off the table for any item no longer for sale (be it a game, other software, hardware, media, etc) would make a ton of sense.
No one can reasonably claim to be harmed in such a scenario. Enshrine abandonware into law.
I find myself in general agreement but I wonder what second order issues would come about. Will we see companies listing an old game for a trillion dollars a copy just to keep rights?
Bob Dylan pulled some shenanigans like this. He "released" an album which only had like 100 copies, but in doing so he maintained copyright of all his old work (and let's be real that's all that anyone would ever listen to anyway).
I think Japan has an interesting model though for abandonware, at least when the copyright owner can't be tracked down: anyone can sell an old game, but a portion of the income goes into an escrow account in case the copyright holder is located.
It's currently accessible, but I'm sure they will start adding whatever roadblocks they can. e.g. Requiring attestation before running game, keeping some logic in server side which will be sent only to clients which pass the attestation, requiring platforms which grant more protections etc.
That's never going to happen. Game companies are not going to give you their source code. Usually the source of any game that gets shut down is shared with games that are still live. Example: if Fallout 76 is shut down, Bethesda giving you their source would essentially be giving you the source to Skyrim also. I'm not saying that I have the solution or that your idea isn't good on some level, but we have to be realistic.
Counterpoint: maybe we could make proprietary software illegal, and make everything GPL so we can just request the source code to anything we want. With enough eyes all bugs are shallow, so why wouldn't banks and nuclear reactors want their source to be audited by the public? lol
(Software might become de facto open source with AI decomp anyway)
I’ve worked on games where the server code is python, or there’s “core logic” in SQL, or we’ve used third party libraries that aren’t suitable for binary redistribution. Most studios will share code between games and server code isn’t intended to be redistributed so will contain “secret sauce” for multiple games. I’m not saying these are deal breakers but saying “just give them server binaries” isn’t a handwave solution for most of the games that these sorts of acts target.
Yeah, the idea of game companies (especially MMO or live service ones) being mandated to release server binaries or code is completely unworkable. Companies are not going to want to give away their main proprietary advantage that they've invested into. Games are already a high-risk investment and this would make it even higher risk because the little competitive moat between studios would be eliminated. The industry has been hit hard by layoffs and making gaming even less desirable for investment will further accelerate that. Any failed game (which is most games, because gaming is a hits driven industry) would be saddled with even more liability. Not to mention most commercial middleware is under NDA, so having their source become public would likely destroy those companies, too.
I am not opposed to some mandatory disclosures at the time of sale - like "this multiplayer game requires centralized servers", etc. But straight up requiring server binaries is not going to be viable for a whole swath of online-only game studios like MMO/live service/subscription games etc.
How about "you need to release the binaries for the servers if you turn them off"? The intent of this sort of regulation is to prevent bait-and-switches were games become unplayable after players have invested their time and money.
I’d want a revenue floor before this took effect. An indie developer should not have to worry about getting sued because they didn’t properly turn off a hobby project.
Indie developers can probably avoid killing games the most easily, they're unlikely to have 3rd party tech or IP that's only temporarily licensed, or elaborate DRM, mandatory connectivity/accounts etc, and may even have complete autonomy/power to do what they want.
Please Jesus. Making a ton of online games as an indie would be suicide. Not to mention the obligations going on a balance sheet when they need funding.
Like functionally should probably be like that 200k revenue or more since it’s potentially a few weeks of labor obligation
How is that working out for the mp3 algorithm or bluray decryption?
The OSS community just laughs at algo patents. There was never any ability to enforce them at the pre-AI scale. Post-AI the corpos have no chance. They lost.
Notice the word new, novel and proprietary. Would you like to ask your AI pipeline to duplicate ours? Unless someone knows what we do to parameterize, create and optimize new, proprietary and novel algorithm sets, it remains as part of any new scientific or engineering moat associated to an AI pipeline. This also include deep knowledge domain expertise and human decision trees applied along the way.
So if I am understanding you correctly, the final moat will be private AI optimizations hidden behind closed doors so the public has nothing to reverse engineer.
That moat will hold so long as no one cares about what you built enough to ask a model of similar power to yours "get me similar results to X" until they learn their own path to do so. Maybe one even more efficient than yours.
It will just take one of those people to Open Source something good enough and game over.
I already have built multiple confidential compute operating systems from 386 bytes of machine code all the way up with many novel and world-first features using exclusively consumer hardware I personally own, without any internet reliance, on my own property. Low level kernel and compiler debugging all with models that will run on old GPUs you can buy on ebay right now for under $500.
The way most people use AI, lighting money on fire, is a skill issue. You can build anything cheaply now if you generally know how computers work at a low level and can tell models exactly what to do.
You're dreaming. Prepare for DMCA2, where it will be illegal to run an LLM on a compiled binary for the purposes of decompiling under penalty of jail time.
As long as it is legal in at least one country, the code will be out there and models will train on it. The ship on IP has already sailed. The moat is gone.
Which models? Of Iranian Army or what? (this was sarcasm)
AI companies tend to discriminate against a lot of data they gather when it comes to training phases, usually for legal reason. Do you have any concrete proof that game decompilation efforts influenced any "mainstream" models?
Consumer protection is already clearly the focus of Congress, and with the demise of the Chevron deference in 2024, it seems that Congress needs to bind (such that they can) groups operated by the Executive Branch to uphold consumer rights explicitly instead of allowing regulators to navigate the commercial market.
The answer to Why is Congress concerned with details like this? is that the Supreme Court of the United States made it their concern by rejecting an established practice of deferring to expert regulators instead of electable people who probably lack the relevant knowledge and experience.
> is that the Supreme Court of the United States made it their concern by rejecting an established practice of deferring to expert regulators instead of electable people who probably lack the relevant knowledge and experience
The current Supreme Court unfortunately unfortunately seems to lack the knowledge and experience to recognize the logic in this thinking (or just doesn't care because it doesn't fit their agenda)
Tis a silly question. This has the combination of being something that the populace either doesn't care about at all (so no opposition from _constituents_) or rapidly supports (basically any gamer with some form of nostalgia that has gone unmet). As an added bonus it has the potential to set a legal precedent over similar more serious software such as SaaS offerings with a client component.
I could use the same argument to oppose pretty much any legislation that isn't like, solving healthcare or preventing climate change. For any given issue, there's almost always something more important than it to at least some people, so if the best argument against fixing a problem is "there are other problems that should be fixed", that's a pretty strong argument in favor of the fix.
Congress.gov says Rep. Ritchie Torres has sponsored 171 bills since 2021 and only one became a law, five passed the House and most of those were under Democrat majority. [1]
This wouldn't have helped with my latest run in with artificial Product Existence failure*, but I'm glad to see it anyhow.
*Hey, remember how Neal Stephenson's last project was writing for a nascent shared sci-fi universe? Did you get a chance to play the visual novel that was its first entry, which was hosted on a crypto project's website? Well, I sure hope you did, because the crypto project rugpulled and took the VN down with it, effectively turning a Neal Stephenson novella into lost media less than a year after its initial release.
I would say that it can be pretty simple to solve these problems. If a software company is going to implement a license server or a time limited certificate into a piece of software that will prevent the software from working, then they should be mandated to keep all customer payments in escrow and within 5 minutes of the software becoming unusable by the users, the money has to be returned, with interest and adjusted for inflation.
So every week when World of Warcraft goes down for maintenance for a couple of hours. Blizzard should have to forfeit all of the subscribers money, since it is unusable for more than 5 minutes?
If a server runs for 30 years, and then shuts down. It should have to return 30 years of revenue, plus interest?
You sound dismissive, but gamers as a whole is a demographic that is hard to be ignored and happens to span groups otherwise counter to one another. Any politician who would not take advantage does it to their own detriment.
If your life is otherwise impoverished, a video game could be one of the few options for affordable entertainment, particularly if a viable market for used games exists (which is one of the things this legislation wants to mandate).
So, to be clear, you believe government should focus on one problem at a time to the exclusion of anything else or am I missing something? That's never been how government, of any form up to and including the utopian visions that people keep in their dreams, has functioned.
I agree, we have much bigger fish to fry, but "I don't care about this issue so nobody should" isn't how you build a coalition to get the poverty addressed. A lot of politics is "hey Gamers, remember how I got you that thing you wanted? Well now I need support as I take on a bigger, more important topic". Inversely, saying "I don't care about your problem until another problem is resolved" tends to fray the group because you're quite literally telling people you don't respect them or their needs/wants.
You should check out the book "Let This Radicalize You", great primer on how to organize and get actual results vs doomering on the internet.
Addendum (reason for edit): Here's a list of other policy proposals and stances this guy is making: https://ritchietorres.house.gov/resources Draw your own conclusions, but he doesn't seem like he's 100% focused on gamer issues at present...
I just realized where the anger comes from: this particular division is not something that D/R team could easily splinter ( yet anyway -- I am sure we will soon be hating on the candy crush ppl ).
You know how some engineering teams have a really difficult time prioritizing? Maybe in planning there's a big long list of project ideas some of which really need more discovery to define scope. There can be stuff that seems really important to a long-term vision but is also hard to estimate and higher risk of scope creep etc. And there's stuff that's cheap/fast/low-risk but doesn't solve the larger important problems? And even in the context of a company that is still burning through investor money, you fix _some_ of the smaller things even while you're still figuring out the bigger things, b/c otherwise you'd likely _never_ do the smaller things?
I'm not saying legislators are doing their best in a good faith effort to serve their constituents. But even if they were, you would sometimes see things like this, right?
Yeah, I'm certainly not opposed to this law, but it seems like a strange thing to focus on as our democracy and the rule of law is crumbling in real-time.
I sincerely don't understand this mentality. Legislators consider more than one bill per legislative session. We can (and must!) push along multiple axes, otherwise we will always be behind right?
If this were the only bill being considered I'd agree with you. By this logic we would only focus on one issue at a time and others would get worse in the meantime, so we would always be behind.
> but it seems like a strange thing to focus on as our democracy and the rule of law
Society is improved one issue at a time, and if you sit around waiting for the revolution to come, you will end up like the socialists who never win any elections and achieve nothing for decades.
No, we do not need to overthrow all of capitalism overnight, or solve "democracy", or whatever it is that you are advocating for, before we take any action to improve society.
That is code for "just don't do anything except LARP and complain, and attack anyone who actually is accomplishing things". Its a useless philosophy.
For some games, like MMORPGs, an offline mode doesn't make sense.
In lieu of that, they need to make the server binaries available, along with client functionality to let you choose a server. They shouldn't be required to offer support, but the nerd community is great at figuring things out. They'll get it working and produce guides.
For example, a manual drill has no real draw backs it will always run. An electric drill with a cord, will likely always run and electrical components can be traced and sourced rather easily. A drill that was designed to use with a battery, will not always run, and has software/firmware with some other limitations likely buried in the software.
The moment support is dropped, it should be released to open source to allow others interested to maintain it. Such as with the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 Ti... no longer supported with driver updates (outside of "security updates"). The firmware should be supported by the people if the company doesn't want to support it, it still is an excellent card even 10 years later...
MMO or not, source code should just be released. Patents are not forever, source code shouldn't be either. Though patent might be too long as well. 15/20 years worked when things developed slowly, but now days its outdated within years and could benefit other advancements.
This should be the case, especially, for software that drives long-lived hardware devices in infrastructure roles (public works, manufacturing, etc).
Then any 3rd party could stand up a new server and at least have an inkling of where to go on.
I think more importantly / more digestible is that you can't pursue legislation against people running their own game servers if you no longer offer the game yourself.
No one can reasonably claim to be harmed in such a scenario. Enshrine abandonware into law.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jan/08/bob-dylan-box-...
I think Japan has an interesting model though for abandonware, at least when the copyright owner can't be tracked down: anyone can sell an old game, but a portion of the income goes into an escrow account in case the copyright holder is located.
Counterpoint: maybe we could make proprietary software illegal, and make everything GPL so we can just request the source code to anything we want. With enough eyes all bugs are shallow, so why wouldn't banks and nuclear reactors want their source to be audited by the public? lol
(Software might become de facto open source with AI decomp anyway)
> Game companies are not going to give you their source code.
Okay but what about the thing they actually proposed?
I am not opposed to some mandatory disclosures at the time of sale - like "this multiplayer game requires centralized servers", etc. But straight up requiring server binaries is not going to be viable for a whole swath of online-only game studios like MMO/live service/subscription games etc.
I don't know if you misinterpreted my comment or if you're strawmanning, because I didn't say anything about source code.
> Software might become de facto open source with AI decomp anyway
Agreed.
We don't need them to; AI can reverse engineer most shit now.
Even if US lobbying tries to hamper that, China will accelerate it.
Sure they will. They can be forced to by the government which is society's monopoly on violence.
> but we have to be realistic.
No we don't. We can just force companies to do it, using the threat of the law.
Also announcements of future announcements is trendy. Companies do it all the time.
I’d want a revenue floor before this took effect. An indie developer should not have to worry about getting sued because they didn’t properly turn off a hobby project.
Like functionally should probably be like that 200k revenue or more since it’s potentially a few weeks of labor obligation
Intellectual property is not going to be a thing anymore.
It just used to take a lot of human labor, but LLMs are closing that gap. Fast.
The OSS community just laughs at algo patents. There was never any ability to enforce them at the pre-AI scale. Post-AI the corpos have no chance. They lost.
That moat will hold so long as no one cares about what you built enough to ask a model of similar power to yours "get me similar results to X" until they learn their own path to do so. Maybe one even more efficient than yours.
It will just take one of those people to Open Source something good enough and game over.
Assuming everyone is provided unlimited compute in the future is very naive
The way most people use AI, lighting money on fire, is a skill issue. You can build anything cheaply now if you generally know how computers work at a low level and can tell models exactly what to do.
AI companies tend to discriminate against a lot of data they gather when it comes to training phases, usually for legal reason. Do you have any concrete proof that game decompilation efforts influenced any "mainstream" models?
Just trying to point out what could be the opposition for this, not that it's a bad thing to pass.
The answer to Why is Congress concerned with details like this? is that the Supreme Court of the United States made it their concern by rejecting an established practice of deferring to expert regulators instead of electable people who probably lack the relevant knowledge and experience.
The current Supreme Court unfortunately unfortunately seems to lack the knowledge and experience to recognize the logic in this thinking (or just doesn't care because it doesn't fit their agenda)
Congress.gov says Rep. Ritchie Torres has sponsored 171 bills since 2021 and only one became a law, five passed the House and most of those were under Democrat majority. [1]
[1] https://www.congress.gov/quick-search/legislation?congressGr...
*Hey, remember how Neal Stephenson's last project was writing for a nascent shared sci-fi universe? Did you get a chance to play the visual novel that was its first entry, which was hosted on a crypto project's website? Well, I sure hope you did, because the crypto project rugpulled and took the VN down with it, effectively turning a Neal Stephenson novella into lost media less than a year after its initial release.
If a server runs for 30 years, and then shuts down. It should have to return 30 years of revenue, plus interest?
I agree, we have much bigger fish to fry, but "I don't care about this issue so nobody should" isn't how you build a coalition to get the poverty addressed. A lot of politics is "hey Gamers, remember how I got you that thing you wanted? Well now I need support as I take on a bigger, more important topic". Inversely, saying "I don't care about your problem until another problem is resolved" tends to fray the group because you're quite literally telling people you don't respect them or their needs/wants.
You should check out the book "Let This Radicalize You", great primer on how to organize and get actual results vs doomering on the internet.
Addendum (reason for edit): Here's a list of other policy proposals and stances this guy is making: https://ritchietorres.house.gov/resources Draw your own conclusions, but he doesn't seem like he's 100% focused on gamer issues at present...
Buddy, gamers are a LARGE part of how Trump won his first term in 2016.
I'm not saying legislators are doing their best in a good faith effort to serve their constituents. But even if they were, you would sometimes see things like this, right?
Why would the people in charge focus on this? They consider it a feature, not a bug.
Society is improved one issue at a time, and if you sit around waiting for the revolution to come, you will end up like the socialists who never win any elections and achieve nothing for decades.
No, we do not need to overthrow all of capitalism overnight, or solve "democracy", or whatever it is that you are advocating for, before we take any action to improve society.
That is code for "just don't do anything except LARP and complain, and attack anyone who actually is accomplishing things". Its a useless philosophy.