Game Industry Pushes Back Against Efforts To Restore Gameplay Servers (arstechnica.com)

Kyle Orland reports via Ars Technica: A group of video game preservationists wants the legal right to replicate "abandoned" servers in order to re-enable defunct online multiplayer gameplay for study. The game industry says those efforts would hurt their business, allow the theft of their copyrighted content, and essentially let researchers "blur the line between preservation and play." Both sides are arguing their case to the U.S. Copyright Office right now, submitting lengthy comments on the subject as part of the Copyright Register's triennial review of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Analyzing the arguments on both sides shows how passionate both industry and academia are about the issue, and how mistrust and misunderstanding seem to have infected the debate.

Comments

Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

If we cared half as much about treason as we do about our video games we wouldn't have stayed home jacking off during the last election....

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Luckyo]

Actually people came out to vote in droves. Just not for your candidate.

It's called democracy.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

Democracy... Nothing 13 people, $8000, and a few faceplant and twit accounts can't fix.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling the American voting system a democracy is like calling Elizabeth Swaney an olympic athlete.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[sexconker]

I voted by mail so I could stay at home and jack off.
I also care about treason, which is why I would love to see HRC, the DNC, and many of the Obama administration (perhaps even Obama himself) brought up on charges of treason.

After all, it's already been proven that HRC and the DNC paid a law firm to hire GPS Fusion to hire a British spy to work with Russians to create a fake dossier on Trump to leak to Yahoo for self-corroboration when presenting it under false pretenses to a FISA court to get a warrant to spy on Trump and his campaign in order to undermine the election. All of this occurred under the nose of the Obama administration with many in the FBI and justice department not only aware of the goings on but deeply involved in the conspiracy as well as planning an "insurance policy" on top of it.

But hey, RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTION, right?

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

If it were a Democracy you would have lost hugely. It's called a Republic, derp.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

Voter turnout was 55.7% (see, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...).

It is not a record low, but it is down there with the lowest. People didn't vote "in droves" and that is not Democracy.

When someone can rule a country with about a quarter of the popular vote, that is called a farce.

(And before you say "But anony, other countries also have low voter turnouts", the USA is among the OECD countries with the lowest voter turnouts. see for example: http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...)

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately for you and Moscow Donald, the Steele dossier produced by Fusion GPS has pointed the way to treason, money laundering, and other crimes in a very accurate and reliable way.

The more it's investigated the more it's proven true. Kind of a silly document to point to as proof that someone other than Trump and his crime family is guilty of treason.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello Russian troll and/or idiot.

Fusion GPS is/was a non partisan opposition research firm WHICH WAS FIRST HIRED BY GOP to do oppo on Trump. Literally every candidate ever has people doing opposition research on every other candidate and themselves. This not thing special. Fake news.

British Spy (Christopher Steele) was an expert on Russian affairs at Mi6. Russia is a state run criminal enterprise. Putin and his cronies are sucking the country dry, while doing everything they can to destabilize the west for their own gain. Putin found in Trump the most useful of idiots, because Trump is a scumbag who's the diametric opposite of discrete. You think the Trump Dossier is the first accusation against him? Donald Trump dragged his wife by hair round the bedroom and raped her. Just one example of thousands of Trump being a creep that literally everyone knew about him. His ties with the mob. His bankruptcies. His MANY failed ventures which fucked people left and right and still crashed and burned.

Back to your "points."

No FISA warrant on Trump you fucking idiot. FISA warrants on scumbags who've already plead guilty and are now cooperating with Mueller to fill out the picture of the most crooked and corrupt administration in this country's history. Seriously, its just a cavalcade of crooks. Flynn, Manafort, Gates, Papadopoulos, are just the tip of the iceberg. Trump's "Best People" are a literal walking criminal lineup. Anyway back to the FISA warrants. Carter Page was under Fisa warrant because he was involved in a Russian Spy network before he even met Trump. It just so happened that several Russian spys or agents penetrated Trumps organization at the same time. The warrants were beyond justified and roped a bunch dumb asses into Treason.

Blah blah blah ohbummmerrr.. Seriously all you idiots do is spit blame on literally anyone you can just to avoid having to admit that you've been scammed or that you're in on the scam. Seriously you so called "conservatives" have demonstrably gone back on every single tenant you pretend to stand for. You want sanctity of marriage? You hire the biggest sex creep the world has ever seen. You want to lower the deficit? Guess what, it just went up $1.5T. You want to drain the swamp? Here's a list of his appointees who've had to resign in shame already.

Rob Porter - Beat the shit out of two of wives.
Brenda Fitzgerald - Served in the CDC while owning Tobacco stocks
Omarosa Manigualt - Dragged kicking and screaming out of the whitehousse
Tom Price - Bilked the tax payers for a million bucks taking free trips around the world for fun in military jets
Sebastian Gorka - Actual Nazi (memeber of the Order of Vitéz, google it) fired for being a Nazi, suprise surprise
Steve Bannon - Fired for going to war with Jervanka, ratted Trump out to a fucking journalist, now cooperating with the Mueller investigation. His quote exactly btw:

“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor - with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers,” Bannon was quoted as saying in excerpts of the book seen by Reuters.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

You notice how nobody is denying it? That's because he let Michael Wolff record him.

Anthony Scaramucci - well who doesn't remember that one?

Less notably
Reince Priebus
Sean Spicer
Michael Dubke
Walter Shaub

If i were to give you a full list it would take me all night. Name another administration where so many people stepped doing because they were caught being this shady?

And yes, the whole world knows Russia hacked the election. They've been trying to hack every election. They hit out of the ball park because if fucking delusional idiots like yourself, or paid trolls like yourself. The only two options here...

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Xenx]

First, I'm not saying your wrong in any way. I'm making no statement about their use of the term treason. I'm just pointing out where the problem lies.

The "we" in their statement isn't overly defined, but in the context it likely includes gamers. Gamers are more likely to be younger than older. As everyone knows, younger people are much less likely to vote. For example, the 18-29 age group had ~46% turn out in 2016. Their comment about people staying home during the last election is perfectly valid, in the context.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

/me Gives you a gold star for paying attention in government class.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

American Democracy... Nothing 13 people, $8000, and a few faceplant and twit accounts can't fix.
FTFY.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[jedidiah]

If you think that 13 trolls are more dangerous than Koch and Bloomberg, you really aren't thinking this shit through.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Luckyo]

Democracy in context of modern western state is a system of electing political representative based on established ruleset in a democratic fashion.

I'm genuinely confused as to why you think that overwhelming majority of Western nations are "a farce". Most Western states don't actually have a two party system, and have prime minister rather than president as the political top job that leads the country. Which means that these people are elected by far fewer than a quarter of people in the nation.

And there's nothing farcical about it. The best part about Western style liberal democracy is that pluralism of opinions is what results in the outcome, and that whoever gets to the top must secure sufficient support from the political representatives of the populace who are in turn elected in a democratic vote by their constituents.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to not come off as too biased you could have mentioned the Sinclair Broadcast Group as well here.

But what the frak is up with people here? Yes, some AC had to bring up politics, but why are you guys taking the bait? So if you think that trolls are harmless, look at what they've already done to this community.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

> Name another administration where so many people stepped doing because they were caught being this shady?

"The presidency of Ronald Reagan in the United States was marked by multiple scandals, resulting in the investigation, indictment, or conviction of over 138 administration officials, the largest number for any U.S. president."
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_administration_scandals

Not saying that the current administration won't trump Reagan's eight year record, it is certainly on track to set a new Republican record.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Darinbob]

What were the official numbers compared to previous elections. Certainly the inauguration was not well attended.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think that 13 trolls are more dangerous than Koch and Bloomberg, you really aren't thinking this shit through.

Apparently that is a common thing these days.
13 is the number of people indicted. The number of indicted Koch and Bloombergs is 0 as a comparison.

The number of non-indicted trolls is a lot higher and if you follow the trail to the top you will find people a lot worse than Koch and Bloomberg.

You know the kind of evil you usually only see in movies, when the big boss have his henchmen cut someone up in little pieces just to send a message or where someone is tortured for days just because they spoke up against the tyranny?
Koch and Bloomberg might be evil, but they aren't close to what the Russian top have done to get to their position.

Re: Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of people under investigation (vs already pleading guilty) in the Trump administration is not yet public. That said, I would take ANY cash bet it will exceed the 134 under Reagan for Iran Contra etc.
 

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Anonymous Coward]

What were the official numbers compared to previous elections. Certainly the inauguration was not well attended.

Doesn't matter; the winner won and the loser lost. Popular vote doesn't count. Inauguration numbers indicate nothing.

Next time you want to spout off, remember that had it not been for the non-white vote trump would have lost. If trump had relied only on white males, he would have lost. He won because he appealed to a large cross-section of the population.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[zifn4b]

Democracy in context of modern western state is a system of electing political representative based on established ruleset in a democratic fashion.

You are correct. But there is a problem and it was identified by Harvard University that what we see, as the result of the Great Recession, is excessive fragmentation in political parties. What that means is that due to that fragmentation, Congress is not effectively making decisions because there is SIGNIFICANT political in-fighting. This results in the, for all intents and purposes, indecisive lawmaking that we have observed for some time in Congress that citizens are frustrated with. In that context, Democracy actually doesn't work. It results in an indecisive Congress that does nothing instead of something. I don't know what the solution to that problem is other than to ride out the transition while the Conservative and Liberal parties redefine themselves. The Great Recession significantly altered America and Western Europe.

If you're interested, here is the Harvard Lecture entitled "Globalization and the Backlash of Populism" by Mark Blyth on the subject.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Luckyo]

Quite an interesting hypothesis considering that as I pointed above, most western liberal democracies do not operate in a two party system. Which means that they by nature have far more fragmented political party base than US.

And yet, they are governed just fine.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[zifn4b]

The difference between Harvard's claim and your claim is that Harvard actually has data as you can see in the lecture. And the data spans a significant amount time. What do you have to support your position to disagree with Harvard University's professors?

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Luckyo]

Overwhelming majority of liberal democracies across the world, their party structure and the way they handle governance.

I have no idea how you missed this particular part of my argument, it being central to it and all.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[zifn4b]

You obviously don't understand how peer reviewed claims come to be accepted by an academic community. There are several problems with your content:

1) It doesn't state your claim proposition clearly
2) There is no evidence or logic supplied to support your position
3) Your statements are solely composed of conjecture and anecdotes which you should know cannot form the basis for an argument

I'd be really interested in your thoughts if you can state them as clearly as Harvard University can. I can understand their lecture clearly but I do not understand you but I am interested if you can make it coherent what you are trying to present.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Luckyo]

If you are seriously expecting me to invest time in writing a peer-review grade thesis because someone on internet forums asked for it, you must think very highly of yourself.

In real world on the other hand, I will simply stick to my previous argument, which you still fail to address in any meaningful way.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[dinfinity]

You are correct and GP is simply appealing to authority.

Harvard sounds nice and all, but the reality is that political fragmentation in Western Europe is something different than the rise of populism, although they are related a bit. It is also a vastly different situation than the corrupt and insanely polarized red-blue situation in the US legislative branch.

Increased political fragmentation is actually a result of (social) freedom, with fewer people voting 'the way their parents voted', or along religious or other strong cultural group lines; People are far more flexible in which party they vote for. Besides that, civilization has become much more media-oriented and collectively we are all more susceptible to the vastly increased number of bells, whistles and rattles that these rich media offer. Thus newcomers touting attractive soundbites can amass lots of votes before (generally) crashing and burning due to lack of organisation and experience. This includes populist parties.

The 'rise of populism' is something in which 9/11 and the geopolitics around it cannot be ignored. The only troublesome 'populist' parties are pretty much all anti-Muslim or more generally anti-brown-foreigner. Raging wars in the Middle East have increased and are increasing the global cultural divides. It's a pretty big ask for democracies in Western Europe to prevent the populist parties from feeding on that. It's not going great, but it could be much much worse.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Luckyo]

They're entirely unrelated. Example: In my country, the current government consists of three parties. This is supposed to be the "populist" government. Previous government consisted of SIX parties. That's double the current party amount in government. That was the government that didn't include the populist party in it.

The amount of parties in parliament depends on how state's political sphere has developed. In most cases, you get quite a few parties that represent certain sections of populace, none of whom can reach 50% support to form government alone. So they have to negotiate with other parties and reach a consensus on government platform.

And this is how political pluralism is traditionally achieved in representative democracy. In case of states like US, where there are only two parties, plurality is present, but more tied into the party structure itself. As in a single party represents specific voting blocks that fight within the party for influence. The process is more rigid than the alternative by definition, because when you vote for a certain party, you also effectively vote for other interest groups represented by that party. So the larger the party is and the more interest groups it represents, the less influence your vote has.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[dinfinity]

[The rise of populism and political fragmentation in Western Europe are] entirely unrelated.

Wouldn't you agree that the greater flexibility of the people in their voting decisions is at least in part responsible for the rise in ease with which political parties in Western Europe can gain influence? Look at parties such as the Pirate Party or in the Netherlands the Party for the Animals. I'd say that such parties would not have had any chance in the 50's, but such parties now have seats in parliaments in Western Europe. The same mechanism also allows all kinds of silly populist parties to pop up (and as said, generally crash and burn quickly).

In most cases, you get quite a few parties that represent certain sections of populace

That is of course largely true, but the one issue parties (as mentioned) are definitely a thing now and they are influencing the political agenda and discourse. I think their existence shows that people approach voting differently now. Instead of generally agreeing with the ideology of a party and choosing representatives, (some) people see voting for parliament as a referendum on the issue they care about the most. Not: "I want to do my part in choosing capable people to run the country in a good way", but "I want to be heard". In a way, it is a more egocentric approach and an extension of increased individualism (Remember when everybody was really worried about that in the 90's?).

In case of states like US, where there are only two parties

This is not true. There are more parties in the US (Jill Steins Greens, for instance), but the winner takes all system stabilizes (in the game theoretic sense) on two large parties. It clearly works very badly. I hope the Americans are going to get around to fixing their politics soon, but I have little hope for that.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[zifn4b]

If you expect me to take your claims seriously without any evidence or reason, then you are not of sound mind. I just dismiss you as a lot of useless talk.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[zifn4b]

And here we go... you say "GP is appealing to authority". Excuse me but fuck you. I made no statement about my opinions of collectivism vs. individualism to base that claim on. I am merely stating facts. See, I can state facts whether they align with my personal preferences or not. Just because I share peer-reviewed information doesn't mean I like it. That's the thing about facts, they are true whether you like them or not and whether you believe them or not. You're either interested in knowing the truth of what is going on or you're not.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Luckyo]

Evidence has in fact been provided to you. Structure of clear majority of Western liberal democracies.

The fact that you're so keen on just dismissing the majority of Western liberal democracies as "evidence or reason" is weird.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Luckyo]

Of course, I would agree. That is the point of democracy, and why it's generally a very stable form of governance - it enables demos, "the people" to air their grievances in a way that doesn't cause a massive systemic upheaval in the country and yet in a way that country's arestos, "the elite" cannot easily ignore. So there are populist parties that only address certain things that do indeed burn up after they succeed or fail in addressing their issues. Example: UK's UKIP.

Or you get the parties that show that their issues are relevant and they are capable of addressing them, becoming a long term fixture of political structure of their state. Example: Austria's FPÖ.

On your last point, you're missing the forest for the trees in my message. I'm not talking about parties that have no meaningful access to power (i.e. representation in national or supernational parliaments). I'm talking about parties that are in fact elected to power on national or supernational level and as such have access to the benefits that democratic election system grants those that succeed in it.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[zifn4b]

Henceforth, you have been deemed irrational and of questionable mental state. It is pointless to continue to talk to a person who dismisses entire areas of academia including logical syllogism which has been around for thousands of years originating with the ancient Greek Philosophers. You live in your own narcissistic parallel universe where everything revolves around you and there is only one truth: you are right and everyone else is wrong. Congratulations. I don't care dude. Live in your fantasy world. If that's what it takes for you to cope with your life because your too much of a wuss to deal with reality, it's cool. I understand. Sorry to hear that you're weak.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[zifn4b]

Oh and by the way, here is the problem with people like you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... I doubt you'll understand what I'm getting at given the way your mental framework is structured.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Luckyo]

That I deny your religious views and cite long standing reality as a counterpoint?

It's a problem for you. Not me.

Re:Push back against TREASON

[Luckyo]

I dismissed nothing. I merely provided a counter claim based in long standing reality. The core principle of peer review as a concept, and scientific view in general is that people are actually allowed to provide counter points without being attacked on personal level for it.

Notably, the fact that you noted that citing counter point based in long standing reality is "a dismissal" tell us a lot of how you view your own claim.

The rest of your tirade is a marvellous projection. More power to you I say.

Copyright is a hell of a drug

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they can't do anything with their code, they refuse to let go. And when the copyright finally expires sometime next century, no one will be alive who remembers the game and no hardware exists which contains the code. Such is life with digital ephemera.

Re:Copyright is a hell of a drug

[Anonymous Coward]

> when the copyright finally expires
"AHHHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAno" -- Steamboat Willie

Re:Copyright is a hell of a drug

[Anonymous Coward]

But they can do something with their code. They can prevent you from using it, thereby ensuring at least some sales of their latest iteration of the series. That's what they meant by the whole "those efforts would hurt their business", right? If they shut down the servers of [GAME_2017], but I can still connect to pirate servers, there's no reason for me to purchase [GAME_2018].

Re:Copyright is a hell of a drug

[omnichad]

If they were smarter, they'd do both. Monetize the old servers rather than shutting them down. Then they make money either way. Still, buying a game with an indeterminate EOL date is a gamble - and there need to be more consumer protections for any device/software tied to a cloud service that could end at any time.

Re:Copyright is a hell of a drug

[zifn4b]

Even if they can't do anything with their code, they refuse to let go. And when the copyright finally expires sometime next century, no one will be alive who remembers the game and no hardware exists which contains the code. Such is life with digital ephemera.

Don't like the law? Write a letter to your state representatives.

Re:Copyright is a hell of a drug

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't like the law? Write a letter to your state representatives.

They do, to keep the general public from ever getting their end of the copyright bargain upheld. Why else would "for a limited time" suddenly mean: "As long as we can keep getting retroactive term extensions"?

Re:Copyright is a hell of a drug

[RockDoctor]

If they shut down the servers of [GAME_2017], but I can still connect to pirate servers, there's no reason for me to purchase [GAME_2018].

Checks the copyrights on my installed games. 1991 (I brought it on floppy disc) ; 1994 (4 or 5 stiffy discs) and 2017 (Freeware, but essentially replicating something I pirated in 1989).

What is this thing about "game servers"? What the hell is the point of a game that requires you to connect to the internet?

Nothin new

[Luckyo]

The idea of "owning the means to play" was one of the key changes in gaming industry. The entire concept of multiplayer on modern consoles is predicated upon this principle, and with windows 10, PC gaming is headed in the same direction.

Not giving players servers they could control was just one step on this progression.

Re:Nothin new

[110010001000]

This no longer applies to just games. A lot of enterprise software won't work once they turn off the servers due to a change in business model, or a breaking software change.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft are *trying* to send PC gaming that way but like their previous attempts it will fail.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

Every piece of historic evidence suggests that they will in fact succeed. There are no meaningful alternatives to windows for gaming on PC, and they control the sales of this OS.

It's merely a question of time, and as industry has shown, large companies can afford to have strategies for getting to their goals last a decade or more in a market like this. The only solution here would be an alternative OS that would actually be popular among gamers. And I think "year of linux on desktop" meme has demonstrated very well just how unlikely this is to occur in any reasonable time frame.

And mobile is already even worse. By a very large margin.

Re:Nothin new

[bistromath007]

Every piece of historic evidence suggests that they will succeed in making titles by massive corporations this way. As long as Windows still allows any code that isn't from a digital storefront to be run, which they must or else their market share will evaporate immediately, people will be able to make games of their own.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

Im going to post this anon because Im about to talk about work lol

I tried pointing this out to the bosses as they moved to office 365 in the cloud. I pointed out that if Microsoft goes under or the servers go down, we will not be able to work. I pointed out that Microsoft only guarantees a 99% up time and that is not acceptable as we currently run a 99.999% up time.

They tell me I dont understand that the world is changing and we have to move forward.

I asked what happens in 15 or 20 years when all that is antiquated and the servers are off? Im told that will never happen as we will upgrade to stay current. I point to the servers I run that were made in 1994 and we can not upgrade because federal regulations require a specific process for documenting and gaining approval for the underlying format changes. I point out that someone decided that spending multiple millions of dollars to upgrade archival data that did not have an ROI was not a smart financial move. I then ask what makes them think this will be any different. Im told "It Microsoft, that's whats different. Now stop being such a pessimist."

I am so glad I am retiring in a few years. I would hate to see the state of IT in 20 years when all this shit falls apart.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

This has gone beyond the mere software. Remember the Amazon cloud outage? We had people asking for help with things like their IoT ovens not turning off during it.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

This argument applies to android as well.

And android demonstrates just how pointless your argument is.

Re:Nothin new

[i286NiNJA]

Comrade your english is shit there is no way I'm going to believe you're an american. Why don't you tell us some more about your neighbor finland?

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

you are so right about PC gaming heading that way with windows 10. For those that have forgotten or are too young to know, when microsoft launched their gfwl platform they wanted to charge gamers a subscription fee to play online just like they do with xbox live gold. Thankfully there was a huge backlash against it, as big as the backlash against the xboxone's early 'features'.

microsoft is still trying now to lock you into the windows 10 store with their own games. But you only have to look at the dead gfwl and ask anyone who owned gfwl games to see how untrustworthy microsoft is running any sort of gaming platform.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

Historic evidence actually suggests the opposite. You only have to look at how far EA and Ubisoft went to avoid paying steam and went their own way with their own platform. This will be no different if microsoft tries to lock down windows to the windows 10 store only. if ea and ubisoft refuse to pay money to valve they sure as hell are not going to pay money to microsoft either and if running your own platform is worth paying a 30% fee to somebody else per game then so is porting your games to linux too which you only have to do once. Linux has vulkan and more than decent graphics drivers. The thing holding linux back now is that it doesnt have enough big companies behind it and these companies dont have a reason to switch because theyre making the same sale at $0 extra cost. However, if microsoft tightens their grip these companies like adobe, autodesk, sap, magix, ea, ubisoft, blizzard and demands money from them, make no mistake they will jump ship and they will take their customers with them. People use their computers for the programs. Most of them wouldnt give two hoots about the operating system its running on.

Re:Nothin new

[jonwil]

Steam (the largest digital store for PC games by a very wide margin) is the reason Microsoft wont succeed in conquering PC gaming in this way.

If they tried to stop Steam from running on Windows, they would be in trouble. Same if they tried to stop any Steam games from running or limited key APIs like DirectX to store apps only.

In the world of PC gaming, Valve and Gabe Newel are far more powerful than Microsoft (especially with SteamOS hanging in the background and increasingly becoming a usable alternative to Windows for Steam gaming if the games you want are on the SteamOS store)

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

Difference being that only one of these companies controls the OS. He who controls the OS controls the people. So if you want to sell to the people, you'll have to deal with OS owner. We're seeing this with google and apple and mobile today. And microsoft made no secret of the fact that their strategy is to follow this line on desktop.

And Linux on desktop is a meme for a reason.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

Valve disagrees with your optimism. See: their linux gaming project that they started the moment they saw win10 and understood what it meant for them.

For now, it seems that they made a deal with microsoft however, which is why it's basically shelved. Remember: boiling the frog needs to be slow enough. It seems that microsoft was a bit too hasty with initial introduction of win10. But they learned and slowed it down.

While keeping the direction intact. Here's a question: do you think that from the point of view of the process, it really matters that much if we arrive in the walled garden five years later?

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

To me it seems that they are basically trying to boil the frog. It needs to be slow enough for people not to overwhelmingly reject it.

GFWL was too fast. Win 10's initial introduction was almost too fast as well (Valve's reaction to it). But it's most definitely moving in that direction. Just at a speed slow enough for most people not to notice.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

You know you're successful in your political arguments when what seems to be paid trolls actually know which small country you come from.

Thank for you for motivating me to continue arguing in the same vein as I did before.

Re:Nothin new

[bistromath007]

Android didn't have decades of back catalog. MS can't pave over its own history and hope to keep the market share.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to be working for that company.

Here is why you don't trust Microsoft:
1) They have a penchant for obsoleting software on purpose. Please tell me why we needed upgrades from WinNT 4 to 2K to XP, to Vista to 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10? With the exception of 64-bit support not being miserable, the only upgrade needed here would have been the jump from NT4 to Win7.
2) Their Office software is even worse for obsolete pushing. I'm quite fine with Open Office thank you. Really the last necessary features were added back in Office 97 (Spelling and Grammar checks) , everything after that, I'm hard pressed to tell you what changed other than the god damn macro languages.
3) Microsoft owned the smartphone market and then just walked away from it when the iPhone beat it up and stole it's lunch money one too many times. Seriously, nobody remembers WindowsCE, but I assure you that Windows CE was "the" thing if you were not on the blackberry platform.
4) Remember Microsoft's iPod clone? Me neither.
5) Remember the Xbox 360 RRoD plague?
6) Even Microsoft has fucked the donkey with the Surface Pro 3 and later.
7) Let's not even mention all the other hardware gadgets Microsoft has put out over the years and then promptly abandoned.

Suffice it to say that Microsoft's track record for abandonment of technology is as bad as Google's. Only Apple tends to be aggressive about it however. Apple abandons tech when everyone else achieves parity with them. Apple has also thus far been right about most of their decisions, except when it comes to battery life, or support of the analog 3.5mm audio jack.

So to go back to the topic. You know why the game industry doesn't want the servers restored? Because that would allow people to play old games that don't have their fucking microtransactions, lootboxes and whatnot in them. If it were permitted to re-activate, or build private servers for these games, the next step is monetizing them again, and because the copyright holder has basically abandoned that game, they can't really say anything about it.

There are some cases (eg FFXIV v1.0, classic WoW, classic UO) where there is a preservation aspect that needs to be taken, where people who play with the game need to be blocked from "speed running" the game without the anti-cheat systems that came with those older MMORPG's. The reason a lot of those old games were ruined was because of botting, spamming, and various ineffective ecosystems that were easily overwhelmed by the "sharding" system in place.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

Do you even for a second think that more than a tiny minority of consumers uses any such applications on their desktop?

Really?

Because I have land on the moon to sell you if you do. This is an argument for companies. Not consumers/gamers. Win10s horrid backward compatibility breaking games from XP era that work just fine on 7, and in some cases, on initial release of 10 and then getting broken when a patch you can't refuse landed is a great case to point here.

Re:Nothin new

[Altrag]

Outages aren't really the biggest concern. Yes they're annoying, but everyone experiences them once in a while and there's a significantly higher chance that your own personal server (ie: probably a slapped together PC that you also game on, browse the web on, etc) will break than AWS will. Not that AWS never breaks as noted, its just a far, far lower chance.

The big problem is the question of what happens when Amazon goes out of business. Or decides they no longer care about AWS. Or jacks up the price by 200%. Or changes the terms of service in a way that's untenable for your needs.

Outages aren't the issue.. control is the issue. If you build your business on AWS (or Azure or whatever Google's cloud offering is called or any other) then you're essentially betting your future on those companies being rock solid both financially and contractually for as long as you intend to remain in business yourself.

Re:Nothin new

[Bert64]

Having the ability to run your own server is a good way to deal with cheating... Run a small private server and play with people you know.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

Current outages demonstrate some of the practical consequences of all the other things you are talking about. When your IoT item starts behaving in a way that can actually cause danger to you (i.e. oven not turning off, creating a fire hazard), it shows that consequences of the things you list are not even considered from the safety perspective, must less others. There's already an existing notion that cloud is reliable enough to be on for the lifetime of the device to tie key functions such as turning the device off and on to it.

Re:Nothin new

[Wootery]

This applies to most 'software as a service', and much of what falls under the 'cloud computing' brand.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot gfwl. That fucked pc gamers up really badly.

They also had a platform for HD digital movies activated on windows which they abandoned.

Then theres windows RT, the zune and their various music platforms some of which had many name changes before they were eventually abandoned only to be started up again to be abandoned.
Not to forget the windows phone store, ado, silverlight, dna, bizapp, .net, j#, xna. too many to list.

Re:Nothin new

[thegarbz]

I asked what happens in 15 or 20 years when all that is antiquated and the servers are off?

This question shows you don't understand the nature of the type of business contracts these cloud computing companies run. Migrating entire companies to the Office365 has a few implications you don't understand:

a) The cloud services are just there for backup and remote access. There's no requirement as part of this for you not to have access to your data locally.
b) The cloud services are perpetual. Servers are coming and going all the time. You've subscribed to something that is continuously evergreen and won't be obsoleted in a way that the user sees (i.e. backend servers are just replaced and you'll never know) or if the entire service is obsoleted it won't be done so without a migration strategy. Your un-upgradable servers are completely different thanks to your platform being tied to your hardware. That hasn't been the case with most things IT in many years, and goes doubly for cloud based services.
c) The contracts engaged in the business side will have an out. Sure you may need to download a few TB of data back locally, but this isn't your consumer level up and disappear act, the lawyers make sure of that.
d) You do not require 99.999% uptime on your Office suite. If you did you may as well close your business now. And I will happily challenge you to prove you actually can provide that level of uptime of your network services to your staff.

Something completely aside: You say there's no ROI on upgrading archived data? If you are going to let it rot and become unreadable due to age, then why did you archive it?

I would hate to see the state of IT in 20 years when all this shit falls apart.

People have been saying this every year since the dawn of IT. And we're still here. There's a lot of money involved here, and everytime there's money involved there's someone willing to make it all work out, for a fee, which is kind of why you have a job in the first place.

Don't compare business services to some screw the consumer crap.

Re:Nothin new

[bistromath007]

I know for a fact that people care about the back catalog because DOSbox exists. Hell, what's the first thing people try to do with literally any computer? They run Doom on it.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

Open office is great but also annoying in many aspects. I just did my taxes today and spent several hours in open office with some spreadsheets on dual monitors. Open office, at least on windows has some real annoying bug where the menu bars at the top resize ever so slightly as you make one window active vs the other if you have two spreadsheets open, one on each monitor.

It got to the point of driving me nuts seeing it by the time i finished my taxes

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

I didn't ask if people care. I asked if more than a tiny minority of people care.

Your attempt to strawman this suggests that you know that you know well enough that it's only a tiny minority that cares.

Tiny minorities are rarely interesting for large commercial entities, unless they're large corporations willing to pay very large sums of money each.

Re: Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

Your whole sloppy comment is nothing but memes looped together. Not even worth debunking.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

This argument applies to android as well.

What exactly are the Android apps that most people download outside Google Play and keep buying Android because "they can't live without" those apps?

For Windows, it's games that people get from Steam rather than the Windows Store, and "can't live without" those games is the reason they give for still needing Windows even though they are tired of being forced onto Windows 10.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even for a second think that more than a tiny minority of consumers uses any such applications on their desktop?

One of such applications - i.e. a Win32 application downloaded separately rather than an UWP app bought from the Windows store - is called Steam.

And yes, I do think that more than a tiny minority uses Steam or other "legacy" Win32 applications.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

The world IS changing and yes, you have to move forward. The fact that you worry about things that may happen in 15 to 20 years tells a lot. Worry about the next three months.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

In Australia , you have capital expenditure and operational expenditure in your IT budget - and you book expenditure against different buckets. Some smart ass managers try to claim - or actually claim this this cloud leasing as project money - and they they have successfully lowered costs, and dont get caught out until the project ends. To prevent this they go Agile - so there never really is an end date.

This would never fly at say Walmart. Right now you have Microsoft trying to convince finance that a new category other than capital or operational needs to be created. Managers are already convinced this is legit!

This is why your concerns are wrong. Plus most of the overheads get charged to ICT, so business owners are happy too - everyone can blame ICT.
You are correct that 'done' stuff will have to be re-written and re-compiled, and MS aims at 8% pa compound price increases . Australians and Canadians pay more even after market exchange rates are applied for the same service.

So its up to you to advise internal audit that cost flim-flams, and kickbacks go to the decision makers. Now if ICT does reports on these leases and full chargeback to the owners, plus handling and admin fees, only then will attitudes change.

Re:Nothin new

[omnichad]

Valve disagrees with your optimism. See: their linux gaming project that they started the moment they saw win10 and understood what it meant for them.

Having Linux at the ready gives them leverage against Microsoft. How do you think they were able to make a deal with Microsoft?

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

If your oven needs to be connected to the internet in order for an auto-shutoff capability to work, someone somewhere did something really really wrong.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

My understanding that even manual didn't work in that particular case. It was used as example of IoT related security challenges in a lecture I attended recently. It was just one of the many instances of really strange behaviour in IoT appliances during Amazon cloud being down for a few hours.

Re: Nothin new

[Luckyo]

That is a one graceful way of conceding.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

My guess? MS saw that their store isn't taking off, and the risk of getting gamers thoroughly alienated from win10 at the get go was too high. So they gave valve some breathing room for now.

Boiling the frog. It has to be slow enough. Remind yourself of all the anti-consumer mobile-style changes in win10 that were not rolled back. And of the new ones that keep coming in large updates, forced on the users. One small victory among the string of defeats is rather meaningless when you look at the whole.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

Could you please tell me more about those "apps that most people download outside google play"? Because unless you're behind the Great Firewall of China, they don't exist. Play store is the central depository for overwhelming majority of users, who never venture outside it. That's why essentially every popular software has to have presence in play store, even though they have to pay significant portion of their income that goes through their app to be there.

Re:Nothin new

[zifn4b]

So write your own software that isn't like this and offer it to us if you don't like the way the big companies do it?

Re:Nothin new

[bistromath007]

I started this whole conversation by saying that large commercial entities were going to go along with this garbage. Of course they are. They're already like this. There's still plenty of space for smaller devs. They already exist, and have several successful distribution platforms to choose from that have no interest in caving to MS's bullshit.

This can't really be overstated: MS already tried to get away with this, with the Windows Store and UWP, and they lost before they really even began in earnest. The only way to impose that kind of control on the market is to make their product useless. They have too much competition for that.

Android is the way it is despite not being locked down for reasons that don't apply to PCs. This platform simply cannot be forced into a service-only model.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

"I point to the servers I run that were made in 1994 and we can not upgrade because federal regulations require a specific process for documenting and gaining approval for the underlying format changes."

The only reason your servers from '94 still exist is because someone hasn't initiated a project to move the system to new servers. File formats dont care what hardware they run on. There is no reason a modern system couldn't be built, running under a totally different OS, software and still ingest and crap out data in the exact same expected data formats.

Once you see signs of such a project starting, you better brush up your resume. You sound like the kind of person that is kept around just to support said antiquated system. If you don't have skills that can support the new system or some other business function, your job is likely to be on the cutting room floor once the project wraps up.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

The cloud services are perpetual.

LOLOLOLOL. Found the gullible millenial.

You do not require 99.999% uptime on your Office suite

Because I'm one of the cost analysts in my firm I can tell you that 99% reliability means almost 21 hours of down time per year, and that would cost us about 950,000 man hours of productivity (or a little over $47 million in lost labor costs). That's quadruple the price of upgrading local installs of MS Office every two years. Which do you think a sane business does in that situation? I'll give you a hint: it's not a cloud service with 21 hours of downtime built into the contract.

People have been saying this every year since the dawn of IT. And we're still here.

Nobody has been saying that about cloud services since the dawn of IT. If you think the dawn of cloud services is even remotely close to the dawn of IT you're probably not even out of college yet.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

shill much... ?

just because you're a windows fan boy with no understanding of history doesn't negate the fact that microsoft has proven time and again that they can not be trusted, especially over the long term.

And for those that adore the "cloud" solution... giving your data and programs away may be fine for you, but it doesn't work for anyone with any real understanding of what they are giving up. Once your data is on someone else's computer then they own it, not you. It doesn't matter what the paperwork says, if you don't keep a copy for yourself, on your own hardware, then it's lost to you, probably forever.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

At which point there are two scenarios. Either I fail for any number of reasons, or I succeed and either follow suit with the business model because it's more profitable, or I get bought out because someone who bought it can make it more profitable.

Reminder: we're talking about the high level principles here.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

Point being that you don't have to "force" as in "locks on every wall" ios style model. You can do the forcing through the coercion instead. Which is what google does, and what microsoft is mimicking as well as they can.

At which point the tiny exceptions reinforce the rule. They will be used as examples of "freedom", while rapidly suffocated of any ability to naturally grow through various methods designed to capture attention of general public, and divert it from other things.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure why this is insightful. I ran a system for a decade or so on replicated servers (8 servers, geographically replicated). The servers were all Dells; The system was always available at key locations even when networks were out. We had zero downtime, ever.

Managing and running your own systems isn't hard, you just need to plan and budget for it. In out case, the system was too important for cloud hosting (plus we needed very fast access in locations with no low-latency network connections).

Current systems I am working in are all hosted on AWS, but we try not to use any of the Amazon lock-in features (of which there are many), so it could easily be picked up and dropped into another provider (or self-hosted). If you let yourself get locked into a cloud provider for an application that needs to live for a long time, the you are a fool.

Re:Nothin new

[Rakarra]

You know, there are plenty of real wolves roaming around here. Crying wolf with people who merely disagree with you muddies any discussion of the wolves who are paid to troll.
Please do not overuse the "Russian troll!" accusation.

Re:Nothin new

[bistromath007]

Changing a platform is not the same as creating one. Android is all about the Play Store because Google was creating a completely new ecosystem. Things were naturally biased towards them, even if they didn't try to make it that way. The first Windows was just a shell on top of DOS, which was itself just one of many OSes that were basically competing in the same space. That's how far back this legacy extends, and how little control MS has over it. Some of that old stuff still matters, and the fact it existed the way it did ensured that development outside of MS's preferred paradigm won't go anywhere.

Re:Nothin new

[thegarbz]

doesn't negate the fact that microsoft has proven time and again that they can not be trusted

Yeah I know right. Just check out the list of partners and corporate clients MS has put out of business:

Yes that was a long list wasn't it.

Re:Nothin new

[thegarbz]

Nobody has been saying that about cloud services since the dawn of IT.

Nope, but people have been saying it about {insert new thing}.

Because I'm one of the cost analysts in my firm I can tell you that 99% reliability means almost 21 hours of down time per year, and that would cost us about 950,000 man hours of productivity (or a little over $47 million in lost labor costs).

Oh, implying that 100% of the time 100% of your work is done in an office application? You're not very good at these estimates.

LOLOLOLOL. Found the gullible millenial.

You're not good at guessing ages either. Maybe you should leave the numbers game to others.

Re:Nothin new

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't Microsoft the company that lost their encryption key for the cloud storage a while back and lost data? Office 365 has also had a few times recently where email wasn't being sent which lead their service to be down for a half a day.

One of the biggest reasons for moving to a cloud service is to lower administrative overhead and reduce storage cost. Keeping on-prem hybrid model for local backup service counter these benefits. Add in it could be very difficult to move TBs of data on-prem or to another cloud service can be difficult and expensive. I'm not saying there isn't a benefit to cloud services, but I don't think many companies fully think through the repercussions if suddenly they need to move their data and services off.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

Wait, you actually think that google didn't try to make play store central to android? The intentional effort by google to shift the OS toward it was one of the major objections that android customization crowd had with google for years. Them shifting OS items from AOSP to Play package is infamous.

MS's "preferred paradigm" of "OS over DOS" has been dead since Vista. Arguably, since XP. Both cut a lot of backwards compatibility as meaningless and irrelevant. Win10 has continued on the same path, now adding breakage with unpreventable updates that come for the OS.

Re:Nothin new

[i286NiNJA]

Does it really matter. Turning russian troll into a meme makes a pretty hostile environment for paid shilling

Re:Nothin new

[Rakarra]

Does it really matter. Turning russian troll into a meme makes a pretty hostile environment for paid shilling

It also means lots of people won't believe charges of Russian trolling anymore either.

Re:Nothin new

[bistromath007]

No, I did not mean to imply that Google didn't try to push the Play Store. What I was saying is that it wasn't the sole focus of their efforts, and didn't need to be. They created Android, so the Play Store would've been the default regardless.

Windows hasn't been a shell for decades, I'm well aware of that. My point in bringing that up is that Windows wasn't created ex nihilo. Even as it has become the overwhelmingly dominant force on PCs, this piece of its history has ensured that there are functional alternatives and strong incentives for backward compatibility. They have dropped some legacy support over the years, but that's generally well after it's sensible to do so for reasons other than getting people to buy new shit.

Each time they release, they try new ways to impose control on developers. Each time, their efforts fail totally. It's not just the existence of space outside the Windows store that matters; it's the fact that most developers are already in that other space, and have no reason to move. If MS tried to force that issue, the majority of devs of all sizes would be more likely to move to Linux at this point.

Re:Nothin new

[omnichad]

MS saw that their store isn't taking off

If they locked down the OS, the store would have taken off. There are good reasons for them not to do that - one is pressure from people abandoning the platform (like Steam moving to Linux).

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

Your argument is essentially "if they cut off their nose to spite the face". You're still missing the core of my message, which is "you boil the frog slowly".

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

You're factually wrong on "totally" part. They fail partially every time. And so, the the temperature of the kettle in which frog sits is raised only a little each time.

Imagine a scenario where win10 limitations would have been suggested in early winXP era. The reason you don't see it that way is that you are the frog sitting the kettle being boiled slowly over decades.

Re:Nothin new

[bistromath007]

They were suggested, and not even by MS itself. Forcing certain updates is a good thing. Since starting to do it, MS hasn't made good choices about how or when to do that, but the idea is still sound as a way to enforce better security.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

You just described one of methodology of boiling the frog slowly. Provide excuses as why you're adding the heat.

Re:Nothin new

[bistromath007]

Whatever, man. You seem really emotionally invested in declaring PC gaming irreparably doomed despite it being in basically its third golden age. There are already alternatives, should they become necessary.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

Are you dyslexic? Because that's a very strange way to read my writings so far.

Re:Nothin new

[Luckyo]

Do you suffer from dyslexia? Because the idea you projected on me is asinine.

Re:Nothin new

[i286NiNJA]

Well before it came out that these were indeed russian trolls. I noticed they'd shut up if you started speculating that they were paid. Obviously they know more about trolling than you and they consider it a threat to their operation.
Everyone else will get tired of being called a paid shill and go back to their reality television where they rightfully no longer matter.

It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

we are no longer purchasing a perpetual license for the use of the software (in this case, the game). Instead, we are renting the game on the publishers terms, Once the publisher decides to no longer to support the auth. servers to host the game sessions, the license is no longer valid. If this is their advertised business model, would there still be such a backlash from the gamers?

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Mad Merlin]

You would think people would clue into this, but they don't. Most Steam users talk about it like it's the second coming of Jesus, even though paying for something on Steam is to rent it for an indeterminate amount of time, such that your rental can be cancelled at any time for any reason that Valve wants without needing to return your money or any of your saved data.

Do you like DRM? Well, buying things on Steam is voting for DRM.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

You would think people would clue into this. Not all games on steam have drm. It is up to the publisher to use steam drm or not. If the game you brought on steam has steam drm, blame the publisher for it because they chose to have it. Plus steam drm is trivial to crack, valve doesnt even try to tighten up their drm. Just look at all the steam games that have steam drm only and get put on tor rent sites day one. This is also the reason why so many companies use denpoovo on their steam games because steams own drm is just a tickbox to cater for publishers that demand some sort of drm.You talk shit about steam but you don't even know what you are talking about. steam drm is optional to the publisher so blame the publisher if its in the game.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you like DRM? Well, buying things on Steam is voting for DRM.

All the more because there is GOG, which only sells games without DRM restrictionware.

At that point someone always comes in to say, "But they don't have $MAHSHITTYAAAPULPOFTHEWEEK!!one!!!"

Who TF cares. You keep voting for DRM, you gonna get DRM because you said you'll happily eat any shit sammich you get fed. You have to create market demand toward games nobody can deny you the right to play in the future, if that's what you want. There's more games on GOG including some of the best modern releases to last you a lifetime. Buy those.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[hairyfeet]

Riiiight...you never hear of GameCopyWorld? Takes less than 15 seconds to crack any Steam game, Steam is to DRM what "pick the pictures with cars in them" is to security, its a joke designed to give someone a bit of security theater, nothing more. In fact if you go download a pirated game in 2018? Its almost always the Steam version because its so easy to crack.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam is still a DRM platform. They enable studios to put that shit in their games with minimal effort where they wouldn't have the resources to do it themselves.

"I'm just the tobacco company, what people do with the cigs once I sell them is up to them."

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Mad Merlin]

Nice strawman argument. However, if you go back and read my post you'll see that nowhere do I claim DRM is effective. Anybody who thinks DRM is effective is clueless, lying, or both.

Let's say that every time you bought something from the grocery store, the cashier punched you in the face. You keep going back because hey, the pain only lasts 15 seconds or so, and it heals on it's own, all you have to do is wait! Plus, you're getting crafty and sometimes you dodge the punch. Although, sometimes the cashier surprises you and kicks you in the stomach instead, what will they think of next? In this case, the violence is DRM and the store is Steam. Violence is a great analogy for DRM here as it is a net loss to everybody involved (well, except perhaps for masochists).

Personally, I don't like getting punched in the face, nor do I enjoy getting kicked in the stomach, so I won't shop there. Also, guess what, if nobody shops there for the same reason, they'll either change their policy on senseless violence or go out of business. Vote with your wallet.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[NoZart]

sadly, voting with your wallet has absolutely no effect in a market that is now completely saturated with brainless consume-zombies. The people who care are such a minority now, they wouldn't even make a blip on the radar if they all left gaming collectively.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[hairyfeet]

Sorry but you are just moving the goalposts. you claimed Steam is "supporting DRM" but the DRM DOES NOT WORK and has been cracked for many years now, so claiming that horseshit is like claiming that buying DVDs instead of stealing is "supporting DRM" despite the fact that DVD encryption has been broken since Bush Senior was in the white house.

But why don't you have the balls to admit the truth? Because I have seen your type a million times, you are a thief who is trying to justify his stealing by adding a layer of "sticking in to teh man!" bullshit. either that or you are one of those ancient farts that haven't played anything released since windows 98 and therefor have an opinion worth less than nothing since you don't even buy the product you are railing against...so which is it? Please don't tell me that you are one of those crackpot FOSSie that want to tell us all we need is Tux Racer and a million Q3 Arena rip offs, because I thought those died out in the early 2010s when everyone stopped giving a shit about Linux after google ripped it off and turned it into the DRMpaloza that is Android and ChromeOS.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

A tobacco company exists only to sell tobacco therefore we can blame them for what they do. Valve doesnt just sell drm nor is the drm sold separately, steam is foremost just a store that holds a record of your game licenses which you can move to any operating system be it linux, mac or windows. They have their drm available to publishers who want it so those publishers don;t turn their back on steam or release their game with far more intrusive drm. You must have forgotten the worst days of pc gaming in the early 2000s when games were released on discs with a serial code that needed online activation. The activation couldnt be rescinded when you formatted your computer and only had 5 installs ever. Going from that to steam with its unlimited installs and multi os support makes steam far better than most other platform alternatives. (GOG being the only better one).

Anyway I'm not disagreeing with your dislike for drm in principle. If you don't like drm you can still buy the games without drm on steam to send that message to Valve.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

You would think people would clue into this. Not all games on steam have drm.

If steam is shut down you might be able to still play some of the games, but when you buy a new computer and re-install your purchased games are lost.

Everything you buy through steam relies on steam being around when you need it.
I have a fairly extensive game library from back in the days of DD disks. (And a couple of floppy ones.)
Very few of the companies behind those games are still around.
You can still track some of them down through mergers and purchases but if you ask the companies if they even have the source code or any computers involved in the game making left and the answer will be no.
Possible exception would be the Digital Illusions games. DICE is still around even if they are EA's bitch now.
The interesting thing is that all EA software I have from that era is non-games. They weren't a game company back then.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Scarletdown]

I could have sworn that a large number of the games I had on my Apple ][ Plus back in 1987 or 1988 were from EA. the Bard's Tale trilogy, Legacy of the Ancients, Adventure Construction Kit, Pinball Construction Kit, Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, etc.

So I am pretty certain EA was a game company back then.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Luckyo]

Juggernaught of steam vs the tiny roach that is gog.

Is it really so hard to fathom the difference by the numbers?

Re: It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can buy a bunch of the same games, minus the DRM, on gog.com instead.

Re: It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

GOG would only be considered a 'roach' by Steam and the Big Game publishers. So why did you use that pejoratve?

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but I share their views. However ineffective the DRM on Steam stuff may be at present, it's still DRM. For me, Steam is what pushed the whole "single player game must phone home before it will work" bullshit into common usage and I will never forgive them for that. That there is what makes me reject them entirely out of principle.

I don't have any kind of account there, I don't buy games from there, and I certainly don't warez them (with one single exception when I found a pirate copy of Half-Life 2 and played it for the one and only time more than a decade ago). Valve will get neither money nor mindshare from me - the same view I have with the **AA and their ridiculous perpetual copyright.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[mjwx]

Riiiight...you never hear of GameCopyWorld? Takes less than 15 seconds to crack any Steam game, Steam is to DRM what "pick the pictures with cars in them" is to security, its a joke designed to give someone a bit of security theater, nothing more. In fact if you go download a pirated game in 2018? Its almost always the Steam version because its so easy to crack.

Most steam games can be started without steam by simply going to the executable. Steam's DRM was designed from the word go to be unobtrusive... that means it's weak, it was designed to tick a box for publishers, not to actually stop piracy.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, I was probably wrong on that.
Just because I didn't have any EA games doesn't mean that they didn't publish any back then.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't Valve go on record saying that if Steam shut up shop, they would release a means to remove the DRM?

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Mad Merlin]

But why don't you have the balls to admit the truth? Because I have seen your type a million times, you are a thief who is trying to justify his stealing by adding a layer of "sticking in to teh man!" bullshit. either that or you are one of those ancient farts that haven't played anything released since windows 98 and therefor have an opinion worth less than nothing since you don't even buy the product you are railing against...so which is it? Please don't tell me that you are one of those crackpot FOSSie that want to tell us all we need is Tux Racer and a million Q3 Arena rip offs, because I thought those died out in the early 2010s when everyone stopped giving a shit about Linux after google ripped it off and turned it into the DRMpaloza that is Android and ChromeOS.

I play video games on a daily basis and own 125 DRM-free games on GOG, plus another ~300 on Humble Bundle (specific count is more difficult there as they don't list a count and some of the items on the library page are soundtracks or videos). I've kickstarted Pillars of Eternity (1 and 2 (although 2 was technically on fig.co)), Torment: Tides of Numenera, Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin, and The Bard's Tale 4. I've run Linux exclusively for over 15 years now. I also have a standing boycott against Steam since they popularized always online DRM with Half Life 2.

Try again.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[omnichad]

Weak DRM is also one step further toward the idea of game preservation like in the article.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam's DRM was designed from the word go to be unobtrusive... that means it's weak, it was designed to tick a box for publishers, not to actually stop piracy.

Which means it does more to stop piracy than the old rootkits. Once a developer starts punishing paying customers, cracking the DRM becomes an essential part of the basic install procedure. While people are looking for cracks, they will also see download options for pre-cracked versions of the same. Since we're no longer actually buying anything on physical media (I was quite ticked when I bought Deus Ex: Human Revolution at a store and the box just had a Steam key in it), we're downloading the whole game anyway, whether it's from Valve or some torrent.

When the whole choice comes down to "pay money to use bandwidth to download a game that treats me like a criminal" vs. "download the same game, that treats me like an owner, and I keep the money", it gets harder and harder to justify paying someone, at least before you play the game.
Games that use Steam DRM fall into a different category, "buy the game and the most annoying part is when it auto-patches and a mod breaks." This is much more appealing than any of the old DRMs.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[_merlin]

Steam fights piracy the same way the iTunes music store did: by making it easy/painless to buy the product so people have less incentive to pirate it. It doesn't have to have effective DRM to work.

Re: It almost seems as if...

[Luckyo]

Because roaches are survivors. It was meant as a compliment. It's one of the more stable store fronts.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[zifn4b]

Most Steam users talk about it like it's the second coming of Jesus

I thought it was more like the 5th coming of the Flying Spaghetti Monster personally

Re:It almost seems as if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Riiiight...you never hear of GameCopyWorld?

Actually... no, I haven't. Because with the convenience of Steam, any time I want a game, guess where I go?
One might ask how YOU know about the current copy protection circumvention methods and sites out there.

Honestly, I can understand wanting to crack something just for the thrill of assembly debugging - that's almost a video game by itself.
But if you're going to do that (and I am not endorsing that action), then at LEAST *pay* for the fucking game, and don't then *distribute* a cracked version to other people.

You're robbing someone of their livelihood when you do that shit.\
By demanding their work for free, you seek to make them your slave - as in SLAVERY. Are you cool with slavery? Because *you* can just as easily be made someone *else's* slave.

If you're doing that, you're literally a piece of shit whose life has a *negative* value to society.

Re:It almost seems as if...

[zifn4b]

so claiming that horseshit is like claiming that buying DVDs instead of stealing is "supporting DRM" despite the fact that DVD encryption has been broken since Bush Senior was in the white house.

I notice you didn't mention blu-ray. :) And you know why. Do you have a VHS collection and a rotary phone too? It's 2018, you know...

I seem to recall

[Presence Eternal]

Didn't Turbine explicitly say they'd be happy to let players run their own servers when Asheron's Call went down for good, but them WB lawyered up and acted like the assclowns they really are?

Re:I seem to recall

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm, now i gotta check. The plan was to have player run servers, but I quit a year before changeover :(

Re: I seem to recall

[Anonymous Coward]

FeelsBadMan yeah. I miss AC.

Re:I seem to recall

[imagio]

Yes that is exactly what happened. Turbine also promised players "lifetime access" to the game. Some enthusiasts are working on server emulators WB be damned. The whole thing seems so pointless. WB isn't using the IP or the old source code for anything yet they go out of the way to piss off a bunch of fans and break the promises made by the previous IP holders.

Simple Solution!

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution is to give teachers consealed AR-15's with extendos. Can't see a teacher ever snapping, so this idea is sound.

The point of copyright.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Copyright was introduced to allow authors a temporary monopoly on their works (something pretty much unheard of before then), in order to encourage creation and the proliferation of creative works. The point was not to give authors complete control over their works.

So it seems only fair that a cultural work is free for all if the author chooses to no longer sell it. And that would include running servers for discontinued games. Offer the server or let others. And in that light, the argument that people running servers for older games would compete with newer similar games offered by the studio, is interesting. If there is a lot of interest in the older game, would it not be profitable for the company to keep its servers up? And if there is only interest in the older game because it would be free, wouldn’t that mean that most of those players would not pony up the cash to play the new one, with only a small resulting loss of sales?

Of course I know that copyright has been perverted far beyond its original intent. But whatever.

Re:The point of copyright.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been thinking about this. I read this on another forum and I think it makes sense.

Leave copyright the same for everything else but software.

For software make it the same if you support it. But if you EOL the software (such as turning off the servers) then you get EOL + 5 years. Basically if you make it impossible for me to continue to use my property you get very limited rights. Basically this would force you to support it. Leave the server on or lose your rights to it.

Re:The point of copyright.

[alexo]

Copyright was introduced to allow authors a temporary monopoly on their works (something pretty much unheard of before then), in order to encourage creation and the proliferation of creative works. The point was not to give authors complete control over their works.

Not really.

Copyright was introduced to allow publishers to keep a choke hold on culture under the pretense of "promoting arts and sciences".

Re:The point of copyright.

[AlanBDee]

And that would include running servers for discontinued games. Offer the server or let others

The problem is that then they will offer a raspberry pi connected to a 56k modem powered by a couple hamster wheels. It'd be completely unusable but technically they would still be "offering the service"

Re:The point of copyright.

[JaredOfEuropa]

That’s where a judge would come in. Which of course the publishers would not mind, to them lawyers are part of everyday business. For hobbyists running free servers, not so much. But that’s a problem with the legal system (the one in the US, over here going to court isn’t that expensive and not a big deal), not with my interpretation of the intent of copyright law.

Re:The point of copyright.

[Solandri]

Actually, that's a good argument for reducing the length of copyright. Copyright exists to allow content creators to profit from their works for a temporary time. If these game companies no longer feel they can profit from these games after approx 20 years and have shut down the servers, then clearly the duration of copyright is too long. The copyright holder's own actions constitute testimony that the length of copyright is too long and needs to be reduced to about 20 years.

Re:The point of copyright.

[rtb61]

Letter of the law mate. Don't care what they thought then or what they claim now, letter of the law. That also means all attempts at copyrighted content should be subject to valuation to ensure in fact it does promote the arts and sciences and that does not mean generate a profit but have actual social worth. Give up the product and you should give up copyright. Really copyright should be paid for, user pays, they should pay for copyright to be renewed yearly and pay for the full cost of copyright enforcement, a pretty hefty fee ie release it to the public domain or pay thousands of dollars a year to keep copyright, this after the content has been evaluated for social worth, no worth that tough luck no copyright.

Re:The point of copyright.

[tepples]

Letter of the law mate. Don't care what they thought then or what they claim now, letter of the law.

The Supreme Court of the United States has a policy of deferring to Congress on whether a particular statute actually "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

Letter of the law:

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

How the Supreme Court interprets it when exercising judicial review of copyright-related Acts of Congress:

To secure for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries, so long as the purported intent is to promote the progress of science and useful arts.

Re:The point of copyright.

[scdeimos]

You'll never get a shorter copyright term on anything while Disney has the mouse.

Re:The point of copyright.

[Anonymous Coward]

But you might get them to go for a variable copyright term. Let movies and books keep the original term, but games and software be reduced to 14 years.

Re:The point of copyright.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you would. As long as Disney makes Mickey Mouse content, they'll keep the copyright of it. And when, say, Blizzard closes the WoW servers, they'll lose copyright of that. It would be a great solution really, allowing media that is maintained (and that the creator still makes money from) to remain protected, while allowing media that obviously is abandoned (and that does not make the creator money anymore anyway) to become freely usable for anyone.

Of course, special consideration is needed for one-shot media like paintings and what not, but that could work as it already does.

Re:The point of copyright.

[omnichad]

So it seems only fair that a cultural work is free for all if the author chooses to no longer sell it.

There needs to be a "shut up and take my money" clause in copyright law. If a company refuses to accept a reasonable amount of money for a discontinued product - and will no longer sell it in any form, they should lose some aspects of their copyright protection just like an undefended trademark.

Re:The point of copyright.

[omnichad]

The problem with that is I still like 20 year old games enough that I don't need the new shiny ever again. I can perpetually stay 20 years behind and never give a company money again and still be happy. But I may not stay happy if that ruins the game industry in the process.

The game companies know they can still profit off the old games 20 years later. Their problem is finding a market for their new games when their old games are good enough. They're out of financial incentive for shovelware, so they really need to do some innovation. Fewer, better games is the answer.

Re:The point of copyright.

[zifn4b]

Wish I had mod points for you. Even though you didn't state the specific fact associated with your claim, this is the most factual thing I've read in this discussion that isn't mostly or wholly composed of conjecture.

For study?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see if they fall for that one.

Hurt their business...

[sconeu]

So resurrecting abandoned servers -- which means that people can't play those games -- would hurt their business?

This means one of two things:

1. They're lying
2. Their new games suck so badly that players would instantly drop them for the older versions.

Either way, not a good thing for them to say...

Re:Hurt their business...

[Pseudonym]

3. The GaaS business model relies on planned obsolescence.

Re:Hurt their business...

[jader3rd]

3. Once it's allowed, gamers will start hosting their own servers for games which are currently not abandoned because nothing is keeping gamers honest. As a result, it does hurt the businesses business model.

Mis-trust

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is any mis-trust there is only one reason for it. Games publishers are unrepentantly two-faced. That's fine, they're businesses, but they can't be a snake then complain about being called a snake.

Profit != Community run

[Anonymous Coward]

Love seeing things like this because they attempt to use morally valid issues as evidence for not so morally valid acts. There's a BIG difference between a bunch of friends running a server at a LAN and servers being hosted professionally. One is in it for the game the other the money.

Wouldn't at all surprise me for example if people start running bitcoin miners on Gamers PC's. It's already happened with ESEA where they embedded it in the client (it's like Gamespy for those that remember).

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Re:Profit != Community run

[rogoshen1]

did anyone mention profit though?

Take project 1999 -- community run server to recreate everquest like it was in its glory days. It uses a slightly modified everquest client and a custom server that attempts to emulate the rules found in the original. Slightly amazing that Sony hasn't run them into the ground yet-- BUT they do not charge players a single penny.

They're doing it for love of the game.. which i'd imagine is a far greater motivator for anyone trying to resurrect long-dead MMO's.

I mean.. c'mon dude, if the publisher can't make money on the game...

Re:Profit != Community run

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually usually it is that they cannot make ENOUGH money.

Re:Profit != Community run

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that the community of at least one MMORPG that was shut down has been watching this situation closely.

Re:Profit != Community run

[Ambiguous Puzuma]

Not only has Sony (now Daybreak) not run Project 1999 into the ground, they took the unusual step of officially endorsing it in 2015.

We have recently entered into a written agreement with Daybreak Game Company LLC that formally recognizes Project 1999 as a fan based, not-for-profit, classic EverQuest emulation project. The agreement establishes the guidelines that we as a project must follow, but it will allow to us continue to update the game without risk of legal repercussions.

This is quite a change from their attitude a decade earlier, when they forced Winter's Roar, a customized emulated server, to shut down.

Re:Profit != Community run

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the original Anon above (why you no tripcodes slashdot??).

I realize it's hard to understand but real IP laws exist for a reason and the outcome of this case would set a precedent. The issue is less the communities involved in _this case_ and what happens later. People will bootleg games for profit without even changing the name for example. It's not quite the same as the warez communities of the 90's, though hard core pirates existed then too. There's a _big_ difference in distribution systems though. We aren't on floppies any more either, hell pirates don't even have to look for ftp dumps with so many free alternatives (Google Drive, dropbox, etc).

Fun fact, underground steam / microsoft / sony networks already exist and for the sole purpose of satisfying drm requirements. Like warez boards and ftp dumps they are quite guarded, invite only communities. They'd be a target if anyone actually tried to make a living off it.

Re:Profit != Community run

[Bert64]

Bitcoin mining seems an ideal fit for gamers, most gamers will have powerful GPUs which should mine with decent performance, you just need to program it to stop once they start playing a game.

Abandon-ware... is suddenly worth something?

[Anonymous Coward]

But we can't make money unless we find a way to force you to buy the "new" version of the game you already love! Abandon-ware is the answer! Our financial eggheads have spoken! Once we start development of new-game-title-X we have determined that our consumer base might not actually buy it because they might want to just keep enjoying what they already own. Thus.. we must put an an arbitrary timer into the infrastructure for the old version to expire.. and we must sick the lawyers on anyone attempting to circumvent our planned obsolescence!

Obviously our old game wasn't worth playing or we'd not have abandoned it.. (sigh) so it shouldn't be a problem that somebody wants to revive that technology... but wait! Abandon-ware! If you take that technology that we've dropped on the floor like last year's fashion we might not make more ca$h... so suddenly that old tech... you are stealing it! Send in the lawyers!

All your (old, abandoned) base belong to us! =P

Peace out.

The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called democracy.

It's actually called the oligarchy of the electoral college ignoring the voters.

But hey, thanks for playing.

Re:The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[jedidiah]

> It's actually called the oligarchy of the electoral college ignoring the voters.

That's an an interesting twist/spin on representation that doesn't make it trivial for New York and LA to bend over the rest of the country.

Are you equally butt hurt about Congress? It's set up the same way.

Re:The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[Zaelath]

Why in particular do you think it's OK for the minority in the fly-over states to bend-over the rest of the country?

The electoral college was /not/ designed to reduce the voting power of the majority of people, it was designed to ensure that the states had voting rights relative to their population. If it was, California would have 180+ votes, to either Dakota's 3, instead of 55.

Your shit is broken, just because it did you a favor this time around doesn't make it any less broken.

Re: The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what's funny to me?

The attitude for a lot of Americans is basically the fittest survive (hence welfare programs should be eliminated).

Some states, ironically most pro welfare, are performing excellently in terms of people and cash... so why shouldn't those states have more power? They're doing something right

Re:The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[jtmach]

The electoral college was /not/ designed to reduce the voting power of the majority of people, it was designed to ensure that the states had voting rights relative to their population.

Do you have something you can cite that shows this, because it's not my understanding, and it doesn't even make sense.

A popular vote ensure that the states had voting rights relative to their population. More population, more votes.

My understanding (possibly misguided) was that the electoral college was designed to ensure that states with less population still had at least some voice in the decision making.

Re:The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[Rakarra]

It's actually called the oligarchy of the electoral college ignoring the voters.

As far as I can tell, almost every Electoral College voter actually voted the way the general populace in his/her district voted. There were seven EC voters who voted differently from their state. Seven out of 531. Not much faithlessness there.

If you want to complain, complain about the "winner take all" that almost (almost, because they don't have to, and some don't) every state uses to decide its electoral vote. I know people are all up in arms about the "popular vote," but the United States is a confederation of 50 states, not a giant conglomeration of 323m people. Each state votes. Moving the EC away from WTA would cause the EC vote to more closely resemble the overall popular vote anyway.

Re:The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[Rakarra]

The Electoral College is fine. The problem is that almost every state chooses a "winner take all" format for electoral votes. They don't have to, but every President has run a campaign that exploited and benefited from the winner-take-all format, so they don't have a lot of motivation to change it.

Re:The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[DamnOregonian]

My understanding (possibly misguided) was that the electoral college was designed to ensure that states with less population still had at least some voice in the decision making.

It was actually designed so that states with less *franchised* population had the weight of their *non-franchised* population.
The large gap between electors-per-elector for our largest and smallest states these days is a product of the fact that we haven't increased the number of representatives in the House of Representatives in 100 years. It wasn't that way initially. The gap was very small. What it did allow for, was states where only landed citizens could vote, having the electoral clout of all the people in their state that couldn't vote (slaves, people without land)

Re:The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[DamnOregonian]

As far as I can tell, almost every Electoral College voter actually voted the way the general populace in his/her district voted.

No- not even close. Not even close to close.

Almost every EC elector voted the way the majority of voters in their *state* voted.
Had it been by district, it would have been a near-tie, or a Hillary win in the EC.
States are winner-take-all (minus 2). The largest plurality gets 100% of elector votes.

Re:The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[Zaelath]

My understanding (possibly misguided) was that the electoral college was designed to ensure that states with less population still had at least some voice in the decision making.

Section 2 of the fourteenth amendment seems pretty clear on the matter: "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers..."

The smaller states have less people, hence less representatives, but it's wildly disproportionate in the smaller states.

Re:The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[Rakarra]

I thought that the EC voters voted their districts, and then when a majority was reached, all votes switched to that winner, but sure, maybe they don't even bother with that first step. Makes sense to me. Either way, it's winner-takes-all, which is the problem.

Re:The bought-and-paid-for-EC

[DamnOregonian]

Electors are selected by the state legislature, by whatever the relevant statutes are. The state is allocated an amount of electors they're allowed to select based on the amount of representatives they have in congress, so while there there is a close relationship to districts, no state is bound to apply any particular strategy to how electors are selected. Technically speaking, a state doesn't even need to hold a popular election to select its electors (and several states have done exactly that in the history of the country).
These days, there are 2 methods in place for elector allocation, the legislature allows the winning party of the popular vote to select all of the electors allocated to the state (making faithless electors less likely) and proportional allocation by parties according to popular vote ratio (2 states)

How would this hurt them...

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's literally abandoned, it means they are no longer making any money out of it, so how does letting them have their own servers hurt their business at all?

Re:How would this hurt them...

[Tyger-ZA]

For example, why spend time and money on Dungeon Keeper for mobile when the old PC Dungeon Keeper is infinitely better; or why waste your time on Destiny 2 or 3 or whatever the next clusterfuck will be called, if someone else is maintaining the original Destiny servers.

Re:How would this hurt them...

[Anonymous Coward]

because people won't buy the new version.

Re:How would this hurt them...

[Bert64]

Or look at it another way..
People who bought the original may be angry that the servers are now turned off, and not buy the followup.
People who can now play the original for free may decide they want to buy the sequel.

To heck with them

[fyngyrz]

So resurrecting abandoned servers -- which means that people can't play those games -- would hurt their business?

No, it means that people can play those games. They don't want that.

Their new games suck so badly that players would instantly drop them for the older versions.

Not quite, but it will mean some people play the older games without the revenue from that going into their pockets. This (a) could reduce new-game purchases and/or play, and (b) means that abandoning software (something they all do) implies that they are abandoning the rights to that software, an idea that scares them silly, because their entire business model is based upon providing a temporary product that they have complete control over so they can make you buy again, and again, and again until your patience finally runs out.

I am 100% in favor of the idea that if the software developer stops supporting the software, they lose ALL rights to controlling its use by the people who purchased it. If they want the benefits from providing a thing, then they have to support that thing. Support gone? Benefits gone.

Re:To heck with them

[sconeu]

I meant "can't play them currently". My bad for not being clear.

Re:To heck with them

[hairyfeet]

Except MSFT is fucking them in the ass when it comes to sales...you take a look at MSFT Gamepass yet? MSFT is gonna royally fuck the game companies by pulling a Netflix and having an "all you can play" buffet and the yearly cost? The same as just TWO triple A titles.

The game reviewers on YouTube are already telling people to buy the XB1X and ditch buying new games completely, and comparing it to cord cutting. If its one thing these publishers should have picked up on is MSFT has no problem at all with throwing other companies under the bus if it makes them more money or gives them a lock in, the history of MSFT is littered with software and hardware corps that thought making an alliance with MSFT would be great only to get a shiv in the back.

Re:To heck with them

[omnichad]

It would be different if buying a physical copy has any value down the road. As it is, you're just renting for a higher price. If the servers are shut down, you can't get the 20GB release-day patch to your game disc ever again. And you just have an archive copy of the beta version.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

" those efforts would hurt their business, allow the theft of their copyrighted content" = "we really want people to not keep playing old games, because we know they won't buy new ones that have loot-crates. As responsible corporations, we have an obligation to gamers to shake them down for more money for worthless recycled and re-hashed content."

Those asshats can KMA. When they start releasing games with something that is actually exciting, and not some re-hashed bollocks and shitty gameplay designed to make money (Dungeon Keeper on iOS is the perfect example, they royally screwed that one up)

Other games I don't want to play:
Any sports franchise game: "Have you played "(Noted Sports Person) (Three Letter Sport Acronym) (Year)" yet? The only exception if Tiger Woods 2004 on the OG XBOX, that was dope :)
or
Call Of Duty, Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 3, COD: Modern Warfare, etc. etc. there is at least 25 released and variations in this franchise.
or Star Wars: Battlefront, Star Wars: Battlefront II, with it's sequel Star Wars Battlefront (2015), and then Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) - now with MOAR LOOT CRATEZ!!!

If you pay for a game

[Anonymous Coward]

then you have legally purchased the rights to use the game in perpetuity, regardless if the original company goes belly up, or decides to discontinue sales of the game in question. In fact, under contract law, an argument could certainly be made that shutting down the online game server breeches that contract, and allows the purchaser to do whatever necessary to protect their investment from breech of the contract, including filing suit against the company and/or setting up their own version of an online server to remedy the breech.

Re:If you pay for a game

[scdeimos]

How does that work for MMORPGs like World of Warcraft? You pay for the game up front (is that just to cover distribution costs?) and get 1-3 months free playing, but then you have to pay a monthly subscription fee to keep playing.

Unfortunately a whole lot of games are going down a similar route, especially in the console market: you pay for the latest Call of Duty up front but then have to keep paying monthly subscription fees to Playstation Network/Xbox Live to actually play the thing.

So a (non-Sony) publisher goes belly up and your favourite FPS-for-the-Win game becomes unusable... are you allowed to somehow replicate the whole Playstation Network environment so you can keep playing FPS-for-the-Win with your friends?

It's a pretty toxic situation that gamers have allowed to develop by continuing to support and buy these sorts of games.

You Crack Smoking Assholes

[bistromath007]

This is an interactive medium. If it's not playable, it's not fucking preserved! That's not blurry at all!

Re:You Crack Smoking Assholes

[cs96and]

Exactly. I thought exactly the same thing. The two things are already intertwined and there is no blurring to be done. They are trying to make a negative point where there is no point to be made.

Re:You Crack Smoking Assholes

[Anonymous Coward]

Came to say the same thing.
It'd be like "preserving" a painting by embedding it in concrete.

You're both failures.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sasha you've been posting this on the internet for a year now. So I'm sure you're well informed that most americans don't like either candidate and more people did vote for hillary than for trump.

I can already hear ..but but but electoral college!!!

Yes that may be true and trump consequently won the election but it doesn't change the falseness of the statement that people voted in droves in 2016 or the implication that they did moreso for putin's candidate.

I'm not sure if it's feigned ignorance, legitimate ignorance of events in america, or your limited mastery of American English but you are indeed incorrect my friend.

If we cared half as much about treason as we do about our video games we wouldn't have stayed home jacking off during the last election....

This of course doesn't mean that we can't tell you're a troll viktor, you're even more obvious but I won't correct associates who are slated to be fired next sprint.

Re:You're both failures.

[Luckyo]

You should learn from your colleague below, who at least knew where I was from. Internet troll factories aren't paid for failure when their competition is better.

Get cracking.

Re:You're both failures.

[jedidiah]

> Sasha you've been posting this on the internet for a year now. So I'm sure you're well informed that most americans don't like either candidate and more people did vote for hillary than for trump.
>
> I can already hear ..but but but electoral college!!!

It's funny that in a thread about GAMES, we have idiots that refuse to acknowledge the ground rules. You would think that the "most qualified candidate" ever would have a grasp on basic civics.

Sadly she did not.

Re:You're both failures.

[Luckyo]

It must be a sad existence, to be talking about computer games and to not understand how fun it is to poke the trolls.

Re: You're both failures.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more fun to poke the trolls in real life.

You should try it, in Texas or Florida...at a gun trade show. If they pull their gun out you know you're winning, poke harder.

Copyright abuse much?

[BronsCon]

Wasn't one of the key reasons for copyright to enrich the public wealth of culture by encouraging the creation of artistic works to eventually be released into the public domain by granting time-limited exclusivity to the creator? Doesn't its use, now, to keep artistic works out of the public domain and, effectively, cause them to cease to exist, fly in the face of the spirit of copyright? On those grounds alone, the gaming industry should be given a swift kick in the ass by the courts; and I say this as someone who makes his entire living on copyright law.

Re:Copyright abuse much?

[Anonymous Coward]

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

Pretty sure you are wrong. -RIAA

Re:Copyright abuse much?

[BronsCon]

I forwarded your remarks to the proper authorities and they've requested that I post the following on their behalf.

I'm pretty sure he's right. -US Constitution

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

City of Heroes

[jandrese]

As a former City of Heroes player, all I can say is Fuck You ESA.

Re:City of Heroes

[Scarletdown]

One benefit to the loss of City of Heroes is that had they not shut down, we would not be getting soon the much better City of Titans.

In the meantime, Star Trek Online is casually satisfying my MMO cravings. :)

Re:City of Heroes

[dkone]

Thank you for this. I have been following Ship of Heroes and had no idea that City of Titans existing. This is awesome news and it looks like this could be the year it comes out. I played the hell out of COH and still miss it.

Cheers

Re:City of Heroes

[cmdr_klarg]

Meh, I'd rather be still playing CoH. Subscribed 8 years and would still be subbed had those fuckstains at NCSoft not pulled the plug prematurely.

But yes, I too am looking forward to City of Titans. Been a long 5+ year wait.

Product lifetimes

[Sigma 7]

If only there was some consumer protection law that requires a product guaranteed to last at least for a reasonable life cycle of said product... For software running on a supported computer, this would be infinite, as the computer itself is more likely to decay compared to the software running on it.

Speaking of decaying multiplayer, even old games such as Doom, Quake, and related didn't stop working simply because some multiplayer master server went down. If only modern developers knew how to implement that feature as well...

Re:Product lifetimes

[Anonymous Coward]

Older multi player games also have the multi player server built into the game itself!

Nothing like the old days of firing up a multi player game of doom or quake/2 on the highschool lan and bringing the whole school's LAN to a crawl!

This was back in an era of Pentium 200's and 10mbps lan to the PCs and internal building LAN, and 100mbps interconnects between the buildings on campus. God the 100mbps interconnects between buildings seemed fast as fuck back then. LOL

The school's network admin had to isolate our classroom from the rest of the school's LAN on many occasions. And yes we got away with this. It was a "computer repair" class. Pretty much all we did the whole period was game LOL

WTF does any of this political bullshit have to do

[TheRealQuestor]

WTF does any of this political bullshit have to do with game and game servers? Jesus Christ. Do you guys have nothing better to do than to bitch/moan/cry/complain/try to sound smart/informed [and fail miserably at both]? I bet none of you whiners didn't even vote and yet you feel the need to push your worthless agendas and "I'd" take 100 Trumps over your asses any day of the week. At least "HE" got our of his mother's basements and is actually doing something. Good or bad, his IS doing more than any of you EVER will.

Right to not have your business hurt

[OrangeTide]

I just checked, there is no such right.

Re:Right to not have your business hurt

[Anonymous Coward]

Money say there is. Money is might and might makes right.

Re:Right to not have your business hurt

[zifn4b]

I just checked, there is no such right [to not have your business hurt].

That is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Businesses and individuals alike have rights, property rights among them, as defined by the laws of the United States and relative State Laws and statutes. There are no laws that I'm aware of that have anything to do with your conceptual idea "not have your business hurt" or "have your business thrive". You are afforded the ability to start a business per the laws of the United States and related State laws and statutes. That's it, period. If you want to talk in terms of citing actual laws and statutes that are actually relevant to the conversation or even if you want to propose that a law or statute should be changed or added then you would be on topic. Your post is absolutely off topic and is very much absurd and adds no value to this conversation.

Re: Right to not have your business hurt

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no laws that I'm aware of that have anything to do with your conceptual idea "not have your business hurt" or "have your business thrive".

Wait, is he wrong or not? Sound like not.

Re: Right to not have your business hurt

[zifn4b]

Wait, is he wrong or not? Sound like not.

There is nothing to be wrong about. Am I right that there are no such things a pink flying unicorns? Probably but there are probably also not talking teapots, dogs with octopus tentacles and so forth. What is the point of enumerating through the set of things that doesn't exist? It's a waste of time and has no value.

Re:Right to not have your business hurt

[Anonymous Coward]

You are off topic, very much absurd, and add no value to this conversation.

Re: Right to not have your business hurt

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone (businesses) are acting like there are pink unicorns and someone else points out that there is not. It your job to point out "That is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard." ?

How the hell does this hurt their business?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they arent selling it, and arent running the servers, their net income is ZERO.

This could only make them money.

Fuck big corporations and their lawyers.

Re:How the hell does this hurt their business?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their current business model can be described as follows:
1. Take whatever we sold last year
2. Tighten up the graphics, possibly get an intern to write up a new single player campaign if it's that sort of game
3. Come up with a new name (if it's a subtitle that could be considered to be even remotely unique, then smack on a symbol)
4. Maybe change the stats of whatever is in the game (guns, cars, sports players etc.) ever so slightly, for "balance"
5. Spend 95% of the "new" game's budget on marketing
6. Wait one year, then repeat

Especially now when the graphics side isn't evolving as fast anymore, people might clue in and stop buying new games if they could still play the old stuff. Even more so if the community of the game itself controlled the servers.

Re:How the hell does this hurt their business?

[Anonymous Coward]

smack on a symbol

That should read "TM symbol"

Copyright should be "Use it or lose it."

[Ihlosi]

Copyright should apply as long as the holder uses it for economic gain, i.e. by making the work in question available to the public for a resonable amount of money or other, nonmonetary forms of compensation.

Under no circumstances whatsoever should copyright be usable to deprive the public of access to something that has already been published. Why? Because loss of access to information and culture leads straight back into the dark ages.

Re:Copyright should be "Use it or lose it."

[omnichad]

Copyright should apply as long as the holder uses it for economic gain

Say goodbye to the GPL, etc.

No. It is worse than that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Games that requires servers whose binaries/executables are private and will never be disclosed ...

Shouldn't be protected by copyright at all.

How you can have copyright of a work that is never distributed? It is a paradox.

That's called a trade secret.

Re:No. It is worse than that.

[Ash-Fox]

The protocol and data that made up the story was distributed though, you could argue those are protected under that guise, as opposed to the server binary distribution if you want to take that logic.

Purchased Product Service

[zifn4b]

If, on the shrink wrapped box, it says you are buying the ability to play online then online multiplayer play is part of the "product". If you purchased this product then you, per the terms and conditions of the product, are entitled to the online multiplayer play component because that's what was sold as part of the product. If the product says "we only guarantee access to multiplayer online play for 2 years" and they give it to you for 2 years and then take down the servers, that's what you paid for. Probably what game manufacturers need to do is be more specific about what you are actually purchasing such that it constitutes a legally binding agreement. For example, this is no different than a product warranty. If you guarantee a product warranty, you the manufacturer are required to comply with the terms and conditions of the warranty. The product manufacturer can't just say "Oh I don't feel like honoring the warranty". Obviously an alternative to being obligated to host multiplayer servers is to let the community do it. ID Software and EPIC did this all the time and it didn't hurt them financially. I don't see what the problem is.

Re:Purchased Product Service

[omnichad]

Same with smart home devices, Ultraviolet movie purchases, Steam game purchases, standalone GPS units, and any hardware device that requires OS updates for security. Mystery EOL where keeping the product functioning requires continued spending on the manufacturer's part should not be permitted under law.

Re:Purchased Product Service

[zifn4b]

Mystery EOL where keeping the product functioning requires continued spending on the manufacturer's part should not be permitted under law.

This is where you and I have a difference of opinion. You have a liberal position. You want government to dictate to product manufacturers what they can and can't sell to you. If a game manufacturer sold you a product with a guaranteed multiplayer online 2 year experience and fulfilled that obligation, you're saying you want the government to tell them they can't produce a product like that because it's unfair in your opinion. I say, sell whatever you want in that regard just make it CRYSTAL CLEAR what is being purchased so that me, the consumer, can decide whether I think it's worth the money or not. That's a Libertarian point of view.

Re:Purchased Product Service

[omnichad]

just make it CRYSTAL CLEAR what is being purchased

So we actually do agree. How can it be crystal clear if it's still completely vague and open to interpretation? If the rights are ever revoked, it's a breach of the sale contract. The government would only be involved because it's easier than having individual lawsuits for every breach of sale contract - it's a generic case.

ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Copyright is the antithesis of freedom of information, man.

Museums with a closed network

[atrex]

How fragile must these companies be if a gaming museum operating a private server on a closed network is a threat to their bottom line?

If the museum were operating a private server on the public internet and letting just anyone log in and play then maybe they'd have a valid argument.

Maybe these companies should just make a deal with the gaming museum's "Hey, want to host our old servers for us? You do all the support and pay for all the upkeep, and you can let however many people you want play on them provided you charge them a subscription fee and give us our cut. Oh, and you're not allowed to change any of the code or the assets (cause you're a museum and we're only giving you this 'deal' for the sake of historical preservation)."

Re:WTF does any of this political bullshit have to

[zifn4b]

You're going to get modded into oblivion sadly. I agree with you. Look, I get it, Trump is an asshole. He doesn't exactly give people the warm fuzzies. But he's not stupid enough to condone lowering the Federal Reserve prime rate at a time when every economics expert would tell you not to and create the housing bubble that led to the foreclosure crisis. That's way more important than what anyone thinks about his personality. I care about my quality of life and if it takes a leader with actual balls to make that happen, I'm all for it. I don't care how it gets done.

I have friends playing...

[mchall]

...Asheron's Call on player run servers right now. It's still a thing with all of its grindy, bot-powered goodness. The XP to hit the upper levels is still stratospherically high, and traveling anywhere in the world still takes bloody forever. I still have friends from that community, but I don't miss the inefficiency of the game itself. They are welcome to it. Still, it is interesting to look back on and compare to the current crop of MMOs to see how far that style of gaming has come.

Migration strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

"it won't be done so without a migration strategy"

Ha.

Haha.

Hahahahahahahahahaha

Re:Migration strategy

[thegarbz]

So while you're laughing, name the corporate systems that have been removed without an way to migrate the data. I'll wait, but I'm sure you won't answer.

On the flip side one of my current jobs is doing quite the opposite. A cloud vendor decided to completely depreciate one product in favour of another that we determined didn't suit our needs. We've already received multiple database dumps, and I'm expecting a copy of all reportable data by next week, just as was stipulated in the exit clause of our contract.

Contracts for those of you who've never heard of them are the things that make you stop laughing and realise how stupid you really are, either when you realise companies typically abide by them or when the lawyers actually come knocking on the door.

Now go back to complaining about Google Reader no longer working where you belong little man.

Right to repair needs to = no rebuying software

[Joe_Dragon]

Right to repair needs to = no rebuying software.

There was this one VM system that replaced the MB of the old system (X86 chip set tied os + custom pci card that booted the system + was also the storage) that controlled hardware over the parallel port. An no that OS on the pci card will not run on newer X86 hardware right as the os only had drivers for the chip set in came on.

But they where forced to sell it and give the Original IP holders an cut. (there is a much bigger story with it) But the point that is wrong is why should people be forced to re buy the IP rights to fix there own hardware. We don't need any chilling effect from things like this.

Like why does apple not want farmers to be able to do tractor repair with out needing to pay dealer fees.

Also want the rights to buy roms / use my own emul

[Joe_Dragon]

I want to be able to buy the rights to use roms in my own emulator and not be locked into the inferior payed ones that piggyed backed on all of the work done by the free ones that came years before them. There are to many to list but some are like why pay for this when the older free (that are still being updated) ones can do stuff the payed can't?

As a game developer...

[paulpach]

I know this is slashdot. I will probably be downvoted in flames as a capitalist pig. Still, I want to give you the scoop from this side:

I am currently making an MMO. I will have a few servers that people can connect to.
Why don't I release a version of my server so people can run their own servers?

This is not my first game, and from experience I can tell you piracy is just rampant. By controlling the servers I don't have to worry about piracy anymore.

I can offer my game for free, which directly benefit my users, and support my game by having a built in vanity store. You can complete 100% of the game without paying a dime, but if you think those wings look pretty, fork a few bucks and support development. If I give the server away, I no longer have this revenue stream, and my servers will be competing with other people's servers and pirated servers. Thus it would be impossible for me to offer my game for free.

Now, Ideally the game will never die, I will keep developing it for ever. But let's say that it is not profitable, if I give away the code so people can run their own servers and I develop new games, I will end up competing with my own game. Worst, people will blame me for bugs, or their kids purchased something by accident. I will end up dragged into support even though I won't be making money.

Moreover, people might perceive my game as dead whether justified or not. They might decide to sue me to release the server. Now I have to deal with a lawsuit because I made a game.

So yes, forcing me to give away my servers now or in the future will hurt me.

Re:As a game developer...

[zifn4b]

If I had mod points I would give them to you. You are actually a more reasonable than typical game developer. This is especially true considering that you don't have a subscription fee or require people to pay for the game client. Wow. You are actually relying on the fan base to support the game because they like your game not because you are strong arming them to pay for it. The thinking there is that if you produce a quality MMO, your players will want to support you to continue to deliver content. That's perfectly reasonable. I don't know why someone wouldn't think this is reasonable. Game developers have to pay taxes, rent, buy food, etc. Do you really think they're going to work a full time corporate job and then make stuff for you for free? No. Would you do that for them? No. Thanks for writing your post!

Re:As a game developer...

[paulpach]

To clarify, it is not donations I am relying on. It is vanity items. People buy wings, hats, or other accessories for their characters. These vanity items have no effect on any stats, they are purely cosmetic and are not required to perform any task in the game.

I might also add a few convenience things, such as speeding a furnace with premium currency. I will drop premium currency randomly as part of the game.

There is nothing at all you would ever have to purchase to move forward, and you cannot level up or gain power by throwing money at it.

I might also rent servers for a subscription fee. You can rent a server and you will get to decide who gets to log in to that server. Completely optional because people can log in to public servers for free. This is also needed to cover the cost of running the servers themselves.

So I am trying to give a fun game to users for free, while being fair to myself and making some revenue to support development and grow further.

like you webiste

[Anonymous Coward]

i listen very well about your website at offline market.so today i seen that. it is so good neat and clean use themes nice work.keep it up!
attitude status

You don't own anything anymore

[fox171171]

When I was a kid, I had a Viewmaster, and several picture discs.

Last week, I saw the modern equivalent on a shelf at Walmart. Runs on a smartphone. As far as I can tell, the picture discs don't have pictures on them. Just codes for downloading them. The fine print said "We reserve the right to terminate the app after 10/31/17." So while you can still buy it, but it might not even work now. Even if it is still up, you have no idea how long anything you buy will work.

It's terrible, but has become the norm.

Old time BIOS

[CanEHdian]

Why can't this be treated the same way old time BIOSes were developed: one team wrote the specs by RE, the other "clean room" team wrote original code based on the specs. The open up your server (using your own DNS servers, so games connect to gamerserver.mygame.mycompany.com as per usual, just get your IP address back) to people that assert to never to have accepted the game's EULA.

and iso to usb writer will be black listed in wind

[Joe_Dragon]

and iso to usb writer will be black listed in windows so it's harder to install / hell they maybe bios lock systems to windows only with new windows logo requirements

banning steam = anit trust and EU issues

[Joe_Dragon]

banning steam = anit trust and EU issues

gfwl also tried to have limited modding

[Joe_Dragon]

gfwl also tried to have limited modding and sand boxing that may of made it so that an map editor can not have it's own EXE.

Re:WTF does any of this political bullshit have to

[TheRealQuestor]

Oh I so expected to be -1 in 2 seconds flat, because, well truth stings and I am pretty sure there was going to be a lot of butthurt after I posted it. But hey it's easier to just go with the flow sometimes.

Nope, according to the RIAA case law

[Anonymous Coward]

you get "monetary benefits in-kind" when you share software or other digital good, even if no actual cash changes hands, so therefore the GPL is still being "economically used" AND SUPPORTED (as much as it was ever supported, so no loss of utility, the same thing).

so try again, plz.