An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends. The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media. We are pursuing this in two ways:
TL;DR this is an EU petition aimed at making sure that companies are obligated to distribute binaries of the server code of their multiplayer and live service games. Currently, video game companies of online/live service games use a form of SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute) model where the “game” someone has purchased is simply a license to run the game in only the way the company sees fit (their servers, their platform, their rules). If a company were to go under or simply not run the servers required for the full game to function, then the user is out of luck as they’ve effectively had the game taken away from them.
This is just another example of why ALL leftists must strive to fight for free software. If we don’t consider software which respects your freedom an important endeavor to uphold, then we make ourselves vulnerable for further and further exploitation. If you’re reading this, this includes you as well.
I remember playing Halo CE on school computers on a USB in like 7th grade. We shared it with everyone , had lan parties, and modded the shit out of it.
All software should be that accessible
Stop killing games. Kill gamers.
The source of the rot is that they’re proprietary software. As a counterexample, look at Doom. It’s a FOSS game licensed under the GPL. This is the main reason why there’s so many source ports and why WADs are still being created today that stretch the limits of what the engine can handle. While most games will become abandonware like all abandoned proprietary software, Doom will continue to live on.
You’re absolutely right, the solution would be to license games under copyleft. Most games make the most amount of their money in the opening months they’re releasing (or even just the opening weekend), having a clause that states in X amount of time the game will be copylefted and given back to the community would be great.
I currently obtained a Fitgirl copy of Hitman because it comes with the peacock server which is a Hitman server implementation that runs on localhost. Hitman, if you’re not connected to the internet, will arbitrarily remove half the game’s content from you until you reconnect. This includes while you’re IN-GAME as well playing a level. I swear more people would actually play Hitman if the developers didn’t shoot themselves in the foot trying to financialize Hitman to the tiniest detail.
Piracy is not stealing because you aren’t taking anything away, just getting your fair share
I thought it was just the various early ID engines that were open sourced but the original WADs themselves were still copyrighted?
Yeah the IWADs (the game content) are still copyrighted and sold commercially. There exists FreeDoom though to provide free open source replacement IWAD and most Linux source port repos will include it by default. Of course, pirating a few megabyte 30-year old file is trivially easy as well.
more like Software used under Service Standards
One example of a ‘multiplayer’ game being kept alive is GTA San Andres. It never got official multiplayer support, not even its anniversary remaster. But players developed their own over the decades and it’s still active. A lot of lesser known/less popular inactive games have received fan revivals with varying degrees of support - Wizards 101, GoonTown, FreeRealms, Arctic Combat, to name a few.
If car manufacturers, and manufacturers of physical goods in general, are required to continue supporting their discontinued products, recalling defective shit, and repairing them, I don’t see why a software company shouldn’t be forced to do the same or release the source code and release itself from that responsibility.
