Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Euros of The Motte, what could be more fun than effecting real life change? You should sign this ballot initiative in the hopes that less live service games get killed by publishers that don't care once they drop support. (And get all your friends, family, and acquaintances to sign it too.)
If that's not fun enough, I guess this can be a thread where you can list your favorite MMOs or other live service games. I know @self_made_human likes Tarkov, very rational because it might be the best and most unique of its kind. Once there was a game called Fallen Earth that was pretty cool, but I think it died ages ago. I also used to play Lord of the Rings Online a lot, but I'd rather drive around the map in a car than actually play the game. There should be another initiative to just release the maps so that someone can port them to Unity or something and do whatever the hell they want with them.
Serious question: does Europe understand that regulations have costs?
I swear they come up with new consumer protection or worker protection laws all the time that make me think "I'm not sure those tradeoffs sound remotely worth it".
Here my immediate thought is: that is really going to discourage releasing MMO type games in Europe.
Sure I get that digital lockouts are annoying and this will likely work to prevent those (I generally choose to never buy those games in the first place).
But what is the cost of keeping all types of games running and in a playable state? Does that playable state require ongoing updates based on operating system or hardware changes? Does that playable state require servers that host large Gameworld to be permanently online? What happens if there is a severe outage with servers, are Euro regulators gonna start prosecuting if a game is offline for too long?
Lot of uncertainty, plus Europe tends to set fines at ruinously expensive levels. Usually millions of dollars or percentages of global revenue, whichever is higher.
Ah, I forgot to link the associated movement, Stop Killing Games started by Ross Scott of Freeman's Mind fame. The campaign isn't about forcing companies to continue running MMOs forever. It's about forcing them to release the server software for users to run themselves, or some other patch of their choosing that lets users continue playing the game instead of just unceremoniously killing the game. Forcing them to run it forever would be pretty short sighted. As for the specific details, I don't know that anyone knows what that's going to be, because I don't know that it's up to the citizens what the actual regulation passed will be, if there is any. But frankly these are not big asks. I doubt it will do much against the MMO industry.
Also, since this is a campaign being pushed by an American in basically any venue he can get, I don't think you can say this is a case of Europe not understanding regulations have costs.
I generally agree with the effort to preserve games. If you also agree I think you should do the following things:
Bethesda open sources their games after some amount of decades.The thing is I strongly doubt legislation is going to get them what they want.
There are a few paths this goes down:
It immediately starts too harsh and too broad. Gaming market in Europe is generally destroyed except for the largest games. No one else can afford the compliance or lawyers for what is already a hard market to serve (non-english translations for small player base). It never gets fixed because gamers aren't a strong enough political entity, and mostly it just enshitified the market, so it screws over niche gamers in niche markets. And everyone else thinks it worked and any attempt to reverse it will be an uphill battle.
It starts too narrowly. The rules are easily dodged. This could be like some exception written for MMOs and then every game puts in a dumb feature that allows them to be an MMO by whatever standards the law has laid out.
It stays too narrow and continues to do nothing or it gets expanded into the first scenario.
At no point do I think the EU will be "too lenient". They'll use their regular fee structure which is % of global revenue or instantly crippling payments for a small business. Not that the size of the punishment for small businesses will ever matter. The legal hassle alone won't be worth it.
I'm also surprised from a programmer/coding perspective. Surely this guy must know what it's like messing with old code? Maybe I'm super ignorant or an absolutely shitty coder. But I'd say it's almost an order of magnitude harder to write code that can work in two decades then it is to just write code that works for two years.
I'm also pretty certain that any games with live services and large companies might be a mess of dependencies on external proprietary 3rd parties. Say a game company works with a hosting company for the online aspects of their game. The hosting company does a bunch of optimizations for the game company as both a service and lock in effect with that game company. The game is nearly unplayable without these improvements from the hosting company.
I basically see most programs that work for ten years as minor miracles. I'd compare them to buildings, but that they age way faster. A ten year old software program that does a significant amount is like a large fifty year old building. Probably with similar maintenance costs. The parts are no longer standard. The people that built it have long moved on. No one would build it the same way if they started today. And while the structure is still sturdy and fine, all the piping and internals that move stuff around is really starting to show it's age. If it wasn't built to last this long then its probably getting to the point where you could tear it all down and build it from scratch for cheaper.
If you aren't a programmer you are probably rolling your eyes and thinking "how does software wear out faster than copper piping". And I'm shouting "it's the demons!" with a crazed look in my eyes, cuz I don't fuckin know how it happens. Better people than me have written about how programming sucks.
The people at valve are top level geniuses in their field and they've written stuff that is still chugging along as some of the best modding software 20 years later. Maybe this petitioner got their start on valve related stuff, so my best explanation for him is that he is super spoiled. But if you wrote the perfect law that basically said "be like valve" it would still basically destroy the gaming industry, because no one can meet that standard. (Unless the valve devs released some super amazing software to make it easier for everyone, and they probably would if it meant saving Steam).
Sorry that rant got way longer than expected, also typed it on my phone, so it might have more spelling and grammar mistakes.
Huh? What games did they open source?
Search engines suck nowadays. Can't find source. Chatgpt agrees with me that they've released source code for TES 2, 3, and 4. I think they do so after they drop all support for the game.
If TES3 refers to OpenMW, that's not Bethesda opensourcing their game, that's a bunch if fanatics rewriting the game from scratch, after reverse-engineering the game's data files. If the other TES games have their own FOSS versions, I expect them to have come about the same way, rather than being released by Bethesda.
Big studios releasing their code happens, but is very rare.
Ya I got a few things mixed up. Bethesda released Arena and TES 2 as freeware, and I must have mixed that up with hearing about the open source projects for Morrowind and Oblivion.
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