This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.
Edit2: Jesus people, please engage with the actual argument… not some strawman argument I didn’t make.
I must be missing something here.
- Company buys land, designs and builds theme park
- Company operates theme park.
- Theme park isn’t profitable.
- Company closes theme park
- ???
- Company must give away designs and schematics to theme park rides for free so people can build theme park themselves that might be in direct competition with new theme park company is trying to build???
Edit: I do think that abandonware should be opensourced at some point… but I don’t understand this level of entitlement.
It’s not a good analogy. Buying a one time use ticket to an amusement park is a very different thing than purchasing a game.
A better analogy would be buying a season pass to an amusement park, which then abruptly shuts down 3 months later.
That’s not the analogy I gave.
That’s my point, your analogy was a bad one so I made a new one.
No. I didn’t make the analogy you claimed I did. You strawman’d my argument and made one you like.
Well then, whatever argument you’re making, which I note you refuse to elaborate on, you’re missing the point.
Why would I need to elaborate on an argument I didn’t make? I don’t understand? I made my argument, if you don’t understand it, I don’t know what you don’t understand?
What are you misunderstanding?
It doesn’t matter. Whatever argument you’re making, you’re missing the point of the OP.
Because the analogy I drew was in line with the OP. And you said you were making a totally different argument. So whatever argument you’re making is irrelevant.
Maybe I’m just missing some crucial info, but an amusement park seems like a fundamentally different thing than software.
It’s the designs and schematics part that makes them equivalent.
You can’t compare a one time ticket to an amusment park to a purchased product tho, that’s just a bad analogy…
I didn’t.
It still doesn’t seem entirely equivalent to me. We’re not talking about them giving out the source code. We’re talking about how shit it is that something like software already installed on your computer just no longer will work.
Or let’s use your analogy; why not just abandon the facility instead of shutting it down and chasing everyone away?
Like, don’t get me wrong. I understand that this is the nature about always online stuff and that it can always be closed down like a theme park, but I feel the conversation is more about “why did they design this like a theme park without an abandonment clause instead of a shut-down clause. Historically, most other theme parks have been fine with being abandoned”
And I mean, I’ll agree with you that it’s nothing new, we saw it with Overwatch 1 and countless others, but I feel it’s a conversation one should be able to have without it being dismissed?
(I may have read too much into your comment, but it felt like it was dismissing it as a non-issue since theme parks work like this, when this is not a theme park)
After reading the rest of your comment, you are reading the wrong thing from it, the physical parts of the amusement park would be the extant binaries you already have. They still run the same as they did before, but without maintenance they will deteriorate and become non-functional or only partially operational. In an online system there are server bits that might not be available to the end user and those pieces also need an operator.
To make a slightly more specific analogy, with a water park we could imagine a separate water treatment facility that would need to be run to keep the water in the water park safe. That treatment facility could also have plans and schematics.
The actual facilities in these cases are not independently valuable in the software case. It’s the plans and schematics (the source code) that has value… but in both cases you only need the facilities and operators/maintenance to allow people to attend the water park/play the game.
Could the game company also give away a physical treatment plants so that an independent organization could buy their own servers and run their own game servers so that they could still play in their own private water parks? Sure.
Should they? Maybe. But it’s specifically the entitlement to the plans/schematics that gets me…
I understand the point now. Thank you! Good explanation!
Just in case you missed it in the op:
companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the source code to those who bought it)
Good analogy. The battle shouldn’t be about forcing abandonware to be opensource. We should focus on DRM, it makes games almost impossible to play when servers shut down.
OP should have compared it to other medias such as movies. When you buy a box copy, you expect it to work long after the authors/studios/etc. are gone.
The issue is about the lack of legal ways to play older games as time moves on. It will only grow bigger in the next few years with even more games relying on DRM and online servers.
This is a good distinction.
Online only play models are difficult for the consumer. I personally don’t play that many online only games for partly this reason… and partly because I don’t play many online games at all.
Image Transcription:
A message from Meta Quest with a picture of quadrupedal orange alien with purple spots down its spine and large green eyes named Bogo from the Oculus Quest experience of the same name. Below the image is the text:
"Hi Kolorafa,
We are reaching out to let you know that Bogo will no longer be supported as of Friday, March 15, 2024. You may continue to wave at, pet, and feed Bogo on your Quest device until 11:59 PM PT on that date.
We admit we’ve gotten attached to the little guy too! There’s still time to grab that just-slightly-out-of-reach fruit one last time. Bogo will appreciate it. And so will we. 🐾 🎆
Thanks,
The Meta Quest team"
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This really sucks when you have to explain this kind of thing to your kids…
That’s the horrible thing about online services. You never really own it, it can be taken away from you at any time. If you want to preserve something, you need physical and/or offline access.
And in addition to that sentiment, compression from moving or sending a copy of a copy is known to very slowly degrade digital media, so physical is almost always preferred.
Games don’t get lossy compressed when sent. They aren’t films or photographs.
If you use most digital formats for media and compress them with something like .7z or Winrar, then it might take years or decades to noticeable degrade, but it is still a matter of when not if.
Holy crap. File compression is not the same thing as lossy media compression.
File compression uses mathematical algorithms to create definable outcomes. Meaning it doesn’t matter how much you compress/uncompress a file, it will always be exactly the same.
5 X 2 will always give you 10 and 10 ÷ 2 will always give you 5.
Also even if you’re using lossy compression you don’t recompress things every time lol.
It is literally the other way around.
There is no way for digital media to degrade, unless it is the physical media.
Compression and transmission of data causes loss of parity. We lose or flip some 1s and 0s. Over time the effects become very noticeable. The best visual example I can think of are experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times, it very quickly degrades. In a more reasonable scenario, near lossless file types and compressions would degrade much more slowly.
The best visual example I can think of are experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times
This has nothing to do with copying a file. YouTube re-encodes videos whenever they are uploaded.
A file DOES NOT DEGRADE when it is copied. That is something that happened to VHS and cassette tapes. It does not happen to digital files. You can even verify this by generating a hash of a file, copy it 10,000 times, and generate a new hash and they would be 100% identical.
You should perform that exact experiment with a sufficient number of bits, you’ll be surprised.
No I won’t be, because I’ve done this before for various reasons, but not a single but was changed.
Let me put it this way. A computer stores programs and instructions it needs to run in files on a drive. These files contain exact and precise instructions for various components to operate. If even a SINGLE bit is off in just a couple of the OS files, your computer will start throwing constant errors if not just crashing entirely.
And this isn’t just theory. It’s provable. Cosmic rays have been known to sometimes hit a drive and cause a bit-flip. Or another issue is a drive not being powered on for a long time causing bit-rot
At this point I’m starting to think you’re a troll. There’s no way someone believes what you’re saying.
Edit: autocorrect
You’re referring to a video codec degrading as it keeps rendering the video again, not just copying and pasting the bits. There is no degradation from copying and pasting a file as-is.
No, I am not referring to that. YouTubers have the option to download their own videos. Not steal it with a video downloading tool.
That’s YouTube’s processed video not the original.
experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times, it very quickly degrades
That just means Youtube’s software uses lossy compression, that is a Youtube problem, not a digital media problem. Are you familiar with the concept of file hashing? A short string can be derived from a file, such that if any bit of the file is altered, it will produce a different hash. This can be used in combination with other methods to ensure perfect data consistency; for example a file torrent that remains well seeded won’t degrade, because the hash is checked by the software, so if anyone’s copy changes at all due to physical degradation of a harddrive or whatever other reason, the error will be recognized and routed around. If you don’t want to rely on other people to preserve something, there is always RAID, a 50 year old technology that also avoids data changing or being lost assuming that you maintain your hardware and replace disks as they break.
Here’s the fundamental reason you’re wrong about this: computers are capable of accounting for every bit, conclusively determining if even one of them has changed, and restoring from redundant backup. If someone wants to perfectly preserve a digital file and has the necessary resources and knowledge, they can easily do so. No offense but what you are saying is ignorant of a basic property of how computers work and what they are capable of.
It’s the most obvious example of a digital media problem. Computers might be able to account for every bit with the use of parity files and backups with frequent parity checks, but the fact is most people aren’t running a server with 4 separately powered and monitored drives as their home computer, and even the most complex system of data storage can fail or degrade eventually.
We live in a world of problems, like the YouTube problem, compression problems, encoding problems, etc. We do because we chose efficiency and ease of use over permanency.
Computers might be able to account for every bit with the use of parity files and backups with frequent parity checks
Yes, and this can be done through mostly automatic or distributed processes.
even the most complex system of data storage can fail or degrade eventually.
I wouldn’t describe it as complex, just the bare minimum of what is required to actually preserve data with no loss. All physical mediums may degrade through physical processes, but redundant systems can do better.
but the fact is most people aren’t running a server with 4 separately powered and monitored drives as their home computer
It isn’t hard to seed a torrent. If a group of people want to preserve a file, they can do it this way, perfectly, forever, so long as there remain people willing to devote space and bandwidth.
We live in a world of problems, like the YouTube problem, compression problems, encoding problems, etc. We do because we chose efficiency and ease of use over permanency.
All of these problems boil down to intent. Do people intend to preserve a file, do they not care, do they actively favor degradation? In the case of the OP game, it seems that the latter must be the case. Same with Youtube, same with all those media companies removing shows and movies entirely from all public availability, same with a lot of companies. If someone wants to preserve something, they choose the correct algorithms, simple as that. There isn’t necessarily much of a tradeoff for efficiency and ease of use in doing so, disk space is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, the technology is mature and not complicated to use. Long term physical storage can be a part of that, but it isn’t a replacement for intent or process.
As long as you are very serious about your backup system, digital can outlast physical.
Sure, it’s possible, but it’s unlikely. A properly kept laserdisc compared to, for example, a YouTube Video isn’t even a competition. Physical media not exposed to radiation or impact can last decades if not centuries. Don’t even get me started on Vynil.
Piracy is a pretty great backup system for everyone. You’re welcome.
Somebody somewhere is archiving it or it has the same problem.
Literally every seeder is part of that archive. You can look at individual trackers in the microcosm as individual archives and indices, but it’s the culture of piracy that causes the wide scale collection and preservation of media.
We’re actually at this kind of interesting cross-generational point of guerilla archival where it’s become easier to find certain obscure pieces of media history. I suspect this is in large part due to things like bounties, where suddenly a forgotten VHS of a 35 year old HBO special that aired once or twice could be a step toward a higher rank and greater access to a wider range of media.
Modern piracy has a strong incentive toward finding lost material that’s no longer readily available. Zero day content is great, but have you seen the RADAR pilot or both seasons of AfterMASH?
They belong in a museum. Indie would be proud, even if Harrison wouldn’t. Not that I know his perspective on piracy.
I have a folder on my D: called OLDINSTALL.
It’s my entire hard drive from 1996, including DOS.
I think it’s a couple hundred megabytes in size, but the vast majority of the files and games were exclusively in floppy disk format.
I don’t have a floppy drive or any disks anymore.
Nah
Err, no. Lossless compression is lossless and there are a bunch of techniques to ensure that a copy is bit-for-bit identical to the original
I concur
oh god this reminds me of Japanese man who married Hatsune Miku in hologram form can no longer speak to his wife of four years.
“The doting husband has gained thousands of followers on Instagram by sharing insights into his life with Miku, but things took an unexpected turn during the pandemic when Gatebox announced it was discontinuing its service for Miku.”
this is why I have trust issues with proprietary software
“Megacorp killed my cyberwife” Is a heck of an vigilante origin story
I’d read it! :D
“Ultraweeb’s Revenge: Coming this Fall!”
Or, you know, supervillain.
If that man harnesses the power of LLM like Chat GPT, he can continue talking with his wife
hmm not sure if that would work as the model that he was using would be different from what’s available so he’d probably notice some differences which might cause a mix of uncanny valley and surrealism/suspension of disbelief where the two are noticably not the same
plus using a chat-only model would be real tragic as it’s a significant downgrade from what they already had
his story actually feels like a Romeo and Juliet situation
Doesn’t even take a change of service provider to get there.
Replika had what had very obviously become a virtual mate service too, until they decided “love” wasn’t part of their system anymore. Probably because it looked bad for investors, as happened for a lot of AI-based services people used for smut.
So a bunch of lonely people had their “virtual companion” suddenly lobotomized, and there’s nothing they could do about it.
I always thought replika was a sex chatbot? Is/was it “more” than that?
It’s… complicated.
At first the idea was it’d be training an actual “replica” of yourself, that could reflect your own personality. Then when they realized their was a demand for companionship they converted it into virtual friend. Then of course there was a demand for “more than friends”, and yeah, they made it possible to create a custom mate for a while.
Then suddenly it became a problem for them to be seen as a light porn generator. Probably because investors don’t want to touch that, or maybe because of a terms of servce change with their AI service provider.
At that point they started to censor lewd interactions and pretend replika was never supposed to be more than a friendly bot you can talk to. Which is, depending on how you interpret what services they proposed and how they advertized them until then, kind of a blatant lie.
LLM is capable of role-playing, character.ai for example can get into the role of any character after being trained. The sound is just text-to-speech, character.ai already includes that, though if a realistic voice is desired, it would need to be generated by a more sophisticated method, which is already being done. Example: Neuro-sama, ElevenLabs
Until ChatGPT is shut down. Have control over your waifus, people!
Let’s take back the means of waifus!
One could say you must seize the means of reproduction.
Representative Boebert has been a commie all along! 🤯
Well, Llama 2 then.
At least the general idea behind language models isn’t proprietary and fairly well available in ooen source. Sure, GPT is better, but it could change.
Geez…that guy really needs
to get laid bya Miku Robot.Next thing you know, he doesn’t read the fine print, ther “brain” is internet connected and, sooner or later, he won’t have a Miku talking back to him again
This is why I always look for cartridge-based Switch ports of games I play, so they’ll be mine long after the online play ceases, they can no longer be legally purchased and my current device reaches the end of its product life. It also helps that game cards last longer than optical discs
The updates are still annoying but yeah it’s better than nothing. Of course there are some releases with the complete games all patched but those are rare and usually special/limited editions.
you will own nothing and you will be happy.
It was a free ‘game’ that was little more than a tutorial 🤷♂️
It’s not like it’s never happened to paid full games before.
*cries in Battleborn*
Don’t you fucking dare say that name. I have never in my life seen a game with so much promise be self fucked so hards by it’s own devs that it kills the game in its tracks.
NO ONE FUCKING ASKED FOR A BATTLE ROYALE - AND WE SURE AS SHIT DIDNT ASK FOR PAID BATTLE ROYALE SEPARATE FROM THE MAIN GAME.
…UGH.
EDIT: I WAS THINKING OF BATTLERITE BUT MY FRUSTRATION IS STILL VERY REAL.
Ever hear of SOCOM?
So why do they need to remove it?
Because Zuck’s dreams of a post-life in his metaverse are crumbling.
Because paying for the servers to keep the game online cost more money than what they make out of it.
What servers? It probably stores a few KB of data per player.
And that isn’t making them money, so they scrap it.
No it’s the great cleansing where… checks notes… billionaires crush the working classes by taking away their free virtual pets?
This is the natural progression of the games-as-a-service model. Any game that relies on online support of some kind just to function will eventually cease like this.
Is it stupid that a vr game about a pet relies on online support to function? Absolutely. But it is what it is. Buy more offline games.
This is also the reason I’m all open source. Not just games, but seeing someone abandon a program hurts. Or just wanting to make a change on your own to suit your needs. I don’t have any big fancy programs, but I at least put my code openly on github.com for that reason. Both my “big” ones are just me using another program and realizing I could make something that worked better for me. At like 100x the time investment, but programming is fun.
Looking at the retro computer scene should make anyone a diehard open source fanatic, it’s god awful how much retro stuff relies on a single guy happening to find an old disc in their basement and upload it to the internet, and a lot of the time that never happened and so the software is just lost forever and the only way hardware can be used is by people writing their own software completely from scratch and sharing it with others.
And of course if they then don’t make it open source that’s extra fun.
God bless the 8-bit guy and his dream come true, Commander X16.
drg is technically game as a service right? it works fully offline are relies on local save files and steam networking for lobbies
game that doubles as a service? beats me.
DRG is also a unicorn of a game
That’s why for the game I develop, players can request a copy of their save file and we have a singleplayer mode you can download and host yourself.
It’s not the most convenient thing, but players use it, and it’s future-proof!
You are a god among men
Is this made in unity?
Wouldn’t be surprised.
Partner found out about the unity crap when a bunch of steam library games published updates about changes in development, at least one of which stated they’re transitioning from free to paid
If people stopped renting games developers would start selling them again. Until then, the incentive is for them to keep pulling this nonsense.
There’s a difference between a game having online elements, such as a MMO, and games that require a connection just so they can keep charging you. Even in the first case though, you should own the client, and ideally it either has a single player mode, or the developer releases the code for a basic server when they shut it down.
That’s why I stated that it should be illegal to promise product while selling a undefined time limited license, there should be a clear minimum time stated when you “buy a subscription” for (single player?) games.
Fair, stating a time-to-live when you’re paying might make some people think twice. At this point though, I think people need to just not be paying unless they get to keep it permanently. Paying for access to the online portion is fine, but the rest should keep working and you should be able to get your data out of the developer’s system.
Pretty big assumption that you own something digital you paid for. Let’s be honest, you paid for a license not a product.
I concur Buyer should not gain rights to product, so they should not be allowed to profit from it, but they should be able to preserve it, unless the license that you actually buy had a time limitation, but that should be clearly stated when you buy it that you only buy access to it to (at least) X amount of time like you have with online subscriptions.
That’s why pirating is completely based.
“don’t worry, you can form a new 3-year attachment with Bogo 2 for just $29.99!”
Unless we sell less of it than the arbitrary sales number we used a bunch of estimated pseudo math on to ultimately guess. Because if we sell less than that number we pulled out of our rectums with a faulty Excel sheet, we’ll just shut the thing down immediately. Because, you know… fuck you.
Don’t let Meta metastasize.
wtf is this this is impossible
Archival is extremely important and one of the side effects of copyright schemes is that they limit its viability. The less access people have, the more likely some work becomes lost forever. I’ve seen it a few times already, with recent work, but in one or two hundred years we’re talking about libraries of art that could have been preserved but are just gone.
Closed source software, that’s actually distributed to people, has all kinds of problems beyond that too. Tons has been written about that, but from an artistic perspective, I think the biggest loss is that people can’t legally expand the original work. Giant franchises with a central cultural presence get walled off and usually just go through a huge creative decline, which is crazy because there’s millions of people preoccupied with the concepts from the franchise who are barred from using them to express themselves. With software in specific, if it’s open source you can modify it, fix it, expand it, maintain it, whatever - there’s all these great resources they could use, but we won’t let them.
Pirates keep many things alive. 🏴☠️🦜
Archival projects like ours [email protected]
It’s pretty insane. At first I thought damn, from now on our culture will be so thoroughly documented that future historians will struggle to parse it all, but now I can’t trust anything to last for 5 years and I can’t have copies of it, either.
Piracy shmiracy, some random dude’s homegrown server is not an archive, and anything that fails without electricity to power it is not a copy.
