6/3/2026 at 7:20:49 PM
This is basically advocating for open source games which is a completely different story than what stop killing games is trying to do.There are tons of closed source games that have zero online component to them.
I don't see how you can actually argue that this is a good thing, especially when they say:
> The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.
by nerdjon
6/3/2026 at 7:34:39 PM
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > > Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.
by F3nd0
6/3/2026 at 7:40:08 PM
In that vein, the other day this got posted to HN: https://twilitrealm.dev/It uses an independent reimplementation of the code of a Zelda game from the GameCube and combines them with the assets from the actual game to make native binaries for various platforms, which blows my mind a bit but demonstrates the power of this sort of split abstraction.
by saghm
6/3/2026 at 7:44:31 PM
Yes! And there are many other re-implementation projects, like OpenMW, OpenGothic, fheroes2, and others, which allow you to play the games if you can provide the original assets. Largely for older games, but the point stands.by F3nd0
6/3/2026 at 8:27:52 PM
Adding on to this but I'm not sure if it's 1:1 what you're talking about.PokeMMO is a online Pokemon Fangame that combines the first 5 generations of games. From what I gather, this is possible because it is up to the user to provide the ROMs, so litigious Nintendo cannot say they are re-distributing copyrighted material
by dpoloncsak
6/3/2026 at 9:45:59 PM
Does it only use the assets from the original games, or also the scripting? If the former, then I'd say it's basically the same concept that I'm talking about, but with making a new game using the existing assets rather than reimplementing an existing one. If it uses the scripting as well and then provides some extra stuff to merge them and put it online, I'd say it's a slightly different (but still extremely cool!) thing.by saghm
6/4/2026 at 2:33:57 PM
I'm not entirely sure...I know the battle AI is custom, and a few moves are still not implemented. This makes me lean towards "they're scripting it themselves" but it could be a hybrid of the two for all I knowby dpoloncsak
6/3/2026 at 7:54:35 PM
OpenMW has been on my list to try out for a while now, I should have thought of that one. I hadn't heard of OpenGothic, but I also only recently started learning about that game at all with the remake coming out soon, so I might need to add that to my list as well!This makes me think, is there one of those "awesome" lists for open game reimplementations? If not, someone should make one...
(edit: Thanks for the multiple great replies on this! Now I have even more stuff to go through to add to my lists, and I love having that problem)
by saghm
6/3/2026 at 7:59:59 PM
Yes, there is <https://osgameclones.com/>. Note that not all of the listed games are free software, but many are.by F3nd0
6/3/2026 at 7:58:38 PM
Luxtorpeda maintains a pretty comprehensive list of game reimplementationsby worble
6/4/2026 at 3:50:27 PM
Unfortunately, open source projects traditionally have a poor AI record. And when (sometimes, contrary to tradition) they make a fully-fledged AI, it plays at a super-expert level and ruins the fun of both campaigns and single-player, turning a simple walk into Saving Private Ryan. I'd call it "made by maniacs for maniacs."by t917910
6/3/2026 at 8:18:53 PM
WTF!That is impressive there is OSS Gothic 2
I wonder if its legal, how is it MIT
by zuzululu
6/3/2026 at 8:27:28 PM
Presumably from the same methodology they laid out in the parent comment: clean-room reimplementation of the code is fair game, and you have to bring-your-own-assets (ostensibly from a legal copy of the original game, but however you do it is your own choice, not anything the people providing the free code need to be concerned with).by saghm
6/3/2026 at 8:47:40 PM
what power, exactly? that nintendo doesn't care about these guys for some idiosyncratic reason?by doctorpangloss
6/3/2026 at 9:49:47 PM
The power to have a game natively on platforms it was never implemented on before but look identical to the original. To me, that's honestly cooler and more desirable than emulation; the fact that it's also more defensible from an IP standpoint is just a nice bonus.I also wouldn't say that "respecting the limits of IP law" is particularly idiosyncratic either; you can make the case that IP owners like Nintendo often overreach due to the inherent advantage of being a large company with a lot more resources than a smaller open source project, but I don't really see it as worthwhile to call them out for not doing that in some cases.
by saghm
6/4/2026 at 3:36:03 AM
IP law is peak law nerd, regular lawyers can't make any definitive statements about IP situations, what makes you think that you could?by doctorpangloss
6/4/2026 at 11:06:11 AM
Do you honestly think that most lawyers couldn't tell you that downloading the Linux source code for personal use is legal under IP law, or that dumping games from a Nintendo Switch and serving them on a website for public download is a violation?If you think that neither of those definitive statements are something regular lawyers could tell you, I think we just have mutually incompatible perceptions of reality. Otherwise, you're claiming that the boundary between what's transparently a legal or a violation and what's murky is itself obvious, which doesn't really make sense if you don't think that regular lawyers even understand IP law.
It honestly just seems like you're trying to pick a fight for reasons that are not really clear to me. You initially responded derisively to my use of the word "power" to describe a form of abstraction, and when I responded to clarify it, you ignored that part of my response in favor of focusing on a different part and starting a new argument about that.
by saghm
6/4/2026 at 4:47:10 PM
> those definitive statements are something regular lawyers could tell yougo ahead and ask. non-IP lawyers will tell you to talk to IP lawyers. another way to think of your two questions is, "in what scenarios would ... be permissible and not permissible, in your opinion?" if you were sincerely interested in learning something.
by doctorpangloss
6/4/2026 at 2:47:11 AM
But why? Both the programmer and the artist have to eat, they both take pride in their work. What is the rationale for treating one side differently to the other?by joegibbs
6/4/2026 at 8:26:20 PM
[dead]by tempaccountabcd
6/3/2026 at 9:25:22 PM
This is largely how open source game engines like OpenMW or OpenTTD work: the game engine is reverse engineered, and the art is something the end user provides by downloading/owning a legitimate retail copy.And that’s really great, but this model is ultimately not realistic for most game developers.
It’s not like productivity software where the code of the product isn’t the majority of the value being delivered. Gitlab is happy to give away their source code because a bunch of enterprise integrations, support, cloud hosting, and features are paywalled.
Game developers really just can’t do this model. If the game is open source it’s going to be far too easy to pirate the game. The economics of single player games largely revolve around the strength of sales in the first month or two.
This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.
For a AAA game where it needs to sell millions of copies at a high price to break even on its huge production budget, game companies can’t risk a high piracy rate. Just look at GTA 6, a game with a production budget of multiple Avatar films.
by dangus
6/3/2026 at 10:03:04 PM
Games will get pirated regardless whether they're on GOG or not.> This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.
This is not always the case. For example this game will be available on GOG on day 1. In fact you can pre-order it now: https://www.gog.com/en/game/gothic_1_remake
As another example, this game was released on GOG 5 months after the Steam release: https://www.gog.com/en/game/clair_obscur_expedition_33
Likewise, Cyberpunk 2077 was released on GOG 4 months after the Steam release. And IIRC the game's revenue didn't cover its costs until ~2 years later.
All three of the examples I gave are $50 or more.
by MYEUHD
6/4/2026 at 8:36:43 AM
You're wrong about Cyberpunk, it was released on both platforms on the same day. I mean it was CD Projekt's own store front.by Podrod
6/4/2026 at 4:15:25 PM
You're right. My bad. I was looking at the price changes in gogdb, and price tracking started a few months after launch. But the details page shows the Global release date and the GOG release date.by MYEUHD
6/4/2026 at 1:33:24 AM
I think you are at least partially reinforcing my point here. Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.Two of the three examples are solidly in the realm of indie titles.
Yes, there are big release games on the platform. I see, for example, that Silent Hill f is on GOG.
I will generally agree that piracy eventually happens, but a lot of DRM has made piracy impractical for critical early weeks of a game's release.
I think different video game publishers have different opinions on the matter and both sides have a lot of validity. I also think that different types of games have different rates of piracy, as it can be a crime of convenience or not.
If your game's demographics skews more educated, affluent, and/or older, I would imagine that piracy rates will be lower. Perhaps your game is more popular in some countries over others that have different laws and/or cultural norms surrounding piracy.
by dangus
6/4/2026 at 4:17:10 PM
> Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.It turns out I was wrong about Cyberpunk. It was released on GOG on day 1. https://www.gogdb.org/product/2093619782#details
The price chart on gogdb mislead me.
by MYEUHD
6/4/2026 at 7:44:53 PM
Ah I see. Yeah I actually thought that would be pretty strange since it was CD Projekt Red’s store.by dangus
6/4/2026 at 4:32:27 AM
I'd argue that games being open source and being pirated does mean you can't make money. I think you are looking at this backwards, like the rest of the industry. You don't need to force people to buy your stuff by making it closed and preventing people from getting at your stuff for free.THe people that matter will compensate you if you make something that matters to them.
The whole idea that you need to force people to by your stuff through restrictions is a perverse way of looking at the world.
by trinsic2
6/4/2026 at 11:25:07 PM
I think the piracy rate probably varies a lot by demographic and overall target audience, and that for some types of games and publishers a lot of the draconian DRM makes a lot of sense from a pure dollars and sense standpoint.A certain type of player just checks for cracked versions first even though they have the money to buy the game and for that person Denuvo buying the publisher a few weeks/months of a crack not being available is worth the investment.
I suspect that a lot of the most famous examples of big budget games with no DRM at all have an older, more educated, and more affluent demographic.
by dangus
6/4/2026 at 12:36:37 AM
There's also the free culture movement, which generally believes all creative works should be free, not just software.There are many people who would advocate for free software and not free culture, but jxself has also written in support of free culture: https://jxself.org/drm_and_free_culture.shtml
That post is from 15 years ago, so of course he could have changed his views since then (but I don't see any evidence of that in this case).
by JacobKfromIRC
6/4/2026 at 5:30:41 PM
Why is there a distinction between software and art? Can't you make the same argument on both sides, either that artists should make their work freely available, or that programmers should retain the rights to their work?by fasterik
6/4/2026 at 7:30:01 AM
I don't see the logic in why art would be treated differently than code, and there is a lot in modern games that are not clearly one or the other (hitboxes? animations? lighting effects?)by qq66
6/4/2026 at 12:25:56 AM
> The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.Personally, I’m a big fan of this idea. I really like the way that games like Doom do things: the engine itself is FOSS, but in order to play Doom, you need DOOM.WAD which is proprietary and must be purchased. DOOM.WAD doesn’t contain any code (it only contains graphics, sounds, level geometry, etc.) so you don’t have to run any unfree software in order to play Doom.
However, there are some people in the free software movement that disagree with me. The Free Software Foundation maintains a wiki called the Free Software Directory. Here’s a quote from the Free Software Directory’s rules for what can and cannot be included in the Free Software Directory [1]:
> Edge Cases
> This is not static information. Policies about adding non-free code obviously don't change, however the way projects are licensed or the way they interact each other is definitely subject to change.
> […]
> • If software is freely licensed but is bundled with artwork that is not, do we consider the program to be free? From RMS "Images and sounds need to be free if they are essential parts of the software. But if they are just decoration, and easily replaced, then they do not have to be free." Sound and artwork fall into the category of essential for interactive games. Logos on otherwise utilitarian projects do not.
That being said, that same set of rules also says [2]:
> Free programs
> Software needs to meet the free software definition to be listed at the Free Software Directory as well as follow these guidelines and requirements for entries.
> […]
> • The software program itself should not package any program-data, art assets loaded by the program, or software which is under a nonfree license. If art or data is available for the game under a nonfree license but not packaged directly with it, that is a different matter and one we should be more flexible about.
Those two quotes seem like they were written by two different people who have opposite opinions on this topic, but IDK.
Anyway, my point is: I really like it when games do that, but it seems that at least some people in the free software movement disagree.
[1]: <https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:Requi...>
[2]: <https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:Requi...>
by BlitzGeology91
6/3/2026 at 8:33:19 PM
Dwarf Fortress is a modern example of that paradigm.by ZeWaka
6/3/2026 at 10:35:12 PM
As far as I know Dwarf Fortress is entirely closed source.by wtetzner
6/4/2026 at 8:37:20 PM
I was speaking in the sense that the base game is free and you can buy it with non-ascii graphics for a price.However,
The "raws" that drive the game are completely configurable and accessible by a user.
It's more like the engine being closed source and the gamedata being source-available. Modding isn't quite the right word - that implies it being less open.
You can delete stuff from being present in your game, add new plants or objects, new diseases, etc.
Also related, the game has been opened up with Lua scripting thanks to Putnam's efforts, for even more powerful procedural addons.
by ZeWaka
6/3/2026 at 11:55:03 PM
In what way? I'm not seeing any.by TylerE
6/3/2026 at 9:36:21 PM
It's not really advocating for open source games despite evoking Richard Stallman and Free Software.A lot of people get all up in their feelings when it comes to "private property", like (hypoerbolic) "if they allow redistribution of abandonware, they might take everything" and it's just not justified. It used to be, for example, that copyrights on books weren't automatically granted and they were much shorter terms. You had to apply for copyright renewals. Why? Because of orphaned works and it was viewed that if nobody held an interest that they asserted, it was in the public good to place that in the public domain.
Abandonware follows the same principles. The arguably controversial part is that "abandonware" here includes "forced obsolescence". And I 100% agree that if you, as the publisher, make a game nonfunctional (or even greatly reduced functionality) then people should have the right to make those games work.
The most egregious cases are like Simcity 5, which was made online for literally no reason (other than "because piracy"). They tried to sell online features but that wasn't the reason.
The idea that this kills the entire gaming industry is just slippery slope hyperbola.
by jmyeet
6/3/2026 at 7:48:27 PM
To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit. It just takes the idea to its logical conclusion. As a game developer, if this thing passes, I would just not build multiplayer ever anymore.by felipellrocha
6/4/2026 at 10:12:55 AM
Why not? Minecraft is the second most selling game of all time and comes with a freely distributable and hostable multiplayer component. How would this legislation have stopped that from happening?by hhjinks
6/3/2026 at 7:54:45 PM
as a game dev myself, agreed.I’m guessing nobody here has ever actually tried to make games, let alone multiplayer ones. It’s not “oh just make it better” we’re usually already stretching the limits of what’s possible financially and time wise to get a working (fun) product.
You can add burdens all you want, but that means the games get simpler.. because they can’t be made cheaper (price sensitive customers) and time is finite in that context. something has to give.
by dijit
6/3/2026 at 8:06:16 PM
As not a game dev myself, may I ask for clarification? How does ‘Stop Killing Games’ legislation kill any sort of multiplayer games specifically? Aren’t there already games which don’t have the problem the movement is trying to solve? Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? I feel like I may have misunderstood your point or am just lacking a lot of important insight.by F3nd0
6/3/2026 at 8:58:41 PM
> Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place?It's a question of when, not if - you're not going to pay to keep the servers online forever. What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't? If they're bad enough then plenty of people will not be interested in taking that risk by making such games.
by DSMan195276
6/3/2026 at 9:24:43 PM
> What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't?How about "the government forces you to release the code"? That's seems fair.
Unless you hid your source code in USB drives under your bed, the government can probably just force GitHub (or similar )to release it. I bet they've got it backed up.
by stale2002
6/3/2026 at 9:39:40 PM
The government will release it with all the copyrighted code and assets that's owned by a bunch of third-parties?Ex. if I license my artwork, music, characters, code library, etc. to a game developer and they don't create a legally releasable version of their server, then the government will forcibly break our licensing agreement and I just get screwed?
by DSMan195276
6/3/2026 at 10:16:01 PM
If everyone in the industry knows what the rules are, you can make contracts and agreements and licensing that works with those rules.by BlarfMcFlarf
6/3/2026 at 10:17:15 PM
Ab1921 in california doesn't propose this. Its either an offline copy, a copy that works without servers, or 100% refund. Basically patch or refund.I can't wait to see "you haven't met your patch obligations" on a balance sheet and a full indie game being underwater
by knollimar
6/3/2026 at 10:06:11 PM
So you're assuming game devs write every line of code in their server infrastructure. First, could be using a third party library you have license to use on a limited number of machines that make up your backend servers. Second you could be paying for third party API access to something like snowflake.You either have to rip out the code (which may or may not break the server, but still requires developer time to do) or write replacement code which likely takes even more dev time to do or you would have done it instead of paying for the library/access to the service.
by runevault
6/4/2026 at 4:36:36 AM
I think this will bring everything back to where it needs to be. We depend way to much on third party stuff as it is.by trinsic2
6/3/2026 at 11:30:24 PM
Genuinely curious - what third party closed source dependencies are they using? Like what is their purpose?by duped
6/4/2026 at 12:12:53 AM
Audio subsystems (wwise, fmod).Physics subsystems (havok, ISI).
Procedural systems (Gaea, Houdini)
Vegetation (Speedtree)
VFX subsystems (Nvidia Gameworks)
First party SDKs (Sony Playstation, Microsoft NDK, Horizon/Quest).
Pathfinding (Kytheria, Mercuna)
Cutscenes/Videos (Bink)
UI (Rive, Neosis)
Networking (Photon, Coherence)
Theres… thousands more, if you’d like me to continue.
by dijit
6/4/2026 at 1:05:26 AM
On the web backend?by duped
6/4/2026 at 9:31:30 AM
The backend isn’t web technologies.by dijit
6/4/2026 at 4:07:05 PM
I mean it absolutely is, but that's not an answer to the question.by duped
6/4/2026 at 4:09:08 PM
Of the 7 AAA games I’ve been part of making, not a single one used HTTP (well, not as a primary driver of anything), HTML, CSS or anything that could be construed as a “web technology” so, what are you talking about please?by dijit
6/4/2026 at 4:21:52 PM
s/web/networked computers/gWhat I'm saying is you have programs running on user machines, and programs running on your machines. There's an interface between those two over a network. There's a problem that consumers face today where they pay to play games that are not functional without data flowing over that interface.
There's a claim that implementing the backend side of that interface is so complex and impossible or too difficult/time consuming/etc to design in a way without 3rd party dependencies.
I'm asking: what are those 3rd party libraries doing? And why can't you design server APIs and client code in a way to provide a different backend if consumers need to do it themselves when you stop supporting the game?
by duped
6/4/2026 at 5:03:28 PM
idk, lets use things you know.Why do you use Ruby on Rails, why not rewrite it so you can release it without relyig on that?
by dijit
6/4/2026 at 5:57:08 PM
I'm not interested in hypotheticals. In AAA games that you have worked on, concretely what 3rd party code did your servers rely on that would prevent you from distributing either the server itself or sufficient description of the servers' behavior to allow a reimplementation?And even if we're talking hypotheticals: stupid example. I haven't worked on a backend where the actual server infrastructure wasn't open source, trivial to open source because it was first party, or irrelevant because the only thing that matters would be the API and protocols, which again, trivial to make open.
by duped
6/4/2026 at 7:14:40 PM
I don’t care.Get a job in industry and see for yourself.
I’m not going to break confidentially to sate your ignorance.
by dijit
6/4/2026 at 8:28:43 PM
I'm actively trying to remove my own ignorance of the domain which is why I posed the question! You're not breaking confidentiality by saying "I need X to solve Y problem which is offered by Z and we can't expose even the application layer interfaces." Right now it sounds like you don't have an answer, or even understand the question.Getting all defensive and not answering it doesn't really help your industry's case here.
by duped
6/4/2026 at 11:00:33 PM
So when you told me that games use web tech on the backend, that was you getting rid of your ignorance?Ok, lets talk about the kinds of things we need.
Networks have latency, so we need to smooth/correct for that.
Our connections need to be authenticated, so we need middleware to handle tokens, because we don’t hand-roll that. On a binary protocol.
Our physics engines are complicated: we don’t usually write our own from scratch; and the server needs physics to simulate the world.
Shall I continue?
by dijit
6/3/2026 at 11:51:03 PM
Web servers, message brokers, physics engines, anti cheat, fraud detection, flood mitigation, ranking systems, chat moderation, match making systems. There are thousands of possible components which may have been licensed in any given game server system. In some cases the entire game engine runs on the server.by mvdtnz
6/4/2026 at 2:54:45 AM
I guess what surprises me here is how much of this is 3p code that couldn't possibly be distributed. Like why would you not be using an open source web server, or widely available message broker? Things like chat moderation/match making/anti cheat/etc seem like add on services that would be implemented per game (well, maybe not match making) and aren't relevant to the problem that the "stop killing games" people are trying to solve.by duped
6/4/2026 at 4:55:33 AM
Frankly it's none of your business why, and it's completely irrelevant. The fact is that this 3p code exists and this law needs to account for it or it's unworkable.by mvdtnz
6/4/2026 at 4:09:47 PM
This is kind of needless aggression that doesn't help non domain experts understand.I've worked on a lot of complicated and deeply optimized networked applications. They're almost all closed source. I know exactly how I would design a system to support these kinds of initiatives. What I'm curious about is why that's impossible for game developers, because either I'm missing something, or game developers are just bad at software design.
by duped
6/6/2026 at 2:43:39 PM
>either I'm missing something, or game developers are just bad at software designUsually the latter, not just game devs themselves, but also infrastructure devs.
by skotobaza
6/4/2026 at 4:11:51 PM
[dead]by simbosambo
6/3/2026 at 11:57:40 PM
A very large percentage of multiplayer games keep the backend in an MS SQL or Oracle cluster.by TylerE
6/4/2026 at 1:06:45 AM
Sure but you don't link in Oracle/MS's database cluster orchestrators to your server, right?by duped
6/4/2026 at 6:18:16 AM
THat really depends on how you define "the server",doesn't it? The intent of the bill seems to be a thing that actually play that game.by TylerE
6/4/2026 at 4:15:07 PM
The "server" being the computer program not running on a user device. The intent of the initiative is to allow people to substitute or replace that program to allow the game to continue to function even if the original publisher/developer disables access to it.It's pretty obvious to me as a gamer and engineer what the intent and design constraints are here, so I'm just wondering what makes this seem impossible?
by duped
6/3/2026 at 11:56:45 PM
And how do they force release of all the proprietary dependencies? Overriding contract law is a hell of a lift, and a terrible precedent.The whole "Stop Killing Games" movement is deeply misguided, and most of the people supporting it have absolutely no clue about how software or anything computer related actually works.
by TylerE
6/3/2026 at 11:48:48 PM
And you're... in favour of this kind of doctrine...?by mvdtnz
6/3/2026 at 8:22:01 PM
Well, ok, you grasped at a few issues there that go off in different directions.The issue with "Stop Killing Games" is that the legislation doesn't currently look like anything, it's a broad appeal and the solution for studios will depend on where it finally lands.
If it lands in the realm of "Games must be released FOSS after x years" then, aside from the fact that a lot of the times we don't own the copyrights to our own assets or certain code (they're on license for a single release) the second issue is how to release it.
First: the online backend for The Division or Destiny are just... not possible to run. The backend is fused to the products via a slurry of certificate pinning and object serialisation, with some things happening only on the server.
"Un-fusing" them is, basically impossible at this point; so the question is: can you build such a system without them being fused together in the first place?
The answer is: yes, but only by slowing down development. It would become much more about defining our boundaries and working on a "slim" version of the backend, or stubbing the backend completely. Obviously this is a lot of effort. The thing is we only barely managed to get a functional system, so adding an extra year for programming isn't going to be possible, we'll have to "cut" features that are hard to make.
"So, why don't you just release the server".
Well, that's a good question, we could remove the certificate pinning we have on the client, and the entitlement checks, stub out all the code that relies on third party APIs and give you a server binary.
But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.
So, we'd have to work on slimming that down, or building things in a totally different way: which means "seamless" darkzones and safehouses becomes impossible.
THEN you have the issue of releasing a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product, which we already had a major issue with.
So, most likely, we just make single player games.
Honestly, the industry is moving that way anyway because unless you've been doing it for a while making multiplayer games is really hard from a game design standpoint and there's an ongoing operational cost which people are a bit too price sensitive to support.
That's why Massive released The Division 1 & Division 2 but then pivoted to doing single-player games like Star Wars and Avatar which only retains the most basic multiplayer elements.
by dijit
6/3/2026 at 8:36:42 PM
> But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.As far as I understand that situation is accepted by the initiative. The requirement is not that it works on any specific hardware or software stack, just that it can theoretically work.
> a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product
Anti-cheat solutions aren't required to be released, and if there are bugs in the server, they might even be found and patched by the community.
by ashdnazg
6/3/2026 at 8:43:02 PM
What you're saying is true for the californian legislation, but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction) - nor the direction of the authors article, and like I replied in a sibling response: it's not like people would be pleased to get our binaries.Second: anti-cheat itself is a fucking joke. A crutch, a last ditch hail-mary because we ran out of time to batten down the hatches or things were changed so often from the start of the project to the end that we couldn't add safety into the protocol design properly.
Exposing how our systems think about how you move, how you shoot, when AI ticks, when loot ticks, behaviour trees and how phase transitions are computed: gives an attacker a hell of a lot of leverage.
To put this into broader easier to understand terms: ask yourself why it's so easy to cheat in Unreal Engine games vs Battlefield.
It's not the anti-cheat. It's the complexity of digging through the engine and knowing what the memory is doing and what the server is doing.
by dijit
6/3/2026 at 9:04:51 PM
> but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction)Where can we find information about the direction the EU is going on this? AFAICT there has just been one meeting on the topic?
by strbean
6/3/2026 at 9:16:01 PM
There's been... a lot more than just one meeting.https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/news/14th-valid-initia...
https://commission.europa.eu/european-citizens-initiative/me...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/stop-destroying...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXdmoeaYZ9Y
https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/news-media/news/eesc-debates-e...
by dijit
6/3/2026 at 10:27:13 PM
Seems like that's... one more substantive meeting?First link is announcing the initiative was submitted, second is a private meeting where the initiative was presented to the comission by the organizers.
Then there was a public meeting on 16 April 2026 and a public meeting on 20 May 2026.
Is there a specific part of one of those meetings that indicates they want to go a different direction than the California bill?
From the last link:
> If designed responsibly, most games that connect to the internet can operate indefinitely without publisher support. This has been a customer expectation for over 50 years. We are open to any solution that solves the problem. We are flexible on specifics and implementation by publishers. We understand that not all game features may be operable in a discontinued game. We are not seeking ongoing support from publishers after a game has been discontinued
This sounds like the California bill would address these issues.
edit: Particularly, I'm wondering if there is any serious push for release of binaries / source code prior to the end-of-life of a game, which seems to be of particular concern.
by strbean
6/3/2026 at 10:44:49 PM
theres a lot of pre-meetings, some major meetings (the ones you mentioned) and talks about getting legislation into other acts.The fact here is pretty simple: they have not indicated any support for the californian style legislation and they aren’t done yet either. The californian model is also very direct and instructive and EU laws tend to be broad frameworks, so they’ll definitely be different in some way, but unsure if they’ll encompass each other.
I can’t say what way they will definitely go, but it seems naïve to presume the californian stance given how disparate the solutions are from with in the SKG movement itself.
I’m watching it closely, obviously, but nobody knows where it will go. But this is like a 500-sided dice, the odds are low that a solution cleanly overlaps.
by dijit
6/3/2026 at 9:16:50 PM
We used to have player run servers for years. Is it some lost skill to write software that way?by tayo42
6/3/2026 at 9:26:45 PM
It's not a lost skill.Spinning up a binary and replicating actors across two computers that both have a connection string to a server is.. for all intents and purposes: easy.
Where it falls down is when you start to have complex interactions with AI that's serverside, or you have a dynamic world that changes based on player behaviour, or you have cross platform requirements, integrations with companion apps and above all: matchmaking.
If you're a looter-shooter, there's a whole host of complicated interactions too.
A game like Apex Legends could probably distribute their server binary, but if you require online, as in, not just a single match, but an economy- a dynamic matchmaker and a dynamic world (meaning: when you kick a box it stays kicked) and a persistent account (you keep your loot): then that doesn't work well anymore.
The interactions are just too complex to batten down reliably, they'll be exploited, there'll be no fun, or: it just won't be possible for certain features, regardless of safety.
You can see how this looks by trying to use one of the many unofficial versions of Runescape.
by dijit
6/4/2026 at 2:48:10 AM
This is the whole spirit of the "Stop Killing Games" argument though: you don't need to keep any of that stuff once support drops. It just needs to be "functional", in the most basic possible sense. If there are no players, no economy, no advanced AI, because it was all disconnected, that's considered fine.The response of "but that isn't any fun!" is totally irrelevant; you can't preserve the initial experience, but you can preserve the basic software itself so that players still have something to mess with.
Programming-wise, this requires a little more emphasis on a modular implementation that needs to be considered from the start. Otherwise, it seems pretty straightforward. Or am I missing something?
by hodgehog11
6/3/2026 at 9:10:05 PM
> But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.This doesn't seem like much of an obstacle? Can buy or rent such without too much trouble.
by singpolyma3
6/3/2026 at 10:32:35 PM
>Can buy or rent such without too much trouble.for... thousands of dollars a month.
the goal of the regulation is that regular people can keep playing their games. not just rich people.
by john_strinlai
6/4/2026 at 12:15:09 PM
Only one group needs to do it for everyone to keep playing. Everyone running their own server isn't very interesting for multiplayer... Usually you'd do it in groups.by singpolyma3
6/4/2026 at 6:12:29 PM
Most of the time, no group of players will run a server at that cost. So regular players still can't play.It's not unheard of though. WoW and City of Heroes had/have large, expensive fan servers. But realistically, this legislation would save maybe 0-2% of games in the thousands-per-month cost range. According to the parent commenter, we might lose many more than that from the legislation causing studios to decide not to make them to begin with.
Games with cheap servers are a different story.
by nearbuy
6/3/2026 at 8:29:16 PM
> the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.> So, we'd have to work on slimming that down
...why? My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.
by fragmede
6/3/2026 at 8:29:55 PM
Community backlash will be fierce if it's not actually runnable.Ubisoft doesn't have the most stellar reputation for example (I don't work there anymore) so people look at things we do by accident as if they are intentionally malicious.
Also, the California law is one law, the EU is also looking at this and it's likely to look different - that's why "Stop Killing Games" doesn't really mean anything yet, even people within the movement have differing definitions.
by dijit
6/3/2026 at 8:40:33 PM
The key is communication. If the company says the binary has a certain min. requirement, then the vast majority of people will accept that.Of course there'll be idiots, but I doubt you'll see a stronger backlash than to a company shutting down the servers without any solution, like they can do now.
by ashdnazg
6/3/2026 at 8:38:44 PM
>My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation.
the spirit of the law is that i can reasonably spin up an instance of the server for me and my friends to play.
by john_strinlai
6/3/2026 at 9:14:26 PM
If a game is popular enough for anyone to care, some turbonerd will get the server running on a massive cloud instance, and then people will be able to play the game.Fans have reverse-engineered and stood up servers for tons of games with no access to the server binaries. The idea that they wouldn't figure it out when given much better resources (server binaries or source code) is crazy.
by strbean
6/3/2026 at 10:09:25 PM
>The idea that they wouldn't figure it out when given much better resources (server binaries or source code) is crazy.i wasnt implying they couldnt figure it out.
i was implying that you would have to be an incredibly rich turbonerd to stand up a massive cloud instance for some of these games. which sort of defeats the entire goal of the regulation.
by john_strinlai
6/4/2026 at 2:07:53 AM
Or maybe 100 years from now, your toaster will be powerful enough to run the game.To me this is about both preserving the access to what consumers purchased, but also future preservation of art.
Copyright is not a natural right. It is a monopoly granted by the government to creators, specifically with the goal of the progress of art and science.
Games that completely die because their servers are shut off, in my opinion should just lose copyright outright. Why should the people via the government provide you with a monopoly on publishing something that you have stopped publishing?
by greiskul
6/3/2026 at 8:45:02 PM
Kind of depends on the definition of no one.If the company puts an artificial proof of work demanding a rack of the latest data center GPUs, that should be illegal.
If the binary has the same hardware requirements that the company used when the service was up, I see it as totally fair.
by ashdnazg
6/3/2026 at 8:55:20 PM
true, but i think this would be exceptionally difficult (if not impossible) to enforce.ubisoft would surely be willing to spend an extra $500k on server hardware while developing a $25MM game, and subtlety bloat their server-side code so that they can say "this is the hardware we had to use to run it".
there are a million ways to slow down code/increase hardware requirements that look plausible.
by john_strinlai
6/3/2026 at 9:28:34 PM
> if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation.This isn't the 2000s. People can rent a computer out of a data center. This isn't some hard problem here.
by stale2002
6/3/2026 at 9:37:56 PM
>People can rent a computer out of a data center.how much does 190GiB of RAM and 38 CPUs go for, hourly?
by john_strinlai
6/3/2026 at 9:53:40 PM
Cheapest I could find on AWS was $1.848/hr for the compute, no storage.$1,349.04/Month
(m6g.12xlarge in us-east-1)
by dijit
6/3/2026 at 8:46:10 PM
Wow, thank you for the detailed answer! I understand your point much better now.I still think ‘kills any sort of multiplayer games’ (what the other dev said) is a gross exaggeration, since you list some ways this could be made to work, but it sounds like some things would cost significantly more resources and need to be done differently. But hey, maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Plus, there are multiplayer games which aren’t quite as resource-intensive on the server side.)
by F3nd0
6/3/2026 at 9:03:24 PM
I think what I'm trying to explain is that we barely make it work by the skin of our teeth, and adding more requirements means fewer features.The extra point I made was that it's actually kind of costly to run these systems, and I promise you publishers would love to push that cost onto the community with community run servers (think: CS1.6) but the reason they don't is because developing systems that way takes much longer and cannot be properly secured (mostly due to cheating but also from an entitlement standpoint).
So, I think either multiplayer games will get much more basic, with simple gameservers. No more large multiplayer RPGs.
Or, there will be fewer multiplayer games, because it's even more risk in an already risky business.
by dijit
6/4/2026 at 2:37:37 AM
I'm not sure what you mean by "no more large multiplayer RPGs" here. It's not technically impossible to have community-hosted MMO servers. Hell, most MMORPG publishers have to have an active legal team specifically to shut those down.As for community run servers being longer to develop... wait, what? How is that the case, when that used to be the standard way multiplayer got built prior to everyone trying to chase World of Warcraft? I can understand the anti-cheat argument, and I will begrudgingly acknowledge that you can't exactly force third-party servers to run your anti-piracy checks. But none of that is a technical argument. That's an argument about business risks, and publishers all jumped on the live service bandwagon because they consider their customers' control over their own games to be a business risk.
by kmeisthax
6/3/2026 at 11:22:01 PM
I'm not a gamedev, but there's a more insidious issue with the CA "Stop Killing Games" legislation that was just passed --- namely, a Ship of Theseus problem.Pick your favorite game today that you purchase once, then have long-term free multiplayer support. Something like, idk, Fortnite before it was made F2P in 2017. Games like these evolve their content over time: sometimes minor changes, like rebalancing guns or matchmaking, but sometimes these are major changes, like completely redoing the map or altering fundamental mechanics. There can also be seasonal events that are designed to be available for a limited time.
The obvious question, then, is: is it "OK" that significant parts of the multiplayer experience changed after you purchased the game? In the spirit of people who prioritize game preservation, the answer should be "no, that's destroying part of the game and losing it to history." If we accept that interpretation, then we end up killing live service games. On the other hand, if we allow significant parts of the multiplayer experience to change, then we've neutered the legislation, because the easy workaround is to slowly patch out all online features until you're left with a husk of what was originally sold.
California's legislation [1] attempts to dodge this by phrasing things in terms of "ordinary use" of the game, but the definition of "ordinary use" is quite vague and will absolutely be the subject of some court case at some point.
---
Of course, there's a bunch of other side effects to the "general" notion of "make games usable past end-of-life," too:
- You might be able to use certain open source libraries on the server side because you are not distributing them to the user, and thereby don't have to open source your server. However, if you were required to distribute a binary, that could pose issues.
- You could have a dependency on an expensive piece of software (e.g. an enterprise Oracle DB license), and be unable to package that with the download.
- You could have a dependency on another online service (e.g. AWS Game Development Services [2]) that discontinues an API you depended on, and would require massive rework to be able to release a functional binary at end of life.
- You could have a dependency on an internal system at your company that you aren't willing to release the IP for yet, due to its use in another game
[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
by apnorton
6/4/2026 at 4:59:54 AM
> Games like these evolve their content over timeThis is true, but the issue is not with the content, it's with the ability (or rather inability) to access any of the content past some point. Even if only the latest content is left accessible after EOL, it will still be better than having nothing at all. The older content can be added back, no matter how finicky it can sometimes be.
Regarding the dependencies, no one is forcing the developers to release closed ones, you can replace them with stubs. But it will be beneficial from a developer to think about it beforehand - how they will implement online systems with additional requirement of EOL etc. It's not an implementation problem, but rather an architectural one.
by skotobaza
6/3/2026 at 11:23:08 PM
> I’m guessing nobody here has ever actually tried to make games, let alone multiplayer ones.One possibility is to charge for online play on the "official" server. This can be done regardless of the availability of source code.
Another possibility is to release the source code when the game reaches its end of life.
by drnick1
6/4/2026 at 2:13:57 AM
> Another possibility is to release the source code when the game reaches its end of life.You might not have permission to, if it uses a lot of third party libraries.
by habinero
6/4/2026 at 5:01:26 AM
It's not a problem, you can replace such function calls with stubs and document it. Some games that released their source code already did that.by skotobaza
6/4/2026 at 3:50:03 AM
A game that can no longer be played at all is very simple but also not very fun.by throwaway85825
6/4/2026 at 12:02:51 AM
> To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit.No, it doesn’t. It just requires that we go back to making multiplayer games the old-fashioned way (the good way). Descent 3 was released in 1999. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer to this day if you want to [1], and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop you from doing so. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer because Descent 3 allows you to host your own servers and allows you to manually enter IP addresses in order to connect to servers (this is necessary because the services that Descent 3’s in-game server browsers depend on no longer exist). Descent 3’s source code was released in 2024 [2] which certainly helps with multiplayer preservation, but I can tell you that a small number of people definitely did play multiplayer Descent 3 in 2023 when the source code was not yet available.
Descent: Underground was released to Steam Early Access in 2015 [3]. Unlike the previous Descent games, Descent: Underground (or at least, that iteration of Descent: Underground) was pretty much multiplayer-only. The developers of Descent: Underground did not allow players to host their own Descent: Underground servers. (I think that they had some plan to allow for hosting your own servers in the future, but that didn’t get implemented in time). At some point, the official servers for that version of Descent: Underground were shutdown. As a result, you can no longer play Descent: Underground’s multiplayer.
The fact that I can play the multiplayer for a 27-year-old game, but I can’t play the multiplayer for an 11-year-old game is unsurprising. Many older multiplayer games did not have fatal design flaws that would cause them to die after certain period of time. Many newer multiplayer games do have such fatal design flaws. The good news is that this means that we already know how to stop killing multiplayer games. We just have to go back to doing things the way that we used to do them.
(In fact, some games don’t even need to “go back to doing things the way that we used to do them”. Take Counter-Strike 2, for example. Counter-Strike 2 was released in 2023 and does indeed allow players to host their own servers.)
The statement “the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games” is absolutely ridiculous.
[1]: <https://tsetsefly.de/>
[2]: <https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/descent-3-programmer-relea...>
by BlitzGeology91
6/4/2026 at 4:48:03 AM
Hard agree. I think it would be a genuine service to the world if it was no longer feasible to make the modern style of multiplayer game. The older games were not only not beholden to a company continuing to run servers, they were more fun.by bigstrat2003
6/3/2026 at 7:30:02 PM
this was written (or 'output') by someone (or something) that clearly has not thought of the knock-on effects of those freedoms.they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".
by all means i 100% agree that an ostensibly single player game should not be locked behind a login or telemetry, and that platforms like steam should not be able to lock you out of playing games you paid for. but i dont think forcing the whole free software thing would work out how the author is imagining it.
by john_strinlai
6/3/2026 at 9:04:28 PM
We have decades of real world experience which shows this is not true. People buy things they could otherwise get for free with a bit of work all the time.by singpolyma3
6/3/2026 at 9:44:29 PM
you aren't getting a company to build baldurs gate 3 and hope they recoup the costs from ko-fi donations.real world experience is that most companies do not offer their software for free, and open source developers either have to get sponsored or have to constantly solicit donations.
donations do not typically cover multi-million dollar, multi-year development cycles.
by john_strinlai
6/4/2026 at 12:24:54 AM
BG3 is actually a perfect counterexample here. It doesn't have DRM, doesn't require an online account to play and uses direct connections for multiplayer. Nothing needs to be done to preserve it.by ben-schaaf
6/4/2026 at 12:40:46 PM
right, but if BG3 had to be free as in FSF free, it would not have been made.by john_strinlai
6/4/2026 at 4:32:17 PM
This is almost certainly untrue. it would have cost the same amount and all the same people would have bought it for all the same reasons.by singpolyma3
6/4/2026 at 4:53:29 PM
>and all the same people would have bought it for all the same reasons.you have to be trolling, right?
if people can get the game for free, because freedom 2 demands the game be freely redistributable by anyone with no restrictions, people are not going to pay for it. they are going to get it for free.
by john_strinlai
6/4/2026 at 5:08:26 PM
This is not true in practise. In practise people can get the software for free no matter what the license is. And in practise people click the "buy on steam" or "buy on Google play" button and you still make money.by singpolyma3
6/4/2026 at 4:45:07 AM
Everything you are talking about appears to me as AAA. There will be many game companies that dont think it's worth the time to do this for the reasons you describe, but IMHO they shouldn't exist in the first place. The way online only games are made right now is destroying the game industry so im glad to see them go. We will see better iterations of games once the bloat is removed.by trinsic2
6/4/2026 at 12:15:42 PM
Obviously not. No one is talking about donationsby singpolyma3
6/4/2026 at 12:37:32 PM
if the games are free, and we aren't talking about donations, how are the studios being paid?by john_strinlai
6/4/2026 at 4:32:53 PM
Same way as now. Selling the game.Free as in freedom not as in price
by singpolyma3
6/4/2026 at 4:57:18 PM
>Free as in freedom not as in pricefree as in freedom = i give away the game to everyone i know for free, and the studio loses out on those sales.
edit: oops, just noticed you are the same person i suspect is trolling. so, probably best for us both to end the conversation here.
by john_strinlai
6/4/2026 at 5:06:37 PM
Definitely not trolling. On the contrary I run a profitable business where all the code is free software. As do many many other people.It's fine to say you don't think it works in theory. But in practise many people have made their living this way for many years.
by singpolyma3
6/3/2026 at 9:26:11 PM
>they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".fyi, there are tens of torrent trackers with every game/movie/album/etc under the sun. had been for two decades.
by b65e8bee43c2ed0
6/3/2026 at 9:41:58 PM
i was unaware torrenting copyrighted content was made legal, thanks for the updateby john_strinlai
6/4/2026 at 1:23:26 AM
I think their point was that lots of media is easily piratable but still makes money and companies continue to produce more of it.by sapphicsnail
6/4/2026 at 4:47:21 AM
Yep another lost soul at the parent that thinks piracy equals death.by trinsic2
6/4/2026 at 12:41:32 PM
that is not what i think.by john_strinlai
6/3/2026 at 9:47:19 PM
>they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".by b65e8bee43c2ed0
6/3/2026 at 9:49:28 PM
yes, i wrote that.right now that would be illegal to do in most jurisdictions.
by john_strinlai
6/3/2026 at 9:57:24 PM
despite that, people have been doing that for over two decades, but publishers continue to publish.by b65e8bee43c2ed0
6/3/2026 at 10:02:29 PM
right. that is because most people would rather buy the game than take the risk of downloading it illegally. if you remove the risk, the math changes.publishers also have legal recourse. remove that and the publisher's math changes.
by john_strinlai
6/3/2026 at 10:13:40 PM
people pay for convenience. when was the last time you heard about someone being prosecuted for pirating something?by b65e8bee43c2ed0
6/4/2026 at 5:12:58 AM
Just yesterday when I saw the Leonhart French video about the NVIDIA piracy case.by tmtvl
6/3/2026 at 7:37:50 PM
you don't need to liberate your project to GPL or whatever OSS to let users distribute them via torrent or at least being able to backup the DRM-free installer... i bet most if not all AAA games have their crack into the pirate land in less than a week after or even before releaseby luqtas
6/3/2026 at 7:40:23 PM
> […] in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".This is exactly what has been happening for years, only illegally. If it became legal, I imagine far less people would end up buying the game, though probably still more than just one.
But again, games are more than just software, so the four freedoms do not enable this.
by F3nd0
6/3/2026 at 7:39:39 PM
As the article mentions, these arguments are basically all the arguments of the FSF, and everything Richard Stallman pushed for since the 80s. So yes, there has been plenty of thought, scrutiny, improvements, etc. 40 years of it in fact.by figmert
6/3/2026 at 7:46:14 PM
>So yes, there has been plenty of thought, scrutiny, improvements, etc. 40 years of it in fact.what percent of businesses follow the FSF freedoms and turn a profit?
i would love it if i could get all my games for free, and legally give additional copies to all my students, family, and friends. but the developers pumping out those games probably want to see some sort of return more substantial than whatever trickles into their ko-fi account. they'll just stop developing games and go into CRM software or whatever.
by john_strinlai
6/3/2026 at 9:06:13 PM
I don't see how "what percent" is the right metric. There are hundreds of such companies (I work for one) but it's a small percentage due to other factors (mainly it not being the default way most founders think about these things)by singpolyma3
6/3/2026 at 8:28:41 PM
Not really my point. My point is more that you suggested no one has thought about this, but yes, they have.To answer your question, there have been plenty of business who have created and published free software (albeit plenty have later closed them). Notable examples are Databricks, Hashicorp, Mongodb, RedHat.
Sure they've built a moat on top of their free software, but they have (or had) free software regardless.
by figmert
6/3/2026 at 8:34:07 PM
>My point is more that you suggested no one has thought about this, but yes, they have.i didnt say no one has thought about free software.
i said that this specific llm that output this article did not think about how the freedoms would work in todays gaming industry.
there are dozens of issues that immediately pop into my head, mostly specific to gaming, which are not mentioned or addressed at all.
by john_strinlai
6/3/2026 at 9:06:51 PM
lol. The article is obviously not written by an LLM.by singpolyma3
6/4/2026 at 3:58:26 AM
If the game is being sold it has to be supported, and if it's supported no legislative requirement applies.by throwaway85825
6/4/2026 at 12:39:00 PM
my comment is in response to the demand that games be free, not the legislationby john_strinlai
6/3/2026 at 8:07:21 PM
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.> Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.
My reading of this was it was in terms of multiplayer games and servers. It was that the server should be freely redistributable and accessible. Much like you can download and run a minecraft server without owning a minecraft license.
The next sentence
> A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files.
by cogman10
6/4/2026 at 7:37:29 AM
We need a version of "open source" that requires you to pay a reasonable ($60) price to get a copy.That's kind of against the usual notion of "open source" but it's the only way this would work in e.g. the game industry, as currently factored.
Studios won't pay people millions of dollars to make games if the return on investment is zero other than helping all of your non-open source competitors.
I do think it's doable, but nobody's done this successfully yet.
by avaer
6/3/2026 at 7:51:44 PM
> redistribute copiesI read this more as game sharing. For example, say I buy a game and my friend also wants to play the game. In the past, I could just give them the disk and we both enjoy it. But today, with DRM and one use keys, this isn't possible. The game industry survived 20 years ago so there's no reason it can't survive without DRM and with sharable keys.
by xmprt
6/3/2026 at 7:59:54 PM
>For example, say I buy a game and my friend also wants to play the game. In the past, I could just give them the disk and we both enjoy it.the difference being that only one person could enjoy it at a time. the math is a bit different when one person can put a copy of their game up online and let thousands of people enjoy it for free at the same time.
there is a happy medium somewhere between intrusive DRM and demanding games be free.
by john_strinlai
6/3/2026 at 8:00:24 PM
Game budgets were a lot lower 20 years ago, so maybe modern AAA games with $100m+ budgets can only exist in a world where every possible customer can be maximally shaken down.by jl6
6/3/2026 at 8:26:38 PM
Maybe we need a separate campaign, "Kill Games": any games whose existence requires players being "shaken down" should not be allowed to exist.by promano
6/3/2026 at 9:11:35 PM
Or “You Don’t Need to Play Video Games”.I enjoy playing video games but I recognize them for what they are: a luxury past-time that is not necessary for life and one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow.
by nkrisc
6/4/2026 at 5:08:51 AM
> one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrowI get what you are trying to say, but in general video games offer unique experience that no other media can provide - interactivity, e.g. exploring different worlds with different mechanics. I think this experience can invoke something in people that no other media can replicate. So I think we will lose something important if it suddenly vanishes.
by skotobaza
6/3/2026 at 8:59:36 PM
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.Pretty dismissive, no?
Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.
Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe [2]. Solarus has a donation page [3].
I'm sure there are many more examples that span the spectrum of payment options and cover different permutations of being online or offline.
To me, the deeper question is what are you actually purchasing? The bytes? The convenience? A slice of server resources? Developers and artists time?
I'm happy to give money to projects that I use, especially if it creates less friction than trying to go outside of the payment method and if the project is libre/free. I'm willing to pay for proprietary content but I have little expectation about what kind of service they're providing, especially they fold.
If there's a libre/free option, I would much prefer to invest in it. If there's a proprietary option that is asking for resources, I'm much less prone to give since it's clearly a transactional relationship.
[0] https://onehouronelife.com/
[1] https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/no_copyri...
by abetusk
6/3/2026 at 9:11:09 PM
> Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. The community only got access to the servers when they had declined to 20-30 concurrent players. So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.
> Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe
Teeworlds doens't pay its staff a living wage, those donations went to server infrastructure.
According to developers of the most popular open-source games themselves, open-source games have not been commercially successful... it is very common for them to only cover operating costs via community donations, and many projects have a player base actively opposed to any monetisation model.[0]
Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.
[0]: https://80.lv/articles/inside-the-open-source-games-in-searc...
FD: I speak from a position of being in the AAA gaming space for 11 years, so I have an economic incentive to... not lose my job due to the collapse of industry- but I'd like you all to be able to enjoy my creations after it's no longer possible for me to run it for you; I want a solution too!
by dijit
6/3/2026 at 11:08:05 PM
> OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period.Reference? The source was dedicated to the public domain in early 2018, which coincides with the release of the game [0].
> So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.
This is a complete fabrication.
> Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.
Making a living from open source software is hard, game or no. Making a living as a game developer is hard to begin with and many proprietary games are not commercially successful or viable.
My point was that the ecosystem is a lot more complex than your reductive analysis.
[0] https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/commits/master/no_cop...
by abetusk
6/4/2026 at 12:20:07 AM
[flagged]by dijit
6/3/2026 at 9:09:47 PM
This is cool and all, but it’s been proven a million times over that surviving on donations sucks. One of the reasons a new field gets innovation in partly because it brings so many people hungry for profit in to give it a go. If your only motivation is art and “maybe someone will toss me a buck on occasion”, we’ll have as many software devs as we do street performers.by kulahan
6/3/2026 at 9:34:40 PM
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.> Am I missing something serious here
Only just that the video games industry as we've known it for the past few decades is basically already dead—at best, it's a hollowed-out husk of what it once was.
by adamrezich
6/4/2026 at 5:10:27 AM
"Few decades" is a stretch I think. More like one decade.by skotobaza
6/4/2026 at 7:46:28 PM
I meant that the games industry is a few decades old, and it's been dead for about a decade and a half or so now.by adamrezich
6/4/2026 at 9:09:48 AM
The blog post is a bit of an incoherent mess.The key point should be to make it legal to use and reverse-engineer abandonware (e.g. games that the developer or publisher has abandoned).
First we'll need a realistic legal definition for 'abandonware' where the abandonware's IP is automatically going into the public domain after a game has been abandondend by the publisher, and the next step must be to legalize 'pirating' and reverse-engineering abandonware.
by flohofwoe
6/3/2026 at 9:02:24 PM
Given that I can already get a copy of any game in existence without paying, the quoted text isn't even a change from the status quo really.by singpolyma3
6/3/2026 at 9:02:11 PM
yeah.I think a more achievable model might be more like GOG, but with online.
GOG games remain closed source, but are downloadable and playable offline with no DRM.
But there's nothing about online/multiplayer play in the GOG equation.
by m463
6/4/2026 at 4:53:34 AM
>That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.The AAA industry are already destroying the gaming industry with there shit games and stupid DRM pratices. This would be returning balance to the game industry.
by trinsic2