• The EU Citizens petition to stop killing games is not looking good. It’s shy of halfway where it needs to be, on a very high threshold, and it’s over in a month and change.
  • paraphrasing a little more than a half hour of the video: “Man, fuck Thor/Pirate Software for either lying or misunderstanding and signal boosting his incorrect interpretation of the campaign.”
  • The past year has been quite draining on Ross, so he’s done campaigning after next month.
  • It will still take a few years for the dust to clear at various consumer protection bureaus in 5 different countries, and the UK’s seems to be run by old men who don’t understand what’s going on.
  • At least The Crew 2 and Motorfest will get offline modes as a consolation prize?
  • lime!@feddit.nuEnglish
    291·
    20 hours ago

    But most of the key points he raised were sensationalized but not actually wrong if you look at things from a developer perspective.

    they were also not really relevant to the campaign, which was the biggest problem with his comments. there was no expectation that studios do extra work to keep servers up, or make offline clients. the expected legislation was to have publishers allow external use of the relevant source code of the product when the publisher deems the work no longer profitable, to spare people the effort of reverse-engineering protocols and building their own servers. a knock-on effect of that would be that future services would have to be built with eventual shutdown procedures in mind, which, let’s face it, they should already have been doing.

    thor was saying “this isn’t feasible because it’s a bunch of extra work for the developers”, completely missing the point that this is not on the developers. it’s on the company sitting on the IP. they can publish source trees no problem, no developer involvement necessary. and the legislation would have made sure of that fact.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
      219·
      20 hours ago

      There is a reason that there are regularly listicles about “top 1000 horrifically angry comments on github” and the like. And that goes up even more when you are working on a closed source product and have been up and pounding through tickets for 26 hours straight.

      Not to mention proprietary or re-used code. Like… I think Call of Duty is STILL technically the quake 3 engine if you go deep enough into the source code? And while Q3a (presumably licensed at some point since it is GPL from a google) is open source, there is going to be a lot of code in there that isn’t. It is very common to use other libraries and suddenly needing to open source your account management system because one of your games is dead in the water is a huge problem. ESPECIALLY if the goal is so that “fans” can… reverse engineer it to build their own servers (and nobody would EVER profit from one of those…).

      And then you just have the kind of “spirit of the law” shit that Apple et al love to abuse. Is that game fundamentally unplayable “offline” because it did REALLY cool stuff with sharding so that players can drop in and out of a game seamlessly? Or is it a bunch of phone homes for every single achievement for a fully SP game? Because that would NEVER happen.

      thor was saying “this isn’t feasible because it’s a bunch of extra work for the developers”, completely missing the point that this is not on the developers. it’s on the company sitting on the IP.

      Which can be the difference between “Okay, we’ll give you two months to get this shit popular again” versus “Well, it is going to cost X engineering hours to clean up the source so we are just gonna kill it now and get on that. Oh, and if the source isn’t cleaned up within, let’s say, one month, that is a breach of contract and none of your team gets severance”

      The other aspect this tends to ignore is the use of proprietary software libraries and even having expert consultants come out. My understanding is nVidia have mostly stopped doing it (for gaming) but for decades they would fly out a solution engineer or five to look at the game, help optimize the graphics and physics pipelines, and even document what needs to be added to the drivers on release.

      Not all of those contractors who have ever touched the code are going to be okay with it being released. Since this would be the equivalent of having potentially entire mega companies worth of software libraries and the like change their license overnight.

      • lime!@feddit.nuEnglish
        16·
        12 hours ago

        and that’s what the regulation is for. to get them to plan ahead.