this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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Not quite as important as the right to repair, but close in spirit: I would love to see a legal requirement for shut-down online games to release the server specs needed for the community to replace/maintain them.
Edit: And data export for existing players, so our game progress can be reconstructed on community servers, of course.
This is not enough, the code is old with vulnerabilities that will be exploited with automation nowadays. To correctly do this you need open source server code, or to have it maintained.
You have misunderstood. I am not talking about continuing to run the old server binaries.
What do you mean by specs then? The protocol? The "protocol" is the ABI of the server binary, the logic of it. The networking protocol is super simple. You need the server code for replicating any server.
I mean whatever is needed for the community to replace/maintain the servers, just as I said.
That would obviously include the network protocols, but might also include data structures, API contracts, map data, timetables, and any number of other things.
I wrote in general terms deliberately, since it would mean different things for different games, and to allow for the possibility of releasing source code instead of descriptive specs.
(And no, source code is not the only way to do it. If that were the case, the community-developed game servers that have been made through reverse engineering could never have existed.)
stopkillinggames.com
One of their ideas is allow private match/self hosted online services for any game that shuts down it's servers.
honestly copyright law shouldn't apply to games that are no longer fully playable for any reason
But it does for proprietary code.
I’ve found that most people on this site don’t care about copyright in any form, so they’ll just ignore it like everything else
Well, when companies are cutting off people's purchases and wiping works from our cultural history, a little bit of disregard for the law that is complicit with it is pretty much necessary.
Say, it's through copyright violation that we can still play games from Mario Maker 1 even though the servers were shut down. People figured out how to copy it even though they weren't allowed to.
If this is wrong, maybe the law should be fixed to provide a proper path.
shutting down most central servers is a death sentence anyway. I'm not putting another decade of grinding into a private server when my Diablo 3 characters are gone.
Agreed. But not impossible. Insignia got original Halo 2 Xbox Live servers back online. Most nights you can find a game easily with 20-40 people online during peak hours. It requires a soft mod and maybe 1-2 hours of set up to get online. If anyone could just turn on their old Xbox and play, I'm confident those numbers would be in the hundreds at least.
Allowing people to run private servers is an easy way to allow those that want to play to keep playing in an era where most games have some level of online functionality.
My Xbox 360 is gathering dust because, unlike all my other consoles, I am not able to mod it myself :/ (softmod).
I did not know the original Xbox had a softmod though.
Yeah... For battle royal and extraction shooters I think it would also be pretty hard to come close to the experience on private servers.
Granted, I wouldn't mind being able to play e.g. Hunt Showdown with some friends on a private server/in a private match. It wouldn't be what it is today, but it could still be fun.
It's not like games with large populations are really getting shut down anyways. The games that are killed are already dead for most people. I really only am bothered by it when it's a clearly single player/offline friendly game.
BRs never caught my interest but I always assumed they where a clean slate each game, which is actually the perfect kind of game for private servers.
The thing about them is you need people to be at close to the same skill level or they're just not fun.