this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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RIP. I hope the levels were backed up.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 5 months ago (2 children)

stopkillinggames.com

One of their ideas is allow private match/self hosted online services for any game that shuts down it's servers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

honestly copyright law shouldn't apply to games that are no longer fully playable for any reason

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

But it does for proprietary code.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is not enough, the code is old with vulnerabilities

You have misunderstood. I am not talking about continuing to run the old server binaries.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.)