Unreal's highlevel of packaing and managing assets for years meant modding was locked off. Unity games often shipped on PC with loose files and hacking C# broke after each update but at least was an option.
Over time the modding community has leverage this high level by building unreal native tools. The net result has been the same sort of cross tool use we saw with Gamebryo. Back with Gamebryo the Civilization modding shared tools with sid meier's railroads and even early skyrim and fallout modding.
Now the Unreal tools mean mods can be done in blueprint and should not break after every update like C# based mods. Likewise the common pak format used by unreal games (common because consoles prefer the pak for faster loading), means mods can replace files without overwriting files. Aka, mod conflicts become a reference overwrite issue and not a file overwrite issue.
As a developer of an unreal based game its pretty nice to know modding is no longer locked out. You still need/should provide the community with a modkit, but even those the community can generate on their own if they care.
One of the reasons: if you want people to buy your next thing. (I was fairly highly ranked online in one of the Ace Combat fighter pilot franchise games, and had built a stable of planes in another one. But when they shut down the servers for the previous installment, after introducing a new one, I found I couldn't get interested in investing in the new one, if it was only going to get ripped out from under me like the previous.)
this is fair but I would also really love to see the problem solved at the regulatory level for companies that go out of business, too
all abandonware -- including server code -- should enter the public domain when certain criteria are met
hell, the whole practice of rights holders choosing to stop distributing media that could be distributed by fans at very low cost -- like the Disney vault or the recent fiasco with Coyote vs ACME -- is an affront to art preservation and to art and to creatives and society in general and should be stopped.
free the media! if you won't sell it, you should have to let others distribute it for you
quibble about details but in general stuff like Ubisoft deleting The Crew should be illegal
> all abandonware -- including server code -- should enter the public domain when certain criteria are met
The problem is that 99% of the time it contains licensed code from an entity that is not going out of business, and who's going to pay the person who has to separate in-house and licensed?
Server code often includes proprietary third party software that cannot be legally open sourced, or depends on licences. Do you think game fans will pay Oracle prices?
The code owned by the company could be released without those proprietary libraries (or code, if embedded directly). The game fans would then need make/source a drop-in replacement or remove the need (if the 3rd party code is something like DRM then they'll do the latter). This is of course work, but less work than replacing the whole server-side perhaps making it at least practical.
Of course it might not even be as easy as that, depending on how the code itself was contracted out and how the rights were distributed around parts of a larger company that might have since split & merged a few times, it could be difficult to make sure such a release only contained what it legally can.
The law can open source any code. It means that in the future the companies using such code might decide to use code they own or the people selling them that code might charge more upfront. But the market will adjust.
If that third party code must go in products that must eventually become open source, they won't be able to sell that code and it will be replaced by open source one because of market pressure.
I completely disagree that rights holders should be required to distribute media or lose the rights.
It essentially means if you create something, it’s not yours unless you are actively selling it?
As for online games, I think the ephemeral nature and limited lifespan of the game should be forced to be very clearly advertised at point of sale, not hidden in an EULA.
The fact you can’t play them forever isn’t a problem, but consumers need to be aware. That said I don’t know how much difference it would make. I think most consumers would not care. I know the online games I play will go away one day and I still pay for and play them. Why? Because I don’t care. I was never going to play them forever even if they were around forever, so I don’t care if they go away. The only difference I’d really like to see is a minimum guaranteed service period and a full refund if that isn’t achieved.
> It essentially means if you create something, it’s not yours unless you are actively selling it?
What is inherently wrong with this?
Why should someone own an idea, just because they had the idea first? I think most people would agree with paying people for their work, and the benefits to society of providing some protections.
But this whole discussion is around where to draw that line and you seem to be starting from "ultimate control by originator" wheras others would perhaps start at "ultimate gift to society"?
At least in the US, having intellectual property interests isn't about authors having control over every aspect of their works in a moral sense but the public benefiting from the investment in and creation of new works through a limited-time monopoly (from the constitution):
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
If you aren't selling them or otherwise making them available to the public, why should the public/government give you any extra control over them in the legal system?
Let's say you're Pablo Picasso and you have a sketchbook from your early years. You get very successful and suddenly the public wants to see your sketchbook. You want to sell the book, but the law says you don't own the rights because you didn't sell it X years ago. So you just keep it, and the public doesn't benefit.
Alternatively, the law compels you to give it away. Little Bobby Picasso, your five-year-old, brings home some stick figures that they drew in kindergarten. In order to be compliant with the law, you now have to give that drawing to the public after X years, along with thousands of others. Presumably also the photos you took of Bobby's first day of school, the song you made up in the shower that morning, and the bedtime story you improvised that night, as they are creative works as well.
In the Picasso example, if the you weren't selling your sketches before, then the potential copyright rights were likely not the incentive needed to create the work in the first place, practicing your craft was. Also, just because you don't have a copyright doesn't mean you can't sell it. In this use it or lose it hypothetical system of copyright, it just means that you can't prevent others from using and building off that work. I'll also note that even actual modern copyright treats unpublished works differently than published ones. In the context of the article about live-service games, your sketchbook example would be more like an unpublished game like 0x10c. I'll agree that there might be reasons to still treat published works differently than unpublished ones.
In your second example, again it would be about extra exclusivity rights you get from copyright, not anything you necessarily need to do for every slightly creative act you're involved in. If you were never going to assert copyright on those, why should there need to be copyright protections provided by the public?
In general, the way I was mainly thinking of this kind of potential requirement was for things that have already been distributed to the public but then no longer supported/sold. I see things being made part of the culture by being released but then becoming totally unavailable to be one of the worst things that can happen to creative works when we now have the technology and capability to preserve everything.
I don't think that's unreasonable. If you don't want to make your creative work available, you shouldn't get to have access to the state's violence to prevent anyone else from making it available.
Copyright is an inherently coercive concept. That coercion should come with responsibilities, or else (current situation) it's just another rent for corporations to extract.
No, it's more coercive. If I own a bagpack, that means people can't break into my house and beat me up to get my bagpack. If I own a song, that means I can stop anyone else in the world from publicly singing the song at my leisure. One is much more coercive than the other.
Maybe, but property is typically an item, which you can't easily copy. Copyright is for items which are easily copied. So, it not the same. If you download a car it's different than stealing it, because original owner of car still has the car.
If you create something it is already not yours now. "Intellectual property" is not property. You are only given a limited time monopoly over distribution in order to encourage more creation to further the commons. If you take your past creations out of the commons you have broken that deal so why should the rest of society keep up their part?
> It essentially means if you create something, it’s not yours unless you are actively selling it?
It would be cool/wise if this rule applied strictly and harshly for large game devs with regular mass layoffs and massive profit margins, but not to struggling indie devs.
Even if you don't if your game is popular enough they will reverse engineer the server-client communication protocol.
The only place where I see that not happening is the future where game are 100% streamed and your computers is just a screen + controller (stadia 2.0). Then they'll have to settle for knock off clones of your game.
I've heard of this, but always wondering: how can these reverse-engineering based private servers be accurate?
Like, reverse engineering the communication protocol is easy, or at least pretty feasible. But how do you acquire server-side data? Like raw probability tables for certain event? Not to mention the game logic itself. Some of them obviously can be fetched or guessed by using the live server, but it can't be comprehensive.
I've (superficially) involved in certain private servers like WoW 15 years ago, but AFAIK they just used leaked server-side software (usually from a foreign agency) than reverse engineering.
In the absence of hard data you just have to guess - take a look at the SWG Emu project. They had to have historians go through decades old archived threads to try to reverse engineer how the game actually worked, I’m not sure the status of the project now but it did indeed take many, many years to even come close to a compareable experience to the original.
You cant tell if they are accurate really if you do not have sources.
You can tell however, if the game plays nicely and accurately when connected via such a server. fyi, a lot of servers, and it looks like this one too, mainly serve to authenticate do license stuff and then do matchmaking or discovery for players to find other players. they dont actually host a game session.
In theory, if AI was really crazy good, which I don't think will happen anytime soon or at all, it would be able to let you play the game, without any code being written other than the AI. Describe your game, connect inputs, and the model will make up some video and audio output through generative diffusion models. The challenge might be that it's way easier to do if you can let the AI have time to process each request, as opposed to having to react to many inputs per second.
It might require the entire power output of a medium-sized country to play a game, though.
> Fortuitously, the creators of "GUNDAM EVOLUTION" provided a timely notice about the game's end of service (EOS), affording me ample opportunity to start capturing game data packets
This is always one of the biggest issues with trying to make a private server. Ideally, we should be proactively capturing game data packets and archiving them for every game that has an online component, to ensure that somebody in the future will have that available if they're interested in developing a private server for whatever game.
I think it's common for multiplayer game engines to implement single-player by running a local server on loopback (or via an equivalent internal mechanism). At the very least, I believe the Source Engine and Minecraft do this. Perhaps Unreal Engine does this also, and if so, that might be why the client has server functionality.
For live service games, self-hosting is increasingly uncommon. During the Source era of Team Fortress 2, Half-Life Deathmatch, etc, self-hosting was certainly a thing. But in the modern era, games like Overwatch 2 have no means to be a server or listen server. Even "custom games" where you can make your own game mode and do fun, arcadey-style things connect to a dedicated server.
For things that are "single player", (e.g. Tutorials/Practice), I agree with you that it's to be expected that some sort of mock-loopback is likely stood up. But what was unusual in this situation is the _entirety_ of the code is there, to the point it even would bind to a UDP port and handle full bi-directional UDP communication.
I would expect that for something like this, they'd include a trimmed down version, and not ship the _entire_ thing.
Probably many games do, but there is often an external master server that the local server fetches data from e.g. Team Fortress 2's local server calls out to a master server that tracks which items you have, Counter-strike: Global Offensive calls out to a separate master server that tracks your level and stats etc.
Over time the modding community has leverage this high level by building unreal native tools. The net result has been the same sort of cross tool use we saw with Gamebryo. Back with Gamebryo the Civilization modding shared tools with sid meier's railroads and even early skyrim and fallout modding.
Now the Unreal tools mean mods can be done in blueprint and should not break after every update like C# based mods. Likewise the common pak format used by unreal games (common because consoles prefer the pak for faster loading), means mods can replace files without overwriting files. Aka, mod conflicts become a reference overwrite issue and not a file overwrite issue.
As a developer of an unreal based game its pretty nice to know modding is no longer locked out. You still need/should provide the community with a modkit, but even those the community can generate on their own if they care.