This reference is so old, that Johnny 5 must be dead by now.

Today I learned I’m a fabulous dish!

While Helldivers 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 might look like sudden jackpot successes

This article is funny. It’s like the feel-good inverse of a rage-bait article. It’s stating what we all want to be true and cherry-picking two games that only sort of provide evidence towards it, and only if you squint really hard.

Both games are sequels backed by huge publishers with tons of cash.

BG3 is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise title; a franchise which recently received a massively successful film, a huge boost in popularity during a pandemic, and a boost in cultural relevance in Strange Things.

Helldivers 2 fits the claim a bit better, but it is still a sequel to a well received, well selling title. The extraction shooter genre is also exceedingly popular right now, and the fact that it has Games as a Service bullshit built in says that publishers weren’t as hands-off as the article implies.

So the more realistic take-away from this is that good games with huge budgets for development AND marketing in reasonably popular genres can make a ton of money.

Which isn’t saying much. And it certainly doesn’t look like a sudden jackpot.

This proposal doesn’t solve any of the issues in your second paragraph, and I wholly agree with you that those should be solved. Those would be much easier to regulate, as truth in advertising is kind of important.

The first paragraph probably feels good to think about, but right now, you don’t have any right to any of that. Perhaps start there if it’s important to you to change things?

It feels like developing the problem space through examples and situations would be better than trying to think of preferred solutions and working backwards.

It might also be a decent exercise for someone to go through this separately from a consumer protections policy perspective vs a culture preservation perspective, which you mention.

For instance, if the law only applied to corporations that continue to exist past the end of the product, that would be a reasonable consumer protection, but would miss most games that disappear to time from a preservation perspective.

And if preservation is the issue you want to solve, then is this the highest priority in gaming? Maybe this could be solved through a non-profit funding the transitions of server code to the hands of the consumers, or through reverse engineering efforts to rebuild servers for games that have shuttered.

But yeah, it would be nice for this problem to go away, I just hope that attempts at regulating it don’t have bad unintended consequences.

I have literally worked at a game company startup that ran out of money and shut down abruptly.

And have you not been paying attention to the news lately? Game companies are shutting down weekly.

So those things are added risks and costs that will have to be factored into deciding which games to fund and which to not.

So it will reduce the number of multiplayer games that get made.

I am a single player gamer so I selfishly am Ok with that, but less Ok with it being handled in a way that could have other unintended consequences.

As an aside, I don’t know how these petitions work, but would it be helpful to give concrete examples of software that has had this happen and what your perceived solution to it could be?

• relase the server software to allow players host them themselves
• patch the game to not require company’s server (even if not all features would be functional)
• allow people to create their own servers after official ones are dead (think private MMO servers)

Your petition doesn’t allow for the second option (exactly how much functionality is allowed to be missing?), fyi, but let’s ignore it for the moment.

Let’s take a not uncommon case that causes games to shutdown: a company that ran out of money.

How do you do any of these things legally without paying your now jobless employees?

You need to either release the servers at the same time as the game, which has cost associated with it, or you need to hold funds up front to handle paying for the costs on the backend (i.e you need to pay an insurance premium).

This petition is worded in such a way that it almost feels like lying.

Most games that shut down aren’t doing so because they had an arbitrary ping home that breaks them, it’s because hosting servers is fundamentally part of the game’s multiplayer-oriented experience.

You’re trying to use the former to backdoor in a way to force the latter to give you all of its server code.

Assuming this law were to go forward with even the most rigorous knowledge of the problem-space, and an intentional push to require multiplayer or server-based games to give you their server code after the game is shut down, all that will do is increase the risk involved in creating any multiplayer games.

Most likely this will reduce the quality and variety of games that get created going forward, which would ironically make preservation much easier.

Aww a catapult, I wanted a peanut!

That’s good!

By allowing emulators on the app store… Apple Bad?

I can’t believe they made a shitty Dota clone based off the Arcane animation on Netflix.

This is true. I asked my LLM.

Like search bars.

If you think of LLMs as a thing to replace search bars then this kind of makes sense.

It’s amazing how context matters on these things, because I was pretty peeved for her when I saw the original article.

Her comment feels a little callous and manipulative with this context, but I am going to give the benefit of the doubt that she didn’t have these details when she made her post.

Not anymore:

https://support-leagueoflegends.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/24169857932435-Riot-Vanguard-League-of-Legends

Gross

Fortunately for you, this lawsuit doesn’t involve the Mac.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Apple doesn’t have anywhere near a monopoly in any industry, which is honestly where this case should be dismissed.

If you have to take a specific month out of the year, limit the region, and define a category as “performance” to get your numbers fudged and you still only get to 70% you’re not exactly making a strong case for a monopoly.

I tried to keep it super subtle but you got me!