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.)
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Projects like these are great stepping stones into learning how to code for younger kids and adults :)
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.
Like others said - do you kill your product and probably company? Open source it :)
It might require the entire power output of a medium-sized country to play a game, though.
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.
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"?
We could do it any way we want, but I don’t see the problem with not selling something.
I have created creative works. Should I be forced to sell them or lose the rights to do so exclusively in the future when I see fit?
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?
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.
I'm not sure I understand a distinction between "ideas" and "creative works"?
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.
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 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.
Copyright is no more “an inherently coercive concept” than is every other form of property.