Yeah, I don't get why people can't understand this. The First Amendment protects your right to free speech from the government, not from private parties.

Although the free speech issue has no merit at all, I do wonder about the removal of access from acquired credits. Money laws are interesting things, and there are quite a few laws on the concept of "store credit", which varies very largely from state to state. It is possible that he is entitled to a refund, at the very least.

It also brings up the issue that I often wonder about, DRM. There are several games on the PSN that require you to be logged in before you can do anything in them. They are online centric games, but the fact of the matter is he payed for the game and is now being denied access. I guess the real issue is the term "buy" being used. You aren't buying and thing with many of these games. You are acquiring a revocable license. As more and more games move this direction, it leads to some real issues in the concept of property ownership. In the past it was always said that you were purchasing an irrevocable license. So at the very least, you always had single player in your game or you had full access to your software. Now days with online activation, a company can revoke your license or simply stop activating software and you no longer have access to your product, which you were told you were buying not renting. The culture of ownership is confusing :(

If often comes down to the old piracy debate. If the game company controls the servers, they can force the player to authenticate, and by authenticating the prove that the player has a legal copy. This does make piracy considerably harder, but as we have already mentioned it does create concern for the end user. Releasing the source code or anything of the sort ruins the game companies main reason for going this route in the first place.

The hope of many, including me, is that they will release the code for the authentication and other important servers so someone else can pick up the cause in the event that the company losses interest. Unfortunately authentication and the Internet in general is just too young to have a good history on this. I'm afraid the game companies are going to run into some real issues before they change their game design to build in a planned retirement for the game.

Tiberath wrote:

Ryan P wrote:

That's why I think game servers should be AGPL (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html) -- that way, if players are unsatisfied with the game service, they can start their own.

Or they can just find another game... If players are unsatisfied with the services provided by a game company, that's their problem.

That's true in as much as game skills are portable. However, some gamers spend large amounts of time learning non-portable aspects of the game like map layouts, weapon timings, skill builds, or what not. In this case, there is a significant opportunity cost to moving to another game, which allows the game-maker to take advantage of the gamer.

AGPL game servers would remove part of this opportunity cost, reducing the amount of crap players will take from game vendors.

The company has every right to keep hosting private, it is after all, their product.

Right -- what I'm saying is that it would be a good pro-consumer development if game vendors started freeing their servers. I believe that it would give an competitive edge once gamers find out that they can host their own servers if they want to.



Edit: I'd also like to respond briefly to Danial.Beta's comment about piracy. Right now, pirates compete on price; you can get for free on the black market what you can get for, say, $50 on the shelf. However, it doesn't have to be that way.

I think that eventually, as piracy becomes more ubiquitous worldwide, game publishers will have to compete on quality of the experience. People will get the game executable for free but will pay for the fastest servers, the best features, the community, etc.

AJX wrote:

I understand your point, but the software is the property of the developers. If anything I'd say that server software should be legal to recreate, as the work is being done by independent developers, not being stolen.

That certainly would be nice, but here are a few reasons for game vendors to release server source code instead of allowing alternate implementations:

* Alternate server implementations will have many bugs, as game functionality can be very hard to replicate. Players will tend to blame the game vendor for bugs. By releasing source code, the vendors improve the quality of alternate implementations.

* The game vendors can get financial returns by making premiere licensing deals with the hosts of popular servers. Just because the server code is released, the trademarks and branding aren't. Allow other companies to innovate on top of your game and offer them "legit" branding to pull in more players, and they'd get a whole new revenue stream.

* The game vendor puts themself in the position to control the game features, rather than having to compete with an alternate implementation owned entirely by somebody else.

Cheap people will always choose free servers, and tolerate the lesser experience. Allowing the server software to be publicly released means the official servers would never have the best features because they'd have to release their updates. And meh...

That's actually missing a crucial point: if the game vendor owns the game and releases it under the AGPL, everybody *else* who uses their server software has to release source code to modifications, but the owner does not. After all, the AGPL is based on copyright law, and you can't sue yourself for copyright infringement.

The game vendor can provide a game server under AGPL that provides most game features, but provide extra features only for those who are paying to play on the official server.

Like I said, I think that people should be legally allowed to release their own servers, if no programming is stolen. But the official distributors should be under no obligation to provide them with said software.

This is not about obligations -- it's about a whole new way to think about making money with games, which gives more freedom to gamers and creates new markets for the game content.

Isn't that exciting? :-)