RIP. I hope the levels were backed up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
One of their ideas is allow private match/self hosted online services for any game that shuts down it’s servers.
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.
Agreed. But not impossible. Insignia got original Halo 2 Xbox Live servers back online. Most nights you can find a game easily with 20-40 people online during peak hours. It requires a soft mod and maybe 1-2 hours of set up to get online. If anyone could just turn on their old Xbox and play, I’m confident those numbers would be in the hundreds at least.
Allowing people to run private servers is an easy way to allow those that want to play to keep playing in an era where most games have some level of online functionality.
Not a week comes by without a reminder about https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
'member when we were able to self host servers of our games? I member. CoD4 was awesome because of that, later the pirated version of MW2 too. These games (the first MW and MW2) are still alive because of that.
Welcome to the world of tomorrow. Who we all helped to make.
This is fun because I have no idea what this is because I was immediately bombarded with ads.
Guy shouts “welcome to the world of tomorrow” from Futurama EP 1 when Fry gets unfrozen.
Could have been an image with a caption.
It’s a very fitting quote for an ad barrage
