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The signatures are still coming and it's already making an impact (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] 60 points 1 year ago (33 children)

Let's be real, open sourcing it isn't "hardly any work". All the code has to be reviewed to make sure they can legally release it, no third-party proprietary stuff.

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  • [–] 91 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Oh but with the new rules they could do that before making their code work that way. The idea is not for the new laws to apply retroactively but for new games.

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  • [+] -9 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    I think your response is coming off as kinda "oh just do it different". But that still means an entire industry of people are going to have to change how they make things. (And still spend time and money evaluating things at the end, just to be sure nothing slipped through.) I'm in favor of this at least being looked at and honest conversations happening, (which will not happen without this.) But there will certainly be an adjustment period where people on ground level learn and develop new "best practices". And invariably someone will screw up. The companies are obviously only worried about money. They'll get over it, is my opinion. But I think it's worth communicating that we all understand new government regulation is likely going to be a pain in the ass. We just think it's worth the pain/money. And that's open sourcing or just creating a new mode for offline play in everything.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    But that still means an entire industry of people are going to have to change how they make things.

    Companies do that all the time in response to government regulation. You like seat belts and backup cameras in your car? No sawdust in your food? Transparent pricing when buying internet access? Government regulation. None of those companies went out of business.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    This is exactly why I said:

    But I think it's worth communicating that we all understand new government regulation is likely going to be a pain in the ass. We just think it's worth the pain/money.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It will be hardly any work once a law passes, because they'll make sure it is. Everyone knows where the proprietary code is. It doesn't just get merged in "by accident" unless you are a really shit developer (and to be fair some are).

    Besides, no one is saying they have to open source it. To be honest, the outcome from this petition that I would most like to see is simply a blanket indemnity to the community attempting to revive, continue and improve the software from that point forward. If the law says that it's legal once a software is shut down, for the community to figure out a way to make it work again and make it their own, and puts no further responsibilities on the "rights holder" at all, I think that honestly solves the problem in 99% of cases. It would be nice if they gave the community a hand, released what they could, and tried not to be shit about it, (and I know some of them will be shit about it, but we're pretty resourceful), as long as they're not trying to sue every attempt into oblivion I think we'll make a lot of progress on game preservation and make the gaming world a much better place.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Everyone knows where the proprietary code is. It doesn’t just get merged in “by accident” unless you are a really shit developer (and to be fair some are).

    Heh. You are still overestimating the average developer. Random code gets copy-pasted into files without attribution all the time. One guy might know, but if he gets moved to a different team, the new guy has no idea. That can be a ticking legal time-bomb.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    Again, if you know going in that is an absolute requirement, processes can be put in place to ensure things like that doesn't happen. (at least not as often) vs what you're thinking of trying to do it after the game is already shipped.

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  • [–] 43 points 1 year ago* (17 children)

    When starting a new game, don't include that stuff. Not including proprietary stuff without meeting the licensing requirements is already a step in the process.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago (16 children)

    "That stuff" is often core to the game. Any anti-cheat library, for example. On the client site, libraries like physx, bink video, and others are all proprietary and must be replaced and tested before it can be released in a working state. Few companies would release a non-functional game and let reviewers drag them through the mud for it.

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  • [–] 43 points 1 year ago

    None of those things will be affected because this isn't about making games open source. It is about making games that have a design that allows them to potentially function indefinitely instead of allowing the companies to design them with planned obsolescence like tying single player games to server verification.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    So you're telling me that this could disrupt the anti-cheat industry, which is currently responsible for a lot of the Windows platform lock in the gaming industry and is tied to a lot of potential security vulnerabilities because it goes to a much higher level of privilege than a reasonable user would expect a game to need? I already wish I was in the right geographic area to sign, you don't need to sell me on it twice!

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    Anti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games. No one wants to play a game against cheaters since they typically have an unfair advantage. If you can't combat cheating then you might as well not make the game since no one will want to play it. Fine by me since I don't care for such games but I could imagine people who like playing them might prefer to play against as few cheaters as possible. What are the alternatives?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    So just don't let them join/kick them from your server?

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    EvE Online doesn't use root access anticheat software. I know it doesn't because it runs on Linux just fine. That particular player base is the worst hive of scum and villainy that you'll find outside of government. Clearly the anticheat software isn't as essential as game studios would have you believe. The only major cheating I'm aware of in EvE was the BoB scandal, and that involved Devs cheating because they were Devs.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Battlefield and cod have cheaters running rampant in their official servers despite using anti cheats. They could employ a team to monitor cheating reported by players. But clearly they just don't want to expend resources to combat that.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Anti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games

    Client-side anti-cheat is useless. It's not a necessary evil, it's just evil. The minute the cheater/hacker has direct access to the system, you've already lost.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Much like every form of security measure, the intention is not to completely eliminate the possibility of an attack (which is impossible in most cases). Instead, the intention is to increase the amount of effort that's required to make an attack.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    What you're referring to is deterrence, and it doesn't apply to online gaming the way it does to theft of property. One cheater doesn't ruin the game for one other person, they ruin the game for dozens or hundreds of other players.

    And the efficacy being so bad is the reason why client-side anti-cheat keeps getting more and more invasive to the point of being literally, by definition, a type of malware and system rootkit. And yet it's still not enough to defeat cheaters, because the cheaters have full access to the system itself.

    And the guys writing the cheat software just have to put in the effort once to defeat the anti-cheat and then they sell it to people who install it like any other software. The cheaters who use the cheats have it easy.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    What you're referring to is deterrence, and it doesn't apply to online gaming the way it does to theft of property. One cheater doesn't ruin the game for one other person, they ruin the game for dozens or hundreds of other players.

    Why are you comparing theft to game hacking out of nowhere? Did you accidentally reply to the wrong person?

    And the efficacy being so bad...

    Source?

    full access to the system itself.

    What do you mean by system in "full access to the system"? Too vague to even say anything about.

    And the guys writing the cheat software just have to put in the effort once to defeat the anti-cheat and then they sell it to people who install it like any other software. The cheaters who use the cheats have it easy.

    The potential guys that can write the cheat software and how quickly it can be developed is the part that matters. Much like when it's easy to use an exploit once it's already discovered. Someone still has to discover the exploit.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Why are you comparing theft to game hacking out of nowhere?

    You made the comparison: "Much like every security system"

    Source?

    It's out there, my dude. It's a constant complaint in literally every competitive online game. If people are complaining about it, then it's not working well enough. This isn't an esoteric thought either. You ask anyone if cheating is a big issue in online gaming and anyone with knowledge about it will tell you it's a constant problem that's getting worse.

    What do you mean by system in "full access to the system"?

    If you own the hardware and have admin/root access to the OS. Then it's yours and you have "full access" to everything. And I do mean everything. You can modify the OS. You can read the values of protected parts of memory. And so on.

    If you don't understand what I mean by "full access to the system" in the context of anti-cheat running on your own hardware, then there's nothing I can say in a short comment to get you up to speed.

    Someone still has to discover the exploit.

    The cheat and anti-cheat battle is a constant cat and mouse game. The advantage is always with the cheaters because they outnumber the developers 100:1 at the least. Plus they have the will and determination to find ways around anti-cheats. In fact, building security against exploits is by far way harder than finding exploits.

    The reality is that client-side anti-cheat is a losing battle.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    honestly with online only games i’d be “okay” (not that it’d be great but okay) with them just releasing a bunch of internal docs around the spec. you’re right that open sourcing commercial code is actually non-trivial (though perhaps if they went in knowing this would have to be the outcome then maybe they’d plan better for it), but giving the community the resources to recreate the experience i think is a valid direction

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Bold of you to assume such spec or docs exist. Usually it's all cowboyed and tightly coupled, with no planning for reuse.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Maybe they should have made sure their code was fully legal to use before releasing the game initially

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    What? There's a big difference between "legal to sell as a compiled binary" and "legal to release as source".

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