Even better would be broad copyright reforms. Fair Use needs to be expanded and clarified. History has shown players are able to keep games alive themselves by emulators, reverse engineering, custom servers, etc. Expand Fair Use to say that these things are protected if needed to keep the game functional.
Fair use is already pretty good, but we shouldn't need to rely on it to preserve older games. The reform we need is a dramatically shorter term for copyrights. All older games should be completely out of copyright.
What you want is to repeal DMCA 1201. It is specifically 1201 that is responsible for the most anti-preservation rulings. Custom servers are legally imperiled because Blizzard, the patient zero of the technofeudalist takeover of the US, sued a developer for releasing a Battle.net custom server and won because he didn't implement the CD Key check. It is fairly trivial to make a central server have DRM checks that a third-party replacement can't replicate, even though they legally have to, which makes them effectively illegal.
Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.
Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.
Fully in support of this, but it will never happen, at least not for digital purchases, for a simple economic reason: the internet enables far too efficient a market and it'd wreck businesses with the first sale doctrine. One game sold by the publisher would then be constantly resold by endusers with an ever decreasing price to the point that you could probably buy most of any game for a couple of bucks a year or so after release. The reason this doesn't already happen with physical copies is because there's tedium + cost involved in the transfer, and they also create a motivation to collect. It's somehow enjoyable see a shelf full of games, music, movies, or whatever else.
More realistic would be improving copyright law. I think it'd be reasonable to state that copyright lasts 20 years from the first 'transfer' (sell, licensing, etc) of a creation. 20 years is long enough to fully monetize, but also short enough to really enable some interesting acceleration/derivation in society. For instance just about now XBox 360 games would be coming out of copyright protection. That seems perfectly reasonable, especially in the era of LLMs where 'sidestepping' copyright is going to be increasingly trivial anyhow.
The people who really ruined for everyone else are the hipsters that supported coffee machines connected 24/7 to the internet and wouldn't function unless you paid a monthly subscription.
I don't think you know what 'hipster' is, and no, there is not some group that did the wifi coffee machines, and if there were, that would not have changed anything.
I don't think it was ever the case that games which could theoretically be redistributed were unprofitable. It's more that locking everyone into a subscription or renting-as-buying for everything just happens to be more profitable. That's true for just about anything ever in the world, it just so happens that the game, film, and music industries were able to actually pull it off. Other industries suffered from problems of bad public opinion, but the frog is being boiled as we speak, just take a look at the car industry for example.
You need to somehow increase the cost of doing the bad thing, and then the natural equilibrium will return to doing the good thing. It's like whenever anyone raises taxes or proposes regulation, someone out there cries about how millionaires or landlords or whoever will all leave. But that rarely happens, if ever, because it's rare that the regulation actually makes something so unprofitable as to not be worth doing, usually it just makes it somewhat less profitable than doing it the unrestricted way.
A year ago, I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown.
Today, I don't. I think it's probably a week's worth of work with AI and 1-2 developers.
However, enforcing this law is going to be tricky. How well does the peer to peer have to work? How about off line mode? How much support does the developer provide for community servers? Is it only a one-time support?
A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Literally all they'd have to do is release the server executable(s) they already have. The community will do whatever work is necessary to get them running even if they require a cursed stack and client modifications.
At least now it’s pretty straight forward for a hobbies group or individual to reverse the protocol and implement something that’s open source along with patches
Why is this an existential issue? Every game that could be played, on all platforms, from all studios, for decades, met this requirement because they could be played offline right out of the box.
Allowing your game to not require an internet connection or checking in with servers from the get go is the way. Easy peasy.
Permutations of environments are the bane of quality. Designing for offline is easy. Designing for online is easy. Designing for both isn’t impossible, but it’s certainly harder than designing for one or the other.
And yet, also for a couple of decades or so, we could play video games that would function just fine offline and could online in multiplayer mode.
This take, and OP's, both feel like they're ignoring nearly half a century of how games have functioned in favor of the over-engineered industry of the past ~15 years. Again, as I said in my first response I'm maybe speaking out of ignorance here, but why are we acting like it's incredibly difficult to do something we were very capable of doing for a very long time, and for less effort than what we put in now?
Yeah, it's not that companies "forgot" how to design for offline use.
They deliberately chose to design against it, because they discovered they can extract a lot more money by offering paid Progression Boosts so that players can more-quickly acquire Artificially Scarce Reward, or selling additional draws of a virtual lottery.
So it's a business thing. In terms of technology, it's the opposite: Offline play is more feasible for more kinds of games than ever before, since local AI (of various types) has improved, reducing the need to recruit a human counterpart over the internet.
> I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown
It’s never like the server becomes lost media when they shut down services. Most development studios have an easy way to run the server stack locally for development anyway. The problem is forcing someone to actually spend several hours doing packaging to get it deployable and the general reluctance of companies to “lose control” of what they have. There are many alternate servers that have existed that developers have intentionally axed like AlterIWNet because of control reasons, not because the complete solution already existed.
They don't have to do anything. They just need to stay the hell out of our way. They don't even need to release anything, we'll do it all ourselves at zero cost to them. Just don't bother us with idiotic lawyer nonsense, that's literally the only thing they have to do.
Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.
Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.
More realistic would be improving copyright law. I think it'd be reasonable to state that copyright lasts 20 years from the first 'transfer' (sell, licensing, etc) of a creation. 20 years is long enough to fully monetize, but also short enough to really enable some interesting acceleration/derivation in society. For instance just about now XBox 360 games would be coming out of copyright protection. That seems perfectly reasonable, especially in the era of LLMs where 'sidestepping' copyright is going to be increasingly trivial anyhow.
FYI the IoT wave was firmly industry driven.
Do you think it's possible we could simply sell physical copies on physical media and deal with the necessity to build new products every so often?
You need to somehow increase the cost of doing the bad thing, and then the natural equilibrium will return to doing the good thing. It's like whenever anyone raises taxes or proposes regulation, someone out there cries about how millionaires or landlords or whoever will all leave. But that rarely happens, if ever, because it's rare that the regulation actually makes something so unprofitable as to not be worth doing, usually it just makes it somewhat less profitable than doing it the unrestricted way.
along with everything else introduced that doesn’t go up for vote yet
Today, I don't. I think it's probably a week's worth of work with AI and 1-2 developers.
However, enforcing this law is going to be tricky. How well does the peer to peer have to work? How about off line mode? How much support does the developer provide for community servers? Is it only a one-time support?
A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Allowing your game to not require an internet connection or checking in with servers from the get go is the way. Easy peasy.
This take, and OP's, both feel like they're ignoring nearly half a century of how games have functioned in favor of the over-engineered industry of the past ~15 years. Again, as I said in my first response I'm maybe speaking out of ignorance here, but why are we acting like it's incredibly difficult to do something we were very capable of doing for a very long time, and for less effort than what we put in now?
They deliberately chose to design against it, because they discovered they can extract a lot more money by offering paid Progression Boosts so that players can more-quickly acquire Artificially Scarce Reward, or selling additional draws of a virtual lottery.
So it's a business thing. In terms of technology, it's the opposite: Offline play is more feasible for more kinds of games than ever before, since local AI (of various types) has improved, reducing the need to recruit a human counterpart over the internet.
It’s never like the server becomes lost media when they shut down services. Most development studios have an easy way to run the server stack locally for development anyway. The problem is forcing someone to actually spend several hours doing packaging to get it deployable and the general reluctance of companies to “lose control” of what they have. There are many alternate servers that have existed that developers have intentionally axed like AlterIWNet because of control reasons, not because the complete solution already existed.