If this removes people’s access to products (software licenses count as products here) someone payed fir once. Then you should only be allowed to do that if you enable people to continue using the product.
Releasing the server code should be a requirement. Software updates shouldn’t be required. Unless the product has a moment where it will stop functioning on the hardware it was build for built in (such as an expiring certificate).
The movement explicitly DOESNT want to force companies to keep their servers running. It is singularily concerned with keeping games playable in some form after shutdown. Be it via patching out the requirement on a server, providing a way to host it yourself or any other option, really.
No. It's not a physical good that is subject to wear and tear. There is no excuse for a single player game to have a lifespan because it has some pointless online verification component.
Because I think it's good for software developers and consumers for people to have the flexibility to sell something that depends on online services which may become unavailable at some point in the future. This is more valuable than requiring indefinite support, public pluggable backends, or required open sourcing or backend redistribution, which imposes onerous technical or business limitations for an extremely minor consumer benefit all things considered.
Why would you be entitled to infinite support? For a game with an online component? Why does the game's purchase price extend to infinity instead of "for as long as the developer supports the game"?
You aren't entitled to infinite support. You are entitled to keep using the thing you paid money for. If the publisher can't support the online service, they're obliged to make the game still playable by either releasing server code or offline modes.
If you sell a product for money, you don't then get to later take the product away and keep the money.
You still can sell X months access, if that's what you plainly state is being bought.
I don't think you could sell "for as long as the developer supports the game" specifically, since that'd be an illusory promise (no actual obligation if the product can be revoked immediately), making the contract unenforceable and the customer entitled to restitution (a refund).
"infinite support" is pretty much just "leave the customer with the product they bought working". There doesn't need to be any ongoing costs.
It's not endless support but more "Don't stop me from playing the game". For example, win xp is no longer supported. You can still use it.
For a lot of games the current situation is essentially the same as "The OS is no longer profitable enough, so the developer prevents you from using it"
How is selling something and then removing the ability to use what was paid for not fraud? (setting aside the EULAs companies currently get away with using to sidestep the question)
There's even a specific term for scams where you pay money based on a specific description for an item being sold that is then changed after the time of sale known as a "bait and switch".
Now imagine your kids never being able to watch them.
Same for books.
Same for music.
Games are an art form distinct from the above, and can in many ways be more powerful than they are. I've played games that toyed with my emotions in ways few movies can.
As such, they need to be preserved just as all the above categories.
I'm incredibly glad I can still play most of my 80's and 90's DOS games. People playing games now should still be able to play them. At least the ones that can be played "locally".
An online game isn't the dos game you played as a kid. It's temporal. It's the roller coaster you rode as a kid. A law forcing the any roller coaster built to stay open so your children can ride it is just silly and going to deter interesting rollercoasters people might not like from being built.
Moreover, if a game is art, it is a form of speech, no? And compelled speech seems like a moral violation.
> Moreover, if a game is art, it is a form of speech, no? And compelled speech seems like a moral violation
Online games are a service that have art in them. That is why they come with licenses and privacy policies. They are an actual service that already has consumer protections.
Hand waving any criticisms or attempts at regulating them because they are "art" is deeply dishonest.
You should be able to sell something and then take it away when you're tired of it.
Would you feel the same if your phone permanently bricked itself because the vendor decided it was out of date and they just don't feel like supporting it anymore?
If you sell a product for money, you don't have the right to take that product away and keep the money.
Well, they're not selling you the game. They're licensing you the ability to play their game.
And yes, I think it should be legal for a hardware product (like Spotify's "Car Thing" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Thing) to stop working because they don't want to support the online component. It's fine to get mad at the company, but I think it should be legal to do.
> Well, they're not selling you the game. They're licensing you the ability to play their game.
I don't think that's a reasonable reading of what it means to "buy a game", by most people's interpretation of the word "buy".
Regardless of that, the neat thing about regulation is that we don't have to settle for that interpretation, and instead force the one that's better for the consumer!
If there was ever a game that should never be recreated, and kept dead and buried forever, it's Peter Moolyneux's cube clicker "Curiosity", which was released on 6 November 2012, and thankfully ended on May 26, 2013, but never delivered on its grandiose promises:
Before Curiosity ever reared its ugly cube, Ian Bogost's game Cow Clicker, released July 21, 2010, actually monetized delaying the Cowpocalypse from its scheduled one-year termination date of July 21, 2011 until September 7, 2011:
>In 2011, an alternate reality game known as the "Cow ClickARG" was held, where a series of clues from the "bovine gods" eventually revealed that a "Cowpocalypse" would occur on July 21, 2011 (exactly one year since the original release of the game). From then on, every click made by players would deduct thirty seconds from a countdown clock leading to the Cowpocalypse. However, players could extend the countdown clock by paying to supplicate with Facebook Credits: paying 10 credits would extend the countdown by a single hour, while 4,000 would extend the countdown by an entire month.
>After $700 worth of extensions, the countdown clock expired on the evening of September 7, 2011. At this point, the game remained playable, but all the cows were replaced by blank spaces and said to have been raptured. Bogost intended the Cowpocalypse event to signal the "end" of the game to players; when addressing a complaint by a fan who felt the game was no longer fun after the cow rapture, Bogost responded that "it wasn't very fun before."
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Gamedate – A site to revive dead multiplayer games
I want to recreate the server for Peter Molyneux's "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?", but put a life changing Rightward-Facing Cow from Ian Bogost's social commentary game "Cow Clicker" inside the cube, instead of a huge disappointment and a pack of broken promises and lies and hype and literal promises of godhood and credits and royalties.
DonHopkins on July 4, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Cow Clicker (2010)
A decade ago attempted to troll Peter Molyneux at the Unity3D "Unite 2012" conference after his insufferably vainglorious keynote presentation of his "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?" Cube Clicker game, jokingly guessing that the big secret inside the box was a cow, but he just didn't get the joke, even after I explained it:
DonHopkins on Sept 5, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Bullfrog After Populous
His Cube game was the epitome of dopamine addiction games, all that was wrong with Zynga/Facebook games, the rage at the time. Nothing at all original about that: a total cop-out of game design.
When Peter Molyneux gave his insufferably vainglorious keynote presentation of Cube at the Unity3D Unite conference at Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, I chatted him up afterwards and attempted to troll him by guessing that the big surprise in the box was a cow.
I don't think he got the point that I was trying to make an ironic reference to Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker, which is a parody of and social commentary on dopamine games.
I tried to explain the joke to him, and he still didn't get it. At least Ian Bogost had the self awareness to design Cow Clicker in the service of making a critical statement about game design, and the capacity of shame to be embarrassed when it was an accidental run-away success.
Unite 2012 : Keynote - Founders & Peter Molyneux (The BS starts at 1h 8m 21s -- It's been 8 years since I saw this live, and it's much worse than I remembered, especially now knowing how it turned out!)
>1h 48m 06s, with arms spread out like Jesus H Christ on a crucifix: "Because we can dynamically put on ANY surface of the cube ANY image we like. So THAT's how we're going to surprise the world, is by giving clues about what's in the middle later on."
>In the wake of a controversial speech by Zynga's president at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2010, Bogost developed Cow Clicker for a presentation at a New York University seminar on social gaming in July 2010. The game was created to demonstrate what Bogost felt were the most commonly abused mechanics of social games, such as the promotion of social interaction and monetization rather than the artistic aspects of the medium. As the game unexpectedly began to grow in popularity, Bogost also used Cow Clicker to parody other recent gaming trends, such as gamification, educational apps, and alternate reality games.
>Some critics praised Cow Clicker for its dissection of the common mechanics of social network games and viewed it as a commentary on how social games affect people.
>Life really is a game—with a lot of clicks—and then you die
>Curiosity is just the latest in a series of social experiments that rely on user interactions with seemingly no point. Of course, Zynga is the king of this phenomenon, providing games full of sticky and addictive action that encourage more clicks for the sake of clicks. Arbitrary value becomes real value, even when it’s not meant to. Just ask Ian Bogost, who created the satirical social game Cow Clicker that went on to such absurd popularity that he felt compelled to continue developing it, trapping himself in an ironic loop that refuses to end. In Cow Clicker, you literally click one cow every six hours to collect Mooney, which lets you buy other cows to click on.
>RPS: Do you think that you're a pathological liar?
>Peter Molyneux: That's a very...
>RPS: I know it's a harsh question, but it seems an important question to ask because there do seem to be lots and lots of lies piling up.
>Peter Molyneux: I'm not aware of a single lie, actually. I'm aware of me saying things and because of circumstances often outside of our control those things don't come to pass, but I don't think that's called lying, is it? I don't think I've ever knowingly lied, at all. And if you want to call me on one I'll talk about it for sure.
My comment was not meant as any form of value judgement upon the game at all. Only that it is an example I could think of where the death of the game was communicated upfront and where it was expected.
The industry already tried to make everything a live service game in the 2020-2022 period and it was financially disastrous because gamers rejected it.
Gamers have made it clear that they don't want a market full of live service games unless they are free to play (and even then, very few will survive).
They'll make rare exceptions for things like GTA6, but these will be unicorns.
That certainly won't stop out of touch CEOs from choosing to do just that anyways. CEOs and making the stupidest possible decisions are also a match made in heaven.
Can you please fix the issue where like 99.99999% of the time Claude tries to launch a subagent on its own accord it gets "Prompt is too long" and tries several more times, then gives up and does it without the subagent. Big waste of time and tokens and not getting almost any subagent advantages. Not kidding that this happens about 100 times a day.
I tried creating a workflow in Claude 1.9255.2 (1dc8f7) 2026-05-27T01:57:20.000Z
and got
API Error: 400 messages.3.content.11: `thinking` or `redacted_thinking` blocks in the latest assistant message cannot be modified. These blocks must remain as they were in the original response.
Tried again in
Claude 1.9659.1 (193bcb) 2026-05-28T16:22:15.000Z also but may need a new chat
The obvious rebuttal to that framing would be that if those workers are not able to create that value on their own (such as by starting their own business or bringing their expertise to a firm with more favorable terms) then they aren't actually contributing that outsized value, the company itself is. And if they are able to do so but choose not to, then they are not being exploited.
There is no such thing as exploitation with that mindset. That sweatshop worker isn't being exploited, they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and open their own sweatshop.
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