I am not fully convinced that a foldable is really going to be something that most will want, but I think it could find its niche. Given that from another article it seems that in the simulator it is using the iPad view it could be useful for some people.
Though, I have yet to find myself in a situation that I wanted to use an iPad and I was not already in a position to be carrying one. I use mine for work and I am already carrying a laptop, throwing in an iPad is a very small addition to my bag.
Any time I have just been out, was never a situation I felt like I needed something like an iPad. Throw in that this looks like it will be the size of a Mini vs the 13" pro that I use now, it puts it in an awkward position. And I could justify the rumored $2k cost to replace 2 devices that cost more than that combined.
It will be interesting to see how it does in practice, but also what it does to the separation of iOS and iPadOS.
A dishwasher is the only reason you can think of a humanoid robot? How about a robot to load and unload the dishwasher.
The fact is we live in a world built for humans. I have a robot vacuum and for it to be effective I had to setup my home in a certain way, and even then it is not fully effective.
People pay for cleaners to come into their home all the time, it shouldn't be hard to think why a humanoid robot would (theoretically, if it worked well) be far better than a purpose built machine in the home. But also in many cases working with those machines.
How about integrating the cleaning mechanism into the dish cupboard so they don't need to be moved at all?
This exists. It's called dish drawers. Two mini-dishwashers in a unit with the idea that you will take your dishes out of one, use them, and put them in the other. When you need to, you run the dishwashing cycle in the dirty drawer. It does seem a little silly, but isn't storing your dishes directly in the dishwasher far more efficient than either manual or automated unloading?
You could build fully humanoid robots that solve every problem generically, or you could solve the sub problems much more efficiently - I don't know why everyone is all in on the hardest problem when in software and hardware we find that the "solve everything" tool basically doesn't work, because solving everything is usually solving nothing very fast.
You can buy a camera, portable music player, handheld gaming console, eBook reader, dumb phone, calculator, etc to solve each sub problem efficiently. Or you can buy a smart phone that generically solves every relevant problem. What direction did you take and how is life with it?
What makes the physical world different in this context? Isn't it things that humans are currently doing that we're automating away? Why not a human-like (in terms of capabilities) machine so it has similar flexibility?
I don't think most people would want dozens of task specific robots in their house it would be far more economic to have a single general purpose robot that can use pre existing tools and methods.
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
>
> Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.
What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.
It uses an independent reimplementation of the code of a Zelda game from the GameCube and combines them with the assets from the actual game to make native binaries for various platforms, which blows my mind a bit but demonstrates the power of this sort of split abstraction.
Yes! And there are many other re-implementation projects, like OpenMW, OpenGothic, fheroes2, and others, which allow you to play the games if you can provide the original assets. Largely for older games, but the point stands.
Adding on to this but I'm not sure if it's 1:1 what you're talking about.
PokeMMO is a online Pokemon Fangame that combines the first 5 generations of games. From what I gather, this is possible because it is up to the user to provide the ROMs, so litigious Nintendo cannot say they are re-distributing copyrighted material
Does it only use the assets from the original games, or also the scripting? If the former, then I'd say it's basically the same concept that I'm talking about, but with making a new game using the existing assets rather than reimplementing an existing one. If it uses the scripting as well and then provides some extra stuff to merge them and put it online, I'd say it's a slightly different (but still extremely cool!) thing.
I'm not entirely sure...I know the battle AI is custom, and a few moves are still not implemented. This makes me lean towards "they're scripting it themselves" but it could be a hybrid of the two for all I know
OpenMW has been on my list to try out for a while now, I should have thought of that one. I hadn't heard of OpenGothic, but I also only recently started learning about that game at all with the remake coming out soon, so I might need to add that to my list as well!
This makes me think, is there one of those "awesome" lists for open game reimplementations? If not, someone should make one...
(edit: Thanks for the multiple great replies on this! Now I have even more stuff to go through to add to my lists, and I love having that problem)
Unfortunately, open source projects traditionally have a poor AI record. And when (sometimes, contrary to tradition) they make a fully-fledged AI, it plays at a super-expert level and ruins the fun of both campaigns and single-player, turning a simple walk into Saving Private Ryan. I'd call it "made by maniacs for maniacs."
Presumably from the same methodology they laid out in the parent comment: clean-room reimplementation of the code is fair game, and you have to bring-your-own-assets (ostensibly from a legal copy of the original game, but however you do it is your own choice, not anything the people providing the free code need to be concerned with).
The power to have a game natively on platforms it was never implemented on before but look identical to the original. To me, that's honestly cooler and more desirable than emulation; the fact that it's also more defensible from an IP standpoint is just a nice bonus.
I also wouldn't say that "respecting the limits of IP law" is particularly idiosyncratic either; you can make the case that IP owners like Nintendo often overreach due to the inherent advantage of being a large company with a lot more resources than a smaller open source project, but I don't really see it as worthwhile to call them out for not doing that in some cases.
Do you honestly think that most lawyers couldn't tell you that downloading the Linux source code for personal use is legal under IP law, or that dumping games from a Nintendo Switch and serving them on a website for public download is a violation?
If you think that neither of those definitive statements are something regular lawyers could tell you, I think we just have mutually incompatible perceptions of reality. Otherwise, you're claiming that the boundary between what's transparently a legal or a violation and what's murky is itself obvious, which doesn't really make sense if you don't think that regular lawyers even understand IP law.
It honestly just seems like you're trying to pick a fight for reasons that are not really clear to me. You initially responded derisively to my use of the word "power" to describe a form of abstraction, and when I responded to clarify it, you ignored that part of my response in favor of focusing on a different part and starting a new argument about that.
> those definitive statements are something regular lawyers could tell you
go ahead and ask. non-IP lawyers will tell you to talk to IP lawyers. another way to think of your two questions is, "in what scenarios would ... be permissible and not permissible, in your opinion?" if you were sincerely interested in learning something.
But why? Both the programmer and the artist have to eat, they both take pride in their work. What is the rationale for treating one side differently to the other?
This is largely how open source game engines like OpenMW or OpenTTD work: the game engine is reverse engineered, and the art is something the end user provides by downloading/owning a legitimate retail copy.
And that’s really great, but this model is ultimately not realistic for most game developers.
It’s not like productivity software where the code of the product isn’t the majority of the value being delivered. Gitlab is happy to give away their source code because a bunch of enterprise integrations, support, cloud hosting, and features are paywalled.
Game developers really just can’t do this model. If the game is open source it’s going to be far too easy to pirate the game. The economics of single player games largely revolve around the strength of sales in the first month or two.
This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.
For a AAA game where it needs to sell millions of copies at a high price to break even on its huge production budget, game companies can’t risk a high piracy rate. Just look at GTA 6, a game with a production budget of multiple Avatar films.
Games will get pirated regardless whether they're on GOG or not.
> This model works for games on GOG because they tend to be priced so low that most users are okay with paying for convenience. Many of the games in that catalog are essentially back catalog that have been paid off for years and whose sales are quite insignificant to the publisher.
Likewise, Cyberpunk 2077 was released on GOG 4 months after the Steam release. And IIRC the game's revenue didn't cover its costs until ~2 years later.
You're right. My bad. I was looking at the price changes in gogdb, and price tracking started a few months after launch. But the details page shows the Global release date and the GOG release date.
I think you are at least partially reinforcing my point here. Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.
Two of the three examples are solidly in the realm of indie titles.
Yes, there are big release games on the platform. I see, for example, that Silent Hill f is on GOG.
I will generally agree that piracy eventually happens, but a lot of DRM has made piracy impractical for critical early weeks of a game's release.
I think different video game publishers have different opinions on the matter and both sides have a lot of validity. I also think that different types of games have different rates of piracy, as it can be a crime of convenience or not.
If your game's demographics skews more educated, affluent, and/or older, I would imagine that piracy rates will be lower. Perhaps your game is more popular in some countries over others that have different laws and/or cultural norms surrounding piracy.
> Two of your three examples had a delayed release on GOG, and that's pretty telling especially considering one of those two was developed and published by GOG's former parent company.
I'd argue that games being open source and being pirated does mean you can't make money. I think you are looking at this backwards, like the rest of the industry. You don't need to force people to buy your stuff by making it closed and preventing people from getting at your stuff for free.
THe people that matter will compensate you if you make something that matters to them.
The whole idea that you need to force people to by your stuff through restrictions is a perverse way of looking at the world.
I think the piracy rate probably varies a lot by demographic and overall target audience, and that for some types of games and publishers a lot of the draconian DRM makes a lot of sense from a pure dollars and sense standpoint.
A certain type of player just checks for cracked versions first even though they have the money to buy the game and for that person Denuvo buying the publisher a few weeks/months of a crack not being available is worth the investment.
I suspect that a lot of the most famous examples of big budget games with no DRM at all have an older, more educated, and more affluent demographic.
There's also the free culture movement, which generally believes all creative works should be free, not just software.
There are many people who would advocate for free software and not free culture, but jxself has also written in support of free culture: https://jxself.org/drm_and_free_culture.shtml
That post is from 15 years ago, so of course he could have changed his views since then (but I don't see any evidence of that in this case).
Why is there a distinction between software and art? Can't you make the same argument on both sides, either that artists should make their work freely available, or that programmers should retain the rights to their work?
I don't see the logic in why art would be treated differently than code, and there is a lot in modern games that are not clearly one or the other (hitboxes? animations? lighting effects?)
> The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between software and art. This means that only the software part of each game would need to be distributable, not the entire game.
Personally, I’m a big fan of this idea. I really like the way that games like Doom do things: the engine itself is FOSS, but in order to play Doom, you need DOOM.WAD which is proprietary and must be purchased. DOOM.WAD doesn’t contain any code (it only contains graphics, sounds, level geometry, etc.) so you don’t have to run any unfree software in order to play Doom.
However, there are some people in the free software movement that disagree with me. The Free Software Foundation maintains a wiki called the Free Software Directory. Here’s a quote from the Free Software Directory’s rules for what can and cannot be included in the Free Software Directory [1]:
> Edge Cases
> This is not static information. Policies about adding non-free code obviously don't change, however the way projects are licensed or the way they interact each other is definitely subject to change.
> […]
> • If software is freely licensed but is bundled with artwork that is not, do we consider the program to be free? From RMS "Images and sounds need to be free if they are essential parts of the software. But if they are just decoration, and easily replaced, then they do not have to be free." Sound and artwork fall into the category of essential for interactive games. Logos on otherwise utilitarian projects do not.
That being said, that same set of rules also says [2]:
> Free programs
> Software needs to meet the free software definition to be listed at the Free Software Directory as well as follow these guidelines and requirements for entries.
> […]
> • The software program itself should not package any program-data, art assets loaded by the program, or software which is under a nonfree license. If art or data is available for the game under a nonfree license but not packaged directly with it, that is a different matter and one we should be more flexible about.
Those two quotes seem like they were written by two different people who have opposite opinions on this topic, but IDK.
Anyway, my point is: I really like it when games do that, but it seems that at least some people in the free software movement disagree.
I was speaking in the sense that the base game is free and you can buy it with non-ascii graphics for a price.
However,
The "raws" that drive the game are completely configurable and accessible by a user.
It's more like the engine being closed source and the gamedata being source-available. Modding isn't quite the right word - that implies it being less open.
You can delete stuff from being present in your game, add new plants or objects, new diseases, etc.
Also related, the game has been opened up with Lua scripting thanks to Putnam's efforts, for even more powerful procedural addons.
It's not really advocating for open source games despite evoking Richard Stallman and Free Software.
A lot of people get all up in their feelings when it comes to "private property", like (hypoerbolic) "if they allow redistribution of abandonware, they might take everything" and it's just not justified. It used to be, for example, that copyrights on books weren't automatically granted and they were much shorter terms. You had to apply for copyright renewals. Why? Because of orphaned works and it was viewed that if nobody held an interest that they asserted, it was in the public good to place that in the public domain.
Abandonware follows the same principles. The arguably controversial part is that "abandonware" here includes "forced obsolescence". And I 100% agree that if you, as the publisher, make a game nonfunctional (or even greatly reduced functionality) then people should have the right to make those games work.
The most egregious cases are like Simcity 5, which was made online for literally no reason (other than "because piracy"). They tried to sell online features but that wasn't the reason.
The idea that this kills the entire gaming industry is just slippery slope hyperbola.
To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit. It just takes the idea to its logical conclusion. As a game developer, if this thing passes, I would just not build multiplayer ever anymore.
Why not? Minecraft is the second most selling game of all time and comes with a freely distributable and hostable multiplayer component. How would this legislation have stopped that from happening?
I’m guessing nobody here has ever actually tried to make games, let alone multiplayer ones. It’s not “oh just make it better” we’re usually already stretching the limits of what’s possible financially and time wise to get a working (fun) product.
You can add burdens all you want, but that means the games get simpler.. because they can’t be made cheaper (price sensitive customers) and time is finite in that context. something has to give.
As not a game dev myself, may I ask for clarification? How does ‘Stop Killing Games’ legislation kill any sort of multiplayer games specifically? Aren’t there already games which don’t have the problem the movement is trying to solve? Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? I feel like I may have misunderstood your point or am just lacking a lot of important insight.
> Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place?
It's a question of when, not if - you're not going to pay to keep the servers online forever. What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't? If they're bad enough then plenty of people will not be interested in taking that risk by making such games.
> What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't?
How about "the government forces you to release the code"? That's seems fair.
Unless you hid your source code in USB drives under your bed, the government can probably just force GitHub (or similar )to release it. I bet they've got it backed up.
The government will release it with all the copyrighted code and assets that's owned by a bunch of third-parties?
Ex. if I license my artwork, music, characters, code library, etc. to a game developer and they don't create a legally releasable version of their server, then the government will forcibly break our licensing agreement and I just get screwed?
So you're assuming game devs write every line of code in their server infrastructure. First, could be using a third party library you have license to use on a limited number of machines that make up your backend servers. Second you could be paying for third party API access to something like snowflake.
You either have to rip out the code (which may or may not break the server, but still requires developer time to do) or write replacement code which likely takes even more dev time to do or you would have done it instead of paying for the library/access to the service.
Of the 7 AAA games I’ve been part of making, not a single one used HTTP (well, not as a primary driver of anything), HTML, CSS or anything that could be construed as a “web technology” so, what are you talking about please?
What I'm saying is you have programs running on user machines, and programs running on your machines. There's an interface between those two over a network. There's a problem that consumers face today where they pay to play games that are not functional without data flowing over that interface.
There's a claim that implementing the backend side of that interface is so complex and impossible or too difficult/time consuming/etc to design in a way without 3rd party dependencies.
I'm asking: what are those 3rd party libraries doing? And why can't you design server APIs and client code in a way to provide a different backend if consumers need to do it themselves when you stop supporting the game?
I'm not interested in hypotheticals. In AAA games that you have worked on, concretely what 3rd party code did your servers rely on that would prevent you from distributing either the server itself or sufficient description of the servers' behavior to allow a reimplementation?
And even if we're talking hypotheticals: stupid example. I haven't worked on a backend where the actual server infrastructure wasn't open source, trivial to open source because it was first party, or irrelevant because the only thing that matters would be the API and protocols, which again, trivial to make open.
I'm actively trying to remove my own ignorance of the domain which is why I posed the question! You're not breaking confidentiality by saying "I need X to solve Y problem which is offered by Z and we can't expose even the application layer interfaces." Right now it sounds like you don't have an answer, or even understand the question.
Getting all defensive and not answering it doesn't really help your industry's case here.
Web servers, message brokers, physics engines, anti cheat, fraud detection, flood mitigation, ranking systems, chat moderation, match making systems. There are thousands of possible components which may have been licensed in any given game server system. In some cases the entire game engine runs on the server.
I guess what surprises me here is how much of this is 3p code that couldn't possibly be distributed. Like why would you not be using an open source web server, or widely available message broker? Things like chat moderation/match making/anti cheat/etc seem like add on services that would be implemented per game (well, maybe not match making) and aren't relevant to the problem that the "stop killing games" people are trying to solve.
Frankly it's none of your business why, and it's completely irrelevant. The fact is that this 3p code exists and this law needs to account for it or it's unworkable.
This is kind of needless aggression that doesn't help non domain experts understand.
I've worked on a lot of complicated and deeply optimized networked applications. They're almost all closed source. I know exactly how I would design a system to support these kinds of initiatives. What I'm curious about is why that's impossible for game developers, because either I'm missing something, or game developers are just bad at software design.
The "server" being the computer program not running on a user device. The intent of the initiative is to allow people to substitute or replace that program to allow the game to continue to function even if the original publisher/developer disables access to it.
It's pretty obvious to me as a gamer and engineer what the intent and design constraints are here, so I'm just wondering what makes this seem impossible?
And how do they force release of all the proprietary dependencies? Overriding contract law is a hell of a lift, and a terrible precedent.
The whole "Stop Killing Games" movement is deeply misguided, and most of the people supporting it have absolutely no clue about how software or anything computer related actually works.
Well, ok, you grasped at a few issues there that go off in different directions.
The issue with "Stop Killing Games" is that the legislation doesn't currently look like anything, it's a broad appeal and the solution for studios will depend on where it finally lands.
If it lands in the realm of "Games must be released FOSS after x years" then, aside from the fact that a lot of the times we don't own the copyrights to our own assets or certain code (they're on license for a single release) the second issue is how to release it.
First: the online backend for The Division or Destiny are just... not possible to run. The backend is fused to the products via a slurry of certificate pinning and object serialisation, with some things happening only on the server.
"Un-fusing" them is, basically impossible at this point; so the question is: can you build such a system without them being fused together in the first place?
The answer is: yes, but only by slowing down development. It would become much more about defining our boundaries and working on a "slim" version of the backend, or stubbing the backend completely. Obviously this is a lot of effort. The thing is we only barely managed to get a functional system, so adding an extra year for programming isn't going to be possible, we'll have to "cut" features that are hard to make.
"So, why don't you just release the server".
Well, that's a good question, we could remove the certificate pinning we have on the client, and the entitlement checks, stub out all the code that relies on third party APIs and give you a server binary.
But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.
So, we'd have to work on slimming that down, or building things in a totally different way: which means "seamless" darkzones and safehouses becomes impossible.
THEN you have the issue of releasing a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product, which we already had a major issue with.
So, most likely, we just make single player games.
Honestly, the industry is moving that way anyway because unless you've been doing it for a while making multiplayer games is really hard from a game design standpoint and there's an ongoing operational cost which people are a bit too price sensitive to support.
That's why Massive released The Division 1 & Division 2 but then pivoted to doing single-player games like Star Wars and Avatar which only retains the most basic multiplayer elements.
> But the server binary doesn't start unless you have 190GiB of RAM and 38 available CPUs.
As far as I understand that situation is accepted by the initiative. The requirement is not that it works on any specific hardware or software stack, just that it can theoretically work.
> a binary that can be used to create cheats against the next version of the product
Anti-cheat solutions aren't required to be released, and if there are bugs in the server, they might even be found and patched by the community.
What you're saying is true for the californian legislation, but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction) - nor the direction of the authors article, and like I replied in a sibling response: it's not like people would be pleased to get our binaries.
Second: anti-cheat itself is a fucking joke. A crutch, a last ditch hail-mary because we ran out of time to batten down the hatches or things were changed so often from the start of the project to the end that we couldn't add safety into the protocol design properly.
Exposing how our systems think about how you move, how you shoot, when AI ticks, when loot ticks, behaviour trees and how phase transitions are computed: gives an attacker a hell of a lot of leverage.
To put this into broader easier to understand terms: ask yourself why it's so easy to cheat in Unreal Engine games vs Battlefield.
It's not the anti-cheat. It's the complexity of digging through the engine and knowing what the memory is doing and what the server is doing.
Seems like that's... one more substantive meeting?
First link is announcing the initiative was submitted, second is a private meeting where the initiative was presented to the comission by the organizers.
Then there was a public meeting on 16 April 2026 and a public meeting on 20 May 2026.
Is there a specific part of one of those meetings that indicates they want to go a different direction than the California bill?
From the last link:
> If designed responsibly, most games that connect to the internet can operate indefinitely without publisher support. This has been a customer expectation for over 50 years. We are open to any solution that solves the problem. We are flexible on specifics and implementation by publishers. We understand that not all game features may be operable in a discontinued game. We are not seeking ongoing support from publishers after a game has been discontinued
This sounds like the California bill would address these issues.
edit: Particularly, I'm wondering if there is any serious push for release of binaries / source code prior to the end-of-life of a game, which seems to be of particular concern.
theres a lot of pre-meetings, some major meetings (the ones you mentioned) and talks about getting legislation into other acts.
The fact here is pretty simple: they have not indicated any support for the californian style legislation and they aren’t done yet either. The californian model is also very direct and instructive and EU laws tend to be broad frameworks, so they’ll definitely be different in some way, but unsure if they’ll encompass each other.
I can’t say what way they will definitely go, but it seems naïve to presume the californian stance given how disparate the solutions are from with in the SKG movement itself.
I’m watching it closely, obviously, but nobody knows where it will go. But this is like a 500-sided dice, the odds are low that a solution cleanly overlaps.
Spinning up a binary and replicating actors across two computers that both have a connection string to a server is.. for all intents and purposes: easy.
Where it falls down is when you start to have complex interactions with AI that's serverside, or you have a dynamic world that changes based on player behaviour, or you have cross platform requirements, integrations with companion apps and above all: matchmaking.
If you're a looter-shooter, there's a whole host of complicated interactions too.
A game like Apex Legends could probably distribute their server binary, but if you require online, as in, not just a single match, but an economy- a dynamic matchmaker and a dynamic world (meaning: when you kick a box it stays kicked) and a persistent account (you keep your loot): then that doesn't work well anymore.
The interactions are just too complex to batten down reliably, they'll be exploited, there'll be no fun, or: it just won't be possible for certain features, regardless of safety.
You can see how this looks by trying to use one of the many unofficial versions of Runescape.
This is the whole spirit of the "Stop Killing Games" argument though: you don't need to keep any of that stuff once support drops. It just needs to be "functional", in the most basic possible sense. If there are no players, no economy, no advanced AI, because it was all disconnected, that's considered fine.
The response of "but that isn't any fun!" is totally irrelevant; you can't preserve the initial experience, but you can preserve the basic software itself so that players still have something to mess with.
Programming-wise, this requires a little more emphasis on a modular implementation that needs to be considered from the start. Otherwise, it seems pretty straightforward. Or am I missing something?
Only one group needs to do it for everyone to keep playing. Everyone running their own server isn't very interesting for multiplayer... Usually you'd do it in groups.
Most of the time, no group of players will run a server at that cost. So regular players still can't play.
It's not unheard of though. WoW and City of Heroes had/have large, expensive fan servers. But realistically, this legislation would save maybe 0-2% of games in the thousands-per-month cost range. According to the parent commenter, we might lose many more than that from the legislation causing studios to decide not to make them to begin with.
Community backlash will be fierce if it's not actually runnable.
Ubisoft doesn't have the most stellar reputation for example (I don't work there anymore) so people look at things we do by accident as if they are intentionally malicious.
Also, the California law is one law, the EU is also looking at this and it's likely to look different - that's why "Stop Killing Games" doesn't really mean anything yet, even people within the movement have differing definitions.
The key is communication. If the company says the binary has a certain min. requirement, then the vast majority of people will accept that.
Of course there'll be idiots, but I doubt you'll see a stronger backlash than to a company shutting down the servers without any solution, like they can do now.
>My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.
if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation.
the spirit of the law is that i can reasonably spin up an instance of the server for me and my friends to play.
If a game is popular enough for anyone to care, some turbonerd will get the server running on a massive cloud instance, and then people will be able to play the game.
Fans have reverse-engineered and stood up servers for tons of games with no access to the server binaries. The idea that they wouldn't figure it out when given much better resources (server binaries or source code) is crazy.
>The idea that they wouldn't figure it out when given much better resources (server binaries or source code) is crazy.
i wasnt implying they couldnt figure it out.
i was implying that you would have to be an incredibly rich turbonerd to stand up a massive cloud instance for some of these games. which sort of defeats the entire goal of the regulation.
Or maybe 100 years from now, your toaster will be powerful enough to run the game.
To me this is about both preserving the access to what consumers purchased, but also future preservation of art.
Copyright is not a natural right. It is a monopoly granted by the government to creators, specifically with the goal of the progress of art and science.
Games that completely die because their servers are shut off, in my opinion should just lose copyright outright. Why should the people via the government provide you with a monopoly on publishing something that you have stopped publishing?
true, but i think this would be exceptionally difficult (if not impossible) to enforce.
ubisoft would surely be willing to spend an extra $500k on server hardware while developing a $25MM game, and subtlety bloat their server-side code so that they can say "this is the hardware we had to use to run it".
there are a million ways to slow down code/increase hardware requirements that look plausible.
> if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation.
This isn't the 2000s. People can rent a computer out of a data center. This isn't some hard problem here.
Wow, thank you for the detailed answer! I understand your point much better now.
I still think ‘kills any sort of multiplayer games’ (what the other dev said) is a gross exaggeration, since you list some ways this could be made to work, but it sounds like some things would cost significantly more resources and need to be done differently. But hey, maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Plus, there are multiplayer games which aren’t quite as resource-intensive on the server side.)
I think what I'm trying to explain is that we barely make it work by the skin of our teeth, and adding more requirements means fewer features.
The extra point I made was that it's actually kind of costly to run these systems, and I promise you publishers would love to push that cost onto the community with community run servers (think: CS1.6) but the reason they don't is because developing systems that way takes much longer and cannot be properly secured (mostly due to cheating but also from an entitlement standpoint).
So, I think either multiplayer games will get much more basic, with simple gameservers. No more large multiplayer RPGs.
Or, there will be fewer multiplayer games, because it's even more risk in an already risky business.
I'm not sure what you mean by "no more large multiplayer RPGs" here. It's not technically impossible to have community-hosted MMO servers. Hell, most MMORPG publishers have to have an active legal team specifically to shut those down.
As for community run servers being longer to develop... wait, what? How is that the case, when that used to be the standard way multiplayer got built prior to everyone trying to chase World of Warcraft? I can understand the anti-cheat argument, and I will begrudgingly acknowledge that you can't exactly force third-party servers to run your anti-piracy checks. But none of that is a technical argument. That's an argument about business risks, and publishers all jumped on the live service bandwagon because they consider their customers' control over their own games to be a business risk.
I'm not a gamedev, but there's a more insidious issue with the CA "Stop Killing Games" legislation that was just passed --- namely, a Ship of Theseus problem.
Pick your favorite game today that you purchase once, then have long-term free multiplayer support. Something like, idk, Fortnite before it was made F2P in 2017. Games like these evolve their content over time: sometimes minor changes, like rebalancing guns or matchmaking, but sometimes these are major changes, like completely redoing the map or altering fundamental mechanics. There can also be seasonal events that are designed to be available for a limited time.
The obvious question, then, is: is it "OK" that significant parts of the multiplayer experience changed after you purchased the game? In the spirit of people who prioritize game preservation, the answer should be "no, that's destroying part of the game and losing it to history." If we accept that interpretation, then we end up killing live service games. On the other hand, if we allow significant parts of the multiplayer experience to change, then we've neutered the legislation, because the easy workaround is to slowly patch out all online features until you're left with a husk of what was originally sold.
California's legislation [1] attempts to dodge this by phrasing things in terms of "ordinary use" of the game, but the definition of "ordinary use" is quite vague and will absolutely be the subject of some court case at some point.
---
Of course, there's a bunch of other side effects to the "general" notion of "make games usable past end-of-life," too:
- You might be able to use certain open source libraries on the server side because you are not distributing them to the user, and thereby don't have to open source your server. However, if you were required to distribute a binary, that could pose issues.
- You could have a dependency on an expensive piece of software (e.g. an enterprise Oracle DB license), and be unable to package that with the download.
- You could have a dependency on another online service (e.g. AWS Game Development Services [2]) that discontinues an API you depended on, and would require massive rework to be able to release a functional binary at end of life.
- You could have a dependency on an internal system at your company that you aren't willing to release the IP for yet, due to its use in another game
This is true, but the issue is not with the content, it's with the ability (or rather inability) to access any of the content past some point. Even if only the latest content is left accessible after EOL, it will still be better than having nothing at all. The older content can be added back, no matter how finicky it can sometimes be.
Regarding the dependencies, no one is forcing the developers to release closed ones, you can replace them with stubs. But it will be beneficial from a developer to think about it beforehand - how they will implement online systems with additional requirement of EOL etc. It's not an implementation problem, but rather an architectural one.
> To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit.
No, it doesn’t. It just requires that we go back to making multiplayer games the old-fashioned way (the good way). Descent 3 was released in 1999. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer to this day if you want to [1], and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop you from doing so. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer because Descent 3 allows you to host your own servers and allows you to manually enter IP addresses in order to connect to servers (this is necessary because the services that Descent 3’s in-game server browsers depend on no longer exist). Descent 3’s source code was released in 2024 [2] which certainly helps with multiplayer preservation, but I can tell you that a small number of people definitely did play multiplayer Descent 3 in 2023 when the source code was not yet available.
Descent: Underground was released to Steam Early Access in 2015 [3]. Unlike the previous Descent games, Descent: Underground (or at least, that iteration of Descent: Underground) was pretty much multiplayer-only. The developers of Descent: Underground did not allow players to host their own Descent: Underground servers. (I think that they had some plan to allow for hosting your own servers in the future, but that didn’t get implemented in time). At some point, the official servers for that version of Descent: Underground were shutdown. As a result, you can no longer play Descent: Underground’s multiplayer.
The fact that I can play the multiplayer for a 27-year-old game, but I can’t play the multiplayer for an 11-year-old game is unsurprising. Many older multiplayer games did not have fatal design flaws that would cause them to die after certain period of time. Many newer multiplayer games do have such fatal design flaws. The good news is that this means that we already know how to stop killing multiplayer games. We just have to go back to doing things the way that we used to do them.
(In fact, some games don’t even need to “go back to doing things the way that we used to do them”. Take Counter-Strike 2, for example. Counter-Strike 2 was released in 2023 and does indeed allow players to host their own servers.)
The statement “the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games” is absolutely ridiculous.
Hard agree. I think it would be a genuine service to the world if it was no longer feasible to make the modern style of multiplayer game. The older games were not only not beholden to a company continuing to run servers, they were more fun.
this was written (or 'output') by someone (or something) that clearly has not thought of the knock-on effects of those freedoms.
they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".
by all means i 100% agree that an ostensibly single player game should not be locked behind a login or telemetry, and that platforms like steam should not be able to lock you out of playing games you paid for. but i dont think forcing the whole free software thing would work out how the author is imagining it.
We have decades of real world experience which shows this is not true. People buy things they could otherwise get for free with a bit of work all the time.
you aren't getting a company to build baldurs gate 3 and hope they recoup the costs from ko-fi donations.
real world experience is that most companies do not offer their software for free, and open source developers either have to get sponsored or have to constantly solicit donations.
donations do not typically cover multi-million dollar, multi-year development cycles.
BG3 is actually a perfect counterexample here. It doesn't have DRM, doesn't require an online account to play and uses direct connections for multiplayer. Nothing needs to be done to preserve it.
>and all the same people would have bought it for all the same reasons.
you have to be trolling, right?
if people can get the game for free, because freedom 2 demands the game be freely redistributable by anyone with no restrictions, people are not going to pay for it. they are going to get it for free.
This is not true in practise. In practise people can get the software for free no matter what the license is. And in practise people click the "buy on steam" or "buy on Google play" button and you still make money.
Everything you are talking about appears to me as AAA. There will be many game companies that dont think it's worth the time to do this for the reasons you describe, but IMHO they shouldn't exist in the first place. The way online only games are made right now is destroying the game industry so im glad to see them go. We will see better iterations of games once the bloat is removed.
you don't need to liberate your project to GPL or whatever OSS to let users distribute them via torrent or at least being able to backup the DRM-free installer... i bet most if not all AAA games have their crack into the pirate land in less than a week after or even before release
> […] in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".
This is exactly what has been happening for years, only illegally. If it became legal, I imagine far less people would end up buying the game, though probably still more than just one.
But again, games are more than just software, so the four freedoms do not enable this.
As the article mentions, these arguments are basically all the arguments of the FSF, and everything Richard Stallman pushed for since the 80s. So yes, there has been plenty of thought, scrutiny, improvements, etc. 40 years of it in fact.
>So yes, there has been plenty of thought, scrutiny, improvements, etc. 40 years of it in fact.
what percent of businesses follow the FSF freedoms and turn a profit?
i would love it if i could get all my games for free, and legally give additional copies to all my students, family, and friends. but the developers pumping out those games probably want to see some sort of return more substantial than whatever trickles into their ko-fi account. they'll just stop developing games and go into CRM software or whatever.
I don't see how "what percent" is the right metric. There are hundreds of such companies (I work for one) but it's a small percentage due to other factors (mainly it not being the default way most founders think about these things)
Not really my point. My point is more that you suggested no one has thought about this, but yes, they have.
To answer your question, there have been plenty of business who have created and published free software (albeit plenty have later closed them). Notable examples are Databricks, Hashicorp, Mongodb, RedHat.
Sure they've built a moat on top of their free software, but they have (or had) free software regardless.
>they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".
fyi, there are tens of torrent trackers with every game/movie/album/etc under the sun. had been for two decades.
>they sound great in theory, but in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
> Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that.
My reading of this was it was in terms of multiplayer games and servers. It was that the server should be freely redistributable and accessible. Much like you can download and run a minecraft server without owning a minecraft license.
The next sentence
> A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files.
We need a version of "open source" that requires you to pay a reasonable ($60) price to get a copy.
That's kind of against the usual notion of "open source" but it's the only way this would work in e.g. the game industry, as currently factored.
Studios won't pay people millions of dollars to make games if the return on investment is zero other than helping all of your non-open source competitors.
I do think it's doable, but nobody's done this successfully yet.
I read this more as game sharing. For example, say I buy a game and my friend also wants to play the game. In the past, I could just give them the disk and we both enjoy it. But today, with DRM and one use keys, this isn't possible. The game industry survived 20 years ago so there's no reason it can't survive without DRM and with sharable keys.
>For example, say I buy a game and my friend also wants to play the game. In the past, I could just give them the disk and we both enjoy it.
the difference being that only one person could enjoy it at a time. the math is a bit different when one person can put a copy of their game up online and let thousands of people enjoy it for free at the same time.
there is a happy medium somewhere between intrusive DRM and demanding games be free.
Game budgets were a lot lower 20 years ago, so maybe modern AAA games with $100m+ budgets can only exist in a world where every possible customer can be maximally shaken down.
I enjoy playing video games but I recognize them for what they are: a luxury past-time that is not necessary for life and one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow.
> one that would probably leave most of us better off if they all disappeared tomorrow
I get what you are trying to say, but in general video games offer unique experience that no other media can provide - interactivity, e.g. exploring different worlds with different mechanics. I think this experience can invoke something in people that no other media can replicate. So I think we will lose something important if it suddenly vanishes.
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
Pretty dismissive, no?
Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.
Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe [2]. Solarus has a donation page [3].
I'm sure there are many more examples that span the spectrum of payment options and cover different permutations of being online or offline.
To me, the deeper question is what are you actually purchasing? The bytes? The convenience? A slice of server resources? Developers and artists time?
I'm happy to give money to projects that I use, especially if it creates less friction than trying to go outside of the payment method and if the project is libre/free. I'm willing to pay for proprietary content but I have little expectation about what kind of service they're providing, especially they fold.
If there's a libre/free option, I would much prefer to invest in it. If there's a proprietary option that is asking for resources, I'm much less prone to give since it's clearly a transactional relationship.
> Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards.
OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. The community only got access to the servers when they had declined to 20-30 concurrent players. So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.
> Teeworlds was at one point accepting donations, I believe
Teeworlds doens't pay its staff a living wage, those donations went to server infrastructure.
According to developers of the most popular open-source games themselves, open-source games have not been commercially successful... it is very common for them to only cover operating costs via community donations, and many projects have a player base actively opposed to any monetisation model.[0]
Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.
FD: I speak from a position of being in the AAA gaming space for 11 years, so I have an economic incentive to... not lose my job due to the collapse of industry- but I'd like you all to be able to enjoy my creations after it's no longer possible for me to run it for you; I want a solution too!
> OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period.
Reference? The source was dedicated to the public domain in early 2018, which coincides with the release of the game [0].
> So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model.
This is a complete fabrication.
> Anyway, just because a handful of games can exist on libre models (even given what I've said) that doesn't mean the industry can survive with mandatory libre requirements.
Making a living from open source software is hard, game or no. Making a living as a game developer is hard to begin with and many proprietary games are not commercially successful or viable.
My point was that the ecosystem is a lot more complex than your reductive analysis.
This is cool and all, but it’s been proven a million times over that surviving on donations sucks. One of the reasons a new field gets innovation in partly because it brings so many people hungry for profit in to give it a go. If your only motivation is art and “maybe someone will toss me a buck on occasion”, we’ll have as many software devs as we do street performers.
> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
> Am I missing something serious here
Only just that the video games industry as we've known it for the past few decades is basically already dead—at best, it's a hollowed-out husk of what it once was.
The key point should be to make it legal to use and reverse-engineer abandonware (e.g. games that the developer or publisher has abandoned).
First we'll need a realistic legal definition for 'abandonware' where the abandonware's IP is automatically going into the public domain after a game has been abandondend by the publisher, and the next step must be to legalize 'pirating' and reverse-engineering abandonware.
>That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.
The AAA industry are already destroying the gaming industry with there shit games and stupid DRM pratices. This would be returning balance to the game industry.
I am thankful that both my partner and myself are in a pretty good spot when it comes to our gaming PC's. I had hoped to double my RAM at some point but I am still at a comfortable spot.
I am annoyed that the new handhelds are all crazy so sticking with my Legion Go for now.
The one I am annoyed with is storage. I desperately need to get a couple new drives for my NAS (one to replace one that its bad sectors are growing and one to add more storage) and I am not looking forward to spending $600-$700 each for 20TB drives.
The way of observing it I find concerning is if you look at PC gaming (or personal computing in general) as a population, with a rate of new entrants or 'birth rate' and people exiting or 'death rate'. It's hard to be optimistic with raising barriers to entry, upgrading or replacing failed hardware which seems like it'd shrink that population over the long term, and make it less attractive to invest in. This isn't even new with the influence of AI, crypto mining was similar but in retrospect just a taster course.
We can be cynics of AI without ignoring reality, if no one wanted this no one would be chatting with Claude or ChatGPT directly, but people obviously are.
The fact is there are people that do in fact want this, and it isn't just CEO's hoping to cut jobs.
There is certainly a lot of demand at the current price of free or subsidised subscriptions. It remains to be seen what the demand is at profitable prices.
If the vendors decide that free (ad-supported) use is necessary to keep demand, we will be entering a new era of surveillance capitalism instead.
It's very, very questionable if people want the situation we have. I have yet to meet anyone in person who is really excited about AI. Of course it's useful, but at this cost?
Claiming people want this is like claiming that people wanted WW2 because look we're all enjoying the tech that was developed during it!
I unfortunately have met a few. I have one friend that legit scares me... we saw how people reacted to o4 being discontinued.
Though I do agree that most people probably don't want as much AI as is being shoved on us right now, there is a subset that do want at least some of it.
More my point, yeah I think there is an issue of the actual demand being extremely over estimated due to shady practices (like of course Gemini gets a lot of use when every single google search calls it whether you want it or not). But we also should not be so quick to disregard there being real demand just to hope for the outcome we want.
Some competition for Apple in this space and competition for Intel and AMD is great.
But I really do question how well Windows on Arm is really going to work out long term.
For Apple it worked because they were able to force the issue. If you wanted a new Mac it was going to be Arm and we all knew eventually (this year or is it next year?) Intel support would drop. Over time we have seen M series exclusive features.
Developers were forced to update or abandon Mac which gave users a great experience (with some early growing pains).
This is something that Windows will never be able too do. They will always be stuck maintaining an emulator and a likely large subset of apps only supporting one over the other. (also does this work the other way around with an Arm only app working on x86?)
This seems like a repeat of when it was not uncommon for games to only support Intel or AMD or NVIDIA or AMD. But worse since they are not both x86. Sure at least we have emulation but just like with Rosetta2 it shouldn't ever be the long term solution.
For Apple it worked because they waited until they had a really, really good ARM ISA CPU (combined with arguably sandbagging their x86 offering for a few years prior but I digress).
Qualcomm is also working on a really good ARM ISA CPU with their acquisition of NuVia and subsequent Oryon architecture.
Meanwhile this is just using off-the-shelf ARM CPUs in a MediaTek SoC with blackwell bolted to the side of it. ARM's CPUs so far have been subpar for laptop-class chips. Hence why neither Apple nor Qualcomm are using them.
> Meanwhile this is just using off-the-shelf ARM CPUs in a MediaTek SoC with blackwell bolted to the side of it
MediaTek is involved in the SoC but both the CPU & GPU from Nvidia are bolted on to it. I.e. it's not a standard MediaTek CPU with an Nvidia GPU added.
MediaTek's press release pretty clearly indicates the CPU came from MediaTek, and so far Nvidia doesn't have any custom CPU core they've called "Grace". Seeing as the DGX Spark has what seems to be the same core chip, it'd be really surprising if the RTX Spark swapped out the CPU cores without any fanfare announcing that
> tbh, I always read this as Intel doing some sales magic here.
Possibly, but Apple choosing a new, thicker chassis the same generation that they introduce their more power efficient replacement is certainly a thing. Even if Intel failed to achieve the TDP they told Apple, Apple also seems to no longer believe the thinness they were doing was viable for that TDP anyway.
Intel's product offering certainly wasn't as compelling towards the end there, but it also looked almost uniquely bad in Apple's chassis vs everyone else's
The Intel chips of that time were fine but it was a problem from both sides. Apple refused to "compromise" their hardware design and Intel failed to deliver on their promises regarding power/heat budgets and kept telling Apple execs that they were just one cycle away from fixing all of the problems.
Ultimately, Apple won that fight when they decided to stop letting Intel control their hardware roadmap and it's been a great change for the entire industry. Intel is finally seeing some changes in their own products, largely in response to Apple dropping them. Now Nvidia is getting into the game which means more competition which is also good.
That's surely one thing, Apple went all-in on ARM, for Microsoft it's still a kinda "reduced experience".
But the bigger problem in my opinion: How much of the Windows userbase actually sticks to Windows because of its backwards-compatibility?
--> What would happen if they break this model and the OS is only judged based on its user experience and available applications...?
I'm not sure it would stand any chance to compete in the B2C space. If I think about it, there's not a single new feature in Windows of the last ~20 years I particularly care about.
Without backwards compatibility, there's barely any ecosystem. MacOS on the other hand is full of ecosystem features, improving collaboration, connectivity, handoff across devices, etc.
> MacOS on the other hand is full of ecosystem features, improving collaboration, connectivity, handoff across devices, etc.
True, but if you're only in the ecosystem as a mac user, in many ways it's felt like a mixed bag. I still wildly prefer mac over other operating systems, but if upgrades had a price, I think those sales would mostly go to iPhone users. Even at free, I'm yet to find a compelling reason to install Tahoe, and will probably just continue waiting until the next one.
Agree, it's a fairly closed ecosystem, that's why I personally don't use it.
But despite that, as a Windows user I acknowledge that any kind of interaction with another Mac from within MacOS (Handoff, Sidecar, Universal Control, Bluetooth-pairing to Apple-ID instead of Hardware MAC-ID,...) is leaps ahead of what Microsoft was doing with their OS for the past years.
Just the scenario of an employee getting a Windows laptop as a work-PC, there's barely any halo-effect if he/she also uses Windows at home. No easier handoff, no interaction, hardly any "just-works" connectivity.
Windows is mostly a vessel for the (legacy) applications it can run, and for these Browser-based Microsoft Online-Applications (which work equally-well on other platforms)
They didn't invest in creating "just works" frameworks for their PCs which amplify the ecosystem the more compatible devices you have, instead most of their focus is now on "just-works" stuff in the cloud.
So if Microsoft would make a clean cut on backwards-compatibility, I'm not sure there would be a reason left for most B2C users to even stay with Windows.
The "you can make it work if you invest a bit of time or google it" paradigm is nowadays well-covered by Linux already, and it's getting even harder for brands to compete on price/quality with Apple's scale, for almost any portable device...
Ya I agree. I'm primarily a Mac and Android user, but also use Windows for gaming, and Windows has never been particularly good at anything. It's never been a smooth user experience.
Recently I upgraded my motherboard and tried reinstalling Win10 Pro, but couldn't activate it despite saving the product key. They have at least THREE obscure flows for re-activation depending on how it was originally activated. The license in my flow needed to have been bound to a Microsoft account that I never previously needed, because it ties itself to the hardware. I had to dismantle and rebuild with my old installation, activate it with my old motherboard on a Microsoft account that I wasn't planning to use to login with, then rebuild again with my new components, sign in to activate, and then disable sign in to be able to use a local user account. Insane.
Hmm, that actually is an important difference. I was considering trying to set something like this up so I didn't have to bring two laptops with me while traveling, but was skeptical it would go smoothly, apparently for good reason.
As someone who is not in the market for a Ferrari, I feel like I am crazy for actually kinda liking the look of it? (The blue is bad, they should have used the red one for all of the marketing)
I mean, I feel like it should be a departure from the Ferrari look since it really isn't one that fits the expectation of what a Ferrari is. It feels like this is more an expansion of the Ferrari brand into a new segment while also borrowing from the rest of the brand?
They even said "entirely new Ferrari".
I feel like if it did try to look like a normal Ferrari but then it didn't feel, sound, etc like one due to being Electric people would also complain.
> if it did try to look like a normal Ferrari but then it didn't feel, sound, etc like one due to being Electric people would also complain
A "normal" Ferrari or any old sportscar looks cool on a race track but in real life it is literally midlife crisis on wheels, very awkward and out of place. I always feel pity/judgement when I see one. I heard it's also uncomfortable for passengers in the back and so on.
Form is function. Making this car look like something it isn't just for the sake of legacy appearance would be top engineering stupidity and waste. And trying to compete with your own ICE cars at what they are best also would not be so smart business-wise.
I'm not a car guy but this car seems to be doing something totally new for Ferrari. If there was no controversy THEN it would be worrying!
I am also not in the market for a Ferrari. The problem is that it looks so pedestrian. Personally, I think the Ioniq has more personality. For a 600k car, it should have some appeal. This just looks like every other EV; it’s generic and boring.
I think they might have had much more success with a strategy like the R32 EV. Take something classic (like the Testarossa) and electrify it. Remind people that EVs are an evolution rather than a capitulation to generic boringness.
No doubt good for them, but I am curious how this is realistically going to work.
The barrier of entry to get new non-union drivers for Lyft and Uber is very low. If a strike does happen I can't imagine it would be hard for them to fairly quickly get new drivers, especially with the possibility of higher fairs due to high demand while it is sorted out. I have to imagine they would be able to get drivers far faster than most other situations with strikes.
I wonder if Uber and Lyft would even try to partner with gocurb or another app to funnel riders directly to taxies.
Not saying a union is a bad thing, I just wonder in this particular case how well it is realistically going to work out. Guess we will see.
> No doubt good for them, but I am curious how this is realistically going to work.
Seems like kind of a pilot-program nationwide TBH. The article links to another article last year about an MA ballot measure which made it possible for gig-work drivers to unionize in the first place (since independent contractors aren't covered by the NLRB at a federal level). It seems that the state labor board intends to sponsor the negotiation process, and per the ballot measure text would be responsible for figuring out what to do if negotiations broke down. Summary of the question is here, if you're interested (full text of the law is linked there): https://www.sec.state.ma.us/divisions/elections/publications...
This is the key: Drivers now have the Commonwealth of Massachusetts arbitrating any dispute over their collective demands. Everyone knows how this is going to turn out.
What are you basing these guesses on? Workforce is pretty difficult to find on basically anything as far as I know.
You might have people that want to drive taxis but they would still have to get used to the streets, how the app works etc. etc. which can significantly degrade service quality.
The number of people with cars that might be willing to do some side work for some extra money?
It isn't like other jobs that have resumes and (possibly) long interview processes.
From what I can find we are talking a few days without talking to anyone and you are driving. Throw in Uber and Lyft doing an advertising campaign with incentives to start driving, I don't see any reason they could not have a potential large amount of drivers fairly quickly.
Maybe it won't be at ideal hours, maybe it will still be hit or miss, but there are a lot of drivers out there. Just due to the very nature of this being gig work.
All they really need to just ignore the union's demands is to be able to sign up enough drivers to out last the members not making money. Getting used to driving the streets and everything is up to the drivers, not uber or lyft. I am just reluctant to think it will actually work and the drivers won't cave. Trying to pass laws would be a more concrete fix.
For most cities, "get used to the streets" means "use GPS". They could be earning money the same day they sign up.
That puts the barrier to entry on the same level as grocery store workers. Granted, those too can successfully unionize; I agree that such strikes are only toothless when unemployment is high.
The barrier of entry is simply owning a car. If you were offered $10,000 to drive someone for 20 minutes you'd likely do it. From there, it's just up to an algorithm to find the right number.
If someone offered me $10,000 to drive them 20 minutes then I would assume that they're transporting contraband or fleeing from law enforcement. Sometimes high prices are a signal that something is badly wrong with the deal.
Reading this, I can't help but feel like there is a weird correlation here going on.
It seems less specifically about the school and more about the support system and the safe place that this program gave to the girls.
It sounds like this was a program specifically built to target the reasons they were not staying in school in the first place. Which obviously is a good thing but just simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here.
That is an important distinction since the question to me remains if the numbers would continue without the program specifically in place.
This is not a one-off study. There is a long record of similar studies showing that the number of years of education a girl receives delays marriage, and while longer schooling delays marriage longer, it is not just because girls are busy. Schools inherently provide female social support, and education provides increased self-reliance.
This is pretty easy to reason through: if a girl knows nothing about the world, a safe place for her to be is with someone who knows more. If a girl knows how to function in the world on par with a boy/man, or at least has visibility into a future where she can, there is no longer that fear/dependence cycle locked in.
Indeed, we know this, "educate girls to fix society", already for many years. The other "societal fix we know for year to work" is reducing economic inequality.
I suspect there would be broad agreement across the political spectrum that more education means later marriage and later first pregnancy. The disagreement would mostly be over whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Complication from pregnancy is the leading cause of death in 15-19 year old girls, and second in 10-14, only because many of them are not yet able to conceive. We have excellent data on this.
Later marriage/first pregnancy is clearly a good thing.
When I looked up causes of death in Nigeria, malaria blew away anything maternal related[]. Not that I would want to die of either.
Another big one was HIV/AIDS. I guess it depends on cultural factors whether early marriage might reduce the number of partners that could introduce HIV/aids. If non-married people are less monogamous it's conceivable the increased risk of HIV/AIDS could overpower the risks of whatever additional childbirth is associated with marriage.
Also note pollution was one of the bigger risks present in Nigeria. So as people get educated to go slave away in a dirty factory (or a city full of them where educated people work) it might actually be worse for their health than staying at home and marrying into some pastoral herding tribe or something.
And more roads means more pollution. It is questionable if the answer is “make everyone dependent on cars”, although doing so obviously improves some outcomes.
Even if true, your "leading cause of death" statement is meaningless as young women are not generally going to die from any other cause. If you "solve" teenage pregnancy, it might well become swallowing food without chewing.
I bet pregnancy is not the "leading cause of death" among 80yo women. That must be the best age to start having children.
Anyways, I couldn't find the reference to your statement by following the link but I found that risk of pre–eclampsia(only clearly stated risk to the mother) and lower birth weight is higher than in 20–24 —no mention of other age ranges.
The report mentions that adolescent childbirth is correlated with low socio–economic status and education. Did they control for that when doing the risk assessment? It is not clear.
No mention of genetic risk to the offspring. No mention of the lives of the offspring that were "terminated" in the making of the non–pregnancy statistics.
Just some vague "abuse" statements that do not include figures for abuse of non–female young people.
Beyond rare risk of death to the mother, I think the health of the child to be born and the potential for younger siblings is an important consideration since we are talking about reproduction.
In Europe, marriage and pregnancies below 18 were rare and people did use to average 21 before "female education" as well but other cultures differed and differ and I don't know to what extent it is appropriate to have "global" organizations mess with their reproductive lives from a Western perspective whether it has 1820s views or 2020s views.
They are included in the statistics for "high risk" adolescent pregnancy in gp's reference which I take as a condemnation of both adult and minor teenage pregnancies and pregnancies in general.
The value judgement is saying the changes you want are worth doing because they might reduce it. Social and personal choices are weighed all the time that include risks to lives, suggesting something that might reduce risk does not end the debate.
We would generally want to prevent people dying in horrible aviation disasters too, we could do that by ceasing non essential air travel.
If the value that the “other side” is espousing is that “it’s okay for girls to die giving birth”, well, we can safely discount that as a valid position to hold in modern society.
I believe nothing is *absolutely bad* in modern society.
For example, the best way to stop pregnancy-related deaths is to forcely termination any high-risk pregnancy regardless of the pregnant woman's own wishes. But seems no one would agree.
Sure, but this provides an argument for postponing marriage (and educating women) at least a little even if you want to coldly maximize birthrate with no regards to their feelings.
This narrative gets thrown around a lot by certain groups in misleading ways, and it's super annoying.
Women tend to advocate for themselves better in healthcare, especially mental healthcare. Women aren't, like, more depressed than men, they're just getting it treated.
The gender gap in compassion is always surprising. There is never “educate boys to fix society”. The argument is as follows: “But girls get raped, so we need to save them” “Who rapes girls?” “Boys” “What opportunities do they have?” “Drugs, army, and the street” “Wouldn’t they too deserve to be given care, notably the care that was too given to girls?” “No, [various reasons]” “But don’t you care that girls get raped by boys?” “Yes” “So what do you do?” “Take care of the girls”.
Males want to attract females and get married. They way they can do this is by achieving money/power. If education is profitable and possible, then executing it takes care of itself. If it's not possible, well it was a moot cause anyway unless some outsider will come in and help.
Females are valuable just for their ... personal assets ... so bootstrapping is a little harder because they have intrinsic value they can fall back on (someone is going to get angry at me for saying that, but it's just the way it is). If I can just marry a rich man I might be okay with that, or whoever makes the decisions for me might be okay with that. You have to get someone to come in and force enough of them to feel like they're a failure for not getting an education and then eventually they'll socially reinforce it themselves without further outside influence.
I believe this is why it's much higher yield for the enlightened outsider to come in and declare their moral and intellectual superiority and tell the females they are losers (or less happy, or less independent, whatever the politically correct terminology is used nowadays) for not getting an education, and get (read: bribe) their families to put them into it.
Every human is equally valuable in the moral sense.
But value is subjective when we are talking about relationships and we can only generalize about this value.
High income women are more valuable to low income men.
High income men already have money. They value other attributes.
And this is the paradox successful women can face. Their success doesn’t attract the mates they desire, quite the opposite. And worse, they were never told that. They were told the opposite.
I've been told men are intimidated by successful women my whole life. Women aren't being tricked into having careers.
The whole framing of "women are only valuable for their personal assets" only makes sense from the perspective of a certain kind of man. My whole point is that this is entirely subjective. People talk about it like it's the natural state of things but it's a cultural belief.
Successful men are not intimidated by successful women, they just don't desire them (for their success)...in general.
The intimidation comes into play when men are put at an income disadvantage. Women also don't find men who make less than them desirable (in general). So it's a double wammy.
A single mutli-millionaire guy is not going to be impressed by a woman who works 50 hrs a week and makes $400k.
He would rather someone available to take care of his needs while he can take care of the financial needs.
This is the opposite of what successful females want.
> A single mutli-millionaire guy is not going to be impressed by a woman who works 50 hrs a week and makes $400k
Sure he's impressed.
People date/marry people from their caste/social circle. You want your partner to fit smoothly into your existing life which means having a similar upbringing and career trajectory.
The work vs take care of needs is a false dichotomy. The person that'll 'take care of your needs' is the person you are on the same page with - assuming you're looking for a long term partnership, rather than the equivalent of a prostitute.
Sounds nice, now imagine the dynamics are in rural Nigeria and 10-15% of kids shit themselves to death or die of malaria before they reach adulthood. Your parents are looking at some men and some are rich, others are thoughtful, others are both. Having a funny thoughtful man is nice but first and foremost you want good water and food so your kids aren't shitting themselves to death before they reach adulthood like what happened to 1/7th of your family. Probably going to want a man that can provide for you and buy nice clean food and one of the cleaner wells / bottled water sources more than you want someone in the same equally positioned caste that 'just gets you' or makes you laugh or whatever. Also nice if he's a bit powerful so that the next time the cattle raids happen, his 10 cousins show up with their muskets or machetes. If polygamy is allowed in this region, you might even prefer to be the second wife of that rich/powerful man over being the first wife of someone in your own caste.
The data in general shows women exhibit relative hypergamy. This makes sense as they have a higher reproductive cost and investment at the time of birth, and probably even thereafter.
As in, women are valued just for having a womb. Men are not valued just for having a penis, or for having bigger muscles, or for being taller, unless they will use those assets on their person to go do something for someone else.
I do not interpret it, as you seem to, to mean, "the only valuable thing about women are their bodies." I do not see how you could come to such an interpretation, unless you are pattern matching the redpill memes you see in the other user's comment and extending that to, "(s)he must believe this, if there is anything remotely related to redpill in the comment".
> If I can just marry a rich man I might be okay with that, or whoever makes the decisions for me might be okay with that
Fyi, “just marry” incorporates a lot of things would disqualify the use of the term “just”. The least of which is pregnancy and the risks thereof, especially in these poorer societies without healthcare.
You say this as if you are providing new information. I suspect >99% of the Hacker News population, including the commenter above you, already knows this.
I think so. These girls still live with their family, it’s not like they’re in some cordoned off area where marriage if forbidden. It’s just a few hours of school every weekday.
Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
I get that its not like they were sent to a boarding school or something.
But it does mention accelerated catch up programs just for them, assisting financially, and vocational training.
Which is clearly more than just "stayed in school". Meaning it is something that can't just be replicated by encouraging being in school but actively needing a program like this. Which is not a bad thing obviously, but it is important that the right lesson is taken out of this.
I think you may be reaching a bit for the "it's not this it's that" when it's obvious that a "get kids to stay in school" program is never "do exactly nothing besides make a kid be inside the school building reliably".
Every problem solved involves fixing dependencies.
But if the issue fixed as "make it possible for girls to stay home until older" and paying the families would have had the same result as schooling, it's important to know that.
Education can be a good and still not be the fundamental cause (just like going to school where they provide breakfast and lunch may be good, but the reason you grow stronger isn't the classes, it's the food).
I'm ok with hearing "it's not this it's that" if there's an overcooked "it's not that it's this" narrative nearby, and there is: education was (and is!) aggressively pushed as a cure-all for job displacement and other ills by people doing labor arbitrage in the united states, it eventually turned out that wet sidewalks did not cause rain, and now there are a bunch of underemployed kids stuck with fake dreams and real loans and on the other side of the trade a bunch of rich boomers+billionaires whose brokerage accounts depend on continuing the hustle. Given that we have seen the exact education-cures-all narrative exploited to disastrous consequence in the United States, we should absolutely be asking the question "is education the active ingredient" to avoid exporting the same stupid mistake to others.
America has fairly low unemployment rates. Yes, schools are expensive and educational debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. But, you know, unemployment rates are the worst for people with low or no education.
Many traditional cultures have a communitarian approach to decision-making. What an individual wants is often a small part of the equation, especially for girls and women.
That doesn’t sit well for a western individualist mindset but… it happens there too. Parental pressure in particular is the conduit for broader social norms.
I'm here to make somebody feel old: The Graduate (1967) came out almost 60 years ago. I wonder how long the norms portrayed in that film persisted or have evolved since then.
I had no idea where you got your interpretation from, then I realized it was lack of interpretation.
the social pressure is traditional society on families, and then elders in families exert significant pressure on younger dependents, not to mention the strong economic pressure of nonproductive mouths to feed in circumstances without significant surpluses. It's exactly how westerners lived a century ago so it should not appear mysterious.
No, it's not a scheduling conflict. A child getting married is entirely about if the parents choose to force that child to be married or not. They were less motivated to marry the child, if the child was going to school, because an education is an alternative path to gain moneys, which is the parents primary motive. It's interesting how disgusting greed like this is wrapped in words, like "culture" that try to make it ok. It's a repugnant behavior, which is why there was effort to correct it, and success in that is why we're reading about it here.
Their motive is to provide financial and social security for their child so that their child won’t be out in the streets if something happens to them. That’s not greed. That’s normal basic universal care for offspring that all humans have.
Again, I strongly implore you to look into this more [1][2]. There are no dramatics or stretching of definitions here (unless you're one that thinks children can consent to sex). There's a reason this effort took place, and why its success is being celebrated.
Lol. Dramatics and accusation and you expect people to take you seriously… All this does is pour serious doubt over the veracity of the links you posted.
You call it greed but in a lot of these places it's necessity. Now that necessity might partially be the result of other people's greed but that's a whole other conversation about poverty.
No, you are right - especially in Northern Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria is in the midst of a protracted Islamist insurgency by Al Qaeda and ISIS where jihadis have often targeted government institutions like schools and kidnapped and subsequently assaulted and trafficked female students, such as in Chibok [0], Papiri [1], and Kebbi [2].
Marriage is viewed from an economic and safety lens in these kinds of communities - if education can provide both then a girl can continue to be educated. If not, marriage is the easiest solution.
This Pathways program had added security monitoring that reduced the risk of girls potentially being made a "war bride" (ie. sex slave) by a jihadist, and never to see their family again, which incentivized families to continue to support their daughters education instead of deciding to marry them off early.
> simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here
> Am I misunderstanding something here?
"Stayed in school" is a clear, binary condition that's easily measured and has obvious benefits to everyone because everyone is at least a little educated.
If I ask you "is your house temperature livable?" and you say "the thermometer says 20", answered. You didn't say "well, I purchased and installed a heat pump and duct distribution system capable of forcing warmed air to be distributed to the remainder of the house, which keeps the temperature in a habitable range, then ensured power supply remains connected and kept it on" and say I didn't really explain the important part.
Except that your example is a simple conversation vs explaining the outcome of a study/program. That immediately requires more information to actually convey what did and did not happen.
For example, I could read the actual details on this and possibly determine that they replace school with some other (cheaper) program that just keeps the girls busy.
Or I could determine that all we really need to do is launch an outreach marketing program encouraging that girls stay in school and ignore all of the other support that was given.
One of those is supported by the headline and one is supported by the lack of information about what actually helped.
If by your example there was a study on how we made a previously unlivable area, suitable for humans in their homes but all it said was "well the temperature is X" than you would have questions on how exactly that was achieved.
Same with living in space, if NASA told us that the way astronauts are living on the space station with "well there is oxygen" we wouldn't accept that because there is obviously more going on.
Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.
My thoughts exactly. I think it’s less that more years of education causes child marriages to fall, and more that changing the environment that these kids are raised in leads to more education and to fewer child marriages.
You might think “why does it matter?”, but if you’ve drawn the wrong lesson, you’re setting up millions of dollars in failed investments in just building schools and sending teachers into them, which won’t have the affect you expect, and that will fail to improve the lives you thought you would improve.
not familiar with nigera perse but in most places with child marriage, the marriage is the reason girls drop out of school.
other then that often its financial reasons. they will put boys to school because those are classically expected to take care of the family while girl will be married off to some guy. (ofc this is changing in a lot of places bits its the historical reasons afaik)
I actually knew someone who worked in rural development where this was an issue (and to his orgs credit reduced child marriage rates a lot).
Both happen at the same time, it's not one causes the other or smth like that. When families struggle with money, marrying girls off reduces their costs. Married boys remain with the family and actually bring someone new into the household, increasing costs or keeping stable if the boy works. Even in cultures where women pay dowries to marry, the ROI could be worth it if you reduce household costs every year going forward and your manual labor work has little chance of growing your income significantly.
Putting a kid through, even free school, costs money and at rural poverty levels in the Global South it's similar to a huge car payment one can't afford. Marrying the kids off is like ending that payment (if they go to live with another family which only girls do)
NO. I've seen quite a few things, across many cultures, pointing out that girls being any combination of low-value, low-status, and unsupported leads to them ending up as "cheap bodies".
That includes several American women friends, whose life stories include getting married at age 17-ish - because, with the situations in their own families, that really looked like their least-bad option.
Yes; it's currently legal in 34 US States. Here are the 16 that ban the practice: Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Missouri.
It isn’t just about the letter of the law, it is also about judicial attitudes-two countries can have the same law on paper, but with radically different applications in practice, to the point that it isn’t really the same law.
Yes, in many US states, someone under 18 can legally marry with the permission of a judge. And if the applicant is a pregnant 17 year old who wishes to marry her 17 year old boyfriend so their child isn’t “born out of wedlock”, a lot of judges will say “yes”. But if the applicant is a father who says “I think my 12 year old daughter is old enough to get married, and I found her a husband I like”, no way in hell is any American judge approving that, even if the letter of the law says they could.
But in some other countries, there are judges who would be happy to give that marriage official permission.
I'm not from the US so excuse my ignorance, but if law says it's legal, how is it possible that the judge doesn't grant it? Wouldn't that make it illegal for the judge to do so?
The law usually says it can be done but needs permission from a judge. This is like saying that an after-school activity can be done for children but needs permission from the parent. That doesn't mean the parent must give permission.
Judges are way too busy to officiate most marriages in the US.
Basically any adult can officiate a marriage, then its just a matter of filing the right paperwork with the county clerk - that is what constitutes the legal/civil marriage in the US.
There was the famous case of the clerk in a county in Kentucky refusing to certify same-sex marriages a few years back.
There is also something called "common law" marriages where the state considers you married even if you didn't file the proper paperwork, but were co-habitating and especially if you had children. But this is a dying practice and only recognized by a few states / territories (ironically Washington D.C. is one of them ...)
The law isn't "child marriage is always legal" but "child marriage is allowed in specific cases with a judges consent" basically. They usually need to be given a reason to make an exception
it's mostly 16-17 year olds getting married to men (sometimes arranged by the family, sometimes a boyfriend who's only a little older). I think in the past a pregnancy would cause it?
the rare younger cases are mostly for the reason you might think, leaning on the parents wanting it. You'd hope the judge would say no but there's religious communities that still support it.
I'd guess your pot/kettle comment is something nationalist/political? My prior comment was trying to say it's universal, not some "country X is good/bad" dig.
Degree matters. A lot. Saying "it's universal" because there is some frequency everywhere is misleading. There are many country Xs that absolutely deserve to be called out as bad, because they are relatively so much worse than the best countries, or even the average ones.
My intent: "it's universal" means the correlation between girls being low-value and child marriages is universal.
Your seeming reading: "it's universal" means child marriage occurs in every country...but that is a huge tactical mistake to say, because it gets in the way of us condemning countries where the problem is much worse than in ours.
My concern is for the girls, not for scoring point for condemning countries. To actually help the girls, the article seems to provide a proven solution. So let's do more of what works.
Vs. what is the track record for major non-aligned nations (like Nigeria) implementing progressive social reforms at scale, in response to moral condemnation by foreigners? That I've heard of, not good.
I agree scolding generally isn't effective, especially when the scolding party has no power to enforce rules.
At the same time, I see no reason not to make the condemnation. It's not being made to effect change, but reaffirm our own norms which, in this specific case, I believe are better, and we shouldn't avoid saying so and call that enlightened. I think it's a form of cowardice.
And in this connected age, perhaps a Nigerian girl could take some hope, or energy, or solace knowing that much of the world does think the way she is treated is wrong, and not normal, and that her intuition to that effect has grounding, despite the powerful local norms she finds herself faced with.
Using official Kenyan government statistics (back when Open Data was en vogue) for school attendance and access to sanitation, we tried to find out whether there's a correlation between school attendance of kids and their access to different types of sanitation (ranging from "flush toilet connected to main sewer" to "out in the bush"). We titled the project "Happy Butts, Happy Pupils". [0]
Learning 1: Districts with better sanitation have higher school attendance.
Learning 2: "VIP latrine" is a very funny and (unintentionally?) fitting name.
To be frank, it sounds like you are also spreading misinformation. In a follow-up you even said that you have not received yours to test and that you are only assuming based on the previous steam controller.
But your comment here is very definitive and is a major problem at how quick we are to defend Valve when we don't actually know.
Because people are saying the same shit about the previous controller, when it's verifiably false. The new controller operates on exactly the same principles
Though, I have yet to find myself in a situation that I wanted to use an iPad and I was not already in a position to be carrying one. I use mine for work and I am already carrying a laptop, throwing in an iPad is a very small addition to my bag.
Any time I have just been out, was never a situation I felt like I needed something like an iPad. Throw in that this looks like it will be the size of a Mini vs the 13" pro that I use now, it puts it in an awkward position. And I could justify the rumored $2k cost to replace 2 devices that cost more than that combined.
It will be interesting to see how it does in practice, but also what it does to the separation of iOS and iPadOS.
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