Companies would still be cutting flour with chalk if they had their way. “It’s limiting blah blah blah” that’s the point you corpos, consumer rights are about the consumer not the bottom line
History taught us that corpos would literally burn the world for a few more bucks. And by history, I mean right now.
Businesses would bring back slavery if we let them.
They don’t really need to bring it back, it’s always been there, just in other countries
Not to mention that studios like Larian have proven that it’s entirely possible to make a blockbuster game without teams of 400 heads, changing direction and leadership every few years and laying off the people who made the product in the first place. They really seethed at that one, so many salty comments lol.
Larian has six studios and over four hundreds of employees. They are not as big as Ubisoft of course, but they are still very much an AAA game studio.
This is just pure fabricated bullshit. They themselves started limiting options. Remember the old days where you could host your own server with basically any game? They took that away, not us. So they themselves are 100% responsible for this ‘uprising’. Besides they could just provide/open-source the backend and disable drm. Hardly any work at all.
But of course it’s not about that. They just try to hide behind this ‘limits options’ argument. But they simply don’t want you to be able to play their old games. They want you to buy their latest CoD 42.
Let’s be real, open sourcing it isn’t “hardly any work”. All the code has to be reviewed to make sure they can legally release it, no third-party proprietary stuff.
When starting a new game, don’t include that stuff. Not including proprietary stuff without meeting the licensing requirements is already a step in the process.
There is a reason it’s included though. Stuff like fmod, bink video etc. does complicated things that you otherwise need to implement yourself.
Oh but with the new rules they could do that before making their code work that way. The idea is not for the new laws to apply retroactively but for new games.
I think your response is coming off as kinda “oh just do it different”. But that still means an entire industry of people are going to have to change how they make things. (And still spend time and money evaluating things at the end, just to be sure nothing slipped through.) I’m in favor of this at least being looked at and honest conversations happening, (which will not happen without this.) But there will certainly be an adjustment period where people on ground level learn and develop new “best practices”. And invariably someone will screw up. The companies are obviously only worried about money. They’ll get over it, is my opinion. But I think it’s worth communicating that we all understand new government regulation is likely going to be a pain in the ass. We just think it’s worth the pain/money. And that’s open sourcing or just creating a new mode for offline play in everything.
But that still means an entire industry of people are going to have to change how they make things.
Companies do that all the time in response to government regulation. You like seat belts and backup cameras in your car? No sawdust in your food? Transparent pricing when buying internet access? Government regulation. None of those companies went out of business.
“curtail developer choice” is such a weak argument because you could equally apply it to literally every piece of regulation ever passed. Of course it curtails choice, that’s almost the dictionary definition of an industry regulation.
Lol. We’re gamers. We know that if we encounter enemies we’re going in the right direction.
The original article completely misrepresents the initiative:
We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.
Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
…
Stop Killing Games is not trying to force companies to provide private servers or anything like that, but leave the game in a playable state after shutting off servers. This can mean:
- provide alternatives to any online-only content
- make the game P2P if it requires multiplayer (no server needed, each client is a server)
- gracefully degrading the client experience when there’s no server
Of course, releasing server code is an option.
The expectation is:
- if it’s a subscription game, I get access for whatever period I pay for
- if it’s F2P, go nuts and break it whenever you want; there is the issue of I shame purchases, so that depends on how it’s advertised
- if it’s a purchased game, it should still work after support ends
That didn’t restrict design decisions, it just places a requirement when the game is discontinued. If companies know this going in, they can plan ahead for their exit, just like we expect for mining companies (they’re expected to fill in holes and make it look nice once they’re done).
I argue Stop Killing Games doesn’t go far enough, and if it’s pissing off the games industry as well, then that means it strikes a good balance.
And “would leave rights holders liable” is completely false, no game would have offline modes if it did
Exactly, and that also includes online games like Minecraft. Nobody is going to sue Microsoft because of what someone said or did in a private Minecraft server, though they might if it’s a Microsoft hosted one.
The argument there is if a game is left online with no studio to care for it then they believe they would be liable for community content.
I don’t think it applies to offline games at all.
If server code is released such that people can run private servers after the official servers are shut down, then legally the people running the servers should be the ones liable for illegal activity that happens on them.
I could imagine third-party companies springing up whose entire business model is JUST providing unofficial servers for discontinued games and moderating them. Maybe a subscription service that provides access to servers for several different online service games.
Of course, it would be more likely that it would be just a player who hosts a server for themselves and their friends and doesn’t attempt to be profitable. That would be fine too.
So does not allowing food companies to sprinkle lead and uranium in food. What’s the point?
Yeah sometimes their choices are bad, that is like 1/3 of the whole point of government. To stop businesses from just doing whatever nonsense they want.
Imo, that should be the primary role of the government
I think providing human rights to it’s citizens is definitely more important, not sure if it is necessarily the primary one though.
Corporate jargon translation:
“It’s going to limit innovation” = “We won’t be able to use those new ways of ripping off our customers anymore”
I think people are overestimating what this petition is going to do. It will likely just end up in a response from the EU listing pros and cons but effectively saying “can’t really do anything about it, sorry!”. It’s still good, even MMOs have server software gaming companies could release if legislation forced them instead of causing fandoms to die. Games are culture. They may also be entertainment, but that’s culture as well. But I wouldn’t hold out hope.
Anti-murder laws are cuttailing my choice! What if I someday would like to make a choice to murder someone?
Yes! When I read that, I immediately thought “curtailing developer choice is exactly the point.”
Why are publishers speaking for devs about how much choice devs would have? Why not get devs to speak?
Because sometimes publishers like to be the ones curtailing dev choices
Developer choice, ha-ha, very funny. I am not familiar with the industry and still feel safe to bet most of them (edit: actual software developers making games) just want to get enough money for doing what they can do without too much stress/disgust and also most of them don’t have a desire to see their work die just because some manager decided it is time to make some other games instead
I bet they’re really pissed off with ubisoft right now. They basically started this whole movement by being so egregious with The Crew. Less than a month before they shut the servers down the game was still on sale for the full price that it had launched with.
Granted it was shut down because it was the most mediocre game ever made but that still isn’t an excuse.
Tbh when I read of it, being an open world driving game where you can just drive around a very large area, I kind of wanted it. Not as a game, but simply for driving around. MarioKart is too happy for that. I just want to get lost in thoughts while driving.
I hear thats what European Truck Simulator 1, 2, and American truck simulator are excellent for. Driving around on long roads with meditative scenery.
Keep signing it! Don’t stop!
Copyright was invented so artists would be able to sell their art, and more art would be made.
When copyright is protected on a product that’s no longer sold, less art is made.
When a copyright holder stops selling their art, copyright protections should immediately cease, and they should be responsible for copyright obligations - releasing the source code to the public. Use it or lose it!
This is the most level headed approach to IP I’ve seen. If you’re not willing to use the property you forfeit it. It’s a common contact for licensing rights for movies that forces a studio to make a movie or lose rights. That way people can’t squat on a licence to prevent others using it.
This initiative sure would make things more complicated for the game publishers, yes.
Because they’re currently not doing the bare minimum.
If they weren’t so accustomed to not doing the bare minimum, maybe they would have different opinions! Just saying.
Edit: Just signed the petition. Didn’t think this was necessary before because, as soon as I heard of it, Finland was already top of the list percentage wise. But I did sign it, just for the hell yeah of it.
It’s not just for the hell of it!
Invalid votes will be removed when it’s time for the final tally, so the initiative needs a solid buffer to still he over a million after.
There’s been a talk of some people using bots to inflate the numbers in a misguided attempt to help the initiative, so every vote is still very welcome.
Also, I kinda want to see just how high Finland can go above the threshold.
Tell your friends!
