The game that kicked this particular petition off was The Crew, a game that you could happily play single player which Ubisoft made always online purely for DRM reasons its a prime example of the abuse of power that legislators should be doing something ab0out.

> The bare minimum would be to ban these kind of things from describing themselves as products instead of a service.

I don't know if amazon kindle books "you are getting a license" wording has affected anything.

But what if you can't call them "games" anymore? Call it "time-limited entertainment"?

>> many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only

> that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.

I think the criticism isn't centered around single player games at all, but rather MMORPGs and the likes.

OK, I signed it. hopefully I entered the correct postal code for my address; I always have to look up the code online.

> that's kinda the point, many users don't like having their single player game be online only because the devs thought it would give them more control.

That’s asking developers to make different games. That’s not the same thing as “stop shitting down games like the crew”

That kind of reasoning makes sense if you have a single publisher controlling the entire market and they don't want to undercut their own business. But that's obviously not the case. There are plenty of publishers that want to publish games like Terraria, especially if they go on to sell more than 60 million copies.

This would be why they’re trying to create consumer protection laws

I’m not sure “sellers would love to raise prices and have people keep buying” is the indictment that you think it is. Terraria and Modern Warfare, which is monetized the way you describe, are such different products…

Planned obsolescence even has affected video games too?

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Why would you want to spend 1000s of hours in a game? That must be eradicated with fire. Time is your most precious resource... why waste it on one game? Games need to be shorter, maybe 20 hrs or so for high budget single player games.

This is literally every industry now. Shall we "regulate" all industries to be like this, then? Is that achievable?

Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point? "That's not what this is about. Ok, where are we heading then?

Because parents and the general public won't see that it's Bob's private server for $game. They see $game_name by $developer/publisher.

Mojang (creators of Minecraft ) is an unfortunate good case study for this. It's sale to Microsoft is in part down to not being able to balance freedom for server owners and the PR issues caused by people scamming others, in this case children, while obscuring it under the Minecraft brand.

I don't agree that we should be coerced into being in the kid safe padded play area, but I ain't blind enough to not see why we are.

Don't you know? If I cmd+S the HN front-end and throw my own backend behind it, host my own instance, and post something illegal on it, then YC is liable!

Obviously they're not, but hey, just joining them in making things up. Protect the children!!

I'll never buy an Ubisoft game again. Instant dealbreaker to see that studio on the Steam store page; I've deleted a $3 sale game from my cart when I realized that it was Ubisoft. No game is worth giving money to a company that hates its customers so much.

> I'm blown away that series like AC, FarCry are still big sellers. These games are vapid and designed to be a time sink.

They are like junk food. Everyone has the junk food that they enjoy. FarCry is certainly the McDonald's of games. I enjoy some junk food once in a while, problems arise if I make it my staple diet.

For Steam users, a reminder that you can go to a publisher's page and "Ignore" that publisher. The option is a little bit hidden, it's in the settings cog on the right-hand side of the page. It'll stop steam from recommending their games to you, and when one does show up, like in the Top Sellers list, it'll have a message on it saying that it's by a publisher that you ignored.

I have Ubisoft, EA, and Sony marked as such, personally.

Not to mention the sexual assault

When I found out that Booking[.]com of all companies is moving major traffic, I started to look at what companies are even buying or selling anymore. I clearly had no idea.

In the following paper, CPs refer to content providers, as defined in the paper.

https://estcarisimo.github.io/assets/pdf/papers/2019-comnets... [pdf]

(more at https://estcarisimo.github.io/publications/ )

canonical link for above paper, which is the lead researcher's GH from what I can tell:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01403... ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2019.05.022 )

> Studying the Evolution of Content Providers in IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Cores

> Esteban Carisimo, Carlos Selmo, J. Ignacio Alvarez-Hamelin, Amogh Dhamdhere

[I have edited out some hyphens that made this really hard to read but were helpful due to the layout of the original document as typeset. If that bothers you, I'm sorry in advance. Links are included above.]

> Our goal is to investigate what role CPs now play in the Internet ecosystem, and in particular, if CPs are now a part of the “core” of the Internet. Specifically, we motivate this work with the following questions: How can we identify if a CP does or does not belong to the core of the Internet? If the core of the network does indeed include CPs, who are they?As the overall adoption of IPv6 has been slow, do we notice that delay on IPv4 and IPv6 core evolution? As the AS ecosystem has shown striking differences according to geographical regions [15], do we also see geographical differences in the role of CPs and their presence in the “core” of regional Internet structures? Finally, as more CPs deploy their private CDNs, can we detect “up and coming” CDNs that are not currently in the core of the network but are likely to be in the future?

> We use the concept of k-cores to analyze the structure of the IPv4 AS-level internetwork over the last two decades. We first focus on seven large CPs, and confirm that they are all currently in the core of the Internet. We then dig deeper into the evolution of these large players to correlate observed topological characteristics with documented business practices which can explain when and why these networks entered the core. Next, we repeat the methodology but using IPv6 dataset to compare and contrast the evolution of CPs in both networks. Based on results, we investigate commercial and technical reasons why CPs started to roll out IPv6 connectivity.

> We then take a broader view, characterizing the set of ASes in the core of the IPv4 Internet in terms of business type and geography. Our analysis reveals that an increasing number of CPs are now in the core of the Internet. Finally, we demonstrate that the k-core analysis has the potential to reveal the rise of “up and coming” CPs. To encourage reproducibility of our results, we make our datasets available via an interactive query system at https://cnet.fi.uba.ar/TMA2018/

[…]

> Finally, we study the core evolution of nine other remarkable CPs that belong to the TOPcore but were not included in the Big Seven. Seven of the nine selected ASes are the remaining ASes in Bottger et al.’s [47] TOP15 list, except Hurricane Electric (AS6939) which we do not consider as a CP since it is labeled as Transit/Access in CAIDA’s AS classification [80]. These seven ASes are OVH (AS16276), LimeLight (AS22822), Microsoft (AS8075), Twitter (AS13414), Twitch (AS46489), CloudFlare (AS13335) and EdgeCast (AS15133). The other two ASes are Booking.com (AS43996) and Spotify (AS8403). Interestingly, Booking.com or Spotify are not normally considered among the top CPs, however, they are in both TOPcores.

Imagine you're an indie game studio developing an MMORPG, both your server and client is likely under constant development and you may only have one or two actual production servers running your server code.

Now this proposal requires you to also continually release your server code.[1] While adding documentation, support for different systems, while ensuring safety as the server can now be reverse engineered and while possibly being liable to abuse created through those servers. Even though your game (and its clients) aren't tailored to working on any server other than the official one anyway.

At least that's my understanding of the issue.

This proposal is obviously aimed at big publishers like EA and Ubisoft, but it hurts small developers. I argue we should just stop playing EA and Ubisoft games, who are the only ones who continue to pull this crap.

[1]: As TheFreim pointed out, this isn't necessarily required. But the server program has to be released when the official servers are shut down. Which means this possibility has to be prepared for throughout development.

I don't think this would have any significant impact on the industry.

Publishers would just advertise their games as coming with a 2-year subscription, or whatever. People would have the same expectations as now: the game will be supported for a couple of years, and it will be supported much longer if there's an obvious way that is profitable to the developer.

No publisher would unilaterally want to start advertising games as subscriptions, but if everyone was forced to do it, nothing changes. Perhaps an extra layer of clicking through for the user, like when we mandated all websites must have annoying cookie popups.

Correct. The backends to these online games isn’t complicated, but it is protected. They want the ability to resell the entire service to another game studio to run.

This has happened a lot in the past. EverQuest, Pirates, Lots of mmos have changed studios and with that, the backend services needed to run them.

Now, that said, there are a few countries in the EU that you could reverse engineer the server and it’s totally legal. Some of the best fun I’ve had were on private WoW or Lineage 2 servers.

> to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.

Yeah, I like the general goal, but I worry about the corner cases; is an MMO “functional/playable” if you just release a localhost server? Are we forcing indie shops to pay for servers indefinitely now? Great way to ensure no more indie MMOs get built if that ends up being the text interpretation.

And, as you say, the question you should always be asking about EU legislation - how does this affect the small/medium shops’ competitiveness? Counterintuitively, compliance can hit the small guys relatively harder and entrench the big guys.

Not to say that we shouldn’t try to fix the problem. But agree that skepticism about EU regulations has some historical merit.

So don’t even try because it might be bad?

This vague handwringing isn't any better. None of us know what the law will end up turning into. But we shouldn't let that stop this being addressed properly in our political institutions. That's what they're there for.

Also, bringing up the DMCA is sort of rich, since it was always just a vehicle for the biggest content companies in publishing, film, television, music and software to protect their property online.

Now we have something that was brought into being by consumers and may finally do something to curb anti-consumer behaviour by companies like this, and you're against it because you have no idea what it'll look like. I just can't, man. What's even the point of legislation if we have to be afraid it'll all be corrupted? Why even have political institutions at all at that point?

> imposes unfair burdens on developers (which include indie devs too)

Any such law should include a carve-out so that indie devs and small startups aren't impacted because just the need maintain compliance paperwork can be a burden. Carve out thresholds can be based on a combination of product revenue and units sold. Similar carve outs should generally be part of a lot of government regulations because startup entrepreneurship is so key to job growth, innovation and ensuring more choice for consumers. The best way to keep huge companies honest is making them keep earning their success by enabling smaller, hungrier new competitors laser focused on better serving customer needs.

That said, I do generally agree with your broader point that how regulations are written and enforced matters a lot. Too many start with good intentions but end up being sidestepped, subverted or triggering unintended consequences. If a "Stop Killing Games" regulation is drafted I think it should be narrowly targeted and conceived with the understanding that both the tech and business models will continue rapidly evolving and the market will quickly adapt to sidestep or subvert whatever new rules are put in place. That will likely mean that, realistically, an effective regulation probably shouldn't be as expansive or all-encompassing as we might be imagining from our armchairs.

I'd be happy if the focus was simply on getting large game companies to clearly commit up front what their commitments are over time by listing how long will each aspect of the game will continue to work by type (ie single-player offline, multiplayer self-hosted, multiplayer cloud, feature updates, security updates). Then company management and investors will know to set aside funds to cover server fees for that time period after the final sale. This isn't new or burdensome. Large companies already have accounting practices to accrue future liabilities on their books. When they sell future enterprise services to other companies there's a contract with financial reserves and revenue recognition. Selling a game to consumers with the expectation of future online delivered services should have a similarly spelled out commitment and appropriate financial reserves.

In reality, this may mean some companies choose minimum commitments that we'd all feel are far too short but as long as the consumers know up front what the commitment actually is, the free market can determine over time what costs consumers are willing to pay for which commitments. I expect some companies will try to minimize their financial commitment by making games which could obviously have offline single-player aspects always require online for everything or be subscription-only and only commit to offer the subscription for 1 month after purchase. Let them try and see how the market reacts. Government regulation isn't some magic wand we can wave to just force companies to "do the right thing" or, more specifically, make the products we want and sell them to us on the terms we'd prefer. Companies will either pass the increased costs on to consumers or not go into that business at all. Realistic regulation should focus first on two things: 1) Ensuring a level-playing field for fierce competition and, 2) clear up front disclosure of what the deal is.

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They claim to protect from illegal content and unsafe communities, but those sound like desperate grasps at straws that are easily disproven. They also misrepresent the basic demands of the petition, as online only games are still allowed.

>Vote with your wallet

I bought Minecraft from Mojang, years later I am forced to setup a Microsoft account to play the game, or risk downloading a cracked version. They did not offer a refund. Minecraft is a video game where you need to login even if you do not play online. (maybe things changed , I think this MS account thing was a few years back, it worked for my account but I read of people having big issues because some MS assholes ahd to force the Java edition players to use an MS account)

This behaviour should not be legal.

Its not always obvious when you buy them which games will still be around a few years later.

Some singleplayer titles from just a few years ago are no longer playable. (Hello, Ubisoft). Meanwhile there are MMOs like guild wars 1, released 20 years ago, still playable today.

Yup

Something I am noticing more and more is how stagnant the North American game industry is. Meanwhile Europe and Japan are still killing it

Larian with BG3 - Europe Cd Projekt with Witcher and Cyberpunk - Europe

Nintendo rocking on as normal Monster hunter wilds and the RE remakes? Capcom, Japan

Elden Ring and Nightreign. FromSoft, Japan

Helldivers 2. Arrowhead Studios, Sweden

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Warhorse Studios, Czech

I cannot remember the last time I bought a new game and had a blast with it from a North American studio. Certainly not a AAA studio anyways

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was such a breath of fresh air in this regard. If you just want a reasonably priced, good game with no shady stuff but still that AA (arguably AAA) experience I can’t recommend it enough.

Everywhere, license agreements that can be changed by the company at any time, pretty much for every game developer that can afford a lawyer to write up said license agreement. They could all start doing shady stuff at any time. Might still leave thousands of games, but they add up to a drop in the bucket of the overall market.

And people are. Games sales are slumping in response to a decade of predatory dark patterns and simply not giving the audience what they're asking for.

Just keeping the games playable is a singular issue and in the noise. It's a good issue to single out for regulation.

There's fewer games to vote on every year, as conglomerates like Microsoft out vote your wallet a billion times over every time they buy a game studio to embrace, extend and then extinguish.

Or just sign the initiative, so that you maybe don't have to abstain to achieve this goal? I don't understand this mentality.

> Vote with your wallet

The ratio of me hearing this vs. seeing it actually affect change is maybe 10000:1 at this point.

Why not just vote with your vote instead.

Look where decades of "voting with our wallets" led us. How some people can still utter that sentence unironically is beyond me at this point.

Also, part of the issue is the death of private servers. Game publishers have chosen to revert to centralized servers, rather than allowing private servers. Thus they have also taken on the additional cost of running those servers. Older games can be easily played on private servers to this day, as the community of any moderately popular game will almost always step up to provide the service. Even games you might not expect would be that popular or games that never had private servers - for example, Rock Band 3 only ever supported connecting to Harmonix servers in an official capacity. This support is also discontinued (they still operate the Rock Central servers, but only for Rock Band 4). Yet right now, thanks to reverse engineering, there is a fan-operated server that you can connect to with a slightly modified game. You can even download the fan-created server software (written in Go) and stand up your own server for your friends or for whatever other reason (maybe you want to run a small tournament and use a private GoCentral server to record statistics and have a private leaderboard).

> just because it's not making them enough money going forward.

sometimes it's not even that -- it's to prevent the older version from competing with new releases. See Overwatch 1 -> 2 or Counter-Strike 1 -> 2

It's such a bizarre counter argument. The whole point of the movement is that developers are choosing to harm the medium and should stop.

I believe if you have a financial incentive not to release source / binaries then that’s a good financial incentive to keep the servers up. If such a mandate doesn’t result in actually releasing anything but instead properly incentivizes the right behavior, I’d still say the movement had won.

The publisher can't do that. No one can tell the future.

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> don’t buy their games

Not a solution. Other people will buy them and outvote you with their wallets. This has already happened. People did buy The Crew, and I doubt that most of them realized that it will be closed 10 years later.

What you just described is a massive improvement over the status quo.

Today, I have no idea when the game I just purchased is going to be disabled.

>and/or just never make a single-player game again

plenty of companies making single player games now would be fine.

Vote with your wallet doesn't work when other people still fork over the cash anyway. Look at microtranactions, universally hated, yet developers/publishers make money hand over fist because enough people are willing to pay.

This is part of the beauty of such a thing being a law.

If your code library, licensed property etc. does not allow companies to comply with the law, then its value is zero and you won't be able to sell it. So suddenly, all providers of such libraries etc. have to make this possible.

how did they do it in the past? If I can put my Tony Hawks cd from the PS2 into a cd player and enjoy all the DRM music, what changed between now and then?

If music labels refuse to license out their songs like that, then if this law passes, they're going to have to suck it up and play nice again, else lose customers/publishers.

The issue with most of what you're saying here is that all of that works the way it does because it can, not because it has to. Code libraries, for example, may essentially prohibit what is being requested by SKG because they can. However, if they couldn't then they wouldn't. The companies selling the libraries aren't going to simply shut up shop.

Which is just to say, if there's money to be made then businesses will do so within the regulatory framework.

Those are all just decisions the companies made. For future games, the game developers and the companies licensing IP can simply make different decisions. If a large market like the EU creates strong incentives for them, they will make different decisions.

Now, this is not necessarily the case for existing games. Revisiting existing licensing deals can be needlessly difficult. But I'm assuming the proposed regulations will only apply to new games rather than trying to force changes retroactively.

All of those things are concerns. But if video game publishers really needed to figure this stuff out in order to sell units, they would. Contracts would change. But they'd still get signed. Everyone wants money too much. The only hard part is trying to fix this stuff for games which have already signed on the dotted line. Or games which have shipped and disbanded their software teams.

But even then, can't they just opensource what they're allowed to? Even if it doesn't build, it wouldn't take the community long to rip out FMOD or whatever and replace it with working alternatives. Or submit a final patch which removed the part where games phone home before launching in singleplayer mode. Why would that interfere with the licence for 3rd party IP?

IMO if I'm "buying" the game, you can't also remotely disable the thing I bought. (And "buy" is the word they all use!). If you want to remotely disable the game at some point in the future, I'm fine with that so long as they list it very explicitly and loudly on the box. "THIS GAME ONLY PLAYABLE UNTIL 2030". Games publishers need to start being honest and upfront about what we're paying for. Its not an unreasonable ask.

How things are doesn’t prevent how things could be. Studios could negotiate better licensing deals.

anyone ever noticed how so many completely different restaurants food tastes almost exactly the same? it’s because so many of them use the exact same food suppliers to buy their food before they cook it. [0]

gaming over the last few years feels the same way. like they all taste almost the same.

> Simply pretending these very real concerns don’t exist is nonsense land.

i don’t believe this to be true at all.

if all of the things you listed are limiting game development so much, than this isn’t “progress” in the games space. if it’s really that bad, maybe we should regress, start from the basics and let some of the incredible indie studios or midsize studios take the lead who will A) bring us actual originality, not more IP rehashed for the thousandth time, B) not bleed gamers wallets dry and C) lets us actually own the thing we buy.

sooo many amazing games were made in the past that were able to do this and do it well, the difference is they didn’t cry if they “only” made $40 million in profit.

cod3 made like $400 million in the first 24 hours.

the difference now is the AAA studios are sucking all of the air out of the room and not leaving nearly as much room for midsize studios.

[0] sysco, us foods, and pfg supply an absolute massive number of restaurants in the US. sysco alone distributes to something like 700,000 restaurants.

> You want games with real vehicles or licensed music?

Not really if it means that I wouldn't be able to play the game in 10 or 20 years.

This isn't relevant to your points, but thought I'd pipe in to your rhetorical question anyway:

> You want games with real vehicles or licensed music?

The answer is actually no.

These concerns have been raised and addressed. Firstly, I am not sure how cars getting damaged means that multiplayer games have to become F2P - but that's not steelmanning your argument.

One of the major concerns raised has been middle are: components that developers purchase and use in their server implementation. This is often the largest hurdle to many pro-consumer outcomes: the developers can't share anything related because they don't own it.

The most likely outcome after sensible laws are passed is that the industry evolves just as it did with GDPR. Developers will look to other middlewares that are SKG compliant.

Failing that, gamers have routinely shown that they are capable of clean room implementations of server software (WoW and Genshin Impact) - all that needs be done is the client being released with all server auth disabled and some way to specify the server to use. Developers might even be required to provide basic protocol specifications. Essentially, repair it yourself instructions.

This strawman argument you have provided is exactly the same one used by Pirate Software. It relies on a highly specific interpretation of the initiative. The initiative calls for "reasonably playable state," which can have a vast number of outcomes that are different to the single one that you have chosen.

And if the cars do prohibit a game from addressing server concerns and remaining in a reasonably playable state, remove them. The game will continue to be reasonably playable following that.

That’s not how it works. The EU does not care about what Apple does in the US. It’s Apple’s choice to either tweak their products to adapt to the laws of their different markets or apply these changes across the board. We’ve seen that with recent iOS versions where EU regulations imposed changes, some of which were done only for devices in the EU.

For some time Microsoft had EU specific versions of Windows.

EULA sometimes differ depending on location because a lot of the bullshit software companies get away with in the US is illegal in other parts of the world.

Another extreme example is the hoops companies have to jump through to sell in China. Again, this generally does not affect the same products in the rest of the world.

It is a problem that we know how to solve.

The EU doesn't have to worry about what happens in the rest of the world. The rest of the world can benefit of this anyways.

That would already be great progress. For context Ubisofts the Crew shutdown only after 3 months of stopping sales.

It could also work as a deterrent on making dedicated servers only architecture. If you can disable dedicated servers instantly(instead of 2 years) but enable private servers that might be more cost efficient.

A law can do much more.

Just like the law don't just require that you can return you toxic ham within 2 years of purchase.

I think that most developers are just afraid to voice such anti-industry opinion. Gamedev is fairly small industry, so if you piss off wrong people, you might be left without job opportunities.

Would any art gallery pay for a piece that the artist could walk in and take away whenever they wanted?

This isn't so much about art, more about what you deserve when you pay money for something. People are still free to make whatever they want.

>I feel... uneasy about the idea. Are games art?

Yes, which is precisely why they shouldn't be treated like a commodity. Nobody is telling artists what art they can make, what the initiative is about making sure public continues to have access to works of art.

Which is normal for everything that's considered to be of cultural relevance. Film studios and novelists don't get to burn libraries down the moment someone stops paying them. It's exactly because games are art that preservation and access need to be priorities. Can you imagine if Amazon started to delete books from your Kindle? (I'm pretty sure they tried that once actually, with 1984 no less)

The destruction of art is, in most civilizations, seen as completely obscene. The reason why game companies got away with it was precisely because games had a lower status.

> are you comfortable telling artists what types of art they can create?

Yes, absolutely. For instance, I think it's fine to prohibit artists to kill animals for the sake of making art. Or humans, but it's already outlawed.

Once art get sold, it becomes a product and your customers have legal rights in that transaction

art, shmart. aside the fact that a large part of art is money laundering or tax evasion, what is being asked for is more like banning radioactive or cancerous paint pigment

Depends entirely on the game. Some are art, games designed by people who love games for the sake of games. Others are things that employ the use of art for the sake of long-term financial gain.

Yes, games are art. Which is why this is so important. Are you comfortable with destroying cultural heritage for the sake of corporate profit? Did you even ask artists working in the game industry what they think about this?

what a strawman. its not about "you cannot draw this" but its more like "please dont use dyes that offgas deadly fumes", a technical regulation not about substance

> Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today?

This is something we can answer pretty easily by looking at the book industry. People do enjoy novelty. The pulp sci-fi/fantasy from the 60s-80s is long forgotten save for a few masterpieces, and there is a flow of recent books that people buy and read.

> At a macro level, killed games are a good thing for gaming companies.

But they aren’t good for consumers.

It would still be illegal to acquire a copy of a killed game. Their numbers would still dwindle, since they'd be limited to people who bought the game before it was killed.

Silly that this is being downvoted, especially since the book industry comparison is an interesting one:

There will always be people like myself who enjoy older (even outdated) books, but even we still buy new books because they are part of the zeitgeist and carry new ideas/developments. It'd be the same for new video games, some people would enjoy older games, but they'd likely still pick up a similar new game that developed something novel.

I guess the real problem here is that video game companies don't want to create anything novel, not least because it's a risk.

I mean, Project Gutenberg and libraries exist and the literature industry hasn't died yet.

Saas offerings are safe as they don’t let you Buy a thing. They’re very transparently a service. Same with timed licenses. It’s clear what you’re paying for. Most of the time.

With games it’s often not the case. You buy them and then at unspecified moment you might lose a significant portion of functionality or the whole game. At the time you buy a game you don’t know if it’s for a time, what time, or what will stop working.

I also think many comments are a bit too eager in claiming "oh just publish the code" and "oh just let users host X". It's obviously not that simple. The biggest one for me is that single player games should still be playable offline after servers have been sunset.

I'm sure that with current games, licenses were indeed acquired for a certain limited time. But if you start development and you know you'll have to sunset it according to the rules one day, I'm sure you'll come up with other licenses or just a way to strip out content like that.

If it's really impossible for you to allow a game to remain playable after you abandon it, the only reasonable option is to not sell it at all. Instead you can rent it, with the length of the rental clearly stated up front. Advertising a rental as a sale should be illegal.

> What about games where the world is fully generative, tied to a licensed engine?

It's ok, the engine will adjust it if big studios can't use it otherwise. It's just people having to talk to each other.

> Code and APIs would be needed to be documented.

Why? Nobody is talking about forced opensourcing.

Why not apply it to Saas? If you sold lifetime licenses and you don't want to run it anymore, just let your customers self host it. Even better if you can open source it.

Great, maybe it will foster innovation among indie studios.

I'm fine with that. Others will come and fill the void.

Sounds good to me! EU gamers will not be taken advantage of.

this has already been addressed but just for you.

they won't leave the biggest global market with almost 500 million potential buyers because they can't rug pull anymore, even if they somehow suddenly don't like money anymore others will gladly take there place.

the same "argument" has been thrown at GDPR which now every single corporation follows.

Maybe they just stop adding hard requirements for online connectivity to their single-players games, which is something which takes more effort to do in the first place?

Honestly? I think we can do without these predatory practices even at the cost of some games.

And I somehow doubt there’s revenue to make off these single player games being online dependent, because the most probable ways simply wouldn’t fly in Europe due to consumer protections.

Most likely it’s just “anti-piracy” or something like that.

>is extremely mediocre games for which you will have the server executable along with the client.

opposed to absolutely nothing? yeah i think we can do with "mediocre"

>video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy

if they aren't misleading customers about it sure. make the game a subscription and you can shut it down whenever you want :)

>And no, "just release your source code then" is not a valid rule to enforce either.

nobody said that. the petition explicitly leaves out the "how" because it could possibly run against existing copyright laws.

>have you tried making your own?

ad hominem and irrelevant to the topic. i don't need to have every build a roof to be against building it with asbestos.

> If you like video games so much but don't like the terms of serivce and price, have you tried making your own?

This is such and odd thing to suggest. People want to play the games they paid for, _obviously_ they aren't going to make their own game.

Your games are mediocre now.

It's better to have a mediocre game that one can play, than an exceptional game that one can't.

You're free to make games now, and yet it's most often hard to justify money for a game that isn't a skin on a version of solitaire (on sale).

That's how bad your industry is. So, please, with your warning. As if you have work product to bargain with.

You act as if your industry is busy. Outside of a couple of exceptional studios, and infinite sequels on literally only a few popular formulas (whether or not these formulas are good is another discussion), your industry is largely non-productive. If we are utilizing your metric of good vs mediocre.

> If you like video games so much but don't like the terms of serivce and price, have you tried making your own?

No need to go that far, there's plenty of games sold with better terms of service than the ones your company offers.

Forcing companies to be upfront about this aspect will help concerned consumers choose these instead of yours.

It is about truthful advertising. If you are selling a video game, you aren't allowed to yank access to that game away from users.

If you wanna do a subscription or a rental, you have to call it that.

I don't see why forcing companies to stop lying is a bad idea.

ah, yes, for example quake3 an extremely mediocre game that has server executable along with the client? what is this argument even about?

I think there’s a mid ground where industry does nothing except slap a sticker on warning people that game features will sunset in the future, making parts of the game unplayable, perhaps making some commitment like no sooner than December 31, 2030.

It will essentially be the similar thing as the Surgeon General’s warning on a pack of cigarettes or the Parental Guidance logo on an album. The are US things, not sure if EU has similar.

> server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy

It is a legitimate business strategy... for now.

It seems you didn't read the initiative text. The initiative does not force game Devs to release the code or make specific technical demands.

Game Devs only have to make a plan for when the game gets shut down to still allow the users to be able to play the game. How that is archived can be decided by the developers. Of course the law could be different in the future.

But most people do agree that it is bad to intentionally break games that people payed money for. All they are basically are asking for, is that games are built in a way that they can be enjoyed as long as possible (maybe supported by the community). Is that not also in the intention of the game developers?

> Whether you like it or not, thanks to piracy and competition ... server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy

The only people you're effecting are legitimate players. Pirates crack the games and have an easier time for it. Unless you're talking about multiplayer games, which wasn't the target of the proposal (though even there I'd argue it's definitely doable).

> I work for a game company

You work for a shit game company.