StopKillingGames - Yet another reminder for European citizens to fight for software ownership before the timer runs out. A signature takes mere minutes and preserves many games and lots of fun.
Stop Killing Games
Can someone explain to me why Pirate Software has such a big problem with it, I tried to look it up and I'm still struggling to understand.
He thinks the initiative's goal isn't clear and passing a law based on an unclear direction would effectively kill all live service games.
The problem is, reason behind making a law about it is clarifying how to approach this problem in the first place.
He has multiple conflicts of interest and is taking the side of his wallet and not consumers.
Without diving tooo much into it, I'm pretty sure the main reason is he doesn't want government regulation around the games industry.
The most generous summary of his better points would be that it is not always feasible to leave a game in a playable state since server architecture might not allow for that. Semi fair since the games industry has gotten to a point where some of these games may be using code contracted from a third party making releasing the binaries difficult from a licensing perspective.
However he seems to have taken playable as 'designed for single player'. Using the hypothetical of MMOs needing to be rebalanced around a single player experience. He extended this to a game Meet Your Maker which is reliant on other real players for the experience and saying there is no way to leave that 'playable.
As a note, Stop Killing Games is NOT asking for any rebalancing to be done and this is an entirely fabricated complaint.
You have to remember that it's not retroactive so it should only affect future games. The games at that point wouldn't have that issue because they would know not to do anything to make it extremely difficult if not impossible to release a server or something. So even that point of his is pretty dumb.
Here is a real-time signature counter for the EU: https://stopkillinggamestracker.pages.dev/
Sign the petition even if it's surpassed 1mil signatures by the time you read this! The signatures will be verified after the petition is complete. This could lead to removal of any number of them. We don't want to barely make it. Let's go as high as possible!
Help a non-European understand... So, if you get enough signatures, it becomes law? Direct democracy?
No, there's no way to automatically make something become law. A successful petition just forces the European Commission to discuss it and potentially propose legislation. Even though it's not forcing anything to happen, there is an incentive for the commission to seriously consider it as there is probably a political cost to officially denying a motion that has proven that it concerns a large amount of people.
If this gets enough signatures, the EU will create a review committee, which, if they approve of the initiative, will draft a law for the European Parliament to vote on.
Holy shit, it's at 994,000, only 6000 votes left. It's going to succeed!
Already at 997,500, pretty sure it'll succeed within a couple of hours. Absolutely amazing to see this, so excited for the inevitable video from Ross!
We just passed 100%, thanks everybody for signing the petition!
But why should we stop here? Keep it coming!
I can't sign it because I'm in the US..... unfortunately..... but it's in Overdrive right now.
Could someone give an example what this fighting?
You buy a game. Every time you start the game it phones home for permission. The company decides to shut down the server that gives permission. You can't play the game anymore. If this is like other initiatives in the same vein it won't stop the game maker from shutting down the server, but it will mandate that they either open source the server so you can run your own, or build the game in such a way that you can still play it (maybe single player only) after the server is gone.
Hmmm i use third party servers for playing online for some really old games. Wonder if this just makes it easier for new games then.
The initiative start with the game "the crew", where ubisoft shut down the servers and you can't even play singleplayer. The argument is that your product can be removed without your consent. The counter-argument is that it is not a product, it is a license.
The best possible outcome is that developers be required to keep games playable if they don't want to maintain it anymore,by either updating the game to work offline or providing lan/private server capabilities.
It might just end up being a warning when buying the game like "this is a license, not a product: access may be revoked at any time"
Wow didnt know it won't even let you play single player what a load of bollocks.
It's on a good roll now. People should go and sign!