this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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A while back I was discussing Ross Scott's 'Stop Killing Games' proposal in the EU, in some other lemmy thread.
If passed, that law would make it so you cannot make and sell a game that becomes unplayable after a person buys the game, or you have to refund the purchase of the game itself as well as all ingame purchases.
If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.
If it uses some kind of DRM that no longer works, it has to be stripped of this, or properly refunded.
Someone popped in and said 'well I think they should just make it more obvious that you're not buying a game, you're buying a temporary license.'
To which I said something like 'But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.'
So, here we are with the American version of consumer protection: We're not actually doing any kind of regulation that would actually prevent the problem, we're just requiring some wordplay and allowing the problem to exist and proliferate.
All this does is make it so you can't say 'Buy' or 'Purchase' and probably have a red box somewhere that says something like 'You are acquiring a TEMPORARY license that may be revoked at any time for any reason.'
US gets a new content warning. EU is working toward actually stopping the bullshit.
EDIT: A few days after I posted this, Ross put out a video with more or less the same angle as I presented, that this solves nothing, changes nothing, and arguably actually makes it technically worse as this functionally acts as the government officially endorsing the status quo: You have no legal standing to contest your evaporating game, as it followed the rules and put a warning or changed some wording.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T-9aXEbGNeo
Honestly, that really does track with how shit works in here.
"The orphan crushing machine may contain components known to the state of California to cause cancer"
And we're done! Fixed all the problems!
I think the idea is, that the minimally invasive regulation only has to fix the information imbalance between producer and consumer. Then, once the consumer has all the information, they can make an informed racional market actor descision. That's supposed to price shitty rip offs out of the market eventually.
... yeah I don't believe it works either.
It doesn't make any sense if the whole market is shitty rip offs.
In this case I'm not saying all games are bad, shitty games, but they are all shitty rip offs in the sense that they all legally can, and many do just suddenly deactivate, and you're not even compensated for this.
The whole fundamental legal trick the software industry has pulled is making everything into a license for an ongoing service, as opposed to a consumer good.
And the problem is that this is now infecting everything, expanding as much as possible into anything with a chip in it.
Even if the consumer is perfectly informed, it doesn't matter if the entire market is full of fundamentally unjust bullshit, as there aren't any alternatives.
All you get is consumers who are now informed that their digital goods can poof out of existence with no recourse.
But the whole market isn't shitty rip offs.
Please reread the second sentence.
The second sentence isn't true.
Can't Stardew Valley, Undertale, Outer Wilds and No Man's Sky also be legally removed from your Steam library for any reason?
Yes, and if you don't like it you don't have to buy them. It's why I prefer not to use Steam.
They're just gonna go all in on marketing to Kyle and his CoD buddies, and ignore the nerds who care about weird shit like ownership.
At the same time, both need to be done, your solution doesn't solve the fact that it's only a license you're purchasing and you depend on a third party service to download the game in most cases.
There are two different problems. One is easier to solve.
I replied to one of it a while ago and basically, this part is impossible since developer also "license" 3rd party backend/plugins/software solutions to make their server working. The developer do not have the right to release licensed code/api etc.
meaning, say if a backend have the free learning version of license, the developer are bound to the commercial license, which dictates if they can release code that involve 3rd party code/api.
You don't need to be protected from video game sales, you need to be protected from fraudulent game sales, that's it.
If you want to buy a game that runs on proprietary servers that will shutdown one day, you should be allowed to do that.
The Stop Killing Games concept is not stopping or protecting anyone from buying video games.
... Neither is slapping a warning label onto games that says 'hey you don't own this the way you own a blender.'
That's very strange framing to use.
What SKG does is mandate that your purchased product be technically possible to be usable in perpetuity, or refund the cost of it.
Everyone knows servers cost money to run, so its not reasonable to mandate every game that is totally online only just have servers up forever, maintained by the publisher.
But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day (Games for Windows Live, anyone?) or having a massively online game that could still be enjoyed by dedicated fans, willing to front the cost for one or two servers... but cannot, because reverse engineering network code is orders of magnitude more difficult and costly than the publisher just releasing it to the public when they no longer want to officially maintain it.
SKG would completely allow you to purchase an online game whose official server support would end someday.
It... just augments consumer rights by mandating either a refund at that point, or a pretty effortless and costless release of the server files and configs.
I am really struggling to see how you are interpreting this concept as somehow preventing the purchase of games.
If games have to be playable in perpetuity, then you can't buy a game that isn't playable in perpetuity.
There are lots of video games without forced online DRM, and video games aren't a necessity. You can simply stop buying games from these services and let people who don't care about such things continue to buy them.
That's a ridiculous requirement. If you want to buy games that are playable in perpetuity, buy games that are playable in perpetuity.
People should be allowed to smoke and gamble, too.
I still don't think it's good that they do that, though.
One of the aims of Stop Killing Games, as far as I'm aware, is the preservation of history, which seems like a very odd thing to be indignant about.
It exists partially because many great games, for a long while, before widespread internet access, could not be played if they were no longer directly sold without either paying out the nose for a working, used cart or disc, and console... or via emulation, which is apparently basically illegal, in practice, technically, its complicated, etc.
Then the video game landscape changed with widespread internet access, much more oriented toward what used to be seen as buying a fancy pants board game into well now you're just buying a ticket to a fancy pants board game that can be revoked at any time, and now you just have an expired ticket to a box that is magically superglued shut and will light on fire if you pry it open.
Some of us olds still view software as a product, a good, not a service.
Oh yeah, absolutely. The fact that we own nothing these days is crazy.
So you want to legally require game companies to "preserve history" in perpetuity, unlike every other kind of company in existence?
'
Are there books in libraries? Yes, and the publishers don't have to do a thing. And it is good for society. Similarly, can you fix an old car, even if the manufacturer went bankrupt? Of course you can.
We have precedent, my friend.
To fair to that rather silly commenter, Stopkillinggames puts the onus on the publisher while your examples are based on the individuals or other third parties providing the "fix"
Only if the publisher has taken steps to stop individuals from preserving them through more traditional means.
As in, the publisher has stopped them preserving it otherwise, so now the publisher must make it accessible somehow?
Exactly. If you implement DRM that will make the software unusable if it can't phone home, you should be legally required to have a plan in place for when your servers shut down.
MMO servers get a bit more complicated since they often rely on third-party components that aren't releasable.
There are also video games in libraries, and there are books in libraries with components that are unusable these days. Nobody is required by law to support these components in perpetuity. Nor is any publishing company required by law to maintain support for a book in perpetuity in any way.
Nor is anybody required by law to help you fix your classic car. People with classic cars spend tons of money to find spare parts or even get them manufactured. This is despite the fact that cars are much more of a necessity than video games.
Likewise, if you paid a video game to keep their servers open, or paid them for their source code, they'd give it to you. If you paid a smart person to reverse engineer the network protocol and write an equivalent server, you'd have your part.
I'm sorry, did you not want to play Ocarina of Time in the year of our lord 2046?