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Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures
- AgentMasterRace 3mo agoPirateSoftware must be so giddy right now.
- PowerElectronix 3mo agoLaws were never going to be the solution.
- w4yai 3mo agoThey are too busy passing freedom-stifling laws.
- dopa42365 3mo agoWell, it's a million signatures for something to be brought up, not for something to definitely become law. A decade or so ago I (among millions) signed to abolish daylight saving time. Still waiting for that heh.
- Volundr 3mo agoTrump's said he wants to end it. That's something I'd back him on. I wish he'd sign that executive order and tilt that windmill in the courts instead of the stuff he is pushing. I'd be rooting for him!
- atoav 3mo agoTrump promises a lot of things, while also promising others their polar opposite or flipping 180° once in office. If you'd back a politician with a track record that bad on any promise, that is probably something telling more about you than the politician.
- Volundr 3mo agoI'm not sure what your saying here? Trump lies so you'd rather his energy be spent on ICE raids, ending birthright citizenship, and illegal tarrifs than ending daylight savings? Personally I'd rather the latter but you do you.
- atoav 3mo agoThat is what you're saying. I was very clear.
- Volundr 3mo agoNo, I said exactly the opposite. My exact words: > I wish he'd sign that executive order and tilt that windmill in the courts instead of the stuff he is pushing. You say you were very clear, but I genuinely don't understand what about that you disagree with.
- merpkz 3mo agoAh, the same guy who promised to end wars, that sounds good
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Hamuko 3mo agoThe daylight saving time shit is such a fucking fumble from the EU. We have an instance of direct democracy, we have EU politicians parading around saying “we’re gonna end it” and then absolutely nothing happens. Council points fingers at Commission, Commission points fingers at Council. “It’s their job.” How am I as an EU citizen supposed to be proud of being part of this dysfunctional mess?
- consp 3mo agoIt's easy talking points during elections but requires lengthy legal procedures and thus gets chopped immediately. Politicians gonna be politicians. Better to be talking about the time of day than some other dog whisle.
- kgwxd 3mo agoIt's also been "abolished" many times around the world, then quickly reinstated when kids start dying.
- Nursie 3mo agoNot everywhere. Western Australia has had four referenda on the topic since 1975, each time preceded by a trial period where daylight saving was observed, and every time it has been rejected and the state has switched back to no DST.
- tmtvl 3mo agoGood thing there's actual data so we can find out how many countries observe DST: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_by_countr...>.
- izacus 3mo agoDoes your member state - as an EU citizen - block the process perhaps? The daylight savings process has stopped because your countries can't agree on which timezone they'd like to be in.
- yndoendo 3mo agoI would say lobbyist are continuing their take over of the EU. Copyright law is the excuse but 90's games proves this to be invalidated. None of the games from the 90s and early 2000's required authenticating with a launder. They just worked and this is why those games are still playable to date. Those same games that had multi-player allowed for downloading a self-hosted server. Enemy Territory is a prime example. The game would still be playable even with out ID Software releasing the source code. GOG is built upon legacy games that don't require a launcher. Politicians in the EU have been bought and paid for. President exists and is not being applied.
- nanaboo 3mo ago> Copyright law who cares. you can still pirate if you so choose (at the risk of your data if you do it on the same PC). you pirating is basically taking part in a distribution, the host simply doesn't do it with a company but a nick (digital loophole*). but the distribution happens no less and the license of right-to-use never covered this to begin with. all these cases are digital loopholes: companies being able to shut down servers and forcing people to move on. we need these laws.
- madanparas 3mo agoThe ECI process forces the Commission to respond formally, not to legislate. The Commission said no, which SKG anticipated. They had already secured a legislative call signed by 45 MEPs and are pushing to amend the Digital Fairness Act through Parliament. The headline frames this as a defeat. Finishing the ECI process shifted the venue to Parliament, where SKG says they have majority support.
- bombcar 3mo agoDon't look so smug! I know what you're thinking, but The Commission was merely a setback!
- kuerbel 3mo agoDid you honestly believe I would trust the future to some Commission? Hahahaha… Oh no, no, no, it was merely an instrument, a stepping stone to a much larger plan! It has all led to this…and this time, you will not interfere!
- consp 3mo agoI'm not sure but it sounds like a skirmish to lure out the lobby groups talking points into the wide open by the voice of the EU commission.
- EarlKing 3mo agoIf only those 1.3 million signatories pledged to never buy from a company that Kills Games again...
- f4stjack 3mo agoYes. Exactly. I, for one, am following this credo: If your single player game has an “always online” clause; I am not your customer. No ifs, no buts, no “but i like this franchise”s. Vote with your wallet. Do not hesitate to boycott.
- necovek 3mo agoI'd like to see legislation to require publisher to clearly state if game works offline, and if not, what is the committed, guaranteed operational life ("at least to June 2030" prominently displayed, for instance).
- logged4upvoting 3mo agoI agree, and i think one more thing should be also explicit; save files. Whether the game works offline, and until when the servers are guaranteed, is one part. But the savegames and progression data should also belong to the user. The game is made by the studio, sure, but the save file is the part I construct by playing. It is my time, my choices, my progress, my world state and my memories. So I would add a clear principle that the publisher should not be able to kidnap the user's save data.
- sdenton4 3mo agoBoycotts are the weakest form of protest.
- Carbon1603 3mo agoYet, most people don't do even that much.
- akramachamarei 3mo ago
- hodgehog11 3mo agoAs is stated in the article, but is not clear just from the headline, this was not an unexpected outcome from the initiative. The Commission did not seek discussions with SKG, and spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups. SKG was prepared for this, and their intention has been to join up with the group putting together the new Digital Fairness Act, since the objective there is very similar, but much broader in scope, and most of the groundwork is already there. Much of the earlier recorded Q&A sessions in Parliament had representatives commenting on this already, so it's the natural approach. This way, legislation will almost certainly be put forward and voted on, and the lobby groups will likely have a harder time trying to wrestle with a larger movement and a parliament that seems sympathetic to the cause. Basically, this is a battle lost that never really mattered. The climax of this war is yet to come.
- HDBaseT 3mo ago[flagged]
- TylerE 3mo agoThis is not surprising. The movement has been all about gamer vibes and not technical reality from day one. It should have been rejected, and I'm glad it was.
- spaqin 3mo agoNot sure about the technical reality here - until 2010s, singleplayer games didn't require an Internet connection, and for multiplayer ones you could download a dedicated server application, host it yourself. Only recently it became locked down for the corporate profit; the only party making it hard are the game developers themselves.
- x______________ 3mo agoBecause telemetry and advertising revenues did not plague the online landscape during those times. It has all been standardized since: "click OK to share data with our 13,285 partners", "always-online needed to prove your identity", "we need to force an upgrade of your software so we can ensure you get what's best for you, when we decide" ..oh and all of that after a 159 page legally binding and enforceable agreement that you can't negotiate or reject. Are you sure we don't need all of this? Seems like we'd be going back to the dark ages of information technology if we did.. (/s)
- NooneAtAll3 3mo agomakes me envy of Switzerland's "enough signatures causes referendum which actually does create a new law" system
- Barrin92 3mo agothe Swiss can only propose new constitutional amendments, not statutory laws. And precisely to avoid having what is supposed to be a technical decision into an overly broad popular vote, because those are still supposed to belong into parliamentary debate. Because if people voted on every single regulation you'd be at the ballot box five times a day.
- izacus 3mo agoYou should check out Swiss constitution sometimes to see how true that is :P
- Symbiote 3mo agoProportional to the respective populations, this would have needed roughly four times as many signatures to get to that level in Switzerland.
- NooneAtAll3 3mo agoif so, making that failure more explicit would also be of great help
- phyzix5761 3mo agoSo, mob rule?
- yieldcrv 3mo ago> In its official response on June 16, the Commission said it “cannot propose a legal obligation” requiring publishers to keep games playable after they stop being sold commercially. Control behavior by regulating the intermediary. Figure out what the intermediary publishers rely on is, and regulate the intermediary or transactions to that intermediary This works within any legal system anywhere and just requires a little inspiration at least, I can do it anywhere, so just reach out
- pull_my_finger 3mo agoI'm curious to see if this will embolden game corps to continue mistreating consumers or if they will acknowledge consumers are aware of that ethereal state of their "ownership" of games and start selling more complete products instead of "clients" to servers that can be rug-pulled at any time. I think we all can guess the answer as consumers continue to buy, unfortunately, but this movement is at least a step in the right direction.
- TheTaytay 3mo agoAs written, wouldn’t this result in fewer online games? Maybe dramatically fewer?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- carra 3mo agoAnd would that really be a bad thing?...
- DexesTTP 3mo agoIt would result in fewer online games that stop working altogether when the publisher wants to stop it. All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this. It's really not that complicated. Not "free", of course, but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.
- maccard 3mo agoGame developer here. If it were “just” that easy I’d love to support this. > All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this You’re making a huge assumption here both about the scope of the law, and about how straightforward this is to do. I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would be fine. I’ve also worked on games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic - running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda, and massive third party dependencies. Getting a “mini self hosted server application” out of this is a rewrite. > but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code. The vast majority of games use existing technologies. First line of code was 30 years ago for any unreal game, for example. This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend. What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service? What if playfab discontinue their offering, or AWS decide to remove a service that our “mini self hosted server” relies upon. Games aren’t some magical piece of technology, they’re just software like everything else.
- slopinthebag 3mo ago[flagged]
- modo_mario 3mo agoHow is it forcing people to work?
- slopinthebag 3mo agoWhat happens if someone decides to no longer work managing a server for a game they built?
- modo_mario 3mo agoThen they don't lock their playability behind a goddamn server. Why are boatloads of games with singleplayer content locked behind a launcher anyway?
- Razengan 3mo agoWhen was the last time any law in any of the so-called democracies was influenced by common citizens? Serious question not snark
- nairboon 3mo agoLast weekend in Switzerland.
- Razengan 3mo agoWell that probably doesn't count as a "so-called" :) But almost everywhere else it seems to be just corporations pushing for laws against other corporations, like with Epic/Tinder etc against Apple/Google etc
- throwaway85825 3mo agoFor UK parliament petitions it was 1 in 800. And only because one MP was really against importing shark fins and pushed it themselves as well. Democracy is fake.
- EdiX 3mo agoDays since last being disappointed by the EU: 0
- reedf1 3mo agoFrom the perspective of someone with some experience in consumer advocacy via the EU is that SKG did not do this the right way, or at least the right way right now. The EU expects radical compromise. The right starting point for SKG was to enter talks with games industry lobby groups to discuss possible solutions. If that fails - you will need to be able to prove that it isn't because you were unable to compromise. Your next step is to find individual game developers and publishers who agree with your proposals and can back them at some (hopefully negotiated) level. Any one-sided proposal is a non-starter. The EU will view this this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers.
- eskori 3mo agoCompletely agree with the first point; it would have been great showing a list of supporters from the game industry. Not that I am an expert in this matter, though. However: > The EU will view this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers. How could SKG be an attack on gamedevs? What changes in the life of someone in gamedev if the online game their company has them working on provides a self-hostable server or offline functionality once they finally stop working on it? I guess we could argue that game companies may get less revenue because users will keep playing older games that no longer produce money, and I am not keen on "perpetual games," which could impact the workers of that company... But this is a highly abusive practice. Sure, gambling makes salaries for workers around the world, but that is no excuse to keep perpetuating such an abusive industry. This is no attack; I am genuinely curious, and I might be wrong on everything :)
- drorco 3mo agoIf you're actually curious, to gate a taste of the cost of compliance, I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc. On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want a accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc. so you could tick off a box and have some sort of insurance in case you're being sued. Now you probably don't have a lot of empathy for big corps, but those laws often apply for small businesses as well (why wouldn't they?) and now imagine the struggling indie dev now also having to deal with another legal compliance so they won't lose their house to a legal troll, when they just struggle to get a game out there they have no idea if it's even going to ever be successful.
- dyauspitr 3mo agoIs this cause even worth a movement?
- skotobaza 3mo agoYes, absolutely! I personally want to be able to play games many years after they are released and after they have stopped receiving any support. Yet we see growing number of examples where this is not the case and you get locked out of a game permanently when its publisher decides it no longer wants to support it.
- swiftcoder 3mo agoConsider that basically every live-service game you have ever played will become unplayable sooner or later, and how many modern AAA games are live-service... We can still play the NES version of Mario (1985), but we can't play Evolve (2015), Anthem (2019), Concord (2024), etc.
- dyauspitr 3mo agoYeah, I guess my perspective is along the lines of nothing of value was lost, at least not enough to mobilize people from more pressing causes, but clearly other people think differently.
- systemdev 3mo agoThe fun part about this is that Evolve is fundamentally a P2P game, so it got an offline revival pretty quickly. Anthem would have gotten one much quicker had they not wrapped the game in Denuvo, as it stands that one’s only possible under certain constraints (Linux with new enough AMD cpu/intel cpu, or windows with a hypervisor). Concord was similarly wrapped in an antitamper, but they shipped the majority of the stuff reqd for local play, so that got an offline revival as well.
- jstummbillig 3mo agoWhy would 1.3M signatures be enough to secure EU law? That is entirely unreasonable and undemocratic, given the small section of the entire EU population that number represents. The "despite" certainly creates an interesting expectation, though.
- dlahoda 3mo agoDemocracy is not just majority. But being represented. Basically you said that Belarus is democratic country because 51% percent people voted for today's dictator.
- iLoveOncall 3mo agoThe fact that the dude from Stop Killing Games completely fumbled his speach at the European parliament definitely didn't help their case.
- Farbklex 3mo agoWhich one exactly? I saw one speech and that was decent.
- iLoveOncall 3mo agoThis one: https://youtu.be/oXcogLmxnJw?is=FJpTrhEpez_S6MzK https://youtu.be/oXcogLmxnJw?is=FJpTrhEpez_S6MzK To be fair to him it's more bad coordination or bad prep but it weakened the argument so much in my opinion.
- blitzar 3mo agoI thought regulations were leading to civilization erasure for the EU ... Or is this one of the good ones(tm)
- lofaszvanitt 3mo agoThe premise was flawed from the get go. It should have been when you release a game it should be sound, NO DAY 0 patches, free of bugs that prevent in any way completing the game or cause serious annoyance, a way to have a digitally bought game made offline, and play offline. If it's an online game, then after X years, or before abandonment by the studio release a vm that holds the server code, so the addicts could host their own shit. That's all. But it was fucked from the get go, maybe literally started by a lobbyist. Or simply Ross Scott was simply didn't know what he was doing.
- greenoracle9 3mo agoCalling this a failure seems a bit unfair. The signatures forced an official EU response, even if they did not produce a law. The disappointing part is the voluntary industry code. Publishers are not being asked to run servers forever, only to avoid making paid games completely unusable after shutdown. At what point does buying a game become nothing more than renting access until the publisher changes its mind?
- greatgib 3mo agoI guess that they forgot to put a big "Protect the children" title on top of their proposal to have it accepted blindly.
- Telaneo 3mo agoOnce more, capital is shown to have more power than people.
- 21asdffdsa12 3mo agoAny grown up media industry - is in a eternal battle against the "classics". And games even more, as some of the classics are LEGO sets that have eternal fun build in. Every new band ever has to compete against the beatles.
- kgwxd 3mo ago1.3M signatures to grant government power it shouldn't be granted. It's good that it failed. Stop giving money to proprietary software if you have a problem with the arrangement.
- dlahoda 3mo agonice idea. Like, 1. Let make cocaine legal to sell 2. Say to people 'Stop giving money to drug deallers if you have a problem with the arrangement.'
- skotobaza 3mo ago> to grant government power it shouldn't be granted What power? Power to save games from becoming unplayable on the whim?
- akramachamarei 3mo agoPower to say "that product you are selling is not okay with me! If the customer is willing to buy, it must be because you have deceived him. We cannot trust customers to buy games on their own, they need help from the state to do that!" Shall I go on? CU: I consent. GD: I consent. EU: Isn't there someone you forgot to ask? "Oh, won't someone think of the gamers?"
- skotobaza 3mo agoThe initiative is not about telling which games customers can and cannot buy, it's about customers getting to play a game they paid for without the fear of it becoming bricked after the publisher stops supporting it.
- akramachamarei 3mo agoThis is equivalent to the government making certain kinds of contracts unlawful. It's the same kind of situation as in prostitution and illicit drug markets. The government claims that certain kinds of agreements should simply not be available to customers and sellers. This is not the government's business.
- sscaryterry 3mo agoEvery time I hear lobby, I hear accepted/sanctioned corruption.
- nottorp 3mo agoThe EU is incapable of forcing the Sony assholes to allow region switching of a PSN account between EU countries... do you expect them to do more advanced thinking wrt the gaming market?
- simplyinfinity 3mo agoPirateSoftware predicted this would happen and got death threats, swatted, multiple videos hating on him. Like he is the villain. Lobby groups, politics and copyright law are the issues.
- skotobaza 3mo agoHe also attacked Ross and insulted him multiple times. He wasn't nice about it, in fact he was very aggressive. He also pretended to be someone who he wasn't. He also tried using his influence to stop the movement, which backfired spectacularly.
- _the_inflator 3mo agoI am mixed here. On the one hand there is the decision part from a game publisher, on the other hand the player. Subscription businesses is simply a usage over time. That's the troubling thing here. You don't really own games physically as we did during the 80th and 90th. Update-mania and buggy games were introduced first as consequence of the internet, then came the registration phase and after that the subsciption model. Why am I mixed? Did I keep my machines from back then? The SNES, the i486 etc? What if the hardware has an defect 30 years after? Eternal rights? They are in no way guaranteed, in either reality. I was a semi-pro gamer for some time around 99-01, being in the top 50 of the Age of Empires II: AoK ladder at the legendary ZONE in RM games. I had several smurf accounts leveled up into the ladder, to sneak into games without being tied to my clan and even clans (CN, Myll, ZXK just to name a few). I had to cut ties, because of the impact on my university curriculum. I remember the huge fallout it took on DBD_Jinx who kind of quit the game from one day to another without notice due to - if I remember correctly - being even kicked out of university due to being to heavily involved with the game all day. He was a notorious FLUSHER everywhere and every time which was unimaginable at the time but beat almost everyone being really an excellent executioner and top notch player even in late castle, on water etc. - and this took time and a toll. After AoK I never touched a game with any potential to being addicted. Never. I didn't play Warcraft, which I was a top notch player when it was called Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and came on a CD in 1995, and this lead me to AoK - an online game. People should consider, what they are doing online. A sarcastic colleague once put it this way: People changing bytes on a server in a cloud, wow... He had a point. Games are fun, but not for ever, sadly. I would love to play AoK like back then and while there is the chance now, I still refuse to take part in any online action at all. I took part in a few LAN party games - yes, we brought our laptops and played like it is 1998! But that's it. So I am mixed. Online gaming feeds more and more addiction and that's why I sometimes think: a server that gets shut down is like a cold turkey for some.
- skotobaza 3mo ago> Did I keep my machines from back then? The SNES, the i486 etc? What if the hardware has an defect 30 years after? For this you have options: emulators, FPGAs, fixing the original hardware. So as long as you have your copy of the game, there is a way for you to play it. But with modern games that is not the case anymore. Publisher can decide on a whim that they don't want to support their game and shut down the servers, which renders the whole game unplayable. It even happens with singleplayer games. This is not OK and should not be accepted as the norm.
- nickslaughter02 3mo ago> The Commission’s full communication said a legal obligation to keep games playable, as requested by the initiative, “would not be proportionate.” Making games playable is not proportionate but mass surveillance of private messages is complete fine.
- agrijakhetarpal 3mo agoNo shit Sherlock! Pay your taxes to fund illegal immigration and shut up, little consumer-comrade.
- canthonytucci 3mo agoHow about a “stop buying games” movement where people just don’t buy this live service garbage? It’s all shovelware. It’s all the same crap over and over. There are plenty of non live service games being released every day, buy those instead. If a game is actually important to people they’ll figure out a way to play it (as people did with WoW classic before classic). The idea that we should spend time and energy to regulate the big studios (who will just find loopholes anyway) instead of just supporting the indies who are making good stuff is wild to me.
- rafterydj 3mo agoThe classic SKG example is The Crew. Where is the indie recreation of the Continental USA to drive around? Indie games are great, but let's not act like art is fungible. I don't like the idea of "they will just find loopholes anyway", that seems defeatist. "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas." I wish people started thinking of good regulation as a technical problem as much as it is a social one.
- brokensegue 3mo agoEU tried to ban tracking cookies. Anyone could've seen the result coming (every site now disrupts your reading). The defeatist attitude would've been right there. I don't see how games won't just charge you a $0.01 "subscription" that lasts 5 years or various other such sidesteps. it'll just make everything more annoying.
- mvdtnz 3mo agoI'll keep buying whatever games seem fun to me. I rarely play a game more than a year or two, they become stale and boring to me. I genuinely, genuinely do not care if the game stops working in 12 years time. Could not possibly care less.
- skotobaza 3mo ago> I genuinely, genuinely do not care if the game stops working in 12 years time That's very grim... I'm on the completely different side, majority of games I've been playing recently are fairly old.
- stainablesteel 3mo agothe attempted takeover of the gaming industry has been the biggest blowback to western political establishments everywhere video games would normally distract people who would otherwise remain politically inactive when these establishments attempt to insert their propaganda and control mechanisms into these industries, it infuriates millions of people who just want to be left alone
- AdmiralAsshat 3mo ago> The Commission’s full communication said a legal obligation to keep games playable, as requested by the initiative, “would not be proportionate.” It cited concerns about intellectual property rights, confidential business information, publisher costs, and potential cybersecurity or safety risks once games are no longer supported. Nice job regurgitating point-for-point all of the talking points that the publishers spoon-fed you.
- butz 3mo agoGovernment should just release legislation, that games that require additional upkeep should provide "Best before" date. That should make customers carefully consider their purchase up front, and instead of buying latest and greatest AAA title, purchase a few 10 year old indie games.
- akramachamarei 3mo agoSo much noise, so few principles. Whatever happened to don't buy if you don't like it? Read contracts before you agree to them? This whole discussion is kind of ridiculous. Gaming is not a matter of health or wellness. We don't need a nanny chaperoning videogame purchases.
- systemdev 3mo agoI’m so skeptical of the “making it work offline is too hard” argument, I’ve personally RE’d dozens of these titles with no source access, often with anti tamper, and succeeded. Very few titles are genuinely unpreservable to some extent. For example, the VAST majority of Unreal Engine games are trivially preservable unless the developers have taken steps to strip server code, and even when devs do take those steps “reading between the ifdefs” isn’t the worst thing in the world.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- skotobaza 3mo agoIt's very hard to reverse engineer something you don't have access to, i.e. server code. Sure, some of it is fairly simple, so it can be done, but when a lot of game logic is happening on the server and you don't have the server binary, then it becomes a step up in difficulty.
- robalni 3mo agoIt might be a good thing that companies kill games, actually. I want Non-free Software to suck as much as possible to give people more reasons to use Free/Open-source Software, which can't be killed.
- glimshe 3mo agoI applaud the rejection. People who care about this should simply stop buying games that require server components instead of pricing out people who don't (like my kid). As someone who does care about it, I stopped buying these games myself and went 100% local indie and retro games.