Probably true! There is likely some additional revenue that the publisher gets from running servers, even for single-player mode. The question then is what will change in these games if that revenue is no longer there to fund them? Will the quality be lower? Will the price be higher? Will the publishers release new games less frequently? Maybe they just don’t make single-player games anymore?
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.
I don't care how smart you are, how much self control you have, whatever, in the face of billions of dollars, voting with your wallet does not stand a chance. The house always wins.
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
Almost every time I have spent more than $35 on a game in the past year I have wound up regretting it. It seems as though the quality of games typically increases til that point (exceptions exist, Terraria) and then declines sharply (again, exceptions exist). It has turned out to be a useful signal to be way more careful about a purchase for me.
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.
Someone at Microsoft should go to jail for this.
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.
Just keeping the games playable is a singular issue and in the noise. It's a good issue to single out for regulation.
> But it's true.
It's not - you're talking about something else entirely. When @umvi says "vote with your wallet" they mean buy things whose values you support. You, and GP @thrance, are not describing that - you're describing people buying things on autopilot without respect to values - the exact opposite. So, no, we haven't had decades of "unsuccessful voting with your wallet" because consumers have been mentally checked out for decades.
> So "voting with wallet" doesn't really work, because you will be outvoted by majority of people who don't know what they're getting into
That's literally how normal democracy works - if the majority of the populace is uninformed, then they'll vote in an uninformed way, and the solution is for them to get informed and start doing research and making conscious decisions. That's what @umvi means when they say "vote with your wallet." - active participation instead of passive existence.
You're confusing the lack of active participation with the presence of it.
>You're confusing the lack of active participation with the presence of it.
Probably.
>you're describing people buying things on autopilot without respect to values
That is probably where I am confused - I'm not sure that people "do not respect the values". It's either that they have values, but those values are imposed, or it's what you describe, that people just don't think deeply about it. And from my personal experience I really can't tell. But when I read the web, everyone apparently figured it out, and do indeed consciously decide.
If that's truly what you mean by "vote with your wallet", then yeah, we're on the same page. I almost only play solo games, most of them indie.
Factually incorrect. There are numerous instances of consumers complaining, leaving bad reviews on Steam, refunding games, or stopping buying games because of their values, and the studios/producers actually changed the thing. Helldivers 2's mandatory PSN account is one of the most recent instances of that happening.
Factually, consumers will band together to take collective action, and when they do, there are positive effects. The problem is apathy, not lack of power.
> We need regulations, isolated individuals have no power against a system built to extract the most out of them
This is literally self-contradictory. If individuals can't "vote with their wallets" to achieve change (which, as I described above, empirically does happen), then individuals in a democracy also can't vote to enact their will on the system - and those regulators are appointed by those elected representatives.
Make up your mind - does voting work, or does it not?
Nice way to make publishers stop making multiplayer services available to the EU in the first place because deactivating it is illegal when costs outweigh profits.
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.
People do not appreciate quite what a narrow path has to be walked by games from an IP standpoint. Code libraries, licensed property, per platform (and platform category) restrictions, general IP restrictions (not showing vehicles being damaged, or UI overlays on certain parts of licensed objects) and so on. This is why in the recent ROG Ally announcement Microsoft could not say all XBox games will run on it, because if it's a PC it's not a console, so various games will not be allowed to be sold on it as those contributing IP rights will have been split up separately.
Simply pretending these very real concerns don't exist is nonsense land. You want games with real vehicles or licensed music? This is what you have to deal with. At least these days they have learned to license music for longer than used to be the case.
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 choice for licensors was to have the music in the game and available on the cd or not.
For a modern release, DRM music tracks that only play in the game is an option.
We've also learned that the licenses are (or were) often time limited... The publisher can't make new copies after some time, without getting a new license for the audio. Sometimes that's also related to a different format.
Which is just to say, if there's money to be made then businesses will do so within the regulatory framework.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not really if it means that I wouldn't be able to play the game in 10 or 20 years.
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.
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.
I think that approaching the problem from the perspective of a physical product, like a smart lightbulb that doesn't work anymore because the manufacturer shut down its servers, would be easier for non-technical people to understand and would likely have a better chance of success.
They don't want games that last forever, they want to pressure you into constantly buying the next big thing.
Its why Neverwinter Nights had extensive modding, local hosted server, and more....
But Baldurs Gate 3 doesn't.
NWN will still be playable in 10 years. BG3 likely won't be, or significant reductions in game quality will take place.
https://www.ign.com/articles/wizards-of-the-coast-not-to-bla...
EDIT: Updated Link. It seems they've added free patches and won't be working on BG4.
The official Larian BG3 Discord server is promoting a mod competition, and they're still adding content, bug fixes, and new features to the game as well.
https://baldursgate3.game/news/the-final-patch-new-subclasse...
So it looks like they've released free content update and after this is is going to be hot fixes?
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?
We currently exist in a two tier global economy where some countries are required to follow a strict set of laws, and others basically make their own. To be clear, I am saying that Russia and China do not care at all about piracy and IP theft and so on.
As you increase the rules that Western companies must follow, you run the risk that some day your only options will be non-Western companies, and that may or may not be a good thing. This is what has happened with manufacturing, and it was good for a while until it wasn't. It still is quite good in some pockets though, like batteries and solar.
Ross from Accursed Farms said this in a video FAQ on youtube:
" Would this initiative affect subscription games? Well, that's another question that depends on what the EU says. Personally, I think it's very unlikely because that doesn't fit well with other existing consumer laws. I think the only way you could even make that argument would be that this is necessary for preservation and most governments don't seem to care about that at all. However, I don't think this is a huge loss, since only a handful of games operate that way today. So if we can give up those but then save 99% of other games, I'm willing to make that bargain. "
so it seems like they actually are suggesting that they'd like for (a law that came out of) SKG to apply to subscription games but there's an understanding that it probably won't.
Content subscriptions like Netflix are different because you are not paying face value for one title. The better analogy here would be the game streaming services like XBox online. It’s clear you are not doing anything like “buying a game”, it’s the whole point of the business model. As you say, it would be a lot harder to make these laws apply there (but I bet that wouldn’t stop the EU from trying).
I think any legislation on this subject would have to reckon with the second-order effects; on the margin you’d be adding pressure for publishers to move to pure subscription services, if these laws don’t apply in those cases.
What we should be doing is applying the laws that already exist: when I purchase a physical book I own a copy of it and can sell it, lend it, modify it.
Amazon and the publishers have zero say in the matter.
Buying a digital copy should be no different. I more of this stupid “you bought a license to access a copy” crap.
All Xbox games around 2004 were physical CDs. Many had online services attached to them. Eventually, those servers were turned off. You can still play LAN and singleplayer. You still have your access to the physical bytes on the disk (though there is copy protection).
What should companies be required to do regarding the servers?
Also, Netflix is a weird comparison here. That seems like it should be an online-only service, they're not selling the actual movies to you. It's one of the situations where the model actually makes sense, unlike single-player video games.
Actually not Netflix as they just offer a monthly subscription and not individual sales, but _YES_ by all means if I "purchase" (not rent!) a book or movie on Amazon (or anyone else), I'd like that, thank you.
All you will end up with, in the best case scenario that isn't even guaranteed to happen, is extremely mediocre games for which you will have the server executable along with the client.
Whether you like it or not, thanks to piracy and competition (and yes I've heard Gabe Newell's quote on piracy), server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy, and not even just for games. And no, "just release your source code then" is not a valid rule to enforce either.
If you like video games so much but don't like the terms of serivce and price, have you tried making your own? It has never been easier to do so, and there are freely usable code and art assets on hundreds of different platforms for you to attempt.
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.
All you will achieve with this initiative is that that will be clearly labeled now, instead of implied.
What I do fear however, is that they will go a step further, requiring companies to release server builds, client and server sourde code, and then of course the ultimate dream, "well no you actually can't turn it off, we require you to maintain it forever even if it loses you money because gaming is a right".
you did not read the initiative. they do not mention any of that and explicitly state that this won't be required (even if they wanted because of copyright laws).
Do not be surprised when they go from something harmless to something punitive that forces small companies out of business.
untested legal ground in the EU
>All you will achieve with this initiative is that that will be clearly labeled now, instead of implied.
maybe or maybe not. creator of the infinitive has already acknowledged that its possible but still preferable to a surprise rug pull grey area.
Will we also require the same of the smart fridge companies? Will we also require the same of companies that don't sell live services, such as toilets?
And no, there's no expectation of source code. That's been covered many times.
That's a strange stance. Even if that was your position SKG has a good opportunity to act as a stepping stone towards something grander.
Put yourself in the shoes of an employee or owner of some business. Would you enjoy being forced to follow certain rules of actual consequence, while others are allowed to do whatever they want?
It is a legitimate business strategy... for now.
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.
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.
Both games available offline and DRM-free.
So your point is that you need to fuck your paying customers in order to mildly annoy people who don't buy your games?
Besides, the proposal doesn't even require you not to have anti-piracy servers; it only requires you to avoid bricking the game once you turn of the servers.
> simply let consumers reward such companies with their money?
For that you would need to be upfront about it.
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.
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.
Is any other industry different? Are Instagram and Tiktok literally not brainwashing hundreds of millions of people? Do defense companies care that innocents are murdered with their weapons? Do airplane companies face any enforceable moral judgment that they encourage relatively rich people to engage in idle leisure in other countries rather than being productive with their time for society, to which they owe some level of production in exchange for the society that raised them?
The argument knows no bounds. It is a matter of taste.
Given that you work for the video game industry, perhaps your comment is in a sense perfect.
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.
Re mediocre, ok that's fine.
Re the "how", then we arent really talking about anything here. Until there is a how, there is nothing to firmly agree or disagree with, so we have to talk in hypotheticals, which we are, and which is semi valuable.
Re making your own, when a company sells you a toilet and it breaks, you fix it yourself or buy a new one. When your 1999 game doesnt run on Windows 11, you fix it yourself or you buy a new one. If you require companies to fix it for you, the small ones will go bankrupt and the big ones will find a loophole.
you mean the loop hole that was industry standard before 2000 and a handful of dudes in basements solved?
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?
My opinion is that you, as a consumer, should reward the companies who treat you best with your money. You should not require the government to do it for you, because if you do, the thing you end up with might not be the thing you receive, sadly.
And yes, this logic holds for most industries, but not all. I for one think there should be stringent rules for food processing, since that can actually kill you, and yet still putrid beef and tainted baby formula are sold on a relatively frequent basis.
If so, are you comfortable telling artists what types of art they can create? I know not everyone is going to agree with me here but it feels like a slippery slope.
Is this entirely the fault of the customer, or is it that the studios have largely forced this model upon customers, leaving them with little choice?
It's much more like "I paid for something, there should be a law so no one can take what I've paid for"
There isn't a scenario where, at scale, someone can offer a product that respects consumer rights and is successful, because it's too profitable to not respect consumer rights just like it wasn't in many other cases.
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.
Games designed for limited play, however, are designed that way for the sake of profit churn.
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.
> This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union [...] to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.
The concern that I have is that I have no idea what the actual text of the law is going to be.
You can look at laws like the DMCA, that had a reasonable purpose (made adjustments to the copyright system for the age of the internet) and a royally screwed up implementation that basically everyone can find a problem with.
It's easy to imagine that the laws that pass could be (1) completely neutered by corruption in the EU leading to regulatory capture (2) far too strong and written in a way that imposes unfair burdens on developers (which include indie devs too) or (3) bad just because of technical incompetence of the authors.
I know that there's not much I can do about those things, but that may explain the emotional reactions of some people like e.g. PirateSoftware - nobody actually knows what the resulting law will be like, and everyone familiar with the legislative system knows how bad the outputs can be.
No, it's absolutely not. You're reading your own thoughts into it. Nowhere is the implication that we should do nothing.
> All these concerns apply to every piece of legislation that gets concocted. What makes this topic especially effected by one’s distrust in the government’s ability?
Because the authors are asking for public support for an initiative, and it now has a lot of public attention, with some specific people (mostly PirateSoftware) that are also publicly opposing it, and likely many more lurkers that don't want to sign it because of their concerns.
It's also the case that the more technical the topic, the more that legislators tend to screw it up, likely because of technical incompetence.
I'm elaborating the concerns so that they can get addressed. If you want more signatures, then you'd want to know what peoples' hangups are so that you can fix them.
The hang ups can’t simply be nihilistic complaints about the government’s abilities without any solutions proposed. That’s an argument for doing nothing
Yes, that's one of the ways to address this. Active consumer participation is still necessary, though, as the consumer protection group can still lose its way.
> The hang ups can’t simply be nihilistic complaints about the government’s abilities without any solutions proposed. That’s an argument for doing nothing
No, it's factually not. If I order soup from a restaurant, and it arrives and is terrible and I complain, I do not have to specify what the chef did wrong, or how they should fix it, for my complaint to be valid - and the fact that I'm not providing the solution does not mean that I think nothing should be done. Similarly, I don't have to point out what the solution has to be for my complaint to be valid, and that does not mean that I think nothing should be done. That's just insane.
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.
This is almost always the case, actually. Regulation and compliance are taxes on the productivity of an organization. And the "shape" of the tax is mostly flat - the burden is sublinear in the size of the organization, so the relative effects on smaller companies are bigger. And smaller companies already have significantly less available resources, and especially less legal resources (no lawyers on retainer), to handle it.
Obviously that doesn't mean that regulation shouldn't be passed, just that you have to write it very, very carefully - think embedded systems rather than web frontend - minimizing complexity and aggressively red-teaming it for loopholes and edge-cases.
The man behind Stop Killing Games has made it perfectly clear that they do not want to force game developers to continue operating servers. Rather, as you suggest, releasing server binaries would be acceptable. Although a mere "localhost" server would likely not be sufficient, because (if I interpret your suggestion correctly) it takes away the multiplayer funtionality of the game. I think it would be reasonable to require developers to release online multiplayer capable server binaries.
Not a game dev but would there be concerns about forcing devs to ship binaries for a codebase that was previously purely SaaS and proprietary, and likely containing logic that is a reusable for future games? The edge cases here seem a little gnarly. (Maybe it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, how much competitive advantage comes from the MMO server code? I gather it can be tricky to do some things well like AoC pushing high player counts.)
They might not even need to release server binaries, even. I would think releasing documentation on how the network commication runs, and adding a box to enter a server IP into the client at EOL would be sufficient. The community, if enough people care, would then be empowered to write their own server implementation without needing the reverse engineering step.
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?
Baseless, fallacious emotional manipulation in substitute for being able to apply useful criticism.
> 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.
This is exactly the kind of thinking that leads to more corruption and regulatory capture. You are literally enabling that kind of behavior by advocating that we should just push ahead without addressing my concerns.
The correct thing to do is for the Stop Killing Games initiative to be more concrete and specify what features of the laws they want implemented to reduce latitude for the EU to screw things up. That's the outcome I'm hoping for - not that the SKG initiative doesn't pass.
> you're against it because you have no idea what it'll look like
I never said that. Perhaps you should read comments more carefully before responding to them.
> 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?
If you don't know that citizens have more leverage than just voting yes or no, I'm afraid you won't be able to comprehend the answer.
I find it really frustrating how they phrase things because there is so much BS in almost one sentence. The entire point of having a private server is so that they are no longer in control of these things.
Moreover if I am running a private server:
- It isn't their responsibility to secure players data.
- it isn't their responsibility to remove illegal content.
- it isn't their responsibility to remove "unsafe" (whatever that means) community content.
So how could they be 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.
This is pretty much disingenuous argument that "PirateSoftware" was pushing. They are pretending that a single player mode would need to be created. This isn't what is being requested.
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.
The biggest competitor to the video game industry is movies (Netflix, Disney plus, etc) and past games.
Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today? If players can play thousands of high quality games for free, why bother paying for a new game?
I suppose the book industry has the same problem, maybe there are some parallels to study from that.
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.
But they aren’t good for consumers.
You would think the very idea of years of your work being rendered unplayable in an instant would be enough incentive to signal boost any effort against this industry practice.
Instead, developer discourse has revolved around just how hard it would be to do what this is petition is asking for. You are an engineer for crying out loud. If you solved a problem but a new constraint arrives in the form of a law, you figure out how to solve the problem under the new constraint. Just because something is hard, doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
It's almost like flexing your skills and signalling your elite knowledge is more important to people than simply defending what's right.
The idea that a publisher can sell a live service game and shut it down in 1 month with no legal repercussions is ridiculous to me.
benoau•3h ago