This basically boils down to “read the terms & conditions”, which isn’t unreasonable.
If a game states in its terms that access may be revoked at any time and you buy the game, then you have no reason to be surprised when access is eventually revoked.
Obviously when terms aren’t clear enough or intentionally obfuscated, that’s indeed an issue for legislation to act upon.
For digital copies, they could bury this into the EULA and make it a requirement that you agree to it before you make your purchase (IIRC some storefronts do this already).
However for physical copies I suppose there could be a case made if the duration of support was not disclosed at the time of purchase (or it was not printed somewhere on the outside of the packaging).
Exactly, because as we all know - all consumers are all experts in all the products that they use and so deserve no protection from scheming producers.
I didn’t say they deserve no protection at all. You are twisting my words because my opinion doesn’t align with yours.
I advocate for games having a clear indicator for any online dependencies. I do not advocate for outlawing said dependencies or mandating “offline patches”.
If you are clearly told that you’re buying an ephemeral product and you are still surprised when it shuts down, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Yeah it’d be tricky. I would rather see a law that requires companies to keep their games accessible for X years minimum from release, which also affects online services.
I’m not in the UK, but it’s incredibly hard for me to make an informed purchase as someone who cares about this stuff. My latest strategy is to use the PC Gaming Wiki, because I can’t even rely on store pages on GOG or Steam to paint a full or accurate picture of what I’m buying. Often times I need to hope the developer responds to particular Steam forum posts.
There’s one issuse: Not everybody has the capacity to interpret the lengthy legal document. While being reasonable, when was your last time sit down and have a good read of the EULA and other related documents? These documents are designed to be difficult to read, and often intertwined with legal concepts that most don’t understand. That’s why lawyers exist.
Then the next question is: should a product a consumer bought (not lease) be completely dysfunctional after a undefined period of time? Is the petition asking for the servers operate indefinitely regardless of revenue? No. The petition is asking to not make the game completely unusable after a server shut down because of an always online DRM or something alike. The online part can go away and we can all enjoy the offline campaign like 10 years down the road. I don’t think this is a request unreasonable to make.
Your interpretation of such action’s legality is valid, but legal is just the minimum bar of ethical, and seems like there is a need to raise the bar.
When reaching out to politicians, a MUCH better angle might be devices that get the same treatment, and then just make sure video games and other software get included.
Example: Fitbit and other purpose-built devices. A TON of functionality goes down when they shutter their servers. To the point where some devices immediately become e-waste.
These companies are literally producing toxic garbage.
As if this comes as a surprise in any capacity. Governments are the biggest criminals out so why wouldn’t they back up other thieves so long as they’re also worth millions already.
That said, this reads as though they truly think the protections that are already in place are good enough. It’s the standard governing body problem of being at least a decade behind, they still live in a world where things can’t just be unplugged by someone not inside your house.
Stop buying games from studios that pull this kind of shit. I get that some industries are run by monopolies and need government regulations since nobody can choose to support the better companies (because there are none), but gaming isn’t one of them. There are hundreds of independent studios that make games as a passion. Stop buying $90 Aways Online, Loot box, Battle Pass, Day 1 DLC, popular IP games with $50 million dollar budgets funded by investors. If people stopped buying these they’d stop being made.
I don’t disagree but aside for The Crew (at a time before Ubi crafted a reputation as a bunch of scumlords) I haven’t bought one yet the market is still littered with them. I used to be one of those people who would preach from the gospel of Jim Fucking Sterling Son and just like the original, I’ve only watched things get predictably worse.
Unfortunately this as a suggestion doesn’t fix the problem of games that are being stolen now, only the ones you don’t buy in the future, assuming things don’t get even worse. It’ll only get worse before it gets better. Voting with your wallet is a fix for the future and only if people aren’t short-sighted morons (something you should absolutely never bank on) but we need a fix for the past.
It read to me that they do think that but also that it needs policing better and companies need to be more up front when selling the game to stay compliant and that ones that do not, need investigating
A: An increasing number of videogames are designed to rely on a server the publisher controls in order for the game to function. This acts as a lifeline to the game. When the publisher decides to turn this off, it is essentially cutting off life support to the game, making it completely inoperable to all customers. Companies that do this often intentionally prevent people from ‘repairing’ the game also by withholding vital components. When this happens, the game is ‘destroyed’, as no one can ever operate it again.
No, it’s unreasonable to expect the servers to stay online forever. Instead, they should be required to hand the keys over to the community if they stop providing the online service.
Cool, that’s great, but that’s also kinda the point.
Live service games suck because you can’t depend on being able to play them. This is trying to fix that. So you (or anyone else) can play these games offline—eventually. Once they shut down the servers, customers should still be able to access their purchases. This campaign is trying to force companies to design around releasing a patch to strip out the online portion/online DRM or face significant financial consequences.
Moreso, I like to be able to have control of the game. If I play a game with my friends that I like, I don’t want the game to be changed into something else (live service) so I can’t come back and play the version we once did.
A requirement to leave a game in a “working state when support ends” doesn’t mean continuing support (ie, running the server). It means the game should still work when the server is gone, which means either fully offline play, or a means for players to run their own servers. That’s the whole point of this campaign, which is taking place across multiple countries.
“Release the source code” isn’t going to be considered a reasonable thing to ask a government to legislate on. “Make sure the game can still be played after support ends”, which in practice means patching it so it doesn’t require an internet connection to servers that no longer exist and/or allowing players to self-host their own servers, is far more likely to succeed. It’s a reasonable request that someone who has bought something should be able to continue using it for as long as they want, no matter what happens to the company that sold it to them.
It’s a request that stands a decent chance of success if a politician can be made to understand what the problem is, because it is an easy extension of existing consumer rights law. Requiring game studios to hand over their source code to gamers would be considered excessive and unreasonable, and is therefore much more likely to be denied outright.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. For the majority of gamers, the changes proposed would be more than sufficient, so that’s a good reason to push for it even if it isn’t what an open source idealist would want.
I wouldn’t require source code, no. I would just consider that one acceptable form of allowing the game to continue being playable. However, it requires intervention from the user, so it wouldn’t be accepted under this proposal.
Under the proposed rule, a company would not avoid penalty by releasing the source code.
Of course they wouldn’t, and they shouldn’t. Releasing the source code doesn’t absolve them of a responsibility to make sure the game is actually working when they end support. “We fucked over all our players, but here’s the source code so someone else can fix it for nothing” would be a really shitty thing to do and they shouldn’t avoid penalty for fucking over the majority of their players (and the unpaid people who will have to fix it for them).
On the other hand “we patched the game so it’ll continue to work for everyone who bought it” benefits most players, and “we patched the game so it’ll continue to work for everyone who bought it, AND here’s the source code so others can expand/modify it if they feel so inclined” would satisfy everybody. It just shouldn’t be a legal requirement.
Also keep in mind that in the UK system, if a petition reaches its 100,000 signature minimum in order to be considered for debate in parliament, that’s only the beginning of the process. It doesn’t just get put into law exactly as the petitioner words it. It goes through multiple debate stages, where the MPs consider all the options, and then the law gets written - and then it usually gets amended a few times. So I would expect that if this petition did lead to a change in the law, the resulting legislation would have considered multiple options for what “leaving the game in a working state” would look like. A surprisingly large amount of UK legislation on this kind of stuff sort of goes “this is what we want, but companies have freedom to choose how they will implement it”.
Should have waited until after the election later on in the year as, all being well, we’ll have a new government. This shower of shit we have in right now won’t do f’all for the average person that’s against business interests.
I thought about this too, but then I checked the end date of the petition. It’s in October, as petitions have to run for 6 months in order to give them enough time to get to the 100,000 signatures. So by the time this petition ends, and then rises to the top of the list of petitions to be debated, we’ll definitely have a new government. 😉
Is it possible to spoof the website into thinking you are in UK? I just signed using a Google searched UK Postcode and after an email verification it counted my signature. If this works people from everywhere should be on this!
if it’s a 100% online game what to do? They would be forced by law to keep servers online in perpetuity? The workaround could be to create a shell company that would bankrupt the day they want to discontinue the game and turn off the servers
They would not even need to open source the servers. Just making the server available for users to run (even under a proprietary license) would be enough.
Or a patch to strip out the online portion. If developers know they’ll need to create that patch eventually, then they can design the game around it. Offline/LAN play/local servers were the norm until ubiquitous high-speed internet.
There’s no technical reason why Diablo 4 needs to be online only. It was a design decision made for DRM and microtransactions. D2 still works great and has thousands of active players.
100% online games in the past were perfectly playable even after developers / publishers ended support. Online only games dying is a relatively recent invention. This petition is asking for consumer protection to return to the norm where a purchaser of an online game always has the choice of being able to play it in some fashion.
A game developer could do this by releasing a server application. They could even do this at the barest minimum by releasing documentation describing how the server ought to work, to allow for reverse engineering.
The Stop Killing Games campaign as a whole isn’t asking for perpetual server access, just to ensure that games stay in some sort of playable state.
Ah, it’s active! I saw this a few weeks ago when the petition had been created but was being reviewed by the petitions team. Been waiting for it to be open for signatures, so thanks for the reminder. I have signed it.
I don’t expect the government to do much about it, though. I’ve signed a number of these petitions over the years and the government response is always very non-committal. They can get more traction when an MP can be inspired to care, so if anyone has a youngish MP who might actually be capable of understanding what the problem is, it could be worth writing a letter to them directly (regardless of what party they’re in - a 35 year old Tory MP isn’t a complete write-off and may be more sympathetic than you’d expect.)
That said… could be the kind of thing the next government could be pushed to act on. We’ll likely have a cash-strapped Labour government that’ll be looking for stuff they can do to make things better for normal people which also don’t cost the government any money, and this is a simple adjustment to consumer rights that would achieve that.
petition.parliament.uk
Aktywne