So…here’s the thing, folks: What you’re REALLY going to have to do is stop buying live service video games.
If I understand this, it is a petition to get the EU government to look into maybe thinking about making some laws to…do something about live service games becoming unplayable when the servers shut down. Okay, here’s how that’s going to go: “We looked into it and decided not to do anything.”
Has anyone tried…not buying the damn games in the first place? If you pay for these games knowing that the soulless reptilian cloacal slits that run the AAA industry can just shut down servers whenever they want, YOU are the problem.
Sure. I remember when Id Software released Doom as open source. They had just released Quake II earlier that month, Doom was old news and not really a money maker for the company, so they opened the source code to let the community play with it. That was a cool thing to do, it should be done more often.
I would say yeah, you should build a game in such a way that it can be played once its abandoned. The greed vampires who are actually in charge won’t let a law like that be passed. Or if it is, they’ll ignore it.
Doom, Build Engine games, Marathon. I can still play those games, but even if Bungie faux-Marathon ever comes out, I wouldn’t be able to play it after a few years. One of the biggest turnoffs to these As-A-Service games is time limited events. I don’t want to feel nostalgic for something and not be able to replay it. Between the discussions on Hell Divers II events and the Sony fuckary, I’m glad I passed. Fuck, I remember my hype for Hawken dying when I saw it was going to be f2p.
I strongly dislike the end-around that these “live service” games are trying to do around copyright law. I’m a strong proponent of the idea that intellectual property law is a compromise. You get some time to make your money on your idea, then it becomes the heritage of all mankind. Treating games as a service is an attempt to weasel out of their end of the bargain.
If the population at large is too stupid to make healthy video game purchasing decisions, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for protections to come from the representatives they elected.
I can see a stack of ways that this isn’t going to work:
The government looks at the petition and says "No we’re not going to consider that."
The government says "We’ve considered that and decided to do nothing."
The government pulls an EU and the solution they come up with is to make every video game published everywhere in the world force the user to agree to the EULA every time the game launches, prompting a slew of “EULA auto-accept” mods to work around the annoying thing you now have to constantly click.
The government puts in a law that’s written decently. The industry, particularly those parts based outside the EU such as Japan and North America, ignore it, and shut down servers when they damn well please.
But let’s indulge in the fantasy that democracy works for a minute and Stop Killing Games becomes a law that works perfectly as intended. The publishers will find some other way to be shifty greedy fuckpukes. Case in point: Live service games just shutting down their servers whenever they want is 100% legal right now. The government currently is not protecting consumers. It never truly will. The shadiness of business will always outrun government protection, 100% of the time.
I still maintain, if you continue to pay for live service games, you’re the problem.
protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist
Nanny State BS. If someone runs a private server, it’s their responsibility to moderate it.
and would leave rights holders liable.
No it wouldn’t.
In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only
Unreal Tournament games are online or multiplayer only games. Even though Epic shut down the master servers, you can modify the .ini file to redirect to a community server. “Online-only” translates to predatory monetization models.
No No. NO! All of this is bullshit. Its not how any of this will work. Its all misinterpreted on purpose and then used as propaganda against the inititive because companies ARE afraid of it. They know this has the power to stop their predatory business practices. Moderation is the hosters responsibility so if anything, private servers would make it cheaper for companies to make games. This is also NOT RETROACTIVE as any other such regulation. Companies will only have to comply with future games. Having to remove proprietary network components from the server so they can release it at end of life IS A GOOD THING. It also makes development MORE ACCESSIBLE for small developers as everyone will have to use more open infrastrucuture. And at last this only affects the end of life of games which means it DOES NOT touch live service games DURING their life and only changes their last stage in their life cycle. For fucks sake this is getting annoying but i take this as a good thing because these stupid multi-national corpos are finally feeling the pressure.
videogameseurope.eu
Najstarsze