We’ve done nothing and already completely ran out of ideas!
Comment on Th EU iniative for Stop Killing Games has reached the goal of 1 million signatures!!
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I’m glad. But don’t get your hopes up because of this. Commission could (and probably will) just say “we have considered it and we are going to do nothing”.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 3 weeks ago
At least we will have an official position, instead of the legal void we’re currently in.
vorpuni@jlai.lu 3 weeks ago
They are supposed to meet with the seven people who first put the initiative forward. It won’t change their minds if they’re already against the initiative but if they don’t care it may sway them to hear it explained to them. I have zero expectations since EU bureaucrats live in a parallel dimension but there’s some hope something happens.
rumba@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
It’s messy. Making a balanced law around it is sketchy. Consumers deserve to own the games they buy, straight up. Businesses deserve to be able to sell their assets when they fold and have them continue to be worth something so they can live on to make new games and their old games can go to new companies to keep development rolling.
There’s obviously low-hanging fruit. If your game is single-player and you’re just doing an online piracy check, and you go out of business, you leave the check servers running in a trust for like five years with the code to remove the check from escrow. Tick Tock, you either relight the game in time somewhere, or it becomes free to play.
But when you have something like Clash of Clans, where you need battle servers. Those assets are useless once you open that code and 100% support a community-run game. The game could otherwise be passed to another studio, and development could continue. Selling and moving games to other companies and publishers with breaks in the middle happens a lot. How long after a game collapses should they wait for it to become worthless to the market? The obvious answer to the consumer is immediately, because they bought it, they own it. Maybe you have to keep a certain amount of money from the proceeds and use it to refund the users. It still sucks for the you don’t own it anymore concept.
Developers and publishers aren’t fair to consumers without guardrails (and there are none), but those rails should also be reasonable to companies.
If the commission does nothing, it’ll probably be wrapped around this clusterfuck.
I do have a worry that the studios will just stop selling games and everything will go subscription if they are required to provide servers and source on game shutdown. It’ll just push more piracy, less sales, less games and everyone loses.
I really wish companies would just have pride in their stuff and be fair to their users and users could just bear a fair price for good games.
e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
I think the commission will take action in some form. The worst case scenario in my mind is that they will only require clear labelling. Similar to what they did with smart phones recently. While this not exactly what I am hoping for, having “This game will at least be playable until XXXX” on the package or store page would still be a massive improvement over the status quo.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I dont understand how such a broad requirement would work. They just have to pick some arbitrary date, and then after that they can continue as things currently are? Can you give an example of a game where this type of labelling would have helped?
e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
‘The Crew’ by Ubisoft was sold for several months before they decided to shut it down. This would have at least forced them to communicate that before taking peoples money. I am also pretty sure that publishers don’t want to put this information on the package because it could seriously hurt sales. So the effect might be that publishers build the game in a way that enables self-hosting.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
If you are saying they knew it was closing and they sold it for months anyways, that sounds like fraud. Has there been proof ubisoft decided to do this anyways?
Sonicdemon86@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yes if we would have known that Concord only lasted two weeks then those that bought the battle pass wouldn’t have bought them. Know eol timing help consumers.
e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Sony actually issued full refunds to everyone who bought Concord.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
They didnt know it would only last two weeks. They probably knew it was a possibility but I doubt they planned for it.
This is what I mean though, if concord had to say the game would be live for a guaranteed amount of time, why wouldnt they just say something low like 6 months. Why wouldnt every company do that unless they knew for sure it would be successful? Its too risky to choose longer periods of time, and we just have the same situation as now.