Comment on It's finally up! Please sign it if you're in the UK :) Petition: Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state.

<- View Parent
frog@beehaw.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

“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.

source
Sort:hotnewtop