Dead Game News: Response from the European Commission

Comments

• Kissaki@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  … any text form?

  source

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This is a summary from @Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world:

    TL;DW:

    • Patrick Breyer and Niklas Nienaß submitted questions to the European Commission on the topic of killing games (the latter in contact with Ross and two EU based lawyers).
    • EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.
    • EULA are probably unfair due to imbalance of rights and obligations between the parties.
    • Such terminations should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis (preferably by countries rather than EU).
    • Existing laws don’t seem to cover this issue.
    • Campaign in France seems to be gaining some traction. Case went to “the highest level where most commercial disputes submitted to DGCCRF never go”.
    • UK petition was suppose to get a revised response after the initial one was found lacking. Due to upcoming elections all petitions were closed and it might have to be resubmitted.
    • Also in UK, there’s a plan to report games killed in the last few years to the Competition and Markets Authority starting in August (CMA will get some additional power by then apparently).
    • No real news from Germany, Canada or Brazil.
    • Australian petition is over and waiting for a reply. Ross also hired a law firm to represent the issue.

    This is a simplified version of simplified version.

    source

    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.

      I think I’d have a category for both.

      You can’t call an SNES cartridge a service, but similarly, you can’t call, oh, an online strip poker service a good.

      I suspect that most good-games have at least some characteristics of a service (like patches) and most service-games have at least some characteristics of a good (like software that could be frozen in place).

      I think that the actual problem is vendors unnecessarily converting good-games into service-games, as that gives them a route to get leverage relative to the consumer. Like, I can sell a game and then down the line start data-mining players or something. I think that whatever policy countries ultimately adopt should be aimed at discouraging that.

      source
    • Kissaki@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Thank you

      source
• HawlSera@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Personally I feel like service games have an obligation to provide offline functionality ala Mega Man X Dive Offline.

  source