Stop Killing Games
After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'
With all the Terms of Service, you rarely actually "own" a piece of software. If all the "Buy" buttons were replaced with "Lease License" buttons - would that really change everything..? everyone would suddenly stop complaining？ I doubt it
B/c the core issue is people/consumers feel entitled to relive childhood experiences. But just like you don't have some inaliable right to go see Terminator in theaters because you did it once as a kid. I don't see why you have a right to emulate and replay a game. You don't own a right to enjoy other people's work. If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right. They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.
I think it's easier to think of the mortality when it's not a big mega corporation and think of it as a singular person's creation and you as a passive consumer asserting your rights to what they made and how they should share it
The secondary issue of "owned" and "leased" being not clearly labeled.. I think is an issue. You should know a priori what you're getting in to - and at the moment it's really unclear at times (ex the washing machine example)
the core issue is people/consumers feel entitled to relive childhood experiencesYou don't own a right to enjoy other people's work
If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right
I do, absolutely, think I am entitled to this. Why not? Do you really think it is a good thing that people can make something valuable, share it with people in a way they find moving, and then destroy it? Do you think it's a good thing when people burn books?
I feel like you are appealing to the way things are ("it's their right") and not thinking at all about how things should be. Why should it be their right? What if we changed the laws so that they didn't have that right? That doesn't mean obliterating intellectual property, it just means that for this fake pseudo-property we change the already-artificial rules very slightly to make society better. Why not?
What if we changed the laws so that they didn't have that right?
I think it doesn't solve anything ultimately. It just makes things worse and more inconvenient. For instance piracy just made everything a SaaS where the code isn't even accessible and is on a server behind an API. If everyone can own and copy games, then business models will just shift to where nobody ever sells games and everyone just has to stream through some online service. Everyone will lose out
Published works are different: you released it, why? People publish art precisely so that it can be enjoyed by others. Your argument as stated seems to naively imply that if I write a book and decide later I'm embarrassed by it, I should be able to remotely destroy all the copies. That's probably an unfair reading and not what you meant, but there is nothing in your argument that rules it out.
Sharing a creative work is a reciprocal act. The consumer (who usually pays for it, by the way) gets pleasure in enjoying the work, and the creator gets pleasure from their reputation and from feeling like they made something important. It is normal and healthy for both sides of that interaction to feel like they are a holistic part of the work. Why do you think so many people form communities around the kind of art they like? Bands are nothing if they have no fans, artists are nothing if they have no following.
To just dismiss this as a nameless/faceless consumer is honestly not even offensive, I just don't believe you.
But
It is normal and healthy for both sides of that interaction to feel like they are a holistic part of the work.
This is just a bit ridiculous ... You person is creating and investing effort in to it and one is not. And the creator should dictate the terms under which he wishes to share his work.
To follow your musical example. If a musican wants to do a performance once and not leave a record, why should he not?
The audience isn't "part of the work" and thereby granted rights to a copy or to listen to it later
About the specific moral question you pose:
If a musican wants to do a performance once and not leave a record, why should he not?
Reversing the question is obviously, "If I want to record a performance I went to see, why should I not?". But I think this is easy to just answer directly. It is very hard to portray the musician who wants to prevent recording here sympathetically. Of course we can't appeal to the usual reasoning (that they're recording it themselves, and want to sell the recording) since you say they don't want it recorded at all. Maybe they want to sell an album, and they're playing the album in the show, and they want to keep recordings of those songs artificially scarce. So let's limit to the case where I record it for my personal use, and I'm not allowed to share it. Or I can sell the recording for the same price as the album, and I have to give it to the musician. What harm is there left for it to do?
The only remaining thing I can say as the musician is "I don't like it and I created the music so you can't have it". Sorry to say this, but this is the logic of a playground bully. Comparing the harm ("I don't like it and I will throw a tantrum if you record me") with the potential benefit ("I get to remember and relive this concert for the rest of my life") it is just a no-brainer to me.
"If I want to record a performance I went to see, why should I not?"
Because that's the agreement you go into when you see the performance. Same with a purchase of a game with a particular license. If you don't agree to the creators terms, you're free to not partake. But you can't in effect just say, "I don't like your terms, I'm going to do what I please with your work"
You're dictating that you either have to give it out entirely (to everyone? sort of?) or not at all. I think this is just violating people's innate right to direct their labor/work/efforts in a way that they wish. To me it feels fundamentally sort of dehumanizing
In the end, as I illustrate in some of the other comments, I think it fundamentally doesn't really solve anything and leads to people just contorting themselves further to regain control (using DRM and SaaS'ing their software) Mario in 20 years will probably just be streamed from a server and you'll never have access to the code in any form at all
As for copyright.. simplistically I think it makes sense to control your work while you're alive and not control it once you die (the whole idea of children controlling their parent's legacy is kinda gross to me). But that's not a real workeable solution for a variety of reasons. The current system seems ok. I have no strong opinions...
If you don't agree to the creators terms, you're free to not partake.
What I am trying to get you to understand is that I am also free to petition for the laws to change.
You're dictating that you either have to give it out entirely (to everyone? sort of?) or not at all.
I am dictating that you have to release it under terms that are fair or not at all. I'm not saying anything about giving it away. For example if somebody sold an album under the condition that they can take it away from me for any reason with no compensation, I think that's unfair, and the police should stop them from doing it. Writing something into a contract does not magically make it acceptable behaviour!
I think it fundamentally doesn't really solve anything
You haven't actually said why, the only argument you've given is a kind of defeatist "legal changes never achieve anything". That's historically wrong. Stop Killing Games is actually not asking for very much at all, it's not like they're forcing all (any) games to release their source code. It's much more likely that if the law passed they would just come up with a sunset plan.
historical figures burning their unfinished works before their deathunfinished
Do you not see the difference between this and what is being discussed?
No one is saying that game studios have to release everything they are working on as open source from the moment they start writing code. They are saying that once a game is published and sold on the market, it needs to remain usable for as long as the actual hardware to run it is usable.
If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right. They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.
This is the thing people should learn to accept - and take on the responsibility to refuse to engage with cultural performances that are artificially gatekept.
I did buy a number of films/series on Amazon, but the moment Jeff decides to pull the rug, I will absolutely pirate them without the slightest feeling of guilt. I don't play video games, so thankfully I'm not at the mercy of those particular sharks. But when it comes to buying ebooks on Amazon, I removed the DRM on every single one of them when I bought them. Since Amazon has moved to stop download via USB, I've simply stopped buying any drm-infested ebooks from them. I'll buy them off kobo or I'll simply not have them at all.
People need to vote with their wallet.
But you're still engaging by pirating and going against their terms. Jeff spent a ton of money making the TV show. He chooses who gets to see it and in what way. I'm not going to shed a tear for Jeff, but I find this sort of weaksauce to then pirate it..
How about if the license is fine, but you don't like their price? Is it okay then too?
This is the thing people should learn to acceptPeople need to vote with their wallet.
Seriously: why? If you think this practice is wrong, and you wouldn't participate in it, and you think voting with your wallet isn't utterly futile (i.e. it would cause some companies to change their behaviour) then why is individual, atomised action the only legitimate one? Why is it not legitimate to make a change in the law, as a collective?
Now if however you bought a physical copy of "The Crew", which is a racing game with a nice single player mode, you can't play that game anymore today. Just because the publisher decided it's time to pull the plug, and no one who bought a copy of this game gets to enjoy it any longer in any form whatsoever. This piece of art is destroyed now, please move along, and don't forget to "buy" one of our other games that will probably be available for a couple more years until we pull the plug again thank you very much.
Game publishers are destroying works of art, stopkillinggames wants to preserve these works of art, and personally I'm on the side of people who want to preserve art.
And of course you can rent a movie theater to watch that movie if you like.
In the UK at least, not that exact one on that disc, because you may own the disc but not the rights (a loicence if you will!) for public display of the content.
They even changed the law in 2016 to make it apply to venues that don't charge admission (e.g. staff rooms): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-sectio...
Whether a movie theater with only you sitting in it counts as "public" sounds like an open question (in the government's own words "What amounts to a public space is a question of fact and only a court can make definitive pronouncements about this"), but I suspect the theatre wouldn't be keen on chancing it.
But just like you don't have some inaliable right to go see Terminator in theaters because you did it once as a kid. I don't see why you have a right to emulate and replay a game.
What? You do have the right to set up a theater and watch Terminator in it. And you can even use the old DVD and an old DVD player to do it. There's no law against that.
There shouldn't be a law against letting you play a game on whatever hardware can play it, provided you have the physical game available to you
This doesn't really solve anything . It just ends up promoting SaaS. Where you never own the game at all and don't have access to any part of it. You only rent access to a server where the software resides and runs (ex Google's failed game streaming service)
Also known as "please pay attention when kickstarter says this is a crowdfunding system and not a preorder system".
I think the bulk of this is kind of a silly semantic argument"After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'"
With all the Terms of Service, you rarely actually "own" a piece of software. If all the "Buy" buttons were replaced with "Lease License" buttons - would everyone suddenly stop complain？ I doubt it
That's not what the campaign is pushing for, the campaign is pushing for not allowing such things in the terms of service in the first place, within reason. The simplest way we can explain it is if you're paying for a subscription (i.e. MMOs) then the current behavior is fine. If you're paying a one-time fee for a game that depends on server somewhere to even play the game, then the publishers would be required to make end-of-life plans so the server isn't required to continue playing, even if in a limited state. I.e. all the single player games that require online connections because publishers are pushing for single-player microtransactions now.
The campaign aims to stop publishers from adding unnecessary dependencies that can shut down the games. This would stop for example publishers from killing a game when releasing a sequel to the same game, forcing users to repurchase what is essentially the same game. The Crew is a good example of this (and what started the campaign in the first place), other examples are sports games and other games like CoD that get yearly releases and services for older versions get killed arbitrarily.
They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.
The law and society decides that, game publishers want to of course control things end-to-end and rent-seek instead of sell, because having an eternal source of revenue is much more profitable for them, those have been established by the rest of society to be predatory. No consumer should be happy that adobe does subscriptions only, no consumer should be happy that apple controls their ecosystem end-to-end to the point that they get a cut of all monetary transactions in their system. Gamers already see similar behavior with Sony and Nintendo on the hardware side, and EA, Warner, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. are pushing things further on the software side. This campaign is meant to be a push-back from such behavior. There used to be a time where charging money for horse armor was a scandal, we'll never go back to those times, but most gamers agree that gaming has gone too far in nickel-and-diming the consumer, so this a pushback to at least not have publishers kill games because of their greed.
The law already restricts software sales in many ways, there's many cases of mass-refunds because software is sold with deceptive practices, or when they do anti-competitive shit like forced bundling or market dominance abuse.
1. I'm not going with Amazon, I live in France so I chose a french cloud provider. Laws are a bit different here.
2. I believe whatever could happen to my data, I'll see it coming and have time to move it all.
3. It's dirt cheap, and doesn't require me to manage my own storage.
I'll see it coming and have time to move it all.
Thanks for the laughs.
Also, you would probably gain by (re)reading the guidelines of this website. You could have kept your "laughs" to yourself.
fashionable in America
Missed.
but this is getting ridiculous
Thinking what you would have any time if something goes wrong eg company bankruptcy, accounting error, being locked out or outright deleted because some anti-fraud triggered something - is what is really ridiculous. No amount of fancy, different laws would help if your data gone the way of Dodo.
you would probably gain by (re)reading the guidelines of this website
Do you understand what this exactly what you should do yourself?
One thing I would suggest is using local encryption of anything you store in AWS. Plausible deniability is useful for all parties involved.
Of course it's more complex, like how often that data changes and costs of backups vs subscription price. But I find any argument for cloud products etching towards a "you'll own nothing and be happy" economy.
Also, I hope to still be alive when I hand them the keys to my (non AWS) S3 account. I doubt they'd enjoy those games more at 60 than at, like, 15.
How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
Excluding power outages that are out of my control, during which I couldn't do any work anyway, I've had practically zero downtime of my homelab services in the many years I've been running them. Even the dozen hard drives in my NAS with several years of power on time have given me zero issues. I know that I've been lucky, and according to SnapRAID the probability of one failing in the next year is 82%, but so far I haven't had a failure yet. Even when it does happen, I'm fairly confident that the interruption will be minimal and my data will be safe.
All this is to say that running and managing services yourself doesn't require much effort at all, assuming that you're technically inclined and enjoy tinkering. The idea that cloud services are inherently more robust is a myth.
Most service interruptions happen because of two reasons: large scale distributed systems are very difficult to run and maintain, and the constant churn of large engineering teams introduces many operational risks. Essentially, it's all due to complexities of scale. These are not problems that a machine in a closet serving a few users will ever have, especially if you're smart about choosing simple and robust technology.
How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
Nobody cares about the 9s. If Amazon wants to they can render the service inoperable legally, over time. Fortunately, S3 is semi-standardized so it’s ”migratable” in a real sense.
The real issue is getting locked out of your account for any arbitrary reason. This happens a lot with big tech and it can be impossible to get help by a human. That’s what scares me the most but more so with Google than Amazon (at the moment).
How many 9s are you getting in your closet at home?
Far, far better than my residential internet connection, that's for sure.
Of course, I have offsite backup of important stuff in case of fire.
That said, ease of use is likely a lot better with S3 for those who don't like to tinker or have a box sit and hum.
I "obtain" a DRM-free copy of every game I own and put them in a private S3 for posterity
What do you do for games that don't have "DRM-free copies", such as Denuvo games, or the increasingly large number of online-only singleplayer games?
I bought a Bosch 500 series because our old one broke, and we needed one quick.
Slightly OT (or maybe not) older dishwashers are usually not very hard to fix (depending on the problem). My dishwasher is over ten years old. The pump broke: I replaced it. It was easy and cheap (EUR 60).
It wasn't even the pump that was broken, just the heating resistance attached to it that had fried. You can replace only the resistor if you're skilled enough to reattach a new one. I couldn't: removing the old one was easy, but I couldn't put it back in place so I bought a whole pump instead.
Likewise, my laundry machine is over 15 years old. I just replaced the carbon brushes: they last for something like 10 years and cost less than EUR 10 a pair.
I don't think I will buy a new machine any time soon, or if I have to, it will be a used one.
Then suddenly we got into this throw away garbage culture at the slightest sign something stops working.
The only way back is rebooting the system, or having governments step in.
Replacing instead of repairing really is mostly a cultural thing.
1) Getting a technician out to identify the fault
2) Order the required replacement part and wait for it to be shipped
3) Getting the technician out again to actually fix the fault
The technician needs to be sufficiently skilled, wants vacations and sick days. We can somewhat trade-off utilisation vs. travel time, but I would be shocked if we can get a single turn out to be reliable below an hour. Even if we are optimistic and calculate with 100 bucks / hour this means the cheapest possible replacement is 200 bucks. That means it's _strictly_ cheaper to immediately throw everything below 200 away. And for everything more expensive we still need to beat opportunity costs and failed-to-actually-fix-the-problem fixes.
If you do these calculations in earnest I'd be shocked if _economically_ it's worth to repair anything below 500 bucks.
You won't even need to pull the oven out, chances are you can unscrew it right there from within.
£20 replacement coil for 10 minutes of work, or pay for a whole new oven?
(The retailer assured us over the phone that they could not repair it, but had great discounts on new ovens...)
After reading it, I was parsing why I don't return it, and remembered that the other options in our area had their own problems. But now I'm wanting to reconsider.
What happens?
If the company fails to do this, they are effectively committing theft, and should be punished accordingly by the law. If studio execs think this it's an unreasonable thing to do, then they're free to not release their games to the public and keep their proprietary services to themselves.
I'm afraid if this is pushed through, the studios will just switch all online experiences to be fully subscription based. No more purchasing the game, you just pay for a month of the experience.
And there's already software to emulate Steam's matchmaking because it's so common.
Or are you saying that the directors of the company would be criminally liable in this situation?
Well, yes. As in any case of any decisions that result in violation of the law by companies.
And some games have online components. Do I expect, for example, Bungie's multiplayer servers to stay up until the end of time? No.
neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
Why do you think that?
Multiple questions are about online-only games.
For existing video games, it's possible that some being sold cannot have an "end of life" plan as they were created with necessary software that the publisher doesn't have permission to redistribute. Games like these would need to be either retired or grandfathered in before new law went into effect. For the European Citizens' Initiative in particular, even if passed, its effects would not be retroactive. So while it may not be possible to prevent some existing games from being destroyed, if the law were to change, future games could be designed with "end of life" plans and stop this trend.
Alternatively they can use proprietary technology in the backend without permission to redistribute, so long as it is replaced before support is ended.
Categorisation, maybe like even how cigarettes are sold, with big warnings and steam made to add a filter that doesn’t show games with no eol support will go a long way in the market coming up with solutions than just legislation forcing creators to make games in one way.
1 do not sell such a game, use a subscription
2 If you sell a online game you need to release the a server, not the source code but binarties, yes I know it is more work, but also lazy people were complaining that adding the mandatory "Unsubscribe" button in email is too much work or even impossible but they eventually do it and nobody dares today to defend that this rule was bad
3 make your game/software work offline, this entire thing was started because a greedy company killed a game that also had a single player mode. So if I bought Minecraft to play mostly single player I will be super pissed if Microsoft kills it because they were really special bastards that decided to force the Microsoft login to let me play the game. When they will abandon the game they need to make a final update and disable the online requirement.
4 The game will not be sold but will be "rended for N years", the customer knows what to expect and the developer is forced to keep the game working for N years from last purchase or refund the users. So if you launch soem AAA battle royale shit and it fails you refund your customers if you don't wana keep the servers running.
5 if all above is too much work then do not sell in EU or whatever USA state is demanding that you will not brick your sold software or hardware when you stop your servers because reasons.
I think best is to buy a game from these platforms, and as a permanent backup, download a pirated copy of that game.
Steam has had a long life and will probably be here for very long from now but only for a limited time.
I'm sure Gabe and Valve as a whole have been pressured countless times to provide stronger DRM and guarantees to game publishers, and it's legitimately incredible they haven't bent. But I fear Valve is one leadership change away from devolving into what we see all over the industry - another shitty company treating their own customers like adversaries.
When does software become a videogame?
Frankly I think this whole "movement" is kinda dumb and deeply misguided.
What's dumb is that now businesses can infinitely sit on a piece of real estate they no longer use, at no cost to them. If that was real estate not IP they would at least have to pay property tax on it.
It's kind of curious that businesses don't pay property taxes on IP, like at all. That might have really improved the ecosystem.
– it’s intended for entertainment
– it isn’t intended for productive use.
In practise, publishers must get an age rating or stores can’t have the game on the floor and may only sell it to adults, so it’s kind of up to the publisher. You could probably just tie a preservation responsibility to that.
But really, all software should be preserved, so the distinction is kind of pointless anyway.
It's actually relaxing to just drive around with different cars into the sunset, turn the radio on and occasionally overrun some pedestrians.
I knew I can't be the only one finding it relaxing, yet the anxiety before starting the game if I can play it or not because of yet another update is really a downturn.
I own these games, but I still use the repacked games instead just because they allow me to actually play it fully offline
The community stepped up and started running their own servers. Eventually the game client proper was also rewritten (by one of the guys who would go on to create Kazaa and Skype).
I don't think anyone expects companies to keep servers running for free forever. But if a community steps up, the IP holders should let it.
I holeheartedly agree with it. I used to have a Netflix subscription until about 3 years ago. Then, the quantity and quality of content got so bad, I’ve reverted back to a trusty radarr + sonarr + BitTorrent solution.
Not only it’s faster to have it all hosted locally, but I also don’t go through mindless binge watching as the only content available is that I’ve previously willingly tag it for download.
Now, the only content I pay is when I go to the cinema sometimes when a movie really seems worth it.
You can have your own moral compass. But most people who pirated games didn't do that out of spite. They didn't do that to protest against game-as-a-service or microtransaction or whatever "unethical" practices that the industry adopted.
That aside it's surprising to hear about the features-behind-an-app behaviour from Bosch, they've normally been a trusted name in appliances for a long time and it seems even that is no longer going to be true.
But I honestly just don't care about video games. If a game company pisses me off, I'm just gonna not play it, and opt for one of the thousands of other games that came out this year. This is needless regulation, and will probably be counterproductive to your interests in the long run.
Not only that, this is such a small problem in the grand scale of things, that I don't know why we're giving it breath. Law makers have far more important things to concern themselves with. This feels like a South Park parody of hand-wringing nerds crying about video games because they have nothing else worthwhile in their life.
Platforms can encourage games which have a clear sunset plan over those that don’t. Eventually the market should come up with viable solutions rather than a law made by untrained people over what and how software should be created.
Of course, the logical minds here will want to tear it apart and analyze it from every direction, but don't forget that it still needs to be "transformed" into an actual non-vague version.
Part of me worries it'll get transformed into some onerous GDPR-style law that just adds a new annoying banner when you install a game that warns you that you accept whatever end of life plan the game has, which no one will read...
Contrary to popular belief, the EU organs are able to learn. About half a year ago, I read statements of members which, if one would translate the political jargon, would amount to: “We haven’t foreseen such a blatant misuse of the law. These banners should never have happened and we would not have dreamed that corporations would shift the burden to the user. We are, in fact, quite furious about the whole thing.”
I am unsure of how your mental model of ‘error correction’ is working without starting at the point of recognising an error in the first place - just deliberately ignoring for a moment whatever you emotionally might attach to it.
I would say the just checked the fist step with bravery by openly admitting the mistake.