Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

That is indeed a case, and potential solutions has been discussed. The main idea is that games that have already been made do not need to comply with this, so they don't need to change anything. Moreover, some videogames have already been released with middleware stripped out of them. From the top of my head: Doom 3, Blietzkrieg. So you can work around that.

> I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game

To my knowledge, you can already do that in most jurisdictions. That's why there are a lot of decompilation projects that started in recent years.

> This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers

The problem is that for games with online components you also require server binaries, which you don't always have access to. So developers would need to provide at least those binaries. So unfortunately even in this case there will be something that developers must do.

> C&C Generals

That's a good example because EA made source code available last year for most C&C games. So people have been improving unofficial versions.

> Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players

SKG itself does not demand anything specific, that's the idea. People who support the initiative do provide some potential options, but I don't think they are forcing it on anyone.

Because you wrote:

> If the opposition simply seeks to silence you, rather than to argue against you, how are they not malicious?

in response to:

> The industry should only be allowed to comment after the laws have been written and fulfill the goals of European citizens.

Where it's clear from your framing of an "opposition trying to silence you" that you think the industry lobby has at least some right to be heard before the council votes on policy. Which is something the statement you are replying to clearly doesn't agree with. And rather than accept that there is a disagreement of the purpose of the council or the acceptability of industry lobbyists influencing law or what not, you just frame it as a moral evil (maliciousness) on the part of the other commenter. A good faith reading of the comment you replied to has so many non-malicious interpretations.

Side note: if your comment implies something hard enough (intentionally or not) that multiple people are "windmill-tilting" against something that you think you aren't saying, it deserves some reflection on whether you may have miscommunicated your point.

SKG and the people signing the petitions aren't legislators, the entire point of this initiative is to actually talk to legislators. It's not their job to propose a hyper-specific law on day 1, it's the job of the legislators to do so. And so far, it has been met with nothing but bad faith attacks on things they have never claimed to want, such as...

> ...the cost of retrofitting games ...

SKG has made it abundantly clear that they don't want any kind of law or legislation to be applied retroactively. There would be absolutely no retrofitting forced on anyone, it would only affect new games released after legislation passes. Similarly to how you didn't have to re-manufacture your old phone model to add a USB-C port into it, you don't have to do anything with your already-released games.

> ... the incredible entitlement from the customerbase

People expect to buy a product and to be able to use it however they'd like, without getting scammed and having it yanked from them down the line? How entitled of them!

> And all that just to apparently be fine with buggy, laggy, borderline playable versions of the game, with worse matchmaking UX.

Again, how is that anyone's problem other than the person who bought the game and is presumably happy to keep playing it? If it has reached EOL, then it's better the game remain playable somehow, regardless of how buggy or bad of an experience it is, than to just fully lose access to it. I'd say no experience is worse than a buggy one.

> I can run very few games that I bought as a child, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or a Windows 98 machine anymore.

You can extremely easily emulate all of these, including on your phone, and hell Windows has native support for many games with their compatibility modes out of the gate, so yes, you could indeed play games from the 90s if you still wanted to. We've still got Doom (1993) being ported to anything that has a transistor in it to this day. In fact, looking over a list of 90s games, pretty much all of them are still playable! Monkey Island (1990!), Wolfenstein 3D ('92), Myst, the OG Warcraft, Quake is still being played competitively to this day, Civ 2, the original Diablo, the list goes on for a while and many of these games have healthy playerbases to this day.

Ever heard of GOG (Good Old Games)? It's in the name, their entire business is predicated on making retro games runnable on modern systems, and oftentimes even improving on them massively by pre-patching community patches and things of that nature.

As a sidenote, looking at lists of old games it's quite depressing how much we've lost in more recent times. I can and do still boot up games from my childhood, and many of them with vibrant & healthy communities to this day, yet there are newer games from a few short years ago that are now completely dead because the devs decided to pull the plug on them. AoE II "Enhanced" Edition doesn't even have LAN functionality without first connecting to their servers! The original game that this is a remaster of you can still play today with literally 0 issues! That is the exact issue with this crap, we're pretending like it's impossible to build games with longevity in mind when we've been doing it for the better part of 2 decades already.