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Stop Destroying Videogames – European Citizens' Initiative

citizens-initiative.europa.eu

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Re: Stop Destroying Videogames – European Citizens' Initiative

#121

Post by johnnyanmac »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #29
nerdjon wrote: post #17

We had a similar discussion about this before and I feel like this is an incredibly simplistic view of the situation. How many games actually only phone home and have been rendered unplayable for that reason? I am struggling to find any examples of this happening, but I am sure there are a few. Unless I am missing it, I don't even see an example listed here. If the game relies on servers for data, online play, or oth…

> If the game relies on servers for data, online play, or other things that is a completely different beast. That isn't just, "oh it was rendered unplayable". No it was an online game and the servers were shut down. It sucks but thats the nature of moving away from p2p online games. A non-exhaustive list of games I have operated servers for: Freelancer, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2, Counterstrike, Space Engineers, Mi…

> Build games to be used after servers are decommissioned, or don't built games.

sounds rather dramatic no? Just don't play badly managed games. If others want to be grifted, a fool and their money...

Re: Stop Destroying Videogames – European Citizens' Initiative

#122

Post by eesmith »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #110
eesmith wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, then consider implied warranty laws. If you buy an item and it breaks, there are laws concerning the implied warranty of merchantability, and the implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. The government might require that certain classes of products, like a washing machine, or laptop, work for at least a given period of time. If it fails, it must be fixed or replaced. This is a legal mandate for the…

here's the difference, if a game shuts down in 6 months clearly no one cares. If a game shuts down in 6 years (past most typical warranties), clearly you got more than enough enjoyment out of it. Digital warranties don't make much sense since popularity is generally proportional to lifetime. If it was a good game it wouldn't shut down quick enough for people to complain.

My point isn't that this a "digital warranty", but to 1) provide another example of how the government has placed mandates on businesses (beyond "life saving medical devices or polluting the planet with toxic chemicals") , and 2) highlight a mandate which has clearly not been "fatal" for small businesses.

For a third example, consider right-to-repair laws which mandate that a company must provide usable manuals and parts at a reasonable cost.

The lifetime of the game depends on profitability to the company, which is only somewhat correlated with popularity. Companies even stop products which are profitable, but not profitable enough.

When does the timer start? Minecraft has been around for well over 6 years, yet it gets new players every year.

Re: Stop Destroying Videogames – European Citizens' Initiative

#123

Post by dns_snek »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #118
dns_snek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People on this site repeat this meme every time there's an EU initiative to protect personal freedoms or consumer rights. It hasn't happened so far, but I'm sure you'll be right one day and we'll all be collectively begging for mega-corporations' forgiveness. Any entity that doesn't want to abide by these rules would be a good riddance anyway and it would give room for customer-respecting alternatives to flourish. Th…

>Any entity that doesn't want to abide by these rules would be a good riddance anyway how would that be different from you simply choosing not to play the game as a personal choice? Why get the government involved?

Good question.

1. Because at its core, this is about personal property rights that we already (used to) have. When we "bought" something, we owned it and it couldn't legally be taken away from us. With digital media these rights have been eroded and laws have been slow to catch up. We're just asking for existing consumer protection laws and personal property rights to be adapted and/or enforced for digital products.

2. The idea of a free market relies on consumers having perfect information about the product at the time of purchase. If one product page said "Buy", and the other one said "Rent for 3 months or more, at our discretion", then consumers could make an informed decision.

Right now both product pages are allowed to say "Buy", and so the predatory business practices are financially rewarded rather than being treated as fraud.

The only time a digital product (or any other internet-dependent product) should be allowed to use the word "Buy" is when all of its features would remain functional even if the company behind it and all of their servers ceased to exist. For multiplayer games that would mean having the option to self-host a server. For other media that would mean a downloadable, DRM-free copy.

3. Since this practice is profitable, we can expect it to be adopted by an ever-growing number of companies. That's capitalism and we need laws to protect consumers from predatory business practices.

4. At the time of purchase, you don't know whether you're going to get screwed later down the line, so eventually, the only real choices are going to be to avoid the entire sector, or piracy. That's a problem for both sides.

Re: Stop Destroying Videogames – European Citizens' Initiative

#124

Post by rimunroe »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #110
eesmith wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, then consider implied warranty laws. If you buy an item and it breaks, there are laws concerning the implied warranty of merchantability, and the implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. The government might require that certain classes of products, like a washing machine, or laptop, work for at least a given period of time. If it fails, it must be fixed or replaced. This is a legal mandate for the…

here's the difference, if a game shuts down in 6 months clearly no one cares. If a game shuts down in 6 years (past most typical warranties), clearly you got more than enough enjoyment out of it. Digital warranties don't make much sense since popularity is generally proportional to lifetime. If it was a good game it wouldn't shut down quick enough for people to complain.

> here's the difference, if a game shuts down in 6 months clearly no one cares.

Plenty of games come out, don't do well overall and then get shutdown despite a loyal fanbase. Just because something didn't meet its sales forecast doesn't mean the people who bought it don't want to play it. A game being popular doesn't mean it's a good game, and a game being unpopular doesn't mean it's a bad game.

> If a game shuts down in 6 years (past most typical warranties), clearly you got more than enough enjoyment out of it.

First: that's not a given. Plenty of people buy games well past the launch date. If I buy a game five years, eleven months, and two weeks after launch and the auth servers are shut down two weeks later should I lose access to it?

> Digital warranties don't make much sense since popularity is generally proportional to lifetime. If it was a good game it wouldn't shut down quick enough for people to complain.

Studios close, and companies don't make decisions based on what's popular, they do it based on what makes them money. A game might have a long tail where people keep playing and buying it but substantial numbers of new customers aren't coming in anymore.

Re: Stop Destroying Videogames – European Citizens' Initiative

#125

Post by rimunroe »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #111
chrisknyfe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with things like this is that companies expect to sell a product to me and then steal it back from me without compensating me.

you were compensated with months or years of usage. You bought a license not the IP.

> You bought a license not the IP.

The entirety of this debate is whether companies should be allowed to treat game sales that way. Most people don't see buying a game like an artist licensing their song to a TV show. They see it like buying a toy.

Re: Stop Destroying Videogames – European Citizens' Initiative

#126

Post by rimunroe »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #113
horsawlarway wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's fairly well established concept that there is a doctrine of sale, and that the purchaser gains rights to the item in exchange for the sale price - notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. Publishers are playing with fire by trying to undermine that doctrine for digital goods. So if your question is in good faith (and I very much doubt it is...) then at least this has a long history of es…

Thing is you don't have a physical product, you have a license to run this software or acces this server. There is no "item" to own. It's like asking to own a spot in an amusement park. you pay for the experience, not the literal land or coasters or slides.

> Thing is you don't have a physical product, you have a license to run this software or acces this server. There is no "item" to own. It's like asking to own a spot in an amusement park. you pay for the experience, not the literal land or coasters or slides.

Again, this is the literal thing that's being debated. Companies are currently allowed to treat game sales as such and this group is arguing the law should stop them from doing so.

Re: Stop Destroying Videogames – European Citizens' Initiative

#127

Post by rimunroe »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #114
rimunroe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do I really need explain why the majority thinking something is good does not make it good? Look-up tyranny of the majority. No, of course not, but if you look at what I wrote you'll note that I did not say that. Majority is obviously a terrible way to decide what's morally/ethically right. Within a democratic system though, it is the way we decide what rights to grant people. > I am always biased in favor of peopl…

>Within a democratic system though, it is the way we decide what rights to grant people. or take rights from people, which seems to be in vouge as of late. I simply think this is a foolish direction. Preservation is important but you can't mandate entertainment to keep servers up and running. If this focused on actual single player cases there may be a point here, but I feel trying to fit in cases like WoW is just as…

> Preservation is important but you can't mandate entertainment to keep servers up and running.

Yes and that would indeed be an unrealistic thing to mandate, which is why this proposal doesn't do that. It requires companies make a "reasonable" effort to make the game continue to be playable afterward.

> And to recognize my bias: I have also been in enough gamer circles to know that any talk of preservation is just wolf whistles for enabling piracy.

We must run in very different circles. I care deeply about game preservation and haven't pirated a game in many many years.

Elsewhere in this conversation it sounded like you were implying that games which get shut down aren't worth much anymore anyway. I don't agree with this reasoning at all, but wouldn't that imply piracy wouldn't matter as much? I guess you might be giving people free alternatives at that point, but historically that hasn't had an effect on things like record sales.

> I lot of people don't actually care about ownership (look at how they praise gamepass, a system that will actually end games ownership as we know it), they care about getting games they like for free.

I'm not denying that what you're saying is true for a large number of people, but it's also false for a large number of people too. If you look at the comments on a gaming site you'll find plenty of people saying things like Game Pass are terrible because they don't give you access to games permanently.

Re: Stop Destroying Videogames – European Citizens' Initiative

#128

Post by rimunroe »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #115
triceratops wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property ownership has been a right for quite a while now, actually.

we don't buy property when we buy a multiplayer game. Not unless you are fine going back to couch co-op.

> we don't buy property when we buy a multiplayer game. Not unless you are fine going back to couch co-op.

Again, you're taking as a given one of the things which some people want to change. Why shouldn't the developers of the newest matchmaking-based shooter be required to release the binary for a dedicated server when they shut the game down? Obviously this won't be feasible for some games, but I can imagine plenty of games where it seems like it should be reasonable to factor it into development costs.

Re: Stop Destroying Videogames – European Citizens' Initiative

#129

Post by mey »

It is worth reading up on this at https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ and Ross Scott has a recent video about this Initiative going up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkMe9MxxZiI He needs to get more credit in the media as the central lightning rod, organizer and driver of this work.

Re: Stop Destroying Videogames – European Citizens' Initiative

#130

Post by wtetzner »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #111
chrisknyfe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with things like this is that companies expect to sell a product to me and then steal it back from me without compensating me.

you were compensated with months or years of usage. You bought a license not the IP.

That's a rental, not a purchase. If nothing else, companies should be forced to use correct terminology.
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