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Stop Killing Games – European Citizens' Initiative

stopkillinggames.com

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Re: Stop Killing Games – European Citizens' Initiative

#61

Post by throwaway48476 »

maccard wrote: post #51
Sakos wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perverse incentives from a very small subset of users This is to the benefit of everybody now and in the future. It doesn't matter if only an insignificant fraction of people recognize the importance.

The perverse incentives are people who cheat in multiplayer games. Like it or not, multiplayer games live and breathe on how well they handle this problem. A single cheater in a BR game can ruin the game for 100 people.

Cheating is a social signaling problem disguised as a technical problem.

Re: Stop Killing Games – European Citizens' Initiative

#62

Post by mpalmer »

tokai wrote: post #50
NekkoDroid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you stop thinking about games as just entertainment but also as an art form you realize that a lot of art has already been lost to time. It's shit to regret down the line when you could have just prevented the loss of art at an earlier point in time. As much as I don't play a lot of AAA games due to how they either play or monetize, it is important to me to preserve them for future times considering I still play…

Not all art needs to be preserved. Everything will be lost eventually, and efforts should be withheld for the worthwhile. People that don't work with preservation usually have a kneejerk feeling that we have to save everything for all time, but it is not feasable nor is it commendable.

> Everything will be lost eventually, and efforts should be withheld for the worthwhile

If art was preserved solely on the basis of whether its contemporaries thought it was worthwhile, we'd be in real trouble.

Re: Stop Killing Games – European Citizens' Initiative

#64

Post by throwaway48476 »

maccard wrote: post #52
user_7832 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, is there an option to buy and download Figma's software? AFAIK it's only an online server you connect to, right?

Unsure. So if a company only offered game streaming they would be exempt from this?

Xbox yes, stadia no. Depends whether the expiration date is communicated at time of transaction.

Re: Stop Killing Games – European Citizens' Initiative

#65

Post by throwaway48476 »

cchi_co wrote: post #60
Yeul wrote: post #18

As I understand it copyright on a videogame is 50 years but the vast majority of games- or all entertainment really- stops making money after a few years. It gets worse if your game has licensed music in it! I think piracy is the best method of preservation because it's removed from a financial incentive. Publishers just aren't going to spend a dime if it doesn't make a buck.

Piracy undermines the creators' rights still. And I think that a legal framework should do its job

Creators were never supposed to have indefinite rights. Copyright has an expiration date to balance fhe rights of the public and author.

Re: Stop Killing Games – European Citizens' Initiative

#66

Post by diggan »

Moru wrote: post #48
worble wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think piracy is the best method of preservation because it's removed from a financial incentive. The problem is that piracy doesn't help for always online "games as a service" games where the game is killed after the server has shut down. You can't pirate the server because it was never available, and outside of being lucky enough that a few hackers dedicate a lot of spare time to reverse engineering it, that gam…

If you look on the thing you sign when getting a steam account, you don't actually own any of the games. Just like the MMO's, you cant play them when steam or producer decides to shut them down.

> you cant play them when steam or producer decides to shut them down.

Doesn't Steam actually let people keep a game in their Steam library even if the publisher takes down the store page for the game?

Re: Stop Killing Games – European Citizens' Initiative

#67

Post by NekkoDroid »

cchi_co wrote: post #55

Would it be challenging for small developers financially to design their games to meet these requirements? And for multiplayer online games to live without publisher support... Yet the proposal is a strong step towards protecting!

> Would it be challenging for small developers financially to design their games to meet these requirements?

I would doubt it. Already the smaller developers are less likely to be part of the current problem, most of those games at least work offline if they aren't already entirely DRM free.

And the ones that require online access, when the game is designed to be self-hostable this is 0 problem. I'd almost wager it is more difficult and time consuming ensuring they are the only ones that the game can connect to if they'd publish the server binary.

And regarding licensing of server software: you'd need to take into account that you need to publish it down the line when sourcing your dependencies, so I wouldn't count licensing complications a valid excuse, as it's already done with the game software itself.

Re: Stop Killing Games – European Citizens' Initiative

#68

Post by diggan »

MrGilbert wrote: post #26
stavros wrote: post #8

I've signed this, and, as an aside, I was extremely impressed that the Europa.eu site localized the CAPTCHA to the Greek alphabet. That's some commitment to accessibility by the general public.

I'm also impressed. I used the "eID" functionality, and it just worked flawlessly. I signed it in under a minute.

I'm not as impressed, tried to use my Spanish digital certificate and got "the submitted certificate is not an electronic DNI".

Re: Stop Killing Games – European Citizens' Initiative

#69

Post by maccard »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #61
maccard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perverse incentives are people who cheat in multiplayer games. Like it or not, multiplayer games live and breathe on how well they handle this problem. A single cheater in a BR game can ruin the game for 100 people.

Cheating is a social signaling problem disguised as a technical problem.

The problem is that the desired outcome of the cheater in a multiplayer game is to ruin the experience for others. It's a game of cat and mouse, don't get me wrong, but that doesn't mean that because it's technically impossible to stop all cheating that no efforts should be made. Distilling everything down to "open good closed bad" doesn't help anything, as the reality is it's far more nuanced than that.

Re: Stop Killing Games – European Citizens' Initiative

#70

Post by NekkoDroid »

IshKebab wrote: post #15
vasco wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just mean the companies can still do whatever they want while the game is being supported. It's an extremely poor way of writing that they are only interested in modifying the rules for end-of-life of games instead of regulate existing playable games. The whole thing is poorly written, but the idea is reasonable.

Define "supported"... This seems like a good goal but I'm not sure they've fully thought it through.

For DRM protected games that "phone home" for verification its when they are unable to reach "home" anymore (not just temporary outage). For online game its when the official servers are shut down.

Are there any other cases where this initiative would apply that I didn't mention?

https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...

> This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or related features and assets sold for videogames they operate) to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.

> Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher.

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