No "StopKillingGames" thread? Ok, I'll do it.

[Stg-Flame]

Stop Killing Games

www.stopkillinggames.com

For those out of the loop, this started last year when The Crew was made completely obsolete after Ubisoft shut down the online support for the game - despite the game being basically a single player game in the first place. This has always been one of the biggest issues for me being against the "always online" bullshit some developers were forcing on their games (Diablo 3) and it sparked a rather large outcry from the public when they made the announcement. The Stop Killing Games (SKG) initiative was started to prevent game developers doing this again in the future, but didn't gain much traction until about five or six days ago when the deadline was nearing. Admittedly, I had completely forgot it existed until a few days ago when the internet started plastering it everywhere but they actually got the 1,000,000 signatures they were looking for to get the EU parliament to possibly pass this into legislation. This topic has also started numerous discussions about piracy in the digital world across many websites since companies like Ubisoft, EA, and Activision have made it abundantly clear that we don't actually own the games we purchase, but rather we are buying the license to play the game.

More info about Ubisoft's shitty practices when they originally shut down The Crew.

As for pushback, from what I could find, there's a EU-based lobby group (VideoGamesEurope) that seems to support the developers making online only games and then shutting them down later. They talk about this being the cheaper alternative, but given the companies who willingly joined this lobby group, I'm calling bullshit. There's a lot of misinformation being spread right now, so it's honestly difficult to pick apart the fact from feelings, but it seems only a few of these companies have mentioned the SKG initiative and all of the mentions I found were prior to the initiative collecting all the signatures they needed. There's been a lot of people claiming the VGE lobby group is already drafting a statement to bring to the EU parliament in opposition for SKG, but I can't find any verifiable information on that one. The people behind SKG are urging EU gamers to keep signing the petition and passing it around for more signatures and I'm sure we have a few EU gamers on this site.


Just curious on everyone's thoughts on this.

 

[Timorous]

In the abstract it is a good idea. Obviously any proposed laws that come off the back of this will need to be scrutinised more in depth at the time but the EU has a decent consumer rights track record.

Most of the issues I have seen raised are either solved problems that you just need to use when building your game, things that are just good practice anyway because you want your game to be modular so you don't have to do a massive re-write because one of your 3rd party vendors decided to increase their licencing costs or things that will re adjust to a new market reality should something end up becoming law.

For the games with a big online element the arguments against are pretty flimsy to me when you think devs have local builds for feature building and feature testing. They won't be building and testing directly on an internal test server and instead will have something that they can run locally. So making that a bit more user friendly so when your game does eventually go EOL you can just ship out those tools to get a bare bones experience working is good enough.

 

[igor_kavinski]

This is what happens when gaming companies hire psychopathic suits to lead their businesses.

A real game developer would never want a person to lose the right to enjoy their legally purchased game.

 

[quikah]

It is easy to feel good about this initiative, but IMO it seems poorly thought out and vague on too much stuff. this was the best counter argument I found, not well versed on EU law, so no idea how right it is.

Daniel's Blog · Stop Killing Games and the EU: When Activism Meets Legal Reality

As someone who had to deal with software licensing for work, it is a massive pain in the a** to release software that uses any 3rd party software. Most games these days uses a plethora of 3rd party software.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Whatever lobbying groups have done a pretty good job muddling the issue, It's a little surprising how many people I argue with online that deliberately or through ignorance misunderstand the purpose of "stopkillinggames".

They say it will hurt indie devs, that it will make games wildly more expensive, that its technically impossible, that expecting games to remain perfectly playable forever is to onerous a requirement etc etc etc.

It's nuts how many people will argue against their own self interest.

Anthem is going to get shut down here pretty soon and I'd honestly be happy to throw a couple bucks at the game if I got to dick around on an empty map and just see what it was all about. But servers go down means the game will be dead and anyone who bought it won't get a chance to play it again.

Just give us a private server patch or update the game not to phone home. If the game was built with this expectation in mind it would be trivially easy to release the patch and call it a day.