It’s amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they’re no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.
Digital Fairness Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act/F33096034_en
This is a masterclass in “pick your one thing in life and focus on that.”
I’m highly pessimistic that the spirit of this legislation, which I wholly support, can ever be enshrined in law with enough specificity that it works the way we want it to in the cases where we need it to, without becoming a truly undue burden on small developers or forcing all publishers to just work around it in some way: like taking everything to a subscription model going forward.
All they have to do is give up the rights. If they can’t afford it, I guarantee I’m there is a web somewhere that will do it for free.
We’ve had the technology since stone ages, quit lying about this so called burden. All it takes is to not be greedy.
Spoken like someone who’s never had to implement regulatory measures in software.
I imagine you see the undue burden as a mandate to keep running the game servers yourself when you have no income to do so.
Once upon a time, the norm for exclusively online games was to provide a hostable server so that any third party could host, because the game companies didn’t want to bother with hosting themselves, so at most they owned or outsourced a hosted registry of running servers, and volunteers ran instances.
Then big publishers figured out that controlling the servers and keeping the implementation in-house was a good way to control the lifespan of games, and a number of games kept it closed.
So the remedy is to return to allowing third party hosting, potentially including hooks for a third party registry for running game servers if we are talking more ephemeral online instances like you’d have in shooters. One might allow for keeping the serving in-house and only requiring third party serving upon plan to retire the in-house game.
Yeah. I have similar feelings. And I don’t think the social media fervor is helping things sometimes. There needs to be a certain level of precision in what is being asked for, and I see lots of broad statements about what laws should prevent from happening from random individuals. Using words like “kill switches” when required servers are taken offline. Or demanding every game have a direct networking mode or LAN options in addition to matchmaking or platform facilitated matchmaking.
Yes it’s video games and people want what they want and always think it’s simpler to deliver than it is.