PieFedThe UK petition to Stop Killing Games is up. Please sign if you live in the UK.
petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702074/
If you live in Eu, you can also sign this one. Every signature is important!
6 Comments
Comments from other communities
LambdaRXIf you haven't, You can also vote on european one, it has 40% of required signatures.
Aielman15I wish some big-name YT/Twitch personality helped raise awareness for the petition. It's ending in a few months and if nothing changes, I don't see it reaching the required signatures in time.
wizardbeardDoes Ross/Accursed Farms, the person who started this movement, not count?
It's good, he's the originator, but the reach in Europe is not that great and there have only been a few multilingual channels that have picked it up.
It's not going to get the signatures because the average person does not care about this. I play a lot of games and even I don't care. If you don't like the game, don't buy it. Why does there need to be regulation to stop me from buying it too?
Interesting how condifently you are talking about the subject even though your comment makes it obvious you have no idea what the petition is about.
The government should update consumer law to prohibit publishers from disabling video games (and related game assets / features) they have already sold without recourse for customers to retain or repair them.
If a company says they're going to disable a video game a year after I purchase it and I won't be able to retain or repair it and I agree to those terms, can I still buy it?
Not sure what you mean. Companies dont tell you beforehand that they are going to shut games down. They usually dont even know they will, so I dont see how your example holds up here. Maybe you could explain.
This is about companies shutting down games after some time making them unplayable, even for people who already purchased them.
Its like if Samsung would remotely lock your TV making you unable to turn it on again because they stopped "supporting" it.
There is simply no way to justify it. Its a symptom of greed, they dont want you to own a product that doesnt generate them revenue anymore.
Its like if Samsung would remotely lock your TV making you unable to turn it on again because they stopped “supporting”
it.
Didn’t Sonos do that with old speakers? I don’t think that it went down well.
Companies dont tell you beforehand that they are going to shut games down. They usually dont even know they will, so I dont see how your example holds up here. Maybe you could explain.
But what if they did? Some places have already put laws requiring sellers to inform purchasers if they are selling a licence instead of ownership. If the terms were clear at the point of sale, and I agree to the terms, what's the issue? You're allowed to think it's a bad deal, but why does that mean I'm not allowed to accept it?
Its like if Samsung would remotely lock your TV making you unable to turn it on again because they stopped "supporting" it.
Right. If they explained that at point of sale they would be doing that, and I was alright with it, what's the problem? I understand you wouldn't accept that deal. That's fine. You wouldn't buy that TV. I don't see why I must be prevented from buying it too.
No company ever sells games with the disclaimer that they might stop supporting those games at some arbitrary point in the future they sell the games with the understanding that you are purchasing a product that you will own after you give the company the required amount of money.
They are not selling you a limited term license, they are selling you a product. They should not be allowed to then change their minds after the fact without compensating the customer.
Yes. Such a transaction would be legally classified as a service: You pay publisher a one-time fee for access to the right to play their game over a known period of time.
ampersandrewDepends on the territory. The argument is that the practice as it stands now is against current consumer laws in places like the UK. Functionally, even if they were forced to provide this disclaimer, it would still lead to the current state of things being less lucrative and would discourage the practice anyway, which I would still call some kind of a win.
Even if you just looked at the screenshot it's pretty clear that's not what the petition is about. Could you go away and do literally one seconds worth of research, and then come back and explain why you made such a brainless comment.
Can't wait for PirateGames to shit on this one too and be a great big Blizzard shill again.
Dude you don't get it, the AAA devs will literally go bankrupt if they have to waste a fraction of their profits to do the bare minimum!!! Why won't anyone think of the children?????
That's the funny thing about all of this it wouldn't cost the company a single penny. All they'd have to do is open source their code that's it.
That too would have costs associated with it. Nothing is free when you do it at work, but it's reasonable to impose those kinds of costs to ensure the products they make meet a base standard.
addieIdentity is a many-layered thing, and I'd never describe myself as British unless very specifically prompted to do so, but I can at least sign that. 5,071 let's go!
One of the big problems about the original petition was that it had a focus on gaming. But this is a problem in the entire software industry, and as much as gaming is probably the more serious concern for the majority of people, it is considered by the government to be somewhat unimportant. Corporate software though has a more mature image, and so is more likely to be considered.
Any software that is sold by a company should be open sourced if the company chooses to end support. Either because the company goes out of business or because they just decide it's no longer profitable to continue updating the software, and yes, this does include older versions of iOS.
A rising tide and all that.
Essence_of_MehThese petitions are limited in scope for a reason - this is a small initiative and the goal is to focus on one part of the market which started the whole thing (the initiative, not the software killing issue), as well as to limit the number of big companies that could be affected (the potential opposition).
Sure, ideally this would expand on all software but you have to start somewhere, especially when you're just a bunch of randos with little knowledge about law and no funds to turn it into a serious lobbying movement - one that could both get the political attention and was able to defend its stance from corporations.
I just want Blur to be revived. I know modded online servers exist for PC, but it would great to have it on consoles and play 4P splitscreen
YungOnionsThe previous version of this was responded to by the government: https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/659071
I'm not clear on how this one is different, but sign it anyway.
hauiIf you read the comments of the original article, I think its about not letting them off the hook? Especially now that many countries have gone over the threshold?
sabreW4K3"A trader or third party can upgrade and improve the features of digital content so long as it continues to match any description given by the trader and conforms with any pre-contract information provided by the trader, unless varied by express agreement. "
That's an odd paragraph to include.
cecilkorikIt's not that weird. What they're aiming to avoid is the situation where a developer does a bait-and-switch replacement of the original, advertised game concept to chase a new demographic with new money. If you have never experienced this, count yourself lucky. A shady developer can advertise/sell a great concept in some niche like a compelling roguelike, survival crafting game or even a cozy and artistic decorating game, and actually create a decent game with lots of potential... at first. And then when it's collected a bunch of genuine good reviews and they realize either it's harder than they thought to make, or it's not making the cash flow they expected and not likely to, literally just replace the whole product, product page, everything with some generic shoot-em-up battle royale asset flip as an "upgrade" and alienate the early buyers to get a whole new audience to throw money at them until they realize the reviews are for what's essentially a totally different game before it crashes into mostly-negative territory. You might not think something this egregious ever really happens, but it does, especially in the horrible land of Crowdfunding/Early Access.
The first example I can remember that happened to me personally was called "Star Forge" not to be confused with the more recent board game adaption of the same name. The linked post is about the internal development drama behind the scenes, but the bait-and-switch bullshit happened years ago and it went sideways very quickly and was eventually pulled from the store never to be seen again.
BjörnThis response reads as though they continue to not understand the problem.
Infernal_pizzaHave any of the UK petitions ever had a response that wasn’t just “nah fuck off lol”?
They only got 13k signatures this time? I wonder if PirateSoftware, who I have very quickly lost respect for (like literally over the course of just a few days), had anything to do with this?
A far shorter time span, and this applies only to the UK, not the EU. It got a (bad) government response, so it achieved the intended effect.
Sips'I'm out of the loop, what did he do?
lime!his take on the petition was uneducated and seemed to stem mostly from a pro-industry perspective. it was like he misunderstood how government petitions in europe works and based all his criticism on that misunderstanding.
basically the point he missed is that these petitions don't become laws as written, but are put up for discussion. highlighting a problem in a niche where it is easy to understand usually ends up highlighting a broader issue.
Thor took this flawed understanding and applied his substantial industry knowledge to it, which led him to the conclusion that games would be impossible to make if this petition won out because it would force companies to keep the servers up forever, which is not at all what the petition is about.
he then refused to back down from this position when people tried to explain it better.
This, but there was also the WoW situation, and when he filed a false DMCA claim against an indie developers game, which got removed from Steam (but is back up now) over content shown in a video that was not actually present in the game files (Thor did not verify that what he was claiming was actually true).
ShadowedcrossThis is the problem with people who have massive audiences, they need to verify what they claim otherwise they can do a lot of harm to people.
He definitely has had some negative impact on it considering almost every time stop killing games news pops up someone parrots his already debunked points.
That guy truly is a knob. I dropped him for his take on Stop Killing Games, it was such an obviously brain-dead take...
Spencer@CancerMancer not to mention self-motivated. Didn't he release a live service game soon after taking that stance?
kugmo
Sunshine (she/her)Current numbers at:
macnielGodspeed UK, as we are failing with the ECI this UK petition may be our last immediate chance.
VictoriaI wouldn't write the ECI off as failed just yet. Some recent videos from a few big youtubers brought a new momentum to it, we jumped from 45% to 57% in ~3 days.
Would be nice. We still have a month to reach the missing 43%>
Bandwagon effect: “let me introduce myself”
Destide
haychSigned and got a couple friends to as well
asudoxUK isn't even in the EU.
Or is the Buy European thing valid for everything located in the europe?
Or is the Buy European thing valid for everything located in the europe?
Yes, the other, EU only, communites are !buyfromeu@feddit.org and !BuyFromEU@europe.pub
Buy European is valid for every country in Europe but Russia.
Signed!
Ross is really doing God's work.
Signed. Thanks for sharing
Signed, hopefully the committees response won't be utter shite like last time.
signed, thanks 👍🏿
Do keep us updated