Games
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It's astonishing to me how even right here on Lemmy so many people still misunderstand what this is about with comments saying that piracy fixes it or that downloading the game installer solves the issue. The games where those things are options aren't what this effort is about, this is about games like Darkspore, Defiance, Tabula Rasa, and our prototypical example The Crew, where there is no one who can play them no matter where, how, or when, they acquired the game, it is impossible to play for anyone, the whole piece of art has been destroyed.
Honestly if we can't even communicate what the movement is about to those who aught to be our base it really does not bode well for gaining any kind of wider traction.
I think the issue is that, as with reddit, a lot of people are only reading the headline and commenting.
Also many young people are so used to games requiring online connection and being shut down, that they can't imagine a better way.
That does seem to be an influence, though oddly there are some modern wildly popular games, Minecraft being a prime example, that still allow you to self host your own server, so it shouldn't really be as foreign of a concept as it appears to be to some younger folk.
I'm not young and I disagree with this petition. I don't think developers are doing anything wrong or immoral, and they should be free to make the design decisions they think are best. If the consumers end up not liking their decisions, then they won't buy the companies product. I think creating a law or regulation around this is too far.
Sure, but when the link is to a video, I don't blame them.
Here's a link to the Stop Killing Games campaign, of which the video is about.
In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they'll never actually die, unless the server source code gets taken down and nobody archives a copy. I mean, WoW Classic only happened because a private server running vanilla got too big, despite Blizzard bullshit of "You think you want it, but you don't" and "We don't have the code to roll back".
Star Wars Galaxies, Phantasy Star Online, City of Heroes, Warhammer Age of Reckoning all still exist and can be played, despite being "dead", thanks to private/pirate servers.
That only works if the server code gets leaked or someone reverse engineers it. Both of those options shouldn't be relied on, especially for more complex or less popular games.
Marvel Heroes Omega is one I recently discovered has private servers now. I really miss that one. The whole campaign is playable, but the server will be wiped once 1.0 of the emu comes out, possibly early next year.
That happened to Ragnarok Online. Iirc the early server code got leaked by hackers (it seems it's still being developed on GitHub lol), so all throughout the game's 20+ years lifetime it has had a flourishing private server scene with hundreds of servers still online, so I don't think it will die in our lifetimes.
You're damn right I don't like it, I especially don't like how it destroys art history, which is why I'm part of this campaign to make that practice illegal.
Its sort of like complaining your favorite pub got shut down though, isn't it?
If that pub has been around long enough that it can reasonably be argued that it is part of regional heritage, then yes.
I don't know any video game thats been around long enough to be called a historical landmark or whatever terminology.
The general minimum for a National Landmark is 50 years. This would make any game released prior to 1975 eligible. That is a good chunk of games. That said, protecting works of art are usually much shorter terms. Works of art can be justified to be protected almost immediately depending on the artist and work.
Okay thats fair, I actually didnt know there were video games that old. I wouldnt day all of them should be archived as a rule but if they are available why not.
I don't know any current publishers that would qualify for the day one protection you mentioned. Can you give an example of something being declared historical nearly immediately though?
I know I could find examples, but I am exhausted after coding all day on one thorny problem, so I am just going to make educated guesses from what I know of US history. I would bet that the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore received National Landmark status before the general 50 year mark. I would hazard that the presidential monuments on DC did as well.
That said, this was an exercise in examples of things that need to be protected as part of history. Works of art have a much lower bar than national landmarks for this. Games that are transformative or innovative in a way that we still feel today, or games that are massive parts of the cultural zeitgeist for a period definitely deserve preservation. Rogue, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy VII, Super Mario Brothers, Zork, etc. The reason this is such a big deal is that it might be hard to measure in a moment what is or is not going to have that long reaching impact. Imagine you are an art historian in 30 years and you are doing a paper on the growth and history of game mechanics. How are you going to research that. If you were doing one on painting and how techniques grow over time, you go look at the paintings, study them. The game paper will have no source material to study to draw new conclusions or find previously unnoticed connections if 70+% of the source media disappears in the next 10 years.
One persons historical piece is another's bit of oppression, using mount Rushmore is a great example of this. I'm pointing out that I find it impossible to agree on what's historical as a country when it comes to things like that. I literally never touched dark souls the entire time its been popular, its not historical for me.
Then theres the fact that you can't really delete anything from the internet. Sure online games can be "disconnected" but even the crew has a private server going live this year. WoW did the same thing and eventually the company started supporting their old games again. Funny thing about that, they didnt have the old code anymore and had to rewrite it.
I would like the same result as you would, I just don't want laws to force it that way. I think its already changing and its unnecessary to regulate. This might not be the case in this instance but regulations tend to be easier to handle by larger companies as well, and I wouldnt want to unduly stress small development teams. Art should largely be unrestricted.
Yeah, but a contract that you cannot negotiate before signing isn't really a contract is it? It is a gate keeper. A gun to the head. An "agree to this or else". In the modern world, one can do essentially nothing without signing a EULA. Want to get a job without signing one? Good luck. Want to play a game? Not many of them. Want to shop online, look at art, communicate with friends and family. Many of the most integral parts of maintaining our mental health are being put behind abusive "contracts" that strip us of any rights we think we have. Community, leisure, socialization, entertainment, all of the primary avenues in the modern world have predominantly become privatized and every one of those comes at a pretty steep nonmonetary cost.
You are acting like an EULA is going to ruin your life. Restaurants have EULAs too, like requiring shirt and shoes. Its not some crazy concept that if you want to enter someone else's establishment (online game) they might have expectations on how you behave.
"No shirt, no shoes, no service" is a health code, not a EULA.
Also, you are conflating social contracts with actual legally binding ones. If you had to sign a contract to eat at a resteraunt which gave them the right to photograph you and record all of your conversations while you ate then use all of it for marketing without compensating you or to sell the contents of your conversations and likeness to unknown 3rd parties without informing you of who they were sold to and what the intended use was, would you still eat there.
Your comment shows an utter lack of understanding of the issues at hand and what abuses of rights are done in digital spaces.
There are many restaurants, especially the largest fast food chains, who do have you sign an agreement to allow them to do everything you said. And no I don't eat at those places because I don't like the practice personally. I don't buy games if I don't like the game company or their actions.
But this isn't about data collection and privacy, its about trying to prevent a game from shutting down because it feels upsetting. I'm sorry but if you are upset about it don't support the company.
I will agree we need laws around data privacy and collection of course, but thats a different topic.
I don't really see it as an entirely separate topic. It is still an abuse of rights. In this case, it is an abuse of ownership. If I make a purchase of a good, I should own that good. If the company later decides that they no longer want to support the services which support that purchase, they should be required to provide the opportunity that all purchased goods remain valid and operational. If we take a different good as a stand in, cars, a manufacturer may eventually decide to stop supporting a vehicle, but they do have to sell the component rights to aftermarket manufacturers (or at least make good faith attempts) when they drop support so people who own those vehicles have the chance to maintain and use them. I see this as no different than that. Their dropping of support means that products purchased are removed from use or function without the owner's consent.
And I know you are going to say "well the EULA says you don't own it and you agreed to it" which is precicely the problem we are arguing. Purchase should mean ownership and forcing people to agree to whatever you want is wrong. Legislation is required because no company will protect the rights of customers, that is the duty of legal systems.
Noones forced to agree to anything, thats why its legal. Dont support shitty companies its that simple.
But people are forced by circumstances to agree. I have to use Slack for my job. I cannot keep my job if I do not agree, thus, I am forced to agree.
This is what I mean by the current definitions are no longer sufficient to cover the modern world.
You don't have to accept your job. Stop acting like choice doesnt exist, its an obnoxious way of enabling shitty decisions. You aren't forced to agree to use slack, and you aren't forced to play a game. You want to have your cake an eat it too.
Although I'd be shocked if someone who argues the things you are is actively supporting shitty game companies so surely you can see when you choose to do something vs not.
You can also choose to call them out on having anti-consumer practices. You are entitled to criticize shitty business practices.
They don't have to. They can release the code and let people run their own servers once they're no longer interested in doing so. This costs them nothing.
Your last sentence is incredibly incorrect. Does exaggeration usually win you arguments where you are from?
Instead of just saying it's incorrect, say why. I can just as easily say that you're incorrect.
It doesnt cost them nothing. There.
That is not a rebuttal. A rebuttal requires evidentiary support of your stance. For instance, as support for saying it costs them nothing, one might offer the following:
There, 3 salient points which support the position that releasing the codebase for the game when sunsetting it costs the company nothing. I could even make points about how it is actually profitable for the company, but I want to give you your turn to rebutt me now that you have a good example of how to provide a good argument.
Okay, if the crew was released at EOL, it would have cost ubisoft money on sales of the crew 2. I would not expect them to choose to lose money in that situation. It was only later with multiple issues with multiple games that ubisofts market value tanked and they had to assess a new position/direction for the company.
Also, we are talking about video games, not a basic right like food, water, and air.
And by what mechanism would it have affected sales of the sequel? Historically, and demonstrably, greater access to a game increases the sales of sequels. Why do you think developers put games in a series on sale when a new game in a series is coming out? I would definitely argue that having released the server hosting code for The Crew to allow people to host private servers would have potentially added to The Crew 2 sales. Also, if they release the server code, but not the game code, they could continue the sales of the game on storefronts at a reduced price having it marked that it will no longer receive updates and still made even more money from those sales. I would definitely prefer if they just release the whole game, but either would have worked.
Its just as likely to do either, its all speculation. I still don't want to force a developer to do anything really. Prohibiting things is a bit different though.
In this case, it is a prohibition on sunsetting a game without providing the means for purchasers to continue playing without your support. They are taking an action in their sunsetting decision, this is a prohibition on one choice made in that process.
Except... For a contract to be legal it must be agreed upon by both parties free of manipulation or coercion. Now, usually this is specified to be manipulation or coercion on the part of one of the parties, but what I argue is that in the modern era that is insufficient to encompass the growing complexity around the way society works and how it will continue moving forward.
Pulling the numbers out of my well educated ass, 40 years ago the average person would encounter EULA-like contracts a handful of times per year. Maybe for a mail order service, or a piece of software. Today we encounter them daily. The amount of information in them is intentionally made dense and overwhelming so the average person becomes numb very quickly and opts to click through on most of them without reading them. This enables all sorts of personal liberty and information abuses on the part of corporations.
40 years ago you did not have one to find a job, a lover, buy a car (still had a loan contract, but if you paid up front you had 0 contracts other than the bill of sale). You would not encounter them to work most jobs. You could go years without having to risk signing your rights over to a company and usually when you did you had negotiation power. This is not true today. You work for a company, they use Zoom, Slack, Google Workplace, a Virtual Timecard service, all of which have individual EULA that you as a private citizen, not an employer, must agree to and be bound by. Microsoft can put in their EULA that they are allowed to take a screenshot of your computer every 15 seconds and transmit it to their servers. This could be intercepted, or the servers could be hacked and have the entire database compromised and you have 0 say other than public outcry or to airgap your system, which then complains constantly that it cannot connect to the internet and becomes virtually unusable for about 80% of why you want to own it.
Being required by an employer to use software which requires that you as an individual sign a EULA is coercion. Having 0 recourse for alternatives in a marketplace which do not require signing a EULA is coercion. Having the terms which strip your rights irrevocably and transferrably buried and written in confusing ways is manipulation.
I should never have to worry that my copyright is being stripped from a piece of art I create just because I share it to a friend on some website.
People aren't used to this as a concept, especially when there are so many terms and conditions screens (that have been shown in multiple jurisdictions courts to not be legally binding) they click through on a daily basis as well as many other "as a service" models that are reliable enough that people don't realise what the pitfalls are (people playing for Netflix are fairly certain it won't close next week, for instance), even the more technically minded expect sunset clauses - which would be a pretty good legal baseline to improve the situation.
Or people are used to this concept and accept it as normal instead of unethical behavior that should be illegal.
That's basically like saying g all mmo's should illegal. Or that it is illegal to go out of business and close up shop without giving away all your code.
That's pretty much exactly what I'm saying. If you offer software that requires outside servers to run, you should be legally obligated to release the code used to run the servers if you discontinue supporting that software. That doesn't make mmo's any different, just a minor change to how they handle end of life.
If you don't like how a company handles their end of life then don't buy from them. Trying to make it illegal is unnecessary as companies are already facing negative consequences for making poor EOL choices. I don't like forcing developers to create in a specific way, I'd rather they have freedom to choose.
What does releasing the code have to do with development decisions? I am a developer and this sentiment really confused me, so please elucidate.
They should be able to decide whether to open source or not. If people don't like their decision they shouldnt buy their game.
At what point in the purchase cycle is it known that they won't? Because the right reserved in a EULA is not a guarantee of occurrence, so how does one make a decision when or when not to purchase?
Also, when single player games are being forced to be always online and are being affected, there is a real problem. If there is no valid tangible benefit to the player for a game to be online, and require the online component to play the game, it should be illegal.
Well, I knew the crew would be decommissioned and dissapear from day one. I'm not sure why people expected it to live forever. I understand people want to change things to be different, but the norm before was that online games are sunset. Its happened over and over.
And you would base your decision on prior actions of the company. Dont buy ubisoft until they prove they have fixed this problem. You already shouldnt be playing online games hosted by shitty companies, exactly for this reason. Most companies actually don't fuck their fan base over, and so its not an issue.