Advances to round 2/7 to be able to do a powerpoint presentation so that companies will, at best, be forced to put some pointless label as a legal loophole, that consumers will promptly ignore because everyone will have it and it'll be meaningless.
I think Stop Killing Games is more important than just "oh noes, they took my toys away". Looking back, video games have been the gateway to computing in more than one one way. Before home computers people had game consoles (which were cheaper than computers) or arcades. Before iTunes and app stores there was Steam. Before the modern smartphone apps there were Wii channels. Maybe in some cases the games came technically later, but they were the initial contact for the broad masses.
What I'm getting at is that it has usually been through games that practices in general computing have been established. If Stop Killing Games is successful it will have much bigger effects on general computing. And I believe that this is why you keep the same false accusations getting repeated over and over again (e.g. saying that SKG would require publishers to keep supporting a game forever). I know it's said not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but at some point the pattern becomes too clear not to notice. All of big tech stands to lose eventually if SKG succeeds.
Can someone please ELI5? I've heard much about it but still, with all the drama, I still don't get it.
SKG is an initiative that will force game publishers to keep a game online, provided that people have paid for it, and the publisher is not bankrupt? Is that right? What does it have to do with democracy?
Some good responses here already. One angle that's not been mentioned yet is informed consent at the time of purchase.
When "buying" not "renting" there is presently no information for the consumer to make an informed choice about what they are purchasing when it comes to a live service game because no end-of-service date is available at the time of making the purchasing decision.
This is in large part why the end of The Crew was problematic for many people.
Had the service end of life been advertised at the point of purchase the consumer could have knowingly "purchased" a time-limited product, or not, but the decision would have been informed.
All this stuff about end-of-life plans, releasing self-hosted servers, patching out online-only stuff and leaving behind an offline-only game, etc, is great, but it's only one of the possible remedies that SKG have been discussing for the last couple of years.
Another perfectly feasible one is not to dress up a time-limited entitlement to participate in a live service as the same thing as an "own forever" product at the point of purchase.
An interesting question about Stop Killing Games is if this should apply to software more broadly. If a company shuts down should they open source their product so people can continue using it? There isn't as strong an argument for this since most software is structured like a SaaS rather than a one time purchase. But it's considerate when companies do this, e.g. Facebook open sourcing Parse Server was better than outright discontinuing it.
Maybe not open source it. But at least allow it to operate in offline manner where for one time purchases you do not have any license checks that stop it from operating. I do not expect things like cloud sync to continue. But at least I should be able to run it on my local machine.
I in no way mean this to be rude, but I think a big part of why the EU isn't in the same galaxy as the US in the realm of business in general, is in some part, the knee jerk reaction to turn to the government to make products and services better.
Governments cannot make you an alternative, they can only make something that already exists, different (usually worse).
I have zero interest in creating in the gaming space, however, my gut reaction would be to start down the path of how I could create competition to companies that rug pulled their games.
And yes, I get that "just make a competitor" is easier said than done. But at least by going down that road, you end up with more games, better games, and people learning skills throughout the process. And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.
Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
Maybe, I think a bigger reason is that Europe doesn't have near the level of regulatory harmonization that the US has. There are tons of policy areas where member states just do whatever they want, in pretty important areas. Like the US has a single bankruptcy code, and state commercial codes are all pretty close to the UCC, that's not the case in Europe.
The current EU commission president is pushing pretty hard to create more harmonization to make it easier for companies and investors to operate across Europe.
> But at least by going down that road, you end up with more games, better games, and people learning skills throughout the process. And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.
Yes, but in that scenario, some really good games would still die. So it would good to make it illegal to kill games in addition to making more games.
> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
I mean, in the short term, yes, the Stop Killing Games movement is demanding that others do some work for them. But, in the long term, the Stop Killing Games movement is asking for others to do less work.
The only reason why games are being killed are because companies are putting in extra effort to include self-destruct mechanisms in games. If a company doesn’t want to bother disarming these self-destruct mechanisms, then there is a simple solution: don’t create the self-destruct mechanisms to begin with. It’s much easier to create games that don’t have self-destruct mechanisms.
I’m a strong supporter of demanding that companies stop doing bad things and that they put in effort to undo the bad things that they have already done.
> I think a big part of why the EU isn't in the same galaxy as the US in the realm of business in general, is in some part, the knee jerk reaction to turn to the government to make products and services better.
Hilarious take considering the initiative is a brainchild of an American.
The initiative is in the EU because the US doesn't have a way for citizens to force the legislative to make decisions. This is on record, with him plainly stating it. Not an interpretation or anything
> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
Srsly, this is as big brain as you can get.
Are you seriously unaware that quiet a few of the most selling games were made in the EU?
Who? The people controlling all distribution channels - they know. Or are you proposing one should create their own hardware platform / software platform? Payment processing? Advertisement network? Imagine all the skills and good software storefronts and operating systems one could end up doing that!
I'd flip this on its head and say this is why the US isn't in the same Galaxy as the EU when it comes to every metric beyond line on graph go up, gun crime, and military spending.(And thats even if you treat the EU as whole, which well, you shouldn't)
There are already competitors, hundreds if not thousands of excellent indie games are made every year. This doesn't mean we shouldnt regulate actors who are mis-selling products, particularly when that mis-selling is purely for the purpose of extract maximum value from consumers. The barrier to AAA game entry is large enough that the existing firms are essentially a cartel, meanwhile smaller devs already manage to ensure their games can be played forever, but its not in shareholders interests to not rugpull. Which is frankly exactly what the state exists for, to ensure the rights of the general public.
There are many cases where we know for a fact this isn't true.
Many things that governments now do used to be private. Trains for example. Airbus wouldn't have happened without government. French movie industry and so on.
But I agree that its not as easy as government randomyl getting into every random entertainment market and trying to create competitors for everything.
I mean, yes, you could attempt to take over the largest entertainment market in the world, already dominated by a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations, in the hope that your "mega success" game is so world-shattering that EA, Ubisoft, etc have a Scrooge-ian change of heart and start following your pro-consumer, pro-conservation ideology.
Now, if you want to actually do something that has a chance of having any effect at all, you go for the legislature. Unlike America's entirely feckless regulatory bodies, the EU does occasionally dislodge itself from the corps' backsides to provide a quick, timid reprimand. It's not very much but it's much better than nothing at all.
Although, I have to wonder, do you believe this should apply to every market? Should asbestos be made legal in buildings on the account you could build houses without it? Should we remove all kind of sanitary requirements for food processing, on the account of the fact that some food companies might not let their plants wallow in filth?
Typical US view of the world. Do not criticise, create an alternative. We see how well that fares in gaming space. You need a lot of good and diverse talent and lot of money to market your game. Good luck.
I'm not sure how I feel about SKG. On one hand: sure, a product you buy should be expected to work for more than a couple of years. This gets fuzzy with modern service subscription models, licensing terms, etc., but in general, planned obsolescence shouldn't exist in digital products any more than in physical ones.
On the other, though, the companies that produce games that stop working are not worth supporting. Their games are often not great to begin with, and rewarding this behavior simply gives them a reason to keep abusing consumers.
There are so many studios that produce games worth playing, and make them accessible without DRM on platforms like GOG and itch.io. A one-time payment can get you many hours of enjoyment for as long as you have a compatible system to run it on. This is getting more difficult on Windows, but thankfully Linux is a solid gaming platform now, and there are many well supported virtualization options for older games.
So my point is: stop supporting scummy companies, and start supporting passionate game developers. There is a practically infinite catalog of great experiences beyond the yearly rehashed EA, Activision, or Ubisoft title.
Well, I don't think this is a good idea, since people need to get off their daily dose of heroin sooner or later. But, if people want to live their lives inside an online world, well, who am I to stop them.
24 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 56.6 ms ] threadDon’t want to get my hopes up, but I think this might be.
What I'm getting at is that it has usually been through games that practices in general computing have been established. If Stop Killing Games is successful it will have much bigger effects on general computing. And I believe that this is why you keep the same false accusations getting repeated over and over again (e.g. saying that SKG would require publishers to keep supporting a game forever). I know it's said not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but at some point the pattern becomes too clear not to notice. All of big tech stands to lose eventually if SKG succeeds.
SKG is an initiative that will force game publishers to keep a game online, provided that people have paid for it, and the publisher is not bankrupt? Is that right? What does it have to do with democracy?
When "buying" not "renting" there is presently no information for the consumer to make an informed choice about what they are purchasing when it comes to a live service game because no end-of-service date is available at the time of making the purchasing decision.
This is in large part why the end of The Crew was problematic for many people.
Had the service end of life been advertised at the point of purchase the consumer could have knowingly "purchased" a time-limited product, or not, but the decision would have been informed.
All this stuff about end-of-life plans, releasing self-hosted servers, patching out online-only stuff and leaving behind an offline-only game, etc, is great, but it's only one of the possible remedies that SKG have been discussing for the last couple of years.
Another perfectly feasible one is not to dress up a time-limited entitlement to participate in a live service as the same thing as an "own forever" product at the point of purchase.
Governments cannot make you an alternative, they can only make something that already exists, different (usually worse).
I have zero interest in creating in the gaming space, however, my gut reaction would be to start down the path of how I could create competition to companies that rug pulled their games.
And yes, I get that "just make a competitor" is easier said than done. But at least by going down that road, you end up with more games, better games, and people learning skills throughout the process. And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.
Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
The current EU commission president is pushing pretty hard to create more harmonization to make it easier for companies and investors to operate across Europe.
Yes, but in that scenario, some really good games would still die. So it would good to make it illegal to kill games in addition to making more games.
> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
I mean, in the short term, yes, the Stop Killing Games movement is demanding that others do some work for them. But, in the long term, the Stop Killing Games movement is asking for others to do less work.
The only reason why games are being killed are because companies are putting in extra effort to include self-destruct mechanisms in games. If a company doesn’t want to bother disarming these self-destruct mechanisms, then there is a simple solution: don’t create the self-destruct mechanisms to begin with. It’s much easier to create games that don’t have self-destruct mechanisms.
I’m a strong supporter of demanding that companies stop doing bad things and that they put in effort to undo the bad things that they have already done.
Hilarious take considering the initiative is a brainchild of an American.
The initiative is in the EU because the US doesn't have a way for citizens to force the legislative to make decisions. This is on record, with him plainly stating it. Not an interpretation or anything
> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
Srsly, this is as big brain as you can get. Are you seriously unaware that quiet a few of the most selling games were made in the EU?
Who? The people controlling all distribution channels - they know. Or are you proposing one should create their own hardware platform / software platform? Payment processing? Advertisement network? Imagine all the skills and good software storefronts and operating systems one could end up doing that!
There are already competitors, hundreds if not thousands of excellent indie games are made every year. This doesn't mean we shouldnt regulate actors who are mis-selling products, particularly when that mis-selling is purely for the purpose of extract maximum value from consumers. The barrier to AAA game entry is large enough that the existing firms are essentially a cartel, meanwhile smaller devs already manage to ensure their games can be played forever, but its not in shareholders interests to not rugpull. Which is frankly exactly what the state exists for, to ensure the rights of the general public.
There are many cases where we know for a fact this isn't true.
Many things that governments now do used to be private. Trains for example. Airbus wouldn't have happened without government. French movie industry and so on.
But I agree that its not as easy as government randomyl getting into every random entertainment market and trying to create competitors for everything.
Now, if you want to actually do something that has a chance of having any effect at all, you go for the legislature. Unlike America's entirely feckless regulatory bodies, the EU does occasionally dislodge itself from the corps' backsides to provide a quick, timid reprimand. It's not very much but it's much better than nothing at all.
Although, I have to wonder, do you believe this should apply to every market? Should asbestos be made legal in buildings on the account you could build houses without it? Should we remove all kind of sanitary requirements for food processing, on the account of the fact that some food companies might not let their plants wallow in filth?
Government is there to protect you.
On the other, though, the companies that produce games that stop working are not worth supporting. Their games are often not great to begin with, and rewarding this behavior simply gives them a reason to keep abusing consumers.
There are so many studios that produce games worth playing, and make them accessible without DRM on platforms like GOG and itch.io. A one-time payment can get you many hours of enjoyment for as long as you have a compatible system to run it on. This is getting more difficult on Windows, but thankfully Linux is a solid gaming platform now, and there are many well supported virtualization options for older games.
So my point is: stop supporting scummy companies, and start supporting passionate game developers. There is a practically infinite catalog of great experiences beyond the yearly rehashed EA, Activision, or Ubisoft title.
- Imagine having a sub r/fuckubisoft and it has even more people than r/ubisoft
- Lots of disgruntled fans have stemmed up from industry practices it seems