Giant FAQ on The European Initiative to Stop Destroying Games!

ImplyingImplications , 45 minutes ago (edited 34 minutes ago)

This is about starting a conversation, so hopefully we can have a conversation. I don’t disagree with consumer protection nor do I want to protect billion dollar corporations. I just don’t think that signing petitions to create new laws isn’t the best way to go about this. Law changes come with all kinds of side effects. Anti-abortion laws have caused lots of issues that even pro-life supporters aren’t happy with. I think it’s much better to directly bring concerns to the companies that are causing the issue. I really do think it’s only a handful of corporations pulling these anti-consumer shenanigans and I think they should be called out directly.

He makes it clear that this wouldn’t affect most games, since most games aren’t sold as a service, and even those that are often do have a way to continue to run after the service ends. So this initiative is quite literally aimed at a specific style of game that he doesn’t like and fears will become more common. He’s afraid selling games as a service is too profitable and companies will start selling all games in this way even if there’s no need. To the question about “why not boycott companies selling games this way?” he explains boycotts don’t work. But when Bud Light ran a pro LGBT ad, so many bigots switched beer that Bud Light had to apologize and fire their executives. It fell from #1 beer to #3 and the parent company is now switching their flagship beer from Bud Light to Michelob. Boycotts work. The fact that gamers can’t stop themselves from buying a single game shows they don’t actually care. It’s way easier to sign a petition then it is to not play the newest Ubisoft release. If 1,000,000 people didn’t buy the newest Ubisoft game, they would change course. Helldivers said everyone would need a PSN account to play the game on PC and it got so much backlash that the company changed course in a few days. Companies absolutely listen to their customers.

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/c599b4fb-96f8-4715-935f-704592c6f4de.jpeg

This is my issue with the direction this is heading. The question is “I am a developer with an online-only game. What will happen if this initiative passes?”. The response is “Shut down your game and never make another online-only game ever again”. He spends a lot of time talking about how games are works of art that need to be preserved for the sake of humanity and the good of consumers, and then he tells devs to shutdown their game and never make another one. This isn’t preservation of games anymore than an anti-abortion law is preservation of life. Anti-abortion supporters don’t actually care about life, they care about restricting choice because they don’t think the choice is ethical. It’s like saying any company that sells a movie must ensure the purchaser can watch that movie forever and when told that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for movie theatres and streaming services to run, respond by saying “Oh well! Who cares about theatres and streaming services? Those shouldn’t exist anyways! They’re unethical and anti-consumer!” Nobody supports a company selling you a licence to watch a movie on a specific date and time…unless it’s a movie theatre. Sometimes, what sounds anti-consumer, isn’t actually anti-consumer, and a broad law could take away something that people actually like as collateral damage.

Creating a law to change how companies operate brings up a lot of issues and questions. This video explaining all the issues and questions is 40 minutes long and often says there’s no clear answers to the questions and concerns since no actual law exists yet. I honestly think that the better way of handling this is an awareness campaign (like is currently happening, keep the conversation going!) and boycott against the worst offenders, not a petition to create a new law. Even if this did get 1,000,000 signatures, I don’t think that any government would pass a law that consumers actually like. No government is keen on messing with multi-billion dollar a year industries. I do think that if 1,000,000 people told Ubisoft or EA or any company to do a specific thing with a specific game or they won’t buy it, they would make the change.

ampersandrew , 14 minutes ago

even those that are often do have a way to continue to run after the service ends

I’m going to guess you use a different definition than the rest of do if you came to this conclusion. Even still, we’ve got an enormous graveyard of games rendered nonfunctional once the servers were taken offline, and we can objectively measure those and see no way it’s going to slow down. Sony’s about to push out Concord this month. The two RTS games pushing themselves most as successors to StarCraft are both online-only. All three of these games will be completely unplayable and lost to time in just a few short years.

To the question about “why not boycott companies selling games this way?” he explains boycotts don’t work. But when Bud Light ran a pro LGBT ad, so many bigots switched beer that Bud Light had to apologize and fire their executives. It fell from #1 beer to #3 and the parent company is now switching their flagship beer from Bud Light to Michelob. Boycotts work.

I agree with you. A lot of people don’t realize the power they have in the marketplace. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is very obfuscated. Why would they tell you clearly that the game is going to stop functioning at some point in the future if they don’t have to? It would be terrible for business. They’ll put it in their EULAs, the things you only see after you’ve already purchased the game, and declining it means you can’t use the thing you bought. It might be in some small italics text on the store page that’s difficult to find. But if you’re looking at Diablo IV next to Titan Quest II, you as the consumer have very little indication that one of those games will live forever while the other lives on borrowed time.

Plus, yes, games are art that are worth preserving.

Helldivers said everyone would need a PSN account to play the game on PC and it got so much backlash that the company changed course in a few days.

It’s worth noting that, because this game can’t exist offline, this is a change they could impose on you after you’ve already bought it.

The response is “Shut down your game and never make another online-only game ever again”. He spends a lot of time talking about how games are works of art that need to be preserved for the sake of humanity and the good of consumers, and then he tells devs to shutdown their game and never make another one.

There was a gaming VPN program called Tunngle that I would use when Hamachi would fail me. It was surely collecting untold quantities of my personal data without my knowledge. When the GDPR passed, Tunngle decided to just close up shop rather than finding another way forward. That was a casualty of consumer protections, but it doesn’t mean that consumers aren’t worth protecting. He acknowledges the very real scenario that this is a non-starter for a lot of current games’ business models, and they’ll sooner shut down than comply, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth making sure that people get what they expect to receive when they pay for a game: actual ownership.

This isn’t preservation of games anymore than…

I’m not touching that metaphor for all sorts of reasons that could derail this discussion, but yes, requiring that a game remains playable after the servers are shut down is preservation. Requiring them to put a label on it, like a surgeon general’s warning on a pack of cigarettes, describing exactly what it is they’re selling to me; that would be consumer protection. I’ll still happily take the preservation as one step further than that.

I honestly think that the better way of handling this is an awareness campaign (like is currently happening, keep the conversation going!) and boycott against the worst offenders, not a petition to create a new law.

Awareness is a huge problem, because, much like I stated earlier, games aren’t even required to inform me that I wouldn’t want to buy them, and it takes me a lot of work to find that out.

If a free market solution (which I like and prefer, by the way) was going to solve this, it would have done it by now.