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EU Citizen's initiative to pass legislation to stop game publishers disabling games we paid for

Videogames are being destroyed! Most video games work indefinitely, but a growing number are designed to stop working as soon as publishers end support. This effectively robs customers, destroys games as an artform, and is unnecessary. Our movement seeks to pass new law in the EU to put an end to this practice. Our proposal would do the following:

  • Require video games sold to remain in a working state when support ends.
  • Require no connections to the publisher after support ends.
  • Not interfere with any business practices while a game is still being supported.

If you are an EU citizen, please sign the Citizens’ Initiative!

leigh ,
@leigh@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I love the idea, but I can’t see it actually working. Developers would just sell even more games as subscriptions instead of selling licenses, regardless of any interactive online content or lack thereof. (Think of EA’s 2013 release of SimCity with always-on DRM, for example.) Then when they want to shut their servers down, they just stop selling subscriptions and wait until the last one expires.

t3rmit3 ,

An interesting question is whether this would be constitutional in the US, if ever attempted here. Generally, forcing developers to code something has been considered “compelled speech”, though this defense gets deployed to varying degrees of effectiveness (i.e. refusing to code proper authentication doesn’t exempt you from liability in a breach just because requiring that auth would compel you to code it).

Frankly I have no faith we’ll ever see game makes forced into being consumer-friendly, and I’ve just begun to refuse to purchase any “Live Service” games precisely because I don’t want to be investing hours of my time into something that can be taken away at-will.

derbis ,

Good question. Presumably games like this will have a server that is proprietary, and the compulsion may simply be to make the server source or executables available, rather than creating anything new

DoucheBagMcSwag ,

I wonder which ESA funded billion dollar game company will tank this if this gets ground

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