(Text below written by @treasure@feddit.org. Hope you don’t mind me yoinking it for here!)
The European Citizens’ Initiative ‘Stop Destroying Videogames’ is nearing its deadline on July 31st and is still missing quite a lot of signatures. To be precise, at the time of writing this post, only 560.000 of the required 1.000.000 signatures have been reached.
Another requirement has already been fulfilled: The minimum signature threshold has been reached in 10 countries, 7 were required.
If this is the first time of you hearing about this initiative, here’s a short TL;DR for you (more detailed information can be found here):
- Publishers that sell or license videogames should have to leave their videogames in a functional (playable) state.
- This means: Remote disabling of video games (such as live service titles) without providing means of keeping the game functional without the involvement of the publisher should be illegal.
- This does NOT mean that publishers should support their games forever, but rather that they provide tools (such as server binaries) to enable others to keep the game playable.
The initiative is slowly picking up speed again recently after its creator published a video explaining some of the background and why he doesn’t want to continue after the initiative is over. The video has been well-received by the community and some big influencers have reported on the topic.
If you are an EU citizen and have not signed yet, THIS IS THE TIME! The month until the deadline is met will pass quickly. Use two minutes of your time to influence something that may improve your life forever!
CLICK HERE TO SIGN. (or click here for a guide on how to sign in your language)
Also, if you are a UK citizen, you can sign a UK specific legal petition that also carries legal weight (forces parliament to investigate the issue). You can sign that here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702074/
I’m pretty sure that’s already the case, if you read the ToS of most games.
Not that it makes this any better.
The typeface must be 16pt, bold, and the copy itself should be on the front page and be required on the cover description(s).
My beef isn’t even with a games-as-a-service premise at all. It’s the corporatist trend in arguing that single-player experiences need perpetual online connectivity, or that releasing self-hosted PvP server functionality is prima fascia “unrealistic in every scenario”. Some games, like WoW, no way. I get the depth of the server stack for MMOs. Other games that are PvP-competitive could easily be self-hosted. These companies could still make money off of these old competitive online games, even though they’ve deprecated their own server stack.
“Stop Killing Games” needs more refined language about what it’s asking for, no doubt. There are many scenarios where blanket statements about demanding source code are just not feasible.
However, let’s not pretend that the industry is not pushing enshittification tactics used by almost every business that’s publicly traded. That’s the spirit in which this movement is fighting against.