This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If digital ownership isn't acknowledged, digital piracy doesn't exist. It's just copying something no one owns.
I mean I am a pirate as much as the next guy but this is missing the point. They acknowledge ownership. They just don't agree that it transfers to you when you buy a game. So that argument gets you nowhere.
If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't theft.
Yeah, no. You buy services all the time, without owning the thing or person providing the service.
If games are or should be a service is a completely different question. I wholeheartedly think that they are not, but that is irrelevant to the argument. But I can't stand those polemic phrases that miss the point completely.
They force it on to us that we cannot own products anymore but instead they are "a service" where we are stripped of our rights, are costantly fed with restrictions locked behind more payments and broken products never to be finished as they don't care about it: they already got their money. And since we don't have rights, as stated in the user agreements, we can just go fuck ourselves.
So you may be right, that it doesn't work "like that", but that's something those fucked up companies forced upon us without consent. Stop defend those companies dude.
Pointing out bullshit arguments isn't defending anyone, it's just being intellectually honest. Not sure what's better, you being serious or arguing in bad faith.
Your argument is basically "according to their made up rules it doesn't work like that, so your arguments are bullshit".
That sounds a lot like defending them.
As a customer you basically have zero rights, when you sign their user agreements. Even when a restaurant kills your partner in a themepark, because they once signed the user agreement for their streaming service (Disney). As a pirate I have more rights than paying customers. You can say what you want but this is factually true. Legally it works like this.
So when I get angry about how they force people into their fucked up world with stupid rules and restrictions they made up, you may be right it doesn't work like that when you follow their rules. I don't pay them, I didn't sign their agreements, so their rules do not apply to me. If I get busted for having an illegal copy of their content I'll pay a fine and it's done (happened when I accidentally downloaded something when I went to Germany once).
Back in the days a pirated copy of something was less than the real thing. Worse quality, missing the DVD extras, no updates etc. These days the pirated version has less restrictions and limitations than the real service. No ads, better quality, not lacking behind a season, never pulled from the platform, never broken because they stopped support and only even though it's an offline game a connection to the now csncelled sever is mandatory, offline download is actual offline download, no locked content like DLC's, etc.
Hang on, arent these the same fuckers who greenlit AI training on IP they don't own?
Sort of. But it's easy to understand their thinking.
A long time ago they were a left winged party. But nowadays they're so afraid of the far right that for each decision they ask themselves "what would people absolutely not expect from a left winged party? Let's do that!" Which has led to several more right winged policies than the previous right winged government.
If left wing is progressive then they're still fairly progressive, imo. For example, making railways public again and banning no fault evictions were some recent things they've done.
As long as the button says buy, then its ownership and should be treated like physical goods.
"Digital ownership must be respected."
Yeah, that's what this entire thing is about.
The same govt that saw the overwhelming support for petition against the Online ID verification Act & went nahhhhhhh we don't listen to our citizens.
Unless it's a referendum, apparently.
They don’t need to “hand online servers” just publish the API and do one last update to accept self hosting.
And new releases should always support self host.
That only covers games that are loosely using servers for communication, piracy and cheating. That also puts game companies into the realm of losing their IP if they shut down temporarily in an acquisition. If you start a studio, run out of cash and get aquired, you'll actually want that game you made to still be worth something, it doesn't just affect those AAA players.
I think you need to add something like an escrow with x months of running costs. Once that well runs dry you need to go down to the providing a working server. I've been through the industry and I can confidently tell you that an API isn't enough for a hell of a lot of games. Some of the stuff I've seen, it would take the actual game team a half a year to bring it back up with the source because the stuff they were using when they went under was ancient. You don't want to buy a server authoratative game and wait around a year while the community tries to ressurect it.
These current politicians dont know a single thing about what you said but I agree
And they will make sure to continue to not know a single thing about what was said. Ignorance isn't a valid legal defence, but it sure is a common deflection tactic these days. Law makers have a professional and ethical obligation to become informed on the issues their constituents care about, but it seems like it's rare to find one that remembers that obligation.
Most of the responses of the ministers(?) covered in the article seem to be pretty solid.
But then:
Responding to the arguments, the government’s representative, minister for sport, tourism, civil society and youth, Stephanie Peacock MP, acknowledged consumer sentiment behind Stop Killing Games, but suggested there were no plans to amend UK law around the issue.
“The Government recognises the strength of feeling behind the campaign that led to the debate,” she said. “The petition attracted nearly 190,000 signatures. Similar campaigns, including a European Citizens’ Initiative, reached over a million signatures. There has been significant interest across the world.”
She continued: “At the same time, the Government also recognises the concerns from the video gaming industry about some of the campaign’s asks. Online video games are often dynamic, interactive services—not static products—and maintaining online services requires substantial investment over years or even decades.”
Peacock claimed that because modern video games were complex to develop and maintain, implementing plans for games after support had ended could be “extremely challenging” for companies and risk creating “harmful unintended consequences” for players.
Handing online servers over to consumers could carry commercial or legal risks, she said, in addition to safety concerns due to the removal of official company moderation.
On the subject of ownership, Peacock claimed that video games being licensed to consumers, rather than sold, was not a new phenomenon, and that “in the 1980s, tearing the wrapping on a box to a games cartridge was the way that gamers agreed to licensing terms.”
“Licensing video games is not, as some have suggested, a new and unfair business practice,” she claimed.
Yeah, full on corpo spin. Fuck her.
TBH this is just how petitions in the UK work: enough people sign it, it goes to parliament, they say a bunch of stuff about it that often sounds reasonable enough, then they do nothing about it. It's just a way to give the public the illusion that they're being listened to without having to actually do anything. It was the same with the digital ID petition, which I still signed but with 100% expectation that it wouldn't actually achieve anything.
On the subject of ownership, Peacock claimed that video games being licensed to consumers, rather than sold, was not a new phenomenon, and that “in the 1980s, tearing the wrapping on a box to a games cartridge was the way that gamers agreed to licensing terms.”
This is absolute bullshit and not at all how it works, now or back in the 1980s. You can't agree to terms without seeing them first, and even then such agreements aren't necessarily legally binding. For someone who is supposed to write laws, she should be removed from office for showing such gross incompetence.
I'm pretty sure (not absolutely) this has appeared in court and even click-wrap licenses, where one clicks to agree to a license with a higher word count than King Lear are not valid due to the end user high administrative burden (reading 20K+ words in the middle of a software install).
There was a period in the 1980s where end users automatically were assumed to agree to licensing, but also licenses were extremely lenient and allowed unlimited use by the licensee without any data access rights by the providing company. 21st century licenses are much more complicated and encroach a lot more on end-user privacy.
Handing online servers over to consumers...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is Stop Killing Games specifically against this? This sounds like some Pirate Software bullshit. My understanding is we want the tools to host our own servers if the parent company decides to take theirs offline.
SKG doesn't specify how companies need to solve the problem, only that games need to continue to function after the company stops supporting them.
For some games (e.g. Assassin's Creed), that could be as simple as disabling the online aspect and having a graceful fallback. For others, that could mean letting people self-host it. Or they can provide documentation for the server API and let the community build their own server. Or they can move it to a P2P connection.
Game companies have options. All SKG says is that if I've purchased something, I should be able to keep using it after support ends.
Hell just allowing people to build their own emulators of the server could be plenty.
Look to games like ragnarok online. While currently active, if and when it sunsets. All that would be required is the company not sueing the tits off people for running the game locally on a homebrewed server.
There's an entire offline version of an mmo made from scratch!
Much of the time the biggest limitation is the legal ramifications of preserving the game after it's sunset. Many companies just need to not do anything at all and they would be perfectly fine. But instead they choose to sue and litigate those who attempt to keep the games going.
They need not build it for us to come. They simply need to allow us to come on our own.
And ideally give enough forewarning that the community can build it before they shut the servers off.
in addition to safety concerns due to the removal of official company moderation.
Piss off. This just means they won't be able to rely on companies to control what people get to say.
They mentioned the early days when it comes to licensing games to us.
But dont mention that in the early days of multiplayer games it was us moderating our own online communities, not the company selling the game.
Such a brain-dead stance on the matter. Nobody is asking for your garbage DRM servers, we literally want the opposite of that.
I'm unconvinced anyone will really legislate this, and if it is, it'll just lead to that country being scratched off the list of where the game is officially supported.
Realistically, we need to stop buying online only games where the servers will eventually go offline, and support those that release open servers.
The hope is that the EU will legislate it and not even apple fucks with the EU.
I stopped buying that stuff ten years ago. Indie games are always better these days
"digital ownership must be respected"
gets into bed with Meta and OpenAI
More proof that the current "Labour" government is in the pockets of rich companies and not on the side of consumers.
If you as a consumer want to own software FLOSS is the only option.
Vindication for bored ape NFT owners everywhere
I mean... A large percentage of NFTs now link to nothing. Dead URLs. So the bored ape bros should actually be on the side of digital preservation & Stop Killing Games.
But considering 96% of NFTs are now dead projects worth nothing, the bored ape bros probably just want to forget about the whole thing and move onto the next get rich quick scheme.
Losing a monopoly on specific game servers certainly can have a commercial risk. Are you entitled to that at all, let alone when you stop hosting them?
Legal risk of what? Others will have that responsibility, unless you've done something you don't want others to see?
Safety - Yes someone might have less moderation than you - that's up to the users to decide if it's okay. We still have the right to change our car's break pad - the thing that stops a large mass moving fast from hitting children.
