geteilt von: https://feddit.org/post/31053244
A cross-party group of MEPs has issued a call for legislation in support of the European Citizens’ Initiative Stop Destroying Video Games.
The ask of Stop Killing Games has repeatedly been misrepresented as a call for eternal server support, endless updates, mandatory private servers, or source-code releases. That was never the demand.
The actual demand is simple: when consumers pay for a game, publishers should not be allowed to deliberately make it unusable after support ends without providing reasonable means for continued operation.
For months, we have explained this to institutions, lawyers, developers, consumer advocates, and elected representatives. Now it is time to move from clarification to solutions.
Tiemo Wölken, the MEP leading the call for us, said:
“When nearly 1.3 million EU citizens are calling on the European Union to take action, it is our obligation to listen and to act. We cannot ignore this overwhelming call to action. The plenary debate a few weeks ago sent a clear signal: This Citizen Initiative has broad cross-party support in the European Parliament. When consumers pay for a game, they invest more than just money. They spend their time on it, make memories, develop passions and make real friends for life along the way. It is indefensible that publishers should have the right to simply pull the plug on these games at any time, and destroy cultural heritage in the process. With this letter, we reiterate our position: It’s Game Over for this abusive practice.”
This is the route we have been working toward for months. The Commission has heard the explanations. Parliament has heard the explanations. The public has now seen why those explanations were necessary.
The next step is not another round of pretending the demand is unclear. The next step is working on solutions.
That means legislation that protects consumers from having paid-for games deliberately disabled after support ends, while making clear that publishers are not being asked to provide perpetual services. It means serious discussion of reasonable end-of-life options where feasible. And it means using the upcoming Digital Fairness Act as the vehicle to turn this principle into law.
Nearly 1.3 million citizens asked the EU to act. On the 16th of this month, the Commission will officially answer the European Citizens’ Initiative.
That answer will show how seriously the Commission takes its citizens. Parliament, at least, is standing ready to act on their behalf and without it.
(Side note on the UK situation: we see it, and we are monitoring it closely. It is not yet fully clear whether this requires us to step in, but we are following developments.)
Source: Update from the SKG Reddit
Another EU Win. I hope this will lead to a law soon.
Probably
All my friends’ reaction was “A petition? You think that will do anything?”
Well I will be thrilled to send them this.
To be clear: This isn’t a new law. This isn’t even a proposal for a new law. Because the parliament can’t propose new laws. They work on and frequently change the laws proposed by the European Commission, but they can’t initiate the process. This therefore is a letter from parliament to the commission urging them to get their shit together and start acting.
With other words: We’ve won a skirmish. We haven’t won the war (yet).
I know. But it’s on their table. My friends wouldn’t even believe it would get that far.
Can I complement you on how hilarious your misunderstanding is because this is quite literally yet another petition asking the EU Commission to do something. You can even click on the images in the post to see the names of the signatories.
tell me you have no idea of the difference between the states this whole movement has gone through without telling me
How can anyone on Lemmy not be aware of this constantly spammed mildly elevated YouTube drama?
What the end-of-life plan looks like for a game isn’t going to be one-size-fits-all.
It could be private server binaries, it could be stripping the multiplayer out of the game but keeping a single-player core. It entire depends on the design of the game. And the best way to make that feasible is to force that end-of-life plan from the beginning, so that its always part of the design.
Anything is miles better than “scrap the whole thing once it stops making us money”.
And that’s always what this was about. The games industry is determined to contort the demands (as they seemingly succeeded in doing in the UK) to make it look completely unreasonable.
People just want to be able to preserve some part of the experience of their beloved games, just as we were able to do with all of our offline games in the generations before.
That’s gonna be a hell yeah from me!
It still really surprises me that this isn’t being pitched for general-purpose products. NO company should be able to release a product that relies on proprietary servers, without a certain guaranteed timeline of official-support, or having a plan in place for how the product can remain usable, post-official-support. Surely that could only have broadened support for the idea.
I actually think having it be quite narrow in scope has made it easier. It has reduced the amount of opposition from large companies and lobbies, and it is something that is easier to convince people who don’t have experience with games that it is bad.
Now this is being supported and hopefully once it is being implemented and improving things for games, I think it will make it much easier for further broader legislation that covers other industries to come in and gain support and traction.
To be honest, EU politicians aren’t idiots. Mostly.
It’s such an easy thing to implement and it would significantly increase pro-EU sentiment and democratic participation of young people.
And the only one’s who are being “harmed” are foreign companies (and Ubisoft). Gaming also does not have an all-powerful lobby.
It’s such an easy win for EU politicians, they’d have to be as out-of-touch as British MPs to not seize that opportunity.
LETS GOOOOOOOO!!!
Stop “Killing Games”!?
Oh.
