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.
“Digital ownership must be respected.”
Yeah, that’s what this entire thing is about.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 same govt that saw the overwhelming support for petition against the Online ID verification Act & went nahhhhhhh we don’t listen to our citizens.
If I gotta pay IL sales tax on a digital game I better fucking own it!
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.
If you as a consumer want to own software FLOSS is the only option.
Such a brain-dead stance on the matter. Nobody is asking for your garbage DRM servers, we literally want the opposite of that.
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.
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.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had marginally competent political representatives rather than the complete wastes of oxygen that we have right now.
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.
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.
This is absolute bullshit and not at all how it works, now or back in the 1980s.
Nah, it’s absolutely how it has worked since the 1980s. You’ve never owned the game, just the physical hardware it’s on and a license to use the game. Go read any manual or back of the box or actual cartridge or disc.
If you don’t want to give the sever away (including the ability to use it) then don’t shut it down or otherwise make the game unplayable.
Or release API documentation for the server and help the community create a replacement. Companies have options here.
So if the developers of a game go bankrupt, or a single developer of an indie game dies, what do you suggest happens?
usually in bankruptcy the game gets sold in order to help pay debts… whoever buys the game assumes the responsibility of contributing to run the online services, or provide options for others to… in the case that nobody buys the game (im not entirely sure what happens to the IP in that case) but it’s relatively minimal effort to release server source code or documentation OR even just remove the online parts that’s usually just for DRM which is now pretty irrelevant because you’re shutting it down anyway so why would anyone care if someone pirates it?!
None of that is “relatively minimal effort” other than releasing the source code, which is not something that should ever be mandated.
mandatory minimum warranties are also not relatively minimal effort and yet we have laws that require those… most consumer protection standards aren’t minimal effort: that doesn’t mean we don’t make laws to ensure consumers get what they are expecting when they hand over money
why shouldn’t handing over source code to a game that’s being shut down (and apparently that nobody finds any value in since it wasn’t even bought in bankruptcy auction) be mandated as a last resort?
The code should go into escrow when the first game is sold. This is standard practice in industry - you don’t buy something without assurance that if the company goes under you have options.
This is standard practice in industry - you don’t buy something without assurance that if the company goes under you have options.
Which industries is this standard in? I can’t think of any. If Samsung went bankrupt who is replacing your S25 Ultra?
Consumer devices are not industry. they almost never get that treatment.
I think they mean in like B2B. Like if you buy of piece of software x thousand times with y years of support it’s standard practice to have a contract that covers what happens if the company goes under while you still have years of support.
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.
It is not pertinent to this article.
What do you mean?
You see…a few years ago anyone with two pennies to rub together but not as many braincells went fucking bananas for these ai images of cartoon monkeys. Some people got really possessive and started claiming that they owned the usage rights and were threatening people taking screenshots with legal action.
“digital ownership must be respected”
gets into bed with Meta and OpenAI
They’ve been owned!
Always have been
More proof that the current “Labour” government is in the pockets of rich companies and not on the side of consumers.
If only that wasn’t true if the other big parties as well.
Member when “no taxation without representation” was a thing people believed in?
Us Americans fought a war over that nonsense, and it’s looking like we might need to again.
Common UK, figure it out.
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.
Digital ownership? Games producers want to own players’ fingers now? I guess that’s slightly better than cutting their ears off.
I don’t dig it. I don’t dig it at all.
You know, I have purchased around 200 games. I have no idea how many of those can be mine because they’re linked to a store, maintained (usually) by a corporation hellbent on optimised profits, subject to mandatory updates so I have no choice but to play the way they want me to, and I don’t have the space to store them all. I don’t feel like any of them are really owned by me (and I know this is true but I reject that notion), not until they’re transferred to an offline machine.
They’re not owned by you. You own a license to use them. Some stores, like GOG, give you a less restrictive license, but it’s still a license.
GoG does actually explicitly state that you own the games bought on the platform, though who knows how well that holds in a strictly legal sense.
and the law is able to make license conditions illegal/unenforceable (like non-compete clauses in employment contracts)
Sure, but has the law made licenses for software illegal/unenforceable? No.
literally what STG is about
Cool, and no laws have been changed, and it’s debatable if any should.
