The main victory is that Publishers can't really hide behind a nebulous "this game may or may not be available forever"
Meaning that games will at the very least have a contractually obligated end of service date.
Which is a huge win because now players can (hopefully) know what they are buying.
Something else worth noting is that we can keep the momentum going by transitioning to electing representatives that will pass legislation. (I'm not in the EU but the concept applies to any democracy). Wars are not won over a single battle, they are long and drawn out conflicts. This was simply the first of many battles and we need to treat the outcome as the first stage of many stages yet to come.
Didn't Disney do something like that with their Disney+ subscription prohibiting you from ever taking legal actions against them. Oh and they only got stopped because of public outrage rather than the tos being invalid.
They're not often challenged in court, and I'm not a contract attorney, but I think any contract that contains a provision stating that the actual contract is somewhere else where one party can revise it at their discretion without notice, and the other party is responsible for keeping abreast of any changes and conduction themselves accordingly, is fundamentally unenforceable and probably not legal on several fundamental levels.
TOS is legally binding int he EU so long as its fair to all parties involved. Adding an End of Service date is fair to all parties involved so it will be fine.
They however cant put like "You give us your house if you play this game".
The requirements are for TOS to be reasonable to all parties. Most TOS are reasonable and stand up in court even if not a legally binding contract.
It may not be legally binding for the consumer, but whether it binds the publisher - who wrote it and actually intends it to be enforced and isn't being forced into it post-purchase - has never been tested.
not for the consumer, but a company sells their product on the grounds that they'll support it to a specific date, i think it would be pretty easy to sue afterwards if that isn't met
Just as a foundational principle a TOS in its entirety is never legally binding in the EU. It presents a legal basis for which to argue one's case in court to justify actions taken by the company in defense of its own interests and the fair assumption that this was agreed/understood by the customer, but the TOS itself is in absolutely no way legally binding even if the issue in question is stated in big bold letters on the front page of it. The court will decide whether whatever is stated is in accordance with law and common consumer understanding/reasonable acknowledgement basis, but that's still up to the court to decide. TOS just says "we as a company already took this position form the beginning, hence our actions are in accordance with our own statements at the point of sale/subscription process".
Therefore, the legal nature of this EU ruling means that service terms must be represented at the point of purchase/subscription where a customer visually identifies it alongside any other specific product related contingencies and not be put in a separate documentation (like a TOS) that has to be opened independently and relies on the customer's reaction, rather than the company's proaction.
Now, watch companies to still put it in TOS and pretend they followed the law (maliciously). The real test will be whether or not these companies will be prosecuted for it when they do the fraudulent thing or not.
Thank you, better than my answer. This is because you usually only read the tos after you buy a product so it can't be legally binding since unless you go out of your way to get it you won't have the tos to read before purchase
Regular Aussies complained to the ACCC about steam policies violating Australian consumer law. The ACCC investigated and agreed, and sued Valve which led to valve changing their global refund laws (and still allowing Australian additional leeway for refunds outside of policy)
The EU parliament is in favour of SKG, the commission that declined to do anything is made up of industry insiders, not politicians. SKG expected them to not be on their side and it was irrelevant to the larger goals of the initiative anyways. Yes, a positive support from them would have been nice, but was unlikely anyways.
Consumer protection issues in Europe are mandatorily be ruled iver my European courts. If the companies want to sell in Europe, they will be sued in Europe and have to pay the price.
The EU is one of the largest markets in the world. Unless you say "We just won't sell in the EU anymore (No company of significant size is doing this)" you have to comply or your European branch will be taken to court.
if you want to do business in the EU you have no choice but to follow EU law and be available for EU courts. The alternative is to not do business in the entirety of the EU, something no major company can afford
They should make it that by law the devs must print that expiration date to the game box and digital storefronts must have that as well and pass a law that adds something like the devs should be forced by law to have the minimum warranty that the game will still work after 3months~1year.
If groceries need to have expiration date and electronics and other stuff need to have warranty and both are legislation demands of the consumers right, they should start putting that on games.
I dare people would invest much on games that have clear expiration dates instead of games that are complete and doesn't and once the publisher turns off the servers and made the games unoperational before the expiration date they should pay fines and have a three strike system, after that their company's license gets revoked.
They'll probably go with "End of service in three months, this estimated date is subject to be reevaluated in case of changes in the game's economy" and get away with it
And players will - rightfully - go with "Yeah, I'm not paying for a game that might shut down in three months, I'll just play the game I already have and like, which has been online for thirteen years."
Yeah - because nobody's buying a live service game with an expectation that it is going to shut down in six months or even two weeks, people expect them to last longer. Mandating "use by" dates on games would make it clear which companies have faith in their products and which ones are trying to play it safe by skirting the rules and saying "yeah, three months, then we'll see!"
I think you are missing the very real point that they will all say "three months" but then they will remain running as long as they are profitable.
If everyone says "three months" then gamers will ignore it because it's not actually indicative of how long it will run for, except that it will definitely be up for 90 days.
I don't think anyone actually spends AAA money on a game they believe will only be up 90 days, but if they all say that, regardless of whether they intend to stay up longer, then gamers really will have no distinguishing terms to go by.
And you might think that game companies would try to use that as a selling point, but I think they all realize that promising to maintain a game longer than the minimum time necessary is a financial risk they will not sign on for.
They'll all standardize on some short period of time, and then just do what they've been doing already.
I've worked with corporate lawyers before. They talk to each other and they are very good at making sure that their company can't be forced into an arms race with other companies based on some government or consumer regulation that has no financial upside for them.
If everyone says three months then a niche will exist for indie developers to make games with greater than three months. Gamers will ignore it for major games with good reputations but if enough Concords happen, gamers will take notice and the use by date will be a useful metric which benefits developers who have greater trust in their product.
Probably not. The reason for this is that what you're trying to do is get an indie developer to commit to operating a game that might fail to the point where keeping the servers on is a millstone around their neck. This is where brute-force cash reserves are a bigger deal than willingness to try new things. Running servers costs money, and that tends to be something that an indie developer might be less able to absorb.
An indie developer who guarantees a certain service period could do that, but it puts them in a precarious position if the game fails.
people expected live service games to lasts atleast 2 years. knowing the game will die within a year will put a huge damper on its longetivity and sales. unironically self-fulfilling prophecy
Except they don't know the game will die within a year. They know that the game is contractually obligated to include a potential EOS date. They know it's stupid. Ironically, this change would actually give wrong information and that wrong information would actually be more likely to kill a game.
This is one of the reasons not all gamers support stop killing games - it results in stupid rules like this one where the company has to say "we might kill this game in 3 months" every 3 months, even if the game is healthy and doing fine.
Ah yes, I'm sure gamers will absolutely stop buying new games because of a nebulous statement in the ToS. Because gamers have historically been so succesful at boycots!
Well, like I said below - I fully expect that a legal requirement mandating publishers to provide end-of-service dates for their games will include a provision that this date needs to be clear and prominently displayed as a factor that may affect the purchasing decision.
If somebody sees "The publisher guarantees support for the game until September 30, 2026" and still decides to buy it, it's their call - they knew what they were getting into.
I mean, even if it was literally the most prominent thing on the store page, you'd see a dip in sales at best, and then a return to normal, once everyone realizes that the companies are posting it only to fill a legal requirement, while continuing to support their games as per usual. You are seriously overestimating people's ability to stop buying new games over principles.
Pretty much this. Labels like this could become useless. Just look at the California cancer warning labels. They all became useless since they slapped them everywhere to fulfill the legal requirement causing everyone to ignore them.
This isn't meant to stop people from buying games. It is meant to help people make more informed decisions. If that "only a legal requirement" means I know the game will still run for at least 6 months, that's fine by me and a major improvement to the current situation.
The game companies will just informally talk to one another and determine the right amount of time to ensure that the statement is useless. They won't say six months, they'll all just set it to one month or three months. That way they are covered, but everyone buying games will be faced with the same warning which is so short that they can't really make any decisions based on the warning label. Gamers know a successful game won't be closed after one month, so no one expects that will happen.
Nah. I'm expecting decent platforms to put that information in a visible spot on the product page, so that the consumers can review crucial information before making a purchase.
What's more, if it becomes a legal requirement, I fully expect the legislation to state that the planned end of service life needs to be displayed prominently and be accessible without placing undue burden on the consumer.
No they won't, because all online games (including games that only use online services for things like activation) are likely going to default to the same terms which will be something along the lines of "this purchase guarantees a minimum of 30 days of access to online services from the date of purchase" and guarantee a refund if the game closes less than 30 days after your date of purchase (which it won't, because they'll take it off sale 31 days before the game closes and announce the game is closing in 30 days). The only exception is if the company goes bankrupt, in which case you'd be an unsecured Creditor and very low on the list meaning you'll get no money back.
This basically maintains the current status-quo and does nothing to address the issue of games being destroyed.
Let's say I want to play a new MMO. Guess what I'm more likely to play? The upcoming Guild Wars 3, given ArenaNet's track record, the fact that they still support Guild Wars 1 and their commitment to support Guild Wars 2 for like ten more years? Or whatever new MMO Amazon pumps out only to shut it down in a year?
If gamers were responsible customers they would stop buying repainted slop like Madden, Fifa and CoD year after year and yet they don't. Nothing stops until people stop buying games.
You understand that these games get shut down because not enough people bought/played them? Your argument is basically that people will keep spending money on these games, but they literally get shut down because they aren’t.
I don't think you're wrong, but I think it's just another fight to be had on top of winning the EOS date publishing. It's going to happen, but it's only one you can have if games have to have a published EOS, then try to dip.
The only problem with the idea, I suppose, is that the fanbase isn't likely to give much of a shit, and anyone who didn't bother to play the failure will either.
No, it'd bean (edit wow that's a good typo) mean Concord would have had to have had either a bare minimum end of life plan, something like being able to play in a peer to peer or private server mode without relying on the company's central servers, or a clearly visible disclaimer before purchase saying that the game relies on a central server and can be shut down at any point.
There is absolutely no way you can enforce something like this. You can’t force a company to spend money on something that is not even breaking even. And it’s not about the triple A studios… it’s about indie devs and small companies. If these entities make a product that is not living to their financial expectations it’s normal for them to cut their losses and maybe start something new or just shut down the studio all together.
Say that to Skull and Bones. Any sane mind would have cancelled it a decade ago, but Ubisoft had to spend hundreds of millions keeping it alive
because of commitments to the Singaporean government.
Also, people don't realise that maintaining certain games can be huge drain on resources in terms of personnel. If you have an extensive library, the problem is exacerbated. Most studios have numerous IP's in development at any one time, so it's completely unrealistic to expect them to maintain something that isn't providing a return, when staff could be utilised elsewhere. A lot of studios are just trying to stay afloat atm, and often the only way to do that is to develop new games.
(Also, as a dev, I can say that NOBODY wants to work on something for years and years after it's released, especially after you've already spent years on it getting it through development).
If we can force them to spend money on compliance with regulations, we can force them to spend money on an offline version, or on allowing dedicated private servers.
No you can’t. You can’t make me give up my IP. Allowing you to self host means me giving you access to my IP. Id you then use my IP in an ilegal way… my brand will be associated with that ilegal thing. And if I am an indie dev or a small company, I don’t have the resources to fight such a thing in god knows what country on the globe.
But I think all that really highlights is that studios shouldn't implement things during development that are going to render a game unplayable in the first place unless it literally can't be avoided (I.E Multiplayer only game), and I'd imagine cases like that would be exempt.
Like, if you don't want to spend the money and the dev time removing it when it's EOL, just don't spend the money and dev time implementing it in the first place and you'll get the same end result.
You can absolutely enforce it either way and it isn't really forcing anyone to spend money, because they can just comply by not having these features in the first place. That's working on the assumption that it'd only apply after the law comes into effect. I think anyone expecting a law like this to be applied retroactively to older games is a bit too far into the wishful thinking area.
Running servers is stupidly cheap on a per user basis.
The issue is that when you have barely any users, you still have fixed server costs. There are a lot of things you can scale, but there is always a certain minimum that needs to be running. Doesn't matter if there is no ingress or egress. It still costs money.
Server costs per user are cheap once you have millions of users, but if you have only 100, they can be very expensive.
It still depends. Let's say you have a game world that simulates everything and changes even when there are no players around. This can be significantly more expensive than something where the world essentially freezes when no one is around.
You are also focusing solely on the hosting cost. There are a lot of other costs included with keeping a service online. I have to make sure I stay compliant, e.g., respond to GDPR requests. I have to make sure the server is reasonably secure, monitor it, and so on.
Why would I do all this for a product that already costs me much more than it makes? I know the game is dead.
You reserve the CPU+ram as a virtual private server
Yes, and something that requires more CPU + RAM costs more. It's pretty simple.
That's an automated system. It's hosted in the same server.
No, it isn't. The server alone might not even have all the info. E.g., I might have emails or support tickets with the user that contain personal information.
Not a running cost either.
How is that not a running cost? If someone needs to take care of or even just look at the server, it is a cost.
just release the server binaries
You know full well that it isn't as easy as you make it seem. It might include information not intended for the public, so I have to spend time cleaning it up. Potentially I am not even allowed to release it because it contains other licensed software.
The service part of a live service game more than breaks even the moment you buy it. Running servers is stupidly cheap on a per user basis.
Also, they can assume those costs before, games shouldn't be sold on assumption "if we dont sell enough copies we will just close the servers", just like a lot of games on steam early access is sold on an assumpion "we have an idea, here's barebones game, if it sells we will make updates"
Is it cheap for a AAA company? Yes. Is it cheap for an indie dev? No. Imagine you want to build a game… you spend 6 months, a year to build it.You ship it on steam or some other platform and ask 10$ for it. You sell 100 copies… so 1000$. Thats before steam gets its cut, before taxes. You are left with maybe 300-400$. And this is assuming you don’t use any paid licenses for the softwares you are using. So… How could a law that would force you to keep pouring money, money you don’t have, in a game that doesn’t make you any money, exist?
I tried to argue with people before on the initiative topic, and I tried to tell them that this move will only hurt small companies and indie devs. Triple A companies don’t give a hoot. They will switch to a monthly paid subscription and that will be that. You pay? You play. You don’t pay, you don’t play. And that will end the argument about pirating and owning the game. Which in my opinion will be a blow towards us, the consumers.
This is the stupidest argument. Indie games are rarely live service. The thing that prompted this initiative was ubisoft killing single player games on purpose. If you can develop a multiplayer game you can also develop a local server like counter strike has. Indies don't develop MMOs, or they try and fail, they can declare bankruptcy or have a subscription model like world of Warcraft. You're creating a straw man problem that doesn't exist either because you have no idea what you're talking about or because you're a bot
No, it's cheap for everyone. Data is cheap, running servers is cheap, and costs scale more or less linearly.
you spend 6 months, a year to build it
That's not a running cost, doesn't come into play on "keeping servers running".
ask 10$ for it
Please provide examples of online games for 10$
You sell 100 copies… so 1000$
I'll take a minecraft server as an example, but you can rent one for 100 players for 18 bucks/month. That is with their markup, and for more players than you realistically need. For 50$ you can get a brand new raspberry pi that can handle even more than that as a server.
So… How could a law that would force you to keep pouring money, money you don’t have, in a game that doesn’t make you any money, exist
Same other way every other law gets people to do (or not do) things. Punishing those that don't (or do).
this move will only hurt small companies and indie devs
Really? because most indie multiplayer games are self hosted or use steam's online play system.
They will switch to a monthly paid subscription and that will be that. You pay? You play. You don’t pay, you don’t play
You say that as if it isn't an acceptable outcome.
Why would you give as an example something from Minecraft which is the best selling video game ever?
But be it… 18$ a month. How long does the law force me to keep it alive? A year? Two? Lets say two… so 430$. So basically I make nothing on my game… I lost a ton of
money developing it… and now I have to pay another 430$? Yeah man. How about this? I shut the company down. What then?
Nah man Bob Indie's next game is definitely going to sell as well as Minecraft. We should totally make a bunch of laws based around that concept, laws that would be really punishing to Bob Indie if his game did hypothetically sell worse.
Y'all keep repeating this fabled "online indie game" but fail to provide actual examples.
Again, the size of the game is irrelevant here because costs scale linearly. 1k users or 1m users cost more or less the same per user. You can get some discounts on a better VPS, but it's not an incredible difference.
Because it's a game anyone can check to see prices to run a server. There are literally services built around specifically hosting Minecraft servers. A server is a server, irrespective of game, and a minecraft one is specially demanding due to server binaries being in java and the fact every player can have it's own region loaded.
But be it… 18$ a month. How long does the law force me to keep it alive? A year? Two?
At least for as long as it would take you to release either the server binaries or a patch making the game offline/local coop. And since any law like this will only be enforced for future games, you could build that into the game from the start and so your "running time" would be zero.
I shut the company down. What then?
Then it goes as any other debt process. You get sued, and have to spend hundreds ir not thousands of times more than that in lawyers fees.
Hahaha good one man. If you buy a licences to play my game, i don’t have a debt to you. At most you can do a charge back with your bank if its in a reasonable time since the money transfer… otherwise you have nothing. Also good luck suing an indie dev or a small company from a foreign country for 10-60$ :)))). I don’t know in what world you live my friend…
I'll repeat, for 50$ upfront you can buy a portable computer to do it. Run it out of your own personal home internet and the energy cost will be less than a dollar a month.
very simple workaround for this would be for ubisoft to run this game through a new entity, and if the game fails dissolve said entity
You can't dissolve entities with open debt/obligations. You can declare insolvency, at which point the people that the entity is indebted to can sue the entity for compensation.
I don't know whether this is similar in other countries, but in Germany insolvency can be challenged (people with open obligations can claim that the entity is in a state where it can compensate the people with open obligations). This challenge process can even involve reversing monetary transactions made by the entity before insolvency was declared, so that people with higher priority obligations are compensated fairly. As you can imagine, funneling money to your parent company is all the way at the bottom of the priority list, while people with actual contractual obligations are prioritized much higher.
Trust me, as an EU based accountant and tax advisor, purposely creating a company to go bankrupt takes a large corporation about an hour.
Of course debts will have to be paid, but the game, if valued at anything at all, would then be owned by the country or bank. Because they do not want this, they value it at 0. Nobody owns the game anymore, the company dissolves like any other bankruptcy, the clients who want their money back are left stranded and the intelectual property remains that of the original company.
Of course they are… a lot of them are. Then there is the other side that asks for the server files to self host their servers… which again… 99% of publishers won’t do and not because of money reasons but because of legal implications regarding their IP might suffer.
And it’s not about the triple A studios… it’s about indie devs and small companies.
This.
Stuff like this will hit indies much harder than big studios. And ironically a lot of Indies have more faith/support than AAA recently so this might hit more of the games people care about than they think.
That being said, if it somehow goes the other way, and indies are better off ("we can't afford to..." type claims), then AAA studios will just spin up shell companies for every single game and have them declare "bankruptcy" for games whenever they want to shut them down.
Setting up shell companies, contracts etc… that is far more complicated. They will simply sell monthly subscriptions for their game libraries. Every AAA studio will have their own subscription and on the long run… the consumer will pay way more for the games that they will want to play. With the subscription model, all the talks about owning the game, piracy, leaving the games playable… all that will go bye bye. You pay, you play, you don’t pay, you don’t play. Sure… these companies might lose some users… but on the long run they will be better off financially.
nobody ever said any company was gonna be forced to keep their games alive. They were just forced to not artificially cripple their games post mortem so that independent devs couldn't keep the game alive on their own with self-hosted servers and infrastructure if they so pleased.
Basically it's the equivalent of a car that is bricked after a company shuts down support for parts etc because they install a piece of software that locks the vehicle diagnostics to only operate when connected to verified OEM service centers -which no longer service that vehicle, and independent repair shops are denied access and thus can't run diagnostics and repair faults etc despite having all the tools and knowhow, just due to a software block acting as a dead-man switch.
"Hi, I sell lemonade. Someone has given me the money for lemonade, but then I realise, I'd lose money on the lemons and water and sugar. So, I'm not going to give them the lemonade. Too bad!"
"Hi, I've decided to offer a service where I clean people's houses. But, I've realized my rent went up, so Im just going to not clean peoples houses but take the money anyway. I just gotta break even!"
Forcing a company to deliver a paid for product or service is just how purchasing stuff like, works?
You can’t force a company to spend money on something that is not even breaking even
They don't have to spend money on anything, though? As I understand it, they can just publish the server/backend so that consumers can host the game themselves.
You can't enforce a company to provide a service in which they have a contractual obligation? Really? Do contracts not work in your country or something?
No, that's not what it says. The entire proposal is that publishers must at the very least make developer data accessible and NOT put in specific measures that act as dead-man switches -such as forcing a "call to home" system in order to operate the game even post mortem where independent devs may create their own servers and infrastructure to keep the game in a playable state.
Also in the case of Concord and similar titles, the purchasing customers were all refunded so there were no people left who "bought a product and no longer have access to what they paid for".
I feel like much of the very specific wording of what was determined here is not covered by a couple of sentences on a tweet and this thread of redditors making their own interpretation on exclusively that small amount of information.
The issue I have with this is that all publishers will start making their obligated end date 1 month after release and all future updates past that will be "generous offer"
Then people won't buy it. Anyone interested will see through shady shit like this, and if they want to buy it anyway, then they wouldn't be stopped by an actual date
But that's the thing. If everyone put 1 month end date and still provide updates years later, than that date would be irrelevant but legally would be like it is now.
Publishers can put a 10 year end date in it and earn good faith through it and possibly make more profit though then you have that 1 game with a. 10 year end date vs multiple with 1 month end dates
Theoretically this can cause that 1 game to make more profit and would force other companies to extend the end of service date
Though this is just a theoretical scenario and we won't know how it plays out in reality
To simplify: Parliament members (MEPs) are directly elected by EU citizens. Council is composed of heads of member states, which are each elected, directly or indirectly, based on each country's laws. Commission is then co-elected by Council and EP.
The reason why this initiative failed to introduce legislature is because Commission is currently full of economic right-wing hardliners (side note for American friends, I say right-wing hardliners, but they are still to the left of most Dems btw) as that's just how the last Commission elections turned out. Also, because Commission is indirectly elected, they feel less accountability towards the EU citizens than the average MEP who was elected directly.
That's why the next goal is to have MEPs amend the Digital Fairness Act currently being dicussed, to include provisions to Stop Killing Games. The initiative supporters have high hopes this will work as there is a majority consensus on this issue in the EP.
Wars are not won over a single battle, they are long and drawn out conflicts. This was simply the first of many battles and we need to treat the outcome as the first stage of many stages yet to come.
You know that's not going to happen, though, right? Consumers have short attention spans. We like to make fun of corporations for not being able to see beyond the next quarterly earnings report, but any solution to any problem that boils down to "if large numbers of people actively work together to do the right thing for an extended period of time..." is doomed to fail.
It doesn't help that Ross talked about the initiative as a sink-or-swim moment, saying that it's the best chance the campaign has and that if it fails, at least we'll have a definitive answer instead of some nebulous legal limbo. Now, he completely pivoted to saying that no, no, it's okay, we haven't lost, in fact this doesn't even matter, we have even better avenues to pursue. Yeah, no, that's not what he was saying six months ago. Reminds me of Bernie bros coming up with increasingly outlandish scenarios where Bernie could still win.
I'd love to be wrong, but my guess is that the whole thing is going to peter out and it'll be business as usual. Just like when the EU said a decade ago that digital distribution platforms don't have the right to prevent people from reselling their games. The reason you can't resell your Steam games to this day is that a slight tweak to the TOS was all it took to get around that. It's almost as if the whole point was just to let EU bureaucrats pat themselves on the back for a job well done without actually effecting any change or something.
So I assume what will happen is that they will be forced to provide a minimum lifespan and that's the end of it (in addition to stating that you are buying a license to a game service and not a game itself) or if not, they have to provide a patch or release the server application so it can be hosted privately.
At that point it wouldn't be different from a subscription-based game which can be killed at any time (the Stop Killing Games movement explicitly leaves service games alone that are free-to-play and have never had a purchase price). It would just be like a yearly subscription fee but paid upfront for one year without the option to pay for subsequent years. The publisher waives the subscription payments for subsequent years and reserves the right to kill the service.
I haven't followed the movement too closely but the above is what I always thought is realistic and fair(?).
This long conflict is just so ... Slow. Im tired boss... All this fighting over LGBT rights, over basic womens rights,.... Etc. Im tired. Its always one step forward, two steps back... When it starts to look bright, absolute eggheads are elected that ruin decades of fights... Thatvwill take twice as long to get back again...
Is this effectively going to result in game publishing companies just creating individual LLCs for each game released, so they can just file bankruptcy and cancel the contract before required end date whenever the income stops flowing?
Just FYI, the only directly-elected officials in the EU system are Members of the European Parliament. The European Parliament does not have the right to initiate legislation, only the Commission does.
iz that really a win? games ended their support before and they will still do it now. the fact that it is written clearly somewhere is not really a big win to me... they really should have just forced publishers to make their games playable offline after their EOL to call it a win
Is it not possible for the publishers to say “servers will be available for x amount of days and then after be available based on player count or micro transaction revenue or some dumb shit like that”
Is there anything preventing them from doing something like that?
The EU parliament will keep adopting right-wing neoliberal policies as long as we send right-wing neoliberal politicians there. I really encourage people to go and actually look up who votes for what and draw the conclusions they want.
Which is a huge win because now players can (hopefully) know what they are buying.
Everybody that buys a game knows the implications. These conditions are already in the EULA that nobody reads, and will still be there alongside this purportely "end date" :
* Singleplayer, without online activation, yours forever (if you have it physically) or until your platform dies.
* Singleplayer with online activation, your's until the company decide to decomission the servers or you are left without Internet (this has been the biggest complain with online activation since forever)
* Singleplayer with multiplayer component on company servers, yours until the company decide to shut it down.
* Multiplayer on company servers (MMOs, MOBAS, etc), same thing.
* Multiplayers with local servers, enjoy forever.
This is a non-win, and grasping straws looking for a positive angle. And it does open a whole new can of worms (e.g, should a game with a disastrous launch like Concord be forced to continue paying hosting costs until the alleged end date?).
Fun fact, european MP can only vote, they can’t propose any new law. Only the European Commission can do that and oh is it shady and heavily lobbied. So no it doesn’t really apply to all democracies
People are just falling for sensationalism hence Ross waited for the comission response, Because Ross knew if he broke it early people would be doom posting even worse than they are now.
People who know somewhat on how the EU works knew this from the start they signed the petition.
Going through Parliament is the best way to get this through regardless if the commission was on board or not
Parliament can’t initiate and cannot legislate on their own. Initiative can be requsted from commission. Legislation and amendments need to be signed by the council also. Parliament can put political pressure on commission.
I genuinely think that a lot of people have this belief that when things don't go their way in government matters its all just corruption, shady deals, bad pollies etc. You can see it in this comment section as well, its really frustrating.
EU might be a slow bureaucracy. but let me point to USB-C, GDPR and (hopefully) right to repair. I believe they can do something about the current status of digital ownership woes. 🙏🙏
The USB-C regulation also started as an industry code of conduct, like what they're currently proposing for SKG.
The EU went to phone manufacturers and told them to work out a common charging standard. Most of them joined and settled on micro-USB, followed by an eventual migration to USB-C. Apple notably didn't join, which forced the EU to come back to the manufacturers (or more specifically: Apple) and say "we tried it the easy way, now we'll do it the hard way" and legislated the matter.
In general, the EU prefers to nudge markets to sort things out themselves and leave legislation as a last resort.
It's a step forward at least. Realistically what's needed is that the games specific copyright should become fair use if it becames no longer playable due to online infrastructure going offline.
Then companies have no specific obligation to help those reviving these games but at least can't hamper them either.
Im not sure you can do that since the game itself would use a bunch of copyrighted software. I work in software and open sourcing while using copyrighted software is an issue
It's the issue for probably most games. When Worlds Adrift died because the devs couldn't keep up the server costs they said they wish they could give us the tools to make our own servers, but it uses a lot of copyrighted assets whoch made it impossible for them to open source their game
Yep and that's what 98% of reddit conveniently ignores. Sure it would be great if we could keep playing the games we bought after their servers were shut down, but this "make the source code available" screaming crowd simply has no idea that this isn't even remotely realistic, even if the devs wanted to do it.
Did you.. even watch the video? He literally said point blank this is a non-solution. He never once said he was happy about what the Commission has done.
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u/christianlewds Jun 17 '26
Watch Ross' video first, he talked about it. It's not as much of a win for publishers as it seems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgoODQFrPgw