Copyright was invented so artists would be able to sell their art, and more art would be made.
When copyright is protected on a product that’s no longer sold, less art is made.
When a copyright holder stops selling their art, copyright protections should immediately cease, and they should be responsible for copyright obligations - releasing the source code to the public. Use it or lose it!
This is the most level headed approach to IP I’ve seen. If you’re not willing to use the property you forfeit it. It’s a common contact for licensing rights for movies that forces a studio to make a movie or lose rights. That way people can’t squat on a licence to prevent others using it.
Sony has to make a Spiderman movie every few years even though DVDs of the old ones are still being sold, but Ubisoft can just delete games forever and they can never be played again.
A good book on this is: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig
The same thing should apply to private property, especially in cities.
Pretty sure it was so publishers (printing press owners) could have a guaranteed profit. Those two things (publisher and artist profits) were correlated at the time. Not so much anymore. Streaming/subscription mentality is like planned obsolescence for IP.
Anti-murder laws are cuttailing my choice! What if I someday would like to make a choice to murder someone?
Yes! When I read that, I immediately thought “curtailing developer choice is exactly the point.”
Whenever a large games company talks about “developer choice” you know they’re referring to one of a few things:
- Think of the shareholders!
- Think of the rich CEO who adds zero value to the company!
- The people don’t know what they want and therefore we need to tell them exactly what they want and need!
“… curtail developer choice” - This from a bunch of people for whom the term ‘executive meddling’ was created.
Sounds like they just put together a bunch of meaningful sounding words. I know what they want to say though: "Noooo! But mah freedumbs! NOOOO 😭 "
Developer choice, ha-ha, very funny. I am not familiar with the industry and still feel safe to bet most of them (edit: actual software developers making games) just want to get enough money for doing what they can do without too much stress/disgust and also most of them don’t have a desire to see their work die just because some manager decided it is time to make some other games instead
I bet they’re really pissed off with ubisoft right now. They basically started this whole movement by being so egregious with The Crew. Less than a month before they shut the servers down the game was still on sale for the full price that it had launched with.
Granted it was shut down because it was the most mediocre game ever made but that still isn’t an excuse.
Tbh when I read of it, being an open world driving game where you can just drive around a very large area, I kind of wanted it. Not as a game, but simply for driving around. MarioKart is too happy for that. I just want to get lost in thoughts while driving.
I hear thats what European Truck Simulator 1, 2, and American truck simulator are excellent for. Driving around on long roads with meditative scenery.
Gran Turismo has similar stuff and is just better as a driving sim game.
Forza Horizon is good for that experience
Uh, yeah, that’s the point of all regulations. To make you not pick bad things.
Well when the choice is anti consumer, too fucking bad.
From the mind of the one Free Man
I don’t know why these companies think they can talk their way out of this. No one is buying your BS. Just STFU.
They can and they will just lobby commission or EU Parliament if needed.
It’s to give talking points to the politicians they paid for.
Do you mean Buying = believing Or Buying = buying
Because I think the real problem here is that people actually are buying=buying and that’s why they keep doing it.
It needs way more people, because I guess a lot of people from all over the world used VPNs to sign the petition and will get nullified.
So if you planned to do it, don’t, you will hurt your goals more than you’re doing an good.
When you work hard to create a consumer economy, the first rule is, don’t piss off the consumers!
I think people are overestimating what this petition is going to do. It will likely just end up in a response from the EU listing pros and cons but effectively saying “can’t really do anything about it, sorry!”. It’s still good, even MMOs have server software gaming companies could release if legislation forced them instead of causing fandoms to die. Games are culture. They may also be entertainment, but that’s culture as well. But I wouldn’t hold out hope.
I think forcing MMOs to release software is a bit much.
Opted for large scaled systems. It’s more than just simple software. There is a ton of infrastructure and proprietary solutioning that goes into it. That’s likely used for other games as well.
It may not even be possible to release the software because it is not just software and the resources to prepare it for releasing may not be available.
However, if a game company shut down their servers, they should not be allowed to prevent other people from try to reverse engineer and make their own servers.
Single player and local games 100% though should not be allowed to be killed.
Opted for large scaled systems. It’s more than just simple software. There is a ton of infrastructure and proprietary solutioning that goes into it. That’s likely used for other games as well.
Doesn’t mean it can’t be released, just that it might be difficult to reproduce. It would still be much, much easier to reverse engineer that than to reverse engineer everything from the client and network communication captures.
It may not even be possible to release the software because it is not just software and the resources to prepare it for releasing may not be available.
In other words, so you don’t know, and vague assumptions on a closed box because closed boxes allow you to make them.
Most MMOs usually have multiple instances running, each which need to be maintained separately. That means they have usually gone through the process of encapsulating the server functionality in a way that can be reproduced and recreated into new instances. They have to be maintained at the same time, so they need to be relatively standard. At one point those supposedly absent resources to duplicate the instance of a server have likely existed, and just need to be packaged for public release. Proprietary portions can simply be excluded - an incomplete release is preferable to an absent one. Can’t release databases, they can release schemas, etc. Incomplete > absent.
You largely seem to be giving MMO companies the excuse that if their server solution could theoretically be proprietary and convoluted enough, even if it really isn’t, that they not be subject to the Stop Killing Games initiative. MMOs, unlike single player games, have a far more notable sociable and persistence factor to them, a bigger cultural footprint within those communities, that makes the Stop Killing Games Initiative particularly applicable to them. There’s one simply way not to be subject to its demands - don’t kill the games.
“but black dynamite!.. i sell drugs to the community!”
