Official response from EU Commission after attending invite only party hosted by lobbyists, attended by Ubisoft and other corpos
Open letter from SKG addressing EU Commision (aka industry/lobbyist talking points)
https://x.com/StopKilingGames/status/2062131784926519424
Video from YongYea if you’d like to listen to the situation
EU institutions are for the lobbyist, not for the people. We already knew that.
I wrote all my EU representatives in the parliaments about the chat control topic, and NONE of them answered. They are an elite above normal citizens, they do not care about us. They are aristocrats.
The commission is famously bad for this, but the EU also has the Parliament whivh is much less of a problem
Isn’t the Commission a famlusly corrupt place? Nearly all popular measures from the EU came from the Parliament, iirc
I’m still counting this as a very broad win.
The corruption is hilariously obvious now, they had no other choice.
They’re afraid.
Them being afraid, the lying and bullshit being undeniably obvious to anyone with ~+90 IQ, and there now being actual substantial public awareness and concern, and real organizations dedicated to combatting this corruption?
Should have been that way a decade ago, but better late than never.
The SKG movement should become the Stop Buying Games movement if they don’t listen.
No buy from gog and show that there is money in being consumer friendly
The Nazi storefront? How about just fuck all corps, either steal it or do the transaction directly with the devs.
I support skg but also I stopped buying (aaa) games a long time ago, and I can’t be the only one. We’re the people who have enough disposable income but simply won’t support shit but beancounter managers are too stupid to realize it would be easy to get if they’d just show a little decency.
🤷
Yeah. There was a statistic about Steam a while ago showing that the percentage of recent releases by playtime was steadily declining. People have their classics, they outgrow competitive games, they don’t want to upgrade their PCs as much with current prices. This was masked for a time by overall steady growth in the gaming sector, but this is slowing down.
I stopped buying and playing Ubisoft games years ago. Far Cry 4 I believe.
Boycotts don’t work when John Gamer spends hundreds of millions on microtransactions. I could never buy another EA Sports game for the rest of my life, and all it takes is one whale to wipe out ten of me boycotting. The economy of boycotting games is completely broken at scale when whales exist, and companies know how to cater to them.
But if the whale does not have 10 other people to play with and show off their whaling, then they won’t whale no more on that game.
You are the plankton accompanying the whale (wtf am I typing while shitting in the morning) even if you are not paying directly, you support the ecosystem. No other players to play with, then suddenly it’s a boring game.
This is why they put micro-transactions into single player games now 😅
I get your point but look at any harbor in the Mediterranean when an event comes to town, it’s full of super-yatchs. The rich will always be fine peacocking for each other, and yatch builders manage to stay in business just fine. I realize it’s a bit different since there’s a whole social aspect of the game, arguably the whole point is to play with others. I just don’t see the bean counters having that foresight.
I’d put more weight behind IP law, where if a company chooses to shut down an online game then it gets treated like abandonware and they cannot pursue fans who run their own servers. That does put the onus on the fans at the end of the day, but I think in the long run it would make companies more willing to appeal to a wider audience if we always had an open model to fall back to.
Gamers are less capable of self-control than heroin addicts. Trying to get them to stop buying games is a fools errand.
I don’t get those two kinds of gamers. You’re paying over $100USD every year to continue to play fundamentally the SAME game. Just that ALL your progress and cosmetics/teams are essentially wiped and you have to spend hundreds of dollars to reacquire them. And they say some games are “too grindy.”
To this day I’ve still failed to talk my stepdad out of buying Madden games… even when they no longer work on Windows 10 (and of course Linux) so he’s having to upgrade… Sigh.
Or “Stop Renting Games” since we only get a digital license on most platforms that can be revoked.
EDIT: I need to watch the (looong) video linked below by MagnificentSteiner as this may be wrong.
This is not true. Don’t spread this false “you don’t own your games” narrative.
You buy a perpetual license for a copy of the game. It’s called a license because you are not buying the actual game but a copy. It’s exactly the same way other software works as well as music and other media.
The whole point of SKG is that we do own our games but publishers are trying to act otherwise.
Here, Ross who started SKG explains it better.
Nobody’s giving you a perpetual license to anything, even GOG, any license you’re “buying” can be revoked at any time for whatever reason they want.
That’s just not true. Inform yourself to save future embarrassment.
You are confusing licensing and terms of service.
“Support for all games cannot last forever.”
…
Again and again and again… Sigh… Sadly I’m sure many of the comission will just believe that shit…
But then again, the big companies are obviously scared, that’s a good sign at least.
Well yes. Publishers of physical books absolutely cannot not put a piece of explosive inside their physical book, whose only point is to burn the book once said publisher claims it’s impossible to not set off the explosive after 25 years of “support”.
Neither games nor gamers don’t need “support”. What they need is to not actively be belittled, castrated and mutilated by publishers.
If this was done in the physical realm wirh equivalent tactics, there’d also be outrage.
That active modding and coding communities exist to keep older gamers working into the modern era is reason enough to show people just love games.
I wrote a Python script that says “lol” last week.
50 years from now, it’ll still be runnable, and it’ll still say “lol”.
Unless I update it to say “Ubisoft sucks dick”.
If you don’t update it to say “Ubisoft sucks dick,” you don’t support games!
If you don’t update it I doubt that. We have computer programs that are 50 years old and are completely unable because the base computer changed so much
So?
Emulate.
As long as the application doesn’t rely on something external like a server that no longer exists, it can always be run.
This isn’t about a hardware system changing. If you can either find the original hardware or simulate it, it should run. Not just go “expiry date passed, fuck you”.
You’re saying it can sometimes be practically impossible. That doesn’t mean it has to be theoretically and actually impossible, too.
SKG isnt even asking for support to last forever. They have repeatedly been very clear about that.
If I buy a physical board game, I can keep playing it as long as I still have the game in my possession. Video games should be no different.
Before the internet was widespread, that’s exactly how they worked.
Yup and games were fully formed because when you got that tape/cd that was it, the whole game. None of this “oh we will be adding blah blah”
Not to say there weren’t issues in that period of time with defunct or broken games. Just that it was more expensive to fix an oops so spending money to make it work right was a necessity.
I mean, until their internal ram failed and you needed to do a full RPG in one sitting, but I guess that’s true of board games losing pieces or breaking.
A streamer wanting to catch all original Pokémon started his session with soldering new batteries into his cartridges.
That is what archival copies and emulation exists to protect. In case your physical copy that you purchased becomes damaged and as a result is no longer usable, you still have the legal right to access the digital content you paid for. You have the legal right to make your own backup copies. You cannot distribute the copy, and are only entitled to one (at a time), and must destroy the copy if you sell or give away your physical copy. Basically the physical copy acts like a proof of purchase.
Nintendo does not know the law and asserts their own creative interpretation is correct, but the letter of the law is very clear.
Games (and software) are one of the few forms of media and free speech that are subject to this.
Hence why streaming, e-books, etc come in to push in convenience while removing ownership/independence.
I see it tangentially related in how it operates similar to fossil fuels/renewables. The industry wants you to keep buying. They can’t control the sun, wind, etc, so you don’t need to rely on them.
Same kinda thing here, they want you to rely on them and keep buying the newest thing. And if they delete your old version, welp, guess you better come get the new one (especially when they “remaster” it with 0 effort and slap it on a new digital storefront.)
I just hate the profit motive lol
Does the EU have a process to report this to their parliament?
@[email protected] should make a list of killable games so that people can be aware of which games they are buying may end up killed and useless.
This is a valid point against SKG: “In addition, increased cybersecurity and safety risks may arise for players once publishers cease supporting those games, (which in turn can also create or increase reputational risks for publishers).”
I know the game was no longer supported by the company and they had no responsibility, and you know that too, but what about all the mainstream that will read only the title in Facebook or Google News that says “5 million computers hacked because of Grand Theft Auto”
Have you seen the state of older COD games on steam? Hacks that crash your pc, add malware, etc just by walking by a person, crazy stuff.
EA seems to be doing just fine.
But yes, let’s burn books, movie reels, records, etc because they might offend someone somewhere.
That’s a somewhat valid argument against letting servers run indefinetly, but SKG is about a lot more than just that.
They don’t have to delist their games, making them unobtainable, when there is single player content you can do. They also should be forced to remove allways online requirements that are solely there as an anti piracy measure when they shut down the authentication servers.
As for multiplayer only, people have reverse engineered server protocols for some games just so they can spin up dedicated servers themselfs after the official servers shutdown. It would be trivial for a game company to ship a dedicated server file with their game so people can still play it.
The “cybersecurity risk” argument is about equivalent to the “think of the children” argument that’s always used for online age verification. It sounds completely plausible only as long as you don’t read past the headline, but can be dismissed fairly easy after that.
To touch on the multiplayer aspect: it used to be standard procedure for PC games to come bundled with the dedicated server so you could host one yourself.
Even with Battlefield games up to I think BFV, we could at least rent servers (meaning that software is out there somewhere) so hosting them ourselves after a studio drops support should be easy. You can still find servers for basically every old Source game if you look hard enough, same with the og Battlefield games, older CoD titles, etc.
You’re right.
Burning the book in case it might offend some future reader is reasonable.
/S
So the “blatant corruption” is that they met? With interested party? Yes, I’m sure meeting the CEO of Ubisoft was dream come true for EC…
Seriously people, EC passed GDPR against Meta, they passed DMA against Google, they have excellent track record on regulating corporations literally hundredths of times bigger than Ubisoft. I know people here think video games are the most important industry in the entire world but the reality is that EC most likely simply doesn’t care.
Yes, it’s sad that 1M signatures was not enough. Turns out it’s pretty much impossible for a organic movement like that to change the laws on a continental level. It takes lawyers, it takes consumer groups, it takes political backing, it takes funding. SKG simply didn’t have a good enough case here.
