Petition: Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state
petition.parliament.uk
Require publishers to leave videogames (and related game assets / features) they have sold to customers in a reasonably working state when support ends, so that no further intervention whatsoever is necessary for the game to function, as a statutory consumer right.
  • jsomae@lemmy.ml
    1·
    9 months ago

    No, it’s unreasonable to expect the servers to stay online forever. Instead, they should be required to hand the keys over to the community if they stop providing the online service.

    • frog 🐸@beehaw.orgEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      A requirement to leave a game in a “working state when support ends” doesn’t mean continuing support (ie, running the server). It means the game should still work when the server is gone, which means either fully offline play, or a means for players to run their own servers. That’s the whole point of this campaign, which is taking place across multiple countries.

      • jsomae@lemmy.ml
        0·
        9 months ago

        so that no further intervention whatsoever is necessary for the game to function

        I mean, I’d accept “release the source code” but this doesn’t.

        • frog 🐸@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          “Release the source code” isn’t going to be considered a reasonable thing to ask a government to legislate on. “Make sure the game can still be played after support ends”, which in practice means patching it so it doesn’t require an internet connection to servers that no longer exist and/or allowing players to self-host their own servers, is far more likely to succeed. It’s a reasonable request that someone who has bought something should be able to continue using it for as long as they want, no matter what happens to the company that sold it to them.

          It’s a request that stands a decent chance of success if a politician can be made to understand what the problem is, because it is an easy extension of existing consumer rights law. Requiring game studios to hand over their source code to gamers would be considered excessive and unreasonable, and is therefore much more likely to be denied outright.

          Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. For the majority of gamers, the changes proposed would be more than sufficient, so that’s a good reason to push for it even if it isn’t what an open source idealist would want.

        • blindsight@beehaw.org
          2·
          9 months ago

          Cool, that’s great, but that’s also kinda the point.

          Live service games suck because you can’t depend on being able to play them. This is trying to fix that. So you (or anyone else) can play these games offline—eventually. Once they shut down the servers, customers should still be able to access their purchases. This campaign is trying to force companies to design around releasing a patch to strip out the online portion/online DRM or face significant financial consequences.

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
    0·
    9 months ago

    if it’s a 100% online game what to do? They would be forced by law to keep servers online in perpetuity? The workaround could be to create a shell company that would bankrupt the day they want to discontinue the game and turn off the servers

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
      1·
      9 months ago

      I think a minimum would be open sourcing the server backend, or at least a compatible one, once servers reach EOL.

    • SpaceScotsman@startrek.website
      1·
      9 months ago

      100% online games in the past were perfectly playable even after developers / publishers ended support. Online only games dying is a relatively recent invention. This petition is asking for consumer protection to return to the norm where a purchaser of an online game always has the choice of being able to play it in some fashion.

      A game developer could do this by releasing a server application. They could even do this at the barest minimum by releasing documentation describing how the server ought to work, to allow for reverse engineering.

      The Stop Killing Games campaign as a whole isn’t asking for perpetual server access, just to ensure that games stay in some sort of playable state.

      • OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        They would not even need to open source the servers. Just making the server available for users to run (even under a proprietary license) would be enough.

        • blindsight@beehaw.org
          2·
          9 months ago

          Or a patch to strip out the online portion. If developers know they’ll need to create that patch eventually, then they can design the game around it. Offline/LAN play/local servers were the norm until ubiquitous high-speed internet.

          There’s no technical reason why Diablo 4 needs to be online only. It was a design decision made for DRM and microtransactions. D2 still works great and has thousands of active players.