The page seems to be not working at the moment but keep on signing https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
One melon!
A whole melon indeed
That’s great and all, but this needs to stop being spammed everywhere. Theres two of these posts in games alone.
Crosspost, people. That’s what is there for.
About my lowest threshold for success is that this at least makes disclosures about what you’re buying more prominent and restricts the ability for software licenses to just alter the deal and pray that they don’t alter them further. Even better disclosures would make the raw deal you’re getting become more poisonous before the point of sale. Especially as an American, I’m going to have wait a few years after any legislation goes through before I can trust online multiplayer games again.
I’m glad. But don’t get your hopes up because of this. Commission could (and probably will) just say “we have considered it and we are going to do nothing”.
We’ve done nothing and already completely ran out of ideas!
They are supposed to meet with the seven people who first put the initiative forward. It won’t change their minds if they’re already against the initiative but if they don’t care it may sway them to hear it explained to them. I have zero expectations since EU bureaucrats live in a parallel dimension but there’s some hope something happens.
At least we will have an official position, instead of the legal void we’re currently in.
I think the commission will take action in some form. The worst case scenario in my mind is that they will only require clear labelling. Similar to what they did with smart phones recently. While this not exactly what I am hoping for, having “This game will at least be playable until XXXX” on the package or store page would still be a massive improvement over the status quo.
I dont understand how such a broad requirement would work. They just have to pick some arbitrary date, and then after that they can continue as things currently are? Can you give an example of a game where this type of labelling would have helped?
Yes if we would have known that Concord only lasted two weeks then those that bought the battle pass wouldn’t have bought them. Know eol timing help consumers.
Sony actually issued full refunds to all customers that bought Concord.
The game still died. One that was in development for five years, and it lasted two weeks.
They didnt plan for it to last two weeks, the game failed. How do you expect them to guarantee a certain uptime when they have no idea if anyone will even play it.
‘The Crew’ by Ubisoft was sold for several months before they decided to shut it down. This would have at least forced them to communicate that before taking peoples money. I am also pretty sure that publishers don’t want to put this information on the package because it could seriously hurt sales. So the effect of this labelling requirement might be that publishers build the game in a way that enables self-hosting.
If you are saying they knew it was closing and they sold it for months anyways, that sounds like fraud. Has there been proof ubisoft decided to do this anyways?
Yes, I think calling it fraud is a fair conclusion, but what do you mean with “they knew it was closing”? This decision is completely in the hands of Ubisoft. Something doesn’t stop being fraud just because someone only decides to defraud you 2 months after they sold you something.
It’s messy. Making a balanced law around it is sketchy. Consumers deserve to own the games they buy, straight up. Businesses deserve to be able to sell their assets when they fold and have them continue to be worth something so they can live on to make new games and their old games can go to new companies to keep development rolling.
There’s obviously low-hanging fruit. If your game is single-player and you’re just doing an online piracy check, and you go out of business, you leave the check servers running in a trust for like five years with the code to remove the check from escrow. Tick Tock, you either relight the game in time somewhere, or it becomes free to play.
But when you have something like Clash of Clans, where you need battle servers. Those assets are useless once you open that code and 100% support a community-run game. The game could otherwise be passed to another studio, and development could continue. Selling and moving games to other companies and publishers with breaks in the middle happens a lot. How long after a game collapses should they wait for it to become worthless to the market? The obvious answer to the consumer is immediately, because they bought it, they own it. Maybe you have to keep a certain amount of money from the proceeds and use it to refund the users. It still sucks for the you don’t own it anymore concept.
Developers and publishers aren’t fair to consumers without guardrails (and there are none), but those rails should also be reasonable to companies.
If the commission does nothing, it’ll probably be wrapped around this clusterfuck.
I do have a worry that the studios will just stop selling games and everything will go subscription if they are required to provide servers and source on game shutdown. It’ll just push more piracy, less sales, less games and everyone loses.
I really wish companies would just have pride in their stuff and be fair to their users and users could just bear a fair price for good games.
Keep it going, let’s see how much more we can get people to sign, let’s aim for 1.2
A) this issue applies to all kinds of software.
B) procuring software is a two-way street … the producer assigns terms by which access is obtained, and you agree to those terms in exchange for that access. If the software is SaaS then if the producer chooses to shut down the service then you are SOL. If the software is provided with a long list of terms via Steam, then you are basically buying SaaS with local caching and execution. Maybe don’t reward producers by agreeing to one-sided deals like SaaS?
This kind of headache is what prompted Richard Stallman to come up with the idea for the GNU license. Maybe you think that is too radical… but maybe imposing your ideas of what licensing terms should look like on (only?) game developers is radical also.
A) yes it does.
B) I’m assuming that you are somehow against this pro consumer movement. If so: why?
For the same reason I think software developers have the right to choose to release under copyleft, I think they have the right to release under SaaS or copyright. I don’t think it is fair to take those rights from them. (I may choose to avoid SaaS or other proprietary models where possible, but I am not pure about it… I just do so recognizing that proprietary tools are a band-aid and could become unusable when any upgrade or TOS changes.)
As one example, keep in mind that some governments may choose to punish a software developer for making “offensive” (by whatever their standards are) content, and rather than fighting a losing battle in one jurisdiction so you in some other jurisdiction can keep using that controversial software the developer may just choose to cut their losses and turn it off for everyone. If you force them to release it anyway then said punitive government may continue to hold the developer responsible for the existence of that software.
There are rights and responsibilities associated with a proprietary model… and IMO you (and your permissive government) should not be overriding those rights for your own short-sighted benefit.
Sounds like the ol’ slippery slope argument.
There are rights and responsibilities associated with a proprietary model… and IMO you (and your permissive government) should not be overriding those rights for your own short-sighted benefit.
Kind of sounds like you misunderstood the initiative to be honest. This only affects games which have been abandoned by the developer, the proprietary model stays perfectly intact as long as you actually keep selling your games.
nobody reads the terms of service, ever.
also, no modern game companies with any relevance use a FOSS license.
so the way i see it, gamers have two options:
- stop playing videogames or
- only play supertuxkart and dwarf fortress
neither of these would happen at a scale large enough to force game studios into making their games FOSS.
the only way i can see of making this happen is by either:
- a series of very popular, targeted boycotts at studios, or
- making governments regulate the industry.
and with the second option, history has shown that only small changes have a chance of passing. effectively abolishing copyright law for software is not something the EU will ever do, no matter how many signatures a petition gets.
I don’t think they need to make their games FOSS to do right by the consumer. If you have an online game and no longer want to support the server part, it would be super cool to share that code, but at the very least companies shouldn’t be trying to shut down community servers. The same goes for the game itself, the source code would be very cool, but not going after people who still want to play the game they’ve chosen to no longer support seems reasonable.
If a company is ending support their ability to enforce copyright should also end, outside of people that are trying to profit off trying to resell the game as their own (which probably doesn’t happen all that much).
There’s this madlad called BlenderDumbass that’s making a FOSS GTA clone in UPBGE & Python
The argument here is that they don’t need to open source or switch over to an FOSS license.
They just need to not actively prohibit people from doing custom servers and they need to release their own server files wheb their support period ends.
If that ends with violating a license agreement they have with another company that is exclusively a that company problem because as shown in the past, law supercedes agreement and contracts.
It will basically put branding companies at a either they don’t agree to let their stuff be used in games and not get the money for it, or they decide that it really doesn’t matter all that much if a community project can use their stuff. Simple choice
They can still release their bespoke parts without any of the third party licensed stuff. Even without instructions on what needs to be gotten and put back in. It’d allow the smarter guys in the community have a headstart to figuring it out anyway. Most licensed software can be replaced, look at the recent decomps like the Lego island one.
Dwarf Fortress is not free open source software! It’s a great game and runs natively on Linux. You can download it at no cost. But it’s not open source.
To address your first point. Yes it applies to other software, this initiative applies to games because the “buyer purchases a license to allow the seller to remove your purchase at some indefinite time later” practices have been most prevalent in gaming.
Extending the scope too far will bring in more opponents than allies and muddy the discussion. Getting a decisive answer here will inform laws on how other industries should be regulated in separate but parallel legislative processes.
Isn’t prohibiting them from not releasing the server software after they shut down the ultimate way to not reward them for such behavior?
There are a weird amount of double negatives in that sentence.
At the current rate (which may or may not hold and may or may not be legitimate) the initiative should beat “One of Us”, the biggest one yet with 1.9M signatures (pro-life, ultimately did nothing).
Ich bin dabei 🙋🏼♂️
Ich auch. Schon 10 Monaten.
Do they still need to get the minimum in at least 7 countries? Anyone happen to know? Ive only been loosely following and i don’t want to stress the website more than it is suffering lol.
No, that requirement has already been met. The final requirement (which has just been met now) is to reach a total of 1 million signatures. Basically, all requirements are now satisfied
Awesome, thank you!!
Do still sign if you can, some signatures might turn out to be invalid and we need a buffer against that.
Only 4 countries have not reached the minimum.
In a way, focussing on the countries was always ultimately pointless (aside from encouraging votes througj country rivalries). It’s almost impossible to not have required countries after the million votes milestone. You’d have to male something very specific like “make dutch the only language in the EU” in order to not make that cut.
This should not stop, the more the merry and also to ensure to filter out anomalies. 34k have already signed pass the million
Fresh update video from Ross about the campaign.
TL;DW:
- There’s a chance many of the signatures for the EU petition aren’t real. Keep signing to build up a safety margin. Official suggestions are: 10% more minimum, 20% pretty OK, up to 40% more for an actual safety net.
- Some countries had problems with signing using the digital ID system - suggests to use the manual method (instructions on the campaign page) or try again later.
- Someone not related with the campaign released a SKG crypto. Don’t touch it, obviously.
- Ross heard about people harassing Pirate Software, asks to stop.
- He’s got a lot of messages to reply to, prioritises ones important to the campaign for now.
- UK petition cleared 100k signatures. Number is most likely more reliable than the EU one.
- Link about contacting UK MP’s for those who want to do more than just sign a petition.
I swear this is not me doomering (I very much support this campaign and even signed it myself half a year ago), but I strongly suspect that at least a good chunk of those are fake. The issue is very hot in “terminally online” circles and those are the kind of people who don’t really think things through before acting.
I hope the number will keep on growing until the “legit” votes make up for the fake ones.
That’s cool. Too bad it doesn’t matter and nothing will change :-/
Stop doomering
Why do you think so?
I may advise you to track previous actions and their outcomes. More often than not, it does work.
Yay! I’m one in a million!
Can we move for a Stop Killing People now!? :)
That’s definitely a stretch goal. But at least if we can start by stopping them from killing something innocuous like games it shows that we still maybe have some power over them.
If you’re in the EU, you should still sign; extra signatures will be useful if it turns out some of them are invalid.
Yeah I signet 10 months ago. Also put the link in the post
To be clear… If you have already signed, thank you but do not sign again.
(I know that’s not what you wanted to say, I just want to make sure it’s not misunderstood).
Does it not stop you from signing multiple times? The UK one tells you you’ve already signed it when you try again. I tried it again recently in case i was misremembering signing the second petition after the first one was misunderstood completely by the uk government.
Oddly, the EU one just has a checkbox that you need to check to confirm that you haven’t signed before. I’m guessing removal of duplicates happens only after closing, along with other data validation.
I thought this strange at first too, but I think it’s because of the disparate identification methods in different countries. If everyone had a digital ID card instant checking would be doable, but note it probably isn’t.
That’s not true. It depends on the country. In certain countries it will tell you if your identification number had been used before.
Interesting! I tried from a country that has an eID so it should be trivial to weed out duplicates, yet I got that checkbox.
Maybe it’s a self report feature >.<
For the UK one it’s just tied to your email address to prevent duplicates, and you just input your name and physical address which will be used to confirm you’re actually a citizen.
Wait, what happened with the first one?
Parliament disbanded iirc
After giving such a bad answer to it that some other part of the government stepped in and said the answer was dramatically insufficient.
I’m not surprised it got a bad answer though. The government was completely dysfunctional by that point (and had been well over a year), I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just some random civil servant who was just told to weave a fig leaf at it.
