Video Game Industry Tries to Squash 'Stop Killing Games' Movement By Stating That You Don’t Actually Own Your Games
Major players in the video game industry are trying to combat the Stop Killing Games movement by stating that you don't own your games.
If nobody really owns games then 'piracy' if fair game.
“You will own nothing and like it.”
Goes both ways, faggots! Yar har!
I will pay nothing and I'll be happy.
That's basically the entire crux of the Stop Killing Games "demands." That these games have an end of life plan that involves removing these features once they decide to stop supporting it.
While the title is intentionally inflammatory, the things its asking for are so basic and logical that the only real way to be against them is to admit to being extremely anti-consumer. Its why all the opposition to SKG had to intentionally misread and misrepresent it.
The catalog of games that either don't require this, or have a patched version that dosen't require this, is so large I don't have enough of one life to play all the games I find interesting, for the amount of time I want to play them.
I think we're hitting a saturation point where games are starting to be treated like books in terms of consumption. I don't need to read books that came out this year and are being marketed as the new hotness because I can just go to my local library and pick up something by Isaac Asimov or Tolkien or a hundred other authors whose great works have outlived them by several generations. Likewise I don't need to play games that are coming out this year if I can go scrounge up some masterpiece that was released six years ago.
The big players in the industry still haven't caught on to this new state of affairs despite how everyone and their dog has been memeing about their Steam backlog for over a decade now.
Yep.
I will add that although AAA studios are rotting from woke parasitism, there are still plenty of great games made by smaller studios.
Colony management games are having a golden age.
I'll say. I just picked up Symphony of War this week and it's been like discovering Ogre Battle 64 all over again. There's very few games that scratch that itch of feeling like a battlefield commander rather than one that sits on the hilltop.
This has been in softwear package agreements for as long as I remember. You are only buying a license to use the softwear. You don't own a thing. The record companies tried to get away with this when they wanted to prevent people from copying their record albums to cassette tapes. I think they took it to the Supreme Court and lost.
And it's wrong there too. SaaS must die.
Software was always license-based. For decades before SaaS was ever a thing. People apparently never paid attention.
On the other hand, that doesn't mean they can't require an EOL plan to be provided as part of selling a software license. The real question here is if they can mandate that be something like, "publish the server code." Which it won't be. Realistically, expect this to be like the EU ePrivacy Directive. That "Accept Cookies" button sure is helpful, isn't it? They might be forced to provide an EOL plan to the customer. The EOL plan is going to be, "go fuck yourselves, lol."
Slavery/Bride Stealing/Serfdom was the tradition for all civilizations for millennia, does that excuse it?
Stop being intentionally retarded.
All digital purchases will always be licensed. Otherwise you could create infinite copies and give they away/sell them yourselves. Video DVDs were licenses. Audio CDs were licenses. They were just licenses associated physical media, so 99% of people were ignorant that it was a license.
If the end customer has full ownership of the data itself, there is no software or game industry because they'd never sell more than one copy. Best you could hope for surviving in a license-free world is a Kickstarter model where everyone chips in for the initial development.
Edit: OR everything transitions to the SaaS you love so much. If I sell you remote access to a server that runs my software locally and don't even provide you a license, Then I can cancel you subscription and none of these proposed protections will apply. Everyone is hoping this somehow pushes towards more ownership. You might just push them towards trash like Stadia being the norm instead.
That is false for the same reason you cannot infinitely print a book you bought. You don't need an EULA for a hardback, software licensing doesn't need to exist either.
You own the book: the physical item. You don't own the organization of the words on the page: the data. You didn't need a SW license for a Tamagotchi because the software was fixed in the physical good. Meanwhile, any digital book you buy is licensed because the IP is not fixed in a physical good.
This is the problem. Digital good are not treated the same as physical goods, which is a legacy of the horrifically evil music industry.
It wasn't physical software, but there was that case two years back where Wizards of the Coast send The Pinkertons to some YouTuber's house demanding merchandise back because someone fucked up and shipped him unreleased MTG swag.
Ubisoft literally has in the EULA that you must physically destroy their games if they declare them no more.
So its not that they aren't willing to do that, they just aren't at the level where its monetarily feasible to do so.
To be sure, there is a world of difference in enforcement.
That's one of many reasons why PC was always better than console. Go look at any console game you "bought" in the last 20 years. You'll see some "licensed for use on a ______" text on the disc. They don't need to revoke your license, they just don't allow for the creation of anything else capable of running it.
Definitely preferable to always-online and DRM. But it was still a license. Arguing about license terms is completely reasonable
*updates qbittorent*
Imagine having so little self-awareness you don't realize this is going to piss people off even more.
It's not the companies saying it. It's a company they hired to lobby for them. So the company has to say something to justify their paycheck. The incentives aren't quite aligned here.
In fact, https://x.com/estama2/status/1942946168910086512.
yeah that's what we're trying to fix
All you need are at least 2 good sources and you will be set up for years. I am on my 4th storage drive now.
I’d like to see them try.
I started my own movement in response to this ages ago, called Stop Buying Games. It's worked out great so far, especially with what's happened to Ubisoft lately.
Archive:
https://archive.ph/3KSO4
Honestly it reads like the group promoting the idea want the government to have more control over games. Companies are trying to stop this.
Sure, any amount of new laws is technically the government having more control over something. I have no qualms admitting there are unanswered questions and this could explode into an EU bureaucratic nightmare, but what SKG is asking for is quite simple. Game developers that sell games with online dependencies must create a plan for twilighting the game ahead of time, so the product you bought continues to function in some reasonable way at end of support. From a technical standpoint, this is easily accomplished because developers will typically have pre-integration test builds anyway, using placeholders instead of AWS or fancy clustering databases. Licensing of third party components (game libraries) and content (music) is probably the biggest hurdle. The proposal does not ask for retroactive changes either and would only apply to new games created after the law goes into effect.
Companies would be fine with the government having control over games if they thought it benefited them in some way. Regulations typically benefit big corporations after all.
Companies are trying to ignore basic consumer protections wherein people who purchase something have a right to actually own it. This has been a principle of the free market for as long as there has been a free market. Rebranding a product as a service in an effort to get around those protections is fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-market. You want to put an end to the WEF "You will own nothing" agenda? Lobbying governments to enforce the basic consumer protection laws that already exist is the bare minimum.
When they shut down Little Big Planet they didn't just wipr out millions of fantastic user creates levels. They made the game unbeatable, because there are levels you can't beat without teamwork. It was very fun while it lasted though.
No one in my house is buying a switch 2 because of this dumb shit.
No one in my house is buying a switch 2 because we aren’t raving homosexuals.