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
The SKG movement should become the Stop Buying Games movement if they don’t listen.
Gamers are less capable of self-control than heroin addicts. Trying to get them to stop buying games is a fools errand.
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.
This is very true. If Amazon shuts down tomorrow, you’ve forever lost that license to what ever software you rented.
You have no way of ever getting that license back, legally. You will have to rent said software somewhere else, even though the nomenclature on the website and everywhere else said “You bought this”
Which is far more patently false than what you’re saying.
It’s not. You’re just talking absolute nonsense and I’ll not spend anymore time talking to you ignorant naysayers.
Here, educate yourself… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
So do tell me, Amazon folds tomorrow, how do you regain access to the video game or software you bought? It has drm btw
The Nazi storefront? How about just fuck all corps, either steal it or do the transaction directly with the devs.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
@stopkillinggames@mastodon.social 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.
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.
EDIT:
To be a bit intentionally dramatic…
If ya’ll don’t know, before Ross Scott became semi-famous as the Stop Killing Games guy… he has a youtube series on reviewing usually older, niche or odd games, and before that, he was probably most well known for a long running show…
Freeman’s Mind. Basically he plays through Half Life and just roleplays as Gordon, his inner monologue. He got somewhat into Half Life 2, but uh, Stop Killing Games started to ‘happen’.
Now, you don’t think one man alone can topple an incrediblely well resourced machine of propoganda and power, with scores of thousands of loyal agents, do you?
Follow Freeman.
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 which is much less of a problem
Have a new government get rid of them. They only keep power because people give it to them.
Isn’t the Commission a famously corrupt org? Nearly all popular measures from the EU came from the Parliament, iirc
Europe seems to be doing alright. Democracy is doing better there than anywhere else right now. There are much worse organizations and regimes, and we need more unity in the world, not less, right now.
I hear too many people taking the stability of the modern world entirely for granted. Do be you want the US to remain the hegemon? China? Russia? Who?
Democracy is doing better there than anywhere else right now.
Switzerland?
The commission should be afraid of siding with the corporations mainly for what we’ll do to them if they do.
These are gamers we’re talking about so plenty of free time for real life COD:MW
Does the EU have a process to report this to their parliament?
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.
I don’t find your examples particularly relevant and convincing, but that’s off-topic. You’re totally right that communicating with involved parties is normal and does not ‘exhibit blatant corruption.’ To be fair, the original article doesn’t claim that it does. OP just wanted to rage bait everyone.
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.
Activision seems to be doing just fine.
But yes, let’s burn books, movie reels, records, etc because they might offend someone somewhere.
You’re right.
Burning the book in case it might offend some future reader is reasonable.
/S
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.
