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hodgehog11
Frieren
> spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups.
The industry should only be allowed to comment after the laws have been written and fulfill the goals of European citizens.
To ask the fox to guard the hen house is killing democracy.
preisschild
Thats what the EU parliament is for
l23k4
This is idiotic. "The industry" are also European citizens.
It's about balancing the interests of people who pay their rent and feed their children by selling games, and the interests of people who merely enjoy games.
Consulting only the group which enjoys games would be absurd to the point of being actively malicious.
skotobaza
But the commission did consult with the industry much more than with the initiative, they misrepresented the initiative and no balance was achieved...
undefined
monegator
Hey! That's exactly what lobbyists against regulations would say!
roblabla
It's a much smaller set of European citizens, and yet they have a much larger access to lawmakers. So no, it's not idiotic.
rookderby
Digital fairness act for those that want to check it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fairness_Act
p0w3n3d
I'd say this shows how corrupted elites are. If the "democratic" entity spends all the time with lobbyists, and not the initiative which started the discussion, this speaks volumes.
one33seven
what can you do? they have billions and we have signatures.
dspillett
That is just restarting the problem: democracy breaks when money easily overrides the needs/desires of the people.
We also have votes, but unfortunately getting people to consider this sort of issue while casting their ballot¹ is rather difficult. Getting people to vote for the bigger picture for their benefit and that of us all doesn't work well as they are far more likely to vote on a single issue that has been in the news recently and whoever they vote for will u-turn on once in control anyway…
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[1] or even getting them to care at all, in the case of European elections [not that this is directly relevant here because of spit brexit].
p0w3n3d
I perceive democracy as a company, where people are bosses because they choose their workers. If you're the boss, and your employee uses your money to buy themselves a car instead of representing your interest, you make them pay for this and fire them
inigyou
Piracy, so they don't have billions any more?
trinix912
You can vote for someone else the next time. Sadly the EU parliament elections turnout is still relatively low in many member states.
jon-wood
[flagged]
account42
> just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve
A lot of things are "impossible" until they become legally required, at which point it's just business as usual.
> and a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things
Which is why we need a legal requirement - so that companies plan ahead for this.
Ravus
> a lot of the time when servers start getting turned off the team that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
That is precisely why the SKG initiative mandates it - so that it's available from the start because it's a legal requirement. Without that, you have no financial nor legal incentive and you end up exactly like you mention - reassigning or dissolving the team.
f4c39012
> If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
"buy" is doing some heavy lifting here. If I buy something, it is mine. If someone else can arbitrarily take it away or stop it working, then it was mis-sold, because what I've really done is rent for an indeterminate period of time. What should be clear up front is whether I'm buying or renting.
hodgehog11
What you're saying is literally what the lobby groups think SKG is trying to go for. It's not at all what they're asking for. You should maybe take a look at what they are actually proposing and some of the presentations by developers on why it is sensible.
They're not stupid, there has been a lot of groundwork for this over the past 10+ years.
nanaboo
>If they kept it to single player games and a push for games which aren’t multiplayer not to have a
but they are keeping to that. unfortunately
casey2
The issue SKG tackles is that it's the video game equivalent of wildcatting & oil spoilation. A publishers contracting a small studio create a live service game hoping to strike it rich, often without doing any market research on the viability of their product, and then drop support shortly after launch leaving owners with a bricked copy.
They have this very cushy setup where they triple insulate themselves from risk while publishing games that have less snowballs chance in hell of matching their expectations (next HoK, Genshin Impact, PUBG, LOL, minecraft, fortnite, roblox, WoW).
I and a million others think the software industry needs to move past their infant stage and start taking their own products seriously. Frankly it's shocking regulation didn't come in the 00s.
>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
You also have a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. People DON'T buy the game, they ARE voting with their wallet. You are doing the equivalent of telling people "If you don't like abandoned wells you shouldn't drive." We like the gushers, you should just pay the actual cost of drilling instead of passing those off on society. That all people would/should stop playing live service games because of the relatively small cost of dead games is just as ridiculous.
gambiting
I work in games, worked on some of the huge(40+ million players) online live-service games out there, and I have no idea what you're talking about here:
" What isn’t realistic is stamping their feet and demanding that companies make it possible for people to run their own servers for live service games, just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve"
Like....what licencing issues? After the game is "dead" and the parent company doesn't want to support it anymore, we could easily release the source code or even just the executables for the servers. There's nothing complicated about it, it's just some windows executables with a whole load of config files to tell them what to serve and how. I once had to go to a gaming conference with a really basic laptop to setup a local-only version of our servers to host some private lobby of the game - it took all of 30 minutes to set it up. But oh no, players can't have that because what, it's too complicated?
Like, as someone who actually wrote some of these servers for various services in these games, I really don't buy this entire argument that it can't be done. If anything, it's just the people at the top who have no idea about tech dragging their feet and coming up with implausible "what if" scenarios as to why it can't be done. For at least 3 of the games I worked on I could give you a zip file with all the files and you'd have the servers up and running within an hour, given powerful enough hardware. And then what, we can't change the servers the clients connect to? Please. Modders would have that done within 24 hours of release, probably with a nice GUI for players to use.
>> that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.
Yes, and their help isn't needed with any of it, the game is by definition dead at this point, the alternative is the publisher shutting everything down and no one ever playing it again.
>>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.
It's not just about consumer choice - it's also about us losing part of the culture that cannot be restored once shut down.
I say that wholeheartedly as someone who has worked on games that are(for the time being) still online. And in few years they will be inevitably shut down, leading to years of my life and effort being inaccessible to anyone - the only way that you will be able to experience it is through Youtube videos. That's a cultural tragedy, and I'm 10000% for companies being forced through law to include it in their design that _eventually_ the servers have to be released to the public. They don't have to offer any support whatsoever, the communities will figure it out, guaranteed.
isodev
> how corrupted elites are
The commission is defined by councils and policy from each member state. Many member states send their right wing nuts so there is a bigger picture than just "corrupt".
xeyownt
Seeing your comment, the base seems more corrupted than the elite. The corruption they suffer is to see everyone as being corrupted.
Think about it: how you would implement such directive and make it implementable... Now you see the problem.
roblabla
What about the directive would be unimplementable? Please give specifics here. SKG has repeatedly hammered this point: They only pursue this for _new_ games, only care about non-live-service games (games where you have a subscriptions are obviously "rented", and so wouldn't count). What they want is for those games to have an EOL plan built into the game from the start if they want to rely on a server. This doesn't feel like an unreasonable ask, and I'd ask you to show me what exactly about this is complicated.
It's worth noting that they don't mandate a particular plan. A solution can take many forms - multiplayer games could have servers released, _or_ be given a "direct connection" method, or even have a local (no network) multiplayer option, and still be within what SKG was asking for. For singleplayer games, it's even easier, they can just have a killswitch for the "required server" components.
All of this is cheap to do, it just needs to be planned for so that when the time comes, all the tools are in place for the EOL plan to proceed.
fallat
Did you even read what SKG was advocating for in detail? Because it answers your question.
okeuro49
> The Commission ... spent virtually all of their time with ... industry lobby groups.
This is how the European Union works.
BoredPositron
[flagged]
HDBaseT
[flagged]
skotobaza
> This sounds like cope
You can listen to Ross' explanation in his recent video [1], it starts at 12:12
TylerE
This is not surprising. The movement has been all about gamer vibes and not technical reality from day one. It should have been rejected, and I'm glad it was.
spaqin
Not sure about the technical reality here - until 2010s, singleplayer games didn't require an Internet connection, and for multiplayer ones you could download a dedicated server application, host it yourself. Only recently it became locked down for the corporate profit; the only party making it hard are the game developers themselves.
hatefulheart
What does telling your customers you plan to make a game unplayable if it doesn’t perform exactly as you expect financially have to do with technical reality, pray tell?
Ritewut
What SKG is asking for is not only technical reality but easy to do if you plan for it from the start.
gundamdoubleO
Please actually read the proposed initiative.
danieltanfh95
wrong, the commission did discuss with SKG, but the entire group had their head in the sand when reasonable people asked SKG to respect technical reality and resubmit a better, reality-focused proposal as SKG 2.0. They ban anyone not in their echo chamber.
Farbklex
The technical reality is: - that singel player games don't need a persistent online connection - that it is not that complicated if you develop your game with offline playability in mind from the beginning - multiplayer games can very well have an offline playable LAN mode (Age of Empires 2 is currently sold as "Definitive Edition" which does not work offline in LAN unless you connect to Xbox online services first)
The gaming industry did way too much stupid shit in the last few years and just needs to take it a notch back.
danieltanfh95
> develop your game with offline playability in mind from the beginning
> players churn on their own without social features
you say one thing but the market votes the other way. Game developers are under pressure to turn a profit. If you want a game your way, develop them yourself! Thats how I started making games for myself. Projecting or pressuring others to do so yield no productive consequence.
hobofan
> multiplayer games can very well have an offline playable LAN mode
_some_ multiplayer games can, many can't, as they are using a cloud-based multiplayer backend that isn't easily replaceable (see other discussions in this thread). SKG makes no effort to address those differences.
skotobaza
The commission was talking with the game industry much more than with the initiative, which opened a clear way for the industry to misrepresent the initiative with phrases like "endless support" which nobody demands.
ozlikethewizard
The technical reality is peer to peer multiplayer has existed for decades, and if indie studios can manage both then AAA games certainly can. Single player always online need not even enter the conversation. No point engaging with bad faith arguments to the contrary.
reedf1
From the perspective of someone with some experience in consumer advocacy via the EU is that SKG did not do this the right way, or at least the right way right now. The EU expects radical compromise. The right starting point for SKG was to enter talks with games industry lobby groups to discuss possible solutions. If that fails - you will need to be able to prove that it isn't because you were unable to compromise. Your next step is to find individual game developers and publishers who agree with your proposals and can back them at some (hopefully negotiated) level. Any one-sided proposal is a non-starter.
The EU will view this this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers.
woolion
1. The standard of compromise makes no sense because there "the video-game industry" is not a company with a representative. Any compromise you could find would be dismissed on the basis that it's one lobby groups among others anyway.
2. The statements made by somewhat representative groups like the ESA showed any compromise was impossible since their whole premise is "if you don't let us kill games (which we aren't doing) then it's going to kill the industry"; the typical propaganda of "our enemies are insignificant and stupid yet the greatest threat to humanity"
3. The ESA statements were disavowed by some developers, and SKG made a point to have longer videos with developers agreeing and debunking the lies in the ESA statements already. If that's not enough, refer to point 1.
>rights of its citizen workers/producers
The whole point is that the basis of commerce is that you can't sell something and destroy it just afterwards. Sure you can have limited time subscriptions but that's not how video-games are sold. They are changing the definition based on context so they can do the most unethical things as they see fit, and as a result they are entirely destroying the industry by breaking consumer trust.
eskori
Completely agree with the first point; it would have been great showing a list of supporters from the game industry. Not that I am an expert in this matter, though.
However:
> The EU will view this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers.
How could SKG be an attack on gamedevs? What changes in the life of someone in gamedev if the online game their company has them working on provides a self-hostable server or offline functionality once they finally stop working on it?
I guess we could argue that game companies may get less revenue because users will keep playing older games that no longer produce money, and I am not keen on "perpetual games," which could impact the workers of that company... But this is a highly abusive practice. Sure, gambling makes salaries for workers around the world, but that is no excuse to keep perpetuating such an abusive industry.
This is no attack; I am genuinely curious, and I might be wrong on everything :)
drorco
If you're actually curious, to gate a taste of the cost of compliance, I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc. On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want a accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc. so you could tick off a box and have some sort of insurance in case you're being sued.
Now you probably don't have a lot of empathy for big corps, but those laws often apply for small businesses as well (why wouldn't they?) and now imagine the struggling indie dev now also having to deal with another legal compliance so they won't lose their house to a legal troll, when they just struggle to get a game out there they have no idea if it's even going to ever be successful.
acron0
I don't really buy this. From my personal experience, indie devs are more likely to use methods which make their server tech distributable (e.g. Minecraft). Large game publishers appear to go in the opposite direction for control and lineage reasons: "Crew 1 is dead so you need to buy Crew 2 now".
Anyone who gamed before 2005 knows that games do not require magic, expensive, managed remote services. We all used to run our own servers! The GameSpy era!
JimDabell
> I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc. On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want an accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc. so you could tick off a box and have some sort of insurance in case you're being sued.
This is a really good analogy, except you made one mistake: it’s not difficult at all to design something to be accessible and respectful of privacy as long as you do it from the start. If you try to build something inaccessible and privacy-invading then get caught and have to retrofit accessibility and privacy at the last minute to avoid fines and lawsuits, that’s when it becomes difficult.
And you see this exact mistake crop up in the Stop Killing Games criticism as well. People say that it’s difficult because they are thinking about taking the status quo and retrofitting longevity. For instance, trying to retroactively obtain licenses to distribute components that they didn’t originally have. When in practice, the effect of a law like this is that it would push game developers to make the right choices up front like picking appropriately licensed components, so there’s no barrier to keeping the game alive when the time comes to cease support.
It might also have escaped your attention that the EU was perfectly willing to create accessibility and privacy regulations, so if you are likening Stop Killing Games to these things then it stands to reason that this is not a reason for the EU to avoid Stop Killing Games legislation.
pdpi
The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly.
Likewise, the legal risk for small indie games here rounds to zero. Most such games will, at worst, lose access to online leaderboards if their developers shut them down.
pdpi
Consider for a moment that end-to-end encrypted messaging protects criminals of all sorts. Surely that’s a bad thing and requiring back doors for law enforcement shouldn’t be considered an attack on anybody?
I absolutely agree that the practices SKG are fighting against are pretty abusive and that it is right and proper to restrict those practices, but I also understand why people see the appeal in anti-e2ee laws.
The thing is, I have a good-enough understanding of cryptography to see why those laws are a terrible idea, and I’m infuriated by how clueless their supporters are. I’m self-aware enough to realise that I might the clueless one here and that me not seeing any legitimate issue with SKG doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
madanparas
The ECI process forces the Commission to respond formally, not to legislate. The Commission said no, which SKG anticipated. They had already secured a legislative call signed by 45 MEPs and are pushing to amend the Digital Fairness Act through Parliament. The headline frames this as a defeat. Finishing the ECI process shifted the venue to Parliament, where SKG says they have majority support.
consp
I'm not sure but it sounds like a skirmish to lure out the lobby groups talking points into the wide open by the voice of the EU commission.
bombcar
Don't look so smug! I know what you're thinking, but The Commission was merely a setback!
kuerbel
Did you honestly believe I would trust the future to some Commission? Hahahaha… Oh no, no, no, it was merely an instrument, a stepping stone to a much larger plan! It has all led to this…and this time, you will not interfere!
nickslaughter02
> The Commission’s full communication said a legal obligation to keep games playable, as requested by the initiative, “would not be proportionate.”
Making games playable is not proportionate but mass surveillance of private messages is complete fine.
dopa42365
Well, it's a million signatures for something to be brought up, not for something to definitely become law.
A decade or so ago I (among millions) signed to abolish daylight saving time. Still waiting for that heh.
Hamuko
The daylight saving time shit is such a fucking fumble from the EU. We have an instance of direct democracy, we have EU politicians parading around saying “we’re gonna end it” and then absolutely nothing happens. Council points fingers at Commission, Commission points fingers at Council. “It’s their job.” How am I as an EU citizen supposed to be proud of being part of this dysfunctional mess?
consp
It's easy talking points during elections but requires lengthy legal procedures and thus gets chopped immediately. Politicians gonna be politicians. Better to be talking about the time of day than some other dog whisle.
kgwxd
It's also been "abolished" many times around the world, then quickly reinstated when kids start dying.
izacus
Does your member state - as an EU citizen - block the process perhaps? The daylight savings process has stopped because your countries can't agree on which timezone they'd like to be in.
Hamuko
I'm Finnish, so my guess is "no". Gallup polling gave a >85% in favour of abolishing DST. 52% also voted in favour of winter time.
Volundr
Trump's said he wants to end it. That's something I'd back him on. I wish he'd sign that executive order and tilt that windmill in the courts instead of the stuff he is pushing. I'd be rooting for him!
merpkz
Ah, the same guy who promised to end wars, that sounds good
atoav
Trump promises a lot of things, while also promising others their polar opposite or flipping 180° once in office.
If you'd back a politician with a track record that bad on any promise, that is probably something telling more about you than the politician.
Volundr
I'm not sure what your saying here? Trump lies so you'd rather his energy be spent on ICE raids, ending birthright citizenship, and illegal tarrifs than ending daylight savings? Personally I'd rather the latter but you do you.
undefined
systemdev
I’m so skeptical of the “making it work offline is too hard” argument, I’ve personally RE’d dozens of these titles with no source access, often with anti tamper, and succeeded. Very few titles are genuinely unpreservable to some extent. For example, the VAST majority of Unreal Engine games are trivially preservable unless the developers have taken steps to strip server code, and even when devs do take those steps “reading between the ifdefs” isn’t the worst thing in the world.
undefined
yndoendo
I would say lobbyist are continuing their take over of the EU. Copyright law is the excuse but 90's games proves this to be invalidated.
None of the games from the 90s and early 2000's required authenticating with a launder. They just worked and this is why those games are still playable to date.
Those same games that had multi-player allowed for downloading a self-hosted server.
Enemy Territory is a prime example. The game would still be playable even with out ID Software releasing the source code.
GOG is built upon legacy games that don't require a launcher. Politicians in the EU have been bought and paid for. President exists and is not being applied.
nanaboo
> Copyright law
who cares. you can still pirate if you so choose (at the risk of your data if you do it on the same PC).
you pirating is basically taking part in a distribution, the host simply doesn't do it with a company but a nick (digital loophole*). but the distribution happens no less and the license of right-to-use never covered this to begin with.
all these cases are digital loopholes: companies being able to shut down servers and forcing people to move on.
we need these laws.
canthonytucci
How about a “stop buying games” movement where people just don’t buy this live service garbage?
It’s all shovelware. It’s all the same crap over and over. There are plenty of non live service games being released every day, buy those instead. If a game is actually important to people they’ll figure out a way to play it (as people did with WoW classic before classic).
The idea that we should spend time and energy to regulate the big studios (who will just find loopholes anyway) instead of just supporting the indies who are making good stuff is wild to me.
rafterydj
The classic SKG example is The Crew. Where is the indie recreation of the Continental USA to drive around? Indie games are great, but let's not act like art is fungible.
I don't like the idea of "they will just find loopholes anyway", that seems defeatist. "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."
I wish people started thinking of good regulation as a technical problem as much as it is a social one.
brokensegue
EU tried to ban tracking cookies. Anyone could've seen the result coming (every site now disrupts your reading). The defeatist attitude would've been right there.
I don't see how games won't just charge you a $0.01 "subscription" that lasts 5 years or various other such sidesteps. it'll just make everything more annoying.
mvdtnz
I'll keep buying whatever games seem fun to me. I rarely play a game more than a year or two, they become stale and boring to me. I genuinely, genuinely do not care if the game stops working in 12 years time. Could not possibly care less.
AdmiralAsshat
> The Commission’s full communication said a legal obligation to keep games playable, as requested by the initiative, “would not be proportionate.” It cited concerns about intellectual property rights, confidential business information, publisher costs, and potential cybersecurity or safety risks once games are no longer supported.
Nice job regurgitating point-for-point all of the talking points that the publishers spoon-fed you.
21asdffdsa12
Any grown up media industry - is in a eternal battle against the "classics". And games even more, as some of the classics are LEGO sets that have eternal fun build in.
Every new band ever has to compete against the beatles.
akramachamarei
So much noise, so few principles. Whatever happened to don't buy if you don't like it? Read contracts before you agree to them? This whole discussion is kind of ridiculous. Gaming is not a matter of health or wellness. We don't need a nanny chaperoning videogame purchases.
NooneAtAll3
makes me envy of Switzerland's "enough signatures causes referendum which actually does create a new law" system
Symbiote
Proportional to the respective populations, this would have needed roughly four times as many signatures to get to that level in Switzerland.
NooneAtAll3
if so, making that failure more explicit would also be of great help
Barrin92
the Swiss can only propose new constitutional amendments, not statutory laws. And precisely to avoid having what is supposed to be a technical decision into an overly broad popular vote, because those are still supposed to belong into parliamentary debate.
Because if people voted on every single regulation you'd be at the ballot box five times a day.
izacus
You should check out Swiss constitution sometimes to see how true that is :P
phyzix5761
So, mob rule?
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As is stated in the article, but is not clear just from the headline, this was not an unexpected outcome from the initiative. The Commission did not seek discussions with SKG, and spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups.
SKG was prepared for this, and their intention has been to join up with the group putting together the new Digital Fairness Act, since the objective there is very similar, but much broader in scope, and most of the groundwork is already there. Much of the earlier recorded Q&A sessions in Parliament had representatives commenting on this already, so it's the natural approach. This way, legislation will almost certainly be put forward and voted on, and the lobby groups will likely have a harder time trying to wrestle with a larger movement and a parliament that seems sympathetic to the cause.
Basically, this is a battle lost that never really mattered. The climax of this war is yet to come.