The initiative is at more than 20% of the 1 million signatures necessary.
As of 4 pm CEST the numbers are:
| Country | Number of Signatures | Percentage of the theshold |
|---|---|---|
| Austria | 4,187 | 31.26% |
| Belgium | 7,116 | 48.06% |
| Bulgaria | 2,764 | 23.06% |
| Croatia | 2,527 | 29.87% |
| Cyprus | 288 | 6.81% |
| Czechia | 4,690 | 31.68% |
| Denmark | 7,684 | 77.85% |
| Estonia | 1,827 | 37.02% |
| Finland | 10,266 | 104.01% |
| France | 16,732 | 30.04% |
| Germany | 45,688 | 67.51% |
| Greece | 2,469 | 16.68% |
| Hungary | 4,509 | 30.46% |
| Ireland | 4,680 | 51.06% |
| Italy | 7,949 | 14.84% |
| Latvia | 1,569 | 27.82% |
| Lithuania | 3,109 | 40.09% |
| Luxembourg | 430 | 10.17% |
| Malta | 279 | 6.6% |
| Netherlands | 15,999 | 78.25% |
| Poland | 20,517 | 55.97% |
| Portugal | 5,019 | 33.9% |
| Romania | 7,917 | 34.03% |
| Slovakia | 2,773 | 28.1% |
| Slovenia | 1,478 | 26.21% |
| Spain | 16,261 | 39.09% |
| Sweden | 13,698 | 92.52% |
| Total | 212.425 | 21,24% |
To be successful the initiative needs to reach 1 million signatures and pass the threshold in at least seven countries.
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home/allcountries
People need to understand what this will mean from a developer perspective before getting all up in arms. This initiative is more kneejerk emotional than it is realistic.
If you’re going to watch only one of these videos, watch the second one:
https://youtu.be/ioqSvLqB46Y
https://youtu.be/x3jMKeg9S-s
what this requires from developers: possibly documenting protocols in an open way when they choose to shut down games so that people can re-implement FOSS servers
“playable” is open to interpretation, and does not include trademarks, copyright, etc… nobody is asking for to allow assets to be traded (ie piracy), or open sourcing any code
but if you have purchased a game, and the servers for that game go away, someone else should be able to re-implement a method for allowing those games to continue being played
… also if DRM servers go away, you should disable the DRM somehow: you don’t get to just say that the DRM and therefor the game isn’t available any more
all of this is not at all knee-jerk, and very realistic
Really doesn’t matter whether the proposal as it is in the petition is completely realistic or not. The point is to get this topic into the EU parliament. It’ll be their job to work out a solution that works for both consumers and developers.
The first video does address this idea - time stamped for convenience. Basically it’s starting the wrong conversation, without enough nuance to a group of people that may not understand the nuance of the gaming industry. Could end up with more bad than good, as gov’t has done by accident before. I recommend a watch of those two videos, I probably haven’t summed it up very well and out of context clips aren’t necessarily a good representation either. PirateSoftware’s a good speaker imo, easy to listen to.
I don’t agree with it starting the wrong conversation. Something does need to be done about companies denying access to a game you bought and that’s the conversation it starts. If this proposal lands on the EU negotiation table, I can guarantee you that the games industry will lobby against it, and heavily. There is no chance the EU will just go “OK sounds good, make it so!”. Heck, the chances are higher that if they pass an actual law, it will be so watered down that it won’t do anything at all. But then at least we tried.
I’ve watched his first video, but I really don’t agree with many of his points. He only barely acknowledges this being a proposal and then gets lost in the details. He’s clearly against any measures that have the slightest potential to be a disadvantage for game developers, which I guess is understandable from his perspective as a developer. But he doesn’t seem to particularly care about the consumer’s rights, basically saying the problem is solved as soon as the publisher makes it clear at purchase that people are only buying a temporary license. He’s also trying to discredit supporters of the initiative by saying they don’t know how the industry works, despite quite a few people in the industry supporting the initiative as well.
The guy who started it and other people helping push it have also responded and talked about how Thor doesn’t entirely get it/missed the point.
Here’s Ross’s entire response pasted because it got buried on the video.
“I’m afraid you’re misunderstanding several parts of our initiative. We want as many games as possible to be left in some playable state upon shutdown, not just specifically targeted ones. The Crew was justa convenient example to take action on, it represents hundreds of games that have already been destroyed in a similar manner and hundreds more"at risk” of being destroyed. We’re not looking at the advertising being the primary bad practice, but the preventable destruction of videogames themselves.
This isn’t about killing live service games (quite the opposite!), it’s primarily about mandating future live service games have an end of life plan from the design phase onward. For existing games, that gets much more complicated, I plan to have a video on that later. So live service games could continue operating in the future same as now, except when they shutdown, they would be handled similarly to Knockout City, Gran Turismo Sport, Scrolls, Ryzom, Astonia, etc. as opposed to leaving the customer with absolutely nothing.
A key component is how the game is sold and conveyed to the player. Goods are generally sold as one time purchases and you can keep them indefinitely. Services are generally sold with a clearly stated expiration date. Most “Live service” games do neither of these. They are often sold as a one-time purchase with no statement whatsoever about the duration, so customers can’t make an informed decision, it’s gambling how long the game lasts. Other industries would face legal charges for operating this way. This could likely be running afoul of EU law even without the ECI, that’s being tested.
The EU has laws on EULAS that ban unfair or one-sided terms. MANY existing game EULAS likely violate those. Plus, you can put anything in a EULA. The idea here is to take removal of individual ownership of a game off the table entirely.
We’re not making a distinction between preservation of multiplayer and single player and neither does the law. We fail to find reasons why a 4v4 arena game like Nosgoth should be destroyed permanently when it shuts down other than it being deliberately designed that way with no recourse for the customer.
As for the reasons why think this initiative could pass, that’s my cynicism bleeding though. think what we’re doing is pushing a good cause that would benefit millions of people through an imperfect system where petty factors of politicians could be a large part of what determines its success or not. Democracy can be a messy process and was acknowledging that. I’m not championing these flawed factors, but rather saying think our odds are decent.
Finally, while your earlier comments towards me were far from civil, don’t wish you any ill will, nor do encourage anyone to harass you. I and others still absolutely disagree with you on the necessity of saving games, but I wanted to be clear causing you trouble is not something I nor the campaign seeks at all. Personally, I think you made your stance clear, you’re not going to change your mind, so people should stop bothering you about it."
Eh, no. “I’m going to make things annoying for you until you give up” is literally something already happening, Titanfall and the like suffered from it hugely. “I’m going to steal your stuff and sell it” is a tale old as time, warez CDs used to be commonplace; it’s generally avoided by giving people a way to buy your thing and giving people that bought the thing a way to access it. The situation where a third party profits off your game is more likely to happen if you don’t release server binaries! For example, the WoW private/emulator server scene had a huge problem with people hoarding scripts, backend systems and bugfixes, which is one of the reasons hosted servers could get away with fairly extreme P2W.
And he seems to completely misunderstand what happens to IP when a studio shuts down. Whether it’s bankruptcy or a planned closure, it will get sold off just like a laptop owned by the company would and the new owner of the rights can enforce on it if they think it’s useful. Orphan works/“abandonware” can happen, just like they can to non-GaaS games and movies, but that’s a horrible failing on part of the company.
PirateSoftware was a blizzard dev, is a current dev, and is just basically lobbying against change. I don’t believe he’s being genuine in his arguments and is misrepresenting the cause or hasn’t understood it. It was possible to make games that didn’t stop working once a server shut down and it still is.
Being given a server binary isn’t a licensing issue unless you make it one. And because publishers and studios sign shitty contracts, doesn’t make it right, nor the only way to do business. If he wants to do business that way, do that shit in the US, but if something meaningful happens in the EU, then don’t sell your games there. Simple as…
Anti Commercial-AI license
Agree. I don’t know this person, but at best he didn’t understand the campaign and also overdosed on defeatism. At worst he’s intentionally misrepresenting the campaign and lobbying against better consumer rights.
I usually agree with Thor but on this one I probably couldn’t disagree more. Based on what he says I’d say his mindset is completely opposite to what his initiative wants to do. He essentially said he doesn’t see any value in (live service) games after they’ve reached their end of service and from that perspective I can understand how this movement is pointless or even potentially damaging. But that assumes that the (live service) game loses value after the company stops supporting it and I just don’t think that’s the case.
A lot of games continue live despite the company ending official support for them. If anyone remembers there’s a gem called Wildstar that was shut down in 2018. Despite the game being shut down and even trademark has expiring people are still running the game on private servers. People are putting in sweat and tears to make sure a game is preserved. Imagine how much easier it would be if Carbine or NcSoft had released proper tools for it. Even Vanilla WoW exists because private server did it first and Blizzard wanted to get some of that money.
And another point that Thor made how it’s not about preservation because you can’t preserve a moment in time. I think that’s a completely disingenuous argument because it feeds into FOMO. If you join WoW today you will never experience “the golden age of WoW”. Maybe another game you might be interested in is having a golden age right now, better buy into the hype. You can’t argue against preservation like this because it’s literally impossible to preserve a moment in time except in your memory so you have be at that exact place at that exact time to really experience that thing, that is FOMO at it’s purest form. That argument against preservation is an argument in favor of FOMO.
Thors points come for a belief that live service games don’t need to be preserved after official support has ended, and he views this initiative through that lens. Of course he will have issues with the initiative because he’s opposing the idea at a fundamental level. It’s like asking a racist how to be more tolerant with other races, the answer obviously is that you shouldn’t want to tolerate other races. And just like you would ignore a racist I think you should ignore what Thor has to say on this matter because anything he says is against the idea of preservation.
Well yeah. Obviously the game losses value BECAUSE it’s not being supported anymore. There’s no value in a paperweight.
You’re stating it like it’s somehow objective, but it’s not. Battlefield 3 and 4 have been delisted and it’s a matter of time until EA turns off services and those games are left for dead. Battlefield 4 still averages above 1k players a month. It’s clear that EA won’t see value in keeping the light on and will turn off the services in the near future, but do you think the players will go overnight from “I want to play this game” to “This game is worthless”. Don’t you think the people playing BF4 wouldn’t want to continue playing after EA shuts down the services keeping the game running?
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are two groups who decide if a game has value or not, the company and the customers. Right now after purchasing the game the customers no longer have a say whether a game has value or not. Only the company has a say and if the company says it’s not worth it then the people who bought it just have to suck it up. And that’s the idea behind the initiative, to make it so that the company isn’t the only one who gets to decide how long you get to use the product you’ve purchased.
I think if we expanded the idea of bricking software beyond gaming, if companies could destroy any piece of software they made, you’d also be in favor of this initiative. Imagine if Microsoft could brick Windows 10 when they’ve officially stopped supporting it. Or Nvidia effectively bricking their older cards by stopping official driver support. Would you then also argue that the software has lost value and it’s acceptable behavior?
I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just stating that a broken unplayable game objectively has no value. The publisher has forced that value to 0 if they turn off their servers without support, regardless of if there was any value there before or not.
Edit: I realize we might be talking about different things when saying “stop supporting”. I meant that to mean when the servers are turned off, not when they stop releasing updates or delist it from stores.
But it’s broken and unplayable because the developer/publisher renders it unplayable and that’s where the initiative comes in. The initiative wants to make it so that if the developer/publisher wants to turn off their official services they don’t render the game unplayable.
Which is what this would serve to counteract, by allowing players to continue operating the servers when devs abandon them.
Nothing happens to the game code itself to devalue it when a game shuts down. The developer not running the server doesn’t actually speak to the quality of the server itself.
I’m a vegetarian. If I asked everyone to sign an initiative called “stop killing animals” that sought to make it illegal to sell animal products wouldn’t that make me a dick for trying to dictate what companies can sell and what people can consume? You think it’s morally wrong to shut down an online game. I think it’s morally wrong to eat an animal.
There’s nothing wrong with voicing your opinion, but trying to push through a law that conforms to your moral view of the world is weird. It’s exactly the same mentality of people who want it to be the law that the ten commandments are in every classroom.
I’m fine with having more consumer protection and making it clear if a company is selling ownership or temporary access. Right now it’s often not clear and that is definitely an issue. But completely making the sale of temporary access illegal is just strange. If you dont agree to temporary access, then don’t buy it. There are many games that are being sold DRM free, you own them completely, and they’ll work forever. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy something they don’t agree with.
I’m sorry this is so off-kilter that I’m not sure what mental hoops you jumped through to end up like that. Laws are made entirely on morals. It’s why murder is illegal, theft is illegal, and insider trading is illegal. It’s always been about morality, and the key here is to get enough people to agree with you that it becomes a general consensus among the general public, or at least make it widespread enough to have it be important for the lawmakers.
You could create an initiative called “stop killing animals”, and you wouldn’t be a dick, you’d just be another extremist vegetarian. It’s not hard to see where vegetarians got the reputation from. If you tried to insist you hold a moral high ground without clearly explaining why you think something is wrong, and got angry that people don’t agree with you, then you’d be a dick.
The whole point is getting people to agree to these morals, and its difficult due to how entrenched a lot of people are in their own heads or scriptures. But the fact that the initiative is pulling these kinds of numbers proves that it’s not being a dick to ask for laws to back up customer rights that people feel are being violated.
As far as what you’re saying here:
I’m unsure of what you mean by ‘temporary access’. Are you referring to the practice where corporations are trying to take advantage of selling licenses for games? Courts in the US have ruled that if you bought a license, you own that copy of the license as it typically took the form of a storage media- like a game cartridge or a DVD. The only difference in modern day is that computers and storage media are cheaper than ever, so laws haven’t caught up with digital distribution.
Companies abuse this legal loophole by not damaging the ‘license’ for the game that you own, but by making the contents of the ‘license’ defunct and inoperable. That’s a heavily legal gray zone, even back in the early 2000’s, and the only reason they get away with it is because the average citizen doesn’t have the income to dispute these obvious violations of consumer rights due to income disparity. They know that, and it emboldens them.
As far as this part:
I’m not sure if this is your honest thoughts, or put out there in good faith even. The argument ‘just don’t buy it’ is reductive and fails to address the problem. It always has been, and always will be. It’s the equivalent of ‘just find a better job’, ‘just earn more money’, or other bootstrap advice. The free market is incapable of policing itself. If your belief is that voting with your wallet is effective, that just shows how uneducated you truly are.
this has never been true
Ah! Thank you. Now I know why despite not buying any meat for nearly two decades it hasn’t caused the meat industry to collapse. It’s because the free market is incapable of policing itself! I had originally thought it was because other people had different opinions but it’s actually the fault of capitalism and lack of regulations. I knew nobody actually wants to be able to purchase meat. It’s that they have no other choice!
I meant like when you go to a movie theatre you can only watch the movie at a specific place at a specific time and only once. You don’t get to own the movie. I also think this must be some kind of loophole that corporations are abusing and anyone paying for a movie ticket is being taken advantage of and they might not even know it. Perhaps a stop killing movies initiative should be next where we ensure movie theaters must give a copy of the movie to anyone who buys a ticket. Temporary access to media is wrong and the people buying it are uneducated and must be saved.
Finland has about 660,000 vegetarians. That’s way more than the 9,000 needed to sign an initiative! It actually looks like all of Europe has enough vegetarians to easily pass an initiative requesting to ban the sale of meat. I guess banning meat wouldn’t actually be extremist at all with those kinds of numbers!
My understanding is that this would force games to be sold as either a good (lasts forever) or a service (lasts a specific, advertized amount of time). It does not prevent service games from existing, it just stops them being sold as goods with an unspecified expiration date. The problem is consumers are uninformed about the lifetime of the game they are purchasing.
I’m sorry to tell you, but both sides of a given moral stance… are moral views. Someone’s morals push them to dictate having the 10 Commandments in classrooms. My morals push me to oppose that happening. The law is going to enshrine a moral viewpoint no matter which way it goes.
All laws entail a moral viewpoint, either directly, or as a simple function of attempting to do what is “right”: something as simple as defining the safe PPM of a chemical in drinking water is only done because we believe it is right/moral to provide clean drinking water (and also, immoral not to).
It’s not like we must choose between a law mandating everyone must do something or a law mandating its forbidden. There can also just be no law or some nuanced law. It’s not black or white. Saying you’re against a law requiring the 10 commandments being in all classrooms doesn’t mean you support a law banning the 10 commandments from all classrooms.
That’s not what I said, I said it’s still a moral stance to oppose having religious iconography in a public setting as a government mandate, which could be a ban of it, or simply not having a law that mandates it. The idea that a choice not to do anything is not also a moral stance, is mistaken.
It’s worth checking out Louis Rossmann’s take too: https://youtu.be/TF4zH8bJDI8
I rarely ever find myself disagreeing with either of them, so this is an interesting situation.
Edit: This is also a good take about live service, separate from the “Stop Killing Games” initiative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO38QvKraTQ
All I’m gonna say about Rossman is that he gives me the same Ick that Mr Beast has given me since long before the allegations about him hit. So far my gut has never been wrong about people that make me feel this way.
Good videos, I enjoyed both of them. The initiative comes from a good place but could use a little more work before being brought to gov’t, if that’s the best place for it.
Imo it doesn’t though. Thor misreads this as a legal document, but it is not, this is initiative, which is essentially to get the conversation started. If you’ll look at other initiatives, you’ll find they read pretty similarly. Stop trying to poke flaws in it like it’s a legal document, because it isn’t and isn’t meant to be!
That’s a good point too, it shouldn’t be held to the standard of a legal document yet. I watched the video and definitely did that - forgetting its initiative nature. I think it could be helpful to specify the scope a little more so it doesn’t suffer from scope creep later and get nothing done, as well as bring some focus to the future discussions. But I’m reading some good points in this thread, and I’m curious to see where it goes. Fingers crossed!