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 commission should be afraid of siding with the corporations mainly for what we’ll do to them if they do.
Nothing?
These are gamers we’re talking about so plenty of free time for real life COD:MW
Congratulations on making the cringiest post on the fediverse.
You got me beat by a LOT
Nah.
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 whivh 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 place? 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 dear too baby people take 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?
“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.
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.
SKG isnt even asking for support to last forever. They have repeatedly been very clear about that.
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!
lol
lol
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.
Well then pls get me an emulator for GamePark GP2X pls? Come on it isn’t even 20 years old.
This is a very entitled take in my opinion, by all means. Further it shows me that you never wrote an emulator nor that you can even fathom how hard emulation actually is. All software that you use relies on external systems mostly your hardware and your operating system. Recreating both is extremely hard and time consuming so it is mostly done due to personal involvement and nostalgia. Both of which will not happen for something like python that is mostly used by scientists to cobble together c libraries.
Without an os or hardware even an open source project will not be able to run. And this even ignores that emulators often don’t even run the software the same way so you are not really playing the same game.
I answered a very very very polemic and populistic take and didn’t even say anything about how closed or open source code should be or how accessible software should be that is just what you interpreted into what I wrote.
So what is it you actually wanted to add?
If you aren’t bringing up practical difficulty to argue in favor of theoretical impossibility, what are you adding?
How is difficulty relevant in the face of the importance of preservation?
As for python… What?
Why would you emulate for python, when what actually happens is that new interpreters get written? It already runs across several operating systems and processing architectures thanks to interpreters existing for each one.
Python isn’t some hobby language anymore. Far too much serious infrastructure uses it for future interpreters not to get made.
Ever heard of an emulator?
Ever written one? I did. Did you? So you know what you are talking about?
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.
We can all start with ourselves, which is easier first step.
The only games I purchase are from GOG with 2 exceptions of 2 portal games on steam.
Looking at you sports and COD gamers 👀
I don’t get those two kinds of gamers. You’re paying over $100USD every year to continue to play fundamentally the SAME game. Just that ALL your progress and cosmetics/teams are essentially wiped and you have to spend hundreds of dollars to reacquire them. And they say some games are “too grindy.”
To this day I’ve still failed to talk my stepdad out of buying Madden games… even when they no longer work on Windows 10 (and of course Linux) so he’s having to upgrade… Sigh.
You kids these days have no respect
wife asks for 70 euro dress
beats wife
pays 70 euro for madden 20 reskin, plays madden
No buy from gog and show that there is money in being consumer friendly
The Nazi storefront? How about just fuck all corps, either steal it or do the transaction directly with the devs.
How do you plan to do transaction with devs…
Take a look at stuff like Vintage Story and Bellum…or og Minecraft lmao. Did you think your comment through at all?
Edit: And Guild Wars 1+ 2 (soon to be 3 as well), and shitloads more I don’t even remember. There’s tons of games I buy directly from the devs. Or hell even join a patreon and support development like with Glory To The Heroes.
Edit 2: Tarkov and Ashes of Creation for some examples of shit games that offered direct transactions, don’t want to misrepresent this lol.
PayPal ofc. Wait, that gives Thiel money…
I support skg but also I stopped buying (aaa) games a long time ago, and I can’t be the only one. We’re the people who have enough disposable income but simply won’t support shit but beancounter managers are too stupid to realize it would be easy to get if they’d just show a little decency.
🤷
Yeah. There was a statistic about Steam a while ago showing that the percentage of recent releases by playtime was steadily declining. People have their classics, they outgrow competitive games, they don’t want to upgrade their PCs as much with current prices. This was masked for a time by overall steady growth in the gaming sector, but this is slowing down.
Boycotts don’t work when John Gamer spends hundreds of millions on microtransactions. I could never buy another EA Sports game for the rest of my life, and all it takes is one whale to wipe out ten of me boycotting. The economy of boycotting games is completely broken at scale when whales exist, and companies know how to cater to them.
But if the whale does not have 10 other people to play with and show off their whaling, then they won’t whale no more on that game.
You are the plankton accompanying the whale (wtf am I typing while shitting in the morning) even if you are not paying directly, you support the ecosystem. No other players to play with, then suddenly it’s a boring game.
This is why they put micro-transactions into single player games now 😅
I get your point but look at any harbor in the Mediterranean when an event comes to town, it’s full of super-yatchs. The rich will always be fine peacocking for each other, and yatch builders manage to stay in business just fine. I realize it’s a bit different since there’s a whole social aspect of the game, arguably the whole point is to play with others. I just don’t see the bean counters having that foresight.
I’d put more weight behind IP law, where if a company chooses to shut down an online game then it gets treated like abandonware and they cannot pursue fans who run their own servers. That does put the onus on the fans at the end of the day, but I think in the long run it would make companies more willing to appeal to a wider audience if we always had an open model to fall back to.
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
Do you really own your game if it can be unilaterally taken away from you ? Copyright law is fucked and the software industry is happy with the status quo - no owning a license that’s behind dozens of pages of TOS is not owning a game.
I stopped buying and playing Ubisoft games years ago. Far Cry 4 I believe.
that’s decades
Think the last one I bought was Rayman Origins
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.
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.
A streamer wanting to catch all original Pokémon started his session with soldering new batteries into his cartridges.
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.
Yup and games were fully formed because when you got that tape/cd that was it, the whole game. None of this “oh we will be adding blah blah”
Not to say there weren’t issues in that period of time with defunct or broken games. Just that it was more expensive to fix an oops so spending money to make it work right was a necessity.
Games (and software) are one of the few forms of media and free speech that are subject to this.
Hence why streaming, e-books, etc come in to push in convenience while removing ownership/independence.
I see it tangentially related in how it operates similar to fossil fuels/renewables. The industry wants you to keep buying. They can’t control the sun, wind, etc, so you don’t need to rely on them.
Same kinda thing here, they want you to rely on them and keep buying the newest thing. And if they delete your old version, welp, guess you better come get the new one (especially when they “remaster” it with 0 effort and slap it on a new digital storefront.)
I just hate the profit motive lol
Does the EU have a process to report this to their parliament?
They’re aware.
Everything is working as designed.
@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.
Our dead games list contains at risk games. Anyone is welcome to check or add to the list: https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead/_game/_list
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”
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.
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.
Minor correction: Call of Duty is Activision, not Electronic Arts.
That’s right. COD and Madden blur together for me. EA and ABK are just conglomerates of corporate greed after all.
You’re right.
Burning the book in case it might offend some future reader is reasonable.
/S
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 want to be that guy, but aren’t Meta and Google American companies, while Ubisoft is European?
EU also banned ICE cars against the lobbying of all the European car companies. Auto industry is ~$600B in EU, video games are ~$80B. Sure, EU relaxed the rules in the end but again, you really think they are able to regulate auto industry but are folding immediately when video games lobbyist show up?
Depends. How much are the lobbyists paying? Its possible the auto industry simply refused to pay whereas gaming companies might pay more.
Also, these people care way less about anything related to video games than they care about banning cars. “Cars are loud, get in the way of their bicycle, and sometimes stink; but video games? What is that?”
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.
I was a bit surprised this was mentioned so far down in the comments. Especially since the article is sparse on the details for obvious reasons.
