It’s amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they’re no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.
Digital Fairness Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act/F33096034_en
No, this is like a law that says once you paid for the guac they can’t come around to your table later and piss in it to make you buy a new pot of the new and improved guac they just released.
Feels to me more like kicking you out of Chipotle at closing time.
Servers cost money. Making server side code available takes effort and money. It’s the issue of positive versus negative rights. The difference between being entitled to food stamps (you have to give me) versus having the right to hunt (you have to let me). Of course we have food stamps, but that’s funded by the government, it’s not an obligation for grocery stores to give food away.
The point of the guac analogy is the entitlement to say that you as a consumer gets to dictate a price singlehandedly.
Chipotle isn’t closing though. They still want to sell you games. Just new ones.
Yes
No. Why do I know this? Because it was the norm until way into the 2000s for games to just have a server browser and people running their own servers. That only changed when publishers increasingly wanted to keep players inside their own infrastructure to better sell them microtransactions and subscriptions. Without those, the one time cost of creating standalone server code for a release to the users is easily offset by not having to run your own servers for the game.
There are a number of different possible architectures for online features. Games don’t have to be designed in a way that makes it difficult to release server code after EOL. And if they still are after this regulation passes, the studios and publishers only have themselves to blame.
Which is why it’s a flawed analogy, because this is not about prices. It’s about what you as a customer get to do with the product you bought after you bought it. And it’s about if it’s ok to even design a product in a way where those rights can’t be guaranteed.
I was thinking along the line of them yoinking the guac right from under your nose, even if you weren’t finished yet.