i feel bad for the poor fuckin eu government dude who has to spy on me while i crank my shit to some washed up single mother putting 4 feet of silicone horse cock in her ass while i leave my camera on... /s
That one I’m not too worried about. Removing end to end encryption would, in its current state, make the internet almost entirely non functional. It’s like banning roofs on buildings so the government can see directly inside with a satellite. Doing something like this would require nationalizing and redesigning all existing communications infrastructure into a single national intranet and then connecting that to a similar set up in another country.
Its almost like the EU have only been interested in a mass surveillance state. They don't care about your privacy, they care about collecting every bit of information they can on you and forcing you to live the exact way they want.
They said the EU because it's an EU-wide thing. The Union is an international organization with a commission that passes international policies for member countries. Was this an attempt at a gotcha or something
What were the suggestions the initiative has/had? I consider it quite complex to write this into law that one, doesnt leave any loopholes and two doesnt create unrealistic expectations.
Nothing concrete. Every time people brought up actual concrete problems that would have to be resolved, the whole movement just hid behind "oh it's possible, the lawmakers will figure it out" and then deflect the problems and call you a corporate shill and an astroturfer. Like what were people thinking would happen when the Ubisoft side of the table has actual valid concerns that need to be addressed, and the SKG side just kind of shrugs and says "you figure it out". Literally a "concept of a plan" kind of an approach. SKG had the initiative and completely wasted it.
Because it's not the same problem, and none of you will actually listen to people who know what they're talking about when they tell you this. Games from decades ago were a codebase manageable by one person or a small team of people and that codebase output a few binaries as artifacts. Games today are massively different infrastructure wise and that fact is something nobody who really stands behind this movement is willing to accept.
I am not even talking about programming, I know how that works, but how would write a law? "Every game has to remain playable forever" is not a law and definitely not a reasonable law. I could see that they have to remove DRM logic from games, but for multiplayer games its just completely unreasonable.
It is not just reasonable, but certain as a law. In fact it's already a law. You're selling products and pulling them down like it was a service when the button obviously says BUY, not RENT. It's outright illegal and we just need to make it more explicitly so so the publishers are held accountable.
You're honestly not even trying to understand the situation here.
There is also that whole thing about multiplayer games that... it doesn't apply backwards, which has been said everywhere already. New games are made from ground up with this in mind, that is without bringing trade secrets into non-compiled portions of the debug single-pc server they already had for ages in every online game ever.
No its not reasonable and completely out of line from how any other industry is regulated. There is literally no point to single out games. What would be a reasonable approach - and based on my research also what is instead being pursued in legislation is defining an expected lifetime for a game. If you sunset it before that you have to either provide a way to keep using it or offer a proportionate refund.
It seems a reasonable approach to say a game has a lifetime of 5 years and then you may or may not be able to play it anymore. If they wanna shut it down after 4 years, they have to refund you 20% of your purchase price.
You realize that virtually every game falls outside of this time period right? Like, even the crew, the game that sparked this whole movement, had nearly 10 years of active lifetime.
Read literally anything anyone said (like my comment to the other guy who replied to this comment 45min before you did) and it will be refuted. Writing the same thing 1000th time isn't fun. You're not listening to people who actually know what they are talking about.
Honestly even better, try sitting through those 1h things recorded by SKG while they were either talking with the EU commission about it or were there just for the people to answer this kind of questions.
Because legally when we buy software nowadays we're purchasing a lease/right to use the software. There would need to be legislation mandating that software/game purchases are actual purchases of the software itself, but even then, companies cant really be forced to keep the servers accessible, so the only other option outside of that is offline capabilities and consumer hosted servers.
Yeah and you'll never see governments legislating that software is sold on an ownership basis because that means that trade secrets in software don't exist anymore.
Its entirely worth noting the EU parliament cant actually propose laws. Which is why Ubisoft was lobbying the EU commission because they can propose laws which parliament can then vote on.
But they can't? Does nobody know how it works lol? They can propose a law it still has to be accepted by the parliament and the council. Which is why people like me knew SKG would not get passed the comission and even Ross himself and his team knew this already.
Hence they are going the better route which is to amend it into an existing law which the Parliament can do without the comission.
Edit; If you are going to downvote atleast try and give a counter argument where i am wrong.
You can be angry all you want, it doesn't change facts the comission cannot adopt a law willy nilly without approval of both the Parliament and the Council.
A link to read upon how it works: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/decision-making/ordinary-legislative-procedure/
Person in the EU here. I can't look at Twitter posts flagged as "mature" without giving my ID over. The Commission is 100% making and enacting mature content bans, just not as quickly or catastrophically as the UK.
But you do own the thing. You own a license, its the product it accesses that goes away.
It be like if you bought a liftetime ticket to a sports team but they disolve after 5 years. What you bought hasn't gone away, you still own the ticket, but you can't watch a team play if the team doesn't exist anymore.
And to continue the metaphor, sometimes they revoke the ticket because you were a drunk asshole who was shouting slurs, but thats you violating what you agreed to do when you showed up to the game.
The EU consists of 450 million people. It may seem that 1.3 million is a lot, but it really isn't. And when the thing they're asking for has other negative consequences for the 450 million people, the number of signatures becomes less compelling as an argument by itself.
450mil, and how many of them would be affected? I doubt there would be even 300k people against it if we only got 1.3mil positive signatures.
Do you assume the law is supposed to be perfect first try? We can patch it later if people hate it despite it having literally 0 negative impact on anyone or anyone's business.
It would undermine intellectual property rights and copyright laws, which would indeed affect every European citizen. This is also what the EU Commission said in their response.
I have explained this in my other replies below. You can read those if you want.
Undermining those would be a pure positive though. Even if you cut 3/4 of the protection time, that's still gonna be like 20 years which is an insane amount of time. Making their hold over everything weaker in general would be a winning scenario for everyone except corpos.(which have to adjust for the people, that's how laws work)
It goes against the conclusions in the Draghi report, which the EU pursues in an effort to ensure the competitiveness and economic growth for the European Union.
I have explained this in the discussion below, I will refer to that.
so let me get this, i am literally paying taxes to work, to eat, to refill the gas tank, to buy a house, to granting free healthcare to everyone but god forbid a software house is required to foresee an EOL treatment for their online titles? if this would require touching copyright laws then ffs change them asap! it's not something bad, it's just being fair to your customer! only 20 years ago this would have been pure madness: you pay for something that whatever-it-is is your. period. we just want to have that right respected today!
You can't just change copyright laws, because they're pretty much universal.
And by changing you essentially mean weakening, i.e. a creator has less rights over their creation - which is what's being requested by wanting game companies to hand over their creations once they don't wish to operate them anymore.
That's a pretty bad route for the EU to pursue. Imagine companies like Disney or Warner Brothers or the Pokémon Company. They would instantly retreat from the EU as a market to operate in, in order to protect their intellectual properties - which are essential to their existence.
Consider how much western companies fight tooth and nail to prevent Chinese companies from infringing upon their intellectual properties by making knock-off products or simply copying them straight up, and how much lost revenue that results in for western companies who essentially see their hard work being stolen.
That's what this initiative kind of says should be legal under certain conditions.
That's not happening. That's not in the EUs interest or in the interest of the European citizens. It would undermine their long-term prosperity and the competitiveness of the European market.
no one is pretending it to change rather than being restricted. adding restrictions to what is universally applied for your continent only is perfectly fine and allowed, you wouldn't touch anything common to other part of the world. in this scenario both european products and american/chinese products would need to comply with this so that would become common ground and therefore no one would be advantaged or disadvantaged by this on european ground.
That doesn't really make sense. If the EU was to weaken its intellectual property rights and copyright laws, the US (and the rest of the world) would not be obligated to follow suit - and most likely wouldn't.
The result would just be that the EU would make itself a less desirable market to operate in for companies, which is of course good for all other markets. More business for them!
If the EU shoots itself in the foot, the rest of the world isn't automatically going to do the same.
It also doesn't resonate with the lay of the land. The US is notoriously known for de-regulating - believing that the fewer rules imposed on companies, the greater the innovation and economic growth you get.
The US is not going to pivot away from that belief, especially not in the area of tech where the US has a huge competitive advantage - in part because of few regulations.
At the same time, the EU has come to the realization that it has too many regulations and that this is a cause of its stagnant economy. This is all covered in the Draghi report on European competitiveness. And there is wide agreement in the EU that the conclusions in the Draghi report should be pursued in order to ensure the future prosperity of Europe. So likewise, it makes no sense to then pivot on that strategy and impose more laws to regulate companies in ways that only further weaken the EUs competitiveness.
It's just not happening. It's a passion project from gamers and the emotions are high and it's all born out of love and that's great. But there's more to a market economy and a functioning society than the whims and desires of some gamers.
And that's not to say that the EU isn't doing something about gaming - it's actually doing a lot! But asking the EU to undermine intellectual property rights and copyright laws, a bedrock of international society, is asking for too much.
i see your point but i don't think our rules are what makes our economy stagnant. also if the US won't follow our rules China can't wait to fill in the gap so it's not really about how are we going to regulate ourselves rather than who's going to take over our market if we'd have such laws. also you keep say that would undermining intellectual property but that's really not true, your intellectual property stays yours, you would just need to think of a proper EOL for it. that is nt something extra, it is something that should be done regardless of a law imposing it, again it just makes your deals fair to the customers. no one wants to pay for something that's going to be ripped off your hands against your will. no EULA can save you from how unfair this is.
Why can’t people just discuss nuanced things instead of quipping things that don’t even address the point, regardless of what side of the issue you sit on. What does creating an obligation to run a multiplayer server indefinitely have to do with whether you own the game or not? People act like this stuff is so cut and dry. Take Forza for example. Microsoft has to license all those cars for a limited amount of time. It’s not like they can just hand over the software to the public and it play the same.
You complain about other people not being any to talk about nuance and then completely disregard most of the potential solutions thatv have been talked about in relation to this. Here's just a few options for studios with primarily online games that would satisfy everyone:
Make the server files public so people can host their own. Set up a server renting service. Make an offline mode. Make it peer to peer.
What does creating an obligation to run a multiplayer server indefinitely
That's not what SKG is. You might want to look into the conversation topics before posting wrong information. SKG is about companies letting customers be able to play games they no longer sell or support in any way. It's not about creating obligations to run servers indefinitely and never has been. As many years as it's been since that was clarified I have to assume you are either grossly ignorant or deliberately disinforming people.
The problem was the scope of what they were asking for was pretty much impossible to implement. Had they downed the scope to just making sure that they patched any single player game to remove authentication and login servers when they closed authentication servers it would have had no problem getting passed. That isn't a big ask and is a pretty easy patch they could implement.
When your asking developers to rewrite an entire game that has tons of online aspects to it to be single player or for them to release proprietary server software as open source that is never ever going to happen. It isn't realistic to expect companies to do either of those.
You have to pick winnable battles here and start there. Once you get the first passed you can work on expanding it over time.
The demands and expectations of SKG initiatives seem to be all over the place. However, the issue that was covered here is about a developer’s obligation to support a game seemingly forever. And I think that’s the problematic part.
If you buy an appliance, there isn’t just an automatic lifetime warranty where the manufacturer is required to maintain your appliance forever.
you have never owned copyrighted media you bought, thats what the green FBI screen at the begininng of every home video movie is telling you.
"owning the things you buy" has no relation whatsoever to whether somebody else should be required by law to provide an unpaid service to you forever because you bought something from them once.
the whole "stop killing games" thing has been misguided and based on misinformation from the very beginning. The incident that started it all, the shut down of The Crew, impacted less than two dozen total players who were still playing that 10 year old game instead of it's three sequels according to SteamCharts.
In what other industry is it normal to have a government-enforced lifetime full-service warranty on all products for free? None. It's an absurd thing to ask, let alone demand the government to mandate.
It's not really worth trying to have a reasonable opinion on this subject. It's just a bunch of people who think they get the right to legislate government over-reach because it personally benefits them, and they can't possibly even consider the downsides of having government regulation of creativity.
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u/c0mander5 Jun 17 '26
Can't pass a laws making it so we own the things we buy, but there can sure as shit be laws banning adult content and social media.