The page seems to be not working at the moment but keep on signing https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
Yay! I’m one in a million!
Can we move for a Stop Killing People now!? :)
That’s definitely a stretch goal. But at least if we can start by stopping them from killing something innocuous like games it shows that we still maybe have some power over them.
One melon!
A whole melon indeed
About my lowest threshold for success is that this at least makes disclosures about what you’re buying more prominent and restricts the ability for software licenses to just alter the deal and pray that they don’t alter them further. Even better disclosures would make the raw deal you’re getting become more poisonous before the point of sale. Especially as an American, I’m going to have wait a few years after any legislation goes through before I can trust online multiplayer games again.
That’s great and all, but this needs to stop being spammed everywhere. Theres two of these posts in games alone.
Crosspost, people. That’s what is there for.
It’s good to see. The UK one is still ticking upward too (133.5k/100k). It’s been an impressive last minute push.
Now, we wait and see I guess. I expect nothing useful to come from the UK one, but at least we force them to respond again. Even if it is the same response.
The EU one, I really do hope something comes of it.
Keep it going, let’s see how much more we can get people to sign, let’s aim for 1.2
This should not stop, the more the merry and also to ensure to filter out anomalies. 34k have already signed pass the million
Do they still need to get the minimum in at least 7 countries? Anyone happen to know? Ive only been loosely following and i don’t want to stress the website more than it is suffering lol.
Only 4 countries have not reached the minimum.
In a way, focussing on the countries was always ultimately pointless (aside from encouraging votes througj country rivalries). It’s almost impossible to not have required countries after the million votes milestone. You’d have to male something very specific like “make dutch the only language in the EU” in order to not make that cut.
No, that requirement has already been met. The final requirement (which has just been met now) is to reach a total of 1 million signatures. Basically, all requirements are now satisfied
Awesome, thank you!!
Do still sign if you can, some signatures might turn out to be invalid and we need a buffer against that.
Ich bin dabei 🙋🏼♂️
Ich auch. Schon 10 Monaten.
At the current rate (which may or may not hold and may or may not be legitimate) the initiative should beat “One of Us”, the biggest one yet with 1.9M signatures (pro-life, ultimately did nothing).
A) this issue applies to all kinds of software.
B) procuring software is a two-way street … the producer assigns terms by which access is obtained, and you agree to those terms in exchange for that access. If the software is SaaS then if the producer chooses to shut down the service then you are SOL. If the software is provided with a long list of terms via Steam, then you are basically buying SaaS with local caching and execution. Maybe don’t reward producers by agreeing to one-sided deals like SaaS?
This kind of headache is what prompted Richard Stallman to come up with the idea for the GNU license. Maybe you think that is too radical… but maybe imposing your ideas of what licensing terms should look like on (only?) game developers is radical also.
Isn’t prohibiting them from not releasing the server software after they shut down the ultimate way to not reward them for such behavior?
There are a weird amount of double negatives in that sentence.
A) yes it does.
B) I’m assuming that you are somehow against this pro consumer movement. If so: why?
For the same reason I think software developers have the right to choose to release under copyleft, I think they have the right to release under SaaS or copyright. I don’t think it is fair to take those rights from them. (I may choose to avoid SaaS or other proprietary models where possible, but I am not pure about it… I just do so recognizing that proprietary tools are a band-aid and could become unusable when any upgrade or TOS changes.)
As one example, keep in mind that some governments may choose to punish a software developer for making “offensive” (by whatever their standards are) content, and rather than fighting a losing battle in one jurisdiction so you in some other jurisdiction can keep using that controversial software the developer may just choose to cut their losses and turn it off for everyone. If you force them to release it anyway then said punitive government may continue to hold the developer responsible for the existence of that software.
There are rights and responsibilities associated with a proprietary model… and IMO you (and your permissive government) should not be overriding those rights for your own short-sighted benefit.
Sounds like the ol’ slippery slope argument.
There are rights and responsibilities associated with a proprietary model… and IMO you (and your permissive government) should not be overriding those rights for your own short-sighted benefit.
Kind of sounds like you misunderstood the initiative to be honest. This only affects games which have been abandoned by the developer, the proprietary model stays perfectly intact as long as you actually keep selling your games.
To address your first point. Yes it applies to other software, this initiative applies to games because the “buyer purchases a license to allow the seller to remove your purchase at some indefinite time later” practices have been most prevalent in gaming.
Extending the scope too far will bring in more opponents than allies and muddy the discussion. Getting a decisive answer here will inform laws on how other industries should be regulated in separate but parallel legislative processes.
nobody reads the terms of service, ever.
also, no modern game companies with any relevance use a FOSS license.
so the way i see it, gamers have two options:
- stop playing videogames or
- only play supertuxkart and dwarf fortress
neither of these would happen at a scale large enough to force game studios into making their games FOSS.
the only way i can see of making this happen is by either:
- a series of very popular, targeted boycotts at studios, or
- making governments regulate the industry.
and with the second option, history has shown that only small changes have a chance of passing. effectively abolishing copyright law for software is not something the EU will ever do, no matter how many signatures a petition gets.
There’s this madlad called BlenderDumbass that’s making a FOSS GTA clone in UPBGE & Python
I don’t think they need to make their games FOSS to do right by the consumer. If you have an online game and no longer want to support the server part, it would be super cool to share that code, but at the very least companies shouldn’t be trying to shut down community servers. The same goes for the game itself, the source code would be very cool, but not going after people who still want to play the game they’ve chosen to no longer support seems reasonable.
If a company is ending support their ability to enforce copyright should also end, outside of people that are trying to profit off trying to resell the game as their own (which probably doesn’t happen all that much).
Dwarf Fortress is not free open source software! It’s a great game and runs natively on Linux. You can download it at no cost. But it’s not open source.
nuuu i always thought it was! so sad
The argument here is that they don’t need to open source or switch over to an FOSS license.
They just need to not actively prohibit people from doing custom servers and they need to release their own server files wheb their support period ends.
If that ends with violating a license agreement they have with another company that is exclusively a that company problem because as shown in the past, law supercedes agreement and contracts.
It will basically put branding companies at a either they don’t agree to let their stuff be used in games and not get the money for it, or they decide that it really doesn’t matter all that much if a community project can use their stuff. Simple choice
They can still release their bespoke parts without any of the third party licensed stuff. Even without instructions on what needs to be gotten and put back in. It’d allow the smarter guys in the community have a headstart to figuring it out anyway. Most licensed software can be replaced, look at the recent decomps like the Lego island one.
Definitely keep signing, I’m really concerned at the speed it rose , and I’m really hoping there wasn’t something else at play here.
It was Critikal and PewDiePie saying to sign it. They could get a million signatures on literally anything.
but dozens a minute increase in the dawn hours?
Someone posted a screenshot from 4chan where they were talking about how to fake submissions… 😠
That’s cool. Too bad it doesn’t matter and nothing will change :-/
Stop doomering
Why do you think so?
I may advise you to track previous actions and their outcomes. More often than not, it does work.
I’m glad. But don’t get your hopes up because of this. Commission could (and probably will) just say “we have considered it and we are going to do nothing”.
I think the commission will take action in some form. The worst case scenario in my mind is that they will only require clear labelling. Similar to what they did with smart phones recently. While this not exactly what I am hoping for, having “This game will at least be playable until XXXX” on the package or store page would still be a massive improvement over the status quo.
I dont understand how such a broad requirement would work. They just have to pick some arbitrary date, and then after that they can continue as things currently are? Can you give an example of a game where this type of labelling would have helped?
Yes if we would have known that Concord only lasted two weeks then those that bought the battle pass wouldn’t have bought them. Know eol timing help consumers.
They didnt know it would only last two weeks. They probably knew it was a possibility but I doubt they planned for it.
This is what I mean though, if concord had to say the game would be live for a guaranteed amount of time, why wouldnt they just say something low like 6 months. Why wouldnt every company do that unless they knew for sure it would be successful? Its too risky to choose longer periods of time, and we just have the same situation as now.
Sony actually issued full refunds to all customers that bought Concord.
The game still died. One that was in development for five years, and it lasted two weeks.
They didnt plan for it to last two weeks, the game failed. How do you expect them to guarantee a certain uptime when they have no idea if anyone will even play it.
Call me crazy but I expect businesses to guarantee their products.
‘The Crew’ by Ubisoft was sold for several months before they decided to shut it down. This would have at least forced them to communicate that before taking peoples money. I am also pretty sure that publishers don’t want to put this information on the package because it could seriously hurt sales. So the effect of this labelling requirement might be that publishers build the game in a way that enables self-hosting.
If you are saying they knew it was closing and they sold it for months anyways, that sounds like fraud. Has there been proof ubisoft decided to do this anyways?
On December 14, 2023, Ubisoft delisted The Crew and its expansions from digital platforms, suspended sales of microtransactions, and announced that the game’s servers would be shut down on March 31, 2024, citing “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crew_(video_game)
People who paid around us$40 for the game on December 13 were being sold a lemon.
Given that it was released in 2014 it seems likely that their licenses were given a 10 year duration and they always intended to shutdown in 2024 at the latest (of course if its user base failed to reach critical mass they could have pulled the plug earlier).
Does selling a game in 2023 when you plan to kill it in 2024 legally qualify as fraud?
Thats not what I’m asking. You just have me evidence that they didnt sell it as soon as an EOL date was announced. Are you saying they should have stopped selling it before they publicly announce the EOL? Should they have announced and removed it as soon as the board meeting ended? How much earlier would that be in this case?
Should they have announced and removed it as soon as the board meeting ended? How much earlier would that be in this case?
My unsubstantiated theory is the the licences they signed for all the vehicles and real world content had a 10 year lifetime.
Usually those contracts would just require that they stop selling the game, but they may have included something about the servers in the contract too.
Either way they new something was going to change in 2024 and realistically they knew which of these possibilities were viable:
- sign new deals with all licensors and continue business as usual
- sign new deals with cooperative licensors and modify the game to remove the others
- remove the game from sale and keep the servers running for current customers
- remove the game from sale and kill the servers - tell people to buy the sequal
I’d they waited until December of 2023 to have that meeting then that feels negligent.
If they had that meeting earlier and continued to sell the game (until ≈100 days to EOL) without warning customers that feels fraudulent.
Yes, I think calling it fraud is a fair conclusion, but what do you mean with “they knew it was closing”? This decision is completely in the hands of Ubisoft. Something doesn’t stop being fraud just because someone only decides to defraud you 2 months after they sold you something.
For all we know when the decision to pull the game was formalized, they pulled it that day. It depends what they did after they decided the game was being pulled. Did they leave it up for a few months to get some stuff in order beforehand, but kept selling it? I’d have a tough time accepting a reasoning from Ubisoft for that.
Thats why I asked for any sort of comment or reporting on it.
We’ve done nothing and already completely ran out of ideas!
It’s messy. Making a balanced law around it is sketchy. Consumers deserve to own the games they buy, straight up. Businesses deserve to be able to sell their assets when they fold and have them continue to be worth something so they can live on to make new games and their old games can go to new companies to keep development rolling.
There’s obviously low-hanging fruit. If your game is single-player and you’re just doing an online piracy check, and you go out of business, you leave the check servers running in a trust for like five years with the code to remove the check from escrow. Tick Tock, you either relight the game in time somewhere, or it becomes free to play.
But when you have something like Clash of Clans, where you need battle servers. Those assets are useless once you open that code and 100% support a community-run game. The game could otherwise be passed to another studio, and development could continue. Selling and moving games to other companies and publishers with breaks in the middle happens a lot. How long after a game collapses should they wait for it to become worthless to the market? The obvious answer to the consumer is immediately, because they bought it, they own it. Maybe you have to keep a certain amount of money from the proceeds and use it to refund the users. It still sucks for the you don’t own it anymore concept.
Developers and publishers aren’t fair to consumers without guardrails (and there are none), but those rails should also be reasonable to companies.
If the commission does nothing, it’ll probably be wrapped around this clusterfuck.
I do have a worry that the studios will just stop selling games and everything will go subscription if they are required to provide servers and source on game shutdown. It’ll just push more piracy, less sales, less games and everyone loses.
I really wish companies would just have pride in their stuff and be fair to their users and users could just bear a fair price for good games.
At least we will have an official position, instead of the legal void we’re currently in.
They are supposed to meet with the seven people who first put the initiative forward. It won’t change their minds if they’re already against the initiative but if they don’t care it may sway them to hear it explained to them. I have zero expectations since EU bureaucrats live in a parallel dimension but there’s some hope something happens.
I swear this is not me doomering (I very much support this campaign and even signed it myself half a year ago), but I strongly suspect that at least a good chunk of those are fake. The issue is very hot in “terminally online” circles and those are the kind of people who don’t really think things through before acting.
I hope the number will keep on growing until the “legit” votes make up for the fake ones.
