And the corporate supporters told us the petition was pointless 🤡
Why is Pirate Software a fraud?
I appreciated his take on it. Don’t trust politicians to come up with a good solution, always present the issue when you have a good solution ready. And the solution proposed by that petition was weak at best and outright dangerous for the industry at worst.
If you want to force specificity on buying v getting limited time access, that’s fine, but that’s not what the petition focused on.
If you wanna force devs to plan ahead with huge infrastructure cost to make sure servers will be online for a specific time, this might result in online games being unjustifiable for smaller studios.
If you want to shield independent people hosting unofficial servers to games, now that’s a different conversation that we first need to have to figure it out, before proposing an exact solution through a petition. Mind you this is a more complicated topic, as this gets into licensing and IP law.
And I really don’t think stop killing games is clear on those, and that makes this endeavor a lottery with the entire multiplayer games industry in limbo.
Give me another more precise initiative and I’ll join, but until then I’ll definitely not sign anything. If we change things, we should change them for the better, so let’s do our due diligence first.
I personally do not care how a policy would damage a company. I am playing the games, not developing them. If a company shuts down servers, they can at least provide players with the server binaries (difficult in the case of MMOs etc, but still better than doing nothing).
The EU can suck, but sometimes they put some pretty neat policies in place to protect consumers (e.g. the difference in USA vs EU MS Windows), so I trust them to hold publishers responsible to not cut off access to a sold product. Let’s say the EU prohibits putting Gacha mechanics in games, would you defend companies then, claiming the EU is cutting their profits (sorry, kinda strawmannish, but it feels to me this way)?
About pirate software (finally looked him up): He just seemed annoying as hell and every time YouTube pushed a short of him it was just ramblings in which huge parts were just untrue. Idk if he even codes, I only see him rambling about some shit with the voice you make when you are 14 and want to sound deeper. People on YouTube said he is a nepo baby but I don’t care too much about him to go down that rabbithole.
Sadly I doubt this was thanks to the petition itself. More likely ubi is trying to claw back some goodwill ( and make some cash too, by promoting the title that was full of mtx instead of the retired one ). They’ve also done this offline fix thing in the past ( with anno 2070 for one ) and also after a healthy dose of player backlash.
Once again. No government intervention required. Companies listen to consumers.
They’re doing this because they’ve lost so much money investors are angry and the executives want to win people back. They aren’t worried about law changes, they’re worried about their stock price and reputation.
In the 12 years since European Citizens Initiatives have existed, there have been few successful campaigns even fewer actual law changes. If I were a greedy company, I wouldn’t be worried about this in the slightest.
If ECIs are to become a useful tool for civil society, campaigners would benefit from a better understanding of how to craft their demands in a way that is likely to lead the Commission to actually propose a legislative initiative. There have now been 133 ECI attempts, millions of signatures collected, a significant amount of money spent, and little to show for it.
G*mers will lap up so much slop and malicious decisions publishers push out, we DO need governments to regulate.
The few (big) publishers that listen to consumers can be counted on one hand.
Downvoted for censoring Gamers. I will always downvote people using that stupid fucking asterisk. Don’t be a child.
I want Crew 1 offline more than the others because it has an actual single player campaign.
While Ubisoft likely isn’t going to make that happen, some dedicated fans are working on it
Well, and because 2 is fucking abysmal as a game. The starter car shouldn’t feel like it’s on rails regardless of speed, mostly - it’s a fucking racing game, get it right. (modern nfs is in the corner giggling but that piece of shit is always trying to force me to drift, again with an un-upgraded starter car with like 150hp, so it’s no better)
I was a closed beta tester for 1 and 2, and was very excited for both, but going from 1 to 2 is a huge step backwards in handling alone. Whereas I pre-ordered 1 and got several others to as well, I told everyone I know to avoid 2, bought it on sale a while after launch, was immediately disappointed they never addressed this, and it sits with… 13 hours on the clock. As a reference, I have 4,048 hours played in Forza Horizon 5.
I have no idea how they fucked up so badly. It’s a travesty.
(I play with keyboard/mouse out of preference but also because of physical disabilities, so while I /could/ use a controller and maybe mitigate this, grab a controller and try playing with one hand, see how great that experience is x_x) .
It’s amazing how companies only do things after a “gobernment” scare, the fight does not stop, this isn’t just about The Crew, it’s about every game that won’t work without internet.
Wow who would have thought that single player games were a good thing. Oh wait I did. And so did lots of other people.
You worded it incorrectly. It should be any single player game that requires online to start to game should be fined. They can have multiplayer option. But single player should be able to be played even offline.
I thought I’d see this and was surprised not to.
Please proselytize your EU brethren. Signing this Citizen’s Initiative is the best chance to fix the dead games issue globally.
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
The guy behind it has a lot of videos explaining the logic. Here is the short version (1 min vid):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHGfqef-IqQ
Call to arms!
While I like and appreciate the campaign, the issue IMO is bigger. IoT devices for example even have environmental impact when services behind them get discontinued.
I would therefore like a more general rule: whenever a product is discontinued for whatever reason, all necessary documents, sources, etc need to be released to allow third parties to take over maintenance (that also includes schematics for hardware repairs).
I think many people who are responsible for pushing the campaign forward would agree it’s a much bigger issue. It’s just that the bigger issue is big enough that there are multiple fronts one could fight on, and this is a politically useful opportunity to push forward. A victory from this campaign will be unlikely to lead to the larger developments without more of a fight, because achieving the general rule will take a few instances of arguing the specific case.
For now, I’m excited to see where this leads, even if the answer might be “nowhere”
