The recent stopkillinggames campaign has been my first exposure to UK petitions.
Link to petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/659071
Link to campaign: stopkillinggames.com
Link to the campaigner’s video
Instead of “if sold on the understanding that they will remain playable indefinitely” should be switched to say unless they are sold with an understanding that they will not be playable indefinitely.
Game companies should be explicitly stating whether a game will have a limited lifespan based on things like server availability. Especially for single player games with online verification.
It needs to be more extreme.
If the use the word buy or own. “Buy now” “buy here” “buy XXX” That is purchased indefinitely.
If they are being rented for a limited time I needs to be explicitly stated as “rent” any mention of buy or discrepancy has the above mentioned purchased indefinitely.
Fully agree.
You would immediately see most devs state that they are at least playable until 1 day after release. Which would make that meaningless.
Nobody would buy a game that says it is only guaranteed playable for one day.
What they need to clearly state are expectations on planned lifetime of authentication servers, any specific technology that is required, and so on. Like people know multiplayer requires servers, but something that says they will have those servers for X number of years would help set expectations and encourage companies to plan long term support for games that might not be massive hits.
For single player games this would discourage terrible DRM that keeps games from being played just because authentication was retired.
Unfortunately, I think there is no real way around companies killing games. Because as shitty as this is, is it worse than every game which doesn’t intend to comply simply selling the game as a service instead? I doubt that could realistically be made illegal.
In other words, one way of complying would simply be to only sell a 1-mo. “lease” to your game. You don’t own it, and at some point they stop selling more leases, and then kill the game. You never owned it to begin with, so you didn’t lose anything; you are no longer a customer. Of course…this is just describing a shitty subscription system.
That said: I think it would be a good start for companies to be required to list earliest end-of-support date. You already get this with many hardware vendors (enterprise network gear won’t be supported forever).
Yeah. Having to make it clear that they’re services would be great.
It would make people more informed about what they’re getting, and give games that the devs intend to be sold and kept a way to stand out as such.
