This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Vindication for bored ape NFT owners everywhere
I think everybody agrees that "digital ownership must be respected". But if you check, you don't own the games. You own licences. You may keep the licence after servers shut down. It is total BS, but we allowed it.
I have to agree that killing online only games makes sense because they can't be forced to run the server forever, not they can be forced to release the source code. But offline / solo / bots should keep working.
Most of the responses of the ministers(?) covered in the article seem to be pretty solid.
But then:
Responding to the arguments, the government’s representative, minister for sport, tourism, civil society and youth, Stephanie Peacock MP, acknowledged consumer sentiment behind Stop Killing Games, but suggested there were no plans to amend UK law around the issue.
“The Government recognises the strength of feeling behind the campaign that led to the debate,” she said. “The petition attracted nearly 190,000 signatures. Similar campaigns, including a European Citizens’ Initiative, reached over a million signatures. There has been significant interest across the world.”
She continued: “At the same time, the Government also recognises the concerns from the video gaming industry about some of the campaign’s asks. Online video games are often dynamic, interactive services—not static products—and maintaining online services requires substantial investment over years or even decades.”
Peacock claimed that because modern video games were complex to develop and maintain, implementing plans for games after support had ended could be “extremely challenging” for companies and risk creating “harmful unintended consequences” for players.
Handing online servers over to consumers could carry commercial or legal risks, she said, in addition to safety concerns due to the removal of official company moderation.
On the subject of ownership, Peacock claimed that video games being licensed to consumers, rather than sold, was not a new phenomenon, and that “in the 1980s, tearing the wrapping on a box to a games cartridge was the way that gamers agreed to licensing terms.”
“Licensing video games is not, as some have suggested, a new and unfair business practice,” she claimed.
Yeah, full on corpo spin. Fuck her.
On the subject of ownership, Peacock claimed that video games being licensed to consumers, rather than sold, was not a new phenomenon, and that “in the 1980s, tearing the wrapping on a box to a games cartridge was the way that gamers agreed to licensing terms.”
This is absolute bullshit and not at all how it works, now or back in the 1980s. You can't agree to terms without seeing them first, and even then such agreements aren't necessarily legally binding. For someone who is supposed to write laws, she should be removed from office for showing such gross incompetence.
I'm pretty sure (not absolutely) this has appeared in court and even click-wrap licenses, where one clicks to agree to a license with a higher word count than King Lear are not valid due to the end user high administrative burden (reading 20K+ words in the middle of a software install).
There was a period in the 1980s where end users automatically were assumed to agree to licensing, but also licenses were extremely lenient and allowed unlimited use by the licensee without any data access rights by the providing company. 21st century licenses are much more complicated and encroach a lot more on end-user privacy.
If you don't want to give the sever away (including the ability to use it) then don't shut it down or otherwise make the game unplayable.
"digital ownership must be respected"
gets into bed with Meta and OpenAI
They've been owned!
Always have been
More proof that the current "Labour" government is in the pockets of rich companies and not on the side of consumers.
If only that wasn't true if the other big parties as well.
Member when "no taxation without representation" was a thing people believed in?
Losing a monopoly on specific game servers certainly can have a commercial risk. Are you entitled to that at all, let alone when you stop hosting them?
Legal risk of what? Others will have that responsibility, unless you've done something you don't want others to see?
Safety - Yes someone might have less moderation than you - that's up to the users to decide if it's okay. We still have the right to change our car's break pad - the thing that stops a large mass moving fast from hitting children.
You know, I have purchased around 200 games. I have no idea how many of those can be mine because they're linked to a store, maintained (usually) by a corporation hellbent on optimised profits, subject to mandatory updates so I have no choice but to play the way they want me to, and I don't have the space to store them all. I don't feel like any of them are really owned by me (and I know this is true but I reject that notion), not until they're transferred to an offline machine.
Digital ownership? Games producers want to own players' fingers now? I guess that's slightly better than cutting their ears off.
I don't dig it. I don't dig it at all.
